I am a software engineer. I have a rate of pay that I consider to be more valuable than my labor, for which I will gladly exchange my labor and feel as though I have profited from the transaction. Prospective employers have an amount of labor output that they value more than a rate of pay, for which they will gladly exchange in an attempt to profit from the transaction. We engage in a mutual arrangement, wherein we both walk away having benefitted from the transaction. The fact that the employer has the capacity to profit from my output is not theft. In fact, I would feel absolutely horrible if my employer didn't profit from me at all, because I ALWAYS profit from them.

My question: an oft repeated refrain, when Marx is touted as a reasonable alternative, is that any time anyone tried his ideas out, it was a total disaster (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Chavez).

I have watched some Wolff on Youtube, as well as other lectures on Marxism, because I'm interested and relatively agnostic on the economic spectrum. But I never see this point (tens of millions dead due to internal issues, in these societies, in the 20th century) refuted with any scholarly heft - do you have any recommendations?

I think Steven Pinker is dead on about why Marx (and other interpretations of far left economic thought such as Chomsky's flavors of anarchism) are dead in the water - they fundamentally misunderstand human nature. I'm looking for someone who sounds as clear as Pinker, that can counter this take. Any suggestions?

Claiming that something is true simply because of law is fairly short sighted. There have been and continue to be unjust laws worldwide.

1. Keep it in cash and get sub-inflationary levels on it, and perform poorly due to your lack of leverage.

2. Invest it in other market securities, effectively running some hedge fund. Not a great idea, distracting from your core biz, and shareholders may not appreciate the exposure to outside risk.

3. Buy back your own stock, which gives back to shareholders.

I'm not saying it was the best thing companies could have done with their money, but there aren't a ton of amazing ways to deploy billions of dollars in cash unless you're expanding operations outside your area of core competency.

I think that lots of people here are creating a lot of revisionist history right now. Almost nobody had any problem with share buybacks for the past five to ten years. The biggest note was that it would increase stock price over time due to the lower availability of shares and higher earnings per share, but hardly the critique most people have these days.

The framework captures dependencies between the reactive "change functions" and underlying variables, and executes the functions whenever a variable's value changes. You can also have dependencies between variables (like computed vars in Vue), and the lib works out the correct order for calculation and execution. All the change functions get queued up and applied in order before the next repaint.

Everything is component based, and there is even a nice kind of inheritance (with lazy, async component loading).

It works rather well. I'd be happy to share it with anyone that's interested! Not open sourcing it yet, as I envisage it would be a full time job to support it!

Edit: the upside of the change functions is that YOU decide how the DOM is updated. It's really quite cool to be able to implement a function like the following and have it run to update this.$dateOfBirth whenever this.data.dateOfBirth changes:

  function()
  { 
    this.$dateOfBirth.val(this.data.dateOfBirth);
  }