caze

I thought the whole FTWD was pretty good, the so called boringness of the opening episodes was necessary I thought, to build up the tension (and frankly to be realistic) - it was just a family going through their normal family shit, then things get a bit weird, then everything falls apart, was well done I thought. The last 2-3 were better in a way I guess, but I view it as a good pay off from the build-up.

The Changeling - George C Scott is great in this early 80s horror, a bit naff at times, but great shots, music and great locations.

January 22nd?!? Eurgh, hate these drawn out release schedules. Excitement dashed by annoyance. Great track though. Yay.

I thought it was pretty good, lots of good scenes, like the last one with the doc picking up the yoke, some great cinematography as well. Which bit was the twist?

yeah, disappointing. saw Wakefield's stupid face and turned it off in disgust, what a cunt that guy is. there are certain conspiracy theories that are all fun and games, and believing them doesn't really do anyone any harm. anti-vax bullshit is definitely not one of them though.

another name for a Vada (those deep fried potato things), is Alloo Chop, so it's just some weird translation from Hindi I think.

the fantasist is the person who finds non-existent patterns in random data.

I can only assume you're trolling me at this stage, you don't strike me as the kind of person who can be this obtuse.

I was always sceptical about those claims, Jackson just seemed like an eccentric guy who had a messed up childhood. There were no pervy vibes off him at all really.

eh, no it doesn't. the use of the word nascent implies they were at the beginning of the industrial revolution. I NEVER MENTIONED CAPITAL!!!! jesus titty fucking christ.

my favourite from years ago:

amazing, that's some turbo charged engrish

When does my quote relate anything to the date Capital was written? I also said "and so on" (this was a long enough post already, I didn't want to go crazy with the parentheses), prior to that I also talked about factory innovations that were going on in Marx's time, so you can see I'm well aware he was up on the modern developments in Manchester and so on, and as I said, this informed his predictions on the negative impacts of innovation (he viewed it solely as a destructive force, never helping the worker, only keeping his wages depressed or putting him out of a job entirely, but like I've shown, he was completely wrong).

I said "nascent industrial innovations", the spinning jenny was one of the first inventions of the industrial revolution.

and I'm well aware of when the spinning jenny was invented, why would you think otherwise?

yes. you seem to be ignoring everything I'm saying and just resorting to ad hominems.

What a strange reply. I'm just some guy on the internet, what empirical basis do I need for my opinions other than the empirical work of other people who actually research these things? Should I just accept Piketty knows what he talking about because it's in fashion with the left currently, ignoring all the other people with well reasoned arguments who disagree with him? That's just some bullshit argument from authority. If you've read Piketty then surely you're familiar with the criticisms of the data that came out shortly after the book? I followed the back and forth after that and wasn't left particularly satisfied with his responses. I'm a 35 year old software engineer who never went to college (been working as a programmer since I was 15). Who are you (aside from a huge dick that is )? You've not understood what I was talking about (apologies if I wasn't being clear), I'm talking about diversity in the labour market (which includes different jobs within companies, not just between competing companies), not among corporations (although there's vastly more competing companies around now than there were in Marx's time), and how this diversity helps explain why Marx's predictions on wage deflation never came to pass. I'm not talking about the modern day (though I can see why that may not have been clear), the first innovations that allowed for a rise in wages came from innovations in industrial management. Factories tended to be run in a very ad hoc manner at the start of the industrial revolution, but various advances in efficiency (taylorism, fordism, rationalization, etc) led to a far greater productivity and increased profits. This had started in Marx's time but there wasn't much in the way of wage increases and there was a lot of worker dissatisfaction to begin with, this no doubt influenced Marx's negative view of innovation and the likelihood of wage depression in his eyes (for good reason). Wage increases eventually started though once the initial capital investments in the new methods were paid off, before the turn of the century, and then in the pre-war years you started to see wage increases in excess of productivity increases. The increased profits could then be funnelled into more innovations and other investments, and new jobs (often to replace old jobs made obsolete by automation), new services, new commodities. This whole thing then exploded in the post-war era, and wage growth saw it's second great explosion and a great widening of the middle classes. All of this was the exact opposite to what Marx predicted would happen - he couldn't have foreseen the effects innovation and the feedback loops of mass production and consumerism would have on the modern world. It's true that, in certain markets at least, the cost of innovation can be currently quite high (pharmaceuticals would be a good example), but computer technology would not be a good example. Because the profits there have been so consistently high they can afford to invest a lot in R&D and because of that there has been steady growth in resources (be it CPU cycles or storage or new hardware features - gfx, wifi, etc.), which has allowed for innovations in software (which are comparatively much cheaper to invest in - you just need a few clever people sat in front of some computers) to reap large profits (first off the PC revolution in the 80s to early 2000s, gaming, mobile software). Though like with the start of the industrial revolution there was an early period (50s-70s) which saw very high capital investments for steady productivity growth and relatively flat wage growth - the era of large monolithic companies like IBM. That whole innovation revolution of course had massive knock on effects in all other areas of the economy too. The important thing to take away from all of this is you can't really predict the impact new technologies will have on an economy, Marx based his predictions on historical analysis of tradesmen, merchant capitalism and mercantilism, in addition to nascent industrial innovations (spinning jenny and so on). He made assumptions based on the past and present, not factoring in the new possibilities that would be soon opened up. As I've said a few times now, it's hard to fault him for this, but from our modern perspective we certainly shouldn't be fooled by it any more.

Inflation is supposed to account for some of those differences, it's more of an art than a science though, and as I said there are different ways of calculating it. You're right though, numerical differences in dollar amounts and equality ratios have their place, but they're not the same thing as actual real life standard of living.

No it doesn't, for one 64% isn't particularly emphatic, it might represent a majority, but I never mentioned a simple majority being a consideration anyway. Even for those employees I don't think modern working conditions bear any similarities to what Marx was predicting. The US isn't the whole capitalist world either. That doesn't disprove my point though, look at what the graph does after it bottoms out, it goes back up again. And again, this is just the US, other countries show different peaks and troughs at different times. Pretty much none of which, including the US, is what Marx predicted. I also note the first link says 'by one measure', indicating there is some other measure that doesn't show these trends, there are different methods for tracking inflation, presumably other methods would give different graphs? The figures look a bit suspicious from around the 90s in particular.

https://youtu.be/1OqqNG0vuO4

I've not read it, but read a lot about it, it's on my wish-list. Seems there's some good about it, he shares my disdain for the non-empirical nature of much economics apparently. Ironically though he reaches non-empirical conclusions, that growth in wealth inequality must widen (that only holds true in his model if you make lots of assumptions about growth rates and other things). There were lots of flaws in his data as well apparently. In terms of innovation there was no way he could have predicted the speed at which innovation now moves, and the knock on effect that would have on labour markets (closing/minimising/specialising some, creating lots of brand new ones in their place, generally of higher value), his ideas were pretty strongly fixed around the notion of large monolithic blocks of labour being exploited by the capital controlling class, rather than ridiculously variegated situation that currently exists (he had ideas around division of labour, but that doesn't encompass the complexity of modern labour segmentation). These ideas are one of the main reasons that Marx's predictions on wage depression never came to pass. The relationship of this to finance is the cost of innovation, which in Marx's time was incredibly high, but today is virtually zero - this is what has allowed the vast growth in the number of companies (in both the service and manufacturing sectors) which helped the growth of the segmentation, the high cost of innovation in Marx's time lead to capital investment being focused on innovation rather than wages, he assumed this would continue hence his predicted downward wage trend. When the cost of innovation began to rapidly decrease though, capital could be put to all kinds of different uses, from paying people better to creating whole new classes of (generally better paying) jobs - which led to the explosion of the middle class from the 50s on. There are other areas in finance that Marx was in no position to predict either, many of which where at fault for the recent global financial meltdown. There's no valid Marxist analysis of that financial collapse. I'm not trying to argue here that the modern system is great or anything, for one thing it's super dependant on growth, and risk has been managed terribly in the financial sphere (largely due to non-empirical economic models that were telling everyone everything was going to be fine), but Marx is more of historical curio at this point. He doesn't have much to say about the modern economy, he never discovered any universal laws of human society, economics or even the operation of capital. Capitalism has gone through multiple re-inventions of itself since the earliest forms of merchant capitalism in the middle ages, there's been two (or maybe even three) since Marx's time already, Marx could barely predict how it was behaving in his own time it's no surprise he has failed to keep up since.

I didn't criticise him for failing to predict future technologies, just pointed out that the fact of those future technologies invalidated his assumptions. I already said that to you before, and that's what the bit you bolded is re-stating. Is that an actual phrase or just an album title? (one of his best) nearly every aspect of the underlying mechanisms have changed, multiple times. from the mechanics of investment, innovation, company structure/growth/death/evolution, the use of labour/education/human resource utilisation, the legal contexts everything has operated in, to the financial instruments used in conjunction with all of that. if you think there's some kind of universal truth of capitalism underlying all of that, then it's you that has to provide the evidence, because you won't find it in Marx.

It's really not. Like I've said already, his theory of value is wrong (so his analysis of the industrial mode of production is wrong), but even if he'd gotten that right as an analysis of the industrial revolution in England, the modern world doesn't work like that at all. The whole conception is based on a political and technological edifice that ceased to exist shortly after he came up with it, it's no surprise it failed to account for anything that came afterwards. Deeper than that though, his ideas on modes of production are logically dependent on his idea of historical materialism, which is also false, and can be traced back to the similarly silly ideas of Hegel and Plato. And this shit isn't off topic, ffs, it makes up a vast swathe of socialist thought. Sure there's more to socialism than Marx, feel free to bring some of that other shit up and we'll discuss it as well.