That’s cute! You guys have plaids!
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Adorable!
I’ve got some Scottish back in there too:
It’s just the Irish is far more recent in my family background.
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I’m jealous. This is what I have to look forward to using, assumming the connection can be documented.
A human breast dripping milk.
yay us.
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Nothing wrong with feeding babies! Noble work, that! Take pride in your family crest!
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If you could have imagined the desire, but not enacted it, would they still be the worst moments? (I’m willing to consider that it’s not possible…)
Interesting, your use of the word ultimate. An evocative fact might be that in group theory, for some groups there can be elements, other than the identity, that are their own inverse. By identity, I mean nothingness (“the ultimate negation of nothing is nothing” seems a vacuous truth); and by the group and its elements, I suppose I mean something like the universe and its thoughts.
The lesser negations may be the ones more worth struggling against.
My family crest is a raised glass with the motto ‘As I Find It’. Seriously, that’s it.
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Classical economics just pushes this question off. It says that the market will ensure that use value is exchange value. I had my own Ligotti/Serling induced epiphany above, and it occurred to me that the market determination of exchange value is basically the same way that small town gossip gives power to certain individuals. Basically, it’s a brutally flawed process that quickly takes on a life of its own.
Exchange value is a crude metric for use value because obviously somewhere in that calculation of how much you’ll pay for something is how useful the thing is to you. But also the calculation factors in things like the presence of irrelevant alternatives, the last two digits of someone’s social security number. More importantly, the exchange value of a thing takes into account the perceived exchange value that other people have. It’s got built-in feedback loops.
So our cultural values create huge distortions between use and exchange value. Teachers and nurses are very, very useful, but the fact that some people feel driven to enter these professions means that wages can be lower because people will do it anyway. The capitalist analysis of this is that someone who always wanted to be a teacher is being compensated for their work in party with wages and in part with fulfillment of that desire. You have to pay more for jobs that no one wants to do, and you pay less for jobs that people do want to do.
But of course, what that means is that caring about other people isn’t just assigned no value by the market, it’s assigned a negative value. A recently publicized study showed that caring professions are paid less to the extent that they care. Doctors may come to mind as a counter-example, but they are paid substantially less than other professionals with similar training and job demands, it turns out. And the highest paid doctors - surgeons - are the ones who deliver the least caring (not to diminish the value of what they do, just to point out the relationship holds).
We might be able to approach the use value of things scientifically if we had some way to measure value. These days people measure value in dollars, and dollars overvalue certain things and undervalue others. You could try to use life-years, but ultimately it would go into its own feedback loops. How do you value the work of a farmer vs. the work of a home builder vs. the work of a doctor?
I think the economists aren’t entirely wrong that the best way to measure value is to look at people and their behaviours, I just think they mechanisms they’ve used to measure are broken. Value is something we have to arrive at collectively, for sure, but maybe it’s a mistake to try to measure it linearly. The value judgments that real people make everyday weigh various factors, arrive at dilemmas, and have more than a bit of randomness. That might actually be the best way to understand what use value is. What is the value of the food that keeps you alive compared to the value of the thing you feel gives your life meaning? The answers 8.4 and 6.3 don’t seem like they are going to cut it.
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A family crest?
Oooh, get you.
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I know, right? Ancient French nobility, doncha know.
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Ancient french nobility eh?
I bet our ancestors fought!
Well I got ancient English nobility back oh 600 years, and my crest is a Bear and a Ragged staff!
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Oh. That’s it. I’ve bitten my tongue for too long!
These are armorial bearings, or arms, or perhaps “coat of arms”.
See that red dragon like creature sitting atop the helmet? That’s a crest. Don’t confuse one small piece of the arms for the whole thing.
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Too metonymic?
And it’s rampant.
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So then I bang me little gavel, like this!
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indeed.
And it’s holding a hammer.
The Arms of Fox-Davies of Coalbrookdale, co. Salop. granted in 1905. “Sable, a demi sun in splendour issuant in base or, a chief dancetee of the last”. Crest: “on a wreath of the colours, a demi dragon rampant gules collared or, holding in the dexter claw a hammer proper”. Motto: “Da Fydd” (Welsh, meaning “Good Faith”, and punning on “Davies”).
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The most interesting part of that window is “xtartan”. A program to draw tartans. Imagine that.
Does it weave them yet?
Apparently, I’m part of the Dickey Sept of clan Douglass. What that means, I’m not exactly sure.
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