Castle Aching

[webbcompound]

1 hour ago, drmditch said:

Personally, I think that Octopus would make a good candidate for a dominant species, once we have eliminated ourselves by our greed and arrogance, or been eliminated by our inability to manage our liability to parasite infection.

 

Perhaps if Octopus learned how to become a social animal?

Octopi are generally inhibited from social development by a) eating each other and b) females dying after laying eggs. BUT the Pacific Striped Octopus seems to have transcended these limitations. They are social, the females lay several times, and instead of mating at arms length to avoid the dangerous beak they actually mate close up, and beak to beak. They are the ones to watch.   /https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/octopus-chronicles/rare-social-octopuses-break-all-the-mating-rules-video/

 

Edited March 16, 2020 by webbcompound

[Regularity]

34 minutes ago, Talltim said:

Terry Pratchett touches on the furniture thing in Men at Arms, Captain Vimes realises that the aristocracy are rich because they never have to buy anything.

The late Allan Clark, Tory MP and all-round snob, once commented that someone was poor because they had had to buy their own furniture...

[Hroth]

30 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

He used the plight of factory workers in the boot trade in an extended example

 

Another "Sam Vimes" socio-economic indicator.  He reckoned that the serial purchase of 5 pairs of cheap boots cost the same as buying a really good pair of boots and that that at the end, the purchaser of the good boots would still have dry feet while he, (Sam Vimes) would still have wet feet...

 

There's a lot of subversive stuff in Pratchett!

 

[St Enodoc]

45 minutes ago, Talltim said:

Terry Pratchett touches on the furniture thing in Men at Arms, Captain Vimes realises that the aristocracy are rich because they never have to buy anything.

https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Economic_Injustice

In similar vein, like the Queen I don't carry money. Not for the same reason though.

[Nearholmer]

Hroth

 

definitely straight from what I’m thinking of.

 

Thinking about it, its probably in Das Kapital, where he explores use-value, exchange-value, and labour-value at mind-numbing length  ......... readers in the C19th really were expected to have much longer spans of attention than nowadays!

 

K

 

 

Edited March 16, 2020 by Nearholmer

[Regularity]

A wealthy person will spend a few hundred quid on a pair of shoes, and immediately take them to a good cobbler who will fit new soles which can be easily and repeatedly changed for maybe £20-£30 a time. If properly looked after, those shoes will last decades, working out much cheaper in the long run as well as being more comfortable.

 

Terry Pratchett was very widely read, and very good at re-hashing others ideas into his books. Eventually, I got bored and stopped buying/reading them as it seemed to me that the same characters were being regularly rehashed and shoe-horned into rather thin plot lines. Subversive? That’s a new slant on his work!

 

Read “Strata” and “The Dark Side of the Sun” if you haven’t already: very interesting works and what he does with Asimov’s “Laws of Robotics” is hilarious. (Although his remark about probability - “it either happens or it doesn’t” - is rather crass, even if meant humourously.)

[Regularity]

Just now, Nearholmer said:

Thing about it, its probably in Das Kapital, where he explores use-value, exchange-value, and labour-value at mind-numbing length

Again, a combination of other ideas, synthesised into a new set of ideas. The ”Labour theory of value” was originally put forward by Adam Smith!

As you say, he explores these ideas (and more than a little tediously!)

[Nearholmer]

Yes, I was careful to use the word ‘explores’,  rather than ‘originates’ or similar, because he was building on previous work in that area.

[Compound2632]

12 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Thinking about it, its probably in Das Kapital, where he explores use-value, exchange-value, and labour-value at mind-numbing length  ......... readers in the C19th really were expected to have much longer spans of attention than nowadays!

 

It certainly was the expectation - vide Dickens etc. above. It was a mark of high Victorian seriousness, derived, I'm sure, from the preaching style of the day. Gladstone took nearly five hours over his budget speech in 1853 - and they didn't come much more serious than Gladstone. It's a measure of Disraeli's essential frivolity that he delivered his 1867 budget in just 45 minutes. 

[Regularity]

13 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Yes, I was careful to use the word ‘explores’,  rather than ‘originates’ or similar, because he was building on previous work in that area.

Try getting that point across to self-proclaimed Marxists who haven’t read the earlier works, or even Marx for that matter...

[Nearholmer]

That having been said, there is a huge amount that was originated by Marx in Das Kapital, even if much of it he’d said before in particular essays.

 

 

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Regularity said:

Read “Strata” and “The Dark Side of the Sun” if you haven’t already

 

Its been a while since I've read either, I suppose its about time I had another circuit!  Of course, Strata is the one in which a prototype of Discworld popped up.

[runs as required]

8 hours ago, Regularity said:

The late Allan Clark, Tory MP and all-round snob, once commented that someone was poor because they had had to buy their own furniture..

I remember that  as originating with Michael Heseltine. 

[brianusa]

On 14/03/2020 at 18:00, St Enodoc said:

I suppose that with the Kaiser and the Tsar as cousins he had some reason to be humourless.

 

I dunno!  I thought his line on bugxer Bognor was rather good!

     Brian

[Regularity]

54 minutes ago, runs as required said:

I remember that  as originating with Michael Heseltine. 

A fine distinction...

 

[runs as required]

1 minute ago, Regularity said:

A fine distinction...

 

Of the two MH was by far the most charismatic, I was lucky enough to be taken seriously by him about not letting Liverpool die (as advocated by other cabinet ministers)

[Regularity]

I think MH unlikely to have been quite so snobby, and he has regularly struck me as one of several candidates for best PM we never had...

[Edwardian]

Said of Michael Heseltine; a snobbish put-down indicating that MH was a self-made man (which, of course, here is always regarded as less commendable than simply inheriting wealth; a strange society, ours).

[Regularity]

8 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Said of Michael Heseltine

..by Alan Clarke?

 

Yes, that would fit. 

[runs as required]

Another snobby larger-than-life character was the chain smoking Nicholas Ridley - of the famous Border Reivers family.

An old friend was his Perm Sec at Environment, where NR was implacably anti-planning until ...

it came to an application for spec houses just next door to him somewhere in ?Wilts.

That’s when he coined the acronym NIMBY about his own backyard. 

 dh

[Buhar]

Reivers have popped up again.  Their murderous activities are etymologically linked with the word "bereaved". 

 

Alan

[Clearwater]

11 hours ago, Regularity said:

The late Allan Clark, Tory MP and all-round snob, once commented that someone was poor because they had had to buy their own furniture...

I went to check the quote earlier.  According to an impeccable source, the Guardian (!), the quote in Clark’s diaries was a report of what Michael Jopling said: ‘Michael Heseltine: "An arriviste, certainly, who can't shoot straight and in Jopling's damning phrase 'bought all his own furniture', but who at any rate seeks the cachet. All the nouves in the party think he is the real thing."’. 
 

I exchanged letters with Clark in the mid-90s.  Having read his diaries, I thought it’d be amusing to invite him to come and speak to the University Labour Club.  To my slight surprise, he accepted.  When I did the ritualistic exchange of term cards with my opposite number in OUCA,  the OUCA Pres was most displeased.  Sadly Clark bailed on me just prior to the meeting.  I think he had started to look for another seat and maybe he realised that speaking to the Labour Club might not have been his smartest move.  A pity - most of my members were looking forward to his visit!

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

Well people who take pride in their hereditary lineages should always remember that we are all out of Africa anyway once you go back far enough. And the reality of human propagation means that we are all related, however the Hapsburgs did manage to rather over do it. But they eventually stopped breeding when they discovered not only that they couldn't eat properly but had basically forgotten what eating was.   

[Compound2632]

5 hours ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

Hapsburgs did manage to rather over do it. But they eventually stopped breeding when they discovered not only that they couldn't eat properly but had basically forgotten what eating was. 

 

Oh, I don't know. There are several eligible Habsburgs about should you wish to revive the Holy Roman Empire. 22 grandchildren of the late Otto.

[drmditch]

20 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

It certainly was the expectation - vide Dickens etc. above. It was a mark of high Victorian seriousness, derived, I'm sure, from the preaching style of the day. Gladstone took nearly five hours over his budget speech in 1853 - and they didn't come much more serious than Gladstone. It's a measure of Disraeli's essential frivolity that he delivered his 1867 budget in just 45 minutes. 

Not sure I entirely agree with that. Have you read 'Sybil' ?

I do have a copy, and will add it to my re-reading list for the next few months.

 

I never understood why Mr G so enjoyed chopping down trees.

(Although of course we have to thank him for the 42 and 44 Railway Acts and the consequence of 'parliamentary trains'.)

Edited March 17, 2020 by drmditch