That would have to be from marketplace sellers, I presume.

Unless you are talking about cheap ass knock off products that get their own product page, and are full of fake reviews.

It's true though. I don't recommend following its conclusions, but if you can push people past the stigma, it's a fairly accessible description of what your employer wants and why office politics work the way they do.

Like your dad, for example. His bosses keep stealing his work and taking credit for it. Well, why shouldn't they? From the company's perspective it wasn't your dad who did the work, it was his bosses who successfully exploited him. This outcome is obvious if you understand what the Communist Manifesto is trying to tell you. The path to success in capitalism is never to do hard work, it is to exploit others. Your only other recourse is collective action.

I should definitely read it. And I've heard it said (on hacker news, of all places) that it is a great shame that the Red Scare basically stopped people form reading it in the US, thereby robbing them from a framework for understanding economic problems, even when we ignore some of its more specific prescriptions. I suppose I always presumed I lacked the historical background to appreciate it enough for it to be engaging or relevant reading, but now that I think about it I'm not sure why I would have thought that.

Daimler is suing Amazon for directly selling counterfeit Mercedes-Benz products. Other than that, they've all been Amazon marketplace or whatever - and the US courts have previously ruled that Amazon isn't responsible for shipping and selling counterfeits as long as they claim someone else was involved.

working as intended

Regarding this hard work: I feel that in a lot of ways, I am really coming down from a false sense of optimism that was handed down to me even as a young child. In this country we tell our children that anything is possible if they work hard, that we should emphasize things like creativity and free expression, and all that other stuff about unbridled individualism. And in retrospect, a lot of it seems to do a lot of harm when applied to the majority of people, and it really starts to look like a twisted ideology of false optimism that works well for those privileged enough that such optimism reflects the reality of their potential to actually carry out their plans, but on the other hand, for the majority of workers, as an excuse for dismissing any protest of unfairness, and to always be able to tell them, "well, you either didn't work hard enough, or you got unlucky, so just roll the dice again and see what happens" over and over until they've resigned to their place in society.

Which makes me think.

Do people actually think that the privileged elite really stop their children from reading things like the Communist Manifesto in their studies at Ivy League universities? Hah.

Like, here's the thing.

All Silk Road did was connect contraband sellers to contraband buyers. They didn't deal in contraband themselves, they didn't even handle the product. All they did was intermediate the financial transaction by displaying a product list and providing escrow services at a small cost. And the US government hunted the Silk Road guy down like a dog.

What does Amazon do? They connect contraband sellers to contraband buyers. They deal in contraband themselves: they import it, they warehouse it, they repackage it, and they ship it. Millions of times more volume than Silk Road ever handled. And the US government doesn't do **** about it. They don't do **** about Amazon selling counterfeit goods, just like how they didn't do **** about Amazon undercutting their early competitors by evading state sales taxes.

It's selective enforcement in the absolute strongest sense. The US government decided a long time ago that Amazon was gonna be a winner, so Amazon is going to win. No matter what else they do or what other crimes they commit. If anybody else tried to do what Amazon has done, they would be in chains.

To be fair to my public schooling, I did get told about the Communist Manifesto in history class, and in fact I was motivated to read it having already absorbed some of the writings of Richard Stallman. In the end thought I was more seduced by technology than interested in history, and I didn't really place Marx's work in context enough to appreciate it down the road.

Also, I was just a dumb high school kid who thought that the Soviet National Anthem was edgy and awesome.

Do people actually think that the privileged elite read?

The working class, even the middle class, we all treat education very differently. For us, education is an investment. We labor for years, unpaid, to build up a reserve of human capital our future employer can exploit. And like all other things in capitalism, we are no more entitled to the surplus of our own human capital than we are the surplus of our labors. Our only hope is the scarcity of kind, not the quantity or quality.

For the capitalist class, education is a shibboleth. Human capital is irrelevant to them, because they already have access to more human capital than they could ever use. Knowledge, skill, intelligence - these things don't matter to the capitalist, to the rich, because they are easily bought when needed.

Certainly, the rich are dimly aware that the Communist Manifesto is a dangerous text to them. Few of them would have the tools to understand it.

I was told about the Communist Manifesto in mandatory school, too. But I was also told about Mein Kampf.

I'm sure even school children know the quote "workers of the world unite", and some of the text around it. The rhetorical portion. In retrospect, I'm fairly certain this was intentional. My teachers represented the manifesto as a brief, easily-dismissed emotional appeal against employment. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized the manifesto was much longer than I thought it was, or that it contained substantial economic argument and criticism of capitalism. If school hadn't satisfied my curiosity the way it did, I might have realized this truth sooner.

I suppose that because the elite passes down its position of privilege by inheritance, this also includes absorbing whatever belief system is convenient to them as well. And these beliefs probably predate the communist manifesto anyway, and in fact surely have more to do with what Marx was reacting to, than anything in reaction to Marx. So I guess to beat communism the capitalists just have to keep doing what they are doing (hey, kind of like everything else in this topic, they can win by default by doing no work).

and on the topic of political beliefs, speaking of trying to win by default with no work: hello conservatism

I have just reflected on what I was told about the Communist Manifesto in school. I recalled the following, as a concise summary of what we were taught:

"Society has six stages. The fourth stage is capitalism. The fifth stage is socialism. The last is communism. This is what Marx said would happen. There is no proof that it will actually happen, since it is just a theory."

just a theory

hey where have I heard that before in some schools (thankfully not in my school, heh)

teach the controversy

Honestly, what they told you sounds much worse than anything I remember. That sounds pretty bad.

Looking back, there are some things in my early education that start to look like propaganda. For example in elementary school we were given lists of things to do that would earn us the distinction of having gone "above and beyond" what was required of us. Somehow in retrospect this looks like training to become intrinsically motivated to want to do things for our superiors, without necessarily being proportionally rewarded for it. I guess it certainly is different when we are talking about children and thinking of ways to motivate them, and I am sure it's possible that it was innocent, but in actual practice I can't help but think that this was all set up to motivate people to do things they knew better than to want to do.

Maybe this goes back to the origins of public schooling in the need to train more workers that somebody brought up in this thread?

They didn't literally say it was brief or an emotional appeal, but they also didn't talk about the parts that weren't. I think it's probably more convincing to let people imagine wrongly all by themselves.



I did. Factory schools.

Schools select for obedience. If you aren't obedient, you don't do well.

Obedience is bad for any leadership skills, but it makes good workers.

Heh. Cynicism alert!

Eeeeh. I mean, maybe now the middle-class and upper middle-class sees education as an investment in human capital. And maybe now we believe that elite post-secondary institutions ought to be institutions that promote upward social mobility, and get frustrated that instead they preserve class differences.

But I don't think that's how we've always seen post-secondary education. In the past, university education (which exclusively accessible to the elites of society) was primarily a way of conferring status on those who attended, and had more to do acculturating a person into the ruling class than preparing them to be... I don't know, managers, or investment bankers, or whatever else Ivy League grads go on to do these days.

If you look back at the requirements to get into elite institutions back in the mid-20th century, students typically needed to know Latin and Greek. This was a way of preventing non-elites from attending elite post-secondary institutions. But it also reflects that the so-called aristocracy valued education as a good in itself, and as a marker that signaled that a person belonged to the ruling economic class. It was valuable, even when it was completely useless.

How else would they have seen it? Years ago, and occasionally today, workers were educated via apprenticeship. They learned a useful or marketable skill over many years of work. Formal education for scholars, tutors, and clerks, was likewise preparing those people for productive work. Other than recent diversions of the petite bourgeoisie, non-elites in history have almost never had the opportunity to pursue any formal education which was not directly and deliberately growing their own human capital.

Not true. Obvious example: universities needed to bring up undergraduates to become the next generation of professors, a job that elites with other obligations would be unable to perform. The majority of university undergraduates were the children of professionals, and most went on to become professionals. Medieval universities were also charged with training the clergy. It's true, however, that universities did accept the children of the elites. Their patronage funded the training of proper scholars.



As I said, education is a shibboleth for the rich. It's not useful for them, but it is expected.

I should have said "university education" rather than merely "education" in the bit of text you cited. Students didn't go to university because they believed it would better prepare them to enter the labor force. Of course, university education wasn't never really designed to do that.



I'm not sure what point we disagree on here? Maybe we don't mean the same thing by elites? I meant by it not only the capitalist ruling class but also professionals.

I think generally when Jon talks about elites, he is referring to the independently wealthy: the class of people who are able to extract sufficient rents from society that they no longer need to do anything themselves.

I imagine this is a fairly small class of people, unless we're also going to include hermits, squatters and survivalists.

n.b.: he doesn't like them

Yerp, that's what I expect too.

Law has been a post-graduate professional degree for literally more than a thousand years. The reason we do it today is the same reason they did it a thousand years ago: because a liberal arts education prepares you to make persuasive arguments. Students absolutely did attend university with the expectation that it would prepare them for work, even in the Middle Ages.

Professionals were well paid experts at the time, but they were far from the titled nobles who sent their children to university for vanity.

Yes, ok, this is true. But the other thing to keep in mind is that the organization of academic disciplines relative to each other was influenced by Aristotle, for whom philosophical knowledge (especially, theology, and to lesser extents mathematics and physics) was the ultimate happiness, the fullest realization of human nature, and something to be sought as an end in itself. It is true that medievals did go to university with a view towards their professional ambitions, and it was incorrect of me to say otherwise. But, alternatively, medieval universities were also institutions organized around inculcating individuals with the requisite faculties for scientific inquiry (especially theology, to which the other disciplines were seen as ancillary), which was seen as the highest good that human beings could achieve "in this life" (to use Christian terminology).

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/03/politics/trump-maralago-remarks/index.html

Trump was such a massive mistake.

But at least he's spent a third of his time playing golf. So, you've got that going for you.

It's ok we know it's not that bad until Susan Sarandon acknowledges that maybe Trump is worse than Hillary after all.

Wherever she is, I'm pretty sure she's still doubling down so it's fine it's fine we're good

How can Trump have been a massive mistake when all of the other options were identical on all of the important issues?

That CNN article smells of bull****. The paragraph after the quote says the remarks came during a session full of jokes and laughter. That quote sure sounds like a joke to me. Not having heard any recordings, though, I can't say for sure, but it does sound like humor.

Edit: the guy says and does enough stupid stuff stuff that CNN doesn't need to make leaps and grasp at straws for anti-Trump news, but they do anyway, which is annoying, because it's hard to filter out what's worth concern and what isn't

Some things shouldn't be joked about. The leader of a country shouldn't joke about consolidating power. Especially when his actions have appeared to be just that at times.

Which is why I don't consider CNN worthy of my time. I'd even rather read something like Media Matters, which doesn't even pretend to be objective, so at least I know what I'm getting. In this way CNN is almost worse than Fox News (well, for those of us who hold no illusions about them being 'fair & balanced'). At least Fox News is funny.

My point is, it's making a mountain of a molehill when there are already mountains to be concerned about.

Had Obama or Bush or Clinton made that joke during a correspondents dinner, it wouldn't be a big deal. It was a comment behind closed doors in an apparently jovial conversation and likely not cause for concern.

Edit: the tariffs on raw materials are far more noteworthy than his comment. He almost certainly won't even be a two-term president, and definitely not Mr. President-for-life.

That said I do give credit to CNN for doing original reporting, when they do. Not up to the standards of the New York Times or even the Washington Post, but they seem to try here and there, even if they ultimately glaze it with sensationalism.

Cable News itself is no better than tabloid news, so they're going to report on non-sense like this just to get a rise out of Twitter. I mean, don't lose sight of just how much **** is plastered all over that site in terms of clickbait and ads. Let's not forget what they're optimizing for here.