davel

Transcript: https://michael-hudson.com/2023/12/is-it-over-yet/

The barter origin story of money is a myth that still lingers in the public consciousness and even in our schools.

Neolithic and Bronze Age economies operated mainly on credit. Because of the time gap between planting and harvesting, few payments were made at the time of purchase. When Babylonians went to the local alehouse, they did not pay by carrying grain around in their pockets. They ran up a tab to be settled at harvest time on the threshing floor. The ale women who ran these “pubs” would then pay most of this grain to the palace for consignments advanced to them during the crop year. These payments were financial in character, not on-the-spot barter-type exchange.

As a means of payment, the early use of monetized grain and silver was mainly to settle such debts. This monetization was not physical; it was administrative and fiscal. The paradigmatic payments involved the palace or temples, which regulated the weights, measures and purity standards necessary for money to be accepted. Their accountants that developed money as an administrative tool for forward planning and resource allocation, and for transactions with the rest of the economy to collect land rent and assign values to trade consignments, which were paid in silver at the end of each seafaring or caravan cycle.

[…]

Origin myths at odds with the historical record [namely, the barter myth] are the result of the conflict between vested interests and reformers over whether the monetary and credit system should be controlled by banks or by governments. Are credit and debt to be administered by laws favoring creditors, or should the prosperity of the indebted population at large be protected? The way in which economic writers answer this question turns out to be the key to their preference regarding the Barter or State Theories of the origins and character of money, credit and interest.

Perhaps a more palatable descriptor than “myth” would be “theory which is not supported by currently available evidence.” It’s hard to investigate pre-agrarian, preliterate societies, and even if you did, how relevant would that be to how literate agrarian societies like ours function?

Edit to add: @InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works’s comment has convinced me that this is an ongoing display name bug that’s unrelated to my bio. I don’t think this is worth further investigation by anyone.

If have not assigned a “Display name” to my @davel@lemmy.ml account, and as expected—at least on lemmy.ml—it displays as “@davel”. However, on every other instance it displays as “davel [he/him] (@davel@lemmy.ml)” (on Hexbear.net it looks slightly different: “davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml”).

My “Bio” consists of a Markdown table, and the pronouns must be coming from it:

|||
|---|---|
| Pronouns | he/him |

I skimmed the lemmy & lemmy-ui codebases for this functionality and couldn’t find anything, but I’m not a Rust developer.

Does anyone know where this functionality is coming from?

Edit to add: I have now set my Display name to “Davel”. We’ll see if this propagates. Later, I’ll delete my Display name, and see if “Dave” is retained by other instances. Then I’ll know that this is unrelated to the Markup table.

Apparently Modi stans have been known to mistake him for an ally, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Wikipedia: Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an American-based Indian historian, author, journalist, political commentator, and Marxist intellectual. He is the executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Editor of LeftWord Books, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, and a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. For Tricontinental, he writes a weekly newsletter. Ideologically a Marxist, Prashad is well known for his criticisms of capitalism, neocolonialism, American exceptionalism, and Western imperialism, while expressing support for communism and the global south.

Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993 when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.

My goal is a blobless Linux Framework laptop, but AFAIK there are no open source drivers for the included AMD RZ616 WiFi card. What would you do, replace that it a different M.2 card? Do any blobless ones exist? Any recommendations?

For all of corporate America’s apparent preparations for insurgency in, and invasion of, its labor markets, it has yet to be met with the kinds of collective action that would confirm its fears or change the political balance in Congress in favor of reforming labor law. Leaving neoliberalism behind would entail just this sort of organization among the millions of unorganized. Until labor unions and their disruptive power grow, any talk of a post-neoliberal order will remain theoretical.

These US healthcare systems are effectively scams. Yes in theory they can save you money, however in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is.

This video delves into the deep-seated, undemocratic nature of the American political system, its system of "checks and balances," the roles of the Supreme Court, the Senate, and Congress and how the separation of powers, far from being a virtue of US Democracy, is one of its most undemocratic features, as it limits political democracy to a propertied minority while foreclosing economic democracy for the propertyless majority. The video also critiques the naive views of social democrats and encourages people to envision alternative conceptions of genuine economic democracy.