4 ms·

> https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/NA_1995_1_31_InventionOfWork.png https://ia902809.us.archive.org/2/items/NinasAdventuresFree/...

> 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.
    - tomp 5y ago
      Ownership incentivises longtermism. When noone owns the land, this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_rainforest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_...
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        No, when you make something a free-for-all, that happens. Conservation areas exist.
    - leereeves 5y ago
      > The point is that the person who owns the land gets to set the pay of the workers. If that were true, the less compassionite owners would set the pay to zero, so it's obviously more complicated than that.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        Just because they get to set the pay, doesn't mean their choice is a totally independent one.
        leereeves 5y ago
        I guess we have different definitions of "set". The word I would use is "negotiate".
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        Sure, that's fair. Regardless, my issue is that the people who do the actual work do not get to determine how profits get distributed - power is held over them by the owner (who is only the owner by virtue of state enforcement of property rights), and this leads to accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. IE, capitalism.
- kmill 5y ago
  Sometimes I think about what it were like if land rights were structured as limited-term exclusive-use licenses. The licences are offered in recognition of the fact that it takes time and money to develop the land, so the licensee, by taking on this risk, should be allowed to try to earn back that value and then some. But after a certain point exclusive use seems to be an excessive reward, so the term should be limited somehow -- I haven't been able to think up a good way this part should work. In many cases, there's a natural limit to land ownership (we only live so long), but corporate land ownership is able to extend normally limited licenses into perpetuity...
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    philosophers have been thinking about more fair ways to manage resource ownership for quite some time. Mutualists, for example, have a construct similar to what you're describing called a usufruct where land rights are granted directly to the person or group working the land (ie, you cannot own land you do not work), and you only have the right to use and profit from the land, without any right to destroy it.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    I read that many ancient farming societies used lottery to rotate which farmers used which plots each year. You know, there's an unfair advantage if you get access to the best land and then that grows you the best crops and then profit and so on. So, everyone gets chances to farm different plots. I agree with you about the problems with corporate land ownership.
- causality0 5y ago
  why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value? They don't. Farming profits are razer thin. That value goes to the person who owns the land, the people who work the land, the people that ship the product, the manufacturers of equipment, shop owners, the list goes on.
quadrangle 5y ago
Even though the comic is a comic, it's not about actual fertility goddesses making food, it's about prehistoric people making up ideas like that while they expressed their gratitude for the abundance of nature. Look, I'm a REAL person. You know how I get apples in apple season? I walk to a park near my house where there are decades-old apple trees. I don't know who planted them. Nobody today does anything to care for them. They just do what trees do. And the majority of the apples fall on the ground because nobody picked them. And I walk over to the park and I pick apples and eat them. Oh, but I had to WALK there you say. And I had to WORK to have a home in this town. And we have to have a working society in order to pay the City to keep the park from being sold to a developer who would cut down all the trees. Or that I have to do the work of EATING the apple, like chewing it and so on. I mean, this is just endless. It's quite simple: Either "no such thing as a free lunch" is falsifiable and I've falsified it with real evidence OR it's unfalsifiable because you'll claim that any tangential aspect of existence that can be called "work" makes the apple not free. Either way, the aphorism is no good. "Too good to be true" is a better aphorism because it isn't used to imply that everything good always has a catch. It doesn't say "Anything great is too good to be true", it just asserts that things that seem great can be too good to be true (they have some catch). And that's useful because we should think about all the catches and context of things. But that doesn't mean we should become cynics who just deny that anything great is ever possible.
- leereeves 5y ago
  That's a literal interpretation, but it's an expression, not a scientific law. People often say something like "That never happens" about things that are simply very rare. Seeing the rather literal tone of the conversation, I responded with an equally literal interpretation of the comic. Of course I know that the "local fertility goddess" is a figurative expression for the abundance of nature, but "no such thing as a free lunch" is also figurative, and "the pot calling the kettle black" isn't actually about a talking pot.
  - quadrangle 5y ago
    I was NOT doing a literal interp. That would mean getting hung up on what counts as "lunch" and not recognizing that it's a metaphor. That's not what I was doing. Everything I've posted is about critiquing what I see as the implications and ramifications and arguments of the metaphor, recognizing it as the aphorism that it is.

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.
  - tomp 5y ago
    Ownership incentivises longtermism. When noone owns the land, this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_rainforest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_...
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      No, when you make something a free-for-all, that happens. Conservation areas exist.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    > The point is that the person who owns the land gets to set the pay of the workers. If that were true, the less compassionite owners would set the pay to zero, so it's obviously more complicated than that.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Just because they get to set the pay, doesn't mean their choice is a totally independent one.
      - leereeves 5y ago
        I guess we have different definitions of "set". The word I would use is "negotiate".
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        Sure, that's fair. Regardless, my issue is that the people who do the actual work do not get to determine how profits get distributed - power is held over them by the owner (who is only the owner by virtue of state enforcement of property rights), and this leads to accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. IE, capitalism.
kmill 5y ago
Sometimes I think about what it were like if land rights were structured as limited-term exclusive-use licenses. The licences are offered in recognition of the fact that it takes time and money to develop the land, so the licensee, by taking on this risk, should be allowed to try to earn back that value and then some. But after a certain point exclusive use seems to be an excessive reward, so the term should be limited somehow -- I haven't been able to think up a good way this part should work. In many cases, there's a natural limit to land ownership (we only live so long), but corporate land ownership is able to extend normally limited licenses into perpetuity...
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  philosophers have been thinking about more fair ways to manage resource ownership for quite some time. Mutualists, for example, have a construct similar to what you're describing called a usufruct where land rights are granted directly to the person or group working the land (ie, you cannot own land you do not work), and you only have the right to use and profit from the land, without any right to destroy it.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  I read that many ancient farming societies used lottery to rotate which farmers used which plots each year. You know, there's an unfair advantage if you get access to the best land and then that grows you the best crops and then profit and so on. So, everyone gets chances to farm different plots. I agree with you about the problems with corporate land ownership.
causality0 5y ago
why should the person who "owns" the land be the one who gets to keep all the value? They don't. Farming profits are razer thin. That value goes to the person who owns the land, the people who work the land, the people that ship the product, the manufacturers of equipment, shop owners, the list goes on.

quadrangle 5y ago

Even though the comic is a comic, it's not about actual fertility goddesses making food, it's about prehistoric people making up ideas like that while they expressed their gratitude for the abundance of nature. Look, I'm a REAL person. You know how I get apples in apple season? I walk to a park near my house where there are decades-old apple trees. I don't know who planted them. Nobody today does anything to care for them. They just do what trees do. And the majority of the apples fall on the ground because nobody picked them. And I walk over to the park and I pick apples and eat them. Oh, but I had to WALK there you say. And I had to WORK to have a home in this town. And we have to have a working society in order to pay the City to keep the park from being sold to a developer who would cut down all the trees. Or that I have to do the work of EATING the apple, like chewing it and so on. I mean, this is just endless. It's quite simple: Either "no such thing as a free lunch" is falsifiable and I've falsified it with real evidence OR it's unfalsifiable because you'll claim that any tangential aspect of existence that can be called "work" makes the apple not free. Either way, the aphorism is no good. "Too good to be true" is a better aphorism because it isn't used to imply that everything good always has a catch. It doesn't say "Anything great is too good to be true", it just asserts that things that seem great can be too good to be true (they have some catch). And that's useful because we should think about all the catches and context of things. But that doesn't mean we should become cynics who just deny that anything great is ever possible.

leereeves 5y ago
That's a literal interpretation, but it's an expression, not a scientific law. People often say something like "That never happens" about things that are simply very rare. Seeing the rather literal tone of the conversation, I responded with an equally literal interpretation of the comic. Of course I know that the "local fertility goddess" is a figurative expression for the abundance of nature, but "no such thing as a free lunch" is also figurative, and "the pot calling the kettle black" isn't actually about a talking pot.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  I was NOT doing a literal interp. That would mean getting hung up on what counts as "lunch" and not recognizing that it's a metaphor. That's not what I was doing. Everything I've posted is about critiquing what I see as the implications and ramifications and arguments of the metaphor, recognizing it as the aphorism that it is.