7 ms·

Better to just say that you can't make free lunches out of money. The standard can't-eat-money point. There ARE such things as free lunches, and the "no free l

Better to just say that you can't make free lunches out of money. The standard can't-eat-money point. There ARE such things as free lunches, and the "no free lunch" quip is a meme that serves as propaganda for the idea that everything in life should have a price (and if it doesn't, it means the price is hidden). That's just not true. Some things in life are abundant and need no pricing and have nothing hidden. https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/NA_1995_1_31_InventionOfWork.png https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/...

iratewizard 5y ago
Free and abundant has a cost too. The time it takes to sort through the free and abundant in order to find what you need. The time to learn that free thing and find it isn't a good fit. The backdrop to life is a complex resource management game and you're constantly spending the one thing you can't buy back.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  Look the world I live in, my reality is one where sorting through stuff is indeed a HUGE problem, but it's not caused strictly by things being free and abundant. We have tons of examples of noise and bulk that needs curation that is the cause of people working to make yet more stuff when its not needed. People flood the market with junk trying to capture some of the value. There are tons of duplicate apps or websites each trying to get their money or attention-to-ads. But the greatest free-and-abundant stuff like Wikipedia with no limits and restrictions — that has the capacity to reduce the trends of people making duplicate stuff. I mean, there's lots of examples of excessive production which takes more to sort through which is caused by things being locked-down. Whereas if the best stuff were just free, there would be less incentive for anyone to make and market duplicate products. But I agree with your "complex resource management game" framing, I'm just saying that free and abundant is not the problem. One problem is that we aren't just having the best free and abundant stuff so that we can stop all the noise and duplication.
leereeves 5y ago
> https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/NA_1995_1_31_InventionOfWork.png https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/... "Food is a manifestation of our local fertility goddess"? Here in the real world, food is produced by work. A lot of work - growing, transporting, preparing, and selling food accounts for about 10% of American employment.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I mean, food literally grows on trees. The comic is obviously set in prehistory when we didn't cultivate our food. Also, even though farming requires labour today, why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Also, even though farming requires labour today, why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value? That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism is supposed to fix
  - leereeves 5y ago
    Even in prehistory, feeding people required a lot of work, that work just took the form of hunting, gathering, and migration, and later cooking and making tools to make hunting and gathering easier. > why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value? They aren't? Many people divide the value in the final product. The person who owns the land pays other people for farm equipment, fertilizer, weed killers, pest control, harvesting, etc, then they sell the product to other people who add value in various ways and each sells for a higher price.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      The point is that the person who owns the land gets to set the pay of the workers. So somebody who doesn't really have to do any labour themselves gets to choose the fraction of the reward (in reality, a set fee ie a salary) that goes to the people who are actually doing the work. If they're the ones producing all the value by mixing their labour with the land (which the land owner didn't create), then they should be the ones who divide the profits.
WalterBright 5y ago
Name something that has no cost, explicit or hidden.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Breathing air ?
  - syshum 5y ago
  - ralfd 5y ago
    We used the atmosphere as a free dump for CO2 and look where that brought us. See also smog and other air pollution.
    - e2le 5y ago
      Breathing air and burning fossil fuels in industrial processes are two different things. Humans are not producing CO2 on those scales that we should worry about attaching costs to the use of such an abundant resource. What are we going do? Incentivise people to hold their breath?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    There's a significant cost we pay to keep the air clean enough to breathe.
    - quadrangle 5y ago
      This was not true for almost all of human history. So, are you just saying "there's no LONGER such a thing as a free lunch"?
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        There are a lot of compromises in our body design to support breathing air. One is the risk of aspirating food, which kills lots of people.
ralfd 5y ago
> That's just not true. Some things in life are abundant and need no pricing and have nothing hidden. Citation needed. What are such things?
- e2le 5y ago
  Air is abundant enough that humans need not consider it's costs when taking their next breath.
  - p1esk 5y ago
    The cost of breathing polluted air in big cities is your health.
    - e2le 5y ago
      Polluted air, not air.
      - p1esk 5y ago
        If you are in a big city the air is polluted air.
        quadrangle 5y ago
        Yes, and we can force "no free lunch" to be true if we use enough nuclear bombs to wipe out life on earth or something. But like clean air is/was analogous to the abundant fruit tree in the comic I posted. And it TURNED INTO polluted air through people ruining it just like the fruit BECAME non-free when Og claimed it and made others work to get any. "No free lunch" is an aphorism used by people who don't want to let there be free lunches. It's not inherently true.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  If you want to just be contrarian, you'll say that it's not "free" if you have to CHEW your lunch. Either "free" is effectively meaningless or our world is full of free things. Uncompromised free things. Sunlight, air, water, fruit on wild plants… I mean this is just nature. You know why Birds of Paradise have unbelievably fancy plumage? It's partly sexual selection, but the reason they can afford to spend 99% of their time doing bizarre dances and pruning their plumes and setting up their special dance areas is because their FOOD IS FREE basically. They live in an abundant ecosystem where it's trivial enough for them to get food. It just grows or is around, and when they want to eat, they just go eat. If that's not "free" then you're just denying the concept of "free". I mean, let's go further, if truly, literally nothing is "free" than the word "free" has no meaning.

iratewizard 5y ago

Free and abundant has a cost too. The time it takes to sort through the free and abundant in order to find what you need. The time to learn that free thing and find it isn't a good fit. The backdrop to life is a complex resource management game and you're constantly spending the one thing you can't buy back.

quadrangle 5y ago
Look the world I live in, my reality is one where sorting through stuff is indeed a HUGE problem, but it's not caused strictly by things being free and abundant. We have tons of examples of noise and bulk that needs curation that is the cause of people working to make yet more stuff when its not needed. People flood the market with junk trying to capture some of the value. There are tons of duplicate apps or websites each trying to get their money or attention-to-ads. But the greatest free-and-abundant stuff like Wikipedia with no limits and restrictions — that has the capacity to reduce the trends of people making duplicate stuff. I mean, there's lots of examples of excessive production which takes more to sort through which is caused by things being locked-down. Whereas if the best stuff were just free, there would be less incentive for anyone to make and market duplicate products. But I agree with your "complex resource management game" framing, I'm just saying that free and abundant is not the problem. One problem is that we aren't just having the best free and abundant stuff so that we can stop all the noise and duplication.

leereeves 5y ago

> https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/NA_1995_1_31_InventionOfWork.png https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/... "Food is a manifestation of our local fertility goddess"? Here in the real world, food is produced by work. A lot of work - growing, transporting, preparing, and selling food accounts for about 10% of American employment.

beaconstudios 5y ago
I mean, food literally grows on trees. The comic is obviously set in prehistory when we didn't cultivate our food. Also, even though farming requires labour today, why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value?
- gruez 5y ago
  >Also, even though farming requires labour today, why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value? That's what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism is supposed to fix
- leereeves 5y ago
  Even in prehistory, feeding people required a lot of work, that work just took the form of hunting, gathering, and migration, and later cooking and making tools to make hunting and gathering easier. > why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value? They aren't? Many people divide the value in the final product. The person who owns the land pays other people for farm equipment, fertilizer, weed killers, pest control, harvesting, etc, then they sell the product to other people who add value in various ways and each sells for a higher price.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    The point is that the person who owns the land gets to set the pay of the workers. So somebody who doesn't really have to do any labour themselves gets to choose the fraction of the reward (in reality, a set fee ie a salary) that goes to the people who are actually doing the work. If they're the ones producing all the value by mixing their labour with the land (which the land owner didn't create), then they should be the ones who divide the profits.

WalterBright 5y ago

Name something that has no cost, explicit or hidden.

thehappypm 5y ago
Breathing air ?
- syshum 5y ago
- ralfd 5y ago
  We used the atmosphere as a free dump for CO2 and look where that brought us. See also smog and other air pollution.
  - e2le 5y ago
    Breathing air and burning fossil fuels in industrial processes are two different things. Humans are not producing CO2 on those scales that we should worry about attaching costs to the use of such an abundant resource. What are we going do? Incentivise people to hold their breath?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  There's a significant cost we pay to keep the air clean enough to breathe.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    This was not true for almost all of human history. So, are you just saying "there's no LONGER such a thing as a free lunch"?
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      There are a lot of compromises in our body design to support breathing air. One is the risk of aspirating food, which kills lots of people.

ralfd 5y ago

> That's just not true. Some things in life are abundant and need no pricing and have nothing hidden. Citation needed. What are such things?

e2le 5y ago
Air is abundant enough that humans need not consider it's costs when taking their next breath.
- p1esk 5y ago
  The cost of breathing polluted air in big cities is your health.
  - e2le 5y ago
    Polluted air, not air.
    - p1esk 5y ago
      If you are in a big city the air is polluted air.
      - quadrangle 5y ago
        Yes, and we can force "no free lunch" to be true if we use enough nuclear bombs to wipe out life on earth or something. But like clean air is/was analogous to the abundant fruit tree in the comic I posted. And it TURNED INTO polluted air through people ruining it just like the fruit BECAME non-free when Og claimed it and made others work to get any. "No free lunch" is an aphorism used by people who don't want to let there be free lunches. It's not inherently true.
quadrangle 5y ago
If you want to just be contrarian, you'll say that it's not "free" if you have to CHEW your lunch. Either "free" is effectively meaningless or our world is full of free things. Uncompromised free things. Sunlight, air, water, fruit on wild plants… I mean this is just nature. You know why Birds of Paradise have unbelievably fancy plumage? It's partly sexual selection, but the reason they can afford to spend 99% of their time doing bizarre dances and pruning their plumes and setting up their special dance areas is because their FOOD IS FREE basically. They live in an abundant ecosystem where it's trivial enough for them to get food. It just grows or is around, and when they want to eat, they just go eat. If that's not "free" then you're just denying the concept of "free". I mean, let's go further, if truly, literally nothing is "free" than the word "free" has no meaning.