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Path: utzoo!utcsstat!laura
From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Money not "wasted" on silos and space
Message-ID: <1510@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 3-Dec-83 01:03:54 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1510
Posted: Sat Dec  3 01:03:54 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Dec-83 11:03:44 EST
References: <135@csd1.UUCP>, <536@dciem.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 39

Ah, but Martin, I *do* think that we have a perpetual motion machine.
(so it looks like a Rube Goldberg machine :-) ). We also manage to
cheat entropy a little bit. The other day, somebody offered me
money to goo and look at his computer installation and tell him
what was wrong with it. All that it required on my part was thinking.
Now thinking is a rather neat thing. I do it all the time. All you
have to do is feed me and keep me warm and I will go on thinking.

Every so often, people will decide to throw money at me for doing
what i would be doing even if they weren't paying me -- namely
thinking. This is astonishing when you really think about it.

The question is "what is real"? You really want your money to represent
something if only "that I consider this valuable". So. We all need
food. Up in this marvellous climate that you and I share ( :-) )
we all need a place to keep warm in  at night so that we don't freeze.
If we get sick, or in an accident, we need a doctor and perhaps some
drugs. 

It is arguable that there are other psychological needs (such as the
need to be loved) but you know far more about them than I do. 

All the rest are *wants* not *needs*. Now it strikes me as very strange to
build a whole world based on wants. i want lots of things which I know
I will never have. (To begin with, I would like to be 5'7"). In grasping
something and saying "i want this" you actualy saying "i want what I
expect this to be". Now as you see this works better when "what you
see is what you get" but this may have nothing to do with the price
of an object. Thus it costs me nothing to tell somebody that he
needs another disk drive but that is still worth money -- so indeed
it is his expectation which is really worth the money, not my service.

I find this all very, very strange and hard to think about. but I still
think that I just "got something for nothing". I am not sure whether it
is the money that i got for nothing or whether it is the thoughts that
i got for nothing, though...

Laura Creighton
utzoo!utcsstat!laura