Seattle
Valued Senior Member
Why ask such obvious questions? If the risk becomes too great they won't be insurable. People won't buy houses in fire risk zones. What's new?
Countrys that will be changed by climate change
- Thread starter RainbowSingularity
- Start date
Then they are not laboring. You may not value what they produce - it may be paper charts, or sales contacts, or service to patrons - but other people do, which is why they pay them to do it.
Using "slaves" in that context is like Trump claiming he has been "lynched."
And you said "not if it's illegal." Murder is also illegal. Thus prohibited.
Fraud is illegal. If you infringe on another company's trademark, that is a crime. (Google USPTO for more info.)
Of course. You will find many demands silly. You might find the demand for beer silly if you don't like it, for example.
Not quite. It need not be tied to a physical reality. For example, you can rate films by using a board of film reviewers who, over time, give consistent reviews to movies based on a list of artistic criteria. Even though those ratings are not tied to any physical reality, they are not arbitrary.
It may be true that somebody values the production of useless things, but that is not the reason people work. They do work, often very hard, without creating anything of value, just because they have to get money to survive.
I don't think it's like that at all. Do you mean nobody has ever used the labour of slaves? Or that wage-slavery is an unknown concept? Or that it's not the employer but the employee who determines the value of work?
Yes, many things are illegal. Very probably, not the same aspects of legality apply to brewing that apply to Trump. And which address the difference between the value of a label compared to the value of a name?
You might also find that value created by 'demand' is unrelated to value created by labour.
Right! So let's not bother with reality.
What reliable units of commodity value can be extrapolated from this?
Last edited:
If the insurance companies are insulated from the risks, they will.
Sure it is.
Most governments try to create a small amount of inflation - around 2%, in Canada making the news recently, for example.
And all governments are prone to making mistakes and creating a lot of it. Incompetent government is bad news in many ways.
Especially when controlled by the Republican Party, since Reagan.
- - - -
A good reason to do like a liberal - read, not watch.
Meanwhile: The historical record of people - entire civilizations - failing to solve even obvious problems is rich and extensive.
As a minor example: The US is still floundering from one crash to the next under Reaganomics, with hundreds of thousands of unnecessarily early deaths and a poverty drag on the entire society among the many consequences - do you anticipate that problem being solved any time soon?
Neither of those problems has been solved, yet - the ozone hole has been addressed, and things look good so far, but it's still there, and the ozone layer is still thinner than in the past
- and if the current movement toward deregulation and "free trade" keeps trending, the progress so far can be reversed easily and quickly
(for example: recent studies suggest that the more violent convection now common in thunderstorms and wildfires since agw took hold is capable of catapulting ozone-depleting water, other chemicals from the more severe fires of the new era, and some ozone reactive pollutants, to heights at which they can remove ozone from the still thin and vulnerable layer. That is, we can no longer automatically count on the ozone layer being insulated from the weather in the midlatitudes, so that only very durable and unusual chemicals can make the long journey of diffusion to the damage zone. Instead, we have the new worry of plain old water vapor making it to the heights in mere days, destroying ozone at midlatitudes.).
Likewise with mass starvation - the political advances that were instrumental in reducing its prevalence and severity are threatened, in part by agw, and can be reversed or evaded by interested parties.
And as the New Deal is rolled back step by step, whether there is a lot of it or only a little is increasingly controlled by people like the makers of insulin or the Martin Shkrelis of the planet. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyw...n-prices-400-because-they-could/#26faeb9c280c
If that kind of pandering to capitalistic corporations is how Republican Party governance plans to handle agw, which seems likely, and we can't get rid of it, which also seems likely, agw will not be "solved" - at least, not by the US, and not without war or equivalent destruction of the US industrial economy.
The "problem" of regular crashes has not been solved (and may never be.) But we survive each crash, due to the work people do to make that happen.
Agreed. But the underlying problem has been solved (CFC interference with ozone creation) and natural processes are causing a recovery. Needless to say, we could mess it up again.
Again, no. You are confusing "useless to me" with "useless." If the person laboring was producing something truly useless, no one would pay them to do that.
I am saying it's meaningless hyperbole.
Copyright and trademark law. You would likely pay more for a Tesla than a Yugo, because you perceive the value of a Tesla to be higher. Someone could defraud you and sell you a Yugo with a Tesla sticker (and yes, there are people who would be fooled) but that's illegal. They are not paying for the label, they are paying for what they think is a more valuable product.
If they are two different things - that is 100% true. The demand for beer is unrelated to the value created by making USB sticks.
?? Your post has no reality. It's not anything physical. In a very real sense it does not exist. Are all your posts therefore meaningless?
Box office sales of future movies evaluated by this board (which is often what they are used for.)
Is entirely separate from and unaffected by the amount of labour required to produce a commodity.
If you went by materials and labour, the two products would have different actual values.
I was not using two different products with the same label in the example.
It was the same product having a radically different perceived/market value with the label than without; i.e. people paying a hundred times more for the same amount of labour.
It's barely conceivable that some people could not tell the difference between two very different cars; it is inconceivable that anyone could imagine a hundred times more work going into two identical dresses.
That example was in the context of whether labour creates value.
As that theme has been clobbered, any further reference to it would be - as you say - meaningless.
Last edited:
Right. It just makes it illegal. Many criminals attempt to profit by breaking the law. Sometimes you can - at least for a short time.
Exactly. But you could get people to PAY Tesla prices for the Yugo by defrauding them. (i.e. get that worker to just slap a Tesla label on a Yugo.)
You are saying that Chanel products are the same as any other product. That's not supportable; it's like claiming that diamonds should be valued the same as coal since they are both just carbon. (Which they are.)
No. I specifically said, twice, that I was talking about the exact same product:
one single particular dress made in the Chanel salon. Before the label is sewn on, it's worth what the material and labour cost; after the label is sewn on, it's worth a small fortune. It's an ordinary dress with an extraordinary name. The the price inflation is all in the name.
Except when it's wholly irrelevant. As is the substance a product consists of. (linen; carbon)
There is little difference in the work of mining coal and the work of mining diamonds. The value difference is determined by some factor other than labour. Or substance.
Last edited:
this made me think of the following true story:
a man and his new wife hit up a public access diamond mine in 1996 (or thereabouts) and pay to get in.
time spent on site: 20 minutes (during an instructional brief he kicked over a "rock" and asked if that rock was what they looked like)
they found a multi-carat diamond which she cut herself, made into a ring, and had it valued at $5,500 (circa 1997)
recently valued at $12,500 when the news of a 7.44-carat diamond hits - the novelty of an Arkansas diamond
No.
Again, that's like claiming a Tesla is just like a Yugo before the Tesla label is put on. After all, they are built out of basically the same plastics, metals and rubbers; the differences are tiny percentages.
Correct. But the value of the labor to mine a pound of diamonds is much higher than the value of the labor to mine a pound of coal, due to the scarcity of diamonds.
I don't see why you want to have so much difficulty with this simple idea.
In my example, I had one dress. One. It was sewn by expert seamstresses in the Chanel salon. It had whatever value a dress of that quality and ugliness has in the fashion stores, regardless of who made it. Then the label was sewn on. It did not change the quality or the appearance of the dress in any way whatsoever. Suddenly, with the addition of another 45 seconds' labour by the very same seamstress, that very same dress multiplied in market value. If that seamstress sewed on a George label, the dress would instantly lose market value, in spite of its high quality.
That value is increased or decreased simply by the name - and how the buyer feels about that name.
If your example were one single car, made by the mechanics in the Tesla factory of the same materials they always use, with the same skill and care they always take, then your analogy would be appropriate: then and only then would that one car have a specific actual value, which could then be increased or decreased by the the addition of one or the other label - that is, by the potential buyer's preconception about the names.
So: Value is not created by labour alone. A second factor is relative desirability - which, itself, has several components: quality of materials, standard of workmanship, skill level of the worker(s) involved, cultural bias, snob appeal, brand association - which itself has at least two components: real-world reputation and success of advertising.
true. Diamond miners are paid double the salary of coal miners. Of course, they don't live in the same country, so the comparison is approximate, at best. However, diamonds are worth considerably more than double the value of coal, anywhere.
So then, there is yet another factor in determining value: Scarcity.
Plus, a diamond has to go through quite a lot more skilled labour (It's a rare housewife has the tools and expertise to cut and set a diamond! Pace, Captain!), while the coal has only to undergo one-stop, largely automated processing. The diamond is sold on from one owner to another, increasing in price at each transaction, until it reaches a retail outlet and becomes available to the end-buyer. Along the way, it requires constant guarding and insurance against theft, which all adds to the cost of maintenance, which cost is added on to the final price.
So then, we have to add: markups, cost of handling and specialized facilities.
That's a very long way, and several orders of abstraction beyond growing a hop vine, or kicking a stone.
And there are even more factors. Each step beyond practical labour and its physical product introduces a less constant, less measurable, less reality-based variable.
Thus: value is an abstract idea, not inherent in things, but projected onto things by sentient beings.
It begins, in the most primitive stage with the needs of a sentient being and the perceived utility of an object. But it is extrapolated, in highly complex human societies to such a level of abstraction as to have become almost entirely arbitrary.
Almost - because in crises, the lowest level of practical valuation still prevails. If you're cold enough, a sack of coal is worth a diamond necklace.
And your refusal to see any similarity to car manufacturing is funny.
Some people will pay a lot more for a Tesla (or a BMW, or a Ferarri) JUST BECAUSE OF THE LABEL. It could be a car built to similar specs with similar materials. People want the label. They will pay for it.
Now, you could say "but I have hard evidence that a Tesla really IS different than a Toyota because X!" No worries. Many people feel the same way about Chanel dresses - feel that they are better designed, have better craftsmanship, whatever. It doesn't matter. What matters is people believe that there is a difference, and many people agree on that difference. That's where the value lies.
Yep. Because people value what the label represents.
Take another example. Let's say you want to buy a parachute rig. Most US rigs come with a TSO tag, a tag which indicates that it has passed TSO testing and can be legally repacked and used for skydiving and for energencies in the US. Now, a skilled rigger could build a parachute rig out of raw materials (webbing, nylon, Spectra etc) such that it was identical to - perhaps even superior to - a name brand rig. But the instant he puts that TSO label on the rig, its value goes up dramatically. Now, nothing about that rig changed. It is the same as it ever was. But the VALUE of the rig went up massively, because it has a label on it that implies certain things about its manufacture, functionality and usability - real or not.
Agreed. Labor creates value - but not all labor does so. Someone who labors at knitting ugly scarves, for example, may not create value because no one wants ugly scarves. That's one of the benefits of employment vs independent labor; if you do a good job as a textile manufacturer the company will tend to keep you even if the product you are currently making is ugly. They take the risk, rather than you.
Agreed with everything there.
That doesn't follow. Values set in a complex and abstracted manner are not "almost entirely arbitrary" - just as the skills needed to fly a complex experimental aircraft with computer-abstracted controls are not "almost entirely arbitrary." In fact they are very specific. Complex does not connote arbitrary. Does it mean that value is sometimes hard to understand? Of course, as with any complex subject. But that doesn't mean it's arbitrary.
I think I covered the car analogy as thoroughly as human patience can stretch.
which itself is a massive derailment of the OP topic.
There is no correlation between the attribution of value to some object and the skills required for a task. This dredging up of non-applicable comparisons does not appear to me useful to the understanding of the topic ---
which itself is a massive derailment of the OP topic.
It's only hard to understand if you're blinded by detail. Once you understand the cultural and economic environment, you can discern the multiple factors that go into the evaluation of any particular commodity. And if you understand that, you see that a large proportion of that evaluation - especially on the part of the end user - is irrational.
Last edited:
You think it's irrational, therefore it's arbitrary. Sorry, that's not how it works. You can think that (for example) the desire for a Tesla over a reliable, run of the mill gas car is irrational, and only makes sense to a looney greenie. That does not mean that other people think it is - or that its value is "almost entirely arbitrary." It's not arbitrary at all. You just don't agree with other people's judgment on the value.
Value in a capitalist market is set by the demand of the market, which is a quantifiable, well understood value. Not only are there people who spend their careers studying these values, the market itself determines its value through competition. That's pretty much the opposite of arbitrary, even if you do not agree with the value the market puts on things.
Ah! So that's why it operates in boom-crash cycles (that those learned men ass-coveringly call "expansion and contraction cycles") and leaves so many of its citizens sick, broke, wounded and homeless.
That makes perfect sense. Thank you for 'splaining it.
(But it won't help with the climate change damage.)
Yes. Capitalism is a great way to apportion value and resources in a consumer economy. As a way to provide healthcare and prevent social injustice, it sucks. As a famous guy once said, it's the worst economic system there is - except for all the others that have been tried.
Simply that value is neither inherent nor constant. In response to
I said: Nothing creates value: value can be neither created nor destroyed: it's not a thing, nor yet an attribute of a thing - it's an idea. The value of any thing that exists is as much as a sentient being needs/wants/cherishes it.
You and Billvon then proceeded to prove this proposition.
The abstraction of media of exchange and complexity of transactions add to the price of an item, not to its value. The vagaries of market economics create nothing; have no effect on the value of anything - only on the price of things.
You would have to have a very personal (and non-standard) definition of value for that to make sense.