When will these communists realize that freedom is an *end* to be pursued for it's own sake, not a means of higher production efficiency
Well, the answer to your question is 1834, in "The Communist Manifesto", when they specifically said that their highest goal was the freedom of mankind from capitalism, which is the system aimed at productive efficiency. But somehow, I don't think you're interested in learning about what you condemn.
I cannot believe this got modded up to 5. Regardless of Marx's indisputable influence on modern economics, his work is not applicable due to inherent inconsistencies with the objective world.
Actually, you may find that the positive moderations are "Interesting", "Informative" and "Insightful", and that there is no "-1, Not Politically Correct" moderation. Though six moderators at the current count appear to agree with you......
When we have technology which would allow a lifestyle, say, twice as materially well off as the richest 10% of Americans now, for the whole world, without any work at all? Given that, if this is a capitalist world, we'll still all be working 60 hour weeks and having no time to enjoy our possessions. Infact, we'll probably be working 90 hour weeks hyped up on futuristic stimulants, to satisfy more and more expensive and utterly artificially created desires.
If the answer is yes, enjoy your symptom.
If the answer is "no", then Karl Marx's prediction error was about 1100 years out of a million; not bad going.
Now that, is a truly strange comment. Which works of Marx are you basing it on? Even Capital, which is basically an economics textbook, is amazingly lucid prose (and I've only read it in translation).
I'm not expecting any reply from Jon, but in case anyone's tempted to believe him in this calumny, here's a favourite passage from Marx:
"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain
and pluck the living flower."
The whole point of communism is that there is *nothing* ethical about work. It's what you do to earn a living. It's not the sort of thing that you feel "loyalty" to.
And your invention of "corporatism" is spurious. It's an inevitable consequence of competition and accumulation among capitalists. To say "capitalism good, corporatism bad" is like being in favour of brewing but against beer.
yeh, this is really more of a summary of G A Cohen's "Marx's Theory of History: A Defence". But if you don't accept the LTV (which I don't), and you go along with the consensus regarding the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, historical materialism is about allthat's left in "Capital". Which doesn't mean it's not worth reading; quite the opposite.
The space programs of both countries were governmental impositions on capitalism, and neither really produced useful technologies commensurate with the amount invested in them. The Soviet experiment simply shows how quickly a country can industrialise if it is prepared to sacrifice around 60 million lives; it doesn't show us anything about capitalism or socialism.
If you ask me, "complexity theory" and "agent-based modelling" and the whole other panoply of the Santa Fe Institute is an elaborate system of smoke and mirrors, designed to allow the participants to convince themselves that they are doing anything other than a complex Monte Carlo simulation, and that their results have any empirical validity at all.
Complexity theory solutions fall into two types:Ones where you can't understand the underlying process, in which case you can't trust the complexity theory result.
It's a pile of charlatanry. I say don't spend another tax dollar on it.
Any details on this? I'm aware of von Neumann stealing the credit for linear programming from Kantorovich, but would be interested in another example of Cold War Mathematics.
If all other options for removing an oppressive government from power have failed, guns are left.
Guns are also very useful for imposing an oppressive government, and you may note that all the nastiest tyrannical regimes of the last century came about with popular support, as the result of armed popular uprisings.
Gun owners are just as likely to be authoritarians as libertarians; I personally would rather my freedom was supported by something a little bit more robust than a duck hunting rifle. Like democracy
Do you think people would stop killing if they didn't have a gun to do so with? No, they would just find a new weapon to kill with, say a knife or an axe.
This is amateur criminology; the actual evidence does not support you.
Hmmmm.... Greg Chaitin's work on algorithmic information theory suggests that there may be more of a link between the time taken by a omputer to solve a problem and "those fucked up Goedelian things" than any of us currently suspect.
Jon wrote: Intellectuals, while they may privately backstab and mercilessly skewer one another, have always publically advocated what they call a "contempt for contempt" philosophy about personal attacks.
They most certainly don't! From Socrates to Plato to Dr Johnson, to Schopenhauer, to Winston Chuurchill, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, all of them, there's a huge tradition of invective and personal abuse among intellectuals. This "contempt for contempt" is a mark of pseudo-intellectuals; people who think they're acting with incredible maturity and cleverness when they're actually just too dull to come up with a good answer.
Nonsense: a random sample taken from parish records in the 19th century reveals that the 100% estimate is accurate to within 0.01% with 5% confidence:)
You have all the facts right, but aren't making the right connections.
that Wall Street and everyone with their personal retirement funds are actually investing in more than a few tiny gems in a big vat of snake oil.
Yes: this is the whole business of venture capital. It's worth it to buy a huge vat of snake oil if you can be reasonably sure there are a few gems in there. Hell, some people crunch ton after ton of rock and mix it up with cyanide, just to get a few flakes of gold. Some companies sign a thousand bands in the hope of discovering one Nirvana. It's not a particularly unusual way of doing business outside the engineering industry.
there was a similar gold rush every time some big technology came around
More accurately, there's a "gold rush" of this kind all the time. Which makes it not a "rush" at all. All the journalists and such calling the Web investment fad a "Gold Rush" seem to think that this pool of VC money literally came out of nowhere. It didn't. It's the standard pool of VC funds which used to be invested in biotechs, in leverage buyouts of supermarkets, in mining companies, etc, etc, being pointed at a media-connected industry, and thereby getting noticed by the media.
Not really as all that. Remember, 100% of babies born will eventually die.
And actually, "go bust" is a bit of an exaggeration on my part -- the figure is really for companies which "cease trading". The reason for this is usually that the sole proprietor has voluntarily given up -- we're talking about the situation where Joe Blow Computer Services ceases trading because Joe decided to take a permanent sysadmin job.
Just a tip to moderators: a post which contains nothing but unsupported assertions cannot be considered "informative". A post which is made up entirely of half-digested Forbes and Barrons' articles, with no actual arguments is highly unlikely to be "insightful". And the fact that someone is talking about "What Wall Street Thinks" in general terms with no specifics is not "interesting".
In fact, there is no "gold rush" about it. A large sum of money has been invested in a successful technology. The venture capital industry continues to grow at around 20% per year (it is outright false to assert that it has "dried up"). A few small companies have gone bust (newsflash: 90% of small companies go bust). And another media fad has begun to enter its "backlash" phase.
I sincerely hope that I am responding to a troll; it would grieve my heart to think that anyone could sincerely consider the above collection of half thought out platitudes worth posting. But I fear that I hope without hope.
Rippy presents a spreadsheet for calculating your "tolerance for career risk". It's a bit like a spreadsheet designed to determine, in strict mathematical terms, precisely how much prettier you think Boston is than Springfield. The question is fuzzy; the inputs are fuzzy; the output is fuzzy; don't pretend it's physics.
This isn't necessarily silly at all; the question of "how risk-loving are you?" may be "fuzzy", but such things as "how many months' living expenses can your savings cover?", "do you have dependents (alternatively could you rely on the support of others)?", "what size of family do you plan to have?", "when do you want to retire?", "what student debt do you have?" are not. Making a spreadsheet to work out your ability (not desire) to bear career risk is a perfectly sensible step and indeed is one of the first things you learn as a financial planner. There are numerous questionnaires which have been designed to give a much better answer to this than "suck it and see". I don't know anything about this book, but to dismiss spreadsheet based financial planning on purely a priori grounds is, well, silly.
Unless the Poles had a big force of submarines I never heard about, I think not;)
The Poles stole a bunch of Army Enigmas (anyone posting the phony plural Enigmae is gonna get a few words from me), and cracked them before anyone else did, but the big prize was the submarine Enigma with the three wheels.
I think you may have seen the naval, two-wheel Enigma, which are not exactly common, but not very rare. This one is a U-Boat Enigma, with an extra wheel. It's mainly important because of the historical significance of the actual object, however, not just its rarity.
errr... good joke, but I'd hate anyone to think that it was actually the Yanks who stole the Enigman machine just because of that film. It was the Brits.
Just about every musician I've ever played with hasn't been concerned so much with how much money they have as with the act of playing music
Not wanting to be a dick here, but I'm guessing that you don't spend every evening jamming with the Rolling Stones. Are you sure that there isn't an element of sour grapes when a bunch of guys with no money say that they don't care about money?
Slashdot Mirror
So your definition of "revolution" is going from one job, with a boss, to another job, with a different boss.
Well, fair enough, if you want to think that way, it is your right.
Well, the answer to your question is 1834, in "The Communist Manifesto", when they specifically said that their highest goal was the freedom of mankind from capitalism, which is the system aimed at productive efficiency. But somehow, I don't think you're interested in learning about what you condemn.
Actually, you may find that the positive moderations are "Interesting", "Informative" and "Insightful", and that there is no "-1, Not Politically Correct" moderation. Though six moderators at the current count appear to agree with you ......
Oh yeh, the first part. Sorry.
If the answer is yes, enjoy your symptom.
If the answer is "no", then Karl Marx's prediction error was about 1100 years out of a million; not bad going.
I'm not expecting any reply from Jon, but in case anyone's tempted to believe him in this calumny, here's a favourite passage from Marx:
Awful writer? Like hell.The whole point of communism is that there is *nothing* ethical about work. It's what you do to earn a living. It's not the sort of thing that you feel "loyalty" to.
And your invention of "corporatism" is spurious. It's an inevitable consequence of competition and accumulation among capitalists. To say "capitalism good, corporatism bad" is like being in favour of brewing but against beer.
yeh, this is really more of a summary of G A Cohen's "Marx's Theory of History: A Defence". But if you don't accept the LTV (which I don't), and you go along with the consensus regarding the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, historical materialism is about allthat's left in "Capital". Which doesn't mean it's not worth reading; quite the opposite.
The space programs of both countries were governmental impositions on capitalism, and neither really produced useful technologies commensurate with the amount invested in them. The Soviet experiment simply shows how quickly a country can industrialise if it is prepared to sacrifice around 60 million lives; it doesn't show us anything about capitalism or socialism.
Well, your alternative is to spend the next million years working 60 hour weeks, but I guess it's your choice.
Complexity theory solutions fall into two types:Ones where you can't understand the underlying process, in which case you can't trust the complexity theory result.
It's a pile of charlatanry. I say don't spend another tax dollar on it.
Any details on this? I'm aware of von Neumann stealing the credit for linear programming from Kantorovich, but would be interested in another example of Cold War Mathematics.
Guns are also very useful for imposing an oppressive government, and you may note that all the nastiest tyrannical regimes of the last century came about with popular support, as the result of armed popular uprisings.
Gun owners are just as likely to be authoritarians as libertarians; I personally would rather my freedom was supported by something a little bit more robust than a duck hunting rifle. Like democracy
This is amateur criminology; the actual evidence does not support you.
Hmmmm .... Greg Chaitin's work on algorithmic information theory suggests that there may be more of a link between the time taken by a omputer to solve a problem and "those fucked up Goedelian things" than any of us currently suspect.
They most certainly don't! From Socrates to Plato to Dr Johnson, to Schopenhauer, to Winston Chuurchill, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, all of them, there's a huge tradition of invective and personal abuse among intellectuals. This "contempt for contempt" is a mark of pseudo-intellectuals; people who think they're acting with incredible maturity and cleverness when they're actually just too dull to come up with a good answer.
Nonsense: a random sample taken from parish records in the 19th century reveals that the 100% estimate is accurate to within 0.01% with 5% confidence :)
that Wall Street and everyone with their personal retirement funds are actually investing in more than a few tiny gems in a big vat of snake oil.
Yes: this is the whole business of venture capital. It's worth it to buy a huge vat of snake oil if you can be reasonably sure there are a few gems in there. Hell, some people crunch ton after ton of rock and mix it up with cyanide, just to get a few flakes of gold. Some companies sign a thousand bands in the hope of discovering one Nirvana. It's not a particularly unusual way of doing business outside the engineering industry.
there was a similar gold rush every time some big technology came around
More accurately, there's a "gold rush" of this kind all the time. Which makes it not a "rush" at all. All the journalists and such calling the Web investment fad a "Gold Rush" seem to think that this pool of VC money literally came out of nowhere. It didn't. It's the standard pool of VC funds which used to be invested in biotechs, in leverage buyouts of supermarkets, in mining companies, etc, etc, being pointed at a media-connected industry, and thereby getting noticed by the media.
It's business as usual. Don't believe the hype.
Not really as all that. Remember, 100% of babies born will eventually die.
And actually, "go bust" is a bit of an exaggeration on my part -- the figure is really for companies which "cease trading". The reason for this is usually that the sole proprietor has voluntarily given up -- we're talking about the situation where Joe Blow Computer Services ceases trading because Joe decided to take a permanent sysadmin job.
In fact, there is no "gold rush" about it. A large sum of money has been invested in a successful technology. The venture capital industry continues to grow at around 20% per year (it is outright false to assert that it has "dried up"). A few small companies have gone bust (newsflash: 90% of small companies go bust). And another media fad has begun to enter its "backlash" phase.
I sincerely hope that I am responding to a troll; it would grieve my heart to think that anyone could sincerely consider the above collection of half thought out platitudes worth posting. But I fear that I hope without hope.
This isn't necessarily silly at all; the question of "how risk-loving are you?" may be "fuzzy", but such things as "how many months' living expenses can your savings cover?", "do you have dependents (alternatively could you rely on the support of others)?", "what size of family do you plan to have?", "when do you want to retire?", "what student debt do you have?" are not. Making a spreadsheet to work out your ability (not desire) to bear career risk is a perfectly sensible step and indeed is one of the first things you learn as a financial planner. There are numerous questionnaires which have been designed to give a much better answer to this than "suck it and see". I don't know anything about this book, but to dismiss spreadsheet based financial planning on purely a priori grounds is, well, silly.
The Poles stole a bunch of Army Enigmas (anyone posting the phony plural Enigmae is gonna get a few words from me), and cracked them before anyone else did, but the big prize was the submarine Enigma with the three wheels.
I think you may have seen the naval, two-wheel Enigma, which are not exactly common, but not very rare. This one is a U-Boat Enigma, with an extra wheel. It's mainly important because of the historical significance of the actual object, however, not just its rarity.
errr ... good joke, but I'd hate anyone to think that it was actually the Yanks who stole the Enigman machine just because of that film. It was the Brits.
Not wanting to be a dick here, but I'm guessing that you don't spend every evening jamming with the Rolling Stones. Are you sure that there isn't an element of sour grapes when a bunch of guys with no money say that they don't care about money?