Power of the Market - The Pencil

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Recommends ZenoArrow · 2017-07 · on “Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust”

> "Do you mean that Boeing is built by independent people who work on whatever they want to and then a plane is assembled of that independently built parts and no one takes the responsibility of the result?" Somewhere in the middle. If you consider the work that goes into making a plane, you'll see quite a bit of it happens outside Boeing. To give one example, think of the aluminium that goes into the plane. Boeing doesn't have to mine bauxite, extract the aluminium from the bauxite, transport it to the place where its sold, etc... A classic example of this ground-up view was this example given by Milton Friedman about the pencil. I don't agree with many of his views, but I think he makes a

Cites bfrs · 2011-11 · on “House votes to end country limits for skilled workers seeking green cards”

A GC grants economic freedom to indentured servants (H1B visa holders is the politically correct term). The longer freedom is denied the more profitable it is for the corporate masters. One of the tricks of this modern day slave trade is to lobby Congress to set a quota (about 30% of the demand) on the number of people who are set free each year. For the groups with the largest numbers of indentured servants, additional quotas are lobbied for. As long as the dollar was strong and life was shit in the third world hells these people came from, this system worked. The corporate masters recognize that the game is now up. The usual argument given for the lack of freedom for H1B visa holders is th

Cites oberstein · 2015-10 · on “All my trash for a year fit into two plastic bags”

I too would be interested in studies. But I do think environmental cost is factored in to the cost of most things, especially if due to environmental damage it is no longer possible to get a Thing at any price. I think the true cost of a single pencil is well reflected. [this video] The problem with the profiler analogy is that economic costs can open up economic gains, whereas wasting billions of cycles in a dumb loop opens up nothing. If you analyzed the human activities that produce the most environmental cost, the individual contributions would be nothing. Only when you look at economies of scale driven by collections of people do you get to anything remotely resembling significant numbers. A

Cites huxley · 2015-11 · on “Making a pencil from scratch (2013)”

While Leonard Read's essay was reasonably well known among Chicago School economists, the concepts it described were made more famous by Milton Friedman's Pencil Allegory from the 1980s PBS series "Free to Choose": [this video] You can read a critical article on the back story to Friedman and Read's writings on pencils here: [LINK]

Cites grondilu · 2017-06 · on “Elon Musk Publishes Plans for Colonizing Mars”

> there is no self-sustaining city on earth Indeed. That's an other concept that I'm not sure Musk is fully aware of. Economies, industrial production systems are highly inter-dependent on Earth. In our "technological civilization", even to build something as simple as a pencil, you need lots of people collaborating from all over the planet [1]. So to me the idea of building a "self-sustaining technological civilization" on mars sounds quite ludicrous. 1. [this video]

Cites 0x27081990 · 2017-09 · on “A New Way to Learn Economics”

>You can't control for every variable in a market. It just isn't possible. Even economic "laws" like supply and demand have counter examples like Giffen goods. That's the whole point. Markets are decentralized brains, while Socialism advocates that a government as a central planner will be more efficient (it could be more efficient in specific cases like total war or natural disasters) and lead to Communism where we won't even need a government because society will behave as one being. The lesson of the pencil comes to mind: [this video]

Cites Namari · 2018-10 · on “The backlash against overtourism”

Maybe but if you reduce the population from whatever group, there is less needs for everything and because everything is related it will an worldwide impact. Watch this video: [this video] and you'll see that all is linked and the more we are the more we will consume this planet.

Cites doomjunky · 2019-03 · on “Nvidia's $99 Jetson Nano Is an AI Computer for DIY Enthusiasts”

Look at this lead pencil. There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. [0] [0]: Milton Friedman [this video]