chenGOD

You can probably pop it out of the case and put it in a stationary computer. It's not in a case, I just drop it into an external bay. I actually fixed it last night. So fws in the end.

Fucking external HD decides to act up last night - the data is still on it, but can't be read. Fuck a bunch of dicks.

Why would you say he based his predictions on nascent innovations when he clearly didn't? Why mention a technology that had been around for more than 100 years before he wrote his most famous economic analysis?

Director's Cut to feature the actual piece of gear being fondled by man in sex face.

So good. Just listened to it three times in a row. amber: good to hear on the Lego front. that makes me happy.

You said: "Marx based his predictions on historical analysis of tradesmen, merchant capitalism and mercantilism, in addition to nascent industrial innovations (spinning jenny and so on)" And you're going to try and say that you weren't implying he wrote Capital (his major economic analysis/predictions) based on that? He did use historical analysis, but the spinning jenny? nascent industrial innovations? nuh uh. He is well beyond that. (I'm assuming you're not talking about the communist manifesto, because why would you be).

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). Because the use of the word nascent implies they were just beginning when Marx wrote Capital. However his analysis of machinery was not based on nascent innovations, so it's irrelevant to the argument. Marx also did not view industrialization or innovation solely as a destructive force. Rather he argues that it creates relative surplus value and depreciates the value of labour power. He also discusses amortization, and the ability for capitalists to realize greater profits through the utilization of machinery. One very interesting point he raises in his analysis is that through the use of machinery, the working day can be elongated. I'd say he's half right and half wrong on this one. It could theoretically increase the working day (and it did for a period of time) - except that it is cheaper for factory owners to run two shifts due to societal attitudes about overtime, breaks, other benefits (when unions and collective bargaining were utilized correctly to mitigate the exploitation of workers by factory owners). That explains the decrease in hourly work noted in the WSJ article linked to earlier. What it doesn't explain is the increase in hours worked by salaried, highly educated men (employed, non-self-employed) from the late 1970s to the mid 2000s. That could be explained by a variety of factors, possibly different compensation schemes by companies, or maybe because it's easier to fire someone who doesn't put in the long hours. It could also be explained by innovation making workers in the service industry (regardless of service or manufacture, it's still labour, because output is simply the value of labour, be it physical or mental) always connected. That growth in work by highly educated men also took place in the higher earning bracket, and probably explains some of the increasing inequality in America that we see. Where Marx was wrong is in his prediction of where the revolution against capitalists and landowners would take place. What did Marx predict - that capitalism would produce internal tensions leading to a revolution of the proletariat. What actually happened in Russia and China? A revolution of peasants. However, the inequality in some places due to capitalism is creating internal tension - and while no one (well no one serious anyways) is recommending communism, people have noticed that there is less inequality and less tension in countries that have better wealth distribution through social safety mechanisms. This type of socialism-with-market characteristics seems to make a happy medium.

What you said was: "Marx based his predictions on historical analysis of tradesmen, merchant capitalism and mercantilism, in addition to nascent industrial innovations (spinning jenny and so on)" The spinning jenny, and indeed the industrial revolution itself, was hardly nascent when Marx write Capital. His chapter in Capital on machinery and modern industry is not limited to old industrial innovations, but fully realizes complex systems and the more important analysis is on the value transferred by machinery to the product. Which matters not what the machinery is, but how it functions in imparting value to production.

Um, I don't think I've resorted to any ad hominems, but apologies if I have. If you know when the spinning jenny was invented, why would you call it nascent in relation to Marx's understanding of technology?

With all due respect, you clearly don't understand Marx if that's your interpretation of historical materialism. What Marx actually says (broadly speaking) is that the development of productive forces and economic activities is central to historical change and operates through class struggle over distribution. His understanding of the factory, industrialization and technological growth is perfectly correct. "It is a means of producing surplus value". How long ago do you think Marx lived? The spinning jenny had been around for 100 years by the time capital was published. Have you read Capital?

Fuck a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit project management.

Apparently encouraged on 4chan http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/10/01/these-are-the-online-messages-posted-day-before-oregon-shooting-that-seemingly-warn-of-future-massacre/

Hours worked are a function of the control of labour to maximise profit for the capitalist controlling the labour. That's out of the control of the wage worker. So I'm not sure why you'd control for that. If the income difference is much greater, then why is poverty on the rise in the US? Just having a TV or fridge doesn't mean you aren't poor. Sure, it's better to be poor in the US than poor in Burma, but you're still poor. You're still not taking a vacation once a year and you're still living paycheque to paycheque. This is what the lower median wage means in real terms. Sure you might argue that those aren't rights, but the argument is that progress is supposed to mean workers have to worry less about living and providing for family. Which is clearly not the case. (btw caze, I use the US because they all about dat capitalism).

Awesome thanks.

I seem to be missing track #242. What track is that?

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. You said: "his ideas were pretty strongly fixed around the notion of large monolithic blocks of labour being exploited by the capital controlling class" If 64% is not a large monolithic block, then I don't know what is. Let's put it another way - those firms (of 100 employees or more) represent 2.44% of all firms in America. So 64% of the working force is employed by 2.44% of employees. The "one measure" is the adjusted by inflation measure. Which is appropriate, because it reflects the world we live in now. There are two main measures of inflation (CPI and PPI) and by either of those measures, you'll find very similar results. Why the lower median wages are important is because while yes, as eugene says, you can buy a better computer for $1000 now than you could in the 1970s, the ability of people to spend that $1000 had decreased, because, obviously, they have lower incomes. And also really? "the figures look a bit suspicious from around the 90s"? Provide something besides conjecture. As to innovation - some argue that it is increasingly more expensive to innovate. Consider this: Apple spent $1.9 billion in Q4 2014 and Q1 2015, and yet there were 5 tech companies that spent more on R&D in 2014 than Apple. Or consider the wild rounds of funding that many start-ups have to go through in order to "innovate". Perhaps incremental improvements have become cheaper, but I would argue that true innovation (Tesla is burning through cash to create an electric car and the required ecosystem to make it viable, as another example) is, if anything, more expensive than ever. Capitalism in the 21st century is essentially still based on Ricardian economics - and much of Marx's critique of capitalism was based on his understanding of Ricardian economics. And if you're going to read Piketty, prepare to be disappointed, because he also believes that Marx's analysis was important and still bears relevance today. There are obviously limitations to Marx, (paucity of data being primary among those), but to dismiss him out of hand is foolhardy.

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've highlighted two bits from you. The majority of workers (64%) in America work at firms with 100 or more employees (source). There are 122 firms in America with 100 or more employees (source). I'd say that pretty emphatically represents the majority of labour being controlled by the capital class. Adjusted for inflation, median wages peaked in the 1970s (source). Or put another way - the middle class in America is poorer than at any time since the 1940s (source). In an inverse to your last paragraph - I'm not saying that Marxism is the way forward - what I am saying is that Marx (not necessarily Marxists, but Marx himself - in Capital) provided, and continues to provide a good critique/analysis of capitalism.

Lol that's awesome. Lego's age range should be - "8 to whenever the fuck you feel too cool to play with lego's because adulthood has stomped the life and wonder out of you" Does Lego even just sell the blocks now? Or is it all kits? The kits are awesome, and I can't wait until my kid can play with lego (as opposed to it being a choking hazard, although I suppose I could still potentially choke on one, so who knows when that stop, when they make Legos that dissolve with saliva I guess) but I kinda hope to just buy her a big ol box of like 1000 assorted bricks and let her go crazy with them. I remember making a half-pipe out of lego bricks. The transitions were a bitch lol.

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. You'll have to do better than saying "it's really not", considering the many many economists who think Marx had some valid criticism and analysis of capitalism. I'm just curious, how do you think Marx characterizes capitalism?

fucking el capitan download is literally taking forever. WTF apple, torrent that shit!

Anyone who thinks Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production is full of shit, is likely full of shit themselves. Marx's analysis of how the capitalist mode of production works is pretty accurate, imo (and of several others) the one thing he failed to take into account was the adaptability of capitalism to meet the political economy in which it was situated. Also information is the most valuable commodity that ever was and ever will be. And I'm not talking about patents or copyright. I'm talking about knowing how to exploit the information asymmetry that is present in all markets. Finally, poblequadrat is right to bring it back on topic - Marxism is not socialism (and though it is political to a degree, he also failed to create a set of ideas that defined international relations, so it does have limitations in describing the world now). For anyone interested in understanding more about Marx - Robert Heilbroner probably does the best job of explaining him. "The Worldly Philosophers" and "Marxism: For and Against" are what I would recommend.

flol poor Bill Nye.

Do any of you find that you had more purpose after having children? Does life click after that? You should never have children to validate your own existence. If you are suffering from depression, one of the worst things you could do would be to have a child.

Report that shit to the authorities.