Money is what money does.
Living in the suburbs with an economic major for a dad, I was subjected to long drives filled with words like Price, Cost, Wealth and Money. Slightly different, shadow images of the same thing - Value. Transactions, hoards and transformations there-of. But this system of Value, has no absolutes - it's a general theory of economic relativity. The essential backbone of which is the equation of effort to value and in some essence has been as revolutionary to me as Einstein's has been to 19th century physics.
$$$: Money is worth what it buys you. The only reason it exists is because other people accept it and provide you services/goods. That'd be why it is infact called currency, because that is the most important property for money. But the exchange of money look like a zero-sum game - you gain only as much as I give. But transactions of value have to be a non-zero sum game. For a stable economic system, the buyer & seller should both go home with more than what they started with.
!Zero: The nonzero sum aspect of trade, is what set that juggernaut rolling in the first place. But to acquire more value than the other gives up, requires for an inequity of value in exchange of money. What I give up in return for money is more valuable to the person paying for it than what she pays for it. And thus the ship sails into the next port.
The Pin: The pin maker is a skilled man. All day long, he makes pins. It would take you an entire day's work to make a pin. He makes ten pins a day. If he demanded half-a-day's worth to make a pin for you, would you pay? I assume you would, after cribbing a lot about the rising cost of living, how they don't make them like they used to and how your children no longer behave. But you'd pay, take the pin & spend the rest of the day doing something fun.
And here's where the inequity of effort and value kick in. It is an equation, for sure, but one of the multipliers in it is skill at a task. The price you pay is fair for something if it takes more effort to do it yourself - DIY solutions excepted. The foundation is laid for the segregation of society into guilds, based on skill & strata based on the multiplier of effort to value. Productivity is no longer a measure of effort, but a combination of various other things.
The world we see around us is the effect of such a run-away economic chain reaction - where all's fair in the price war. There's nothing you'd buy at a loss, whether you profit in fluid currency is another matter altogether. You're built to be a winner at the game of value, but transmuting it into gold is another skill altogether. But you still got what you paid for.
On the other hand, there's probably one born every minute, who hasn't.
PS: this entry initially was penned in my notebook, when people protested about Apple dropping the iPhone price
--The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money.
-- B. Franklin
posted at: 09:12 | path: /observations | permalink |
Frustration is my fuel. I spent an all nighter re-doing up one of my old valgrind patches to work with valgrind-3.3.1. This one was a doozy to patch up the first time (stealing rwalsh's code), but not quite very hard to keep up with the releases. The patch needs to be applied to the 3.3.1 source tree and memcheck rebuilt. It also requires the target code to be instrumented.
#include "valgrind/memcheck.h"
static int foobar = 1;
int main()
{
int *x = malloc(sizeof(int));
int wpid = VALGRIND_SET_WATCHPOINT(x, sizeof(int), &foobar);
*x = 10;
foobar = 0;
*x = 10;
VALGRIND_CLEAR_WATCHPOINT(wpid);
}
What has been added anew is the foobar conditional (you could just pass in NULL, if you always want an error). In this case the error is thrown only in first line modifying x. Setting the conditional to zero turns off the error reporting.
With the new APC-3.1 branch, I'm again hitting new race conditions whenever I change around stuff. I have no real way of debugging it in a controlled environment. But this patch will let me protect the entire shared memory space and turn on error flag as soon as control exits APC. Just being able to log all unlocked writes from Zend should go a long way in being able to track down race conditions.
Yup, frustration is my fuel.
--An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-- Albert Camus