🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@TruthSandwich Of course not, no one is the alt/far anything, they dont exist... well at least not to the people in them.. Best way to tell if someone is alt-left, if they say the alt-left doesnt exist.

@mk

Oh im sorry, you were right about everything, now that I realize you were using your own made up words with entirely different definitions than what is accepted I realize now I was the fool and should have realized you were really just speaking english from 100 years int he future that you just invented this very moment... God i should have learned to listen to you sir, I feel so stupid.

@icedquinn

@ceoln

Don't sweat it too much, im surprised you lasted this long with the sandwich.

@TruthSandwich

@mk

I guess thats one way to cope with your ignorance.. have fun with that.

@icedquinn

@mk

The accepted definition of wealth may very well be too complicated for you and others to understand. I'd like to think you can, but perhaps your right. But an idea being too complicated for you to understand doesnt suddenly make you right to make up a fictional definition all your own just so you can understand it.

@icedquinn

@mk

Yes your quote agrees just fine with my first response to you about cows as money:

https://qoto.org/@freemo/110789213414775541

@icedquinn

@mk

No, well sorta. A society can pick anything as money. It can be pieces of paper, or it can be camels.. sure.. But those things arent money just because someone somewhere used them for trade.

Two cows **could** be money, if society were to make it money.. but it doesnt just become money because we happened to trade them once.

@icedquinn

@mk Well its complicated. The question is how deep do we need to go in order to understand the original question.

So in its simple terms people think of it as the total sell value of everything you have. But in reality thats not the case for several reasons.

1) The money you can get for an object can be drastically different depending on how quickly you want to sell

2) As you sell goods you effect the market balance and as such effect the money value of the very thing you are trying to measure.

3) even if you do find a way to define the money value of an object it really only has relevance for a particular moment in time and place.. Any other currency, or time and youll get very different numbers. In other words, the value is fixed to utility, as is the market.

For example to #1, if I have an antique gold ring I get very different amount of money if i sell instantly (pawn shop or melt value) vs if im willing to auction it. If I am willing to wait months for the right buyer, in the case of a specialty item, it may take some time. This can more than double the sell price of an item.

So if we cant use the simple definition then how do we define wealth... Well the best way to think of it is the worth of everything you have in a much more abstract case.

As I said earlier its best to think of this in terms of a world of one or two people.. If I am the only person in the world and I own 2 cows that feeds me, I have wealth (the worth of 2 cows in terms of their utility)... If I breed those 2 cows and have 4 cows, I now have twice the wealth I did before, even if I am the only person on the planet and money never existed.

Now if all of a sudden some other person existed on the planet with me and offered me 100$ a cow, if i have 2 cows still and he offers me double at 200$ a cow, even though the money value is twice, it doesnt imply I have created any wealth, since i have all the same "stuff" I had before, and presumably the worth of the cows hasnt changed (if it did I might have more wealth).

To e

@mk Sadly the world is sometimes complicated. the level of complication is needed (and would become evident if this were a productive conversation)

@mk Money is part of the conversation, but money is not wealth.. first you need to understand how wealth is generated and what it even means. Then we can tie it back into money.

@mk Jesus christ, I never said that things dont have a price... money and wealth are different things. Wealth is also not the sum of all the prices of everything you own either...

But you seem more intent on arguing about something you dont understand than trying to learn and having a productive conversation...

@mk Again posting this just shows you need tor ead up ont he base concepts first... see how your quote doesnt have the word "wealth" anywhere in it... that should be a clue to you. Wealth is NOT money.

@mk Nop im sorry that is not how wealth works.. you are thinking int erms of "1 dollar".. dollars are paper, they are money, they arent wealth. If you want to understand these base ideas so you can understand the bigger one, you first need a better understanding of what wealth is. You can probably understand that best when you think in terms of one or two people, but you are right in larger populations it gets more complex, but the same principles still hold.

@Gbudd

Honestly even within a company it isnt a 0-sum game, it just might be hard to see. I think it is most obvious (though not limited to) companies that sell a product, particularly when manufactured from raw products.

If I am a lumber company then cut and cured lumber has more value than a tree the dead trees I buy.. so generation of new wealth is clear and easy to quantify,

@mk