That’s actually kind of genius. It’s even made of lead!

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.

A lot of people in this thread knee-jerk hating on the nails don’t realise that it’s just culturally-entrenched misogyny. More people need a “Don’t be an asshat because not everybody is like you” guard rail.

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.

There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can’t be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they’re probably not people I want to engage with.

And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that’s because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren’t going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.

Oh cool, I might give it another look.

Yeah, it’s possible that wasn’t an option back when I used it. I remember thinking that some sort of default off would be better. At the time I think it was either on by default and toggleable - I always toggled it - or it was just disabled and unwieldy to enable.

Edit: actually even better would be to have a short community written summary that could be more descriptive. Just like a popup or something. I don’t need the title to disappear, just know if the video is worth my time.

The problem I have with dearrow is that it’s editorialising and arbitrary. It’s not like removing ads which can be clearly identified and the user can make personal decisions, like no sponsors but self-promo is fine, or whatever.

No, there is one alternative title and one alternative thumbnail, and that’s it, and often I have serious disagreements with the choices the community makes. There’s a bias towards intervention, so if a title is fine according to me but someone else doesn’t like it, then it gets changed. I found most of my votes were to restore the original title and thumb. Eventually I got tired of it and just uninstalled, and presumably so did other people with the same feeling, so the community continues to skew towards changing every video they encounter.

Also, the thumbnails and titles that creators choose tells me a lot about them, and I get rid of clickbait by not engaging with creators that do clickbait. Also, sometimes it’s not clickbait, just people being creative. It seems like the whole thing is just an exercise in being the fun police by people that don’t understand the creative process.

Cooking up charges and rigging a court case specifically to take you down is a different level of hate though.

Oh arrested? Wow, only guilty people are arrested by states led by their fascist political rivals. If he’s arrested, he must be guilty. That’s how justice works.

You could’ve said “convicted”, but that was annulled and a UN human rights committee found that:

The committee concluded that prosecutors and the lead judge in the investigation, Sergio Moro, showed bias in Lula’s case, violating his right to be presumed innocent.

I’m not a fan of politicians in general, but I’d take these charges more seriously if the people prosecuting them weren’t so flagrantly politically motivated and breaking the rules. Presumably the reason he was tried in the wrong court was because the state was shopping for a judge that wouldn’t give him a fair trial. If he’s that guilty, they’ve muddied the waters by not actually caring about his guilt, and it’s going to be way harder to get anything to stick anymore. Like they were in charge of the whole fucking country, how were they this bad at persecuting him?

What I do know is that when a fascist like Bolsonaro is that mad at you, you might actually be doing something right.

Where? Is this paradise oasis of helpfulness on the internet? Or is it offline somewhere?

Ah dang, well, thanks anyway.

Unironically I think it must happen to some extent, and that doesn’t mean every toxic person is an op. It wouldn’t take a lot of manpower to create a toxic environment. Just hassle the devs with annoying questions, suggestions and bad “contributions” until they’re sick of everyone’s shit and start to become toxic themselves. If they’re dealing with all the noise of bad actors, they get overzealous in moderating it, and it’s hard to tell the difference between a troll who’s trying to waste your time, and an honest newbie who doesn’t know what questions to ask or what information to share, so they all get blasted to some extent, and the devs lose any interest in catering to the newbies.

Edit: actually I remember asking a question on stackoverflow about PuTTY one time, it was answered and I moved on with my life. Then five fucking years later some dickhead shows up in the comments and says, “aw… putty… windows…” So I’m like, “Listen, I don’t care if you think I’m sad for using windows, I don’t use linux because it’s too much work” Then they start lecturing me about how linux is for experts and if I don’t know what I’m doing it’s not for me, and I’m like “Ok? Then leave me alone. This question is five years old, why are you here? Just to hassle a rando because they use windows?” Then a mod bumped the comments into a private chat and off the question page, then this person starts offering to “help” me learn Linux. I told them if I wanted help they’d be the last person I would ask, then blocked them, but the bad taste of that interaction has stayed with me for a long time and I think about it a lot whenever I want to put effort into switching myself over. Was that an op? Being a troll is easy, and it would’ve been maybe 20 minutes of work for whoever was doing it. Like, maybe that was just some kid who thought they were helping further the linux cause by going around windows-shaming people, but maybe not.

Wait wait wait… where do you get these? That sounds amazing lol.

I tried talking about how absolutely horrendous their behaviour was recently, pointing out how completely unhinged and self-defeating it is, and someone actually literally said that this was a good thing because Linux is hard work and they should keep away people that aren’t experts.

And first of all, if that’s right it’s an admission that linux will never succeed, and secondly I agree that’s the effect but I think that’s bad actually.

I honestly think there must be at least some amount of psyops in the community poisoning the discourse for everyone.

Okay, thank you for the information about econometrics, but the economics that goes from data to model tends to be heterodox, not orthodox. Occasionally orthodox economists will accidentally do real science and they usually don’t like what they see.

My question was about why you don’t see the data being presented when being taught about supply and demand, and you basically answered it by saying that the data isn’t there. Now, I see your point that the prices tend to be relatively stable and so the data doesn’t extend beyond these short line slopes, but then why are we told that supply & demand “sets prices” when there is no evidence of, for instance, a shock to the system upsetting prices which then follow a standard supply & demand curve to restabilise?

Well, because such a situation would not be “convex”, so economics has written an escape clause for this phenomenon whereby it can avoid ever making any real predictions about what the market will do in a situation that isn’t already “stabilised”.

And also, if it’s just short line segments, why is it fashionable to use a curve that implies more data than exists? Again, I would say that it is to ape the aesthetics of science without actually doing it.

And it’s very strange that you turn to your personal anecdotal experience to say that you’ve “seen supply & demand play out”. If that were true, then you should be able to gather the data and present it. The fact that data doesn’t exist should tell you that you are probably using confirmation bias to evaluate your personal experiences.

For instance, the housing market is something where ideally there would be very inflexible demand, because people don’t need more than one bed, typically. The reason the demand is flexible is because there are in reality two markets in the same space. The first market is the people who want housing to actually live in, and the second are landlords that hoard housing, speculate and leverage assets against loans and so on. The landlord market is responsible for both the short housing supply and high price, because they would often rather keep housing scarce and drive up rents, and speculate against one another than put their property back out on the market to go to a competitor. Selling a property you can’t rent out is a pretty bad financial decision, you’re better off waiting until the housing market flips and it becomes a seller’s market again. If a financialised housing market didn’t exist, housing would be much cheaper and homelessness would be much, much less.

The reality of all markets is that they are subject to boom & bust cycles which supply & demand cannot account for. Housing in particular is notorious for huge bubbles that burst spectacularly.

Here’s an example from a government consumer watchdog in Australia: https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/petrol-and-fuel/petrol-price-cycles-in-major-cities

Here’s the really damning sentence:

Petrol price cycles are the result of pricing policies of petrol retailers and not from changes in the wholesale cost of fuel.

They straight up say that it is not about supply & demand.

Here’s the heterodox explanation of this phenomenon: the Supply Chain Theory of Inflation

EDIT: Actually this is a separate phenomenon, but it does emphasise how prices are set by sellers, and not by supply and demand. Wherever a seller can get away with changing their prices, like for instance in petrol sales, they will, but then it follows boom-bust, not supply-demand.

And this is where the authors of that article talk about how orthodox economics institutions will launder heterodox theories. The point of doing this would be to maintain their prestigious position as the arbiter of all economics knowledge, as a result of which any damage such information might do to existing insitutions can be dampened by orthodox economists putting their own spin on the information. If they never acknowledge where the theory comes from, they get to rewrite it however they want. That’s distinctly unscientific.

Okay, so I think we’re largely in agreement except for a little misunderstanding. I’m glad because that means you might be a little more receptive to some of the stuff I might share. I have more links but I’m writing this novella on my phone if you can believe it. I’ll share them later.

My criticism about the professional class being paid by the owning class to justify their wealth was specifically about orthodox economics, like the Chicago School who would literally construct studies to justify whatever you wanted if you paid for it. The yardsale model - that’s a great link by the way, the graph that emerges perfectly mirrors our actual economy - is an example of heterodox economics, which largely stands in opposition to orthodox economics. The opener to that page is very well written. It’ll do a better job than me.

Now, for an example of how completely divorced from reality orthodox economics is, the market convexity concept is perfect. The exceptions you mentioned about veblen and giffen goods aren’t the main problem with convexity. The simple problem of inelastic demand is a much bigger problem. This is all couched in extremely obfuscating language, those articles are impenetrable to anyone who isn’t steeped in economics language.

I assume you know what inelasticity is, it’s something for which demand doesn’t change with price, for instance things like shelter or food. So, to demystify the language, another term for “inelastic demand” is “need”. Basically, if you read between the lines even slightly, the founding, econ 101, highschool level principle of orthodox economics has been forced to admit that it doesn’t work for anything anybody actually needs. And then they go on insisting that this principle should govern our entire society. Got to keep that yardsale going.

Market convexity is an amalgamation of post-hoc justifications for why supply & demand is so hard to find in the real world. When I mentioned the perfectly straight, bisecting, perpendicular lines graph, you admitted that was just an illustration, and I agree, it is a doodle. I know it’s now in vogue to use slightly curved lines, but that’s just because economists are aware of how ridiculous the first illustration was and they put in just the slightest amount of extra effort to hide it.

When I’m asking for the science, let me ask you this: what data constructs the graph? Where did it originate? This is the question I’ve never had answered. Just literally the graph appearing in real world data, just one time.

See, when actual sciences want to “illustrate” a concept, sometimes they idealise, but they almost always have real data and real graphs to show. Their idealised lines pass through data points with error bars. Scientists work hard for their data, and they always, always show it off. Stress-strain curves, electron microscope images, star life-cycle data, red-shifting, animal population surveys, and on and on. Real data is complex and interesting and beautiful and scientists will show you their cool slide and say “you can see such-and-such feature here and this indicates…”, it’s great.

I have looked for the supply & demand version of this and can find nothing but hand-waving excuses.

Also, the convexity article talks about the Nobel Prize in Economics, which is wrongly named. It is the Nobel Memorial Prize. It was named after Nobel, because it’s not a Nobel prize, because the Nobel prize committee rejected the economics category because it isn’t a real science. Some Swiss bank then financed the wish.com version Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

I suspect this isn’t so hard for you to accept since you’ve already come so far in your understanding of heterodox economics. You still seem to have some respect for the orthodox schools, which is strange when you understand so much of where they have led us.

As for the Epstein thing, I don’t have any reason to believe that anything has changed. We know Epstein was part of the trafficking of minors, and absent any evidence about the state of that practice, the idea that removing two people from the network actually fundamentally altered anything seems hopelessly naive. I think the burden of proof lies on anyone who wants to claim the practice has been abolished.

Which dictator do you mean? The democracy movement and the June struggle was in 1987, 10 years before the general strike.

Also, neoliberal capitalism is very, very happy with right wing dictators because they love oppressing workers and lowering wages. Just look at Pinochet in Chile.

And again the June struggle was won by popular struggle, not market forces. The idea that the unions supported the dictator is a weird one too. Like, where are you getting that, and is there any evidence they weren’t just yellow unions approved by the dictator?

Even then I don’t know why you brought those things up. You just added a bunch of details and I guess assumed those details - some of which were very wrong - were somehow in support of some point, but you didn’t say what that point is.

And I don’t know why you think I’m talking about industrialisation when I talk about workers improving their lives. That is not at all what I’m talking about. And industrialisation isn’t a capitalist thing, they just happen to coincide in human history. We don’t have alternative Earths to test the idea, so crediting the gains of industrialisation to the market and capitalism is weird. You just put that out there completely unsupported.

That’s another thing neoliberal economists love to do, just blame all the problems of capitalism on unions and regulations, and credit every good thing that happens on the glorious invisible hand.

And since you understand a good amount of economics, perhaps you can tell me what is the scientific basis of supply & demand for instance? I’ve looked for this information and had people try to show me, but they’ve never actually shown it. It’s a fundamental part of economics so I’m told. What is the science behind it? The perfectly straight, perpendicular bisecting lines on an unscaled graph do not suggest any scientific basis to me, they suggest the aesthetics of science devoid of its substance. If you could disabuse me of this notion then perhaps I could move on from my current woeful ignorance on the matter.

And finally, you don’t think there’s any conspiracy around Epstein, fine. I bet it’s easy to maintain that idea when you just ignore all the evidence I gave you.

Honestly it sounds like someone was paid to do something about adblocking and just like… did something. Like if you were tasked with reducing adblocking, and your first and most obvious idea of “reduce the obnoxious ads” was disallowed because enshittification is mandated, you could say no, which most workers won’t do, or you could just do whatever random bullshit feels like it might work because it’s punitive. Or at least it’s a gesture that shows your boss you’re trying.

Authoritarian systems like capitalist corporations are inherently low-information for exactly this reason. People on the low rungs doing the real work who understand what needs to be done will typically not report problems to their superiors. And when they do, those superiors tend not to listen, because the idea that lower workers know something they don’t threatens their leadership status.

Also our society’s legal system trains us to believe punitive measures must do something even though they don’t.

Also I guess another reason they might wind up at this strategy is that straight up telling users that the problem is their adblock is the fastest way to get adblockers to block your countermeasure, so they think they have to be sneaky.

I guess that’s possible, and a very creepy thought, but more likely they saw the level of general attention on the issue and backed off globally.