TreadOnMe [none/use name]

Ah, yes, the electronic warfare tactics of turning it off.

My big thing is that their lead times on things were horrendous before AI started fucking with everything. Like, year long lead times on things that China will make and ship to you in 3 months.

Oh, more recent than I thought!

That hasn’t been true for like… Idk, nearly 20 years?

Germany makes some nice stuff, but they’ll never get it to you on time.

Lol he’s sending Vance, that’s how you know it’s going go poorly. Presidents always send the Veep to do the shit jobs.

The fact that four of the countries at the bottom are ones that we did a bunch of war crimes in never ceases to amaze me. Those people really don’t like China lol

Lol that’s awesome.

They recently approached me on interviewing for going to work there, and they did the ‘We are just looking to help the Third World get internet.’ thing, as I was like… You know that places like Aspen, Colorado have Internet right? The issue of access isn’t usually one of technology, it is usually about economics, and unless you think that these areas are going to, with access to the Internet, magically generate a bunch of money for you to extract, this isn’t a viable business model.

That was when they got really uncomfortable, because those engineers really believe the bullshit that they are selling them.

Needless to say, I didn’t get the job, but it was an interesting experience to even be offered to interview.

What? You mean the idea that you would just sell StarLink to third world countries and somehow make up the difference between having to fire a rocket into space every two weeks for the rest of eternity didn’t work, and doesn’t make sense?

Why do you think we call him JDPON Don? I am sending them emails telling them I think they are doing a great job. Excellent work Mr. President, sir.

All labor under capitalism is subject to “wage theft” according to Marx. Idk where you got this idea that things under"wage theft" don’t produce a “labor value”. The “labor value” is just the socially nesscery time required to make something. A part of that socially nesscery time is the time required to acquire the resources. The ‘labor value’ savings that the Spanish found were two-fold, they were able to simply take a melt down existing gold jewelry and statues into bullion, and they did not care if they worked their native slaves far below the actual “labor value” required to sustain human life. Less resources = Less time = Less labor value. For the Spanish, the “labor value” in comparison to domestically mined gold was extremely low. Now, from an actual humanitarian perspective, let’s call it the ‘real labor value’ of extracting gold does not change. Marx’s point is that while supply and demand are real things that affect each other, the primary drivers of both supply and demand are, at their core, the labor value, not each other. If you reduce the your inputs of something past it’s ‘real labor value’, you don’t actually see any larger economic boons, and it, in fact, causes economic stagnation.

Basically, slavery is regressive as an institution not only because it is morally abhorrent, but because it doesn’t actually stimulate national economic development, it stagnates it. This is why others of his time believed that Southern plantation slavery would eventually go away naturally. This, of course, underestimated the North’s ability to innovate on the process and introduce the cotton gin which reduced the real labor value by over three times, thus breathing new life into the practice. A real life example of why we can’t just wait for capitalism to wither away due to it’s inability to sustain the real labor value and maintain the rate of profit. You have to have a revolution to kick the rotting structure over and set it on fire, otherwise people will just keep trying to prop it up.

In our modern case, that is with industrial robotics (something I am keenly aware of as that is usually my job, to prop up the rotting structure) and ‘AI’. However these practices are hollowing out the real economy, when they produce the efficiency wanted at all, because that means that they are spending less and less money on the real labor value required to sustain the laboring community that really drives the business. As the guy who just burned that warehouse down said, “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” They might pay me well, but even if I create an overall system efficiency improvement of 3 times, they aren’t going to pay me the salary of 3 employees, which means that despite creating the ability to create three times more of whatever it is, my ability to purchase what was made doesn’t rise unless the exchange value of the item drops. But the exchange value of the item cannot be allowed to drop because then what was the point of increasing the efficiency? This is how you get a crisis of overproduction, where the shelves are full because no one can afford what is on them.

The issue is that all of this stuff is, on it’s own, simple, but the dynamics (one could say dialectics) are what make it horrendously complex, because things that are static in isolation (like a supply demand curve) suddenly behave entirely different when seen within a whole system.

Yeah the exchange value fluctuates when gold is used instead of fiat, however the ‘real labor value’ remains the same, unless technology comes along to reduce that.

Actually, that is exactly what Marx believed. And he specifically used the historical example of the rapid inflation of gold coins when the Spanish brought over their hoard from conquering, colonizing and enslaving South America. One of the only times in history where gold has had that tendency.

The labor for creating gold became cheap, so more gold was available, so gold itself became cheap. So instead of being extremely wealthy like the Spanish thought they would be (which they were, just not like modern capitalist wealthy) they were forced to limit their spending. The only way for them to maintain the exchange value is through hoarding, like with diamonds. However, this creates a limit on how much exchange value they can get at any given time. The inflationary tendency is created because there is less labor value being created with any single gold piece.

For Marx, it isn’t a goldbug thing, it was a demonstration that even gold currency follows the LTV. Marx would be horrified at fiat currency, as it is an abstraction on top of an abstraction. It is barely tangential to labor value.

I can believe that. This whole thing is way too specific, almost feels like some ChatGPT of a classic Trump tweet.

Always told people that when the real, competent, organize your death on a train car Nazis come along, they will probably be Democrats.

Holy shit this is Trump spinning gold.

Bringing up the Candace/First Lady of France thing is a wildly obscure pull, and then doubling down with ‘She looks better than you anyway.’

Fucking Classic Donny.

It’s a joint venture, as in I sit back and smoke a joint, while they run a venture.

The important thing is to think materialistically. Cuba isn’t ‘doomed’ because of its geography, it is presented with different opportunities, and it is up to the community of proletarians, which is ideally represented through the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to recognize where those opportunities lie and create a labor force that can take advantage of them.

Cuba still possesses top of the line medical professionals, and likely one of the most comprehensive counter intelligence operations against the U.S.

Compare this to their neighbors, whose only real industries are fishing, financial crimes, sex work (non-derogatory), and tourism.

They work what they can.

There have been a significant amount of informal work done. But western academia has relegated actual materialist analysis to the engineers, financiers, and supply chain managers, with the human affects relegated to non-profit work.

However, because of that, there is data out there to analyze.

Everyone wishes they had zero inventory.

However, less quippy, as long as everything in that warehouse has a known buyer, it can be considered ‘zero inventory’. It’s a production philosophy, not an exact description. I doubt that is what this company was doing though.

Who ever this person is needs to get their head out of their ass. Western Marxism did not produce an academically honest critique of the Soviet Union, it served to sell lies to Soviet leaders about how much better and more free their populations would be under democratic socialism, which never came to fruition.

Whatever problems exist within Rockhill’s analysis, the fact that there has been no actual widespread public Western leftist re-examining of the Marxist-Leninist approach, in light of the opening of the Soviet Archives which put to bed the most absurd of Soviet stereotypes, is a damning nail in the coffin of most of these so called ‘honest intellectuals’.