[DJP]

gnome wrote:

DJP wrote:

The question is, how reasonable is it to expect volunteers to be on call 24/7?

Nobody's expecting them to be but is anyone seriously suggesting that three adults can't work out a shift pattern whereby at least one of them is guaranteed to be awake at any given time?

What a strange suggestion. There is no need for the forum to be continually monitored in real time. This is a web forum with very little traffic, not a trench on the Aragon front.

[DJP]

The content and functionality of the new website will be exactly the same as the existing one. It will just look different. All that is being undertaken is an upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. The project is on ice until October but should easily be completed in a few months after that, most of the complicated work has been done. There's not much more to say..

[DJP]

gnome wrote:

Not only that but we need to address the entire issue of the moderator function.  Last night there was a concerted and multiple spam attack on the forum which amounted to well in excess of 100 separate posts over numerous threads.  When, after about half an hour, the matter hadn't been addressed I contacted the three moderators and the Internet Committee.  I received this response:

Moderator1 wrote:

I'm taking a well earned break at the mo.  Found the spam about 30 minutes ago and Mod2&3 have been PM'ed that if they need for some practice on removing spam please feel free to so.

Moderator2 was also in bed at the time but Moderator3, despite suffering with a serious medical condition, came online and eventually most of the spam was finally deleted some four hours after the onset of the attack.  An example of the spam still remains in the rubbish bin.

The question is, how reasonable is it to expect volunteers to be on call 24/7?I've added some extra steps to the security processes so hopefully no further spambots will get through.

[DJP]

jondwhite wrote:

Time for a six month progress update? Looking forward to this.

Work on the new website has been put on hold until I have done an exam, in early October. The present situation is that the problem of importing multi-leveled content, i.e pages and issues of the Standard, has been resolved. Some custom code had to be written as the Drupal Migrate software does not adequately import such content in it's current form. We have also set up a virtual machine environment and GIT hub depositaory. So that development can easily be shared amongst multiple developers. The remaining work is to combine the import configuration I worked out with the code that has been written. I hope to make some videos available so people can see what we have been doing.

[DJP]

Seeing as you mention it. No they should not be entering into discussions with the moderator hat on. The guidelines advise against this. If moderators want to discuss they can log in with their personal account and do it that way.

[DJP]

In effect we already have our own 'on demand' internet radio station here: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio

[DJP]

mcolome1 wrote:

This is a very good explanation about the concept of value , price and profits

It doesn't cover the transformation of values to prices though… I'm not sure if Marx had fully formulated this at the time when "Value, Price and Profit" was written.

[DJP]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Well, I was using value in the context of Marxian economics, and using the examples of rip-off and bargain to explain the difference between value and price.  The value is there, even if the person making the contract isn't consciously aware of it.

The mistake is to think that "value" in Marx is something like "natural price", or that the price of individual commodities is determined by the amount of labour time necessary to produce them. It's only in the aggregate, the totals across the whole economy, that "price" and "value" are equal.If you were making this mistake I don't know..

[DJP]

Now Green Party leadership contenders are at it

David Malone wrote:

I believe the era of reformist politics and parties is over. I think none of our problems in the environment or the economy are going to be solved by tinkering with the economic and political systems as they are now. Those established systems are the problem. We do not have a few bad apples. We have a diseased orchard.   And from it we have had one diseased harvest after another. Time to re-plant

GREEN PARTY, LET’S GET SERIOUS ABOUT ECONOMICS

[DJP]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Quite right, but we still have a notion of worth behind the price, so, yes, price and value will (usually) not be equal: if you buy a rolls royce for a penny you know that someone has undervalue it (or you have overvalued a crock). [/quote]Sure, but when we use the word "value" in this way I don't think we're using to mean the same thing as we do when we talk about "value" in the context of Marxian economics. As I'm sure you'd agree.

[DJP]

robbo203 wrote:

I was more interested in the underlying argument presented in this article and the point that merely presenting factual evidence that seems to contradict a person's viewpoint might not necessarily undermine that view point and could even lead to it being reinforced.This has huge implications for the way in which we go about promoting the case for socialism and it is these implications which I wish to explore

I'm interested in this too. I think the best thing is to take a look at how other people have gone about trying to overcome this problem. Look at the work of people who counter climate change denialism and anti-vaccination stuff. The "Backfire Effect" and how to counter it has a lot of literature about it.

[DJP]

jondwhite wrote:

Can anyone tell us a bit more about the stance on elections of junge linke gegend kapital und nation? Their London affiliation was wine and cheese who produced the journal kittens. Didn't junge link come from electoral parties?

Perhaps you could try asking them yourself?

[DJP]

Sympo wrote:

So what is value?

Value is the form of wealth under capitalism, or exchange economies based around socially necessary labour time.

Sympo wrote:

"Human labour is the only thing that can create social value. For example, a leather shoe can only exist because someone spent labour time getting all the materials, sewing the shoe so that all the parts stay together(I'm not a shoe expert) and so on.Because human labour is the only thing that can create social value, the only way for the Capitalist to make a profit is by giving his employee less value than what the employee is creating. This is economic exploitation."Is this an incorrect view on exploitation during Capitalism?

Not bad. This would be a bit better:"Human labour, applied to materials provided by nature, is the only thing that can create wealth (in capitalism this takes the form of "value"). For example, a leather shoe can only exist because someone spent labour time getting all the materials, sewing the shoe so that all the parts stay together."And just to complicate things, not all labour in capitalism produces "value". Some sectors just redistribute value that has already been created in other sectors of the economy. See the thing and productive and non-productive labour.

[DJP]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

Value and price are different, the concepts of bargain and rip-off occur when you pay above and below the value of a good.  

This isn't what "Value" means in Marxian economics. Value and price never converge, or if they do it's by accident.

[DJP]

Collecting facts that only support one side of the argument is just an exercise in confirmation bias. Wouldn't we be better off collecting arguments against socialism and then seeing if what we say stacks up against it?Personally, I'm not to fond of the utopian planning of the future bit either…

[Author]

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