interpenetrate

> Maybe the problem should be looked at from that angle, and maybe there's no problem, really. One's garbage will always be another one's treasure.

Yes, that's a very nice story. Tell me it again, please mommy.

I've crunched the numbers. They just don't work without me giving up video games. And I'm not giving up video games!!

Then who's going to do the mining? Adults? Do you want your iPhone, your car, your video games, your shoes, your plane trips, or not? All that stuff is gonna be "cost prohibitive" if all of these quarry kids go to school and all if these factory workers go home early. Cause: These unfortunate saps work 14 hours a day, eat straw, and have the philosophical thoughts whipped out of their brains. Effect: We live like kings and post all kinds of philosophy online. Don't believe me about this causality? Good, then we can go back to living like kings. You keep posting about ethics, and I'll keep posting about epistemology.

You want to trade off positions with those 10 year olds in the quarries? That's fine. I'd rather go home at night to my family, watch The Wire with my wife for the tenth time, and then when everyone goes to sleep I'd like to come here and post on Hacker News. Please report back with your experiences.

I don't know about that. I'm on a first name basis with my CTO. I hope to never see in person those wretched souls mining the cobalt for my Tesla. Ghastly!

You don't want to be divided from the miners who extract the minerals and the factory workers who assemble the crappy tech that we design? I do. It's absolutely squalid over there.

Thanks for the articles, I'll have to catch up.

This is my first time hearing "central sensitization syndrome." I know back ~5 years ago John Sarno's "tension myoneural syndrome" was still the dominant diagnosis in the self-help circles of mindbody illness, and it at least had the mechanism of repression to enrich its explanatory power. Still a far cry from the richness of psychoanalytic theory, but at least it was a move in the right direction after such an epic retreat from Freud. Central sensitization syndrome seems like such a concession to the medical model, which I guess puts it in alignment with the poverty of therapy ("mindfulness," etc.).

A rupture: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EksIy3aW0AEIsK-?format=jpg

The scope of Science has been set by private capital, but the Chinese lockdown is very clearly a scientific endeavor. Might as well compare vaccines vs. lockdown as two scientifically-informed tactics, although the two aren't mutually exclusive, as in the case of China.

The final step, you've unified the two sentences: "Chinese people are docile and weak or are evil, greedy liars."

Oh. Well more people died of COVID in the past two weeks in the U.S. (where COVID is no longer a thing) than have died of COVID in China ever.

That's right. So the "cultural difference" you were referring to is the capacity to commit horrendous atrocities against basic civil rights that the West is too benevolent to grasp. You just used the words "expunging basic civil rights" and "atrocities" instead of "evil." You're one step further in the logical progression than the people you were annoyed with in your first reply to me.

This unfolding progression is why we cannot take people at face value about what they "really mean." People don't know what they mean! See below: "I honestly couldn't imagine people in the West putting up with that, however I'm yet to fully understand why Chinese people continue to suffer the rules without riot." See? They don't understand it. Why not? What is being repressed, that their conscious could form these highly abstract and grammatically correct sentences, but yet they don't know from whence they came?

> All I am seeing on HN are people being careful to not offend, but at some point it stops being "cultural differences".

That's exactly my problem, too. Thankfully, someone in the replies to the tweet you sent finishes his sentence without ellipses. "Which is more sad: that they are locked up, or that they allow themselves to be locked up?" But this time he hides behind the rhetorical question mark! Just say the two things already: "Chinese people are docile and weak" and "Chinese people are evil, greedy liars." Let's just skip right to the Myth of the Jew. I just want people to take their beliefs seriously instead of hiding behind vague gestures and "fill in the blanks."

Much more interesting to follow live stories rather than throw around Adrian Zenz's crumbs years later. Here's the ongoing protest I was referring to, where "shattered lives" is a bruised back or (worse) the imaginary threat of becoming proletarian: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/10/china/china-henan-bank-deposi...

Why are you responding to me with this?

Those ellipses are doing so much ideological work for you. Those unspeakable, fantastical horrors cannot even be named. That's how bad China is.

Reality is much more boring. China a place with 1.4 billion normal people and it's amazingly not that much more different than anywhere else. Different enough to where they've prevented widespread death from COVID, but not different enough that they might effectively suppress the ongoing petty bourgeois protest against COVID restrictions in banking in Henan. You're the one stuck in Disneyland, believing in fairytale wonders like "totalitarianism." What exactly do you think happened off-screen to the speechless mass of animals after Scar was assassinated? The ellipses work wonders for Disney, too.

There are differences between the systems of a private capital and of a nation (or for that matter, the entire globe, which has never been planned centrally; incidentally this explains black markets).

The difference in goods is a mere quantitative difference. (Amazon sells literally everything.) Still, the amount and diversity of crap managed by Amazon is much greater than that of North Korea (comparing net sales vs. GDP). "It seems that there is simply too much in an economy for one entity to wholly plan" has to be tongue-in-cheek if it's not simply a mindless mantra. It's a staggering ideological contradiction whose poles the Hacker News crowd must oscillate between. On one hand, we're on the cusp of generalized artificial intelligence, and on the other we can't figure out the linear algebra needed to maintain a input-output table that changes over time.

But the difference in competition is a qualitative difference. The laws that determine the "competition" between teams at Amazon are different (opposite, even) than the laws of competition between capitalist firms. This is an empirical question. We can certainly imagine Amazons teams undercutting each other's "prices" in order to maximize private "profit," leading to a centralization and concentration of "capital" in the hands of a "monopolistic" team, but this simply does not happen in practice. The categories of intra-firm operation are totally different than those of inter-firm operation.

Well empirically lower demand does not lead to higher prices. The hopes and dreams of sustained profits are dashed by the coercive forces of competition. It's very sad.

Within a single firm, particularly large ones, surpluses and deficits can be communicated absolutely and crises can be practically eliminated. (It would be unthinkable for Amazon to leave the coordination of its processes up to some sort of internal free market.) As for action between firms, the anarchy of the market is fundamental to capitalism. Real competition is a basic characteristic of capitalism and so perfect information is not a tendency of the system (despite its theoretical elevation in neoclassical economics).

So, no, there is no solution. To avoid crises of overproduction (including the subsequent adjustments), the planning that takes place within the capitalist firm has to be extended to the global network of production.

Wow, that's cool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)

Forget "sprang." You said this:

> Before the existence of our universe, there was no time.

This is just a logical error. Unless you're using "before" in some novel way that needs clarifying.

To be clear: The author is saying that the universe has no beginning in time (and no outer bound of space). Once you remove your logical error of presupposing time before time, you are saying that the universe has a beginning in time (and presumably is enclosed within spatial bounds).

Is this not what you're saying?

The esteemed author, in saying confidently that there is no "before" the universe because the universe has no beginning, falls into the same trap that you do but lands on the other side of Kant's Antinomy: the author takes the empiricist stance in the dialectic, and you take the dogmatic stance. But even so, at least the author's stance is amenable to the infinite empirical regression of scientific practice; your stance just "puts speculative reason to slumber."

Time, as component of the universe, itself "sprang into existence?"

Despite "sprang" being a fantastical word to use in this context, it at least carries with it one thing for sure: a temporal component. "Springing" on its own indicates some sort of motion, which can only take place in time. Furthermore, "sprang" indicates a past tense, so that this "springing" took place at some (primordial) moment in time. According to your account, time presupposes itself.

You're applying the terms of experience to non-experience. The error is in a sophism of figure of speech.

Unfortunately you haven't explained anything at all. All you've demonstrated is that Kant was justified in writing the Antinomy.

Reading the first chapter alone (in particular the section on commodity fetishism) will tell you all you need to know about how economists think, because it tells you why economists think. This is a domain of inquiry that is necessary for any science, but that the economists since Marx have ran from for reasons Marx exposed in Capital itself. Notice that the OP article doesn't even try to justify its categories. How do economists think? Marx responds very simply: ideologically, dogmatically.

Marx identifies 5 functions of money in the 3rd chapter of Capital Vol 1 called "Money," not to mention the expanded treatment of money by Capital Vol 3.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm

It's unclear what you think Marx said on "how" to end capitalism and how this relates directly to his theory of money.

They're company companies, meaning that their goal is to make profit, not do something that's "interesting." You can't take Apple seriously when its spokespeople explain the logic that drives its production. It's a load of horseshit. You can't take BP seriously when they says that it's an "energy company" and you can't take Apple seriously when they says that it's a "tech company."

European oil majors invest in "renewables," American oil majors basically do not at all (unless you count carbon sequestration for the purpose of further oil extraction as "renewable"). Here's a source:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daneberhart/2021/03/09/oil-gian...

This difference in strategy stems from the difference in economic opportunity between the two imperialist spheres.

I think GP meant overheating/overcooling during off-peak hours? In which case plenty of people in well-insulated buildings go along with this, motivated by lower electricity prices during off-peak hours.

Primitive Accumulation: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm (see ch. 26-33)

Bingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Europe_Underdeveloped_Afri...

The question contains a false premise.

> Paging back through history, there have been very few opportunities for near-zero marginal cost goods.

The only way that capitalism allows for the production of non-rival use values is by turning them into "club goods" and excluding access to them by state-enforced monopoly (intellectual property laws in this case). There's no shortage of examples of club goods.

The three "downsides" the author lists as unique to club goods aren't unique to club goods at all. (1) All commodity production requires capital ("up front time"); (2) All new commodity categories are risky and only tested when they hit the market; (3) Breaking into any commodity category is next to impossible without sufficient capital.