Well, let's start with commodities. They have value, see, and that value contains both the exchange value (what it's worth in exchange for another commodity) and the use value (the value it provides as a commodity, like a coat keeping you warm.)
But exchange value of commodity to commodity is a pain, so inevitably people tend to turn to a commodity that can be the "money commodity". A universal store of value, in this case gold.
Then exchange becomes commodity -> money -> commodity. Gold becomes the interface between commodity exchange.
But, over enough time something else happens. Hoarding, luck, and gains in the money form mean someone now has enough spare gold to skip straight to money -> commodity, which then can be sold for more money when prices fluctuate.
Now you have two flows: commodity -> money -> commodity and money -> commodity -> more money.
The first one uses gold as a means of smoothing the interface between commodity transactions, the second, however, makes increasing the store of gold the goal. But that surplus gold doesn't come from just anywhere. It's not just ethereal excess, it needs to come from either the raw material value or the labor that was used to produce the commodity. While rarely, surplus value comes from making a commodity cheaper, the bulk of the excess gold in a money -> commodity -> money transaction comes from extracting value from labor.
> Well, let's start with commodities. They have value, see, and that value contains both the exchange value and the use value
Worth remembering also, that what you call "exchange value" is essentially a derivative of what you call "use value". I can use (eat) a side of beef. I cannot eat 50 sides of beef before it spoils. To get any value at all our of the other 49 sides of beef I have to find a market (49 other people who want to eat beef) and exchange it for something else. If there is no "use value" though, there's no market. Exchange value (prices) will change based on market conditions, but use value only changes with occasional technological innovation (freezers to freeze your beef, new industrial or chemical uses for gold, etc).
This is where fiat currencies come in. Fiat currencies like the US$ have a "use value", and that use is legally settling debts (being legal tender[0]), and paying my taxes (which actually are debts).
In any case, I think the extreme gold bugs who see fiat currencies all collapsing and gold going to the moon really over-estimate the market demand for gold in any scenario where shit hits the fan that bad. I mean, one way or another, whatever Government is in power is going to want to eat 25-50% of your income in taxes, regardless of what currency you use.
Even in a world where the only model is commodity -> gold/money -> commodity, there will be people who will hoard a commodity to sell it when the demand is high. So, hoarding and making profits is a human nature, that just cannot be avoided.
The desire to do that is human, sure, but we can build systems to limit its impact.
We could have a negative interest rate, tax wealth rather than income, etc etc. People going to try to hoard, but you can add friction to make that harder.
That is popular thinking right now but exactly the opposite of what makes economic sense.
Taxing income is counterproductive - an economy should reward, not penalize, the creation of value, whether that is individually or in groups/companies.
But taxing wealth is even worse - savings and investment are what generates higher rates of productivity.
By far the best thing to tax is consumption. But it will always be unpopular because it just seems unfair since people must consume to survive. But it's the only truly fair tax, since it actually makes taking from the world more expensive, rather than making contributing to the world less valuable/profitable.
You can hoard services coupons aka money. Just think about being the guy on the other side. One guy accumulates 50 years of burger flipping and you are 60 years old and now owe someone 50 years of burger flipping. That money is effectively worthless its value will be reduced by inflation and no the government didn't steal 40 years of burger flipping. The simple act of 40 years of aging did that.
That's a fair question, my comment was getting long in the tooth.
So, let's take a commodity like a wool blanket (or some other simple commodity to illustrative purposes). That blanket has more value than the wool that made it, but where did that come from?
When the wool becomes a blanket and gains value, it does so because someone put the labor into converting the wool to a blanket. So the generic function here is commodity + labor = higher value commodity.
This goes all the way down. The wool comes from someone putting in labor to get it from the sheep. And it continues up, the blankets become part of hotels, bedding, other higher value commodities, etc.
More expensive commodities are more expensive because they need more labor to produce.
So a commodity is essentially a crystallization of labor value. It represents a complex chain of labor value multiplying other labor value.
So back to your question. CMC transactions are about using gold to compare labor value crystalized in commodities. I'm selling my blankets to an iron miner, but I don't need iron ore. But with a universal money commodity like gold I can go buy the commodities I do need.
The MCM transaction has you buy my blankets and sell them later for more than you paid me without adding labor. If the value has increased, but no additional labor has been done to it, it's still the same blanket I made. I can also sell my blankets at the higher current price, so what have you done except taken some value from me? Where else does the value come from?
I'm pretty sure the Marxists got that wrong. Most economic transactions hurt the consumer i.e. the person that spends most of his money on the daily necessities of life and other unavoidable expenses. Capital gains are paid by consumers to owners of capital.
I mean the consumer decides how much he is going to spend on a product and thereby sets an upper bound to how profitable a product can be.
Your boss uses external financing through debt and stocks must at least compete with the yields on bank accounts. The costs of capital are passed onto product prices as they aren't something that differs from company to company that much.
Why are people watching things they enjoy? Because they enjoy them.
Stop trying to be the arbiter of what other people enjoy. I'm sure you have some tastes in media others would find cringeworthy, but we're all better if we recognize that taste in media is highly personal and we should let people enjoy things.
> Why are adults enjoying things clearly meant for kids?
There are many potential reasons. Abnegation, power fantasy, sense pleasure, social cohesion (being able to discuss with your peers what's in the zeitgeist). I could spend a paragraph on each of these and why they are reasonable for adults.
Your attitude is narrow minded, and you've resorted to insults to try to make your point on several occasions, rather than having an investigative, curious mind. You've drawn your conclusion before interrogating the details.
Academic research into games has identified 8 or nine broad categories of why people play games, and I'm sure there's something similar for movies.
Well, as I have tried to indicate before, only the words are mine, the tone and emotion you attribute to them while reading are entirely yours and are limited by your experience with people. If you are still watching superhero movies with engagement, it is very likely that you are attributing the emotions of those overblown characters to people you encounter.
Wait till you hear about the history of shows like Transformers, HeMan, Gundam, etc. Media has more or less been an ad for 50+ years at this point, that's hardly a new phenomena.
Why do you think it wouldn't ban that? What if a kid says, "why are there two daddies in that story?" Or goes home to their parents and says, "my teacher read us a story about two daddies".
Look at the vitriol children's books like "And Tango Makes Three", a book that does zero moralizing and just tells the real life story of a mating pair of male penguins raising a chick, received.
In america, at least, this law would absolutely punish what you described.
"some boys like boys" or "if someone touches you in a swimsuit area, tell a grown up right away", or "many families have mommies and daddies, but some families have two mommies and some have just one parent"
Teaching kids that we should acknowledge and respect each other, even if our families are different, and protect themselves from predators is not abuse.
No one is talking about graphic penises and vaginas, sexuality education at this development age is about recognizing that families are different and that's ok.
The responses in this thread are deeply disappointing. Every law we have, just like every piece of tech we have, needs to be considered not only in the context of what words are on the paper but also how could it be deployed maliciously.
How could this law be used to hurt or discriminate should be on someone's mind, just like we ask how could this API be misused.
Seeing so many reactionary comments from folks who jump in to defend them because it aligns with their (in this case, right wing) political tribe is antithetical to the rational, deep thinking nature this place usually shows.
I'm curious why you chose to reply throughout the comments here using a burner account, rather than your main. Are you at risk of retaliation? Genuinely curious.
I don't have a main. No risk of retaliation. Just a topic I'm informed on and it drives me up the wall to have people claim "reason" and "science" and then ignore the fact that science and reason widely agree with the idea that gender and sex aren't binary.
Use of "widely" suggests bias, so I'd recommend being careful with that use. There is definitely a concensus among many scientists of that hypothesis, but it's disingenuous to pretend that there isn't the presence of a significant number of scientists that argue the opposite. Objectivity is incredibly important in science, and it breeds credibility. This topic has social and ideological components, both of which cloud objectivity when speaking of the science. If you believe that science evolves, it's paramount that we treat hypotheses objectively rather than through the lens of absolutism
I'm suggesting it's the majority opinion. Yes, there exist minority opinions as well, but generally we don't consider agreeing with the majority/consensus to be "ignoring the science".
That seems qualitative, rather than quantitative. Similar to how we use voter sample polling. Objectively speaking, I believe you'd have a hard time quantifying that assertion. Most people seems to take that position based on the loudest voices and personally held convictions rather than raw numbers. Quantifying the majority would require polling every single scientist that works in the field, which is likely not possible. I continue to consider the arguments of the many camps in that field, as the science is not settled and is constantly changing as we gain understanding of our own genetic makeup.
This is a very wholesome comment and it made me smile. It has the same vibe as someone noticing a hacker planting a backdoor in their companies code and giving then a gentle telling off because "that kind of security faux pas can have serious security implications!". I'm imagining a Mr Rogers type character saying it.
Gender? If a kid has a friend who is non binary, or has a trans friend, and asks their teachers about it you think it's inappropriate for the teacher to say, "well, some people are boys, some people are girls, some people are neither, and we try to make sure we respect each other."
Would you be uncomfortable with your school teaching that we should respect redheads, even though they aren't common?
Red hair is about 1 to 2 percent of humans. This is roughly the estimate for trans and non binary folks.
Pretty monstrous to teach kids anything other than "respect your neighbor", especially if they are very likely to encounter trans and non binary people.
Ignoring the existence of non binary folks doesn't make them not exist, any more than ignoring red heads does.
The problem is, that's science-denial, so yes, it would be inappropriate for the teacher to say that.
Unpacking the accurate phrase "some people feel they are neither and their views should be respected" for a five year old or even an eight year old is not reasonable territory for a primary school teacher whose only training on the matter is political.
Teaching children to respect other's views is very much something that I want schools to do. What's the legitimate alternative? What should the teacher say there?
> The problem is, that's science-denial, so yes, it would be inappropriate for the teacher to say that.
So - imagine that little Timmy has religious parents, and thus believes that God created the heavens and the earth in six literal days (a not-uncommon belief held in the fundamentalist Christian community). Suppose then that little Susie overhears it and asks the teacher about why her parents told her that life evolved gradually over the course of eons.
In my mind, an appropriate response could be "some people believe that the universe was created by a deity, and their views should be respected." But you've indicated that "some people believe <x> and their views should be respected" is in fact inappropriate.
It's not science denial. Biology has all sorts of instances of more than two sexes. Humans have at least a dozen different genetic configurations that affect their sex organs and hormonal development in a visible way.
And that's just a narrow view of sexes through the lens of biology. Social science, anthropology, neurology, medicine, psychology, endocrinology and basically every other science that interfaces with human bodies generally agrees that sex is not binary in humans.
Once you've updated your understanding of what the science says on sex, come back and we can talk about gender, and how science agrees that gender is not only not a binary concept, it's purely a social concept.
It also forbids discussing gender identity in primary school, which is completely reactionary. Discussing gender is fine for kids, and it's totally developmentally appropriate for primary school kids to know that there are boys, girls, and non binary people.
It also requires disclosing any emotional or mental health changes to parents. If a kid tells a teacher, "I've realized I'm gay, and that is making me depressed/hard to concentrate" the school needs to inform the parents. That's a huge problem in some parts of the country where being gay can result in neglect, abuse, abandonment, being sent to conversion therapy, or more subtle discrimination and outing.
You've really given this law a very surface reading, and not thought about, "how could this be used adversarially to hurt people."
(I'm about as lefty as they come, but I'm generally against gun control laws, for instance, because I believe they will be enforced in a way that hurts people.)
But exchange value of commodity to commodity is a pain, so inevitably people tend to turn to a commodity that can be the "money commodity". A universal store of value, in this case gold.
Then exchange becomes commodity -> money -> commodity. Gold becomes the interface between commodity exchange.
But, over enough time something else happens. Hoarding, luck, and gains in the money form mean someone now has enough spare gold to skip straight to money -> commodity, which then can be sold for more money when prices fluctuate.
Now you have two flows: commodity -> money -> commodity and money -> commodity -> more money.
The first one uses gold as a means of smoothing the interface between commodity transactions, the second, however, makes increasing the store of gold the goal. But that surplus gold doesn't come from just anywhere. It's not just ethereal excess, it needs to come from either the raw material value or the labor that was used to produce the commodity. While rarely, surplus value comes from making a commodity cheaper, the bulk of the excess gold in a money -> commodity -> money transaction comes from extracting value from labor.