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From Profit and Loss by Ludwig von Mises. Pg 11.

There is a simple rule of thumb to tell entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs are those on whom the incidence of losses on the capital employed falls. Amateur-economists may confuse profits with other kinds of intakes. But it is impossible to fail to recognize losses on the capital employed.

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[1] There is a simple rule of thumb to tell entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs.

[2] The entrepreneurs are those on whom the incidence of losses on the capital employed falls.

[3] Amateur-economists may confuse profits with other kinds of intakes.

[4] But it is impossible to fail to recognize losses on the capital employed.

[1] I think one is the root node.

[2] seems like an obvious child of [1]. [2] is the rule of thumb that [1] mentions.

[3] I don’t think is a child of [1]. It doesn’t really make any sense to have it there. In fact, [4] seems necessary to make [3] make sense even as a child of [2]. [4] seems like a part of [3]. [3] and [4] considered together talk about losses on capital employed. I think [3] is a child of [2], and [4] a child of [3].

[4] starts with but and so contrasts with [3]. The contrast is between losses being impossible to fail to recognise, and profits being something that may confuse an amateur-economist.

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From Profit and Loss by Ludwig von Mises. Pg 19.

Profits are never normal. They appear only where there is a maladjustment, a divergence between actual production and production as it should be in order to utilize the available material and mental resources for the best possible satisfaction of the wishes of the public. They are the prize of those who remove this maladjustment; they disappear as soon as the maladjustment is entirely removed. In the imaginary construction of an evenly rotating economy there are no profits. There the sum of the prices of the complementary factors of production, due allowance being made for time preference, coincides with the price of the product.

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[1] Profits are never normal.

[2] They appear only where there is a maladjustment, a divergence between actual production and production as it should be in order to utilize the available material and mental resources for the best possible satisfaction of the wishes of the public.

[3] They are the prize of those who remove this maladjustment;

[4] they disappear as soon as the maladjustment is entirely removed.

[5] In the imaginary construction of an evenly rotating economy there are no profits.

[6] There the sum of the prices of the complementary factors of production, due allowance being made for time preference, coincides with the price of the product.

[1] seems like the root node.

[2] explains in more detail what [1] means. It’s details.

[3] uses ‘this maladjustment’ to refer to the maladjustment in [2]. It seems more like a part of the maladjustment subtopic, than a new child of [1].

[4] could be a child of [3] in that it describes in what way they are like a prize: they disappear when they are claimed by someone (the someone who removes the maladjustment). But [4] also seems like a child of [2] because [2] says when they appear, and [4] says when then disappear. But 3 and 4 are separated by a semi-colon, which indicates less of a separation than a period, so the writer sees them as being more related than typical adjacent sentences. I think I’m going to go with [4] being a child of [3].

[5] I think is either a child of [1], or a child of [2]. It is a new subtopic about the ‘evenly rotating economy’. I’ll come back to this cos I’m not sure.

[6] I think is definitely a child of [5]. It refers to the evenly rotating economy and gives details on it’s operation.

So [5] does seem like a child of [1]. I think a paragraph of {1, 5, 6} makes sense on its own. [5] is about an evenly rotating economy. I think an evenly rotating economy is a hypothetical economy in which things don’t change. Like peoples ideas about what to want don’t change, or how to make things don’t change, so there aren’t opportunities to capitalise on a future state of the market by like buying low right now, or stockpiling supplies or something. I think it’s in this respect that von Mises means profits ‘are never normal’. They can arise because things can be different in the future than some people expect. So, I think [5] introduces a subtopic of [1], which is the evenly rotating economy and how it has no profits.

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The main conceptual difference for restrictive vs. non-restrictive modifiers is whether the modifier restricts (limits) what’s being talked about.

In “I want a marble.” there is no modifier. Any marble would work. You can imagine the set of all marbles and the phrase “a marble” refers to any one of them.

In “I want a red marble.” the adjective “red” is restrictive. You can imagine the subset of all marbles containing only red marbles and this refers to any marble from that subset.

Sometimes ignoring them does ruin the sentence.

This isn’t correct. I see that some sources are confusing about this such as:

https://style.mla.org/restrictive-nonrestrictive/

You can test to see if a modifier is restrictive or nonrestrictive by temporarily removing it and checking the resulting sentence for sense and meaning. A nonrestrictive modifier can be removed without fundamentally affecting the identity of the element it modifies, because the information it provides is supplemental.

Non-restrictive modifiers are not essential to identifying what’s being modified. That’s correct. It’s a way of saying they don’t narrow down the set of things that it could mean.

But their test doesn’t even work well on their own example. Non-restrictive modifiers can be essential to the point of a sentence, and restrictive modifiers can sometimes be removed without ruining sentences.

They give this example for a restrictive modifier:

My friend who lives in Chicago says that the city’s museums are among the best.

Removing the bolded modifier is relevant to identifying which friend is meant (though I wouldn’t say “fundamentally”). The shortened sentence gives us less information about which friend is being referred to. But it doesn’t ruin the sentence. The “sense and meaning” of the shortened sentence are fine.

Also I see that a lot of the internet search results focus on clauses which is the wrong place to begin understanding this concept. It’s better to begin with single word adjective modifiers because they’re simpler. I’m not sure if you realized this topic applies to one-word adjectives.

Restrictive one-word adjectives are easy to come up with. If you take a noun like “dog” and then add an adjective like “smelly” or “fluffy” or “small” you restrict the meaning (narrow down the set of all dogs to some smaller subset of dogs). Restrictive adjectives are the typical, common case. Can you give an example sentence containing a non-restrictive one-word adjective? If not, can you find one using internet search?

After adjectives, the next thing to consider before clauses is adverbs. Analyze some adverb examples.

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1 says there’s a rule of thumb.

2 is a child of 1 giving the rule of thumb.

That part is straightforward.

3 is trickier.

2 talks about losses. 3 talks about profit. 3 isn’t directly about 2.

I think 3 is a child of 1. It’s returning to the topic of a simple rule of thumb. It’s starting to explain why we would want a simple rule of thumb. Between 3 and 4, we see why that’s useful: it’s harder to get confused about losses than profits, so the simple rule of thumb focusing on losses helps reduce errors.

I agree with 4 as a child of 3. 3 doesn’t work well on its own. It’s the {3,4} group that explains why we want a simple rule of thumb.

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I think you know a semi-colon works approximately like a conjunction. So, question: What type? Is a semi-colon like a coordinating or subordinating conjunction?

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Ok I think I see how I was wrong. A modifier being restrictive or non-restrictive is about whether or not the modifier is essential to identifying what is being modified. It’s not about whether it’s essential to understanding the sentence. So, because it’s not about the sentence, in some cases removing a restrictive modifier might not make a difference to the sentence; and in some cases removing a non-restrictive modifier might make a difference to the sentence.

Yeah a lot of the stuff I saw used subordinate clauses or appositives, and I don’t think I saw anything using just simple adjectives. I think I realised it applies while reading your marble examples where you talked about sets.

I can’t think of any. I think I’m going to be surprised to find one because it seems like they just do inherently limit the set of the nouns they modify. It makes me wonder if that’s why there are lots of more complex examples of non-restrictive modifiers: because there aren’t simple ones? Idk though a thought. I’ll look online for simple ones now.

Interesting! The wikipedia page for restrictiveness gives an example of a one-word non-restrictive adjective:

By contrast, in “John’s beautiful mother”, beautiful is non-restrictive; “John’s mother” identifies her sufficiently, whereas “beautiful” only serves to add more information.

In this case ‘beautiful’ is non-restrictive because implicitly John has only one mother. (Although, John could have two mothers if by ‘mother’ one meant a female parent and not just the female who john is the child of.) But yeah it’s interesting that the adjective is non-restrictive when the noun it’s modifying is the only member of a set. So maybe whether the adjective is restrictive or not depends on the context. One thing I notice is “beautiful” is only non-restrictive because the restrictive adjective “John’s” is there. I wonder if I can think of other ones that don’t also need a restrictive modifier.

I suppose proper nouns would work!

I caught a plane to rainy England.

That’s another example of cruel Mother Nature.

My workplace expects busy Fridays in December.

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Woops I realise ‘in December’ is a restrictive modifier actually. Better would be:

My workplace always has busy Fridays.

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Yes okay cool. I can see that.

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Yeah. It seems more like a subordinating conjunction to me. What comes after a semi-colon seems like it’s relying somewhat on what’s before the semi-colon. I’m not sure though.

I looked it up, and it seems that as a rule semi-colons join independent clauses, so are unlike subordinating conjunctions that join a dependent clause to a main clause.

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If you were replacing semi-colons with a word, what word would be the best choice?

Also, if you have a coordinating conjunction joining two clauses, and you put the clauses into a paragraph tree as separate nodes, what tree structure would you expect? What if it’s a subordinating conjunction instead, then what tree structure would you expect?

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Seeing many results about clauses, I searched

non-restrictive adjective -clause

and found

Restrictive vs. Non-Restrictive Attributive Adjectives

Attributive adjectives can be either restrictive or non-restrictive. Restrictive adjectives help establish the identity of the noun or pronoun being modified, while non-restrictive adjectives simply help describe a noun that is already clearly identified. Note the difference between these two sentences:

  • “She was emotional, and would avoid a sad film at all costs.”
  • “Titanic was a sad film that no viewer could finish with dry eyes.”

In the first sentence, sad is restrictive: it tells us what kind of films she avoids. In the second sentence, sad is non-restrictive. We already know that Titanic is the film in question; the adjective sad simply serves to describe it further.

This uses a proper noun but it doesn’t have to. You could clearly identify a film without a proper noun, e.g. by saying the 77th film on 2024’s top 100 list was sad. And you can do it without a linking verb too, e.g. “The sad film at 77th on 2024’s top 100 list made me cry.” Although here the identifying information comes later, so one could claim that “sad” restricts in then the prepositional phrase restricts it further. But if you read the whole sentence at once then analyze it all together, instead of going bit by bit, then the “sad” doesn’t add identifying information.

Also compare:

Titanic was a sad film.

Titanic was a film.

The non-restrictive adjective in the first sentence is really important to the meaning and purpose of the sentence.

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Yeah cool I can see that.

An example I came up with:

The first friend I made was a good person

and one without a linking verb:

My long third post got 2 replies.

Then I wondered if it only worked with individual things like the previous examples or if it also worked with groups of things. I was able to come up with one (I stopped at one) that worked for a group:

The nurses on the night shift are dedicated people.

This is cool because unlike my previous examples the noun isn’t identified by being enumerated.

Yeah totally.

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Also I had either forgotten or failed to realise that I could get Google to omit search terms! Good idea.

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I found a handful of sentences that use semi-colons and imagined each coordinating conjunction (from the FANBOYS acronym) in its place and found that overall that “and” worked the best.

Hmm, in a sentence tree, the clauses would be children of the coordinating conjunction. In a paragraph tree, I think it would depend on the context and conjunction. I haven’t thought about this or tested this much (I have to leave the house shortly). But I think that, at first glance, if it was ‘and’ they’d in general be siblings.

At first glance, I think the dependent clause would be a child of the independent clause.

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yes

yes, siblings. coordinate things means they’re approximately equal.

adjective | kōˈôrdənət |
1 equal in rank or importance: cross references in the catalog link subjects that may be coordinate.
• Grammar (of parts of a compound sentence) equal in rank and fulfilling identical functions.

yes

So, with this in mind, review the tree this was about.

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Update on assignments:

Baba is You: I’m at 99 Dandelions and 42 hours play time (+18 dandelions and +10 hours since last update 22 days ago). This hasn’t been from small regular sessions, but larger less frequent sessions.

Typing: I haven’t spent any time on typing or thinking about a new approach since we spoke about it ~20 days ago.

Daily Writing: I have only written on 9 of the last 30 days.

I was on something like regular daily tutoring schedule up until about 3 weeks ago, when I started working a new job a couple of days a week. It is a day job from 10-5pm, and on those days I will usually then work at my other job the evening 6pm-11pm (I freelance in the evenings). My new day job is very flexible and I can basically choose the hours and days I work during the week. I chose the current schedule because my two jobs are in the same area and so I could do less total commuting during the week compared to doing the day shift on a day that I don’t have evening work. But this way of working might be putting too much of a strain on me. I am falling behind on my assignments, and that’s been causing me some emotional distress.

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So I had 4 as a child of 3. But 3 and 4 are separated by a semi-colon, which joins independent clauses, like a coordinating conjunction.

Here is reviewed tree with 3 and 4 as siblings and children of 2. Here they are both talking equally talking about profits and their relation to the maladjustment, and one doesn’t depend on the other.

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Do you think that’s right? Are you satisfied with it now?

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13 hours plus commute is a ton. That’s exhausting enough to affect other days afterwards.

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641

Yes and yes. I recall liking this option when I initially made the tree too.