According to this, pennies are now worth less than their cost of manufacture. My rule for getting rid of a coin is the point at which you can no longer purchase anything with a single one of it. In fact, at this point, with multi-hundred-thousand-dollar houses, and new cars costing over twenty thousand dollars, is there even anything that you can buy with a nickel any more?
Time to can the coin, and come up with some other way to honor Mr. Lincoln.
Ron Bailey explodes it.
Ron Bailey explodes it.
Ron Bailey explodes it.
In The Ethicist column in the New York Times Magazine last month, Randy Cohen talked about organ transplant sales being unethical:
For a system of acquiring organs to be ethical, it must be equitable, which is not the case when one economic class is exploited (and put at significant medical risk) for the benefit of another. And exploitation it is when the seller is not making a truly voluntary decision but responding to financial desperation.
Is it unethical to hire a maid who is financially desperate? If I had trouble getting a job out of college, I would be financially desperate, but I would be very grateful for the opportunity to sell my labor.
Organs are different than jobs. But the difference is not financial desperation.
Well, actually, power from the people:
I’ve always thought it’d be cool if we had giant turbines powered simply by brawn, sort of like that mill-thingy that made Conan so strong in the first Conan movie. I’m not talking slave labor, but if we could work out the technological kinks we could hire people at minimum wage to push a giant wheel around and around generating electricity much the same way dams do. Teenagers who couldn’t find other work could do it. They’d get in shape, stay out of trouble, and earn a few bucks. Unemployed people would always have at least one fall back job available to them. It would help with health care costs as it would provide ample exercise. There would be no damage to the environment and pretty much the only foot print would be, well, footprints. People who worked nights or in bad weather would be paid a bit extra. PIRG hippy volunteers could do it too, in their spare time. Every human turbine spin is one less gallon of oil pumped from the ground.
Though, as he notes in the preamble graf, he’s not sure about the economics of it. I can assure him that it’s nuts.
But it reminds me of an idea I and some colleagues at Rockwell had back in the eighties about how to get the public more involved in space. Since one can view the space program as the modern-day equivalent of a cathedral, or building pyramids, why not get the masses into the act? Instead of using those big diesel engines on the Crawler at the Cape, why not harness human muscle power? We could have hundreds of people–volunteers–pulling on ropes, hauling the giant vehicle down the causeway. I think that it would be quite symbolic of…something.
Maybe.
Housing starts are down, more than expected.
Just anecdotally, we’ve had several houses on our street for sale for months, and they’re not moving. One house down the street was on the market for almost seven hundred thousand last fall. It’s now for sale by the owner. He had marked it down to six something. Yesterday I noticed that the sign said “price reduced” and the flyer no long had a price.
I also noted that Zillow has dropped its estimate of our house in east Boca Raton over the past few months, by about ten percent.
Dennis Wingo makes a curious statement in a comment to my April Fools post.
Space tourism is a wealth depleter, not a wealth maker.
Is there something unique about space tourism that makes it a “wealth depleter,” or is it true of tourism in general? If so, I suspect that the region around Orlando, Florida would find it a surprising statement. As would Hawaii, or much of the Caribbean. Or France.
I’ve had this argument before, once on the NASP program, with a second lieutenant who didn’t believe that something had value unless you could drop it on your toe (in defiance of the market, in which people part with their money every day for non-material items).
I often complain about politicians who are focused on creating jobs, rather than creating wealth, which is why we have a very expensive, and not very productive space program. But what is wealth? I don’t know what Dennis means by his statement, but I’m quite confident that he’s very, very wrong. Which society is wealthier–one in which no one travels anywhere, or one in which many do?
There is value in tourism–if there weren’t, people wouldn’t pay money for it (and travel and tourism are among the top three industries on the planet, measured in the trillions of dollars). A world in which people can afford to go into space, and indulge themselves in their desires to do so, is a world that is wealthier than a world in which they cannot. Moreover, the space passenger market is just the kind of market needed to drive launch costs down, and reliability up, which is a necessary condition for many other space activities that Dennis presumably would consider “creating,” rather than “depleting” wealth.
Truly, I find this statement utterly baffling.
Nathan Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures, former CTO of Microsoft, is calling for the Supreme Court to hang firm on patent property rights in “Inventors Have Rights, Too!” in the Wall Street Journal.
Goliath is crying “Unfair! Take David’s sling away!” Without full rights there is no way for a small inventor to get a big infringer to the table to settle. Instead, they’ll stall and drown the little guy with legal fees. The courts would be put in the middle and have to decide all future licensing revenue. Is that the way we want to run an innovative economy?
If we prevented people who owned houses and cars from removing people who were infringing their rights there, it would be pretty clear that the rights would be worth a lot less.
But how should we grant these patents? Is it sufficient to stick a virtual flag in meme space like a 16th century explorer? Should there be a time window when many can make a filing after the initial filing and the patent right auctioned to the highest bidder with all of the filers getting a portion of the royalties?
—–Update 2006-03-30 09:21—–
The Economist weighs in too. They say save injunctions for “irreparable harm” which strikes me as a rotten standard. Either money is good enough and royalties can be decided in the courts or it isn’t and patent holders need a stick.
Nathan Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures, former CTO of Microsoft, is calling for the Supreme Court to hang firm on patent property rights in “Inventors Have Rights, Too!” in the Wall Street Journal.
Goliath is crying “Unfair! Take David’s sling away!” Without full rights there is no way for a small inventor to get a big infringer to the table to settle. Instead, they’ll stall and drown the little guy with legal fees. The courts would be put in the middle and have to decide all future licensing revenue. Is that the way we want to run an innovative economy?
If we prevented people who owned houses and cars from removing people who were infringing their rights there, it would be pretty clear that the rights would be worth a lot less.
But how should we grant these patents? Is it sufficient to stick a virtual flag in meme space like a 16th century explorer? Should there be a time window when many can make a filing after the initial filing and the patent right auctioned to the highest bidder with all of the filers getting a portion of the royalties?
—–Update 2006-03-30 09:21—–
The Economist weighs in too. They say save injunctions for “irreparable harm” which strikes me as a rotten standard. Either money is good enough and royalties can be decided in the courts or it isn’t and patent holders need a stick.