Grateful Dead

...and I usually am...but...my favorite price is free.

so if money is a proxy for value, does everything then have a price? I have argued about this over many bottles with my dear economist friend L. She believes yes, it is possible if required to put a financial value on anything and, like it or not, that is what makes our (human) world function. I reply that hers is an attitude which explains so much of what is wrong with the place. We normally split the bill.

> Want to know what a dollar is worth? Try to give one to a frog for his lillypad and see what they think about it. Mr. Pid, your poetic substitution of a dollar for a lilypad made me smile broadly. Both are known for their greenness and they're roughly the same size, but, as our friend the frog knows, it's nearly impossible to keep that dollar afloat.

do you mean margarine in a paris tango stylee?...!!i, personally, don't think they are broader. i think they fit right in, in an intelligent way. irksome be damned. i heard your hairdresser smokes pot through a kettle, so she can't be trusted...

(or alternatively, Gimme Back My Margarine, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor) Thanks, jonapi, and not to go all Miss Anne Elk on you but deadlifting my content as your own would be a violation of this site's TOS. And I've never even been to Nakano's Pancake Breakfast, I swear! Well, now that we've got that unpleasantness put aside, perhaps a link to this thread over on Blair's post might be a better answer than the ol' cut and paste. Especially as I'm not real big on repeating myself, and I find it kind of irksome when others post identical content repeatedly in multiple threads. Besides, I think that my comments are broader in scope than just the issue Blair is raising. Am I the Pot or the Kettle? Only my hairdresser knows for sure. In any event, I only want to be one of them.

that's a wonderful lesson, Mike!i'm gonna use that in Japan with the primary school children. fuck the times table! can get them to construct the wall too! or imagine it and hold the day's class in silence in their imaginations. "no problem here, Head Sensei; we're studying hypothetically. the parents will understand...". more power to the inner faculties.

nice post Mr. D-Piddy.my answer would be for people to keep drinking the kool-aid under intensive applicational appliance! journey and review should be hand-in-hand! can you please post that in Blair's blog topic? that was worthy of far more than the 4 or 5 people who are going to engage in this here subject. it demands a wider audience. if you don't, i will commandeer it and lay claim of authourship to the mighty Pancake! no one will check anyway!

Over on one of Blair's recent blog posts, as well as several other places on the 'net there has been much hue and cry about Phil's choice of a price point for the initial run of shows at his new digs in San Rafael. This, and Mike's post here leads me to contemplate three of the most thoroughly misunderstood related concepts, two of which are peculiar to humans: Value, Money and Markets. Let's start with Value. The most frequently overlooked truth about Value is that it exists only as a concept. There is no physical property "Value." Sentient creatures perceive Value in things around them because they determine those things to be important to them for various reasons and in varying degrees. The more importance they see in any of those things, the more they are willing to risk to keep or make those things available to them. So Value is not only conceptual, it is also relative. What is this Money stuff anyway? Well, money, specifically units of any particular sovereign currency, is merely a physical manifestation of a fraction of the commonly held perception of the aggregate value of the underlying economy of that sovereignty. That's right, I said perception. Money is only "worth" something because people choose to believe so. Since it is a proxy for Value, it too is purely conceptual, a complete abstraction. It only works as long as people keep drinking the Kool-Aide. Case in point would be the global effects of the subprime mortgage fiasco. Approximately one third of all the accumulated capital on the planet disappeared simply because people stopped believing it was ever there at all. So it's not like one scoundrel made off with a large chunk of your 401K, it was the whole mob. And the sad part is that they didn't even realize that they were doing it to you. Or themselves. But such is the nature of Markets. Markets are where the current relative value of things are determined. A finite valuation point is reached when one party determines that they are willing to part with something they have for some other thing, and they find someone else who feels exactly the opposite about those things. That coincidence determines the relative value of those two things, at that point in time for those two entities. Others can and most likely will have differing perceptions of the relative value of those things at other times. Whether one is fulfilling the role of Buyer or Seller depends entirely on the motivation of the party to the transaction. In the case of Phil's shows, one could argue that Phil has taken the Sell side by creating an Offer (give me $150 and you can get in to see my show) in the belief that people will perceive that the opportunity is worth more to them than the money. If he's right, he'll sell out his shows. If not, the potential audience will establish an alternative price point at which they are willing to sell their dollars in exchange for a show or Phil will allow his volatile inventory to just evaporate. Hard to imagine anyone finding much value in the right to attend an event in the past. Well, at least until we get that whole time travel thing worked out. Anyway, circling back around to the question that sparked this diatribe, we run out of other people's money just as soon as we stop believing that there's any more of it to get, and not one moment sooner or later. Simply because it only exists because we choose to believe it does. Want to know what a dollar is worth? Try to give one to a frog for his lillypad and see what they think about it. That's what a dollar is really worth.

> 3D? More like 4D at least. Or the 13 flavors proposed in some versions of String Theory. But it's the collision of theory and praxis, the Thud Factor, that's got me thinking this morning and recalling my sixth grade math teacher, Mr. Kruger, and the lesson he taught us one day with the following scenario: if you are standing one foot from the wall and then move closer to the wall by half of the distance, and then again close the remaining gap by half, and then again close the remaining gap by half, etcetera--you would never reach the wall, in theory. He then kicked the wall and ended the lesson.

don't forget that any trauma we encounter is because we perceive it that way.