8 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
    1. To paraphrase Gibbon on the Roman Emperor Gordian’s 22 acknowledged concubines, my books are for use, not ostentation.
    2. Books aren’t commoditiesAdvertisementI despise — viscerally, perhaps irrationally — the people one sometimes sees at used book stores scanning every title with a handheld device to check its online price. They regard books strictly as products and usually don’t know anything about them, only caring about what they can buy low and sell high on Amazon or eBay.
  2. Mar 2023
    1. In economics, Gresham's law is a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will gradually disappear from circulation.[1][2] The law was named in 1860 by economist Henry Dunning Macleod after Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579), an English financier during the Tudor dynasty. Gresham had urged Queen Elizabeth to restore confidence in then-debased English currency. The concept was thoroughly defined in medieval Europe by Nicolaus Copernicus and known centuries earlier in classical Antiquity, the Middle East and China.

      Gresham's law is an economic monetary principle which states that "bad money drives out good."

      It relates to commodity value, particularly in coinage, where cheaper base metals in coins will cause more expensive coinage to disappear from circulation.

  3. Jun 2022
    1. Apr 5, 2022 — MicroStrategy (MSTR), a bitcoin-accumulating business-intelligence software company, said it bought another 4,167 BTC for around $190.5 million.microstrategy bitcoinmicrostrategy bitcoin holdingsmicrostrategy bitcoin holdings chartmicrostrategy bitcoin purchase historymicrostrategy selling bitcoinbitcoin pricePeople also search for
  4. Feb 2021
  5. Feb 2020
    1. Exchange value

      Exchange value appears as the property of a commodity that is exchangeable for other commodities. It also presupposes societies who produce commodities and exchange them. While all societies have things with use values, exchange value is relative to a specific time and place.

      Additionally, exchanging commodities must also presupposes a way to determine proportionality between different commodities, so that they can be exchanged in the first place.

      Exchange therefore requires some other measure that stands above the two commodities meant to be exchanged. If there were no ways in which iron and corn were found similar to a society, for example, then we would not exchange them and they would have no exchange value.

      Marx will contend that what each commodity must contain crystalized within it is value (formally) and that the substance of value is labor (viz. the common factor of both iron and corn is labor). Marx will call this kind of labor abstract labor.

    2. Section 1. The Two Factors of a Commodity, Use-Value and Value

      Marx's analysis of a capitalist system begins by postulating that it's fundamentally composed of units called commodities.

      In the capitalist system commodities have two features.

      1. They are produced

      2. They are produced by capitalists

      Capitalists produce commodities by employing workers to produce them.

      In this section, Marx begins his analysis of the first feature of the capitalist system (viz. that it is commodity producing). Workers and capitalists will not appear in Marx's analysis for several more chapters.

    3. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful

      What commodities are thought to be useful for or not is irrelevant to Marx at this very early stage of his analysis, even from a moral point of view. Diamonds satisfy a need in some societies at specific times and places the same as corn or iron.