That everything I buy can be measured as totalCost/wages*0.82=hoursCost.
I love measuring things in hours.
Let’s assume I make 12/hr. Is 24 cans of soda really worth more (taxes) than an hour of work? 12 bucks might not sound too bad, but over an hours wages does.
This gets dangerous once you make semi decent money though. Like why would I take public transit that takes an hour to get there for $2.50, when I could just take a cab that costs $25 and only takes 30min to get there.
Like, sure…if making $50+/h one can justify it. But one could also instead save $23.50 for the piggy bank by taking the bus. And the 30min extra is not time one would have been at work getting paid anyway (unless your taking the bus/taxi to work I guess and actually gain 30min of pay).
This gets dangerous once you make semi decent money though. Like why would I take public transit that takes an hour to get there for $2.50, when I could just take a cab that costs $25 and only takes 30min to get there.
Like, sure…if making $50+/h one can justify it. But one could also instead save $23.50 for the piggy bank by taking the bus. And the 30min extra is not time one would have been at work getting paid anyway (unless your taking the bus/taxi to work I guess and actually gain 30min of pay).
That’s when you start calculating your hourly wage once all your livings costs have been deducted. Once you amortize your housing costs, car, food, retirement, student loans, and whatever other bad decisions that you’re still paying for every month and figure out your hourly wage AFTER all that it’s a lot easier to keep a level head.
Doing this when you make $12/hr is much too depressing though.
Even when I was only making $25 an hour. I would place greater value on my personal time than money. If you are sacrificing hours out of your day on transport then you will life miserably.
For me public transit is 3.25 and it would have taken me an hour to get home. Walked home for free in about 45 mins. Or paid for a cab to bring me home in 5-7 mins for $17.
Sure I’ve almost lost an hours wages but I have an hour of my time back as well that I could put towards household chores or my hobbies.
True, or you could enjoy the commute, in which case is a double win.
But yea, money is basically time debt owed to you by society, so if spending money to get time, it balances out. Kinda like how spending money on assets doesnt directly affect net worth.
24 cans of soda probably embodies a lot more than 1 hour total work to create for a lot of people. Planting and harvesting the coca, mining the bauxite ore and refining it into aluminum, etc etc. The main reason that much cola is available to you at that price is that the coca and aluminum probably come from somewhere where workers get paid a lot less than $12/hr.
I’m all for people being paid more, but in a just and equitable world a case of soda would probably cost more than it does now.
That’s interesting. Comparing the time input across various income levels. Does that essentially mean the person getting paid more per hour has those being paid less working for them?
One of the functions of colonialism (in this case colonialism via exploitation of labor and resources of the global south economically) is to transfer wealth from the colony to the empire (we call these the Imperial Core regions).
I’m going to use a really simplified example and some made up numbers to illustrate. Say a pound of coffee takes 1 hour of labor to produce. The people producing it in Ethiopia are being paid $1 an hour to produce it. A capitalist from the Imperial Core buys that pound of coffee for $2, ships it to the Core for another $1, and sells it for $5.
The capitalist makes $2 and the buyer gets a pound of coffee for $5. Now imagine if the worker in Ethiopia is being paid $12 an hour. The capitalist cannot buy a pound of coffee for anything less than $12. After $1 shipping and his $2 cut (assuming he does not inflate his cut because he’s taking a percentage of the sale), the pound of coffee is now $15 to the buyer.
The buyer does not have the Ethiopian worker “working for them” in the strictest sense, but the buyer does benefit from getting their pound of coffee for 1/3 the price they would otherwise have to pay.
This is why Marxists say that the current living standards of the so-called First World are being propped up by the economic exploitation of the global south, even if the residents of the First World are not directly engaging in colonialism in the pith helmet and whips sense.
Another thing to keep in mind is that imperialism also has the effect of driving down wages in the imperial core since the capitalist can pay their workers less if the price of basic, essential commodities can be decreased by super-exploitation in the imperial periphery. This is a major reason why real wages in the US have been stagnant for a while, for example. So this would have a counterbalancing effect on how much a first-world worker would need to pay proportionally to their income for a case of soda if the process of imperialism were ended.
You’re right. Marxism famously doesn’t involve any mathematics. This is why Marxists find volumes II and III of Das Kapital to be light, easily comprehensible, reading.
They simplified it so it would be comprehensible for you, you dolt. They even wrote that at the beginning. If you really wanna get into the math, just read Das Kapital. Here’s a brief excerpt speaking about the price of linen
Or replaced. If you make an automation tool to work more efficiently, it will be fun at first, but then you get fired because your job is no longer needed.
If I understand LLMs right, they have a maximum prompt length, but can be trained on any amount of text data.
The only way to add knowledge that doesn’t fit into a prompt, is to put it in the training data then re-train.
But, you could describe some sort of algorithm that it can use to sleuth out data using API calls, and it would then have access to lots more up-to-date data than can fit in a prompt. Except the body of the response would all have to become part of a prompt.
But the whole dataset it has access to doesn’t have to be mentioned in the conversation, so doesn’t have to be part of the prompt. Ultimately you don’t want your AI assistant telling you everything it knows in each interaction, just to access some slice of your data world, make changes to it, then eventually get you an answer or a report.
My sister had a marketing gig that she got let go of, because she was so good at selling her product that the company said they established strong markets in her area and didn’t need the publicity anymore.
Exactly that: too good at her job.
I signed up at gandi.net earlier this year. I even read their Wikipedia, which said they merged with another company in February. Still went ahead, because they had email included in the cheap domain name. A month after I got the mail they’ll be increasing prices too. Not sure if I’ll go somewhere else now, or if I’ll just start paying for email (4€/month or something)
What a hilariously and refreshingly honest company! I don’t think I want to join in the beta phase yet, but I’ll definitely keep it in mind and will check back in the future.
The rich can easily exploit the political system and lobby for favorable laws = Not only is it pay to win, the devs suck the dicks of their biggest whales
Whistleblowing corruption is dangerous and might often end in persecution against the whistleblower = Reporting cheating whales is a surefire way to get yourself banned
The wealth inequality gap is mind-boggling = You’d need to grind nonstop for a total of 5 billion hours to buy one of everything on the cash shop
Edit: Sorry for my harsh words. It’s just … the raw urgency and essence of the original criticisms here have just been squeezed out when converted into gamer-code language…
Arise ye gamers from your slumbers Arise ye prisoners of ea For reason in revolt now thunders And at last ends the age of games journalism. Away with all your superstitions Servile masses arise, arise We’ll change henceforth the old tradition And spurn the dorito dust to win the prize.
So squad mates, come rally And the last fight let us face The Internationale unites the pc master race.
No more deluded by reaction On pay to win only we’ll make war The pvpers too will take strike action They’ll break ranks and fight no more And if those cannibals keep trying To sacrifice us to their pride They soon shall hear the bullets flying We’ll teamkill the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers No faith have we in prince or peer Our own right hand the chains must shiver Chains of hatred, greed and fear E’er ea will out with their booty And give to all a happier lot. Each at the xbox must do their duty And we’ll strike while the iron is hot.
Yeah the consumerist rhetoric in game reviews (and the entire technology press more broadly) dooms all of their attempts at analysis to be extremely shallow. Maybe one day a journalist will pay attention in one of their media studies classes and read the fucking Adorno reading that one of their teachers assigned, but that day has not yet come.
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