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> In a capitalist society (such as we live in, like it or not), we express value in money. IF your company isn't making money, is it adding value? Yes, but it'

> In a capitalist society (such as we live in, like it or not), we express value in money. IF your company isn't making money, is it adding value? Yes, but it's a very imperfect way to capture value. Without legal support, it doesn't account for negative externalities - eg, if your factory saves money by dumping waste into a stream, making people sick (but you don't pay for that). Or your site gets visitors by sending spam, wasting the time of the recipients and everyone who works trying to filter spam (but you don't pay for that). It doesn't account for things consumers don't have the foresight to care about, or don't have options to choose between. Eg companies that manufacture a fridge that will last 10 years and be unrepairable may make more profit than those who would make one that lasts 50 years and be repairable, because they'll sell more product. Planned obsolescence wastes resources, but is profitable. It also doesn't account for the value of things like raising children. If I play for my own children for 2 hours, that's not part of GDP, but if I pay someone else to, it is. And it doesn't account for the fact that people's desires and priorities are warped. Child pimps generate revenue, whereas the social workers rescuing kids from them do not.

marcus_holmes 8y ago
obviously you don't like living in a capitalist society, then. Fair call, good stuff. I hope you manage to change the world to your liking. Meanwhile, in a capitalist society (such as we live in, which you clearly don't like), we express value in money.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  I never said that. It's not perfect, but I far prefer living in a capitalist society to a centrally-planned economy, which I think can never work. The game of capitalism requires referees. Otherwise, robbery is an excellent business model.
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    That, I completely agree with. Unfortunately we have a habit of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted... people are much quicker at inventing ways of abusing the money system than the regulators are at stopping them. I'd like to demonstrate my point of view about money=value with a story, if you don't mind reading a bit: When I was in my late 20's I was earning a lot of money working on a software project that was doomed to failure. Everyone on the project knew it was doomed, but it was politically infeasible for the current management to pull it or deal with the fact that it was going to fail. So every day, our little team of very expensive contractors wrote a bunch of code that we knew was never going to be tested, let alone run on real server. We all collected our pay and waited for the project to be canned. During this time, I met a nurse randomly one night. We ended up walking around town talking. She had just got off shift at a local hospital, saving people's lives. She got paid about 10% of what I did. The ridiculousness of me getting paid 10x more than her, when I was producing nothing of any value, while she was saving lives, was stark, and it has always stuck with me. It seems like such an obvious mis-allocation of funds, a failure of the economy. But in a larger sense, building the Internet (by which I mean our global networked computer-based infrastructure) is the thing that Humanity is engaged in at the moment. When they write the history of our time, it will be all about the Rise of the Internet. Creation of public health services, on the other hand, was the thing we did last century. So in that sense, it's easy to see why our profession is highly paid, even if the small-scale project we're working on right now is doomed. We are doing the most important thing on the planet right now, and everything else is merely background noise to that effort (at the moment, this will change). All this is a long-winded way of saying that seeing emergent behaviour from inside the thing is much harder than seeing it from the outside. To us, this all looks like random bullshit and injustice. But zoomed-out, from a historical perspective, it makes more sense. Still not perfect, but at least coherent. The individual injustices and weird nonsense get smoothed out, and it looks like everyone had a plan all along.

marcus_holmes 8y ago

obviously you don't like living in a capitalist society, then. Fair call, good stuff. I hope you manage to change the world to your liking. Meanwhile, in a capitalist society (such as we live in, which you clearly don't like), we express value in money.

nathan_long 8y ago
I never said that. It's not perfect, but I far prefer living in a capitalist society to a centrally-planned economy, which I think can never work. The game of capitalism requires referees. Otherwise, robbery is an excellent business model.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  That, I completely agree with. Unfortunately we have a habit of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted... people are much quicker at inventing ways of abusing the money system than the regulators are at stopping them. I'd like to demonstrate my point of view about money=value with a story, if you don't mind reading a bit: When I was in my late 20's I was earning a lot of money working on a software project that was doomed to failure. Everyone on the project knew it was doomed, but it was politically infeasible for the current management to pull it or deal with the fact that it was going to fail. So every day, our little team of very expensive contractors wrote a bunch of code that we knew was never going to be tested, let alone run on real server. We all collected our pay and waited for the project to be canned. During this time, I met a nurse randomly one night. We ended up walking around town talking. She had just got off shift at a local hospital, saving people's lives. She got paid about 10% of what I did. The ridiculousness of me getting paid 10x more than her, when I was producing nothing of any value, while she was saving lives, was stark, and it has always stuck with me. It seems like such an obvious mis-allocation of funds, a failure of the economy. But in a larger sense, building the Internet (by which I mean our global networked computer-based infrastructure) is the thing that Humanity is engaged in at the moment. When they write the history of our time, it will be all about the Rise of the Internet. Creation of public health services, on the other hand, was the thing we did last century. So in that sense, it's easy to see why our profession is highly paid, even if the small-scale project we're working on right now is doomed. We are doing the most important thing on the planet right now, and everything else is merely background noise to that effort (at the moment, this will change). All this is a long-winded way of saying that seeing emergent behaviour from inside the thing is much harder than seeing it from the outside. To us, this all looks like random bullshit and injustice. But zoomed-out, from a historical perspective, it makes more sense. Still not perfect, but at least coherent. The individual injustices and weird nonsense get smoothed out, and it looks like everyone had a plan all along.