> Since the article talks about "social value" it almost implies that our commodity will always have some value to the society (it's called "social" after all), but that is often not the case at all.
Seriously? Again? My goodness. Listen, we have already established you are the kind of person that goes around pretending to discredit an entire branch of economics without having the slightest clue about what that branch even claims to say. Fine. But repeating the same nonsense after being told that it is nonsense is just too much. The entire freaking idea revolves around how individual labor which under capitalism is done by private initiative is converted to social labor, which is through market mechanics accepted as socially necessary. Of course that whether or not that labor was in fact desired, has some value for society, is a factor, and that is a fundamental aspect of the LTV. The Wikipedia article explains this, the article I linked to explains it, I explained earlier that value under the LTV is realized at the point of sale, ie, when someone actually goes through and establishes the usefulness of the labor invested by exchanging something (usually money) for it.
The rest of your post conflates price with value, which are different things according to Marxian thought, so again it is pretty useless as far as "debunking Marx" goes. Again, this is even explained in the Wikipedia article you linked to but that obviously haven't read.
Now, do you want to believe the LTV and everything Marx wrote is wrong without having any actual idea of what that is? That's cool. Just don't try to have a conversation with someone that has bothered to read it and think you can get away with it.
> What he missed is that if you're putting labor into making something nobody wants (the classic example being toothless combs for bald men), you are not only failing to producing any value, you're arguably reducing the overall wealth present in the market. The labor theory is no longer a part of mainstream economics, replaced by marginal theory [2], but I suppose many people still imagine value of things as equal to the labor put into them.
Uh, what? Why do people that have never read Marx think they can get away with this kind of thing? You only have to read the same wiki page you have linked to to see that what you claim Marx never thought about is in fact very much so part of the theory. According to Marx commodities under capitalism have different kinds of "values"; one of them is their "use-value", which measures whether the item is in fact useful for a given purpose for anyone. In a market economy a commodity only realizes its value (usually seen in the monetary expression of its exchange-value, or price) when it is actually sold: ie, value is realized at the point of sale, not production. Thus no matter how much labor you put into something, if nobody actually wants it for anything it has no value at all. This kind of misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the LTV is so popular it has its own nickname: the mud pie fallacy, see for example http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/law-of-value-3...
This whole thing is explained, plain as day, in all of Marx's works on this topic, including the most famous one, Capital. Why people that have never bothered to even read one paragraph of it like to pretend it says things it does not say? Beats me.
I generally agree with most of what you are saying, but honestly this litte-s socialism, fascism, communism thing you are doing is making me gnash my teeth a bit :)
Socialism was and is at its core about the working class as a whole owning the means of production, becoming the only social class in existence and in effect ending the cycle of class struggle that has defined human history for the past few thousand years (at the very least since Marx & Engels first formulated scientific socialism. Utopian socialists had similar visions of a future society but usually lacked the framework to clearly articulate their criticisms of existing societies).
The term Communism, although used since the XIX century, became mainstream in the XX as a reaction against the perceived reformism or capitulation against capitalism of the then-called "socialist democrats" of the Second International. Technically, though, Communism only means the end-goal of the socialist struggle, again a classless society where everyone works according to their capacity and receives according to their needs (see 'The Critique of the Gotha Program' by Marx, or Lenin's 'State and Revolution' where the distinction between the revolutionary transitional stage and the classless, stateless end-goal of Communism is clearly made. Yes, Lenin thought a society without any State at all was desirable). The fact that States ruled by Communist Parties implemented imperfect versions of socialism, or had any number of problems small or big, in no way should make you pretend that the definition of Communism is "the government owns everything". Or, much worse, that it is in some sense just the same thing than Fascism. This makes no sense historically or theoretically, and is about as accurate as pretending that parliamentary democracy in industrialized nations is at its core all about spending 10% of their GDP in weapons and bombing the shit out of third world countries.
And some people argue laissez-faire capitalism does not naturally lead to concentration of capital and oligopolies/monopolies. I guess they should play MMOs ;)
What's the alternative exactly? Sell your resources as cheap as possible to avoid being corrupted by money? Surely there should be a way of capitalizing on your natural resources to improve the living standard of your people, and the explanation for most OPEC countries not being great is a big more complicated than this.
I've seen some estimates saying that the total percentage of waste coming from households can be as lows as 2%, depending on how you count. For example, this cites an EPA study: http://www.zerowasteamerica.org/Statistics.htm
The same page mentions a higher bound of 20%, but in any case it seems reasonably well established that the vast majority of the waste produced (at least in the US) comes from the manufacturing/industrial process itself, not from households.
A book that goes into quite a bit of detail about this is "Gone tomorrow" by Heather Rogers.
It's a necessary condition for a functioning capitalist economy. I can go into more details if you want, but the fact that the key economic indicator is GDP growth and that all economies go into turmoil when growth approaches 0 should tell you that this goes beyond the opinion of a bunch of people. It's an emerging effect of the rules of capitalism.
> What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?
The need for constant economic growth is just a side effect of how a capitalist economy works. That's why they all go into deep shit when growth slows down too much or stops. Nothing good or bad per so about it, in my opinion (although the improvement of productivity has obviously some positive effects).
"What is the worst-case scenario for Fukushima Daiichi?
It's difficult to be definitive, because information is limited and often confused, and the outcome will depend on the decisions the plant's operators take."
They don't discard anything, and just because something is less serious than Chernobyl it does not make it "minor". Also, so-called experts have been consistently wrong in estimating things in the past days.
Seriously guys, just wait and see for a few days before shouting from the rooftops how amazingly reinforced nuclear power has come out of this. You are not helping anyone.
It honestly just seems that you already know that nuclear energy is a must-have, so you are reasoning backwards from there. If the accident was very serious it would call into question your ideas, so it must be minor, even if it's not over yet and some serious shit still could happen in the future. I just can't support this way of reasoning.
I never said it'd easy, or that it wouldn't cost money. Everything costs money. Nuclear power plants are expensive, and they have vast hidden costs that are offset to society (how much will it cost to Japan to clean up this mess? is this added to the cost?). Many countries are already getting a very significant percentage of their energy from renewable sources, things like solar power or wind power are getting more efficient by the day, and if a real, massive and sustained investment was done in this area I think we wouldn't be having debates like this one in 10 years. And I won't even enter to discuss topics like energy independence, which are huge.
Anyway, clearly a complicated issue, not trying to convince anyone here of anything.
What potentially devastating consequences would there be if instead of a nuclear plant a windmill had been hit by an earthquake, tsunami and explosion? I honestly fail to be impressed by this kind of reasoning about nuclear energy's safety.
Disclaimer: I still think fission power might be better in the long run than coal power (catastrophic global warming is worse than any nuclear disaster), but I'd rather do without either and strive for 100% renewable energies. It can be done, just needs the willingness to do it.
There's a tension between making software fast, reliable and attractive and making it completely configurable. The current culture in GNOME, as far as I understand it, is that the primary goal is to provide a great experience for your users, even if extreme configurability needs to suffer in some cases. Others can disagree and try to do different things, but if you want GNOME to agree with you the only route you have is to join the project and change things from within.
What does that even mean? How could GNOME do what Apple does if all the code is open source? Anyone can come, change whatever they want and ship it as their own. This is what Ubuntu and others have been doing for years. The kind of competition you consider "ideal" is already happening, and has happened for years. The only problem is that some people seem to expect that because you hack on free software you should not be allowed to have strong opinions about the UX of the code you are doing, and must submit to the will of all users and drive-by designers on blogs (which routinely ask for an innumerable set of mutually contradicting features, threatening to leave the project if they are not listened to).
You are still saying the same thing. "A socialist country would have freedom restrictions in place". Who says that? Norway, and many other countries, have had socialdemocratic governments for a long time, who also define themselves as socialist (for instance, they belong to the socialist international). Why is an authoritarian regime describing itself as socialist actually socialist but a socialdemocratic government doing the same isn't? Honest question here, just trying to figure out how do you end up there.