I don't know as much about labour theory, as you seem to think I do. I'm not trying to argue for any ideology and I find the reduction to a duality between supply-demand and labor-entitle overly simplistic. Those are ideological landmarks, for sure, but both are volatile in nature and both happen, whether it's allowed or not (even though the decision to allow is a big one).
Since you asked me about a constructivist model of value, let me try at a sketch (and put qualify with "in my mind" as necessary):
First and foremost, value is information, because it's a relation over facts, so relates facts to one another, puts them in perspective. What I think many people would call "true" or "real" values are those that can easily be considered facts in and of themselves, because all their relatives are known facts.
Those values, when considered closely, are few and far between and many intellectual currents, including science, have been devoted to finding more of them.
Social constructivism (a category, that includes capitalism as well as marxism, basically every model talking about people doing things with their lives), has the inherent problem that many of its facts are unknown. That's because people keep them secret, because they are part of their private lives, that they don't want other people to know about. Also, people change over time and so do their private facts.
Hence, in social sciences, it's _even_ harder to find meaningful true values and successful models have to account for large degrees of individual freedom.
Coming back to your argument, I categorically agree, that supply-demand creates untapped demand. I don't categorically agree, that that's a good thing. More concretely: Sure, free expression has promoted many good things, still, everybody has their own line about what they want to be allowed to be promoted and/or even sold.
In practice, I think for a functional state, it's much more common to defend the free market against yet another asshole that just found out that destructive behavior can give you a temporary advantage, but didn't quite figure out the calculation of long-term costs and / or doesn't care.
If I had to guess, I'd say that he'd tell you, that those managers "managed" (haha, get it?) to prevent the worst of bad losses to shareholders and got paid accordingly, and/or that said payments were contractually agreed on.
I can't bring myself to categorically disagree with either of those positions, because big business, fundamentally, is about setting common goals for absurdly large groups of people and to operate within even (much) larger groups of people in the real world. Complicated situations are bound to arise, and even if a manager failed to save a company, their contract entitles them to bonuses for whatever business goals they did achieve. If they managed to get that agreement signed beforehand, it needs to be honored, because binding contracts are a really fundamental building block of society, that needs to stay intact.
It's legitimate, though, to question the payment amounts and business goals they were bound on, as well as whether payments were made, that they were not entitled to. That's where our taxes need to fund a strong justice system, that can bring corruption suits to such cases.
Also, I'm sympathetic to situations and feelings of people being ground up in corrupt systems and I think we really need to understand how capitalism-apologists insulate themselves against those feelings by focussing on the guilt of weak people for not taking care of themselves.
It's a coping mechanism, that helps when one has been of the receiving end of things before, but on the way up.
It also protects from the guilt of not being able to help everybody, that one would like to.
I'm certain, that there is a more effective model. It might or might not be known at this point in time and it might even be closer to social constructivism than to mechanistic pragmatism. Can you tell for sure?
In any case, that's not the point I'm trying to litigate.
What I'm trying to get at: Given the obvious flaws in pure capitalism (as there would be in any "pure" ideology), how can we reject the need for checks and balances?
Let's dispell another popular myth: Demand and Supply isn't nessecarily an indicator of value. It only follows value, if the power balance is close to equilibrium. Otherwise, Power picks and shapes the demand it wants. How much value has been lost to superior marketing?
or: The blog post, Revolut doesn't want you to read ;o)
or: How Revolut self-owned by ways of XSS
That page was presented to me as an in-app communication, that I noticed after not getting through a transfer to my debit card and I wanted to to get the url, to send to my bank. After failing to google it, I noticed a tag below the article, saying `unlisted`.
Not being easily frustrated by such a feeble attempt, I cranked out android-studio and apktool, but stopped after tracking a build error (in my attempt at recompiling for debug), back to a ticket in something called apk-backdoor ...
It seems, like Revolut at least has their basic security measures right. At that point, I also want to applaud Revolut for communicating openly with their customers, even if not posting this publicly seems ridiculous to me.
So how did I actually get at the url? Logcat? Binary disassembly? MITMing myself?
Nope. I just pushed the floating `open in app` button, which triggered a 404 page with a broken Medium in-app link. <lol.gif>
Avid NixOSer here. While it's sad, that we're not there yet in terms of user-friendliness, I still think, given the radical approach, NixOS takes, it's increadibly feature-complete. I find it easy to tweak, too, but that might be due to previous experience with functional systems.
For the specific suggestions in the article, I'm not convinced that they are possible, while retaining the same benefits:
- Filesystem snapshots are not enough to deal with, e.g. slightly different builds of the same shared library
- Namespaces, however are. In fact, there is buildFHSEnv in nixos, to take advantage of those.
- Hiding of runtime dependencies is done with the intent to minimize "accidental success", because that leads to unstable systems.
- Also a package could, e.g. depend on a patched version of Python2.7, that you'd never want to accidentally end up on the system path.
Having packaged some, I do feel the author's pain though. I wonder, if we couldn't get rid of a lot of upstream grind, by encouraging usage of fhs-env namespaces.
I think he is talking about implementing .shouldComponentUpdate(), which is more efficient with immutable data, since you can compare identities (===). David Nolen made this point with Om's TodoMVC.
Stalin is a beautiful proof of how much a compiler can optimize even "dynamic" languages under a closed-world assumption. This works because the compiler basically just infers all the types (EDIT: that it can, and that's sometimes much more precise than would be expressible in C, hence more optimization opportunities)
Another example of that, to me, is the google closure compiler for javascript (in advanced mode).
The PR situation stemming from stalin's name is a bit unfortunate, but you can always fork and rename it, if you want to work with it, right?
Also, I'm pretty glad that I live in a time where people are free to argue whether jokes about genocidal dictators are acceptable and in the place where I can read them doing so, from the other side of the globe.
Since you asked me about a constructivist model of value, let me try at a sketch (and put qualify with "in my mind" as necessary):
First and foremost, value is information, because it's a relation over facts, so relates facts to one another, puts them in perspective. What I think many people would call "true" or "real" values are those that can easily be considered facts in and of themselves, because all their relatives are known facts.
Those values, when considered closely, are few and far between and many intellectual currents, including science, have been devoted to finding more of them.
Social constructivism (a category, that includes capitalism as well as marxism, basically every model talking about people doing things with their lives), has the inherent problem that many of its facts are unknown. That's because people keep them secret, because they are part of their private lives, that they don't want other people to know about. Also, people change over time and so do their private facts.
Hence, in social sciences, it's _even_ harder to find meaningful true values and successful models have to account for large degrees of individual freedom.
Coming back to your argument, I categorically agree, that supply-demand creates untapped demand. I don't categorically agree, that that's a good thing. More concretely: Sure, free expression has promoted many good things, still, everybody has their own line about what they want to be allowed to be promoted and/or even sold.
In practice, I think for a functional state, it's much more common to defend the free market against yet another asshole that just found out that destructive behavior can give you a temporary advantage, but didn't quite figure out the calculation of long-term costs and / or doesn't care.