I thought the idea of a labor theory of value wasn't related to the actual effort you put in, but more that value is related to how much average social labor would be currently invested to acquire or produce something. So if you have a machine you can pull a lever to produce 10 items in 1 second, each of those items acquires 1/10th of a human-second of value.

I get though that those other conditions matter more in terms of the actual price though. Marx distinguished between "value", "use-value", and "exchange-value", the latter being price, the second being required for value or exchange value, and the first being used as the basis of comparison between goods. I took it to mean that exchange value is like temperature while value is like heat.

Can you elaborate? I'd like to know more about how these different theories interact.

It's pretty shocking. What becomes _infuriating_ is when they say this while also defending their right to own the product of that labor because they were there first or happened to present capital in the right place at the right time.