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2025-01-08 00:16:06
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX
I mean little actual input cost and no raw materials.

'Financial services' are a massive con, apart from insurance most of them are effectively ponzi schemes - hence the regular crashes where the investor gets robbed, often the taxpayer too.
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2025-01-08 02:15:35
uziq
Member
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how is labour not an input cost? why do you think films cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce? that’s not all going on film stock and fancy camera lenses. it’s not like making a novel is all about ‘having an idea that costs nothing’ and then magically getting it out on paper, which, hmm, must be a cheap material.

lots of the middling culture industries, below the marquee james bond and harry potter tier acts, are barely profitable and large parts of the sector are subsidised by government tax write offs or philanthropic causes (which isn’t unique to the UK; look at how france helps out its film and book industries, or the generous incentives hollywood squeezes out of the government). it’s not like the insubstantiality of creative ideas like melodies or stories leads to an infinite money glitch.

it’s all a sideshow anyway that exists almost exclusively now for the establishment and well-heeled. the post-industrial population of stoke-on-trent or port talbot were never imagined to transition to a new economy of working at the coal face of the entertainment industry, for tv production companies presumably making shows about victorian gangsters in birmingham or treading the boards giving hamlet a work over in a lilting welsh tongue, following hopkins. it’s fairly obvious that the cultural industries are their own hermetic bubble and won’t drive any great growth or transition in modern britain. you’ve only got to look at the roster of famous actors working today: most of them either had parents directly involved in the same thing, or ancestors who were some variety of baronet/knight/major/bishop.

what all the great unwashed were meant to do is sit in front of a computer or at a call centre all day. even better if they can be granted a degree from a former polytechnic on their way there. that’s surely the ticket to middle-class mobility. unfortunately the graduate jobs sector has gone basically nowhere since the blair era. massive expansion in student numbers, colossal growth in student debt, but no meaningful jobs waiting for them at the end. the small minority of financial services jobs that are actually worth their salt still have the same tiny minority of graduates from LSE to draw on anyway. they don’t need those promising young graduates who staggered from the potteries to the gleaming halls of the university of staffordshire.

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-08 02:24:11)

2025-01-08 03:58:20
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX
Labour is an input cost, but its a small amount of pretty light labour and not much energy, plus no raw material to speak of as its all digital now.

An author writing is a whole lot easier than digging coal or laying bricks, for example.

Incidentally I was amused to learn that some authors are still using Wordstar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar
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2025-01-08 04:38:29
uziq
Member
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i'm afraid you haven't a clue what you're talking about, but it's hardly the point. 'it's all digital now': really? which industry are you referring to? i can assure you almost every cultural industry has lots of real-world, physical costs and production. the physical and messy work of typesetting and composition may have moved from hot lead to cold pixels, but there's still plenty of 'input costs' to making a book, dilbert.

an author writing involves 1000s or 10,000s of hours of unpaid labour. a coal miner doesn't work without a day's wage. of course it doesn't involve backbreaking or dangerous work, but the culture industries operate on a whole different conception of labour and value. the average salary for a 'full-time' writer in the UK is about £11,500. a coal miner wouldn't have got out of bed for that amount of money even in arthur scargill's day.

the notion that creative ideas and writing/painting/composing come easily and without much labour (compared to that real work in the real world of objects, and moving heavy things about hither and thither, oh aye lad) and therefore all the profits are delicious thick cream, is really very silly and naive. ironically, as a scientist you’re romanticising creative work.

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-08 04:49:19)

2025-01-08 05:55:11
unnamednewbie13
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i remember reading an author's note talking about (their move to, or move back to) wordstar back in the day. they said they felt more in control of and immersed in their work without the little doodads of modern word processors second-guessing their work or windows mucking things up.

as a sometimes notepad (exe) user when there are all sorts of high-powered office suites to choose from, i can still sympathise. sometimes you just want text on a plain background and to save it without a monstrous string of account metadata or whatever.

speaking of writing books, how is mac doing on his cuckpendium?

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2025-01-08 06:06:55)

2025-01-08 06:03:44
uziq
Member
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there's a bajillion applications or apps for word processing, note taking, and even specifically tailored to the writing and structuring of books. i don't see how it removes the input costs of book writing, though. compared to what, the days of typewriters and ink ribbons? quills and parchment? have you seen the costs for software licenses/subscriptions thesedays? at corporate scale, do you know how much companies spend on adobe licenses per year? the move from physical to digital hasn't necessarily obviated those particular costs at all.

it's a lot less cost than setting up a steel works, sure enough, but the whole arc of decline in the UK has been what to do with all those redundant industrial workers (with their 'real', heavy labour). nobody made any suggestion they should all retrain as budding thespians or try to publish poetry collections for a living, so the asinine side-swipe at the creative industries doesn't make much sense. they've never been pointed to as a structural solution to anything macroeconomic in the UK. the problem in the UK isn't an overproduction of 'useless' creative things that 'people don't want'. we aren't drowning in bohemians. it's the post-industrial underclass we have to think about.

i suppose now a new generation can pursue the fata morganas of the 'green revolution'. that'll get the plants going again ... in china.

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-08 10:54:08)

2025-01-09 01:55:40
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX
I'm not making a swipe at creative industries, the ideal business has minimal input cost, material and energy, maximum value addition and minimum downstream costs and waste. Creative industries are ahead of pretty well every other industry in these respects.
The problem is the market is limited and if people have no money in their pocket because all the other industries have been shut down based on some asinine theory about moving everyone to the service economy they have nothing to spend on the creative stuff so it dies totally.
The service economy is there to service the actual economy, not be the economy.
We're two to three generations into the 'post-industrial underclass', you'd think that all the Oxferd economics geniuses would have figure out what to do with them now.

At least people are slowly waking up to this. Its a shame its taken the gammons to realise their businesses are slowly crumbling and the academics to notice their funding has dried up before anyone start making any noise.

Just remember, these are dangerous times. The last time the creative industries fell off a cliff we got Stalin, Mao and Hitler to take their revenge on the world as frustrated hipsters.
Fuck Israel
2025-01-09 02:44:37
uziq
Member
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you continually mischaracterise the soviet and maoist movements, it's really very odd.

granted, the nazis had a smattering of archaic volkisch esoteric claptrap in their ideology. they were in effect morris dancers with a greatly expanded budget. but hitler was turned down from art schools and trained to be something more like a draughtsman -- you know, those people who do .... engineering and architectural schematics. i don't think many hipsters want to become those.

but the whole point of sovietism was to design a new society on scientific grounds. engineers were the new prophets. like this was not a subtle or hidden part of the soviet program: both lenin and stalin openly discussed the importance of engineers. lenin famously said that soviet power was 'communism plus electricity'. stalin notably put a huge bunch of the leading engineers who helped to electrify and industrialise the nation on a show trial, because he was afraid that the soviet experiment was turning into a society ran by an elite of tsarist-era bourgeois engineers who knew far more than the actual politburo about how to run society. after that, he opened thousands of engineering schools to educate a new generation in his favoured type of polytechnic education. like, it's not even subtle. some of the greatest points of national pride of stalin's era were new model cities called things like MAGNETOGORSK. it's comic book science villain shit.

read a book instead of talking a lot of nonsense about their economics.

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-09 02:48:05)

2025-01-09 04:08:48
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

read a book instead of talking a lot of nonsense about their economics.
I'm talking about Stalin as a person.
a society ran by an elite of tsarist-era bourgeois engineers who knew far more than the actual politburo about how to run society
A shame, maybe Musk can pick up where they left off.
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2025-01-09 04:23:56
uziq
Member
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tried many times in the 20th century and never worked.

https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/the- … fford-beer

you evidently know very little about stalin as a person, other than a few factoids gleaned from those turgid trade books you read on WW2. by no means was he part of some literary-artistic milieu or intelligentsia. he was a rube who barely made it though the local version of a provincial poor child's education, sponsored by the church seminary.

many people wrote poems or kept diaries back then. they didn't have bf2s or x to while away the hours or express their thoughts. not everyone who kept a diary or journal (and that was most of those who were literate) should be remembered as a 'diarist' like pepys, and stalin was hardly a 'poet' because he penned a few ditties in his notebooks. growing up before even the invention of radio, writing was the form of media literacy and expression nearest at hand to the majority of people -- if they even made it that far in their rudimentary education. it is simply dumb to characterise the soviet union as being a regime led by a despotic poet, on the evidence that stalin was an occasional scribbler. it's not like he was john clare, some illiterate peasant who became an artist. he was a vagabond and a layabout.

you would have written a few poems too, if you grew up in the late 19th century, and didn't have lady gaga concerts to lobotomise yourself with. trying your hand at verse or song as a teenager in 1885 was the equivalent of sitting at home and playing karkand infantry only. poets and novelists were the closest thing to rock/pop stars, or national celebrities (particularly so in the era of great revolutions and consolidation of modern nation states). people trying their hand at writing was like teenagers today recording tiktok videos of them dancing to a no. 1 song, or recording a youtube cover to express their fandom.

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-09 04:37:58)

2025-01-10 00:39:14
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

you would have written a few poems too, if you grew up in the late 19th century
No, I would not.

I would have been tinkering with bicycles or engines or something.
Fuck Israel
2025-01-10 01:03:23
uziq
Member
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yeah, the rural caucasus were full of mechanics in the 1880s.
2025-01-10 01:21:04
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,054|7043|PNW

dilbert, you would have definitely dabbled while studying steam engines in the 1800s. shot in the dark but there was probably more draw toward 'polymathism' than toward prideful ignorance of the arts.

people could have been arguing to this very day about what the Great Dilbert had in mind when he put cat ears on his famous portrait of the countess of twaddleshire.
2025-01-10 02:05:18
uziq
Member
+498|3723
lol henry ford himself wrote several books. nobody describes him as an arts and humanities type though. no, he was your regular version of a ‘man of science’, who wrote about three long-ass books full of pseudo-scientific bunkum, outlining why He Knows Best.

that is, of course, when he wasn’t writing the occasional poem, just as i said most literate people did in that age.

https://www.thehenryford.org/collection … ct/372088/

...

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-10 02:21:30)

2025-01-12 12:20:08
uziq
Member
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 … poll-finds

One in five generation Z and millennial Britons prefer strong leaders without elections to democracy, and voters overall are feeling downbeat about politics, a report has found.

The polling, due to be published next week as part of the FGS Global Radar report, found that overall 14% of people agreed with the statement: “The best system for running a country effectively is a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with elections,” rather than the alternative: “The best system for running a country effectively is democracy.”

That rose to 21% of people aged between 18 and 45, who answered that the best system was a strong leader without elections. In contrast, only 8% of people over 55 preferred that system to democracy.
https://news.sky.com/story/proportion-o … 6-13286954

The proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds living with their parents has risen by more than a third in just under two decades, according to new analysis.

Last year, the share of the age group living at home was almost a fifth (18%), up from 13% in 2006, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said in its Hotel Of Mum and Dad? report.

The latest figure is down from a pandemic high of 21%, but the five percentage point rise represents an estimated 450,000 more people in this age group living with their parents in 2024 than if it had stayed at the 2006 level.
incredible that boomers in blue home counties shires are willing to watch democracy itself be put onto a bonfire so that they can continue watching their property prices and pension pots go zoooooooom.

https://preview.redd.it/7t146welfv041.png?auto=webp&s=8d3dbb161bf73d5f48b91fd063d8aebe6e785460

ironically, it is common in the literature to talk of mid-20th century fascism as being a sort of 'death cult', with plenty of recourse to freud's writings on the death drive (contra the pleasure principle) in his seminal work on civilisation and its discontents. but rich, developed free nations are developing a peculiar death cult of their own, in which retirees seemingly want to carry 7 or 8 figure fortunes with them across the river styx into the underworld.

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-12 12:39:31)

2025-01-13 04:56:30
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX
Democracy doesn't even work in theory.

First past the post delivers power to the largest minority.

Proportional representation delivers power to the first and second largest minority, or some cabal of extremists who represent no-one.

The best system is benevolent dictatorship.
Fuck Israel
2025-01-13 05:00:10
uziq
Member
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it's almost as if there's 500 years of political theory examining the structure of democracy and liberalism. 'doesn't even work in theory' ... ah, okay, our resident edgelord has nixed that problem.

the balancing act between republicanism and oligarchy/empire is old as rome.

there are umpteen models of electoral or representative democracy in the contemporary world. the two options are not the antiquated british FPTP system or direct democracy and rule by mob majority. there are all sorts of hybrid or intermediary solutions, such as power-sharing, term limits and leadership rotation, party alliances and coalitions, etc.

a far bigger problem ailing modern democracy is its uneasy relation to the market, where real power resides. it leads to short-termism in budgeting, borrowing and investment, and a shackling of the political class to a bunch of speculators in the bonds and currency markets. the fat-cat speculators have to approve of fiscal or monetarist policy. the global order is determined by corporations and oligarchs more than any elected representatives - regardless of the shortcomings (or not) of their particular system. states can no longer exercise sovereign autonomy to make wide-reaching structural changes because they have to satisfy an extremely narrow - and economically spurious - logic of 'costing'. we continually talk about national finances as if they are household budgets, a mendacious trick played on us by treasury wonks who have no problem pressing the 'DEL' key on billions of debt for failing banks.

we are led back to the quandaries which were thrust to the fore in the post-2008 era, which gave rise to sanders/corbyn and to a lesser extent platforms like elizabeth warren's. we've kind of tried to repress those difficult questions with a bunch of 'business as usual' administrations which are fundamentally limited in their room for change.

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-13 05:09:31)

2025-01-13 08:53:59
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,054|7043|PNW

whenever i hear an argument in favor of the endlessly hypothetical benevolent dictatorship, i think the person has read too much sci-fi. doesn't doctor doom kind of like his country? would probably still suck to be under the thumb of a super-egotistical supervillain, even if they were a nation-builder.

taking the power out of the hands of any number of admittedly flawed democracies and putting it into… one, just trusting that they'll flex it in a non-corrupt way, is better how? we scream into the void as we march to the hazy future of world president lex luthor.
2025-01-14 00:48:45
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

it's almost as if there's 500 years of political theory examining the structure of democracy and liberalism. 'doesn't even work in theory' ... ah, okay, our resident edgelord has nixed that problem.

the balancing act between republicanism and oligarchy/empire is old as rome.

there are umpteen models of electoral or representative democracy in the contemporary world. the two options are not the antiquated british FPTP system or direct democracy and rule by mob majority. there are all sorts of hybrid or intermediary solutions, such as power-sharing, term limits and leadership rotation, party alliances and coalitions, etc.

a far bigger problem ailing modern democracy is its uneasy relation to the market, where real power resides. it leads to short-termism in budgeting, borrowing and investment, and a shackling of the political class to a bunch of speculators in the bonds and currency markets. the fat-cat speculators have to approve of fiscal or monetarist policy. the global order is determined by corporations and oligarchs more than any elected representatives - regardless of the shortcomings (or not) of their particular system. states can no longer exercise sovereign autonomy to make wide-reaching structural changes because they have to satisfy an extremely narrow - and economically spurious - logic of 'costing'. we continually talk about national finances as if they are household budgets, a mendacious trick played on us by treasury wonks who have no problem pressing the 'DEL' key on billions of debt for failing banks.

we are led back to the quandaries which were thrust to the fore in the post-2008 era, which gave rise to sanders/corbyn and to a lesser extent platforms like elizabeth warren's. we've kind of tried to repress those difficult questions with a bunch of 'business as usual' administrations which are fundamentally limited in their room for change.
Well you say democracy works, but then in the same - very extended - breath say it doesn't work as external forces hold the actual power..
Its amazing you don't pass out from oxygen starvation or cognitive dissonance.

There's no democratic system which is immune to the influence of the rich and powerful.
Most systems were set up by the rich and powerful as sham democracies - America and Britain for two - to permanently cement the control of external forces with their short term money-grubbing priorities  and no thought for the long term or the interests of the people.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

we scream into the void as we march to the hazy future of world president lex luthor
We effectively have malevolent dictator Lex Luthor in the form of Trump - did you not notice?
Select anyone at random and there's a god chance they'll do a better job.

Douglas Adams had it right - give power to some guy living on a distant planet alone, except for a cat, who is wholly detached and can take rational decisions.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2025-01-14 02:34:28)

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2025-01-14 06:51:10
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
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trump may want the prestige of dictatorship, but it's as of yet still out of his reach. we still need to put more of project 2025 in place, hold a constitutional convention, and disband the legislative branch before he can truly claim the title. right now he's just a delusional, malevolent man entering his second (not third) term, and may or may not have dementia. the hands of the heritage foundation, etc. firmly up his ass to stay as long as they keep whispering sweet nothings into his ear.

definitely on some level of alert for the future of the country, though. you should probably be more concerned than this "oh well we'll just see what happens" i'm always hearing from old white dudes. this shit's probably going to roll downhill.
2025-01-15 01:45:11
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

trump may want the prestige of dictatorship, but it's as of yet still out of his reach
Trump has both houses, a completely supine republican party congress, he's effectively a dictator even before the inauguration.

After inauguration we can expect executive orders as thick and fast as tweets (xeets?) on subjects completely outside his authority as President - no-one will do anything about it.

"As chief number one of the GOVERNMENT OF AMERICA I have HEREBY DETERMINED that Greenland is a SOVERIGN US PROPERTY and have declared war on Denmark and the rest of NATO! I have instructed Spaceforce to BOMB DENMARK AND HER ALLIES INTO THE STONE AGE! MAGA GOD BLESS AMERICA"

"Also ISRAEL can just kill everyone. BLESS JESUS"
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2025-01-15 03:36:31
uziq
Member
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Dilbert_X wrote:

Well you say democracy works, but then in the same - very extended - breath say it doesn't work as external forces hold the actual power..
Its amazing you don't pass out from oxygen starvation or cognitive dissonance.
because you say it doesn't even work 'in theory'. democratic theory is older than the neoliberal world order. it's quite a bit older than capitalism itself, actually. so how about your quit with the fulminating-edgelord rhetoric and make some sense in your statements?

Dilbert_X wrote:

There's no democratic system which is immune to the influence of the rich and powerful.
Most systems were set up by the rich and powerful as sham democracies - America and Britain for two - to permanently cement the control of external forces with their short term money-grubbing priorities  and no thought for the long term or the interests of the people.
of course, there's purchase in such arguments, and critiques to be made about how vested interests have set up and maintained these systems. you're not pointing out anything new here: it's there in 17th century hobbes and machiavelli, and has been restated many, many times. foucault, most notably, structured his entire corpus of work around the premise that there is a hidden threat of violence beneath the civilised liberal order which claimed to have escaped such things. it's there in walter benjamin, too, with his aphorism 'there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism', etc. etc. the 'nice' self-congratulatory parts of democratic or liberal theory are underscored by the threat of sovereign power and bloodshed, and of elites trying to cover up their initial power-grabs. we know.

there's still a theory/practice divide here, however, and there's nothing to say that reforms towards a better realised democratic system are impossible. you shutting down all suggestions with 'democracy is a broken idea' is dumb. reforms - even revolutions - do happen to challenge orthodoxies or elites. read a history book.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Douglas Adams had it right - give power to some guy living on a distant planet alone, except for a cat, who is wholly detached and can take rational decisions.
again with the 'we need rational people, preferably engineers in the room, to do the job' talk. this has been tried umpteen times in the 20th century. the idea of a scientific government or rational political programme was literally an obsession for governments across the spectrum. whether it's socialist command economies or friedman's iron laws of the market: we have rationalised and scientised ourselves to death! the 20th century's great superpower struggle was structured by rationalist wonks at the RAND corporation pumped full of systems and game theory.

the dream of a 'rational' leader is as historically complicated as adam smith's 'rational' agent interacting with the markets. markets aren't rational, so we've learned -- and, get this, nor really are humans. looks like you're going to need a better idea. perhaps read something a little more nourishing on this topic than anorak's favourite douglas adams?

i mean, how convenient that your ideal solution is basically a loner with a cat -- i.e. you. that would be a good gag if it wasn't so pathetic and didn't reflect such an obstinately undeveloped mind.

Last edited by uziq (2025-01-15 03:40:56)

2025-01-15 04:26:52
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,816|6377|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

because you say it doesn't even work 'in theory'. democratic theory is older than the neoliberal world order. it's quite a bit older than capitalism itself, actually.
It still doesn't work in practice
so how about your quit with the fulminating-edgelord rhetoric
No
there's still a theory/practice divide here, however, and there's nothing to say that reforms towards a better realised democratic system are impossible. you shutting down all suggestions with 'democracy is a broken idea' is dumb. reforms - even revolutions - do happen to challenge orthodoxies or elites. read a history book.
After ~2,000+ years a proper working incorruptible democracy has not yet evolved.
Look at the state of the world, all the great democracies have gone to shit.
i mean, how convenient that your ideal solution is basically a loner with a cat -- i.e. you. that would be a good gag if it wasn't so pathetic and didn't reflect such an obstinately undeveloped mind.
I think we should try it, I mean, weren't most of the great thinkers and economic theorists basically loners with cats?
Fuck Israel
2025-01-15 04:29:19
uziq
Member
+498|3723
an incorruptible anything doesn't exist. it's a process, not a final state you achieve and live in everlastingly without effort or maintenance. no wonder you think democracy is doomed to failure when you're so absolutist and utopian in your thinking.

the best great thinkers and economists certainly read a lot more than you.

 

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