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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.

That sounds great, but the problem is that you now have to invent a new economic system to replace capitalism. If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return! What do you mean I can't sell them for $50, I have to sell them at a price the very poorest can afford? What's my incentive there to invest in a company where, no matter how much product they produce, no matter what volume of sales, they're just about covering their operating costs and I'm making back pennies instead of dollars on my investment?

Dismantling and replacing capitalism is going to be the way more difficult problem than finding out how to make cheap cheap goods and services.

the idea is the volume makes up for the lower price.. the McDonald's business model.

But you can't just price everything at pennies. McDonald's may have a Eurosaver menu, but they also have the full-price products.

I'm poking at this because it sounds great and if achievable, who could object to cheap drugs? But the nuts and bolts don't seem worked out. So where is every garage pharma getting all the energy and ingredients and plant and transport and so on? Oh something something AI has solved the problems of pulling rabbits out of hats something something. Everyone has their own personal robot slave, maybe a couple of them. We're all cellar alchemists turning lead to gold.

Take the step of "and the AI is magic" out, and how do you keep it from collapsing into a pixie dust glitter of wish-fulfilment?

If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return! What do you mean I can't sell them for $50, I have to sell them at a price the very poorest can afford?

Unfortunately for you, a malaria vaccine production facility only costs $20 in this post-scarcity utopia. If you tried charging $50 for a single dose, I'd just start my own company (blackjack and hookers optional). At that scale, I don't need to attract investors and even the utter basics of running a company like "tracking sales" or "accepting payments" might not be worthwhile.

We currently have pseudo-post-scarcity availability for a few substances:

  • Salt is the root of the word "salary", but most restaurants will have a month's supply of it just sitting on their tables that you can use as your whims dictate.
  • Water use isn't even tracked in residential Vancouver. You just pay a flat rate because measuring it isn't worth the bother

It would be great if we could add hundreds of other items to that list.

I think this kind of extreme deflation will be challenged by governments using it to just print money.

Maybe compare it to Tylenol? I didn’t realize it before having kids, but Tylenol is a life saving medicine as a fever reducer, and costs effectively nothing.

I don’t think GeoHot is laying out a full business plan here, just speaking in broad terms, and I do generally agree with him.

If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return!

And when they’re abundant and cheap like Tylenol, other people will sell them for 49.99, 49.98, 49.97, […], 0.01. Nobody will want your $50 malaria pills just like nobody wants $50 Tylenol.

At that scale, I don't need to attract investors and even the utter basics of running a company like "tracking sales" or "accepting payments" might not be worthwhile.

We've seen what happens when you don't bother tracking basics (coughFTXcough) 😁

But see, that's what I'm talking about. "At that scale" where any Tom, Dick or Harry can start churning out malaria pills without, it would seem, needing to worry about sourcing and paying for ingredients, machinery, plant, etc. then we are talking a whole new economic system.

We've seen what happens when you don't bother tracking basics (coughFTXcough) 😁

Let's stick with my example of salt.

Imagine that an accountant went up to a restaurant owner and asked:

  • How much additional table salt does the average diner use?
  • Is there a difference between breakfast/lunch/supper?
  • Which specific menu items induce higher or lower salt use?
  • Can you predict salt use based on the features of a group?

The answer would likely be something like "idk, maybe about 500 mg each because I bought a 10 kg bag ten thousand meals ago and it's half gone." In this case, the basics literally aren't worth tracking. (If the accountant was asking about steaks, on the other hand, the owner had better have those answers.)

...then we are talking a whole new economic system.

We're already 1% of the way to post-scarcity, and capitalism works just fine. I don't see any reason it would fail when we're at 50% or even 90% post-scarcity. It would simply focus on the remaining, scarce resources.

Yes, but Tylenol is not being sold at $0.01 a pill. Look at the hoops pharma companies jump through in order to keep medicines under patent, instead of becoming cheap generics.

To make things work where you get investors for your "it only costs $0.01 to make it and hence we can only charge $0.02 to sell it so your dividends will be $0.005", you will need to find some refinement of free market capitalism that we don't yet have.

Yes it is.

https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-extra-strength-acetaminophen-500-mg.%2c-1%2c000-caplets.product.100213623.html

That's 1000 for $9.99, 999 pills for 1 cent each and then 1 extra. Now, if you buy a smaller quantity it is more expensive, since you're paying them to make and ship around a smaller bottle, and there's probably also a bit of a premium for name-brand Tylenol if you don't know about generics (some of which is you paying them to advertise the existence of Tylenol to you), but here's a smaller quantity of brand-name Tylenol for something like $0.15 each.

https://www.amazon.com/Tylenol-Acetaminophen-Extra-Strength-Count/dp/B000052WQ7/

Not exactly an onerous burden.

Yes, but Tylenol is not being sold at $0.01 a pill.

It's being sold for $0.08 a pill.

Like, what the argument here? That capitalism prevents anything from becoming cheap, plentiful, and accessible?

That capitalism prevents anything from becoming cheap, plentiful, and accessible?

So far, yes. I want to see the working out when everyone can make 1 cent Tylenol in their kitchen.

Huh? Super cheap products require economies of scale. You absolutely can set up a factory churning out cheap Tylenol and sell tons of it for cheap. You're not going to be able to make small batches in your kitchen and sell them cheaply and it be economic, even if you magic away all the regulatory and supply chain hurdles.

Competition is still a powerful force when applied to big pharmaceutical corporations though. If Pharma Giant #1 and Pharma Giant #2 can both produce malaria vaccines for $0.01 per shot, the sale will go to the one that sets their price lowest. Since even a price of $0.02 per shot creates a big profit margin if you have enough volume, they get churned out, and humanity wins.

What a way to miss the point. What they seek is to make the free-market value of most things so minimal that we no longer bother to put a price on them in much the same way you're not being metered for the air you breathe, or at the least like how you don't have to pay a fee for running a tap in a restaurant even if you're not ordering in there.

It's not like Taylor Swift concert tickets being sold at a price far less than the market will bear, largely for the PR benefit of fans deluding themselves into thinking Taylor is looking out for them, so that you can make a killing off re-selling them for much more than you paid for them, if you're lucky or have a bot helping you scalp them.

This is, of course, completely orthogonal to whether or not that's feasible (I do think it is, at least for malaria vaccines), but that is what their goal is.

The world as we know it is already radically abundant compared to most of history. There are no end of things that people won't mind you taking in passing, with objections only rising when you show up with a handcart to grab all the "free" stuff.

you're not being metered for the air you breathe

Because nobody manufactures air on Earth (except Mother Nature). Creating a breathable atmosphere on the Moon is a different matter, and that would be charged for (at least according to Heinlein) and if you can't pay your oxygen bill, you will suffocate and nobody thinks that's wrong.

There's a reason I'm implicitly describing air on Earth as opposed to on a hypothetical lunar colony. My analogy is the inverse of what you're thinking, it's going from a commodity being scarce and worth rationing out to being "too cheap to meter".

Last time I heard about "too cheap to meter" it was nuclear power and we were all going to be living the abundant life with the clean energy generated by the nuclear power plants:

The phrase was coined by Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, who, in a 1954 speech to the National Association of Science Writers, said:

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.

So how did that one work out in reality, then?

Not a failure of nuclear power, but the idiots blocking it with onerous regulation. That's being reversed now, better late than never.

We don't manufacture iron ore either. We still buy and sell that - including when it's still in the ground.

Scarcity is the key variable.

X. Instead a hypothetical moon colony would nationalize the oxygen production industry, and if you don't pay your taxes you would be beaten by the police and then imprisoned.

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