> Instead of simple, readable text-based menus, icons everywhere because they are "more intuitive". Navigation aids because, otherwise, "users get lost".
I'm not especially dumb but after they dropped "hamburger button" I think it took me about 10 years to ever look for the "hamburger button" for basic functionality, especially on non-touch devices.
What horrors lie beneath the hamburger? What void of regular function could there be?
> One product of mine takes reports that come in as a table that’s been exported to PDF
Here's the first problem!
I can't believe actual businesses think that a report is anything other than for human eyes to look at. Typesetting (and report generation) is for presentation, and otherwise data should be treated like data.
I mean it's a different story if the product is like "we can help process your historical, improperly-formatted documents", but if it's from someone continually generating reports, somebody really should step in and make things more... computational.
Nice try, but getting 10,000 people to dig holes (e.g. gigantic infrastructure projects) ends up costing much more than what it takes for "one guy" to "design a microchip"
Sure, it costs more, and everyone agrees on that. Where we disagree is whether it provides more VALUE. The LTV says that it does by definition, because labor = value, and therefore more labor = more value.
You may choose to disagree. Just as modern economists disagree with the LTV.
You are completely wrong. This stupid example of digging holes is dismissed even in the first chapter of Das Capital if I'm not mistaken. First because if you do not provide use value (like digging useless holes), you cannot produce exchange value. Second because what really matters is the social necessary labor to dig the holes, assuming that there is a market for this. You will just waste money paying people to dig holes if we live in a world with technology to use backhoe excavator.
Economy is not a natural or exact science. There is a mainstream. But this does not mean that there is no valid inquiries and theories outside mainstream.
The market does not always choose to use the maximum amount of automation for everything. For example, a small business may rationally choose to wash dishes by hand rather than paying for a dishwasher. Are their meals more valuable (because more labor intensive) than the big restaurant across the street that does own a dishwasher?
You are the one defending the LTV, not me. If value = labor, but not when that would be silly, it's a bit like saying F = ma, but not when that would be silly. No serious scientist would accept this formulation. You would be laughed out the room.
After millions of deaths, environment devastation, and political repression, Marxism deserves to be laughed out of the room as well. I hope it will be, some day.
The exchange value produced in the business with or without the dishwater would be exactly the same if they are from the same society. It is not the individual labor, but the socially necessary labor that is counted. Moreover, value is also entirely different than price.
I never said anything about "use the theory, except when its silly". What was silly was the example because of the lack of understanding of the parent comment: LTV does not work like described by that comment. You can not even properly criticize something if you do not understand it.
The moralist excuse to forbid or negate certain knowledge is also silly. Depending on where you live (USA, Europe), you probably post these comments in a society built (and perhaps even mantained) by an even larger kill count, but I never will use this as a way to refuse or negate discussion or knowledge.
I never said we should forbid discussion of Marxism. I just think it should be treated the same as Nazism, with which it shares many similarities. The general pattern of "find a minority, say that they are the source of all problems, argue for dictatorship so you can solve the problems" is clearly present in both. This is called "vanguardism."
I've already presented several scenarios where a different amount of labor did not produce a different amount of value. Your response has just been that "socially necessary labor" is different than "labor." But this is nonsense since we don't have any authority to tell us what is "socially necessary" and what is not. Indeed, we have many examples of socialist governments deciding that it's not "socially necessary" for certain groups of people to eat at all -- the Holodomor in Ukraine, or der Hungerplan in Nazi Germany.
> I've already presented several scenarios where a different amount of labor did not produce a different amount of value.
Your examples are exactly as expected by LTV. LTV agrees that they do not produce different exchange values. The problem is that you are just ignoring what the LTV says, ignoring the theory definitions and is coming with your own ideas of what you think it says. And when I try to give you what the theory says, you just say that it is nonsense, saying more things that confirm that you have no idea about what you are talking:
> But this is nonsense since we don't have any authority to tell us what is "socially necessary" and what is not.
You do not need the authority. The theory describes the functioning of free markets, and capitalism running without hindrances. But taking into account the material reality that you need nature + labor to socially produce things and that in one side you have production, at the other side you have consumption and these things need to be balanced.
Pro tip: LTV was the mainstream of economical theories during the era when Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Marx, and all other classical economists published their contributions. All them agreed with LTV. Do you really think that you can refute it using so silly examples? In fact, there are several criticisms and known paradoxes that applies to older forms of LTV, but your attacks are missing even these older and more naive forms. Which is expected: you cannot formulate proper criticism for things that you do not fully understand and did not study.
The LTV effectively argues that competition brings prices of mass-produced commodities down to a magical threshold, and that magical threshold is the aggregate cost of labor in order to produce whatever commodity is being examined.
The LTV absolutely accounts for demand (what capitalists call "value") and in fact requires it for its description of how capitalism operates. It's really just saying there are two forms of value: aggregate demand and aggregate production costs, with competition driving prices down to production costs. If you don't agree with that, I don't really know how else to help because it's kind of a universal truth in a mass production market economy.
> Just more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the mind arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like a soul then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and days after cessation of cardio-respiratory processes.
Is recognizing your mother's or spouse's face a spiritual/soul function? If the mind did not arise from the brain, how does one explain lesions in the fusiform face area making one unable to recognize faces? This is without blindness, you see everything and go about your day normally. It's just that the meaning of faces may as well be kanji characters in hanzi-land and all you know is English.
I'm surprised that the definition of 'community' he uses here so strongly revolves around a shared identity and activity, and that what is shared is what defines a community.
For one, I don't really think communities where people share the same interests or ritual really does the trick, otherwise so-called YouTube 'communities' or Twitch stream 'communities' or even strangers you play games with online would be all that's needed. In those cases, whether it happens in real life or online wouldn't really matter. I think some people can tick all the boxes he has here with an online group and still feel lonely from it. Some people still feel lonely going to church every Sunday.
There certainly needs to be a common thread--that's what you get out of place-based communities, for example: we all experience the same weather--but what I feel really combats loneliness and creates belonging is having to connect with people that are different you and, importantly, to witness and connect with people because of their difference, and that these connections are made because you have no choice. The richness and complexity of life and all of the kinds of sorrows and joys that you get to see and relate to yourself and relate to others is what is sorely missing from incidental, emergent, real-life community. I suppose I'm basically just describing the Breakfast Club experience.
Like kids don't feel lonely because there isn't an authority figure around that can boss them around. That makes for a more ... socially conditioned ...? person, and maybe a wiser, more carefully-guided person, but not necessarily a less lonely person. It's not the bossing around that makes them feel like they're in a community, it's the fact that there is someone with a different experience with whom they share some connection, and it's a coincidence that it's an authoratative one.
when community is formed geographically, it also helps that there's a diversity of people/opinions which serves to moderate the group.
if people select community based on some other criterion, you are more likely to get narrow group think and increasingly extreme opinions/culture that isn't ultimately welcoming or sustainable.
So their politics on freedom and privacy of blah blah blah non-cohesive ideology doesn't correlate with their actual stance on crypto. A politician being pro-crypto does, however, tell me that they are dumb enough to be duped/greedy enough to be paid into wasting time giving lip service to something that, regardless of ideology, is actually completely worthless.
I'm not especially dumb but after they dropped "hamburger button" I think it took me about 10 years to ever look for the "hamburger button" for basic functionality, especially on non-touch devices.
What horrors lie beneath the hamburger? What void of regular function could there be?