bjhoops1
bjhoops1 on Hacker News
fry squinting can't tell if ironic or earnest...
It does for shareholders, the only people who matter in a capitalist economy. The only people at all, really, everyone else is just a resource to be maximally extracted from.
Everything is NOT a market, that’s a profoundly ideological statement. Check out Karl Polanyi and the distinction between a society with markets vs a market society. We live in a market society, but that is a historically unprecedented state of affairs - historically, many important aspects of society were distributed and regulated through other social forms. It is capitalism alone which commodifies everything under the sun, including land, housing and labor. Many of the most awful aspects of our society are rooted in this historic aberration and the creative destruction it brings with it.
I think it is useful, and that’s a perfect way to describe mainstream economics. What’s frustrating (but predictable) is that there exists an entirely separate branch of economics which makes much more powerful observations about the fundamental nature of capitalist economics, including politics, power, and sociology. But Marxist economics are simply excluded from the Western economic tradition because it makes value judgements which directly and dangerously controversy the interests of the ruling capitalist class. In a healthier world, elements of mainstream economics would be combined with the fundamental Marxist critique of capitalism to produce new systems that are more efficient and less exploitative.
Thank you for demonstrating my point. Economics imagines that it's possible to divorce the two, when it fundamentally is not. When economists do attempt to divorce the two, they inevitable work from a set of political assumptions which reinforce and never directly challenge the existing distribution of resources and power.
It's a very adroit slight of hand that benefits the global economic elite: "Hey there, smart professional, I want you to think VERY hard about this problem of how to efficiently allocate resources. Oh but you're not allowed to question why I, the descendant of a colonial robber baron have the ability to personally deploy the wealth of entire nations, and your definition of efficiency is literally just return on investment, no need to worry about questions like 'will the planet remain habitable' or 'is this system in any way just.'"
Strongly agree about values propagated into everything. Speaking of game theory, I highly recommend Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap. He talks about John Nash, the Cold War ethos and his struggle with schizophrenia, both of which highly influenced his work and view of humankind as utility-maximizing machines. Obviously lots of economic implications, kind of touches on "homo economicus", that sort of thing.
Yeah, and because basically all of mainstream economics has VERY strong ideology built into its foundational assumptions, and its practitioners enjoy a great deal of (largely undeserved) respect and often great power (unlike other more truly scientific fields), the odds that a mainstream economist would look at the failure of their theories and conclude "wow, everything we've been doing is deeply flawed at best" is low. Good luck getting a mainstream economist to dig deeply and take a critical look at the fundamental contradictions within capitalism.
Their definitely is a difference between academic economists vs the "economists" who direct policy in the halls of power.
If you're a hyper-wealthy property owner of the type who can afford to fund an entire economics department, the answer is "no."
If only there were a branch of economic thought which predicted regular, increasingly intense crises of capital, say, one which was articulated by a bearded 19th century German...
Golly, if I didn't know any better I'd think that maybe the field that deals with questions of power and resource allocation might not actually be apolitical, but may be primarily driven by the need to justify existing distributions of power and resources.
I think the answer lies in the history of the collapse of the mid-20th century consensus (capitalist economy with strong unions, regulations, welfare state ad broadly shared prosperity) and the rise of neoliberalism starting in the 1970s.
Neoliberalism seeks to roll back the welfare state, deregulate industry, and - above all else - crush unions. It's an ideology created and propagated by and for the billionaire class, who resented the limits imposed on their power in the mid-20th century, and it captured both political parties by the 1980s.
A couple good articles on the subject, looking at it from both a Republican and Democratic perspective:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-...
http://theweek.com/articles/725419/decline-fall-neoliberalis...
People who say "unions are good" almost always
have a critique of unions (they should be more democratic, member-led, etc.), but our neoliberal environment is SO strongly anti-union that it's not strategic to give ammunition to billionaire-backed union busters.
(Ironically, the intensely anti-union environment actually makes for worse unions. When you're struggling to survive it's hard to be on your A game)
I don't know about other islands, but on Oahu you can get up to 300 down with Oceanic TWC. I was pleasantly surprised.
Awesome! Windward side FTW. :D
I just moved to Oahu (Kaneohe) from the mainland, thanks to flexibility of a 100% remote gig. Worth checking out, and if you play your cards right you can get a solid salary to boot. weworktremotely.com, angel list, etc.
Why yes. Yes it did. Maybe the real benefit of homeopathy is making people like me feel superior... Hmm..
I found a bottle of Teething Tablets for my 10 month old labelled "homeopathic." I threw them in the trash, pointing out to my wife that placebo effect can only occur if the patient is old enough to comprehend that they are receiving a treatment.
I also think it would be nice to have a search/browse page to see more than one favor. I looked for such a feature and of course didn't see it. That way if the current favor isn't my cup of tea, I might find something else that is.
Haas is also a popular variety of Avacado. #TheMoreYouKnow
I knew someone would beat me to this. :) Even as an introvert, I rarely have moments of sadness and loneliness like this any more. I kind of miss that, and enjoy it when one does sneak its way into my life. It's really hard to regularly decide to leave the phone and "do nothing" over "doing something", even though we probably all know that the thing we're doing with our phone was really not that important.
And how do you imagine these "massive penalties" would be enforced? Perhaps by government regulation? Can't recall the last time I heard a Libertarian talk about a lack of that, or say anything favorable about labor unions. I think a lot of Libertarians think of Libertarianism as economic Conservatism, except it all works out magically because Free Markets and legal marijuana! Both sides tend to have an misplaced trust in the free markets to solve problems, and have a knee-jerk reaction against any increase in the size of Big Government, new regulations or labor union-strengthening measures.
I've been both a conservative and libertarian myself in the past, and I would agree that these outcomes are not considered desirable by adherents of those viewpoints, but unfortunately this sort of thing is very often the result of the policies and philosophy they thought would make everyone's lives better.
My two cents. Or if I'm more honest, Thomas Frank's two cents. http://www.amazon.com/The-Wrecking-Crew-Conservatives-Govern... Good read, that.
Half of the time when I'm pissed off at the DMV, it's because I stupidly forgot to bring a document that I needed. I'm afraid to admit DMV workers have far more to complain about me than I them.
I'm amazed you haven't deleted this post considering it must have been down-voted into oblivion. Or so I hope.
> government-job level human potential
I'm so fucking sick of hearing (presumably conservative) people badmouth and dismiss all government employees. Are you contemptuous of the law enforcement officers who protect? The firefighters who would risk their lives to save your ass should your home catch fire? The over-worked, underpaid, disrespected teachers like my wife who slave away educating your [God I hope you don't have any] children? The National Guard and FEMA workers who would pick you up off your roof in the event of a flood? The DOT employees who construct the highways you drive on? The FDA workers who make sure that everything you put in your mouth is safe and poison-free?
But no, those whole groups of people are to be held in contempt. They're all incompetent DMV workers unfit for jobs in the private sector.
I'm sorry that I'm kind of losing my shit on here right now. Maybe you don't deserve that, IDK. I've kind of been rehearsing this diatribe since a few weeks ago when my uncles went off on this tangent at a family gathering, even declaring "the only thing a government employee cares about is their paycheck." I said nothing at the time and regretted it later as the arrogance, scorn and fucking vacuity of that comment wormed its way further and further under my skin.
The patently obvious thing to say at that moment would have been something along the lines of "Oh, and are private sector employees not motivated by pay?" What a moronic assertion, that public employees, who are frequently overpaid and certainly not overpaid compared to their private sector counterparts, are somehow more motivated by financial gain than private sector employees. I suppose the firefight working for < $30k/year is just greedy. Same for my wife, who with her Master's in Education pulls in less than a Junior developer at Innitech. Obviously the only reason they do the work they do is for the pay. Whereas the VP of Sales at GE does what he does out of altruism and selflessness.
Ridiculous.
Are there incompetent, unmotivated government employees? Certainly. Are they more prevalent than disengaged employees in huge private corporations? I'm not so sure. All I know is, with all the shitting on that gets done en masse on government employees, someone needs to defend them.
Emphasizing "shareholder value" as a corporate strategy has always seemed self-evidently short-sighted and foolish to me. I find that it is frequently embraced by the sort of people who look for quick answers to complicated problems; who prefer their answers simple and free of nuance. The same bunch who hold a near-religious faith in the ability of Free Markets to solve all of man's problems in the most efficient way possible. If only things were so simple. You'd think that 2008 would have been enough to put neoliberalism behind, but sadly it is not so.
This was incredibly engrossing and amusing. It was interest timing to see this, since today is actually my last day working as a contractor/consultant at a large financial company doing a job that repeatedly left me with days or weeks on end with no real work to do. What made it more painful was that this place blocked Gmail, Facebook, etc. so I was pretty much relegated to reading HN articles and screwing around on Twitter.
Somewhat amusingly, they blocked POST requests to Twitter, but not GET requests, so I could view tweets, but couldn't post any. Fortunately, I was able to use Buffer to get around this. :)
Happy ending - after 10 months in the corporate jungle, I am now going to work remotely for a startup! Very excited to be part of the startup scene instead of peering in from the outside.
I get a 500 error on the /new POST that occurs when I click the "Try RethinkDB Now" button. Might wanna look into that.
UPDATE: it's working. Load issue of some sort?