Commodities only have the commodity-value (i.e. price); actual value (i.e. something's worth/weight/utility/what something means to you) is unrelated to commodification. Most valuable things in your life likely have no meaningful commodity value. Very much including the concept of friction.
If only commodities are "valuable", the word has lost all value.
There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.
Most software development is a lot of low value commodity stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong, your product becomes less valuable.
A good example of something that is both a commodity and a common source of friction is all the signup and security friction that a lot of software providers have to do. If you do it poorly, it creates a lot of friction, hassle, and frustration. And support overhead. It's literally costing you money and customers. Doing it right isn't necessarily directly appreciated but it results in less friction, frustration, and overhead.
That's why good UX is so important. It's a commodity. But there's plenty of opportunity for turning that into friction by doing a poor job of it.
It's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.
> The other piece of "evidence", Cal-Maine's quarterly P/L, is also useless, for all we know they decided to invest in less capital equipment than previously in Q3 2025
There's no serious moral or value distinction here; if you insist on pointing fingers you can, but at the end of the day the profits we see celebrated come with higher costs, and the continuing-to-increase wealth inequality in this country confirms that not everyone sees the benefit.
> You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.
> They always feel slightly like academics reading into things too much when it's totally possible they were meant platonically or like a brotherly type of love.
Why on earth are you looking for definitive proof of specific claims when it comes to history? That just seems like a fool's errand.
I think you should strive for definitive proof and also acknowledge that you will probably never get there.
To be honest, the title did seem click baity leading to one to assume there was a possible misreading of the era. But I think this should be unflagged because as foldr points out downthread [0], the family wanted the passages removed not some editors generations later?
Or the Democratic Party can get their house in order before the next federal election? They run a decent pro-growth platform at the federal level, but CA is a living counterexample that will be a sink on their credibility until it's fixed. It should be an existential issue for them given they'll lose a bunch of congressional seats in 2030 if they fail to start building.
I am not judging them based on price, because price is not under their direct control. I am judging them based on artificially depressed housing starts per capita and the lack of will to address it.
Commodities only have the commodity-value (i.e. price); actual value (i.e. something's worth/weight/utility/what something means to you) is unrelated to commodification. Most valuable things in your life likely have no meaningful commodity value. Very much including the concept of friction.
If only commodities are "valuable", the word has lost all value.
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