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Regardless of whether or not most people spend money to breathe oxygen, any approximation that loses a 9.5 billion dollar industry to rounding errors is a poor
by Fomite 13y ago
Regardless of whether or not most people spend money to breathe oxygen, any approximation that loses a 9.5 billion dollar industry to rounding errors is a poor approximation.
And while most people don't pay for their use of atmospheric gasses, those who do are paying for something mission critical. You might as well say there is no value to sunlight because I can go lay on my roof deck.
- dredmorbius 13y agorounding errors You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply. What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder of total economic output ($70 trillion, give or take rounding errors of a few trillion), every last dollar of which requires humans, animals, plants, factories, fires, and god knows what else to have access to an atmosphere. Your $9.5 billion? 0.013% of the total. Again: air has, to any reasonable approximation, zero economic value. It has tremendous utility value. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy
- dredmorbius 13y agoApologies for dupe posts, was getting HN errors when this went through.
- dredmorbius 13y agorounding errors You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply. What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder of total economic output ($70 trillion, give or take rounding errors of a few trillion), every last dollar of which requires humans, animals, plants, factories, fires, and god knows what else to have access to an atmosphere. Your $9.5 billion? 0.013% of the total. Again: air has, to any reasonable approximation, zero economic value. It has tremendous utility value. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy
- dredmorbius 13y agorounding errors You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply. What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder of total economic output ($70 trillion, give or take rounding errors of a few trillion), every last dollar of which requires humans, animals, plants, factories, fires, and god knows what else to have access to an atmosphere. Your $9.5 billion? 0.013% of the total. Again: air has, to any reasonable approximation, zero economic value. It has tremendous utility value. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy