Sphere [he/him, they/them]

Avatar: A cutaway view of Photosystem I, showing only the light-capturing molecules and the electron transport chains.

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  • 8 Posts
  • 679 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: July 28th, 2020
  • Sphere [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.nettoChapotraphouse@hexbear.net•I finally get the concept of falling rate of profit!English
    4·
    12 days ago

    I would argue that the reduction in socially necessary labor time is the driving force behind the way these numbers end up working. Your counterexample is unlikely because the firms that work on mechanization of production are aware of the market forces acting on their clients.

    The real hole in my scenario is the fact that you could spend your $900 on nine more buildings and hire another 36 workers, keeping the rate of profit at 6%. But this is where socially necessary labor time does come into play: the fact that automation exists to reduce the socially necessary labor time means that prices can potentially fall, if competitors who do automate join the market, meaning any participant is forced to automate or eventually fold.

    But even in close-to-monopolized markets, we still see the TRPF applying; the way capitalists have been finding new ways to escape the TRPF is by cannibalizing older industries (think Uber “disrupting” the taxi market), or by some form of enshittification or other cost reduction at existing firms (for example, my own employer has been both doing layoffs and reducing benefits to improve its margins recently, much to my chagrin). The reason for this is that automation technologies are typically far more expensive than in my example, in which an automation technology that cuts labor costs by fully 75% while simultaneously boosting production fivefold, aka a 20-fold productivity increase, costs a mere 150 days’ profit, and only nine times as much as the original investment; this is already unrealistic, so your suggestion that there might be something even better is a bit silly, given that, again, firms doing the automation know how much their efforts are worth. So, the rate of profit still tends to fall even in oligopolized markets that don’t face major price pressures from competitors.

  • Sphere [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.nettoChapotraphouse@hexbear.net•I finally get the concept of falling rate of profit!English
    21·
    13 days ago

    This is actually going deeper than is necessary. Suppose you have a business that requires spending $100 to buy a building in which workers can labor, such that you can hire 4 workers to produce 1 widget each per day at a pay rate of $1/day, with materials costs of $0.50/widget, and you can sell each widget for $3. Your rate of profit (and the rate part is key, as we’ll see in a moment) is 6% per day, since you earn $6 profit on an initial capital investment of $100.

    Now, suppose you get a chance to build some robots within that building that will massively reduce labor costs: for another $900, you can set up your building so that it produces 20 widgets per day and only requires one worker. You’re now spending only $1 + (20*$0.50)=$11 per day, and raking in $60, for a profit of $49/day, much more than before. But your rate of profit is 4.9% on your $1000 investment, a reduction from the previous 6%. The extra step of prices going down according to the reduction in socially necessary labor time (which may not actually happen under the monopoly conditions toward which capitalism tends) is not necessary for the rate of profit to fall.

  • Sphere [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.nettoGlobal News@lemmy.zip•French far right wants to reopen brothels and put sex workers in chargeEnglish
    3·
    14 days ago

    The article quotes a lady from a “sex worker support group” that turns out to be a SWERF organization:

    L’Amicale du Nid firmly supports the belief that prostitution is intrinsically incompatible with human dignity and equality between men and women; the human body cannot be construed as an object or piece of merchandise. It refuses to liken it to a profession and wishes to build its action along consistent abolitionist lines, advocating for the ban of any form of sexual intercourse for payment

    It goes on about non-penalisation of sex workers but last I checked, a total ban wasn’t what actual sex workers wanted.

    I don’t know, this just might be a broken-clock kind of thing. Probably for the worst possible reasons, though, if I had to guess.

  • Sphere [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.nettoChapotraphouse@hexbear.net•Torture Techniques from CIA Black Sites Were Used at Alligator Alcatraz [CW: torture]English
    10·
    15 days ago

    It’s 2x2. That’s length and width; depth is not mentioned (it is mentioned when referring to the CIA box), and it says they are unable to sit down, not unable to stand. It also says their feet are attached to the ground in the current cage at issue, again implying that the prisoner is being forced to stand for a long period of time.

    The article is confusing and poorly written, though; the CIA box is mentioned again, after the quote about the one at this immigration site. This later mention includes a reference to being unable to stand (but also refers to being “barely able to sit,” thus distinguishing this as the CIA box and not the immigration one, in which we’re told sitting is not possible).

    Edit: we don’t have any photos of this thing, and at no point is depth mentioned in the Amnesty International source report, but page 38 of the PDF linked below has an illustration of it. Note that the illustration does not depict a box with any dimensions matching 2 feet, so it’s unclear how accurate this illustration actually is, nor does the artist’s name appear in the report beyond copyright notes for the various images.

    https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AMR5105112025ENGLISH.pdf