6 ms·

It's crazy to think how unrecognizable the world is today in terms of attitude towards money. Yes, money allows big companies to do great things. But the real v

It's crazy to think how unrecognizable the world is today in terms of attitude towards money. Yes, money allows big companies to do great things. But the real valuable work is to do great things, not to make a lot of money. If we knew of a better way to accomplish that than using money, I would be all for it, because it would allow for more people to do great things without having to care about funding.

Clewza313 5y ago
The most objective measure of "greatness" we have is money, which comes from people who think something is great and are willing to pay for it. Sometimes this works well: for example, pretty much everybody thinks Toy Story is a great movie, and Lasseter and Pixar were rewarded handsomely for it. Sometimes it doesn't work so well: for example, Wall Street thinks money is great, so they spend a lot of time and energy figuring out ways to extract more money from people.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  > The most objective measure of "greatness" we have is money Why is this more objective than other metrics? The fact you can easily put a number on it doesn't make it objective. It's a definite indicator of wealth, but surely greatness is a different thing?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - canadianfella 5y ago
    What other metrics?
- simonh 5y ago
  An awful lot of them spend their time figuring out how to extract less money than other people, but make sure they're the ones doing the extracting. That's competition for you.
- underwater 5y ago
  Money is a measure of the ability to earn money, nothing more.
- nxpnsv 5y ago
  As soon as money doesn’t only come from customers directly purchasing a thing you make, that is not a great metric. Money is more complicated than that.
- stkdump 5y ago
  I wouldn't say it is the most objective way. It is a remarkably simple way to accomplish a number of excellent things and with more success than other methods humanity tried so far. I hope we can come up with something better in the next few hundred years. The main problem of money lies exactly in its simplicity, i.e. everything becomes fungible, which in reality many things just aren't. To work around this we needed to invent stuff like taxation and legal persons. A mind-boggingly huge part of government and thus man-power is set aside to work around the problems that the fungibility of money creates. I am pretty sure there are superior technological solutions, where the rules/laws don't have to work-around ever more clever ways that cooperations and rich people use to work-around the limits we try to set for the fungibility of money.
- Emma_Goldman 5y ago
  I don't think this is anywhere near as obvious as you make out. Film is an odd example, given that the films that lay claim to being great works of art (e.g, Koyaanisqatsi, Wild Strawberries, The Battle of Algiers) are rarely the most popular and highest-grossing films (e.g., Transformers, Avengers, Toy Story). We usually mean something by 'greatness' quite different from 'popular'. Even if we just focus on popularity (i.e., first-order preference satisfaction), money is a very rough proxy for it: 1. Lots of profitable activities, once you price-in their externalised social costs, are net negative. Given the scale of the climate and ecological crisis, that is very far from a marginal phenomenon. Ecological economists like Herman Daly argue that once ecological costs are included in the national accounts, we are running a GDP loss. 2. Some commodities are instrumentally necessary but intrinsically negative. Many people acknowledge that social media is a net negative, but use it anyway because it helps build their profile and career. Market dynamics often transform intrinsically positive activities into merely instrumentally necessary activities, e.g., the marketisation of academia means researchers spend their whole career optimising for maximum articles and grants, not great work. 3. Market demand reflects the stratified incomes of people around the world. Markets are therefore heavily skewed in favour of the interests of the rich. 4. Market exchanges which are mutually beneficial for the transacting parties often have unintended effects in the aggregate, sometimes negative, e.g., no one wants Facebook to be a monopoly, and no individual makes it so, but it is the aggregate consequence of people joining Facebook.
mavhc 5y ago
Disney spend loads on developing new technology for their films, and developing the story in their weird, but apparently successful way, while other animation studios don't often don't bother and just want to rake in the cash.
- wdb 5y ago
  Yeah, think there is a big Disney lab in Zürich?
- csharptwdec19 5y ago
  This sounds inverted to me. There are two things that IMO Disney does far more than most other animation studios; First being sequel churn (the general pacing of MCU releases, the pacing on the last SW trilogy and sidecar movies,) But the bigger one being Toyetics. [0] Neither of those things are particularly 'innovative', and the latter of the two is a semi-exploitative practice of child psychology. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyetic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyetic
  - daniel_reetz 5y ago
    Look up Disney Research and Disney Imagineering R&D. Check out their SIGGRAPH papers. I used to work for them (not representing them here), you'd be surprised at the scale+level of R&D activity.
indigochill 5y ago
An idea in this vein I've been toying with is implementing a P2P IOU bartering protocol. I do something for you, you cryptographically sign me an IOU (which is a plaintext IOU note - no monetary amount required) which I can either call in later or trade to someone else who needs your services more for something I want from them. Messages sign adjacent messages (probably using Secure Scuttlebutt), so when someone comes back to you with the IOU, you can have a strong guarantee that it's the original note and not a copy even though you don't necessarily have visibility of all the participants it transited through. Even in theory, it only works in some contexts, though, namely in exchanges between individuals. Because there's a strong reliance that neighbors in the path trust each other and leaves them responsible for settling exchanges to mutual satisfaction. All this proposal adds to direct barter is long-distance authenticity guarantees.
- luma 5y ago
  This sounds like money with extra steps.
- matheusd 5y ago
  The Offset[1] project seems to be around that position in design space, at least going by their Economic Idea[2] page. [1] https://www.offsetcredit.org/ https://www.offsetcredit.org/ [2] https://docs.offsetcredit.org/en/latest/intro/economic.html https://docs.offsetcredit.org/en/latest/intro/economic.html
- deepnet 5y ago
  This is needed. IOU works well on small scales. It has often worked locally or within small communities[1]. LETS[2], babysitting vouchers, friends who value and track favours and keep the scales balanced. Make the FOSS infrastructure as easily deployable as wordpress. IOUs with a PGP signed chain of trust is brilliant and it could be a killer app for PGP adoption. Who of us doesn't owe Stallman and Torvalds at least a favour ? But never got their key-signed ? Widespread PGP adoption means lots of people would have their own crypto so privacy and trust could be run over any insecure transport medium. Maybe there could be a FIDOnet type central glue and exchange protocols so money could travel further than local. Local non-currency ledgers on a eco-friendly blockchain. Money is human glue. It represents creativity and potential energy. It is democratic to have lots of types of small monies so no-one has to be excluded. Small things often work well. National monies fail for a lot of people and cryptos current success model is to be worth something - and so are stuck being tied to national monies so the excluded are still excluded. Make it easy to make an altcoin, so anyone can and the goal can be stimulating a local economy rather than being tied back into the main one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Exchange_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Exchange_System [2] https://www.lowimpact.org/lets-origins-michael-linton-letsystems/ https://www.lowimpact.org/lets-origins-michael-linton-letsys...
shkkmo 5y ago
The problem isn't money nor is it free enterprise nor is it markets. The problem is ehe capitalist structures of ownership that divorce production from ownership and commoditize all economic activity.

Clewza313 5y ago

The most objective measure of "greatness" we have is money, which comes from people who think something is great and are willing to pay for it. Sometimes this works well: for example, pretty much everybody thinks Toy Story is a great movie, and Lasseter and Pixar were rewarded handsomely for it. Sometimes it doesn't work so well: for example, Wall Street thinks money is great, so they spend a lot of time and energy figuring out ways to extract more money from people.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
> The most objective measure of "greatness" we have is money Why is this more objective than other metrics? The fact you can easily put a number on it doesn't make it objective. It's a definite indicator of wealth, but surely greatness is a different thing?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- canadianfella 5y ago
  What other metrics?
simonh 5y ago
An awful lot of them spend their time figuring out how to extract less money than other people, but make sure they're the ones doing the extracting. That's competition for you.
underwater 5y ago
Money is a measure of the ability to earn money, nothing more.
nxpnsv 5y ago
As soon as money doesn’t only come from customers directly purchasing a thing you make, that is not a great metric. Money is more complicated than that.
stkdump 5y ago
I wouldn't say it is the most objective way. It is a remarkably simple way to accomplish a number of excellent things and with more success than other methods humanity tried so far. I hope we can come up with something better in the next few hundred years. The main problem of money lies exactly in its simplicity, i.e. everything becomes fungible, which in reality many things just aren't. To work around this we needed to invent stuff like taxation and legal persons. A mind-boggingly huge part of government and thus man-power is set aside to work around the problems that the fungibility of money creates. I am pretty sure there are superior technological solutions, where the rules/laws don't have to work-around ever more clever ways that cooperations and rich people use to work-around the limits we try to set for the fungibility of money.
Emma_Goldman 5y ago
I don't think this is anywhere near as obvious as you make out. Film is an odd example, given that the films that lay claim to being great works of art (e.g, Koyaanisqatsi, Wild Strawberries, The Battle of Algiers) are rarely the most popular and highest-grossing films (e.g., Transformers, Avengers, Toy Story). We usually mean something by 'greatness' quite different from 'popular'. Even if we just focus on popularity (i.e., first-order preference satisfaction), money is a very rough proxy for it: 1. Lots of profitable activities, once you price-in their externalised social costs, are net negative. Given the scale of the climate and ecological crisis, that is very far from a marginal phenomenon. Ecological economists like Herman Daly argue that once ecological costs are included in the national accounts, we are running a GDP loss. 2. Some commodities are instrumentally necessary but intrinsically negative. Many people acknowledge that social media is a net negative, but use it anyway because it helps build their profile and career. Market dynamics often transform intrinsically positive activities into merely instrumentally necessary activities, e.g., the marketisation of academia means researchers spend their whole career optimising for maximum articles and grants, not great work. 3. Market demand reflects the stratified incomes of people around the world. Markets are therefore heavily skewed in favour of the interests of the rich. 4. Market exchanges which are mutually beneficial for the transacting parties often have unintended effects in the aggregate, sometimes negative, e.g., no one wants Facebook to be a monopoly, and no individual makes it so, but it is the aggregate consequence of people joining Facebook.

mavhc 5y ago

Disney spend loads on developing new technology for their films, and developing the story in their weird, but apparently successful way, while other animation studios don't often don't bother and just want to rake in the cash.

wdb 5y ago
Yeah, think there is a big Disney lab in Zürich?
csharptwdec19 5y ago
This sounds inverted to me. There are two things that IMO Disney does far more than most other animation studios; First being sequel churn (the general pacing of MCU releases, the pacing on the last SW trilogy and sidecar movies,) But the bigger one being Toyetics. [0] Neither of those things are particularly 'innovative', and the latter of the two is a semi-exploitative practice of child psychology. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyetic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyetic
- daniel_reetz 5y ago
  Look up Disney Research and Disney Imagineering R&D. Check out their SIGGRAPH papers. I used to work for them (not representing them here), you'd be surprised at the scale+level of R&D activity.

indigochill 5y ago

An idea in this vein I've been toying with is implementing a P2P IOU bartering protocol. I do something for you, you cryptographically sign me an IOU (which is a plaintext IOU note - no monetary amount required) which I can either call in later or trade to someone else who needs your services more for something I want from them. Messages sign adjacent messages (probably using Secure Scuttlebutt), so when someone comes back to you with the IOU, you can have a strong guarantee that it's the original note and not a copy even though you don't necessarily have visibility of all the participants it transited through. Even in theory, it only works in some contexts, though, namely in exchanges between individuals. Because there's a strong reliance that neighbors in the path trust each other and leaves them responsible for settling exchanges to mutual satisfaction. All this proposal adds to direct barter is long-distance authenticity guarantees.

luma 5y ago
This sounds like money with extra steps.
matheusd 5y ago
The Offset[1] project seems to be around that position in design space, at least going by their Economic Idea[2] page. [1] https://www.offsetcredit.org/ https://www.offsetcredit.org/ [2] https://docs.offsetcredit.org/en/latest/intro/economic.html https://docs.offsetcredit.org/en/latest/intro/economic.html
deepnet 5y ago
This is needed. IOU works well on small scales. It has often worked locally or within small communities[1]. LETS[2], babysitting vouchers, friends who value and track favours and keep the scales balanced. Make the FOSS infrastructure as easily deployable as wordpress. IOUs with a PGP signed chain of trust is brilliant and it could be a killer app for PGP adoption. Who of us doesn't owe Stallman and Torvalds at least a favour ? But never got their key-signed ? Widespread PGP adoption means lots of people would have their own crypto so privacy and trust could be run over any insecure transport medium. Maybe there could be a FIDOnet type central glue and exchange protocols so money could travel further than local. Local non-currency ledgers on a eco-friendly blockchain. Money is human glue. It represents creativity and potential energy. It is democratic to have lots of types of small monies so no-one has to be excluded. Small things often work well. National monies fail for a lot of people and cryptos current success model is to be worth something - and so are stuck being tied to national monies so the excluded are still excluded. Make it easy to make an altcoin, so anyone can and the goal can be stimulating a local economy rather than being tied back into the main one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Exchange_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Exchange_System [2] https://www.lowimpact.org/lets-origins-michael-linton-letsystems/ https://www.lowimpact.org/lets-origins-michael-linton-letsys...

shkkmo 5y ago

The problem isn't money nor is it free enterprise nor is it markets. The problem is ehe capitalist structures of ownership that divorce production from ownership and commoditize all economic activity.