I view your example of different doctors similarly to "efficient machines" which I said this doesn't deal with well.
silly results ... elevator
Indeed! However, you're looking to disprove it by coming up with comical definitions instead of looking for useful and insightful definitions, this is the opposite of productive (mathematical) reasoning. It's akin to throwing away a hammer because it's bad at turning screws. Sure, some communists would probably argue this steak is worth more because you burned 20 barrels of crude to cook it, but that's obviously just waste. The actual energy used to do the thing - that's a more useful lens. In context, you'd recursively consider all the energy used to get through the bureaucratic and credentialing requirements, to be better than others vying for spots etc. and those failed people who invested but didn't make the cut, the energy they invested is also included in the end (otherwise the supply of physicians would be higher and the price lower etc.) It's more useful to search for situations and problems where this tool is useful, leads to insights etc. so you can take it out of your toolbox for them. I find it helpful for macroeconomics and valuing commodity companies, as a measure of competitive of advantage etc.
Quite a few EToVs have been proposed. My main lens of seeing things is biophysical economics which takes a lot from EToV ideas (read this book review for an introduction) leading me to work with commodities.
How does your energy theory of value deal with high value and low energy services
The obvious solution is: The energy was spent training the physician before the service was rendered. You can do accounting directly with industrial inputs. The matching principle recognizes expenses when the revenue they generate, is earned. The physician simply charges for past energy investment (along with profit from carrying uncertainty/risk, temporary or structural distortions preventing rapid reskilling etc.) Depending on the framework e.g. strict GAAP, the physician exercised pricing power leveraging intellectual assets capitalized (years ago, when studying) blabla scheduled amortization.
How does it deal with more efficient machines?
Not very well, but the same book review describes related ideas about capital efficiency, relative yield etc.
Attention/throughput of energy expenditure is also important, which @crushedoranges alludes to with "capital being the infrastructure of which energy flows" but in Marx' framework, you could replace "labor" with anything including capital and rewrite my above paragraph simply talking about the capital costs of having supported and trained the doctor. Modern economics/finance struggles under Cobb-Douglas where everything is money to enable simpler math (but we can't always/directly transmute gold into oil and transmuting oil into food often takes time...) Cobb-Douglas is a production function used to handle input substitution (increasing capital reduces labor etc.) If the elasticity of substitution (conversion cost) is 0, you can't transmute. Leontief functions have fixed proportions, where you require 60 food and 20 gold to train a soldier; in ideal situations, the free market(place) does allow conversion, with further transaction costs. Normal economics has a closed loop (and helicopter money style hetereodox economists just see a... slide), but my school points out entropy via EROI etc. Nothing has a conversion cost of 0, non-substitutibility is just an impossibly high cost for instant conversion.
The US massproduces and exports the very ills which put Western Civilization on its deathbed. Many in the US may tend the embers, but far from all and not from a position of strength.
Much of my friend circle are Iranian, largely still enthusiastic but they've stopped posting "thank you Trump" every day. (I am mindfucked by their pro-Shah and pro-Israeli posts, which came out of left field after knowing them for ages.) But they don't discuss.
veqq
5d ago
Sour product's more important now because while the gulf makes up 20% of overall production, its refineries were producing half of exported "specialty" products. American fracking mostly produces on the lighter end too (besides gassing out).
pricing the effects of this war correctly
Not even close. PTRRY, NTR, PXS, EKO etc. will thrive in this new suicidal macro while China will grow and control the light cone. But US oil producers face a huge threat: Trump banning exports and crashing domestic prices. But you're a bit late, after so much movement the risk:reward's much lower.
The growth in passive investing already removed price discovery to a large extent, but everyone sold their vol away (options became popular) pinning the indexes. As everything unwinds, the indexes will experience radical price discovery again.
veqq
15d ago
veqq
17d ago
We could send a probe to an asteroid to mine the gold, and then just leave it there, which massively simplifies the mission. It could be traded electronically back to Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Also, today, known deposits have values and getting traded on the market like CNL. Exploration any discovering resources and reserves is a big (capital incinerating) business already.
veqq
1mo ago
"We have a word in our tongue, Komerex. Your translator has probably told you it means Empire, but what it truly means is the structure that grows. It has an opposite, Khesterex the structure that dies. We are taught by those you wish to receive your story that there are no other cultures than these and in all my years and all my travels I have seen nothing to indicate that my teaching was wrong. There are only Empires and Kuve."
Ratzel and Kjellen wrote important books about this.
veqq
1mo ago
How he can also be Fatos Ali Dumana, is beyond my Slavic knowledge
In the 80s, Bulgaria forced name changes on Muslims/Turks among other things.
I've been in mining for a few years, this has all been known (though only became a goldbug 2 years ago from other commodities.) Here's the current state: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RVacfj1eDYU?si=AY1u7uGg2s0IV2ml&t=1512 described by a business partner.
You can hear him discuss this a few years ago in this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-mBqpZEc7w8
THX.V remains the best investment around.
the gap between an Occitan and a Catalonian
A perfect example of my point, they are the same language but were not unified etc. rather colonized and converted by other areas - and very recently. By 1860, 40% of Frenchmen still spoke Occitan with a literary history older than French and a Nobel prize in literature in 1904. Catalonia recently had an independence referendum. In 1792, 10% of modern France spoke French and it took 150 years to eliminate/kill off minority languages.
Not just Austria, but even Bavaria and the rest of Southern Germany had their own standard until the late 18th century. Some of the Northern dialects until today have maintained their own standard: Dutch, which Germany had to explicitly erradicate in its own areas.
Even today, no one speaks standard Italian without an accent. The "dialects" remain very strong and heavily color speech in colloquial use.
These are standards imposed over various dialects and often larger speakerships, but there's inherent cultural and linguistic bonds leading to the current clustering. The regional identities are far older (often the regions aren't conncted to current administrative boundaries). In a different world, a lattice of sovereign regions where people spoke e.g. a panromance or panslavic standard readily comprehensible to all speakers (indeed often easier to comprehend than many existing neighboring varieties) could have been possible.
veqq
2mo ago
We don't live in ancapistan so we have to accept some government services given away at below market rates
A fun thought experiment is analyzing everything concretely done in an economic sector and redoing the cluster analysis. Existing clusters (companies) should be profitable and do many unprofitable things along the way (which they might argue ultimately help the bottom line) but you can reslice in different ways to share some services or remove things which merely compete without value add (e.g. advertising to counter the competition's ads). It's a bit difficult to determine what's ultimately accreative economic activity, just looking at the current clustering.
In a different world, with better policing/less crime making public transit more user friendly and with some union busting, to allow low hanging cost savings like train automation, the relative subsidies could fall while the social benefit grows - and the overall economy would waste less on transportation: roads are one thing, but car's depreciate quickly. Just imagine where we'd be with 7 decades of compounded investments instead!
veqq
2mo ago
Tribal clan systems (Arabs, Afghans) are incompatible with democracy.
You don't think they're more similar to the original American representative yeoman democracy pre-1840 or so? In form they seem similar, just without the high literacy and civic engagement the American colonies always enjoyed.
veqq
2mo ago
Italy is still mostly run by Italians, Spain mostly by Spaniard
It's insightful to analyze Europe(an countries) by individual provinces; the nation states are mostly rather modern of course. Bavaria, Catalonia, Ile de France, Rhone-Alpes, Baden-Württemberg, Lombardy (cf. blue banana, four motors of Europe etc. and Europe of 100 Flags)
veqq
2mo ago
Trump's anxieties and reckless tantrums are creating the very conditions that the US is trying to delay.
Verily! As with his 1st term, I remain convinced Trump is a Chinese agent. His every single action but strengthens China and weakens the US (while of course grandstanding otherwise.)
veqq
2mo ago
Meanwhile actual Europeans see them as a bunch of borderline-savages
I think this applied to both Americans and Russians.
veqq
2mo ago
What European nation would willingly submit to Ottoman or Mongol hegemony just to spite the Pope?
Byzantine Egypt before the Arabs, 18th and 19th century Hungarian and Polish leadership and national heroes constantly worked with and fought for the Ottomans...
- one of Poland's 3 national poets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Mickiewicz
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Celalettin_Pasha
- Formed a full Polish cavalry division for the Ottomans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Stanis%C5%82aw_Zamoyski
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micha%C5%82_Czajkowski
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teofil_Lapinski
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Kmety
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislas_Saint_Clair
Many thousands of examples, the Hungarian ones are mostly in Hungarian only though:
veqq
2mo ago
That I, a non-American, had to make the top level post was evidence enough that it's of secondary interest at best.
You effort's laudable. I've begun a few times, but stop as soon as I consider the audience. Others have tried. I'll disengage with most of the internet/noosphere again, as I did some years back.
veqq
2mo ago
I feel far closer to being Chinese than Indian just in ethnic/biological terms etc. But culturally? The PRC's partial deracination makes it easier than before! And well, Chinese culture seems easier than e.g. Pakistani (I mean this as closer than India, because of Abrahamic religion etc.)
veqq
2mo ago
drone-based violence
The Mexican cartels have been equipping themselves with drones and counter measures for a while. They're mostly focusing on intel but they've been used offensively too. The army's been capturing very capable ones.
veqq
2mo ago
easy for Iranians to claim asylum in Europe
The dynamics are weird. I've known Iranian refugees who settled in e.g. Hungary (which doesn't want any and makes it quite hard) while Germany often denies cases of conversion to Christianity, some official going after the family etc. but accepts gay people. (Tangentially, sex changes are a mandatory solution to homosexuality in Iran - by 1987 Molkara convinced the Ayatollah.) There is a huge brain drain of them going to grad school in Europe or Turkey, so many girls doing MAs or PhDs in STEM to escape. The wealthy have also largely fled - in some nicer malls in Turkey every woman has that fake nose...
I wrote multiple times that I don't or it doesn't work. I literally started with:
I also wrote:
How is that not clear? Why do you think I'm proposing the opposite of what I write?
Yes. You obviously don't value a car at $20 million USD because someone got scammed or overpaid on purpose to create a hypothetical. It's value not price. It's just changing units.
More options
Context Copy link