• Orion@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    Any Utahns here? I wish we had an actual leftist newspaper here, Salt Lake Tribune is the best of all the ones I’ve looked at, but then they publish articles like this and this.

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    9·
    20 hours ago

    I have mixed feelings about romance. Sometimes I’ll sort of forget about it like it doesn’t even matter. Sometimes I’ll really yearn for it hard like it’s a huge deal. But I don’t know how much of the 2nd one is cultural influence of putting romance on this huge pedestal as like the best thing since gluten-free sliced bread. Like a good partnership would probably help me a lot, but it’s also not going to solve my problems on its own and a bad one could make them worse. I think the more important thing, probably, is to unfuck my brain with regards to attachment more generally. I tend to have that thing going on, I forget the exact term, where you seek attention and then want to run when you actually get it. Fearful… anxious… something or other. I could just look it up. Anyway, I have come a long way in emotional stability and self esteem I think, but it could still be a lot better and unfucking attachment is probably a significant part of that so that attachment is a source of security and stability instead of a combination of desiring it and fearing it. My gut tells me I’d actually have a pretty easy time having long-term relationships, platonic or otherwise, if I didn’t have the fear/avoid thing in the mix, along with general insecurity about my capability to maintain relationships over time and distance due to my distractability and sudden dropoffs of interest; but then, judging relationship maintaining with distance as a factor is pretty unfair, as most human beings throughout history did not have the internet and such, they could just know the people who were right there and not have to think about it beyond that. My gut also tells me I need to eat healthier and that holding onto anxiety is bad for its digestion. It’s not even speaking in english. I don’t know what language the gut uses. Communicates through “this feels good” and “that feels bad” I guess.

    • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
      5·
      13 hours ago

      I have mixed feelings about romance. Sometimes I’ll sort of forget about it like it doesn’t even matter. Sometimes I’ll really yearn for it hard like it’s a huge deal.

      I believe this is the orientation called “Aro-spike.”

  • Jeanne-Paul Marat@lemmygrad.ml
    9·
    22 hours ago

    It’s genuinely crazy that Chiang Kai-shek/Jiang Jeshi was about 5 minutes from getting deposed only to be saved by the Japanese invading Manchuria.

    Context:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident

    Not saying Wang Jingwei would’ve been…good or better [its wang Jingwei]. But it certainly would have been interesting.

    Plus its massively ironic and funny Chiang was saved because he had to “fight” the Japanese.

  • SlayGuevara@lemmygrad.ml
    19·
    2 days ago

    I got metal shrapnel in my eye today and it had to be drilled out by a doctor. Sounds horrific but at my job it was a badge of honor so in a dumb ass way I was looking forward to it too. I swear these people are just build different.

    Still no luck in joining a political org. I feel like it would be a bit of a waste to join a Trot or Ortho leaning org that operates as a niche. On the other hand it might be the most serious option. Maybe I should just start with the union.

    I also shoot my shot with someone way out of my league and it somehow worked and now I have to think about when I will drop that I also have dozens of Star Wars extended universe books.

    • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
      15·
      2 days ago

      Lethal injection is creepy cause it tries to sanitize execution as something less grisly than what it is, so that people can sit back and pretend like it’s “clean” and “painless”, and wash their hands of it, when it’s neither clean, nor painless, nor even guaranteed to work.

      I do think there are contexts where execution has its place, like in revolutionary war for gaining and then maintaining power where you’re up against people who will literally kill you if you don’t, who have committed immense war crimes and are a danger to have around, but pretending like it’s not a brutal struggle and thinking you can wield it as some kind of sanitized tool of justice is twisted. And even then, it’s not automatically necessary, like in the story of the CPC reeducating the “last emperor of China” after they had power.

      But US “justice” is a joke and it has, last I remember checking, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Racist, sexist, settler trash system cosplaying as “democracy”.

  • TabularTuxedo@lemmygrad.ml
    5·
    2 days ago

    Could someone help understand use-values?

    Is use-value something a commodity has, or something a commodity is? (or is this question incorrect?)

    Relevant quotes from The Capital:

    In the following quote, he defines an use-value as being inseparate from the thing:

    The utility of a thing makes it a use value.[4] But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity.

    Here Marx kind of talks about use value as separate:

    To resume, then: In the use value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim.

    • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
      5·
      2 days ago

      Use value is something that a commodity has because of how people use it. Rare earth minerals were essentially without any use value for most of history but now they have significant use value.

      The value is imparted by its use but it can only be used that way because of its properties.

    • Ember_NE@lemmygrad.ml
      6·
      2 days ago

      A commodity has use value in so far as it can be used by a human being to do something. Without humans it is just a chunk of matter. But the ways in which a human can use it is particular to it’s matter.

      These commodities are all made by human labor. The act of producing a commodity which is useful means that the labor is useful because it produces a useful commodity.

      • TabularTuxedo@lemmygrad.ml
        6·
        2 days ago

        I think it’s pretty interesting how much Marx probes each object with different lenses in his work. Like you said, a thing can be a natural-form (chunk of matter) or value-form (how humans see it), labor is abstract or concrete etc.

        I have read about dialectics before but seeing how Marx does it and how his German is translated, it confused me quite a bit, hence the question. Still, commodity is a pretty cool thing to study.

        Also, I liked your last sentence. Pretty great summary.

        • Ember_NE@lemmygrad.ml
          6·
          2 days ago

          Yes, a key part of reading Marx is understanding which set of abstractions he is using at a given moment. He operates on different levels of abstaction at different points and writes as if he is just testing them out to see if they work, so you need to think about which one applies at a given time.

    • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
      6·
      2 days ago

      I suspect this confusion may be just an artifact of the specific words chosen for the English translation.

      As far as i can tell in the German original text Marx uses the terms “use value” and “use item” somewhat interchangeably, at least in this section. But clearly, if you read further the entire section, which is about the distinction between the use and exchange value of an item, you see that what he means is that use value is a property of an item.

      Feel free to run the original German text through a few different translators to get a feel of what some alternative wordings might be:

      Your first quoted passage

      Die Nützlichkeit eines Dings macht es zum Gebrauchswert. Aber diese Nützlichkeit schwebt nicht in der Luft. Durch die Eigenschaften des Warenkörpers bedingt, existiert sie nicht ohne denselben. Der Warenkörper selbst, wie Eisen, Weizen, Diamant usw-, ist daher ein Gebrauchswert oder Gut. Dieser sein Charakter hängt nicht davon ab, ob die Aneignung seiner Gebrauchseigenschaften dem Menschen viel oder wenig Arbeit kostet. Bei Betrachtung der Gebrauchswerte wird stets ihre quantitative Bestimmtheit vorausgesetzt, wie Dutzend Uhren, Elle Leinwand, Tonne Eisen usw. Die Gebrauchswerte der Waren liefern das Material einer eignen Disziplin, der Warenkunde. Der Gebrauchswert verwirklicht sich nur im Gebrauch oder der Konsumtion. Gebrauchswertebilden den stofflichen Inhalt des Reichtums, welches immer seine gesellschaftliche Form sei. In der von uns zu betrachtenden Gesellschaftsform bilden sie zugleich die stofflichen Träger des Tauschwerts.

      Second quoted passage

      Man hat also gesehn: in dem Gebrauchswert jeder Ware steckt eine bestimmte zweckmäßig produktive Tätigkeit oder nützliche Arbeit. Gebrauchswerte können sich nicht als Waren gegenübertreten, wenn nicht qualitativ verschiedne nützliche Arbeiten in ihnen stecken. In einer Gesellschaft, deren Produkte allgemein die Form der Ware annehmen, d.h. in einer Gesellschaft von Warenproduzenten, entwickelt sich dieser qualitative Unterschied der nützlichen Arbeiten, welche unabhängig voneinander als Privatgeschäfte selbständiger Produzenten betriebenwerden, zu einem vielgliedrigen System, zu einer gesellschaftlichen Teilung der Arbeit.

      (I copied a little more than your short quoted passages so you can see the full context.)

      I think the following part illustrates this interchangeable use of the terms “use value” (in German “Gebrauchswert”) and “use item” (“Gebrauchsgut”):

      Ein Gebrauchswert oder [Gebrauchs-]Gut hat also nur einen Wert, weil abstraktmenschliche Arbeit in ihm vergegenständlicht oder materialisiert ist

      (My addition in the square brackets is just to clarify that Marx here, i.m.o., is using a typical German syntax where a compound word can be abbreviated when its first part was already used in the previous compound word.)

      Translated:

      A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it.

      I think this is some unfortunately imprecise use of language, but that is how Marx wrote it.

  • ArcticFoxSmiles@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    3 days ago

    I am kind of curious, I used to be conservative and then right-wing libertarian. I was never a liberal. I wonder if liberal propaganda is less extreme. I had some traces of the alt-right pipeline which I had to do away with although I don’t know if there is a similar trap for liberals.

  • ConfusedPuppy@lemmygrad.ml
    9·
    3 days ago

    Tired of people saying how your body will get significantly worse over time. I’m already in immense pain walking, you telling me this shit gets worse?

    • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
      11·
      3 days ago

      FWIW, your body can get better over time too! Aging can certainly make things more injury prone and such, but you can also be in good health and good shape even at an older age. Some things are affected by genetics, some of it’s environment, some diet, exercise, mental health, etc. It’s not a thing where you inevitably slide downhill and everything just gets worse over time. Far more complicated than that. If it were a simple downhill trajectory, then everybody who dies of natural causes would be dying at the same age.

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    8·
    3 days ago

    The psychology of wealth is weird. I’ve never had money in RL in that way, but I’ve had experiences in an online game before where, due to RNG / rare item drop, I came into “wealth” in the game temporarily. Notably, not the capitalist kind of wealth where it is tied up in investments and so on; more akin to winning the lottery. The reason I call it weird is, like, when that kind of thing happens, I start doing this thing that goes something like: I don’t want to spend too much of it because then I will be low on in-game funds again.

    But it’s not like the game requires you to have a lot of money on hand. It’s not like in RL where it’s important to save because if you don’t, you could end up without money for essential things. The worst that happens in a game like this is you gotta do some events/activities to gradually get funds back. Yet still, it’s like some part of my mind gets tangled up in this fear of losing the spending power itself? The perceived flexibility that comes with having those funds available that theoretically could be spent if something I really want comes up. But being ruled by this fear actually means I spend less often and therefore get things I want in the game less often because I am afraid to lose it.

    As it is just a game, the “just have fun with it, it’s a game” mindset usually wins out eventually. But it feels like such a weird hangup to have at all and it feels like a little window into something a little bit like the way rich people think under capitalism, especially if they weren’t born into wealth; they know the feeling of artificial scarcity and so become all the more afraid of going back to it when they are free of it, and this motivates them to do whatever it takes to never have to go back, no matter how capitalist it is. This is somewhat guesswork/extrapolation as I haven’t exactly interviewed rich people on this, but I find it fascinating when a simulation can spark, perhaps, a kernel of insight into something real.

    • n1bricsfan@lemmygrad.ml
      7·
      3 days ago

      What game was it? Lots of online games have a black market where game currency/items can be traded for actual currency, which makes me wonder if there’s value in doing a Marxist analysis of game economies (Runescape, Counter-Strike, etc). If a means of transfer exists between in-game and actual currencies it appears somewhat analogous to crypto. Although with crypto there’s not much direct labor-power involved compared to a game like Runescape where you have to manually do in-game actions in order to generate wealth.

      • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
        6·
        3 days ago

        Guild Wars 2, so no way to actually turn it into real currency that I’m aware of (unless you sell your account or something); I mean, you can convert “gold” (game currency) to “gems” (game store currency) but gems can’t purchase anything other than GW2 items, which are all virtual and contained within the game and your account.

        But that is an interesting thought. I’d be curious to read such an analysis.

        Also, it occurs to me, one area of potential interest about GW2 in terms of economic analysis is the internal design of the economy. Though I’m not real familiar with the specifics, there are players in the game who play the trading post like a game of its own, amassing in-game wealth with things like flipping, or (anecdotally I’ve heard) with organized attempts to control the market for specific items in order to make more off of them. Ultimately, GW2 devs can step in and wreck this pretty easy by adjusting how easy it is to obtain items, but a particular one I recall this happening with is the “black lion weapons”, which are uncommon or rare drops from GW2’s lootboxes. GW2 devs solution to this (as I understand it) was to have these items come back every so often on a rotation, so that supply would not become too rare. But nevertheless, you can see how certain items like this end up with fairly consistent, high cost to buy from other players on the trading post, suggesting people are actively manipulating it. As opposed to more random range of listings and availability if they weren’t.

        One player on reddit even actively admitted to doing market manipulation with the essence that drops from this item: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Chest though I don’t know if they are still playing now

        And there is potential analysis to be done in how people like this are probably being allowed to exist in a game economy because, in some cases, they actually make it more stable, even though their greed is not good for players; the company itself can benefit from it if it becomes harder to get certain rare items as a result while having consistent supply listed, such that players will be tempted to spend real money on gems, convert it to gold, and then buy the item off the trading post.

        • n1bricsfan@lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          2 days ago

          I hadn’t considered the relationship between high item prices, item availability and its benefit to the company, but that’s very interesting. Something similar happens in OSRS. There’s a huge price difference between mid-game, late-game and end-game gear, to the point where the average player (most of the playerbase are adults these days) really doesn’t have the time to sink into the exorbitantly long grinds to acquire either the items directly or the in-game currency needed to buy them. Buying in-game currency ends up being a no brainer for them because it’s the path of least resistance. Spend 6 months trying to get one item, or get it immediately and move on to the more interesting content.

          In the case of OSRS I think the majority of actual prices aren’t so much due to market manipulation or flipping, although both do occur. There’s been some big scandals in the past involving clans and market manipulation so it’s a bannable offense. Rather, there’s a lot of item sinks that have been implemented to prevent supply getting to the point where it starts crashing the price. Regardless though the company still has the same interest, being keeping in-demand item prices reasonably high to sell in-game currency.

  • 3scene@lemmygrad.ml
    11·
    4 days ago

    I’ve been struggling with work, with an uninspired boss and an unguided boss’s boss. I had so much energy when I started this role but I question myself and what I can achieve here. It occupies so much of my time and energy and this is all happening when I know we are running towards climate disasters with no action, and with people ‘enjoying’ 30c weather at the end of September. Don’t look up.

    And then we have the utterly untrustworthy US Americans that openly pillaging everything and ““centrist”” governments debating if they can form a fascist government with the far right all over europe.

    Fight the fight comrades, we have much to do.

  • LeninZedong@lemmygrad.ml
    11·
    4 days ago

    I am in a bit of a slump and I am just spending my days just playing games and watching vids (no visible job opportunities besides one that would be a horrible option and no college, plus I have debt).

    • n1bricsfan@lemmygrad.ml
      10·
      3 days ago

      I’ve found it helps a lot to be overly kind to myself during those times. Treat yourself like you would a friend who’s going through that. As much as it sucks, under capitalism it’s a totally normal situation to be in and there’s a lot of us out there experiencing the same thing - you aren’t alone. I’m in a similar spot myself.

        • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
          4·
          2 days ago

          Back in my birth country we used to get a few months of unemployment insurance payouts after losing a job. You’d get paid almost as much as you’d take home when working and all you had to do was confirm you didn’t have a job. We called that period “funemployment”

    • Ember_NE@lemmygrad.ml
      10·
      4 days ago

      Knitting doesn’t need to be expensive and fills the same “play games and watch videos and zone out for a bit” space for me

      • LeninZedong@lemmygrad.ml
        2·
        2 days ago

        Hmm, knitting seems interesting (though I do not have any of the tools so I would have to ask parents for it), even if it is not something I am interested in right now. Maybe I could take on some other type of project…

        • Ember_NE@lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          2 days ago

          Well, knitting needles and cotton is pretty cheap usually if you want to look into it. Plenty of free recipies on Ravelry.

        • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
          7·
          3 days ago

          If you find a game where you don’t have to do much thinking it can be nice to listen to audio books wile playing games.

    • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
      10·
      4 days ago

      I suggest taking on a project, even if it isn’t monetizable and doesn’t mean much of anything. One way to do that if you’re big into games, is to make a mod for a video game; ideally one that has established resources/tutorials for doing so and isn’t getting regular updates that will break what you make, such as Fallout New Vegas.

      Anything at all that you can point at and say “I made that” or even “I contributed to making that” (if it’s collaborative) can be a help for motivation, self-esteem, and building confidence in your abilities. And it gives you a goal that can feel more motivating than playing through a video game. Not that there’s anything wrong with games, but since you describe it as a slump, that makes me think you’d especially benefit from having a project that you care about.

      • LeninZedong@lemmygrad.ml
        3·
        2 days ago

        Hmm, thanks for the interesting idea, but I have none of the technology, money, or know-how to mod games (maybe I could do something like try to learn a language without burning out in a day). I hope I can come up with some idea soon.

        • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          1 day ago

          Language learning apps might help with that, depending on the design. Many of them are designed to encourage incremental, daily practice, rather than doing a ton at once. They have their limits for teaching language, but for introductory or casual learning, they can do something.

            • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
              3·
              7 hours ago

              Indeed. I ranted myself about Duolingo at one point on here lol. Honestly, my biggest reason against them off the top of my head is just that it’s not good pedagogy/teaching. They are popular because they did gamifying well to hook people, they did marketing well, they were early in the market when language apps were just getting started as a thing. But the pedagogy of how they did it is mediocre at best and was largely excusable in the beginning when nobody had a clue how to try to teach a language through a gamified app, but by this point, speaks to capitalism’s interest in cornering a market and then turning it into profit. What little interest they may have had in the pedagogy of it at points is now lost to making money.

              The major turning point for me was years ago when they introduced the “health system”, where getting an answer wrong lost a heart, which IIRC recharged each day but could leave you with none left to keep learning that day if you weren’t a paying subscriber. Which is not only not good pedagogy, it’s actively terrible for learning in order to push people to pay up. And it showed me where their priorities were at.

                • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
                  2·
                  4 hours ago

                  Like better ways to learn a language than through an app or better apps?

                  For the first one, I’m still trying to figure that out myself. Principles that stand out to me are: believing that a language can be your own (as opposed to something you are simply memorizing/borrowing from foreigners) and learning things in context (as opposed to memorizing lists of words in isolation and never putting them into practice). These two together make a strong case for cultural immersion of actually living in a region whose language you want to live, but obviously that’s not an option for a lot of people. There are the traditional methods like learning in classrooms and getting help from tutors, but these may not combine well with low money, low time, or both, which is probably why apps are popular.

                  For the second one, I don’t really have any single one that I love. I’ve tried many different language apps and consistently run into some kind of issue, whether it’s the cost being too high, or the design having elements I don’t like, or the app creators making changes that (in my view) make it worse to use. That last one happened to me with HelloChinese. I do believe still that it has a lot of good learning material on it, but they changed the UI at some point to make it more like Duolingo’s and literally made it harder for me to get through the lessons as a result because of the attention-grabbing design of the progress bar at the top. I’m probably more sensitive than some when it comes to that though, on account of distractability. I’d still recommend it to people who want to learn Chinese, so long as they can afford the monthly cost.

                  In general, the best bet is looking for an app that specializes in teaching a single language. Apps that boast of being able to teach you 10-30 languages or whatever, are probably doing a lot of cutting corners, copy/pasting, and might be okay if you’re English learning Spanish or something, but are likely going to suck badly for languages with dramatic differences from your native one.

                  I’ve also experimented with apps that use AI for conversation practice. One example is TalkMe, which is okay. The catch is apps like that may have the reverse problem that the gamified language course apps have; if you have no familiarity with the language yet, they aren’t giving you much of a foundation to learn on. Whereas an app like HelloChinese tries to give you more of a guided course foundation to work with.

                  For languages like Chinese or Japanese where you may want to be practicing writing Characters or writing Kanji, there are apps like Skritter (though I don’t like the cost of it myself just for that one thing). More recently, I found something called ScriptPad, which is a pretty cheap one-time purchase for each language version of it you want to have and has practice for that kind of thing. So I got the Chinese version of it and have used it some to practice with writing/vocabulary.

  • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    4 days ago

    I’d just like to let you all in on a secret about me. I am all about High Quality Materialist analysis, that’s what really gets my motor going.