Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Sacha,
you have an eidetic memory, eh?
Only for books I've read more than 3 times. The Dispossessed is an old favourite. I liked it even more than A Wizard of Earthsea, which was remorselessly ripped off by J K Rowling.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to James Butler,
The question is why does the market place its value as "fuck all", while society places its value somewhat higher (as revealed by the minimum wage)?
They don't think the same way, thankfully. Society has compassion. The market has only the supply-demand tensions.
A lot of us might agree, for instance, that teachers and social workers are underpaid; this is hardly down to oversupply, or the work being "unskilled" - the work is simply so far along the value chain from "capital" that it's too difficult for the market to measure quantitatively what it's "worth". The quantifiability of value has become a proxy for value itself.
I'm not sure teaching isn't oversupplied for the demand. It's not unskilled, but it doesn't have particularly high barriers to entry. Lots of tertiary degrees are sufficient qualification. With training college? I don't know exactly how it works.
Again, supply and demand doesn't take into account how hard teaching is, in the sense of being exhausting. It's not relevant to the price, any more than the exhaustion involved in digging ditches is (oh yeah, I did a fair bit of that as a student too...jeez I forget how many shit jobs I've had. Hell, I did teaching too. But the school went bankrupt). All that matters is "how many people can do this, and want to do it" and "how many people do we need doing it". As the first goes up, the price comes down. As the second goes up, the price goes up.
Yes, the true utility of school and teachers are very poorly reflected by market forces, because the kids have got no money, and the parents might not either.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to JLM,
Great book. However, one of the most important points of that books was that Shevek was considerably undervalued in his own society, that getting the most amazing physicist in the known universe to till the fields, or to use his mathematical talents on the horrible job of deciding who gets to eat, was a shocking waste of his talent. Shevek, was, however, meant to be very strange guy, a total enigma. Right from the start, the odds were against his talents coming to the fore - to discuss physics at school got him kicked out for being an egoist. To send letters back to Urasti physicists made him a traitor to Anarres. He was held back by a jealous colleague stealing his work for years (which never occurred to him, theft being a foreign concept on Anarres). To travel to Uras involved the only attempt ever made by Anarrians to mob violence, desperate to stop him.
I found the idea at the end of him simply giving his theory away on the airwaves strangely prophetic of the Open Source mentality, and incredibly inspiring. But I also think Anarres would never happen.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Sacha,
Sure, but don't forget that to win the World Cup you have to string three in a row against a selection from the top 7 teams in the world, each better than the last, after having won or come second in your pool. Every chance of losing compounds up towards the end result of a win being unlikely.
As you get closer to the final the overall chances get better, even though the chance of winning each game actually gets less.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to John Armstrong,
I wasn't singling you out, John. Nor do I think it's a very angry debate. Just seems to me that when you get down to what people are saying, mostly there's agreement.
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Tap into the energy that we all have, that fuels our (slightly masochistic) belief that we will win again, despite the All Blacks traditional quadrennial "loss at a very important stage tournament".
Isn't it enough to just want them to win, rather than the slightly irrational requirement for belief that they will win. I don't believe they will. It's a big ask, which is something a lot of kiwis don't get. Winning any international tournament against stiff opposition is highly unlikely, even for the favorite. Even if the All Blacks had a 90% chance of winning against all opposing teams, there's less than a 50% chance of stringing 7 wins in a row together. If they have a 60% chance of beating the Wallabies, and the same for the Springboks, then they have only a 36% chance of beating them both.
All that being the favourite means is that you have a higher chance than everyone else. But it could still be a very small chance. I could buy ten thousand lotto tickets this week, making me the favorite to win Division one, but it's still going to be unlikely.
The "traditional quadrennial "loss at a very important stage tournament"" happens to every team that doesn't actually win the tournament, every time.
This whole business of claiming there's something defective about the All Blacks because they haven't won the World Cup more than once is just silly. Most teams haven't even won it once. Only 2 teams have won it twice. The French have beaten the odds-on favorites (the All Blacks) twice in the World Cup, and yet never won it. In 95, the Wallabies didn't even make the semi-finals.
This volatility is exactly what makes the RWC exciting. The upsets are dramatic, and the chances of any of the top teams of getting through are quite close to each other. The hulking dominance of the All Blacks in international rugby is all part of the drama - virtually everyone I know of outside of a team competing wants them to win, knows they're an awesome team, great to watch, and feels compassion when they lose. That's what the tournament is about, IMHO.
But I'd still like it if we won.
At an almost equal level of feeling, I would like one of the Pacific Island teams to make the semi-finals. I'd love it if Japan could win another game.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to James Butler,
I think the value is mostly dictated by supply and demand under capitalism. There is no end of supply of unskilled labour, so it's worth fuck all. Doesn't matter how hard, unpleasant or dangerous it is, nor how much that labour is on-sold for in the product/service. The position to be if you want money is either the capitalist, or selling labour in short supply with high demand. The capitalist is not really that sweet a position - most of them go broke. It's only sweet for that fraction who crack it open. The person selling short supply high demand labour is in a good position only for as long as that labour remains in short supply, which can be for a surprisingly short amount of time. Then they can end up on a different scrap heap altogether. Certainly it's mostly down to luck and hard work whether they can hold that position.
Alternative ways of organizing things have their own problems too. There's a whole lot of organizing to get things done that no one wants to do, in, say, a collective. Anarchy tends to go for the tragedy of the commons - when you give stuff away for free, hoping for it to magically come back to you, most of the time it just doesn't. Setting prices for work is an administrative nightmare, rather like the wage and price freeze - it's pretty easy to work around, just by changing every single job description over and over again. I'd like to hear any other serious alternatives - it seems to me that I'm just lacking imagination here.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
This promotion is at serious risk of alienating (or at least depressing) members of society who are going through a bit of a dry spell.
Yes, I'm now scared to allow any ads on TV (thank God for MySky), in case my wife sees them.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Islander,
I feel like there's no debate going on here. This is people agreeing with each other angrily. Time to seize control of the means of discussion.
The reason I even brought up the rising number of elderly workers in shit work, in a thread about youth unemployment and welfare, is because I think there is a connection. The funny thing is, I actually agree with the kids, in a strange way. Some of them most assuredly do want to work, in whatever shit job they can get. Most of these kids do actually get a job, of some kind or other, often part time. But one thing about kids is that they haven't spent so long being inculcated in the righteous value of work, and actually see a shitty deal for what it really is. Doing hard work for less pay than some grandma doing exactly the same thing, when she actually collects a pension and owns a house, is bound to make you go fuck it.
ETA: I must confess to never having been this clever as a child. Or perhaps my privilege made me see the long game, certainly I was never seriously threatened with destitution, so taking work without pay was a gamble I could afford.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to John Armstrong,
I fail to see how the idea that your workplace pride is imposed on you by your betters could liberate anyone, either.
I don't. It's pretty obvious really. If you refuse to accept being told that something horrible is something you should like, you might learn the resolve to refuse to do it, to convince others to refuse, and to effect some actual change in the workplace.
Similarly, enjoying the dull or stupid can be a barrier to change. Sometimes lazy people are quite valuable in workplaces because they find ways to avoid the dull crap, and actually come up with innovations. I was unable to accept that burning my fingers whilst drying off meat patties at McDonalds was a good idea, and found a much better solution, to use a tool for the job. I was told not to do this by management who had developed massive callouses from years of burger flipping, and could do the job at the same speed as I could with the tool. The fact that I could not do it, that my burnt fingers were actually seeping my blood into the food, did not distract them from their righteous stupidity. Nor were they able to understand that I've found a way to man 3 stations simultaneously, just by changing the order that things were done. I was told off for it repeatedly whenever it was time to earn badges for knowing the checklists. They never complained when I was cranking out 30% more burgers during a rush though. In fact, they never noticed, but they did notice if the "pickles were crossed". They're fucking gherkins, you idiots.
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