Because 5 companies control 80% of movie box office in the US and that number is about to shrink to 4? Not only making the profits and doing massive layoffs, but deciding what content we can see?
When purchasing Paramount, David Ellison published a press release to the Jerusalem Press talking about how he supported the IDF financially. Actor Mark Ruffalo recently reminded people he said this, and Zionist organizations are denouncing him as an "anti-semite" for reminding people of this.
She started her activism spying on European progressive groups for the CIA.
You take it for granted that she is the representative of the women of the world. Thus any critique of this woman the establishment foisted on us is misogynistic. We do not all take this for granted though.
we all know how passionate the hackernews community have always been about the integrity of european progressive activist groups, it's practically all anyone talks about on here
Can you please transmute your frustration into thoughtful, interesting comments, rather than venting it into putdowns of others?
Since you're posting here, you're as much "the hackernews community" as the rest of us.
The intention of the site is clear: curious, substantive conversation (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We know better than anyone how easy it is to get derailed from this, but really the best thing to do is to practice thoughtful conversation even when others are not.
The CIA sent her to Europe to spy on progressive groups. She talked about it long ago. She says the CIA was progressive and liberal (her words. not mine).
The US and Europeans did not make decisions to "keep" countries under subjugation - they were tossed out - in Ireland, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Vietnam, Indonesia and so on.
The US lost 50,000 soldiers trying to subjugation the Vietnamese, who would nit bend.
> The US lost 50,000 soldiers trying to subjugation the Vietnamese, who would nit bend.
This is just ridiculous on multiple levels.
The US fought a war to prevent north vietnam from conquering south vietnam. You mention 50,000 US deaths during that war. The south vietnamese lost easily 10 times that many soldiers (and another 10 times that many civilians murdered) and at no point were they some kind of slave soldiers who had no choice about fighting.
There's a decent chance that if North Vietnam had just waited 20-30 years the country would have reunified through a vote, but it turns out quite a few vietnamese did not, in fact, want to be ruled by a communist dictatorship and north vietnam decided the best way to get what they wanted was a war of conquest.
You can argue that vietnam shouldn't have been split up in the first place, which is perfectly reasonable, or that america didn't benefit from helping south vietnam fight north vietnam, which is probably true, or that the south vietnamese government at the time was by no means a shining bastion of perfect democracy, which is definitely true.
None of that justifies north vietnam (and china/russia) from launching an invasion.
> Loss of sovereignty' for some reason is perfectly fine for Iceland, Switzerland and Norway, but not UK or others wanting to leave.
Kind of rich to say after the "Labour" PM of the UK said he would not allow the six occupied counties of north Ireland have a border poll, reneging on the Good Friday Agreement.
She and/or you have a false conception of what a big five corporation is, or how it works. Yous probably also have a false conception of how relations of production under capitalism work as well. The man higher up the hierarchy at the FAANG has a better grasp of how these things work. Often, people don't realize their conceptions were wrong until they get let go.
That she worked tirelessly, was well liked does not matter. That in this short life we have, that she skipped vacations to devote more time to the company does not matter.
You said the person above her is not smart but he clearly is - he is higher up and survived and she is lower down and was cut.
Insofar as it being healthy for these companies for him to be there - him being there is in the nature of the corporation and perhaps its intrinsic infirmities, just as it is intrinsic to relations of production under capitalism.
One would hope that something as dramatic as not only him being over her, but him staying and her going would disabuse you of these notions. Especially the idea that she had sone kind of relationship within the corporation where working tirelessly and skipping vacations would engender any loyalty on the part of the corporation's higher managers and owners.
While this may make sense for the individual and their actions, I do not see how this is healthy or good for the organization. And, to my original question, I struggle to understand why organizations elevate those, or let those elevate, where the end goal is not to have a darwinistic corpus of staff, only interested in their own survival.
The inflation adjusted hourly production/bonsupervisory wage in the US in 1972 was $31.10 an hour. That wage is currently $32.40 an hour. A half century of productivity growth is 5% gains for those who work for a living in the US. Meanwhile the heirs are doing better than ever.
A parasitic economic system making a parasitic country, which even its workers don't benefit from.
Like all historical thinkers making claims in economics, sociology and history Marx was wrong about a lot of things. So was Smith, Ricardo and countless others. However that doesn't settle the question if there is an updated version of some descriptive or normative claims traceable back to Marx, Smith or Ricardo that is well supported today. Agree?
"wealth would concentrate more over time", which it in fact did and keeps doing, on some measures such as the absolute GINI.
> Suppose you become politically radicalized and become a Marxist. You get convinced that the labor theory of value is correct.
> The number of people in the general population who will know enough about the history and philosophy of economics to give you a clear account of why Marxism and the labor theory of value is incorrect,
He's correct most people don't know about labor theory of value. Which is why it's easy for him to categorize those who believe it as "radicalized" and "Marxist" versus the minority of calm, rational, objective people who can discount it.
Marx did follow the labor theory of value - as did virtually every major economist (or as they put it probably better back then, student of political economy) before Marx, who also believed it. Marx credits another revolutionary for discovering the labor theory of value - Benjamin Franklin. There were a few proto-papers on subjective theory of value, but an alternative theory of value did not even really exist before Capital was published.
Labor theory of value was the theory of Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and all the major economists before Marx. And Marx accepted what they accepted.
Alternative theories of value were not really fleshed out until after Marx published Capital.
So consider all of this when he categorizes the idea of the labor theory of value as extremist, radical, Marxist etc.
According to this article, believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value is an extremist belief. Even though pretty much every major economist before Marx believed the same thing.
Ps. This was told to you by myself - from one the 1% of people who know this stuff
Pps. If you didn't read the article, you would not know I am referring to myself as part of an elite 1% of knowledge sarcastically
The important issue to focus on isn't that long ago people had a model that was not a good model of reality. The issue is that now we have better models and the person who claims they have an educated opinion should know it. Blindly holding to a model that has been shown to be inferior is what makes it an extremist belief.
The geocentric model was thought to be true for literally thousands of years by every astronomer and scientist. Today if someone claimed the geocentric model was true, we would consider it an extremist belief - even though pretty much every major astronomer believed it for thousands of years.
Yes, we should compare the best currently available descriptive models and normative systems. But Masley's claims in the text can then be critiqued for disregarding that there are contemporary thinkers in the marxian tradition who either hold an updated and modified labor theory of value informed by contemporary evidence or hold a marxian view that does not rely on any labor theory of value at all.
I am with the author on how people get radicalized, but he could not have picked a worse example that Marxism as an example of extremist idea.
Equating Marxism to labor theory of value is akin to maybe equating economics to a supply/demand curve.
There are unequivocally true parts of Marxism, such as surplus value of labor, and the fundamental incentive conflict between a capital owner and laborer (which Marx deems exploitation)
The labor theory of value is also I think misinterpreted by modern economists as a price-setting mechanism, which it isn't. It's a mechanism to show that there is a certain floor on value of an economic good, which is raised every time constructive labor is applied to a product.
> It's a mechanism to show that there is a certain floor on value of an economic good, which is raised every time constructive labor is applied to a product.
The problem is that this argument is circular: whether the labor is "constructive" gets judged by whether it succeeded in adding value.
Yes, I was considering making the same point, but in fairness to him, the vast majority of the millenial marxists and beyond don't know this either, nor that marxism doesn't mean "no profits or reinvestment or insurances, all value goes to workers".
Sorry, but this completely misrepresents what LVT actually is, as well as suggesting considerably more agreement between Marx and e.g. Smith than they actually had; it's also wrong about the chronology of alternative theories, or at least the main one that came to dominate (and which is still considered mainstream).
Smith can be forgiven for giving an unsatisfactory answer to his own water-diamond paradox, as he preceded Marx by almost a century. But the originators of the formal theory of marginalism (Jevons, Menger and Walras — you likely know the first for his paradox) were roughly contemporary with Marx; they published their work only a few years after the first volume of Das Kapital, and well before Engels could publish the rest. The roots of the theory can be traced to Italian mercantilists contemporary with Smith, and even a bit further to Bernoulli (yes, the mathematician, the actually-turns-out-to-be-wrong explanation of wing lift guy).
More importantly, "believing that a carpenter banging wood and nails into a table creates value" is a strawman version of LVT that none of the people you mentioned would actually espouse, including Marx; and it is extremist, as it pays no heed to issues of either quality or utility, never mind market demand.
When purchasing Paramount, David Ellison published a press release to the Jerusalem Press talking about how he supported the IDF financially. Actor Mark Ruffalo recently reminded people he said this, and Zionist organizations are denouncing him as an "anti-semite" for reminding people of this.
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