obrero

As this was the main point of the Cultural Revolution's Down to the Countryside movement, I'd have to strike this as one of the successes of the Cultural Revolution.

You can see this in its modern form by reading the Wall Street Journal, Businessweek etc. in the year 2000. There were worries the unemployment rate had gotten "too low" (<4%), i.e. it was a problem too many people looking for a job could find one. Talks of inflation and so forth, basically the WSJ-speak way which can easily be translated into Marxist terminology.

If the powers that be were openly seeking to increase unemployment in 2000, what is the point of devoting a lot of effort to charity? The communists thought charities contributed to this problem, by prolonging the agony. It seems the problem is more structural.

Well you must be rather young and have no idea of the history of the Internet that some of us here have lived through (or you're old and are just oblivious).

All changes to the Internet's root zone need approval by the US Department of Commerce. That's because the Internet is an invention of the US government. It is government's purview since it's government's creation.

You can go out to an audience of laymen and probably fool them, but I remember when there were hosts still manually mapping name to IP in /etc/hosts, before switching over to pointing to sri-nic.arpa. As do others here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're just ignorant of what you're talking about, as opposed to being deceptive. Either way, this is the wrong crowd to try to fool with this - many of us were there when it happened.

The Cultural Revolution kicked off an era of double digit GDP growth in China, which persists to today.

I think the Cultural Revolution created one of the most politically educated generations in history. The PRC seems to have survived its graduate schools closing for a few years. Didn't the US and Europe see a dropoff in college and grad school during the early 1940s? They managed to survive that.

Personally I think that empowering young people to smash and burn Buddhist sculptures and paintings, and to eradicate the feudal vestiges of China are what helped it onto its current path of prosperity.

Also, the pathology of focusing on bodies instead of GDP per capita can be found in the US in the Social Security debate. Instead of dividing the GDP by the number of people collecting social security, they count bodies working and retired, as if GDP per capita were not rising. This approach only works where there is no GDP growth. GDP per capita in China doubled in the past eight years, and quadrupled in the past thirteen years.

The feudal thinking was that something like 4-2-1 is a problem. The standing committee of the Politburo of the communist party of China knows that the problem was too little economic growth, and too many children for each peasant family. If they thought your way, they really would be worse off.

People have been saying this since Deng Xiaoping took over, over 35 years ago. Actually, they've been saying it for over 65 years.

One Fortune 500 company I worked for set up a fledgling out-sourcing group. I would see the tickets come up and I grabbed every one of them. I also watched for their caller ID on the help line and picked those calls up. My modus operandi would be to just not do any of the work they needed. Luckily for me, they usually didn't dot every i and cross every t with their requests. Usually we would hand hold most people, but I used this as an excuse not to do them. I remember the group manager screaming at me that he was paying a tech to sit there all week and the tech was not doing any work because I was blocking him from getting e-mail, logins and so forth. Then the next week they managed to figure out how to talk to my manager, but I had been doing a good job on everything else so far, and showed my manager how their requests were imprecise (of course, usually I helped people fill any gaps on the requests). I set up that account that day, but managed to quash or delay a lot of their other requests. Within a few weeks I was transferred to a better position on another team, so their requests may have started going through faster, but I had probably managed to put their project behind schedule for a few weeks.

In her book "Nickled and Dimed", Barbara Ehrenreich talks about applying to some minimum wage job and on the application it said something like "Me and my employer have united interests" with her able to agree completely (a 5) to disagree completely (a 1). I saw a similar question when I applied to a minimum wage job years ago. I thought of her book, and the opening words of the preamble of the IWW constitution "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common". Of course I put a 5, that I thought my interests and the big retailers interests were completely aligned :) .

One of the first books on the subject of computer crime, "Computer Crime" by Donn Parker, tells employers that their worst problem is not outsiders, but their own employees. It goes back to the IWW constitution, or William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech. Or FDR's 1936 speech at the Democratic national convention about how "conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship". A speech after which FDR won over 60% of the vote and all but two states. Those who work and create wealth are a class different than the parasites and heirs who control and live off our labor. When the word comes down from on high that our work decisions are to be sabotaged more than usual, it's natural for us to sabotage the sabotage. It's in the nature of the relations of production at this stage of our society.

Bill Gates was also born with a million dollar trust fund, so make sure you have a safety net and starting capital like that as well before dropping out.

I read bizarre pieces from New York Times columnists ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/opinion/18kristof.html ) which say "If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he should support an “Internet freedom initiative” pending in Congress. This would include $50 million in the appropriations bill for these censorship-evasion technologies. The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier, and we can help puncture it."

Huh? US corporations built it. The US courts have OK'd it. Why should US taxpayers pay to circumvent the technology that S&P 500 companies like Cisco are building?

I was just reading the convention speech of the Democratic candidate for president in 1896, William Jennings Bryan. In his speech ( http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/ ) he says "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it." So some Democrats had to counter this trickle down nonsense even back then.

As an aside, in the speech he says "we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world". Can you imagine a Democratic presidental nominee saying that today, even if by some miracle it was Bernie Sanders? It's impossible - the heirs, and rentiers, and LPs and VCs and "job creators" and other parasites on those of us who work and create wealth have gained too much control of the system. And for the past two weeks signs are around that it could be entering one of its periodic crackups.

Then we have the 1979 government bailout of Chrysler...the 2009 government bailout of Chrysler...this company seems to need a bailout every thirty years...with some of the same talking heads shouting how the banks need to be bailed out denouncing the "socialism" of bailing out Chrysler.

Of course there was the 1971 government bailout of Lockheed as well.

Every year the US government sends $500 million to Iowa in direct farm subsidies...Senators Jodi Ernst and Chuck Grassley are against "socialist" measures that tend to go more to big cities in other states, but of course hypocritically demand the government give corporate welfare to the farmers in their state. Texas gets $400 million a year in direct farm subsidies, with the same hypocrisy surrounding it. At least Democrats are honest about what they're doing.

Then of course we have the net neutrality debates, with the backers of the AT&T/Verizon monopolists saying "get the government hands off the Internet". This is a laugh to people like me (and some others here I'm sure), who remember the days of ARPAnet and NSFnet and sri-nic.arpa and nic.ddn.mil and so forth.

Some people act like Red Guard students are still marching through Peking, throwing portraits of the Buddha in bonfires during a Smash the Four Olds campaign. In the modern day, the economy of the PRC does not operate all that differently than that of the US or Germany or some other country in terms of a "free market". The only different for the PRC is its economy has been booming since the 1980s much more than these other economies. Since 1990, every year the PRC's economy has grown 7% or more. That this might slow down for this quarter is what is eliciting surprise. Looking at the US economic downturns after 2000, and after 2008, it seems incredible that so many American pundits point to a slow quarter in the PRC's growth as signs of how they've been heading in the wrong direction all along etc. 7-14% economic growth every year since 1990 looks pretty good to me.

What about prior to 1999? The people running Venezuela had many decades and centuries to create a "robust economy" in Venezuela. I wasn't seeing constant US headlines about how Venezuelan leaders were mismanaging the economy in those times.

Venezuela is being hurt by the same thing hurting every oil producing state - low oil prices.

Those in Venezuela who wanted to create a "robust economy" had decades to do so. As soon as power falls from their hands, everything becomes a crisis, they suddenly notice Venezuela lacks a "robust economy".

The PSUV has been continually reelected since 1999, they must be doing something right, the people of Venezuela keep putting them into power.

Remembering the New York Times editorial page celebrating the coup d'etat against Chavez's elected government, by the head of the Venezuelan business council, who, surrounded by the heads of the military, abolished the parliament, I'm slightly skeptical of the concern of the owners of US media outlets for the economic well-being of the average Venezuelan.

The people drawing cave paintings in Chauvet 30,000 years ago were living in a communist society. 10,000 years ago the entire world was communist. Then slave societies arose in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Just go to the front page of the New York Review of Books ( http://www.nybooks.com ). I know I just had to scan the front page to find some article condemning Arab nationalism and of course one is there, "The Mystery of ISIS" by an anonymous author. It contains pictures of people about to be executed, and a picture of someone pointing a gun at the camera, so you can guess what the text is. What it doesn't talk about is how the US in the past supported religious fanatics in the Middle East against the real US enemy - secular, left-leaning pan-Arab nationalists. Just as the US does today. The US supports Saudi Arabia, where women can't drive, yet bombed Libya, just a few years after Qadaffi had given in to the US and UK after years of Nasserite posturing. Now Islamic fundamentalists sprout there. In Iraq, we had another Nasserite, pan-Arab secular nationalist in a party with socialist roots - Saddam Hussein was overthrown and now we have ISIS in Iraq. More recently the pan-Arab secular nationalist in a party with secular roots in Syria has the US and Europe working to undermine his power. This just happened. So now ISIS controls much of Syria, and just blew up an ancient pagan temple. It's quite clear with all its work to undermine Bashar al-Assad that this is what the US was working to have happen. We can go more into the distant past as well - the secular nationalist parliament of Mossadegh being replaced by a dictatorship initially backed by the mullahs by the US/UK in the 1950s, then the persecution and execution of the secular left - eventually the mullahs changed their mind and now Iran is run by them and devoid of the secular liberals that the CIA sent lists around to be executed.

I'm surprised the New York Review of Books doesn't have a nostalgic front-cover piece bashing the Warsaw Pact. Well there were just two on HN's front page the other day. It's great - while the US government is tapping its own citizens and the whole world, extraditing and torturing nationalists who oppose foreign intervention in their home countries, ringing the world with military bases - a US soldier just murdered a Filipino prostitute who he learned was a transvestite, spying on foreign corporations and stealing their industrial secrets, sending drones to willy-nilly bomb villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan and so on, everyone can focus on the errors Lenin commited a century ago, or how some ISIS militants blew up an ancient pagan temple in Syria (who the US helped back by undermining al-Assad's government - in fact investigative reporters have found the US has been actively backing jihadists in Iraq even in recent years).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Fred_Hampton

> If factory workers go on a strike in the US, are police troops sent in to "shoot to kill" them? They did in Poland 30 years ago, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek

Oh god yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockton_cannery_strike_of_193... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_sanitation_stri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Lite_strike#The_.22Battle... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Steel_strike

And what are the record and movie companies imploring us with, when they say we shouldn't copy ("pirate") songs, movies or software? They say that the value of the product came from the work of the artists or programmers, and they deserve to be paid for their efforts. Well what is that but the labor theory of value?

Even corporate America has cast off the subjective theory of value. The labor theory of value was and is correct, but more and more we see things with a new form. A commodity used to be a scarce thing, but nowadays people increasingly create "commodities" which once built are infinitely reproducible for almost no cost, or actually no cost. To where it is not even a commodity any more. So even Marx's theory of the 19th century commodity is upended. Not only that - these new commodities are reusable - from hiphop artists sampling older songs, to developers reusing components. Production is changing, so theories of production must change also. Neither the marginalists nor Marx described what is going on now and will be increasingly so. Although in the sense that Marx posited that production would be radically changed in the future from the 19th century factory system, in that sense he was correct.

In a rational society, more jobs being destroyed would be something to be celebrated. It is a sign of a sick culture in which it would be seen as a bad thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eE9BIUfBg&t=16m43s

Note how he says to Mandela - "the assets of the white people - I have worked for my banks, my mines, my businesses, and my farms". The sense of entitlement he has that the mines and farmland of South Africa are "assets of the white people" is incredible. Also, who was working on those farms and down in those mines? Not Koos van den Merwe, I can tell you that.

Whereas in economics, where the data is fuzzier, and you have questions like, how should the pie be divided up, people are not united together in the pursuit of a universal truth, things are more dialectic. Even the name economics is part of this agenda-pushing, as is the B.S. "Nobel Prize for Economics" and so forth - in the early days, "economics" was called by its proper name "studies of political economy". Nothing was more political than dropping the word political from the field.

Wow, it's amazing that you have such incredible negotiating skills that you can beat out a Fortune 500 companies human resources department, their outside lawyers that make you sign an employment and terms of service agreement, and who have a boilerplate of similar agreements for all the other firms they have done this for etc.

The hubris you have in saying this is farcicial. The fact is that you as an individual do not have the skills to out-negotiate this leviathan. You sound ridiculous claiming that you do have the skills to do this. This is why unions have massive legal teams, lobbyists and so forth. You may be right or wrong whether being in a union would currently be better for you, but the notion that you as an individual have super-negotiating powers, and that only losers when faced with a pack of lawyers need their own pack of lawyers, is risible. You do not have good negotiating skills because you're too dumb and hubristic to know that you're outmatched. These companies are laughing at you in that you think you're outmatching their negotiating teams singlehandedly. Why are they hiring you? Because for every dollar you make in salary, they are making $1 + $X off of you. They wouldn't hire you otherwise. That $X you are leaving on the table while patting yourself on the back about what a good negotiator you are. By the way, workers in the same jobs, one union and negotiated by a team of lawyers, one non-union - studies show the workers who have the contract negotiated by a union statistically get a better contract, more wages etc.

This is why estate planning exists. Any business that actually plans for estate taxes will not have this problem at all.

And military front lines. The US has had a system to allow the children of the rich to avoid the military during wars since World War II - the student 2-S draft deferment to the end of conscription altogether in the early 1970s. This goes back in US history - the US Civil War is where the phrase "rich man's war, poor man's fight" comes from.

In 1951 Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City, where she gathered a group of these admirers around her. This group (jokingly designated "The Collective") included future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

News stories like this marked Usenet going away - http://www.cnet.com/news/riaa-tries-to-pull-plug-on-usenet-s...

It's a confluence of forces. The old Bell monopolies get a stranglehold on the last mile, and then wireless transmissions as well. They become so bold as to lobby to end net neutrality so they can pump more money from content providers with their monopoly. A vast infrastructure is being built to monitor what people say on the network (like the NSA's Utah Data Center) which makes the Stasi look like Inspector Clouseau, in a country quite different than the one whose Secretary of State said in the 1920's "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail". The RIAA/MPAA oligopolies are not busy yet trying to extend their 95 year copyright lease which is kicking in again in 2019, so they can try to shut Usenet down as well. After all, it's one of the rare mediums of distribution of content they don't control. I'm surprised the powers that be haven't cracked down on Internet Relay Chat yet, it's one of the last remnants of the old, distributed, decentralized, noncommerical Internet.

You could say the US thinks the current Iranian leadership is too religiously zealous. But the US (and UK) overthrew Iran's secular parliament in 1953 and installed a dictator by bankrolling the ayatollahs, such as Mohammad Behbahani ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta... ).

We here talk of a danger to Israel...what about a danger to the Iranians, who have lived there for a long time and now have to contend with millions of Jews who moved into the region in the past decades from Russia and Brooklyn, displacing Palestinians. Who are nuclear armed themselves - but bringing that into the discussions of a peace plan is off the table apparently - Jews from Brooklyn new to the Middle East can have the bomb, Iranians who have been there for thousands of years are restricted even in having nuclear power. Podhoretz is right about one thing - the situation will not hold forever. When it changes, it will probably not be in a manner he will be happy with.

Disney made his money ripping off Lewis Carroll, but taxpayers have to pay to enforce the rights on the works he ripped off 95 years after the fact.

As others replied, it is true when it is just the government and company and individual employee involved, companies usually break this law with impunity. If you are in a labor union or a union organizing campaign, like for the CWA, then you are on more equal footing, as all court rulings up to this point have enforced this right.

Not that the US government enforces labor law (for the workers creating the wealth any how), but it is illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act for an employer to tell employees they can't share what their salary is.

The reality is, the derivatives market is larger than the actual market. More capital is invested in calls guessing if Google is going up than is actually invested in Google. This is a sign something is rotten.

This article from 2008 has a lot of interesting data from after the subprime crash ( http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-... ). It then has an analysis of that data. Whether or not you agree with the analysis, the data it points to is interesting.