Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DonHopkins 2164 days ago
Just cheaper for whoever salvages the ship -- somebody else had to pay for the sunken cost of building and sinking the ship.
2 comments

> sunken cost

Nice.

> somebody else had to pay for the sunken cost of building and sinking the ship

Na remember it was war, so all the money went back to the economy :/

Money-oriented thinking is a road to economic misunderstanding. The economy is about stuff. In practice one often measures all the stuff using money, yes, because what else would one use? but as a proxy measure for its value; it's never actually about the money itself.

(stuff = "final goods and services" to be technical)

> because what else would one use?

Energy witch can be food, oil, gas, the energy transformator is a human (or his brain) a maschine or a animal, and the exchange between energie to the endresult is often money. So money/exchangemedium has just the worth both partys agreed on.

Now you are measuring electricity instead of the light you read by, and fuel instead of the vacation trip you take with it. You have worsened the problem I refer to.
Surely energy input is the right metric. If I use a gallon of gas to power a life-saving ambulance or if I burn it just for fun, those two actions should have the same importance.
Energy IS electricity, and to create a Lightbulp you NEED energy, it's exactly the same.

For your vacation trip you NEED energie in form of food an fuel, the vehicle you travel in, is made by food and fuel...exacly the same.

If the transport company accept your fuel (or workforce witch again is fulled by energie (your food)) as payment, you exchanged energie to energie, probably they dont and thats why you use a exchangemedium called money.

EDIT: You dont have to messure anything, if you need light exchange energy to light, travel exchange fuel to distance, working body food to (body)-energy. To make stuff you calculate the sum of the energie needed for, and thats the price of the product, sure exeptions like apple exists ;)

the fundamentally inescapable problem is your approach measures an input instead of output, and thus makes technology improvements look like an economic crash

consider the 'light' market:

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/12/Trends-in-the-Pri...