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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Right, so the quantum field model is designed to solve the assymetry paradox, but it’s just unconfirmed speculation. It’s a hypothesis, barely a theory, not a law. It’s discussed honestly for the most part, unlike the way orthodox economics discusses supply & demand. Just because you can find something roughly analogous in a hard science doesn’t make the problem substantively the same.

    And do you really think supply & demand isn’t taught as a law? We hear the phrase “the law of supply & demand” bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?

    And you actually think housing speculation doesn’t happen on a wide scale? Like… what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you’re denying that housing speculation is real?

    https://www.urban.com.au/expert-insights/property-speculation-to-continue-boom-but-will-a-bust-follow
    https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26457/w26457.pdf

    The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble. I really don’t understand where you get off saying speculation isn’t a thing.

    Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.

    Here’s a quote that confirms what I just told you:

    Even more disturbing are the figures comparing vacant homes to the homeless population of a given country. While Canada ranks lower on this list at 13, it is still not a ranking that we should be proud of at all. It would take just 9% of the over 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada to give every homeless person in the country a place to live.

    Like sure, there might be a housing shortage in the market but not in reality. In reality it’s a hoarding problem. We know from the pandemic that governments could house everyone if they simply made it a policy priority, but they don’t.

    And as for the “lab politics” of economics, I’m glad you’ve been able to see that issue, and I think that’s a good term for it. The lab politics doesn’t come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.

    Social sciences are a little different, usually capital can kind of just ignore the policies proposed by social scientists, even if they can cause minor problems for them.

    For economics though, when someone like Marx comes along and points out that capitalists are stealing value from the working class and that working class can unite to overthrow their oppressors because in reality those oppressors create nothing and they depend on us, then that has real teeth. That causes problems, of the revolutionary variety. The ruling class has to respond to that, so they will use their influence to fund think tanks, sponsor economics departments that are friendly to them and torpedo institutions that say things they don’t like.

    Richard Wolff talks about this:

    Sure. I’m a product of the elite top of the American university system. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford in California to get my master’s degree. And then I went to Yale to get my Ph.D. So, by the normal standards of this profession, I’m the elite product of these institutions.

    I was always struck that as I went through these schools, studying history, politics, economics, sociology—the things that intrigued me—I was never required to read one word of Karl Marx. And I remember telling that to my father, who looked in stunned disbelief at the very possibility that an educated person going to such august universities would not be required to at least read people who are critical of the society, simply as a notion of proper education.

    https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/25/watch_extended_interview_with_economist_richard_wolff_on_how_marxism_influences_his_work

    Just like kings used to, they have raised up their own class of priests to proclaim to the commoners that their power and wealth is justified and good, and we should all bow to their blessed interpretation of the mystical movements of the market. That’s why they don’t do science, and they quibble on the minutiae of the interpretations of long-dead texts, just like the priesthood did, because they can’t work in the realm of science, because it would destroy their entire project.



  • Her eyes and mouth are slightly wider than a relaxed expression, so there’s visible tension. In video it could be cute, like she might just be happy, but if you freeze just that one moment then her expression is ambiguous. Either she’s talking and smiling enthusiastically, or she’s about to eat you enthusiastically, or more realistically she’s afraid and trying to hide it. Add the creepy text and you’re primed to interpret the expression negatively.


  • My point about convexity being a handily-written escape clause was not to say that economists invented it out of whole-cloth, it’s to point out that it’s tautological. It’s basically saying, “Prices follow our law in all of the cases where they follow our law.” So it’s not a law then, is it? It’s an observation of extremely limited utility that just so happens to provide a justifying narrative: “our law says the market will be stable,” when we see the absolute opposite in many places.

    And if you feel like you’ve seen it in person, then again the data should exist. Again I’d say if you’re saying this is an example of the effect, without seeing the data, then you’re admitting out loud that you are just confirming your own preconcieved ideas rather than seeing any real evidence. These are statements of faith, not science. Orthodox economists would be proud.

    I’m not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times. That’s literally what the concept entails. It’s analogous to supply & demand in that the graphs are merely illustrative and it is only applicable in very specific situations. The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.

    As for the “don’t try to time the market” advice, if you’re right about that then someone should tell all the real estate speculators that are leaving extremely expensive real estate empty because they can’t rent it out and don’t want to sell at a low price. It would help our housing shortage immensely. Either they don’t exist, or your story about that isn’t complete.

    I don’t need you to look into Australia - price cycles and boom-bust cycles are well-documented economic phenomena. I linked an Australian case because I’m familiar with it.

    And to the extent that other sciences engage in politics over actual science, they are also being unscientific. However I’ve never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an “orthodox” school, except in economics. It’s the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.





  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneFrench rule
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    7 days ago

    Words are objects in a sense, although they are abstract, but there is no singular objective language in the same way that there is no objective gender. Both are intersubjective, they are interactions negotiated between subjects. There is no fixed object that you can point to and call “language” independent of a subjective experience of that language.

    And your argument could be applied to expressions of gender. A feminine dress is an object, and a beard is an object. These are gender signifiers, but that doesn’t make gender itself objective in any way. The analogy to language is very close. They are both sets of signifiers.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneFrench rule
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    7 days ago

    It does change all the time, and dictionaries don’t ensure any kind of standard. The linguists who write dictionaries will tell you that their only function is to describe the most popular parts of the language, not to prescribe any particular rules. Telling people how they should speak doesn’t actually work.

    I could say the phrase “abso-fucking-lutely” and you understand it, even though it’s not in the dictionary. That’s still language, it’s still English.

    And I don’t know what you mean by a “‘hard’ contradiction” or why that matters. My point is that both language and gender are forms of communication that rely on socially constructed signifiers and they are both fluid to a similar degree, so the analogy is good. If you want to argue with me, that’s the point you should be dealing with.


  • I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.

    People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.

    Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.

    Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.



  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneFrench rule
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    7 days ago

    Language isn’t objective though. It wasn’t handed down from some deity.

    Language is a constantly evolving negotiation of new and remixed communications, performed through billions of interactions every single day. It’s collaborative and unpredictable and sometimes someone comes up with something cool and the next day everybody is copying them.

    In short, language is socially constructed.

    I think it’s a great analogy for gender in that respect.




  • Genuine answer is that you need to get a feel for when the clutch begins to bite. The rest of it - when to use the brake, handbrake etc, is going to depend on what you’re doing. Learning to feel the clutch is the critical skill.

    The way to learn how to use the clutch is to start on a flat piece of ground with no traffic around, like an empty car park. With the engine running and the brakes off, press the clutch pedal and put the car into 1st gear. Then, slowly release the clutch pedal without using the throttle. Practice this until you can get the car moving without stalling the engine, and you’ll have a feel for it.

    When starting normally you’ll gently press the throttle as you do this. Cars usually idle around 1K RPM, use the throttle to maintain about 2K RPM for a normal take-off.

    Then all the other skills will fall into place. The key objective is that you should have the brake engaged until the moment the clutch engages and is ready to take control, then the brakes should be smoothly & quickly released.

    You can do this with either the handbrake or the foot brake, but if you’re using the foot brake you need to be manipulating the clutch, brake and throttle at the same time.

    That requires pressing both throttle and brake with the right foot, which is a more advanced technique, but very useful for smooth driving in a lot of situations. It’s often called “heel-toe”, but that’s misleading. You don’t use heel & toe, you use the two sides of your foot.


  • Oh arrested? Wow, only guilty people are arrested by states led by their fascist political rivals. If he’s arrested, he must be guilty. That’s how justice works.

    You could’ve said “convicted”, but that was annulled and a UN human rights committee found that:

    The committee concluded that prosecutors and the lead judge in the investigation, Sergio Moro, showed bias in Lula’s case, violating his right to be presumed innocent.

    I’m not a fan of politicians in general, but I’d take these charges more seriously if the people prosecuting them weren’t so flagrantly politically motivated and breaking the rules. Presumably the reason he was tried in the wrong court was because the state was shopping for a judge that wouldn’t give him a fair trial. If he’s that guilty, they’ve muddied the waters by not actually caring about his guilt, and it’s going to be way harder to get anything to stick anymore. Like they were in charge of the whole fucking country, how were they this bad at persecuting him?

    What I do know is that when a fascist like Bolsonaro is that mad at you, you might actually be doing something right.


  • Okay, thank you for the information about econometrics, but the economics that goes from data to model tends to be heterodox, not orthodox. Occasionally orthodox economists will accidentally do real science and they usually don’t like what they see.

    My question was about why you don’t see the data being presented when being taught about supply and demand, and you basically answered it by saying that the data isn’t there. Now, I see your point that the prices tend to be relatively stable and so the data doesn’t extend beyond these short line slopes, but then why are we told that supply & demand “sets prices” when there is no evidence of, for instance, a shock to the system upsetting prices which then follow a standard supply & demand curve to restabilise?

    Well, because such a situation would not be “convex”, so economics has written an escape clause for this phenomenon whereby it can avoid ever making any real predictions about what the market will do in a situation that isn’t already “stabilised”.

    And also, if it’s just short line segments, why is it fashionable to use a curve that implies more data than exists? Again, I would say that it is to ape the aesthetics of science without actually doing it.

    And it’s very strange that you turn to your personal anecdotal experience to say that you’ve “seen supply & demand play out”. If that were true, then you should be able to gather the data and present it. The fact that data doesn’t exist should tell you that you are probably using confirmation bias to evaluate your personal experiences.

    For instance, the housing market is something where ideally there would be very inflexible demand, because people don’t need more than one bed, typically. The reason the demand is flexible is because there are in reality two markets in the same space. The first market is the people who want housing to actually live in, and the second are landlords that hoard housing, speculate and leverage assets against loans and so on. The landlord market is responsible for both the short housing supply and high price, because they would often rather keep housing scarce and drive up rents, and speculate against one another than put their property back out on the market to go to a competitor. Selling a property you can’t rent out is a pretty bad financial decision, you’re better off waiting until the housing market flips and it becomes a seller’s market again. If a financialised housing market didn’t exist, housing would be much cheaper and homelessness would be much, much less.

    The reality of all markets is that they are subject to boom & bust cycles which supply & demand cannot account for. Housing in particular is notorious for huge bubbles that burst spectacularly.

    Here’s an example from a government consumer watchdog in Australia: https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/petrol-and-fuel/petrol-price-cycles-in-major-cities

    Here’s the really damning sentence:

    Petrol price cycles are the result of pricing policies of petrol retailers and not from changes in the wholesale cost of fuel.

    They straight up say that it is not about supply & demand.

    Here’s the heterodox explanation of this phenomenon: the Supply Chain Theory of Inflation

    EDIT: Actually this is a separate phenomenon, but it does emphasise how prices are set by sellers, and not by supply and demand. Wherever a seller can get away with changing their prices, like for instance in petrol sales, they will, but then it follows boom-bust, not supply-demand.

    And this is where the authors of that article talk about how orthodox economics institutions will launder heterodox theories. The point of doing this would be to maintain their prestigious position as the arbiter of all economics knowledge, as a result of which any damage such information might do to existing insitutions can be dampened by orthodox economists putting their own spin on the information. If they never acknowledge where the theory comes from, they get to rewrite it however they want. That’s distinctly unscientific.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneNipple rule
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    21 days ago

    Men can lactate, specifically when they are severely malnourished, but I have heard it’s possible to induce it in various ways. This would aid the survival of a tribe when food was scarce by keeping the babies alive for longer, but some mammals can do it under normal circumstances as well.