Cows are so cute, it’s a real shame what we do to them

I definitely don’t want to make it sound like it would be easy or anything. But I definitely think it should be a lot easier than what the Incas did when you consider what they had available to them and that it’s basically some of the rockiest, most rugged terrain on the entire planet. And also keep in mind too that the altitudes are so high that their growing season wasn’t even very long either! Pretty much the only thing that Inca had going for them that made their life any easier was volcanic soil. In basically every respect Appalachia has a 100+ times advantage over them so again I’m just saying that I have confidence that we really should be able to do this if we put our minds to it.

As for nightmarish logistics, that’s actually kind of another reason to do this in the first place because people live there right now and it’s very expensive to get food into all of these very isolated communities. It would be a very empowering thing if a small little hollow that spends a ton of money on food because of the nightmare logistics could just grow its own legumes and grains right there (and I also just want to point out that grains and legumes don’t require refrigeration either after you dry them.)

I also want to address something you said about an agricultural business having to do this. Yes, that is true, but only if we literally do not think that we have some kind of moral responsibility to remediate the destruction of the coal industry in Appalachia. Otherwise, the way I see it: if we have a social problem, we as a society have to find a solution otherwise, it will make everything worse for everyone, even the ones directly experiencing the problem. In solving problems usually will cost us something. So the effort costing us more than the labor involved doesn’t necessarily seem like a problem to me. And in fact, when you really think about it, wouldn’t it be actually insane if it was possible to actually solve the destruction wrought by the coal industry without having to spend more than we would save?

And one last thing I would like to address other things you’ve kind of mentioned in general about like the people they’re not wanting to and stuff. You have to understand that Appalachia was literally like one of the greatest strongholds of labor politics in the history of the United States and a lot of the reason why it became like that was because of ambitious New Deal-style economic projects just like this one. and we’re literally having a conversation on an article talking about strategies for how the Democrats can appeal to voters in places like Appalachia. I just don’t really see a good reason to think that if you give basically any group of economically exhausted people something to believe in that made sense, even if it’s a long shot, why we should expect them to respond any differently this time around.

The irony is terrace farming is in large part a strategy that is designed to literally improve the quality of soil and reduce erosion.

Do you ever think about how if the Incas like 500 years ago were able to turn the Andes Mountains into an agrarian paradise with terrace farming, that it should definitely be possible to do in the humble hills of Appalachia with a bunch of unemployed miners who have excavation experience and who literally know how to drive bulldozers?

https://www.wired.com/2002/05/follow-that-sign/

Do you think that the more important the product is the less responsibility the marketing company has? Like if you’re trying to sell democracy instead of an air fryer, do you think that means that the marketing company for some reason should be held to a lower standard? Because I don’t know about you, but I think it should be easier to convince people of democracy than to buy an air fryer. So if your marketing company can’t even do that…

And you don’t think the majority of the fault lies with American voters?

I don’t know, did I actually say that anywhere or are you just assuming this?

What I think is that it’s extremely emotional and self-centered to be more interested in assigning blame than on figuring out where we can most effectively put pressure to actually make change happen.

I think at this point, the danger has crystallized pretty thoroughly. Even if you somehow stopped everything that was currently happening, I don’t really know why anybody would want to come here anymore for university. Getting a degree is already stressful enough without having to worry about whether or not the institution will legally be allowed to keep you enrolled for the entire duration of your program.

I’m not telling you to not do that, and I think you should. It’s important. I just am trying to get you to realize that the person you’ve been responding to is not actually standing in your way at all, and in fact you seem to have at this point acknowledge what they’re saying, which is that the Democrats have constantly failed to successfully play the political game and all this person is saying is maybe we should demand more of them. But for some reason, even just saying that gets everyone to accuse you of a lot of horrible things even though literally all you want is for the people who are supposed to protect you to do a better job.

Like do you see how this is kind of like refusing to be angry at a fire department that just stood in front of your house while it burned down because technically they weren’t the ones that started the fire and then getting angry at people who are getting angry at the fire department on your behalf because you’re wondering why they’re not angry at arsonists instead? Have you considered that like you can be angry at a lot of different people all at the same time for a lot of good reasons and that being angry at a corporation though isn’t going to change anything but being angry at the Democrats might change the Democrats, so long people don’t literally resist trying to improve the Democratic Party and make it more effective at convincing people to vote against fascism

I’m just wondering, but do you think that a political party that is literally apparently unable to convince enough people to vote against a literal fascist sounds like they understand politics very well either?

I really just wanna point out that this person didn’t say anything other than criticize the Democratic Party for ineffectually marketing their ideas. If you hire a marketing company to advertise your product and their campaign spectacularly fails even though your product is obviously much better for consumers than everything else, would you be mad at the consumers for not understanding how your technology works or would you be mad at the marketing company for doing a very bad job at convincing the public of your very obviously much better solution?

Do you read my comment and interpret it as me saying that I think that this was negligence?

Even if you’re the most naïve person in the world and willing to give unending benefit of the doubt, I’m not really sure how you can conclude that the late CEO wasn’t at the very least grossly negligent on an industrial scale.

So like neoclassical economics as a framework was formalized and developed mostly during the hundred years following Marx’s death so I don’t understand the idea that any of his criticisms were oriented at neoclassical economics, or could’ve possibly taken it into account.

Communism abolishes the individual as economic subject, and the conflicts of interests found in a “market”. Communism abolishes exchange, and abolishes economies. So, no, there is no “market” in a communist mode of production, even by your definition.

I have to be honest I’m not really seeing what you’re saying here because my definition of a market would include just like a neighborhood of people that has like a local nonprofit grocery store that is managed by the people who live there specifically so that people can have food and for no other reason. but maybe like a handful of people notice some problems with the way the grocery store is being run, but are having trouble actually getting people to listen to them so they decide to just show everyone what they mean by starting their own grocery store in the neighborhood too under the same exact community managed model. And I also understand that neoclassical economics gives me extremely powerful tools to analyze situations like that.

I’m just curious is that sort of economy like completely incompatible with your understanding of communism? Also, I would appreciate it if you don’t say something like “well in capitalism ‘stores’ are places where people spend money so there’s literally no way anything remotely resembling this could happen in communism, not even if the food was free”

“Utility” is not a concept I subscribe to per se, unless you just mean use-values in the same sense Marx uses them. I am responding to the concepts you are using. In a communist mode of production, production is, in the famous quote, “according to need”; in a capitalist mode of production, production is divorced from need, and we find production for the sake of production.

Well, since you still haven’t told me what you think the word means in like a formal, well-defined, academic sense, I can’t really tell what your objection to it is. Like at the end of the day it’s just a word, and i have never actually run into a situation where if I thought about it for five minutes, I wasn’t able to actually reconcile the academic concept of utility with Marxism. And in practice, thinking about utility and realizing the highly arbitrary nature under which utility is realized under capitalism, is one of the main things that drew me to leftist economics in the first place.

Marxists use the word “exploitation” differently to its colloquial use. “Exploitation”, in Marx’s critique of political economy, refers to the extraction of surplus-value. I’m not sure if you know what that means or not. I can explain it if you want but you can also look it up; it’s a pretty basic part of Marx’s critique.

I certainly am not using it in a colloquial sense and in fact, I have been using it in the Marxist one the entire time which is why I described a market economy where literally all of the firms are compulsively required to reinvest the very surplus revenue you describe back into the firm itself. So again I’m asking you: in that situation, where is the exploitation?

And then the next important thing is to simply realize that such an economy, whatever you wanna call it (because for some reason you seem like you don’t wanna call it a market and I don’t understand why, but fine) is completely consistent with what is called a “market” in neoclassical economics, and so even if for some reason you think it’s really valuable to say that an economy stop being a market when everybody in the economy isn’t trying to mindlessly get ahead anymore, you can still analyze it as a “market” and resisting this extremely useful framework is only making your own life harder

I mean, it depends. Are you insisting that a market necessarily be composed of extractive firms? Because if so, of course, I can imagine interacting with each other outside of such a structure. But my point is that what people call a “market” in neoclassical economics is literally just any situation where you have a bunch of relatively autonomous groups of people all trying to accomplish various goals all interacting with each other, and so like if we’re going by the neoclassical definition of markets, it really is pretty difficult for me to imagine people interacting with each other outside of that paradigm. The important thing to understand is that even if you hate capitalism, neoclassical economics provide provides a pretty useful framework for analyzing and understanding it, and because of the fact that it can also apply the situations where firms are motivated by other things, like social progress for example, it means it’s perfectly suited for analyzing non-extractive economies too, as long as people are allowed to come together and work on problems without asking someone else for permission first.

I’m just curious what you think utility is and also who do you think is being exploited in economic institution that literally has to internalize all of the external cost? Also believe it or not I didn’t actually express any political beliefs here so I would appreciate it if you didn’t just assume that because I’m challenging you on your conception of things, it means that I disagree with your politics

Have you ever considered that the model of free market under perfect competition in neoclassical economics doesn’t actually say that the market needs to be powered by the financial profit motive, just that the firms need to maximize their own utility? It’s just that in capitalism these get conflated because it’s almost always one and the same thing. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you have an economy composed entirely of mission-oriented nonprofit organizations for example that compulsively reinvest all their excesses and internalize all of their external cost, you can still analyze it as a free market under perfect competition, and ironically, it works even better than it does for capitalism.

I need you to give me a rigorous definition of what a “firm” is. Because I think to a lot of people, “firm” just means “distinct agent participating in an economy” and so the idea that this is something that can or even should be avoided on principle (even if basically all firms organized under capitalism are socially harmful) I think makes people imagine a bunch of hermits that never interact with each.