Unintended Consequences: Seattle Edition

Synonym

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Sheez, Hapax. Cut me some slack here. I was only trying to get kuwi to look at it differently.

Work is work. Art is art. Some work and art is indeed worth more than other work/art. Potential and...oh forget it.

Time for bed! :)
 

kuwisdelu

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Sheez, Hapax. Cut me some slack here. I was only trying to get kuwi to look at it differently.

I would also argue that freelance contracted work and wage work are inherently different. Training for a position for a wage does not so often involve such basic skills for a trade but does require a lot of idiosyncratic information for that particular position that will not be useful elsewhere. Therefore the training is of more value to the company than to the individual, and should pay for it.

This is what I was going to say anyway.

Contracted work is completely different.
 

Hapax Legomenon

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As someone who knows a lot of freelancers and a lot of artists, I can say that freelance work, especially art, is often very undervalued. They're always talking about how you should never work for "exposure" and that contests are a trap. If you need exposure for your work, you can expose yourself (hehe) online.

In your story, I was just thinking that the person who was trying to buy the sign was dumb. They were the one who wanted anime characters on a clothing store's sign in the first place and signed off on a design that could not be read on the street. Even though this guy didn't try to at all, there's only so much you can do to protect a client from their own bad decisions, shrug.
 

kuwisdelu

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In your story, I was just thinking that the person who was trying to buy the sign was dumb. They were the one who wanted anime characters on a clothing store's sign in the first place and signed off on a design that could not be read on the street. Even though this guy didn't try to at all, there's only so much you can do to protect a client from their own bad decisions, shrug.

Yes, that too.

Often the client is their own worst enemy when it comes to getting good design from a contracted artist.
 

Don

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Not a bad idea, but I'd prefer to get rid of wealth entirely rather than divide it up.
I assume you mean money instead of wealth. If so, how does a society build wealth without a medium of exchange and the division of labor that makes possible? How does a society efficiently allocate scarce resources (including people's time) to competing uses without the price signals of a medium of exchange?

Of course, if you really mean wealth, I guess we could go back to hunter-gatherer tribes and live in caves, although that's still going to generate some short-term wealth.
 
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Don

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Good point, ben. A hunter's club would qualify as wealth. It takes a combination of natural resources and the hunter's time to produce. If we get rid of wealth altogether, life's going to get very rough very fast.
 

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Yes, I was tempted to ask for a working example of a society that had effectively unhitched value from effort--successfully.

And no. The Federation does not qualify. :rolleyes: We have no replicators, sadly.
 

Don

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Yes, I was tempted to ask for a working example of a society that had effectively unhitched value from effort--successfully.

And no. The Federation does not qualify. :rolleyes: We have no replicators, sadly.
I think most people think "monetary value" when one says value these days, and seem to believe that value can be created without effort. See Wall Street for a whole population that thinks that way. :D Indeed, given our monetary system today, one can create monetary value without effort and without creating any material value whatsoever. That's the biggest problem with our monetary system today. Monetary value and material value have been effectively decoupled.

I think the most egregious failure of the public school system is the widely-held belief that economics encompasses only monetary transactions, and that monetary value and value are therefore synonymous. As the American Economic Society's own definition points out, it encompasses far, far more than that.
Economics is the study of how people choose to use resources.

Resources include the time and talent people have available, the land, buildings, equipment, and other tools on hand, and the knowledge of how to combine them to create useful products and services.

Important choices involve how much time to devote to work, to school, and to leisure, how many dollars to spend and how many to save, how to combine resources to produce goods and services, and how to vote and shape the level of taxes and the role of government.
Economics at heart is about material or subjective personal value, not monetary value.

Frex, economics encompasses how one chooses to use one's time, the rarest of resources under one's command. But pointing out that choosing who to date or who to marry, or indeed whether to marry, is an economic decision often seems to cause people's heads to explode. As the definition above shows, even the choice of how to use one's leisure time is an economic decision. An hour spent vegging out in front of the TV, for example, is an hour that can never be spent in learning a foreign language, or in any other way. Spending dollars is economic activity, but so is spending time or effort.
 
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Synonym

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Agreed. That's why I mentioned earlier...wait, was it this thread? Hah. It's hard to say.

I think it was. The person that achieves a level of comfort in his or her field of endeavor. They find a place that requires no more effort/work than they want to expend, and it allows them enough money to enjoy their leisure interests. I've seen it time and time again. People decide that more effort isn't worth the loss of their hobbies and that is where they stop climbing the job ladder.
 

Don

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Agreed. That's why I mentioned earlier...wait, was it this thread? Hah. It's hard to say.

I think it was. The person that achieves a level of comfort in his or her field of endeavor. They find a place that requires no more effort/work than they want to expend, and it allows them enough money to enjoy their leisure interests. I've seen it time and time again. People decide that more effort isn't worth the loss of their hobbies and that is where they stop climbing the job ladder.
...and that is a profoundly economic decision, and for some people, an extremely wise decision economically, although those who think only in monetary terms would say otherwise.

I decided to retire at 55. People who think only in monetary terms would say I made a bad economic decision. Yet on my personal subjective value scale, it was a supremely wise economic decision. Nothing is more valuable than my time.
 

Xelebes

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I think what kuwi is refering to is the departure from the possession of assets resulting in power, where the question of who gets to make what decision is not reliant simply on what one has.

On the atomic level, it is the child and the mother and father where the mother has all the possessions but the baby has the power to demand the possession because the parents knows that if the baby dies, a part of the parents dies.
 
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Don

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But that's still an economic decision. The parent values the child more than the continued possession of whatever asset is in question. I flushed a ton of money down the drain when I was married to a high-maintenance woman, because I valued her goodwill higher than the cash. And let's not ignore the fact that plenty of parents choose other values over their children. Parents gamble away or drink away money instead of using it to feed their children every day.

See also: the recent mother that accidently killed her seven-year-old son because she valued a night out drinking more.

Those are all economic decisions, although they may be horrible decisions.
 

Synonym

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Or my niece, who called to ask her dad what he would do if offered the same opportunity...

I assume most of you know what an EBT card is? One of her neighbors came over, offering to sell her their card and pin number for $100. The card was supposed to be loaded with $290.

Now I can't guarantee that the numbers quoted are right, but, I do know that this isn't the first time she's been approached with the same offer. That's supposed to be grocery money for the card holder's kids, ffs! Any guesses as to what they want to do with the money instead?
 

Xelebes

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I don't understand how those would be counter-arguments. Some humans are wreckless and then they die. Okay.
 

Don

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Or my niece, who called to ask her dad what he would do if offered the same opportunity...

I assume most of you know what an EBT card is? One of her neighbors came over, offering to sell her their card and pin number for $100. The card was supposed to be loaded with $290.

Now I can't guarantee that the numbers quoted are right, but, I do know that this isn't the first time she's been approached with the same offer. That's supposed to be grocery money for the card holder's kids, ffs! Any guesses as to what they want to do with the money instead?
Obviously those parents value something considerably more than they value their children's well-being. I'd guess booze or drugs. I hope your niece realized that while this was an economic decision, the monetary considerations were not the only ones of value. Personally, my self-image and the welfare of my neighbor's kids would be worth a whole lot more than $190.
 
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kuwisdelu

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I suppose you can stretch the definition of wealth to include things like happiness and loved ones, but that's not the way it is generally used. When people say wealth, they usually mean monetary wealth.
 

Synonym

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I suppose you can stretch the definition of wealth to include things like happiness and loved ones, but that's not the way it is generally used. When people say wealth, they usually mean monetary wealth.

The envious kind of wealth, or the I'm satisfied kind of wealth?

Plain folks use the term to mean health, happiness--all that stuff. Mainly because they don't have a lot of wealth, or consider themselves well enough off with what they have. I wouldn't know what to do with actual big time wealth. It would probably ruin my life, which I'm quite happy with as it is.
 

Don

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I suppose you can stretch the definition of wealth to include things like happiness and loved ones, but that's not the way it is generally used. When people say wealth, they usually mean monetary wealth.
Well, "they" are wrong then. While expanding the meaning of the term to include things like happiness and loved ones may be stretching the definition to it's most inclusive, going to the other extreme and considering it to mean only monetary wealth is even more fallacious, and I'd argue, agenda-driven.

Wealth as an economic term includes all forms of material and resource goods. Saying "eliminate all the wealth" takes society back to pre-stone-age technology.

Saying "eliminate all the money," on the other hand, would just eliminate the availability of a medium of exchange and throw us back into a barter economy, much as what's happening in Venezuela now.

They're both supremely silly slogans that do little but illustrate a misunderstanding of basic economic terms.

Too many people seem to think they're groovy ideas, IMO, and it comes directly from a lack of basic economic understanding.

Destroy money, the instrument of peaceful trade, and you destroy cooperative economics as the basis for a society, regressing to the age of authoritarianism, whether it be church or state making the (poor) decisions. The inevitable result is North Korea, Cuba, or the equivalent of Madman Maduro making your economic decisions for you.
 
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Xelebes

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Wealth as an economic term includes all forms of material and resource goods.

Wealth includes all the promises that are kept and therefore wielded accordingly.

So let's suppose that within a society, there is very little to compare since the distribution of goods is equal. That is, the family or tribal unit own the enterprises and not a single individual. No single individual gets to claim that any single enterprise is their own and therefore unassailable. The role of an individual is therefore to take a position in any of the enterprises, hopefully according to their ability, and carry out the duties so to make sure that the enterprise is carried through.

In that end, there is no individual wealth but a wealth that is shared amongst everyone. No one is let go because there is a very grave fear that a part of the family, and therefore part of each individual, is let go or in the case of death, part of the individual dies. There are always situations where banishment is required but what must be factored in is whether or not the individual to be banished leads to more harm than him remaining in.

This works in the tribal sense and is a fundamental part of the Iroquois Confederacy and other first nation societies. You will see that such societies are still striven to be maintained on reserves and such. Banishment is also a problem, especially when it comes to criminal court proceedings because of where the individual ends up (often times in the city preying on others of their or neighbouring communities who are looking for other opportunities.)
 

ShaunHorton

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Seems like Ivar's is going whole hog on this issue. (whole clam?)

Despite the fact that the raise to $15 is expected to be incremental over the next few years, they're bumping their minimum pay up to $15 this Wednesday and telling people they no longer need to tip.

While menu prices will increase 21%, the actual increase for consumers will be 4% because the food markup includes the previous tip, Ivar's said.
 

Xelebes

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