Subject: Re: cost, value, price From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 05:18:30 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3226281524757946@naggum.net> * Paul Foley > Only if "zero" counts as "something"; but that's the same "something" > as "nothing". * Thomas Bushnell, BSG | Huh? By all the measures here, labor is worth something. People can | and do pay dearly for it, it has use value, etc. Sure, but if you just "work" and claim that people should give you some money, you will see that labor itself has no value. Unfortunately, effort itself is rewarded in some forms of education, so if you work hard on something in a counterproductive way, you still get rewarded. Some of my teachers refused to give me high grades because I did not need to work at all to get excellent results. (It never became clear to me what they wanted me to do.) The same problem appears to have been at the core of my skirmishes with the tax authories. Because I could earn enough money keep myself comfortably supported for a whole year in three months and did not fancy paying a lot more taxes just to get at lot less money back from my effort, I took the rest of the year off to study or do volunteer work (such as Emacs and SGML), but these morons thought that anyone who does not report working nor collect unemployment benefits, must of course be defrauding the government. I have also worked with people who got pissed at me for suddenly figuring out how to do something a lot smarter and cutting my development time and costs in half and still wanting to get paid in full according to contract. If I had wasted away the extra time and not "surprised" them with early results, they would apparently have been a lot happier. My intolerance for morons has probably been shaped by these experiences. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.