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NASA Is Planning Mission To An Asteroid Worth $10 Quintillion (usatoday.com)
New submitter kugo2006 writes: NASA announced a plan to research 16 Psyche, an asteroid potentially as large as Mars and primarily composed of Iron and Nickel. The rock is unique in that it has an exposed core, likely a result of a series of collisions, according to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator. The mission's spacecraft would launch in 2023 and arrive in 2030. According to Global News, Elkins-Tanton calculates that the iron in 16 Psyche would be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10 quintillion).
dumping that much extra iron into the economy would make the "value" close to zero.
The $10 Quadrillion figure is total baloney. You can't just take the current value and extrapolate, because the price would fall as the supply rises. A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
Somebody forgot about shipping and handling.
It's all about location, location, location. You got a buyer for that $10 Quintillion USD worth of iron protoplanet located in the astroid belt? Didn't think so.
There is a point where raising the minimum wage continues to be beneficial; we have not reached that point, but I highly doubt it's more than about $15-20/hr at this time.
The reason it continues to be beneficial is that price increases are still slower than wage increases up to a certain point. If we want a viable economy, money needs to change hands - and people at the bottom end of the wage scale are going to spend most of their money pretty much no matter what, which means that money changes hands more often.
Yes, the "rich" (more appropriately, the entrepreneurial class, regardless of the amount of money they have) need an incentive to actually create jobs... but a lot of people at the top end aren't interested in that, they just want to keep their money stagnant because it's safer to do that and keep people from breaking into whatever their pet industry is (which might cause - horrors! - competition) than to, you know, actually put it to active use.
In short: there's a fucking middle ground between "no raises in the minimum wage" and "minimum wage needs to be enough that someone working 20hrs/week can support a whole family" and that's where we really should be aiming for.