So you're saying the whole system is taking ineffective measures on purpose because it's corrupt? That wastes my money. That behavior is an economic drain, creating more poverty and slowing wealth growth by engaging in cost-producing services with no productive output.
The goose that lays golden eggs eats entire grain silos of food. You can trade a hundred golden eggs for that food. They're stealing my food and getting an inefficient return. Kill the damn goose so I can eat it.
The problem is that in real life companies pocket that $1 (return part to investors, the rest to executive compensation).
Competition is a funny thing.
Initially I expect everyone tries to jack up prices; something keeps them under control, though. How does that work? A lot of people claim things like demand curve economics, competition, or just "prices come down with costs" (which is obviously an oversimplification--as a direct effect, it's untrue; as an indirect effect, yes). The market's a complex place.
If you're buying 10 million pounds of soy, you've got plenty of farmers to choose from. When oil was $97/barrel, Calumet Specialty Fuels had negotiated $10 million barrel per year contracts at $23/barrel from suppliers, rather than buying on the open market; similarly, you can pick and choose your farmer, if there's excess capacity. This doesn't even require competition: sure, if Farmer John is making $2/profit and Farmer Clem will sell at $1/profit, you can guess who's not getting $20 million profit; but if Farmer John has 12,000 acres of unused land (farmers often have unused land), selling even at a 10 cent profit means turning zero-income-producing land into a million dollars of profit this year.
That begs quite a lot of questions: who's going to eat all this soy? Perhaps you can project the impact of the production cost of soy falling significantly below the production cost of crude oil, such that biodiesel costs less than fuel oil. While an enforced switch to biofuels causes food price increases--oil costs more than soy, so prices rise toward the cost basis of the competition--a market switch would tend to attract extra business by bringing prices down closer to costs, below the displaced product. That is: biodiesel at $1.50/gal means farmers are going to be shitting Tiffanies, even if they have to lower the price of soy bean and take slimmer margins. Cut your profits in half, and then expand your market 10 times? You're going to make 5 times as much profit.
The problems with traditional farm competition are well-known; we have farm subsidies paying farmers to keep land unplanted to prevent production beyond demand, which results in a short-term crash in food prices, followed by a lot of failing farms (no income, because there's 10 times as much wheat as anyone will buy, so you just took a 90% loss, so fuck your business), followed by food shortages. The stuff I outline above is a bit more up-to-date than that 200-year-old problem, but only an opportunity risk (a likely one, once you get below the cost of traditional oil; but still not a guarantee).
That, of course, only means these things are all subject to the same economics that have worked throughout all of history, which have brought the steady and continuous drop in prices of wheat and soy since we started growing them.
The idea that fruit juice is nasty, sugary garbage is relatively new. Up until around 2009, people were told constantly that fruit juice is just about the healthiest thing around, packed with vitamins and minerals, great for your kids and an excellent way to keep proper nutrition in adults.
The mechanisms of economics, psychology, and law are quite real; they are, however, based in an enormous amount of information.
Think about a human being as an absolutely-deterministic machine which will turn out in a precise configuration given correct inputs; now consider the inputs to a human. Everything around the human--sights, sounds, smells, the product of arguments, tones of voices, the suffering they see, the rewards they get, and the precise timing (to the exact second, and especially given their mental and emotional state at the time)--affects them. Now think about the broad strokes psychologists make about psychology.
Lawyers are not scientists; they're engineers. They're wholly pragmatic. Laws are tools, and legal arguments use the tools of manipulation of perspective as well as the citation of facts. The thousands of papers about the development of human expertise are important for scientists to understand, more precisely, how it works, and develop new implications; however, the roughly half paragraph summary of that entire body of knowledge is useful to an engineer for designing an effective school system, and the rest of that body of knowledge is almost entirely useless for that purpose. Lawyers, similarly, require only the tools to accomplish their tasks, not the understanding of social policy implications to develop civilized law; they advertise themselves precisely in that way.
Economics isn't there to tell people how to predict the future, as much as they wish it. Economics tells you how to analyze what is happening, what must happen, and how to respond to it; and what must happen is general in the extreme, so much so that it never changes, and thus has no contextual meaning without examining what is happening now.
Despite this, people search for the holy grail of policy following concrete economics to make a nation wealthy; it doesn't exist. My Citizen's Dividend would require a 120%-135% tax on all income in 1950--that means you pay $1.20 for every $1 you make, which is impossible--and now it only requires 17%; our welfare system cost 1.5% back then, and now costs 17.2%. I am completely confident my modern policies, while being the best thing possible, will similarly become useless and, eventually, outright harmful, facing a new economic climate brought on precisely by the mechanisms I describe, explained easily by those mechanisms, and facing oncoming disasters wholly predicted by those mechanisms only when any idiot with a spyglass can look out to the horizon and see them upon the hill--maybe not understand them as well as I do, but well enough to say, "Bad shit is coming this way!" Someone will have this exact conversation about my policies, and about their betters--including that their better policies would not have worked today, when mine were created.
They'll probably take much less time to antiquate my economic theories. My observations open a door so far from anything people have ever considered that some 20-year-old college kid will get himself a Nobel prize drawing huge implications off my papers probably two years after I've published. That's just fine by me; I'd like to see it, give me some fuckin' hope about the world. Do you see Trump and Sanders? Terrifying people.
Actually, there's only so much you can get out of an area of ground. My sunflowers grew 8 feet in weeds with heads 4-8 inches in diameter, 15 feet in bare soil with heads 12-14 inches. Round-up, pre-emergent, and then seedlings gets them growing faster. If I pump the ground with mineral salts (chemical fertilizer), they grow faster--and I can manipulate how they grow, making fruiting plants bear more fruit. Likewise, supporting the soil-borne fungus helps plants take up nutrients faster; soil-borne worms help break down organic matter fertilizer faster, supporting that.
Genetically-modified soy lets you keep the weeds down. Genetically-modified rice produces more rice.
and there's plenty of ocean water we can process.
Requires energy. Small RO facilities reject 95% of the water as waste; large RO systems might reject about 50%. Likewise, distillation requires heating frequently 0 degree ocean water (ocean water gets really fucking cold, thanks to all the salt) to 100 degrees, adding 80 times as much energy to transition from 100 degrees to steam as to transition from 99 degrees to 100 degrees. We need more efficient desalinization methods, or more efficient energy production.
All other resources are reusable. Time, not so much.
Time is critical. The mechanism I describe explains the Industrial Revolution pretty well: unemploy 0.01% of your labor force and you're okay, several months go by and new jobs come up for them; unemploy 50% of your labor force and 50% of the demand goes away, unemploying 25% more, and you wind up with 80% unemployment, no markets to sell to, and 60+ years of severe economic devastation. The difference? How fast you displace workers--how much time it takes to eliminate labor.
In the Information Age, we had non-linear-scaling problems. 1,000 documents may take 10 clerks to manage; 10,000 clerks will not manage 1,000,000 documents as well, because you need the full awareness of everything going on to make things like financial projections about your legal obligations. That's a lot of time sunk into communication and cross-analysis of accounts, assessment, distribution of results (communication), re-assessment, new analysis, etc. Much less getting done. Computers uncorked this bottleneck, allowing industries dependent on information to grow rapidly, reaching into consumer demands and creating a wealth of new jobs and new products.
Automation, the up-and-coming replacement of mechanization, targets mainly operative jobs. Assembling a sandwich? Can automate that. How do you think that compares? If you open 1,000 McDonalds, you need exactly the same number of sandwich makers per McDonalds to make the same number of sandwiches--linear growth. McDonalds already scales as big as it can; automation will just cut away at jobs massively. Projection is 47%. Without new growth waiting on this cut, we'll get the Industrial Revolution all over again.
Time is a dangerous thing to consider. I want to accelerate us back into the world I was born into--the golden age of information--permanently; hence the Citizen's Dividend. It's cheaper than current Welfare, and more effective; it also gets money into the consumer base (break-even is $625,000 income) without increasing total taxes required (decreases state taxes, increases Federal). Since that source is ultimately stable, it both encourages employment (you don't lose it when you get a job, thus there is no risk or reward decision) and supports spending, thus allowing the recovery from damage such as industrial and automation revolutions to occur more quickly.
It also reduces labor costs (reduces payroll taxes and eliminates the need for a minimum wage), spreading out the crossing points of ROI on automation. The economy of automating jobs will occur more broadly spaced in time, reducing the size of the wound inflicted at any given moment, thus
I think people are massively overestimating the amount of litigation that goes on over this issue.
People would just stop buying RR licenses, is the point. They would have reason to believe they're not subject to the license, and would take no action to subvert that license--in the same way Toyota is not taking an action to subvert paying Nissan to use their brand on their cars.
Not faster; less resources. Less labor, particularly, since human labor makes all things. Humans mine coal and oil to power machines, made of steel mined and refined and worked by humans. Humans move, maintain, and operate those machines to mine coal, oil, and steel; to cultivate crops; to build injection-molded plastic baubles. Humans even make electricity, which then drives fusors which apply nuclear fusion to base materials (any material is possible) to create cesium and molybdenum, both requiring more labor to mine and refine than to just create.
If you can do it "Faster" with the same people, you are investing fewer labor-hours, meaning reduced labor costs (if the workers cost 3x as much but the work goes 2x as fast, you don't do it that way).
Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's not.
Cutting back objective quality is one way we save costs. We find a way to produce a thing at 5% lower quality for 50% the cost, which is a net gain. That's why hand-made shoes fit better and provide much greater comfort, but cost 5x as much: it takes the same materials, plus far more than 5x as much factory labor. That's your "sometimes it's not" scenario in a nutshell: we can all have good boots, but the expensive boots of the past were better because they used a process that's slightly better but *much* more labor-intensive.
On the other hand, we now make the case for things like sewing machines out of high-quality, light-weight thermoplastics instead of metal. The frame is cast iron, while the case is a light-weight, durable plastic. Some meshing gears are hard, low-friction, flexible ABS plastic, requiring no lubrication and taking less wear (at applied torque) than metal gears, but also stripping when stressed (under excessive torque beyond design specifications). All this saves weight and improves the duty cycle, as well as eliminating problems like corrosion of unnecessary metal parts. It's also cheaper!
That's how we develop wealth. 479 labor-hours in 1803 to make a shirt--$4,000 at today's $8.25 minimum wage. That same shirt costs $15 made on a power loom using cotton seeded by a mechanical cotton seeder. Long ago, we invented a spinning machine that allowed one operator to use the same motions to feed three times as much staple fiber in, spinning three threads instead of one in the same time; that's been mechanized further since then.
Everyone in the history of economic theory has done this: they've written big dissertations about how labor invests wealth, and about how the employment of labor to make tradable goods builds wealth; and throughout it all, they've completely missed the cycle of eliminating labor in the production process, reducing costs, allowing a reduction of prices, leaving more wealth in the consumer's pocket, allowing consumers to buy more goods, creating new jobs for the displaced labor.
This happened the first time we stopped nomadic forage and started hunting in an area--no longer requiring the labor of seeking shelter, rather returning to already-known shelter--and continued through the invention of agriculture, complex language, tools, and so forth. Hell, the first instance was probably moving from trying to catch a fish or squirrel with your bare hands to sharpening a pointy stick you could pitch at a moving elk; or, perhaps, as far back as monkeys evolving to gather food in groups, allowing any individual dearth to pass, and any individual excess to relieve the group from additional work, reducing the total work performed.
Why do you think we have 7 billion people on this planet? We've actually got time to raise and feed 7 billion people, somehow. This is not something that naturally scales with population size; limited food supply is a natural population restrictor.
Wait, is it abusive to view and distribute? It's abusive to create, for certain; I'm not sure I buy the line about viewing and distributing.
OIG explained to our entire department one day that, each time a person views a child pornography image, the person in the image is victimized again. I've not yet wrapped my head around the idea of someone suddenly stopping somewhere as the finger of God touches them inappropriately, collapsing to their knees and gasping for breath in distress as some dude in Korea looks at their naked 12-year-old body.
Many in the last decade held the opinion that the greater crackdown on child pornography possession was an excuse to draw attention away from the lack of action against child pornography production. What happened? Do we now all accept producers and care most about consumers? That sounds like a by-the-numbers approach confounding two very different things: 10 producers and 990 consumers are not 1000 child abusers, but 10 child abusers. Eliminate 900 of the consumers and you still have exactly as many children being abused exactly as frequently--and my own sense of doing it by the numbers tells me the numbers aren't any better in that case. I'll be the first to push 100,000 kids off a cliff in a bus to save 1,000,000 people from terrible death, but methinks you've simply avoided saving anyone and, perhaps, saved yourself dirtying your hands with the bus.
It's not that I disagree with what you're doing, Mr. Anderson; I just want to ensure you're going about it in the most efficient way.
That's because the economists get incredibly close and then veer off in odd directions. Marx, for example, believed that a good had value based on human labor invested, and thus reducing the human labor invested in a good stripped its value, making us more poor. That means you should definitely find the least-efficient way to produce things so as to create valuable goods (and more jobs, keeping the working man fed by making him work); yet it also suggests that goods are not valuable in their own right, and that the working man cannot be applied to other problems when one problem of production becomes trivial.
Marx would have enjoyed the ideal that we have food, thus we don't need a way to produce more food--or the same food with less labor. That was kind of critical to the ideal of successful communism.
In any case, the fact that my theories not only fully encompass all hindsight--they explain all economic behaviors which ever occurred--but also provide direct and indirect foresight--they exclude out of the range of possibilities those things which current economic theory suggests but which will not actually happen--indicates reproducible results. In this case, all things which may occur are easily explained by the same theories; a great range of exact outcomes may occur--perhaps people would have liked Android phones instead of iPhones, or preferred flip phones and a dockable phablet to computers and tablets and smart phones--and each fits well into macroeconomics as explained.
It's like explaining that a human may run and consume additional calories, or may stay seated and consume additional calories, and in the latter case will become obese and unhealthy. Sure, we can't say which any given human will actually do; but we can predict the precise outcome of either action, and understand why it leads to that outcome.
You can't deny that spending $100/month less on food would leave you with $100/mo to spend on other things--including, perhaps, working less at your part-time job and taking the time to enjoy life. At $12.50/hr, that's 8 hours, a full day of leisure time which your employer would need filled with another worker who has $100 more to spend. In either case, somebody has $100 more to spend on something other than food.
Is the gene from a bacterium, or is it a weed gene inserted into a bacterial cassette and transferred into a soy bean?
The goal would only be to make it expensive for Monsanto to litigate, by genetic testing and estimation of how much of a crop is Monsanto RR and how much is Selected RR. That, coupled with legal good faith--that a person can't reasonably tell that his original, Selected RR seeds were cross-contaminated with Monsanto RR--and the reasonable person's expectation that he can replant RR soy every year and still get RR soy, thus has no way to test and verify that his RR soy is Selected RR and not Monsanto RR (thus, good faith), would damage Monsanto's ability to litigate.
It's purely to be an asshole about things. I can confirm it would have positive economic benefits, but also that I'm not concerned much with that.
It's a matter of not understanding economics. For example:
good farming practices and an end to widespread war will feed us all many times over.
While this has obvious merits--war is expensive and destructive to the wealth of an economy, for certain--it also carries the suggestion that efficiency is not important beyond capability. That, of course, suggests that resources are generally unlimited: that the ability to farm food draws from a resource pile not useful for anything else. 100% of all resources are, essentially, human resources, until we've mined out all the natural resources (getting at some of those resources requires a lot of labor, so we hit the rich mines and don't work the ones that are primarily dirt with flecks of iron and gold; and, honestly, we can turn any matter into any other matter, if we had enough energy to put into the process--we create cesium and molybdenum by nuclear fusion rather than mining as it stands).
The truth is investing in newer practices cuts production costs. Less labor invested, more profit; and, under demand pressure, the same (or less) profit, less cost to the consumer. Demand pressure comes from competitors within the market and from shifting consumer demands outside the market: someone producing corn cheaper will try to capture your enormous market by underselling you; while people's interest in a new gadget will force the producer of a different overpriced gadget to slim his prices closer to costs if he wants to keep making any sort of profit.
When you slim labor costs, you eliminate jobs. This pads remaining consumers's pockets with the remaining money (residual wealth) as per the above mechanism (among others). New products, then, capture the consumer's new spending ability (this only works in broad demographics: making the poor and middle-class goods cheaper means hundreds of millions of new customers), requiring labor for production of such goods. This creates new jobs to take up the displaced laborers.
If you insert a gene from barley into rice, you get rice that grows shorter, consuming less water (labor-intensive to produce in Saudi and Egypt), requiring less growing time, and providing 50% more edible rice production per land area. This cuts labor investment in raw production down to 2/3 for the same output; when you add in the reduction in water and the shorter growing time, labor investment comes down even more, approaching a full half. The same resource investment--the same cost--produces twice as much rice. Poorer people can eat, and richer people can buy more things, creating new demands in markets. In the most backwards, poverty-stricken nations, these "new markets" may include adequate medical care, roads, clean water, and viable education systems.
If all this seems new, it's because Smith, Marx, Ricardo, and their contemporaries all made very good observations that came entirely too close to the truth for comfort; but they never dug in deep enough, and so made glaring errors about how the wealth of nations actually develops. The insistence defining and discussing value in modern economic theory shows just how immature the field is: valuation is an important market concept, while value has never actually carried any concrete or useful definition. Cost, price, and wealth describe macroeconomics, meaning macroeconomics and market economics interact in the extreme--which should be obvious.
I'd like to say my grasp of economics is decades ahead of any modern theory, but it's just not true: besides that every misguided attempt in the past 300 years has come disturbingly close (suggesting I could claim to be centuries ahead of modern theory, which isn't much ahead of Adam Smith's 1776 dissertation), publishing these facts in my lifetime means I'm only at the direct forefront of modern economic theory. It's science fiction writers who get those decades and centuries in front of them; my policy theories could have also come 60 years ago, but I don't believe I'd have
Perhaps you need to prove we have a true problem with food supply
We have the eternal problem: production involves human labor; human labor costs money; all costs are human labor; price is human labor plus profit (which eventually comes down to human labor, as profit is spent to expand, to pay bonuses--to make CEOs and farmers happy--etc.); thus price can only come down as far as human labor costs.
Make it cost $1 per pound less to make soy and farmers can sell soy for $1 per pound less and make exactly the same profit. This makes all your food cheaper by $1 per pound soy used. This means more poor people can eat, while more middle-class people have more money left in their pockets (residual wealth). Because the middle class have unspent residual wealth, new markets can sell new things to the broad demographics (millions of people with money). These new markets create demand which competes with other demands, reducing profits at price for other products, pushing their prices closer to costs (e.g. a $200 computer stops selling for $2000 and now only sells for $800 because everyone wants $600 cell phones and $400 tablets). These new products, as well, require labor to produce, thus creating jobs.
You should notice the labor is displaced: jobs lost in the production process make cheaper goods, creating demand for new goods, creating new jobs to re-hire the employees. This turn-over is one reason we need welfare (our existing system must go, in favor of a Citizen's Dividend). In terms of cost, labor isn't just hours of labor, but cost per hour of that labor.
In the end, this means you get more stuff for the same expense. You spend the same amount of money and buy more goods. With inflation, your salary may increase more slowly than inflation, while your quality-of-life still increases, because your inflated dollars still buy more stuff even though you're technically making less real-money.
That's why most of today's poor live better than most of the middle ages's wealthy--even better than some kings. Back then, being poor and having just enough so you could eat and feed your family meant possible starvation (to death), spending the winters huddled and freezing, with only your wits (and a lot of incest and infidelity) to amuse you. Nowadays, being that poor means possibly not eating every day, but having a well-insulated house, electricity, running water, heat, and an old-ass TV from like 2001 that still receives OTA broadcast so you can get mad at Obama or Bush or whatever.
What happens if I repeatedly apply a light glyphosate spray to untampered soy, culling down the plants that react the worst and keeping the ones that manage to somehow survive; then start moving down through their descendants with younger and younger applications, keeping those seedlings which don't die; then start raising the dosage, culling out those which react most poorly?
We already have superweeds. Monsanto transposed the RR gene from weeds adapted in the wild. If I adapt it into soy by another process, is it still patented? Is the fact that a cultivar has resistance patented, or just that it's injected from Monsanto's GM process?
Amusingly, psychosomatic reactions can cause this. People have the same reaction to wifi signals, even when you put a piece of metal in front of them and only pretend it's emitting wifi.
Coffee is considered acceptable and orange juice is considered healthy. Most people who want to attack soda would immediately sign on for guzzling orange juice as a healthy alternative.
Methinks sedentary lifestyle is a big contributor. Significant research indicates eating a lot of starch instead of a lot of fat and protein also contributes to obesity and general fatness. There's also some evidence that lowering the temperature in your house to 68F or even 66F instead of a toasty 74F in the winter will make you burn like 500-1000 more kcal per day--I don't know how much I believe that, since people are trying to sell me pseudoscientific bullshit based on that, except they have dozens of scientific papers spanning a few decades from independent sources recognizing the effect.
I used to eat, every day, 20-30 pieces of sushi, a whole 2 pound chicken, a box of stovetop stuffing, and, for breakfast, 3 eggs, sausage, mushrooms, fried baked beans, fried bread, and fried black pudding with lingonberries, all cooked in a mixture of butter and lard. I was bicycling the 7 miles to and from work each day, which took about 5 minutes longer each way than driving it. I lost fat, gained muscle, and came out two pounds heavier; pounding nine or fifteen cans of soda each day didn't hinder that in the least.
I have no great illusions about how an investment of half an hour each day would affect my health. If I spent an hour three days each week on the trainer and ten minutes per day with resistance (push-ups, pull-ups, maybe weights), my body would dramatically shape itself up. No reasonable amount of cocacola will stop a burn of 950kcal/hr from controlling my weight.
Classical economics--Smith, Marx, Ricardo, et al--all bases on this broken ideal of "value". When you look hard enough, you realize they're very close to correct, but building everything on a fallacy of equivocation. It's like reading dissertations written by some coke-fueled twelve-year-old with ADHD.
I've decided the idea that something has "value"--that a good is invested with 1,000 human labor hours, and thus has a value of 1,000 hours--is broken. This takes on a whole new meaning when you start talking about how a good's "value" is also what labor-hours it saves a person from producing the good itself (as per Adam Smith, who claimed both definitions), which usually differs from what an expensive factory can invest per-unit to produce the same good.
Valuation is a good term for markets. What a market or an individual will pay for a good--its valuation--is a valid concept, claiming nothing more than the demand of price based on the perception of the purchasers. Value... is stupid; goods don't have value, largely because economists have defined value as, essentially, "You know... value... like, what something is worth, you know what I'm sayin'?"
I've instead come up with three terms: cost, price, and wealth. This implies macroeconomics and markets can't be separated as well as you'd hope.
A good's cost is the labor invested. This gets into the same problem "value" has: it is a very real thing that our actual resource limit is TIME, and particularly human labor hours invested. If you have 1,000 people and need them working 40 hours per day to produce enough food to feed everyone, you have famine. Unfortunately, the cost of a good is the cost of labor in representative wealth--money. 1,000 hours of $10/hr labor is, in reality, much different than 1,000 hours of $20/hr labor; 500 hours of $20/hr labor is the same as 1,000 hours of $10/hr labor, in terms of cost.
Nevertheless, I define cost as the labor cost in transferable wealth (money). Materials, of course, have labor cost: you don't pay fuel and machines; you pay laborers to produce fuel and maintain machines, and so in negotiations for large purchases can argue a lower price closer to the labor costs all throughout the system (in so much as your supplier makes large purchases through his suppliers to fill your large order, and so can negotiate in the same way). Your hard barrier is the cost of labor: you will never get a sustainable price below worker wages.
Price, of course, is the price charged for a good. Prices don't become costs (unless you're specifically talking about business finance; however, managing a business and understanding an economy are two different things--economics is not accounting).
So what's wealth?
Consider the cost of labor. In most crude form, assume all laborers producing a good--say, coal--cost $10/hr. At your mine, including the material labor for machines and fuel, you invest 100 labor-hours to extract a 100 cubic meter block of pure anthracite from a rich vein, producing a cost of $10 per cubic meter anthracite.
A week later, you've figured out how to do the job with an investment of 50 labor-hours. For the same working hours per employee per year--40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year--you can produce the same amount of coal; but you can do it with half as many employees. You fire half your employees, and now you produce coal at a cost of $5 per cubic meter anthracite.
To go on a brief tangent, this simple behavior does explain market dynamics. For example, your competitor's mine is less-rich, and so his 50 labor-hours haul up a 100 cubic meter block that's 50% anthractie and 50% rocks and dirt; it still costs him $10 per cubic meter anthracite. That's your supply limit: it costs more to produce more when the method of production at higher flow is more labor-intensive (or when the wage workers charge more for labor). This is also why you can charge a $9 price: your competitor can't charge less than $10 without going out of business. E
That's due to a complete failure to understand economics. At all.
I can probably use my new theories of economics to explain how public domain makes us more wealthy, but I'd be more comfortable making that claim with patents (I can definitely draw that one up) than art and entertainment. Educational material, however...
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So you're saying the whole system is taking ineffective measures on purpose because it's corrupt? That wastes my money. That behavior is an economic drain, creating more poverty and slowing wealth growth by engaging in cost-producing services with no productive output.
The goose that lays golden eggs eats entire grain silos of food. You can trade a hundred golden eggs for that food. They're stealing my food and getting an inefficient return. Kill the damn goose so I can eat it.
The problem is that in real life companies pocket that $1 (return part to investors, the rest to executive compensation).
Competition is a funny thing.
Initially I expect everyone tries to jack up prices; something keeps them under control, though. How does that work? A lot of people claim things like demand curve economics, competition, or just "prices come down with costs" (which is obviously an oversimplification--as a direct effect, it's untrue; as an indirect effect, yes). The market's a complex place.
If you're buying 10 million pounds of soy, you've got plenty of farmers to choose from. When oil was $97/barrel, Calumet Specialty Fuels had negotiated $10 million barrel per year contracts at $23/barrel from suppliers, rather than buying on the open market; similarly, you can pick and choose your farmer, if there's excess capacity. This doesn't even require competition: sure, if Farmer John is making $2/profit and Farmer Clem will sell at $1/profit, you can guess who's not getting $20 million profit; but if Farmer John has 12,000 acres of unused land (farmers often have unused land), selling even at a 10 cent profit means turning zero-income-producing land into a million dollars of profit this year.
That begs quite a lot of questions: who's going to eat all this soy? Perhaps you can project the impact of the production cost of soy falling significantly below the production cost of crude oil, such that biodiesel costs less than fuel oil. While an enforced switch to biofuels causes food price increases--oil costs more than soy, so prices rise toward the cost basis of the competition--a market switch would tend to attract extra business by bringing prices down closer to costs, below the displaced product. That is: biodiesel at $1.50/gal means farmers are going to be shitting Tiffanies, even if they have to lower the price of soy bean and take slimmer margins. Cut your profits in half, and then expand your market 10 times? You're going to make 5 times as much profit.
The problems with traditional farm competition are well-known; we have farm subsidies paying farmers to keep land unplanted to prevent production beyond demand, which results in a short-term crash in food prices, followed by a lot of failing farms (no income, because there's 10 times as much wheat as anyone will buy, so you just took a 90% loss, so fuck your business), followed by food shortages. The stuff I outline above is a bit more up-to-date than that 200-year-old problem, but only an opportunity risk (a likely one, once you get below the cost of traditional oil; but still not a guarantee).
That, of course, only means these things are all subject to the same economics that have worked throughout all of history, which have brought the steady and continuous drop in prices of wheat and soy since we started growing them.
The idea that fruit juice is nasty, sugary garbage is relatively new. Up until around 2009, people were told constantly that fruit juice is just about the healthiest thing around, packed with vitamins and minerals, great for your kids and an excellent way to keep proper nutrition in adults.
Actually, the lists contain a type of image hash that contains no actual image data. You would need the original images to compare.
The mechanisms of economics, psychology, and law are quite real; they are, however, based in an enormous amount of information.
Think about a human being as an absolutely-deterministic machine which will turn out in a precise configuration given correct inputs; now consider the inputs to a human. Everything around the human--sights, sounds, smells, the product of arguments, tones of voices, the suffering they see, the rewards they get, and the precise timing (to the exact second, and especially given their mental and emotional state at the time)--affects them. Now think about the broad strokes psychologists make about psychology.
Lawyers are not scientists; they're engineers. They're wholly pragmatic. Laws are tools, and legal arguments use the tools of manipulation of perspective as well as the citation of facts. The thousands of papers about the development of human expertise are important for scientists to understand, more precisely, how it works, and develop new implications; however, the roughly half paragraph summary of that entire body of knowledge is useful to an engineer for designing an effective school system, and the rest of that body of knowledge is almost entirely useless for that purpose. Lawyers, similarly, require only the tools to accomplish their tasks, not the understanding of social policy implications to develop civilized law; they advertise themselves precisely in that way.
Economics isn't there to tell people how to predict the future, as much as they wish it. Economics tells you how to analyze what is happening, what must happen, and how to respond to it; and what must happen is general in the extreme, so much so that it never changes, and thus has no contextual meaning without examining what is happening now.
Despite this, people search for the holy grail of policy following concrete economics to make a nation wealthy; it doesn't exist. My Citizen's Dividend would require a 120%-135% tax on all income in 1950--that means you pay $1.20 for every $1 you make, which is impossible--and now it only requires 17%; our welfare system cost 1.5% back then, and now costs 17.2%. I am completely confident my modern policies, while being the best thing possible, will similarly become useless and, eventually, outright harmful, facing a new economic climate brought on precisely by the mechanisms I describe, explained easily by those mechanisms, and facing oncoming disasters wholly predicted by those mechanisms only when any idiot with a spyglass can look out to the horizon and see them upon the hill--maybe not understand them as well as I do, but well enough to say, "Bad shit is coming this way!" Someone will have this exact conversation about my policies, and about their betters--including that their better policies would not have worked today, when mine were created.
They'll probably take much less time to antiquate my economic theories. My observations open a door so far from anything people have ever considered that some 20-year-old college kid will get himself a Nobel prize drawing huge implications off my papers probably two years after I've published. That's just fine by me; I'd like to see it, give me some fuckin' hope about the world. Do you see Trump and Sanders? Terrifying people.
Not a problem. All that will be mechanized
Actually, there's only so much you can get out of an area of ground. My sunflowers grew 8 feet in weeds with heads 4-8 inches in diameter, 15 feet in bare soil with heads 12-14 inches. Round-up, pre-emergent, and then seedlings gets them growing faster. If I pump the ground with mineral salts (chemical fertilizer), they grow faster--and I can manipulate how they grow, making fruiting plants bear more fruit. Likewise, supporting the soil-borne fungus helps plants take up nutrients faster; soil-borne worms help break down organic matter fertilizer faster, supporting that.
Genetically-modified soy lets you keep the weeds down. Genetically-modified rice produces more rice.
and there's plenty of ocean water we can process.
Requires energy. Small RO facilities reject 95% of the water as waste; large RO systems might reject about 50%. Likewise, distillation requires heating frequently 0 degree ocean water (ocean water gets really fucking cold, thanks to all the salt) to 100 degrees, adding 80 times as much energy to transition from 100 degrees to steam as to transition from 99 degrees to 100 degrees. We need more efficient desalinization methods, or more efficient energy production.
All other resources are reusable. Time, not so much.
Time is critical. The mechanism I describe explains the Industrial Revolution pretty well: unemploy 0.01% of your labor force and you're okay, several months go by and new jobs come up for them; unemploy 50% of your labor force and 50% of the demand goes away, unemploying 25% more, and you wind up with 80% unemployment, no markets to sell to, and 60+ years of severe economic devastation. The difference? How fast you displace workers--how much time it takes to eliminate labor.
In the Information Age, we had non-linear-scaling problems. 1,000 documents may take 10 clerks to manage; 10,000 clerks will not manage 1,000,000 documents as well, because you need the full awareness of everything going on to make things like financial projections about your legal obligations. That's a lot of time sunk into communication and cross-analysis of accounts, assessment, distribution of results (communication), re-assessment, new analysis, etc. Much less getting done. Computers uncorked this bottleneck, allowing industries dependent on information to grow rapidly, reaching into consumer demands and creating a wealth of new jobs and new products.
Automation, the up-and-coming replacement of mechanization, targets mainly operative jobs. Assembling a sandwich? Can automate that. How do you think that compares? If you open 1,000 McDonalds, you need exactly the same number of sandwich makers per McDonalds to make the same number of sandwiches--linear growth. McDonalds already scales as big as it can; automation will just cut away at jobs massively. Projection is 47%. Without new growth waiting on this cut, we'll get the Industrial Revolution all over again.
Time is a dangerous thing to consider. I want to accelerate us back into the world I was born into--the golden age of information--permanently; hence the Citizen's Dividend. It's cheaper than current Welfare, and more effective; it also gets money into the consumer base (break-even is $625,000 income) without increasing total taxes required (decreases state taxes, increases Federal). Since that source is ultimately stable, it both encourages employment (you don't lose it when you get a job, thus there is no risk or reward decision) and supports spending, thus allowing the recovery from damage such as industrial and automation revolutions to occur more quickly.
It also reduces labor costs (reduces payroll taxes and eliminates the need for a minimum wage), spreading out the crossing points of ROI on automation. The economy of automating jobs will occur more broadly spaced in time, reducing the size of the wound inflicted at any given moment, thus
I think people are massively overestimating the amount of litigation that goes on over this issue.
People would just stop buying RR licenses, is the point. They would have reason to believe they're not subject to the license, and would take no action to subvert that license--in the same way Toyota is not taking an action to subvert paying Nissan to use their brand on their cars.
Not faster; less resources. Less labor, particularly, since human labor makes all things. Humans mine coal and oil to power machines, made of steel mined and refined and worked by humans. Humans move, maintain, and operate those machines to mine coal, oil, and steel; to cultivate crops; to build injection-molded plastic baubles. Humans even make electricity, which then drives fusors which apply nuclear fusion to base materials (any material is possible) to create cesium and molybdenum, both requiring more labor to mine and refine than to just create.
If you can do it "Faster" with the same people, you are investing fewer labor-hours, meaning reduced labor costs (if the workers cost 3x as much but the work goes 2x as fast, you don't do it that way).
Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's not.
Cutting back objective quality is one way we save costs. We find a way to produce a thing at 5% lower quality for 50% the cost, which is a net gain. That's why hand-made shoes fit better and provide much greater comfort, but cost 5x as much: it takes the same materials, plus far more than 5x as much factory labor. That's your "sometimes it's not" scenario in a nutshell: we can all have good boots, but the expensive boots of the past were better because they used a process that's slightly better but *much* more labor-intensive.
On the other hand, we now make the case for things like sewing machines out of high-quality, light-weight thermoplastics instead of metal. The frame is cast iron, while the case is a light-weight, durable plastic. Some meshing gears are hard, low-friction, flexible ABS plastic, requiring no lubrication and taking less wear (at applied torque) than metal gears, but also stripping when stressed (under excessive torque beyond design specifications). All this saves weight and improves the duty cycle, as well as eliminating problems like corrosion of unnecessary metal parts. It's also cheaper!
That's how we develop wealth. 479 labor-hours in 1803 to make a shirt--$4,000 at today's $8.25 minimum wage. That same shirt costs $15 made on a power loom using cotton seeded by a mechanical cotton seeder. Long ago, we invented a spinning machine that allowed one operator to use the same motions to feed three times as much staple fiber in, spinning three threads instead of one in the same time; that's been mechanized further since then.
Everyone in the history of economic theory has done this: they've written big dissertations about how labor invests wealth, and about how the employment of labor to make tradable goods builds wealth; and throughout it all, they've completely missed the cycle of eliminating labor in the production process, reducing costs, allowing a reduction of prices, leaving more wealth in the consumer's pocket, allowing consumers to buy more goods, creating new jobs for the displaced labor.
This happened the first time we stopped nomadic forage and started hunting in an area--no longer requiring the labor of seeking shelter, rather returning to already-known shelter--and continued through the invention of agriculture, complex language, tools, and so forth. Hell, the first instance was probably moving from trying to catch a fish or squirrel with your bare hands to sharpening a pointy stick you could pitch at a moving elk; or, perhaps, as far back as monkeys evolving to gather food in groups, allowing any individual dearth to pass, and any individual excess to relieve the group from additional work, reducing the total work performed.
Why do you think we have 7 billion people on this planet? We've actually got time to raise and feed 7 billion people, somehow. This is not something that naturally scales with population size; limited food supply is a natural population restrictor.
The lists are never reviewed I'm certain.
Wait, is it abusive to view and distribute? It's abusive to create, for certain; I'm not sure I buy the line about viewing and distributing.
OIG explained to our entire department one day that, each time a person views a child pornography image, the person in the image is victimized again. I've not yet wrapped my head around the idea of someone suddenly stopping somewhere as the finger of God touches them inappropriately, collapsing to their knees and gasping for breath in distress as some dude in Korea looks at their naked 12-year-old body.
Many in the last decade held the opinion that the greater crackdown on child pornography possession was an excuse to draw attention away from the lack of action against child pornography production. What happened? Do we now all accept producers and care most about consumers? That sounds like a by-the-numbers approach confounding two very different things: 10 producers and 990 consumers are not 1000 child abusers, but 10 child abusers. Eliminate 900 of the consumers and you still have exactly as many children being abused exactly as frequently--and my own sense of doing it by the numbers tells me the numbers aren't any better in that case. I'll be the first to push 100,000 kids off a cliff in a bus to save 1,000,000 people from terrible death, but methinks you've simply avoided saving anyone and, perhaps, saved yourself dirtying your hands with the bus.
It's not that I disagree with what you're doing, Mr. Anderson; I just want to ensure you're going about it in the most efficient way.
That's because the economists get incredibly close and then veer off in odd directions. Marx, for example, believed that a good had value based on human labor invested, and thus reducing the human labor invested in a good stripped its value, making us more poor. That means you should definitely find the least-efficient way to produce things so as to create valuable goods (and more jobs, keeping the working man fed by making him work); yet it also suggests that goods are not valuable in their own right, and that the working man cannot be applied to other problems when one problem of production becomes trivial.
Marx would have enjoyed the ideal that we have food, thus we don't need a way to produce more food--or the same food with less labor. That was kind of critical to the ideal of successful communism.
In any case, the fact that my theories not only fully encompass all hindsight--they explain all economic behaviors which ever occurred--but also provide direct and indirect foresight--they exclude out of the range of possibilities those things which current economic theory suggests but which will not actually happen--indicates reproducible results. In this case, all things which may occur are easily explained by the same theories; a great range of exact outcomes may occur--perhaps people would have liked Android phones instead of iPhones, or preferred flip phones and a dockable phablet to computers and tablets and smart phones--and each fits well into macroeconomics as explained.
It's like explaining that a human may run and consume additional calories, or may stay seated and consume additional calories, and in the latter case will become obese and unhealthy. Sure, we can't say which any given human will actually do; but we can predict the precise outcome of either action, and understand why it leads to that outcome.
You can't deny that spending $100/month less on food would leave you with $100/mo to spend on other things--including, perhaps, working less at your part-time job and taking the time to enjoy life. At $12.50/hr, that's 8 hours, a full day of leisure time which your employer would need filled with another worker who has $100 more to spend. In either case, somebody has $100 more to spend on something other than food.
Is the gene from a bacterium, or is it a weed gene inserted into a bacterial cassette and transferred into a soy bean?
The goal would only be to make it expensive for Monsanto to litigate, by genetic testing and estimation of how much of a crop is Monsanto RR and how much is Selected RR. That, coupled with legal good faith--that a person can't reasonably tell that his original, Selected RR seeds were cross-contaminated with Monsanto RR--and the reasonable person's expectation that he can replant RR soy every year and still get RR soy, thus has no way to test and verify that his RR soy is Selected RR and not Monsanto RR (thus, good faith), would damage Monsanto's ability to litigate.
It's purely to be an asshole about things. I can confirm it would have positive economic benefits, but also that I'm not concerned much with that.
You must be fucking old.
It's a matter of not understanding economics. For example:
good farming practices and an end to widespread war will feed us all many times over.
While this has obvious merits--war is expensive and destructive to the wealth of an economy, for certain--it also carries the suggestion that efficiency is not important beyond capability. That, of course, suggests that resources are generally unlimited: that the ability to farm food draws from a resource pile not useful for anything else. 100% of all resources are, essentially, human resources, until we've mined out all the natural resources (getting at some of those resources requires a lot of labor, so we hit the rich mines and don't work the ones that are primarily dirt with flecks of iron and gold; and, honestly, we can turn any matter into any other matter, if we had enough energy to put into the process--we create cesium and molybdenum by nuclear fusion rather than mining as it stands).
The truth is investing in newer practices cuts production costs. Less labor invested, more profit; and, under demand pressure, the same (or less) profit, less cost to the consumer. Demand pressure comes from competitors within the market and from shifting consumer demands outside the market: someone producing corn cheaper will try to capture your enormous market by underselling you; while people's interest in a new gadget will force the producer of a different overpriced gadget to slim his prices closer to costs if he wants to keep making any sort of profit.
When you slim labor costs, you eliminate jobs. This pads remaining consumers's pockets with the remaining money (residual wealth) as per the above mechanism (among others). New products, then, capture the consumer's new spending ability (this only works in broad demographics: making the poor and middle-class goods cheaper means hundreds of millions of new customers), requiring labor for production of such goods. This creates new jobs to take up the displaced laborers.
If you insert a gene from barley into rice, you get rice that grows shorter, consuming less water (labor-intensive to produce in Saudi and Egypt), requiring less growing time, and providing 50% more edible rice production per land area. This cuts labor investment in raw production down to 2/3 for the same output; when you add in the reduction in water and the shorter growing time, labor investment comes down even more, approaching a full half. The same resource investment--the same cost--produces twice as much rice. Poorer people can eat, and richer people can buy more things, creating new demands in markets. In the most backwards, poverty-stricken nations, these "new markets" may include adequate medical care, roads, clean water, and viable education systems.
If all this seems new, it's because Smith, Marx, Ricardo, and their contemporaries all made very good observations that came entirely too close to the truth for comfort; but they never dug in deep enough, and so made glaring errors about how the wealth of nations actually develops. The insistence defining and discussing value in modern economic theory shows just how immature the field is: valuation is an important market concept, while value has never actually carried any concrete or useful definition. Cost, price, and wealth describe macroeconomics, meaning macroeconomics and market economics interact in the extreme--which should be obvious.
I'd like to say my grasp of economics is decades ahead of any modern theory, but it's just not true: besides that every misguided attempt in the past 300 years has come disturbingly close (suggesting I could claim to be centuries ahead of modern theory, which isn't much ahead of Adam Smith's 1776 dissertation), publishing these facts in my lifetime means I'm only at the direct forefront of modern economic theory. It's science fiction writers who get those decades and centuries in front of them; my policy theories could have also come 60 years ago, but I don't believe I'd have
Perhaps you need to prove we have a true problem with food supply
We have the eternal problem: production involves human labor; human labor costs money; all costs are human labor; price is human labor plus profit (which eventually comes down to human labor, as profit is spent to expand, to pay bonuses--to make CEOs and farmers happy--etc.); thus price can only come down as far as human labor costs.
Make it cost $1 per pound less to make soy and farmers can sell soy for $1 per pound less and make exactly the same profit. This makes all your food cheaper by $1 per pound soy used. This means more poor people can eat, while more middle-class people have more money left in their pockets (residual wealth). Because the middle class have unspent residual wealth, new markets can sell new things to the broad demographics (millions of people with money). These new markets create demand which competes with other demands, reducing profits at price for other products, pushing their prices closer to costs (e.g. a $200 computer stops selling for $2000 and now only sells for $800 because everyone wants $600 cell phones and $400 tablets). These new products, as well, require labor to produce, thus creating jobs.
You should notice the labor is displaced: jobs lost in the production process make cheaper goods, creating demand for new goods, creating new jobs to re-hire the employees. This turn-over is one reason we need welfare (our existing system must go, in favor of a Citizen's Dividend). In terms of cost, labor isn't just hours of labor, but cost per hour of that labor.
In the end, this means you get more stuff for the same expense. You spend the same amount of money and buy more goods. With inflation, your salary may increase more slowly than inflation, while your quality-of-life still increases, because your inflated dollars still buy more stuff even though you're technically making less real-money.
That's why most of today's poor live better than most of the middle ages's wealthy--even better than some kings. Back then, being poor and having just enough so you could eat and feed your family meant possible starvation (to death), spending the winters huddled and freezing, with only your wits (and a lot of incest and infidelity) to amuse you. Nowadays, being that poor means possibly not eating every day, but having a well-insulated house, electricity, running water, heat, and an old-ass TV from like 2001 that still receives OTA broadcast so you can get mad at Obama or Bush or whatever.
What happens if I repeatedly apply a light glyphosate spray to untampered soy, culling down the plants that react the worst and keeping the ones that manage to somehow survive; then start moving down through their descendants with younger and younger applications, keeping those seedlings which don't die; then start raising the dosage, culling out those which react most poorly?
We already have superweeds. Monsanto transposed the RR gene from weeds adapted in the wild. If I adapt it into soy by another process, is it still patented? Is the fact that a cultivar has resistance patented, or just that it's injected from Monsanto's GM process?
Monsanto's seeds don't carry a terminator gene.
Holy shit 5'8 225lb. That's like a 4 foot wide woman, or a dude with a beer gut.
Amusingly, psychosomatic reactions can cause this. People have the same reaction to wifi signals, even when you put a piece of metal in front of them and only pretend it's emitting wifi.
Complete the thought, dammit. All throughout modern economic history, people have made this observation without realizing what they're looking at.
Coffee is considered acceptable and orange juice is considered healthy. Most people who want to attack soda would immediately sign on for guzzling orange juice as a healthy alternative.
Methinks sedentary lifestyle is a big contributor. Significant research indicates eating a lot of starch instead of a lot of fat and protein also contributes to obesity and general fatness. There's also some evidence that lowering the temperature in your house to 68F or even 66F instead of a toasty 74F in the winter will make you burn like 500-1000 more kcal per day--I don't know how much I believe that, since people are trying to sell me pseudoscientific bullshit based on that, except they have dozens of scientific papers spanning a few decades from independent sources recognizing the effect.
I used to eat, every day, 20-30 pieces of sushi, a whole 2 pound chicken, a box of stovetop stuffing, and, for breakfast, 3 eggs, sausage, mushrooms, fried baked beans, fried bread, and fried black pudding with lingonberries, all cooked in a mixture of butter and lard. I was bicycling the 7 miles to and from work each day, which took about 5 minutes longer each way than driving it. I lost fat, gained muscle, and came out two pounds heavier; pounding nine or fifteen cans of soda each day didn't hinder that in the least.
I have no great illusions about how an investment of half an hour each day would affect my health. If I spent an hour three days each week on the trainer and ten minutes per day with resistance (push-ups, pull-ups, maybe weights), my body would dramatically shape itself up. No reasonable amount of cocacola will stop a burn of 950kcal/hr from controlling my weight.
Classical economics--Smith, Marx, Ricardo, et al--all bases on this broken ideal of "value". When you look hard enough, you realize they're very close to correct, but building everything on a fallacy of equivocation. It's like reading dissertations written by some coke-fueled twelve-year-old with ADHD.
I've decided the idea that something has "value"--that a good is invested with 1,000 human labor hours, and thus has a value of 1,000 hours--is broken. This takes on a whole new meaning when you start talking about how a good's "value" is also what labor-hours it saves a person from producing the good itself (as per Adam Smith, who claimed both definitions), which usually differs from what an expensive factory can invest per-unit to produce the same good.
Valuation is a good term for markets. What a market or an individual will pay for a good--its valuation--is a valid concept, claiming nothing more than the demand of price based on the perception of the purchasers. Value... is stupid; goods don't have value, largely because economists have defined value as, essentially, "You know... value... like, what something is worth, you know what I'm sayin'?"
I've instead come up with three terms: cost, price, and wealth. This implies macroeconomics and markets can't be separated as well as you'd hope.
A good's cost is the labor invested. This gets into the same problem "value" has: it is a very real thing that our actual resource limit is TIME, and particularly human labor hours invested. If you have 1,000 people and need them working 40 hours per day to produce enough food to feed everyone, you have famine. Unfortunately, the cost of a good is the cost of labor in representative wealth--money. 1,000 hours of $10/hr labor is, in reality, much different than 1,000 hours of $20/hr labor; 500 hours of $20/hr labor is the same as 1,000 hours of $10/hr labor, in terms of cost.
Nevertheless, I define cost as the labor cost in transferable wealth (money). Materials, of course, have labor cost: you don't pay fuel and machines; you pay laborers to produce fuel and maintain machines, and so in negotiations for large purchases can argue a lower price closer to the labor costs all throughout the system (in so much as your supplier makes large purchases through his suppliers to fill your large order, and so can negotiate in the same way). Your hard barrier is the cost of labor: you will never get a sustainable price below worker wages.
Price, of course, is the price charged for a good. Prices don't become costs (unless you're specifically talking about business finance; however, managing a business and understanding an economy are two different things--economics is not accounting).
So what's wealth?
Consider the cost of labor. In most crude form, assume all laborers producing a good--say, coal--cost $10/hr. At your mine, including the material labor for machines and fuel, you invest 100 labor-hours to extract a 100 cubic meter block of pure anthracite from a rich vein, producing a cost of $10 per cubic meter anthracite.
A week later, you've figured out how to do the job with an investment of 50 labor-hours. For the same working hours per employee per year--40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year--you can produce the same amount of coal; but you can do it with half as many employees. You fire half your employees, and now you produce coal at a cost of $5 per cubic meter anthracite.
To go on a brief tangent, this simple behavior does explain market dynamics. For example, your competitor's mine is less-rich, and so his 50 labor-hours haul up a 100 cubic meter block that's 50% anthractie and 50% rocks and dirt; it still costs him $10 per cubic meter anthracite. That's your supply limit: it costs more to produce more when the method of production at higher flow is more labor-intensive (or when the wage workers charge more for labor). This is also why you can charge a $9 price: your competitor can't charge less than $10 without going out of business. E
That's due to a complete failure to understand economics. At all.
I can probably use my new theories of economics to explain how public domain makes us more wealthy, but I'd be more comfortable making that claim with patents (I can definitely draw that one up) than art and entertainment. Educational material, however...
Indeed. Software piracy has become too risky; we'll have to return to pirating shipping lanes.