I’m buying both the beer, and the bottle. I’m buying the record both for the music, and for the vinyl, (and the jacket). In both cases the “container” has value. They both keep the product “fresh”. I have fifty year old records that sound brand new. CDs aren’t so good at that. And, like beer tastes better from a bottle than a can, music sounds better from a record, (if you have the right equipment).
If CDs were sold for a couple of bucks, I might buy them, too. Probably not, but at least it would be reasonable. The fact is, we know what blank CDs cost, and we know the artist only gets about a dollar out of it. It’s a poor value on the one hand, and an obscenity on the other, enriching the middleman. Records, at least, have some intrinsic value, as well as their more obvious benefits.
I would say to those people who don’t own a hifi - buy files directly from the artist. If you want to sell me music, put it on vinyl.
I think it’s “star” in the same sense that basically anyone who gets paid to appear in pornographic movies is a porn “star.”
[quote=“Nylund, post:15, topic:70681”]
I almost don’t even want to live in a world where “Go make funny videos for youtube” actually is sound financial advice. [/quote]
I do. I want to live where you get money and enough pressure off so that you can do what you want to do, be it stupid youtube content, to picking up trash on the highway, to trying to cure cancer, to trying to educate the next generation.
I want to live in a world where Money is more a sign of status and less that thing we spend our lives chasing after because the instant we stop is when we fall under unable to take care of ourselves…
That said I want the guy trying to cure cancer to make MORE than the youtube guy because I fel one is more important than the other, but I feel a lot of the social anger in the world would stop if we didn’t feel like we had to fight day in and out for basic necessities like food, or medical care.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just use a thermometer for that?
Joke’s gone completely over my head I’m afraid.
It wasn’t a joke. I meant that if people needed to know somebody’s status, that some actual sensor which yields actual biological data says a lot more, and is a lot simpler, than an abstract symbolic circle-jerk like money. It might sound flippant, but the money doesn’t actually say anything about the person themselves. Whereas something even as simple as a thermometer does.
Or even just ask them!
If status is due to temp, we are gonna have a lot more brain damage and ER visits 
Plus the Human Torch as our leader? I’ll pass on that.
Think of Wuffie and Doctor’s reputation based economy.
Sorry, I’m an economist, aka someone who specializes in the study of scarcity. Yes, it’s great if everyone gets a pony, and even better if the cancer-curers get two ponies instead of just one, but that’s not how it works. If everyone gets a pony, then landlords get a pony too, so those who get a pony are going to end up just scraping by as their entire pony goes to rent. Give YouTube comedy makers a pony. Give garbage collectors a pony. Give waiters a pony. Give landlords a pony. Give the electric company a pony. Give the gas company a pony. Giver your ISP a pony. Everyone gets a pony! Guess what? Everyone who gets a pony is just barely scraping by. It’s no different.
In the end, what you collect is limited to the value that others are willing to part with. If you had to personally part with two dollars every time you clicked on a youtube link, would you click on them so freely? “I get free entertainment, but entertainers get rich!” isn’t ever going to exist. Your choice is either, “I don’t pay and they don’t get paid,” or “I pay and they get paid.” Anything else isn’t really a sustainable option for anyone whose views aren’t extraordinarily high enough to make up for in volume what they lack on a per-person basis via contemporary advertising regimes.
How many ponies if the pony ranch is too big to fail?
Certainly. And that is why some pony fields produce value and some dont.
FSM knows I have created things I thought were valuable. But weren’t. (But maybe they are 
)
No such thing as too many ponies.
But scarcity doesn’t have anything to do with what @singletona082 said:
America throws out nearly enough food to feed the entire population. The American government spends more money per citizen than the Canadian one providing medical care despite the fact that the American government doesn’t provide medical care to most of its citizens. These things aren’t about scarcity. In America they are about a wealthy, nearly aristocratic class that has to be given a cut of everything, and an attitude that would rather punish people who are perceived as not contributing than have a better society.
I’m not saying what I want is a perfectly easy or even ‘rational’ system that could work right now even if you snapped your fingers/clapped twice/wrinkled your nose and suddenly It’s A Thing.
I’m just saying it would be better psychologically and socially if instead of hounding after flat survival we shift to a status based economy.
Everyone gets some basic level care, but those society percives as more valuable are able to do more on their own. I use ‘money’ as satus indicator, Cory Docrow used the Wuffie, and while there are some similarities there are key differences in I"m woking under a ‘we all stay dead and aren’t immortal’ mindset.
As @Humbabella pointed out, we actually have enough both in food and in money spent on care as well as more than enough land. What we lack is a distribution method that works.
Just as with piracy, poverty is a distribution problem. That and people going ‘Well I"m not going to pay for that layabout!’ On the other hand ‘Why should i pay for cops to protect your bigoted lifestyle and family mister hypothetical?’
Selfishness is the problem… then again were I Bill Gates or Elon Musk rich I would rather be first of equals in a world reaching to the stars, rather than king/Emperor of a shit heap.
Meh, throw enough economic jargon at it, and it all seems “natural”, so it’s okay if children starve, because REASONS based on that natural science ECONOMICS!!!
There is a kind of evolutionary problem - who ends up at the top? People who really, really care about being at the top. It’s pretty easy to demonstrate a correlation between wealth and happiness when wealth means eating enough, but basically that correlation vanishes above a very low level of wealth (by first world standards). For most people, making more money won’t really improve their satisfaction in the long run. But some people seem to be motivated entirely by being able to show dominance over other people. So while many think of getting into management and think, “That seems like a lot of extra work, I think I’d be happier doing what I’m doing” and some think, “Yeah, I’m good at managing people, that’s the right career move for me.” mangers are also likely to be people thinking, “MORE… POWER!” And when you get to the very lofty heights it’s all the dominance-oriented assholes. The only solution is to get rid of the very lofty heights entirely - make sure no one can actually get that much power because it doesn’t help the rest of us when they do. A big part of that is taxing the hell out of the very wealthy. And lest anyone bring up the Laffer curve, I’m saying we should tax the wealthy as a good in and of itself even if it were revenue neutral to do so.
I think the basic argument is that we are so brutally incompetent at everything that everything we try has exactly the opposite effect we wanted. That’s why focusing on profit makes everything better. Profit is obviously the least important thing to society, so if we focus all of our efforts on it, we’ll surely screw that up and accidentally make the poor better off.
In a way it makes sense, but the problem is one of projection: Just because economists have never gotten anything right doesn’t mean no one else has.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
