Loftwings and Demons

I think sometimes people are reluctant to spend money on food because it's not seen as something you can keep long term. And I think that is not an entirely correct way of looking at food. It's better to think of food as having different categories ranging from short term, highly perishable items like fresh fruit or vegetables to items that can last effectively forever if properly stored like vanilla extract or salt.

It's more reasonable to look at dried and canned foods as an investment that can often last longer than, say, your new cell phone. This is why I collect spices and teas. Even though most won't last forever, they can easily last a few years. These things may seem pricy, but if they're something you enjoy, they can save you money if you can use them at home rather than relying on restaurants to enjoy them, which will cost you more in the long run.

I also think buying staples that you use in bulk can be very beneficial. I love buying a few pounds of freeze-dried vegetables or lentils or beans and then just not having to worry about buying that food for a year or two. It's been more than a year since I've had to buy peas, carrots, or corn. This doesn't mean I never buy these things fresh, but that I mostly only do that to enjoy the experience of the fresh vegetable and I don't have to worry about not having these available or constantly buying them. And because my mixed vegetables are dried and not frozen, I don't have to worry about freezer space for them either.

Tumblr is continuing its vast slide downhill and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to hold out on that platform, even with a defunct blog. The Tumblr Live debacle (what is this 'snooze' nonsense?) has convinced me that no, Tumblr is not going to get better, it's just going to give its users the option to pay Tumblr for them to be exploited by it. And no, this cannot be fixed, because it is the point of venture funding and how companies like Tumblr work. It's not and never will be about the customer, even if the customer is paying for the service. This is because the company runs on debt. There are plenty of other paid services like this--for example Amazon, which is anti-customer in a lot of ways. I boycott them both because they're anti-worker and anti-customer. Amazon, like Tumblr, was also not profitable for a large portion of its history, and regularly operates by selling items for a loss. But profitability didn't make it start treating employees or customers better. Its entire business model is about pleasing the investors at the expense of everyone else. And that's how Tumblr works too.

This leaves me with a dilemma because I know a lot of the people I met on Tumblr are never leaving that site...

I want to have a better understanding of the basics of economics.  To this end, I feel like there are two works that I should read in their entirety in order to better understand the underlying principles that all of the world's major modern economies operate on:

• An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776)

 

• The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (1848).

I have read parts of both of these works.  The problem is--it's hard for me to motivate myself to push on, because this isn't the type of reading my brain naturally takes to. The types of things that do come easily to me are like, reading fantasy and sci-fi, reading how-to's, browsing through portions of pop science or pop mathematics books.  So I need to find a way to motivate myself to really read over this material in an effective way.  Maybe it would help if I made annotations on the book while reading and/or kept some notes of thoughts and observations I had while reading these documents?  Hmmmm.

Of course, there's way more to economics than just these two documents.  There's all sorts of historical context, and different countries have applied these concepts in different ways.  Also, another thought I have is that there's two aspects to economics, what is and what could be.  As such, I think it's important to examine not only the 'what is' which models itself closely on these two documents, but also to take a more speculative approach in terms of what could be.  Additionally, there's also the question of how economics functioned historically outside of the context in which these two economic systems developed, because both Adam Smith and Karl Marx are European.  I don't think that's an accident, since the conditions in which they developed their ideas were a direct response to societal forces that are currently relevant worldwide due to the long history of European imperialism and colonialism (in fact it might be said that the colonialism and imperialism of the US, Australia, and Canada, for example, are simply extensions and continuations of this history).  But it also means that these societal forces...are not a universal, and so perhaps we need to take a more expansive view of economic systems than simply the current dichotomous view of 'what is' and expand to 'what could be' in order to ever really hit upon 'what should be'.

So stocks aren't really money any more than bitcoin is (despite what the latter attempts to pass itself off as), but if they were, then wouldn't selling stocks for cash just be an extreme form of currency arbitrage?

It occurs to me that a lot of the vital studies done to understand the flow of resources, while many times utilizing advanced scientific techniques, are essentially, at their core, accountancy.  Like the study I mentioned in my earlier post today about the aquifers.  That's all about measuring the inflows and outflows of water.  Climate change studies do that too, via measurement of greenhouse gases and other related indicators.  Maybe one of the problems in our world is that there are too many accountants focused on money and not enough focused on the environment.