How the fuck did you read that as anything but a joke? Like seriously, how? What did you think I was saying with that comment?

EDIT: And just to be clear, I am an anarchist and I think it’s absurd that any state has the hubris to tell anyone that they’re not allowed to die. FOH.

I’m gonna go ahead and feel threatened.

There is no ethical suicide under capitalism.

(I know, you don’t believe my source)

That’s literally not what I said, I said something direct and specific, something you can read in the first paragraph of that source. I believed what they were saying and I repeated it to you. I read your source back to you and you misunderstood.

This is the problem - you clearly aren’t engaging in what’s being said. If you did so directly and specifically, then maybe you could get farther, but you dissolve things into nonspecific drivel, to the point it’s just either wrong or meaningless.

It’s like if I asked you, “What’s 2+2?” and you replied, “The nature of addition is involved in the very definition of numbers, which comes from set theory. Entire books have been written on this subject before we can even define the number 2 and I couldn’t possibly cover it all, it’s just so complicated.”

Like sure, maybe that’s all true, but motherfucker, what is 2+2? You go broad and vague and mysterious with things that sometimes have simple answers.

Maybe that’s why you feel it’s pointless having conversations online. I certainly don’t find that, but I try to stay focused on the points and deal with things directly, and when someone is wasting my time I tell them so and I disengage.

Again, you seemed responsive to what I was saying at first, but when you’re talking about the limits of the “speed of language” in response to a request for details, you are clearly looking for an out. I wouldn’t spend this much time talking about this with someone if I thought it was a waste of time. I’m making the effort to give you this feedback because you’ve shown the ability to be responsive and I don’t sense any ill-will. But if you find that “this always happens”, then maybe you need to take a good look at why, and what it is that you’re doing that might cause that.

Are SCUBA and cave exploration not dangerous enough for you? Why not do both, at the same time, at even deeper depths! Hear the call of the void louder and clearer than ever!

According to this there are about 91 different definitions of league throughout human history, so I thought the most reasonable way to deal with your question was to calculate them all:

I remember reading about digital warfare and how the character of different weaponry can be stabilising or destabilising.

So the example given was nuclear weapons. The consequences of using them are so disastrous that there is no good use case, and so they tend to be stabilising. They discourage use.

Digital warfare is destabilising, because it’s very easy to do and very hard to catch, so you’re better off using it, even without any declared war.

Information warfare is probably very similar, it encourages use, but that’s because it’s very low-stakes. It wouldn’t be very exciting. I imagine it’d make a better comedy than a drama.

“We” haven’t “reached the end of the useful period of conversation”, you have reached the end of your capacity or willingness to engage with what I’m saying, and I’ve laid out very clearly how you’re displaying that, and instead of engaging with the points, you fell back into passive-voiced vague notions about human working memory and the speed of language, drawing on sciency language to lend credibility to some absurd notion that nobody could possibly be expected have this conversation, but you just made that up.

We’re not at the limits of human mental capacity, you’re doing specific things that I’ve pointed out, with details, and instead of engaging with what I said in any specific way you’ve done more vague waffle that says nothing.

And if you didn’t even check what you were sending me, why are you so confident about everything you’re saying?

My sources gave very specific numbers -which I directly highlighted with quotes - about the state of the housing supply compared to the unhoused population that you completely ignored in favour of economic rationalism.

This is precisely the kind of thing orthodox economists do, and this is how economics students are taught to think. It’s a real shame, it looks like your critical thinking skills have been pretty badly sabotaged by miseducation. I’m sure you’re intelligent in many ways, but intelligence is domain specific, and if you don’t learn the kind of rigour it takes to think critically, then you won’t be able to.

Your link isn’t talking about actual housing supply, it is talking about affordability. If you think that addresses my point, you don’t understand what I’m saying. Like on a fundamental level, you don’t get it.

And you keep throwing up vague, unsourced opinions like:

Speculation happens, sure. I don’t buy that it drives things way out of equilibrium in the long run. As far as I can tell from a skim, neither do your sources.

Like, okay? You don’t buy it, but you’re not going to bother much more with it, you’re not going to make an argument, it’s your opinion so you can just handwave anything I say away. If you’re not convinced, fine, don’t be, but there’s literally nothing for me to respond to here.

This is incredibly frustrating. I don’t even know what your point is anymore, you seem to just be knee-jerk arguing with every point no matter how weak or irrelevant your response is, and you seem content to throw up smokescreens of details rather than actually engage with anything in a substantive manner.

You seemed responsive for most of this, so I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but this is going in circles and you’re not actually taking on board anything I’m saying. Just focus for a second, deal with the speculation thing. Make a point. If you can’t do that, I’m not going to keep giving you the benefit of the doubt.

It’s like reverse propaganda. They come into a comment section with this tone and just announce how utterly unhinged and disconnected from reality they are in their support of Russia.

Vizzini was very clear that the most famous is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”.

You can with a sub-wavelength antenna like a nintendo joycon has, it’s less than 10mm in X and Y axes. It will just have terrible reception, like a nintendo joycon has.

Also it could be a higher frequency which would allow a smaller antenna.

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.

Right, but nobody except grammar nazis and the sith deal in absolutes like that.

Obviously the signifiers have a level of stability otherwise nobody would understand any of it.

This is yet another way in which language and gender are analogous.

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.

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.

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.

It’s Buddy the Christ.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Buddy_christ.jpg