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by boplicity 2214 days ago
"post-scarcity"

There will be no more "scarcity" when the "value" of the time required to produce these works reaches "zero." Until then, there will be plenty of scarcity.

By the way, I think we would all need "immortality" in order to reach that point.

So, yeah.

Not going to happen.
1 comments
sudosysgen 2214 days ago
Well, no. That is not what scarcity means. If we had an economy where you could replicate cars, food, houses, spaceships and so on for free, that would be post-scarcity, even though it takes some work for it to be engineered at the beginning.

Bits on a computer that can be reproduced forever are not scarce.

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boplicity 2213 days ago
Your comment illustrated the problem quite well. Your list of things are physical objects.

Some people don't seem to value the effort required to create new ideas. Hence, they are seen as "free" and not worth anything.

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sudosysgen 2212 days ago
Ideas have a marginal cost of zero. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to monetize them on a per-unit basis. In that sense, copies of ideas are not scarce.

A car is not just an object, a car is also an idea. It's a design, the engineering of its parts, the implementation of its constructions, the code needed to make it work, and so on. And yet if we could replicate it for free, achieving a marginal labour cost of zero, then it would not be scarce anymore.

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kube-system 2212 days ago
The implication of what you're saying is silly. Yes, making a marginal copy of the latest Star Wars film is nearly zero. However, the first instance cost $275,000,000 to create. We split the cost across each unit because if we didn't, the movie wouldn't exist, because nobody would buy the first unit.

You are getting too caught up on the fact that some things have low marginal costs to produce that you're entirely neglecting that overhead costs are a thing that also exist.

Even for something like Linux, there are gigantic overhead costs. The vast majority of Linux commits are made by people sitting at their paid job. Those lines of code are not free, they are financed by the companies who are willing to pay Intel/IBM/RedHat etc for their products and services.

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