Occupy Wallstreet

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Please try to reply with a full paragraph and not with a one-sentence quote plus a one-sentence answer. These are hard to follow and put into context even by me who originally wrote that wuote reply

Well, that's mostly because I was trying to squeeze that entire post into 10k characters. Since your new post(s) are even longer, I'm not even to try that, so hopefully that'll break up the problem. (Of course that means that this response will take up at least 2, possibly 3 actual posts.) EDIT: it is also 1:30am, so sorry if this post is hard to read or anything like that.

Of course the margin of profit will not drop to zero and depending on politics that other competitor will not have a chance anyways, but basically the value of the egg at the AF base is the price at the producer plus the cost of transport and the wages of the people arranging transport.

Isn't value, almost by definition, the (maximum) price people will pay for things? Eggs don't have any intrinsic value, after all, only value in the context of goals. Aliens might "value" eggs negatively, because they are, e.g. poisonous.

And I think that latter is highly overvalued in the present system. We pay people 2 or 10 times the value of a good at the producer just so that they organize bringing it to us (not even including expenses of that service). That way some people get fantastically rich on these "profits" - richer than those who in the end sell the product or the ones who produce it or the ones who transport it.

Some resources, like peoples' time and instaneous power generation, are, AFAIK, heavily affected by demand; the value is not so much in posessing the resource, but in posessing the resouce right now.

And in the end you even use Milos behaviour as an example of what leads to financial crash - so what is your intention then - showing me that this kind of "creating profit" and "shuffling money around" is not working? I knew that.

Actually, Milo's behavious has very little to do with the crash, and if, for some reason, the value of eggs plummeted, he would be fine, because his wealth is not in eggs; his wealth is in US dollars. The crash happened because the big investment banks had their wealth in things like investment indicies and the shares of other corporations, which as mentioned earleir, have no intrinsic value.

Imagine if Apple were not an electronics manufacturer, but an investment bank. What could conceivably happen upon Jobs' death is that shareholders lose confidence in Apple, and so their share price drops. However, if other companies have shares in Apple, and use them as assets, the value of that company drops. This means that their share price also drops, and...

Capitalism in its current form or even worse uncontrolled free markets lead to that inequality in distribution of the limits which results in localized scarcity. Of course the value of something is determined by the limits of its availability, that certainly is at the basis of trading - a feature that is really really old.

I would disagree that capitalism causes scarcity and say that scarcity is the default; capital and resources are required to move resources around. (What a lovely catch-22.)

The problems arise however if it is easy to "screw over" people by shuffling money - creating fake assignments of value to some things. Like your egg again. Its value at the AF base is the value of its production plus the cost of transport. Yet there is a virtual, created value assigned to it by the trader. That profit has to paid by someone - by the farmer who could charge 2ct for the egg or more understandably by the AF, who overpay Milo for that egg - in the end that cost then is paid by the tax payers.

Opportunity cost can hardly be called a "cost," in the actual financial sense. It costs the AF 5 cents per egg, but they don't "lose" 2 cents because they could have theorectically bought directly from the farmer for 3.

Another example for created fictional value are brand name shoes. People pay three times as much money for a sports shoe that was produced in a Sweat shop somewhere because it has a special symbol on it. The quality is the same as others, the pain and suffering involved in production is the same, just the trader did a better job at screwing over the buyers by something called PR and marketing.

Yes, the brand itself has value. That value is only as fictiotious as the value gold has over, say, platinum. For instance, in the 17th century, the Spanish were off counquering South America, and they found a group of islanders who decorated themselves with a unknown, silverly metal. It wasn't a particularly nice status symbol, nor was it rare on the island. The Spanish hadn't any idea what to do with it, so they mined for gold and then sailed off again. Neither gold nor platinum has any "real" value; they are both completely useless unless you happen to manufacture electronics.

How DARE they say that they can produce something for a few $$ if that number is completely ignorant of all the suffering of life outside their economy? The "best" they are doing is to try and put some value into it that is supposed to represent the monetary value of ecological destruction. A few $$ for the elimination of a wetland, some $$ for burning a forest?

Simple: see above. It is the belief of most people that ecology does not have value, or it has negligible value.

Numerous studies show that it is not the same, that it is fundamentally different to have an old growth forest compared to a bunch of seedlings. And that this will not change for centuries. What is the monetary value of an ecosystem destroyed or changed for centuries. What is the monetary value of a species gone extinct!

...Pretty much nothing, unless they produce something we trade. Sorry.

And to make one thing clear - I do not think that modern capitalism is in so many things fundamentally different from previous systems in the medieval ages or in ancient Rome. There are some added features like planned obsolescence, fiat currency and consumerism that add to the predicament, but the problem lies deeper. Modern capitalism came out of an economic system that already had all the flaws, it just increased their impact.

As mentioned, this is a disadvantage of captalism: nobody planned it out, and so businesses basically treat any stragy alloewd by law as a valid tactic, which includes artificial scarcity and planned obsolscence.

(Since I don't believe in an intrinsic value in the gold standard, I am unsure how fiat currency is actually less "backed" than gold. They both rest on the same consensual value.)

But by spreading things more equal, I think scarcity can be avoided. Of course with all the grain available in the world, not everyone will be able to have a swimming pool fileld with graint o take a grain bath in it, but if it is reasonably distributed, everyone would have enough to eat, so there would not be scarcity in food for anyone.

Who's paying for it? I'm serious actually: distrubuting grain does, itself, take resources.

Not per se. I merely pointed towards that there is commodification of emotions happening, something you said is not possible.

That's technically commodification of IP, which isn't the same. If A2 was bland, but broke another box office record through sheer inertia, it wouldn't make a difference to the value of the IP.

There are some concepts for that around, a common one is the "culture flatrate" where people pay a small amount to use cultural infrastructure and that money is put into maintaining the infrastructure and providing artists with investments.

This is a wonderful idea.

Add to this the concept of publicly shared income - basically every citizen gets a minute share of the profits of everything in the state.

This, however, is not, because it removes the main incentive to make a profit. It may also rely on people spending their money wisely, which is a silly assumption to make.

This sums up to enough money to fulfil all the basic needs for a house, food, water, some extras - an artist can then create art free of the pressure of making money with it. If he does well any many people want to see his art, he gets rewarded out of the "big pot" that all people paid into. This is a system that could solve some issues, that also might fail misearbly due to buerocracy - just wanted to point out that people actually have thoughts on these issues.

What incentive is there for the artist to create "good" art, as opposed to anything?

Oh I am all in for letting people who cash in on profits personally feel and suffer from the long term consequences of their actions. Fire away - let Tony Hayward eat oil contaminated fish and let him spend his next vacation on a stretch of oily beach or give indigenous people who have been driven away by Chevron in the Amazon free access to the houses of the executives of that company. Things would become very different very fast.

It's also vastly impractical to actually implement. It probably also won't make a difference. Humans are irrational like that.

For example, a computer may as well as a rational human conclude that it is highly efficient, profitable and does not pose any risk to profits beyond the gains to keep pigs in small metal cages and force feed them. Humans would object if they would have to do this themselves - but from an economic standpoint it makes perfect sense.

PR itself has value, in that good PR increases profits.

I have huge issues with that idea, sorry.

If you remind me, I'll write a thread about it tommorow.