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by mapt
433 days ago
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> If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money I feel like money is overwhelmingly how we denominate value, effort, and agency in our society. Almost every time somebody says "You can't just throw money at the problem", they are arguing that we shouldn't even try that, contrary to all established reasoning about how society works. There are diminishing returns to funding, but the people who use this expression are typically at a tiny fraction of where we would expect to hit them. If you want to have a fishing industry because fish are your idealized heritage, then choose to subsidize it heavily either to continue to exist, and/or to expand it into waters and economies of scale where you can still fish profitably. Like the Japanese and the Chinese do, respectively. |
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Money is something you give people so they can eat and stay warm while they do the thing you want. They still have to be doing the thing you want. Sometimes there's enough reputation and legal threats on the line that you can assume the person will do the thing just based on the fact they're taking money from you and not freaking out. Companies do things this way a lot - individuals not as much.
The abstraction is not the territory, and the idea that money denominates value is an abstraction... often we define "value" as "that for which money is exchanged", making the abstraction tautological, at no gain. This is often done by people who want to think the thing they're spending a lot of money on is very valuable, or want to make you think the thing you're spending a lot of money on is very valuable.