c_man posted:

Bablu posted:


are quasi pop science ppl like kahneman worth reading?


it really depends on what you want out of it. the important thing to know about them, imo, is that those books are all designed to be read by businesspeople on plane flights or whatever. they have some interesting bits but all of the interpretation done by the author is going to be framed as something thats valuable for Making Important Decisions, or as why their field should be funded.

yeah i skimmed some of it and it was neat-ish. just wanted to know if it's important enough among bigtime ppl to be able to knock it apart at the water cooler etc or is my time spent better in other ways

depends on who i'm around i guess

Edited by Bablu (Dec. 22, 2018 17:14:43)

One illustration of the difficulty of investigating and tracking the contemporary production chain process is that it took Intel more than four years to understand its supply line well enough to ensure that no tantalum from the Congo was in its microprocessor products. As a semiconductor chip manufacturer, Intel supplies Apple with processors. In order to do so, Intel has its own multi-tiered supply chain of more than 19,000 suppliers in over 100 countries providing direct materials for their production processes, tools and machines for their factories, and logistics and packaging services. That it took over four years for a leading technology company just to understand its own supply chain, reveals just how hard this process can be to grasp from the inside, let alone for external researchers, journalists and academics.

Caesura109 posted:

Can someone more savvy than me go through and undo the instances where he replaces cited descriptions like "an ofshoot of the KKK" with "a local group"?

no, no one can.

that guy's heavily entrenched in the editor clique pecking order and has mastered Jimbo's Rules Of Order, he get to decide what's true on wikipedia and everyone else gets a pedantic lecture on Wikipedia's Criteria for Notability and Reliable Sources if they disagree

The game began in earnest in 1980, when the United States made two moves that gave its opponent an advantage it has never relinquished. One was industrial: Molycorp, then the country’s largest rare earth mining and processing company, began transferring its processing technology to China (as detailed by Boston University professor Julie Michelle Klinger in Rare Earth Frontiers). The other was regulatory: although rare earths are most easily and cheaply obtained as a byproduct of mining for other minerals, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the IAEA in 1980 more or less inadvertently placed this activity under the same regulations as mining nuclear fuel. Within a decade and a half, all U.S. producers of heavy rare earths shut down. Today, China gets most of its rare earths as a no-cost byproduct of iron ore mining, while the U.S. runs one expensive, low-value specialty mine: the Mountain Pass operation in California.
Over the following two decades, China raced to cement its global dominance in the field. It established the world’s largest rare earth research facility. Chinese researchers filed for their first international rare earth patent in 1983; within fourteen years, the total number of Chinese patent filings in the field exceeded that of the U.S., which had been working in the field since 1950. And Beijing was using its leverage as the world’s top producer of rare earths to acquire or import U.S. technology companies specializing in metals, alloys, magnets, and integrated rare earth components.
Perhaps our worst blunder came in 1995, when Congress allowed China to buy Magnequench, the only U.S. producer of magnets for our most advanced guided missiles; and GA Powders, a producer of rare earth magnetic powders. Acquired by the family of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, Magnequench shut its U.S. facility seven years later, ending America’s ability to produce magnets key to missiles and other weapons.

Caesura109 posted:

looking for a good, academic text on the definitions and distinctions between what constitutes private property and personal property, any suggestions?

a couple longish entries (complete with subsections) in the MIA encyclopedia seem to summarize Marx pretty well

https://www.marxists.org/encyclopedia/terms/p/r.htm#property
https://www.marxists.org/encyclopedia/terms/p/r.htm#private-property

in a certain sense the two are the same: "fundamental social relations in which the relations between people are expressed in the relation between people and things." as private property evolved and reached a high enough stage of development to encompass means of production, wage labor, etc, then it became useful to draw the distinction in question. A simplification might go: when speaking of exclusive rights, we say "private property" where we refer to relations of production or exploitation, and "personal property" for relations of consumption or use.

anecdotally, i've seen the distinction crop up more in anarchist (e.g. this) than communist lit. i guess one could claim a certain logic to this, given the fundamentally petit-bourgeois roots of anarchism -- there's more of an imperative in the core than the periphery to have to clarify to one's peers, "no, don't worry, we're not taking your stuff." but this is just me indulging in some armchair theorizing, a fun thing to do

the other thing is, i don't know that there's really enough to say just in terms of defining or delimiting these terms to warrant an entire book

Edited by Constantignoble (Jan. 9, 2019 23:33:58)

Caesura109 posted:

As much as we all like to go to bat for Corbyn or Melenchon,

huh? what?

Thousands of Russians have joined something called the ‘Union SSR’ trade union, calling themselves Soviet citizens and refusing to pay their bills — Meduza https://t.co/Fm0to33TMG via @meduzaproject

— Victoria Smolkin (@SmolkinVictoria) January 15, 2019