Subject: Re: cost, value, price
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 05:18:30 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3226281524757946@naggum.net>

* Paul Foley
> Only if "zero" counts as "something"; but that's the same "something"
> as "nothing".

* Thomas Bushnell, BSG
| Huh?  By all the measures here, labor is worth something.  People can
| and do pay dearly for it, it has use value, etc.  

  Sure, but if you just "work" and claim that people should give you some
  money, you will see that labor itself has no value.  Unfortunately,
  effort itself is rewarded in some forms of education, so if you work hard
  on something in a counterproductive way, you still get rewarded.  Some of
  my teachers refused to give me high grades because I did not need to work
  at all to get excellent results.  (It never became clear to me what they
  wanted me to do.)  The same problem appears to have been at the core of
  my skirmishes with the tax authories.  Because I could earn enough money
  keep myself comfortably supported for a whole year in three months and
  did not fancy paying a lot more taxes just to get at lot less money back
  from my effort, I took the rest of the year off to study or do volunteer
  work (such as Emacs and SGML), but these morons thought that anyone who
  does not report working nor collect unemployment benefits, must of course
  be defrauding the government.  I have also worked with people who got
  pissed at me for suddenly figuring out how to do something a lot smarter
  and cutting my development time and costs in half and still wanting to
  get paid in full according to contract.  If I had wasted away the extra
  time and not "surprised" them with early results, they would apparently
  have been a lot happier.  My intolerance for morons has probably been
  shaped by these experiences.

///
-- 
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.