Dialogue on economy and other things.

diana_coman mircea_popescu, can trade now?
mircea_popescu can.

diana_coman: 18 * 9999 * .16 * 60 * 1.85 = 3196480.3200000003ⁱ
mircea_popescu thanks.

diana_coman thanks
mircea_popescu finishing up this batch of ibs, then will put it in prod. still gotta make bct, cc, qf, but getting there. ppb too, obviously. how's the sb ?

diana_coman the sb can still wait I guess, seeing how demand for woa is high so probably best to make more of it in one go. funny how this works: demand for woa is high, but supply for sb is..non-existent. it's ongoing basically, aka still gathering it, I didn't get around to mix it - should be another couple of stacks I'd say by now, at least when mixed.
mircea_popescu hm.

diana_coman heh, the flagons want wpl meaning the wpl I sold you some time ago, isn't it? lel
mircea_popescu afaik ~all the wpl i have i either mined or bought from you. 2015-2017, rancho foxy.

diana_coman ahahaha, quite. I actually have more grass too, just didn't yet get around to mix it; at those quantities even that can take a while
mircea_popescu heh.

diana_coman so it was 18 stacks now + 16 last time + 11 before,that's 45, not bad
mircea_popescu yeah. certainly didn't leave me much time to craft other stuff. anyway, the market is getting pretty stupid. demand for woa is nominally high, but i doubt it exists ; demand for cft appeared immense, then it didn't exist. the whole system of quota allocationsⁱⁱ is fundamentally broken in that the reason market even exists in the first place is to help people optimize resource allocation rather than having to engage in the "oh, but i put up the sb, or but i put up the that, i should get this i should get that". yet nobody wants to use it, because obviously once it's on the market suddenly everyone's "cautious" or w/e the fuck it's called. i dunno what to do about it, quite frankly.

diana_coman well, I'm not sure the market actually...exists in game as such; it isn't really about "but I put up x or y" - it's simply that they feed into one another to such degree that one is then better off NOT selling it if not able to get back the resulting product. efficiency re costs is nice and fine but gets punched in the nose by scarcity I guess.ⁱⁱⁱ
mircea_popescu i suspect the problem is a lot deeper. you don't powerwash a century of socialism + the benefits of socialization in a year. this whole thing of "i expect to solve my problems through the use of money" thing is just not there. and that's pretty much the substance of capitalism, as opposed to "through talking them out" or "through prayer" or whatever alternative responses seen in history.^iv scarcity is entirely manufactured, here, what's so scarce naturally about basics ?^v

diana_coman not about basics; about cft needed to get basics! if I sell you all grass and get no cft then I'm fucked. no more grass. simple. moreover: if I sell you all grass and then have to buy cft at a price that is too high then I'm better off making cft myself and selling it.
mircea_popescu ah, but i'm selling it back anyway. not like i want to use it.

diana_coman yes, but to someone else so see above. and with woa look here: I don't mind AT ALL selling tons of sb to make woa for everbody who wants it, sure, what's the problem: I sell MORE sb, good; BUT if I don't get ANY woa then I can't start the numina market which is actually even more profitable; moreover I'm prolly better off getting something other than sb which is a pain.
mircea_popescu not how it worked, in practice. which is i suppose a fine restatement of the problem in alt terms : the expectation ~never meets the reality. this gap is then definitionally braindamage, or ideology, or however you call the difference between what people think is and what actually is.

diana_coman well, in practice there was no demand for cft so that was not an issue, but initially it seemed to be precisely that, aha.
mircea_popescu but this is not the first time. even not counting the "buy package for x, sell components for x/2" faux market problem, pretty much every item to date of any note was "omg huge demand -- wait, what ?" lbn, you name it. the cgd-cft binome we got going is by far the largest such trade in history, 45 stacks wut.

diana_coman myeah; and we got it going basically when I finally got some noobs going, be they bots if people was such a tall order. tbh I'm no expert and all that but essentially I don't think there is a market, simply because there aren't...merchants basically or industrialists or how you want to call them around.^vi
mircea_popescu well yeah. once there was reliable production (of grass, via bots, of cft, cuz i did it) then suddenly prices dropped to ~half what "they seemed to be" and nobody had anything substantial to say about it, showing that, again, the say wasn't worth much in the first place.

diana_coman precisely; and yes, it all reminds me very pointedly of the village "shop": does anyone in the village actually have a say on the prices or even produce there? theoretically yes, in practice they will talk, sure, all of it nonsense and they might even be the first ones to be surprised if anyone pays attention to that talk.
mircea_popescu i suppose what we got basically are rural economies, and if franz joseph hadn't done transylvania the honor of banishing the vlasini^vii and forcing peasants to pay money, the peasant society would have happily traded wood and wool for grain and so forth until the termic death of the universe. basically eulora economy is suffering from combat not being implemented.

diana_coman ahahaha, pretty much it would seem, yeah
mircea_popescu and then dorks and "our democracy" whine about the un-necessity of war. and so forth. schmucks, if it weren't for the evil "warmongers" they'd still be rubbing sticks together, as happy as the nude iroquis.

diana_coman well, they WOULD be happy
mircea_popescu yeah, the happiness of the pregnant if barefot female. "but the mud between toes feels so good!"

diana_coman thing is: it really feels good for some people, what.^viii
mircea_popescu the problem comes back to headcount, because the fundamental way in which war works is by killing people, which is the statal equuvalent of breaking fingers. whereas the blobs of existence present in eulora aren't yet differentialed enough to have recognizable fingers.

diana_coman aha
mircea_popescu i suppose you're leading the way there, with your children. logically you'd be the zerg queen of eulora.

diana_coman ahahaha, indeed

mircea_popescu thinking more about it, it seems to me evident that there's two components of demand : commodity and strategic. commodity demand works like buying electricity works, i don't pre-buy and store a pile of electricity wtf^ix. strategic demand works like meat in socialism, buy today for it's better to have it rot in your fridge than to not have bought all you could. these are very strictly separate -- a habit of interacting with highly specialized, muchly refined commodity markets make people regard even 1% slack as excessive ; meanwhile the sheer panic induced by the obvious doom of the socialist system makes strategic buying fundamentally cataclysmic, quite like the rotting meat thing. because the phase transition between these two modes is so abrupt, the gap so wide, things appear to be in demand strictly when not available. "yes i want x, but now that i can buy it i only want an hour's worth.^x had it not been available i'd have wanted a lifetime's worth". seems to explain the "ghost demand" problem entirely -- i can't live without shoes, but i am not buying more shoes than a pair if i can buy them. i do want 50 i mean 500 i mean just give me the whole truck if i can't buy them, however.
diana_coman basically it's more: I want x to BE AVAILABLE rather than I want x

mircea_popescu just about. essentially, "i am not a person, i do not wish to exist, therefore i have nothing to say about myself. as far as the world is concerned, however, here's a list of oughts". goes straight into "just the facts"-ism, and all that. i suddenly understand what they're trying to say by "not being egotistical"/"being empathetic" or whatever the fuck they call the contemporary anglovirtues. it's basically -- nonexistence.^xi
diana_coman tbh some years ago I think I blurted the "just the facts dammit" thing myself: MY meaning at that point was "you idiots have nothing to say so stop saying it and just let the facts speak for themselves". might not be the same meaning for everyone, granted.

mircea_popescu except idiots can't access facts much like ghosts can't move furniture. as that spooky kid aptly put it (in the sixth sense), "they only see what they want to see."
diana_coman myeah, I hadn't realised I was asking the impossible anyway.

1. ~3 mn ECu, 0.0319 etc BTC's worth. [↩]
2. I do this thing whereby I always sell back certain quantities of finished product to the people who provided the raw materials. This is fundamentally necessary to avoid choking the production lines -- if the guy mining grass can't buy thread he won't be able to mine further grass, making further thread impossible. The problem is evidently improductive use of finished product, ie fundamentally resource misallocation, and I suppose under a socialist regime would be repressed as hoarding or whatever. "Ban shorts!!1".

   The amusing parallel with the situation in dying Soviet economies, where workers were forced to take on some random chunks of random items in lieu of pay does not escape me. How the wheel turns. [↩]

3. Obviously the converse statement of this is purely financial -- consider all the discussions of relative inflation and so forth.

   The simplest statement of the situation would be to say that there's no capital controls in Eulora which makes economic activity problematic! Take that, proponents of free markets in the sense of free capital flows. What is your answer ?

   And in subsidiary, I can't help myself but reiterate that I've never seen, nor ever imagined, nor ever could have conceived of an economic laboratory quite as useful, effectual or productive as this little gem called Eulora. I confess I've learned more about economy by participating for a few years than otherwise in my entire life, decades participating in all sorts of markets, schools and whatnot. In any case I've learned more than the entire profession of economics ever figured out, in its coupla centuries of history. This isn't an idle boast, but an understatement if anything. [↩]

4. Take for instance the "patriotism" of the dressed whores, as fine example as any of the reflex attempt to "protect" oneself from capitalism -- entirely reminiscent of the animal's attempt to "protect" itself from the vet, or the street urchin's insistence on protecting itself from washing. [↩]
5. Just about anyone can mine basic resources, their first day in game. But they still have to actually do it, experimentally much too high a bar for white people, paralytics of the can as they find themselves. [↩]
6. Capitalists. Yes. [↩]
7. Reference to dumbass Romanian Socialst Republic propaganda piece, casting some shepherds as the victims in the interaction with their sovereign because he made them pay money and get involved economically, which they didn't wish to do, "these lands were ours forever, we won't make contracts" etc. Somehow the fact that the commies themselves did exactly that on a larger scale escaped the view of the propagandist, as per usual. [↩]
8. I do not believe there's aught more obscene or more immoral than to tolerate this kind of "happiness". And I do suspect that's exactly what drove the Mongols : they saw all these herds of bipedal sheep befouling god's green earth and simply could not tolerate the insult, so they did something about it.

   I can't help but regret they did not do more. [↩]

9. Technically I do, because UPSen etc, but let's say most people don't. [↩]
10. Remember Elaine Benes buying the Today Sponge ? Quite like that. [↩]
11. The word for existence, as far as these zombies are concered, is probably "sociopathy". Harvard certifies. [↩]