Money is quite simple - it is the accumulation of value of individual work. The same way batteries store electricity - money store value of work. The same way batteries exchange stored electricity to perform work, money is exchanging stored value to work of others that we desire.
Modern money is more debt and promise rather than fruits of labor. Most money is created by loans which are 90% invented money (10% deposit to loan ratio, Federal Reserve "funding", etc). So 90% of all loan money is just a marker of debt and a promise to repay rather than the fruit of anyone's labor. But you pay massive amounts of compounded interest on that invention, and many/most people work most of their lives to pay off their mortgages. So we must churn out grain our entire lives for basic necessities because people have access to this marker, and they will price you out of a home if you won't get on the treadmill with them.
There is a social/historical commentary and a philosophical/political science discussion to be had here, but unfortunately I don't have the time right now...
Yeah even putting aside demand (just because someone spent 50 years making one really good vase doesn't mean 50 years of pottery wouldn't be better even if the potter had to dredge all of the clay themselves instead of using apprentices or hired servants) it has been obviously broken since the Industrial revolution at least but had predecessor cases that pointed out it wasn't true. Aquaducts or irrigation canals alone snap it in half.
It goes from "effort to haul X ammount of water Y distance by N people" to "and it just flows after this constant work".
Why? A 100 dollar bill, is a reciept that promises to buy you 100 dollars worth of value. Previously that value was tied to gold, but now it’s a more flexible notion.
What do you mean? It has been proven empirically, see work done by Paul Cockshott. Coming from pure reason, the theory is pretty sensible as well, and provides a good model to understand the origin of value in the economy. It is especially useful when trying to understand the effects of massive automation on society.
>>it is the accumulation of value of individual work
But it's not though is it? When money itself can do the work (investing) then this whole thing sort of falls apart. A battery can't create a larger battery by itself. Also plenty of people inherit their "batteries" or find them through random chance (lotteries, sweepstakes, etc.)
This all sounds good in theory but I don't think it really holds up when examined closely.
That's not entirely it. Money is a generic and nigh-universally honored claim on future production.
It is the "pay it forward" method of splitting full barter trades into two time-separated half-trades. Instead of giving you a chicken for a bag of milled chicken feed, I can buy the feed for money now, and you can spend that money on a chicken later. Or on something else. It presumes that there will be a chicken to buy later, and that other people won't end up wanting the chicken more than you.
In order to accumulate value from individual work, that value has to be rolled into something durable, or it decays and is lost.
When labor produces a consumable good or service, the value exists only until the good or service is consumed. Why would anyone work on consumables? Because we live on consumables. We eat; we drink; we drive; we set thermostats; we end-user-license IP.
When labor produces a capital improvement, future labor output is multiplied. That's a permanent increase in value, provided that there is some useful purpose for that multiplied labor to work toward. The fisherman can trade fish for a net, or trolling motor, or ice-chest, and thus have more future fish to trade per unit of labor.
The stream of consumables is created by labor, multiplied by capital, and then annihilated by consumption shortly thereafter. That value can be stored for some amount of time in stockpiles and warehouses, but then entropy eats some of it, rather than making it to the consumers.
Money allows the holder to bid for some fraction of the stream of consumables. Divert a tiny stream toward your personal cup for a fraction of a second, and then drink it.
When you hold money, its value is the flow rate of the consumption stream, divided across the quantity of all money.
It's not a battery. It's a voucher for a quantity of grid power. As long as the grid operates reliably, it works the same in practice. But if you really want to store the value of your work, you need to buy goods that multiply the consumable output of your work, or stockpile consumables whose values decay more slowly over time than most.
So it's not quite that simple, especially when some people start issuing themselves claims on future production when they are not actually producing anything now, or planning on producing anything in the future.
If budgeted for properly, this should in their reduce overspending because the amount you can freely spend is one you've previously accounted for as "an appropriate amount."
Depends on the kind of a book. Novels, easy read - definitely better in e-form. Anything complex - textbook, or science popularization or even rich fiction - makes me miss real print. Mainly due to the lack of easy navigation. It is a lot easier to go back and re-read fragments in the real book than it is in the e-book.
TL;DR; Working with the book is easy in printed form and pain in e-format.
Huh, interesting that our preferences are polar opposites despite being formed for the same reasons. I much prefer technical or 'hard' literature in electronic format due to ease of searching and bookmarking, since I will often need to refer back to previous sections or take notes. However, for something like fiction novels I far prefer paper books, since I don't often need to reference back for something like a SF novel, so I don't care that it's harder to find a specific section.
Might be a difference in reading style, but for something like a physical textbook it is normal for me to have 40-50 separate bookmarks, which I always found unmanageable.
Which is a shame, because the primary reason I like ebooks is because technical books are so much cheaper in electronic format. Likewise, I'd much prefer to read a paper electronically than kill trees, but (even if you reflow a pdf [grr!]) it is so hard to follow the text when it references a diagram or a code sample on another page, as I want to see two different things at once, and it is so easy to have two pages open in a book (or, more likely, one two-page spread open flat) and switch between them quickly.
One more thing I'm torn on: I really like reading on a dedicated reader; it has much less eyestrain, and doesn't come in with built-in distractions (like the internet being a click away, or notifications popping up). OTOH, the responsiveness, being able to zoom in and out, for example, on a tablet, is really nice.
Given that generic public finances science being done, a reasonable explanation is expected when it is being requested. Perhaps if scientific community put forward 10% of their time explaining importance and fun aspects of the research that they do - they could expect a raise in the level of funding.
The reasonable explanation will be offered when the research is published - no researcher has time to sit down and explain every anomalous data point to the public.
It would take much more than 10% of a researcher's time to explain research concepts in a way that would let the public truly understand it. Otherwise they are just giving out meaningless soundbites that will be misinterpreted.
