A friend from Argentina once told me Argentina keeps its best wines for themselves and exports the mediocre stuff, even at the sake of profits.
Similarly, a friend from Turkey once said he couldn’t find good Turkish olives outside of Turkey because “Turks are terrible businessmen and keep the best olives to themselves.”
These are anecdotal and might be untrue but I liked the idea.
At an individual level, it’s irrational to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma yet experiments show people cooperate.
Contributing to open source projects may fall into this category.
Have you observed any obvious behavior that goes counter to profit maximization? Any cool examples?
Heard the same (keep the best for themselves, only sell the inferior stuff) about Spanish olive oil, Italian pasta, and Chinese everything.
Trump.
My state has free school lunch for all kids. However it’s typical school lunch quality and quantity
My kid’s high school wants to install a fingerprint system to keep hungry kids from cheating by using the code of someone who brings lunch. You want to install an expensive system to collect biometrics n kids to save like $2 per instance, or whatever pittance goes into school lunches?
Gawd forbid people actually enjoy the things they produce rather than sell them abroad.for maximum profit.
The UK under Thatcher utterly anihilated its own manufacturing sector at a huge longterm economic detriment seemingly just to destroy labour unions.
The UK manufacturing sector for raw materials and basic products was on the way out anyway due to costs being so low in Asia, so it was more to be able to shut it down and save the government from needing to bail it out while also destroying labour unions while they were at it, hence why the advanced manufacturers (JCB, Rolls Royce, etc.) were largely unaffected
I can go to Starbucks and pay $5 for a coffee, or I can make better & get higher on at home for 25 cents.
That’s rational though, isn’t it?
Modding in general, most of us never profit from it at all.
I will never, ever respect someone who looks at the creativity and altruism of modding communities and says “That is irrational”. Absolutely soulless talk. No value in the world that isn’t monetary to those assholes.
Absolutely, life isn’t about making money, modding is a hobby like any other.
I think a lot of people think that anything that can make money should.
Thank you for the fun times. I don’t mod games, but other creative work I’ve done still feels real good.
Other than self entitled twat end users shitting up a comment section. Very loud minority.
No problem!
I’ve only done this for about half a year but nearly all the interactions I’ve had with the users have been great, I really can’t complain.
A friend from Italy told me that they keep the best cheese for themselves and export the rest.
While Italy does have very good cheese, I can’t help but to be reminded that they also consider maggot infested cheese to be excellent.
I’m sure you could write an entire collection of books on the irrationality of Brexit.
As James O’Brien graciously puts it: “We are the first country in history to have placed economic sanctions upon itself”
Subsidies on consumer goods. You do not want to be in Bolivia right now.
This.
It’s irrational to consider maximum monetary gain to be the only best outcome. Why? What’s the goal? Money is only means to an end, not intrinsically worth anything.
Put another way, if the Argentinians cherish good wine, how are they better off with slightly more money and mediocre wine? (I guess they could use the profits to buy good wine?)
Totally agree. That’s why I love it so much. Like a big “fuck you” to economic theory and profit maximization.
Germany does the same with wine to the point where Brits go to Germany and wonder why they’re sending us all the shit stuff
Gambling.
My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.
To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.
Both of those seems very rational in term of maximazing value.
