SourceForge takes over SF accounts; releases gold-laced installers of questioned monetary value



  • @Gaska said:

    the question is why.

    I believe I've offered several rational reasons for the desirability. Of course, I hadn't written them yet when you wrote this; however, several previous posters have made some of the same points.


  • FoxDev

    @Gaska said:

    So by this point, by a series of logical conclusions, we've proven that "rare things are expensive" is equivalent to "rare things are desirable". Don't you agree?

    Agreed, with the caveat that there is a usefulness for those rare things.


  • Banned

    Yes, I think the original argument is pretty much settled - gold is useful for making things, hence it initial price; then it became valuable by definition, and now it's mostly industrial uses, tradition and historical hype.


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    Agreed, with the caveat that there is a usefulness for those rare things.

    I said, for the sake of argument, let's ignore the usefulness.



  • @Gaska said:

    rarity increasing the price is irrational.

    Not if there is some rational reason for $thing to have any value at all. Given that $thing has some intrinsic value, there will be a demand to have $thing. If $thing is readily available, it will not be expensive; if $thing is difficult to obtain, it will be more expensive than if it were common.


  • Banned

    ...Oooooh, I see it! You're catching on the discussion and don't read my clarifications here at the bottom of topic yet!


  • Banned

    Still waiting for Everything Wrong With Prince of Persia: Warrior's Within.

    Ping @blakeyrat


  • FoxDev

    @Gaska said:

    I said, for the sake of argument, let's ignore the usefulness.

    As a raw material yes, but not as an investment medium


  • Banned

    It wouldn't be useful for investment if it wasn't expensivedesirable in first place.


  • FoxDev

    It's usefulness as an investment medium makes it desirable



  • I have taken the liberty of updating the topic title.

    • questioned, not questionable, because @gaska is questioning it


  • @RaceProUK said:

    It's usefulness as an investment medium makes it desirable

    And this is not irrational. "$thing is considered to have value by everyone else, and it is likely to retain or increase in recognized value" is a rational reason for you to also consider it desirable and valuable as an investment and/or medium of exchange, at least to the extent your belief that it will retain recognized value is rational. Of course, speculators count on people being overly optimistic in this regard.



  • @riking said:

    questioned, not questionable, because @gaska is questioning it

    But if it is being questioned, it must be able to be questioned.


  • Banned

    Not just a instead of ą, but also a non-capital letter at the beginning? Such disgrace!


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    It's usefulness as an investment medium makes it desirable

    It's good for investment because it's desirable, and it's desirable because it's good for investment. A circular argument. That's hardly rational.

    The irony is, this circular argument is probably the most accurate description of how it works - and not just gold but anything highly tradeable.


  • FoxDev

    No, it's desirable because it's useful for investment, and it's useful for investment because it's rare



  • @Gaska said:

    A circular argument. That's hardly rational.

    I would agree it is, at least partially, based on a circular argument. However, it would argue that it is not (necessarily) irrational. The fact that everyone else agrees on and accepts a value makes it useful and desirable, and thus valuable. The extent to which you believe the accepted value will increase, remain stable, or at least decrease more slowly than other forms of investment forms a rational basis for considering it a good form of investment, and if it is a good form of investment, that gives it value to you.


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    it's useful for investment because it's rare

    Not rare, but expensive, and we proved... Ah, forget it. I don't care about this discussion anymore.


  • FoxDev

    Now who's ragequitting? 😛


  • Banned

    @HardwareGeek said:

    The fact that everyone else agrees on and accepts a value makes it useful and desirable, and thus valuable.

    This is pretty rational, but very dangerous if the agreed value is irrational - much higher than intrinsic value - because as soon as people realize the king is naked, the value will drop to zero and the whole economy will collapse.

    I can't wait for this to happen to Euro. 2050?


  • Banned

    @RaceProUK said:

    Now who's ragequitting?

    I'm ragequitting because I'd be about to say the exact same thing I've already said and you confirmed. I can't quote it because browsing Discourse on WP8 is way too difficult (though they fixed selecting). That's different from just saying I'm stupid and it's over.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    This is pretty rational, but very dangerous if the agreed value is irrational - much higher than intrinsic value - because as soon as people realize the king is naked, the value will drop to zero and the whole economy will collapse.

    Lots of stuff is valued higher than it's intrinsic value. It's quite common for people to value things as status symbols, or for the promises attached to them, or even simply because other people value them. The world doesn't actually collapse when it happens…


  • Banned

    You pretty much made a list of things I consider irrational.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gaska said:

    You pretty much made a list of things I consider irrational.

    Is it rational to insist that the rest of the world is wrong?



  • @Gaska said:

    So, a rare thing is more valuable because it has low supply-to-demand ratio. Supply is supply, not much digging into that. But without demand, this law would imply very low price. So rare things must have very high demand. Why is it?

    The same can be asked about diamonds, emeralds, rubies, works of art, furs, and so on. Status. Power. Control.

    Those are always very pricy...and only arguably irrational.



  • @dkf said:

    @Gaska said:
    You pretty much made a list of things I consider irrational.

    Is it rational to insist that the rest of the world is wrong?


    Is it reasonable to suggest that the rest of the world is rational?



  • @CoyneTheDup said:

    @Gaska said:
    So, a rare thing is more valuable because it has low supply-to-demand ratio. Supply is supply, not much digging into that. But without demand, this law would imply very low price. So rare things must have very high demand. Why is it?

    The same can be asked about diamonds, emeralds, rubies, works of art, furs, tech startups, and so on. Status. Power. Control.

    Those are always very pricy...and only arguably irrational.


    Sure it's rational to count on cupidity always to be a thing for humanity. That doesn't make the emotion itself rational though.


  • Banned

    @dkf said:

    Is it rational to insist that the rest of the world is wrong?

    I'm not saying it's wrong - I'm saying it's irrational. Those are different. For example, religion is irrational, yet I'm fairly religious myself.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    WHY DID THEY NAME THEIR FUCKING WINDOW BULLSHIT AFTER...

    Windows Metro?

    Doing research when naming products appears to be hard. It's something every marketing group fucks up royally almost every time.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Buddy said:

    Is it reasonable to suggest that the rest of the world is rational?

    I'm not going to claim that. I'm merely pointing out that insisting that everyone else is irrational requires a larger assumption for it to be true than the rather more modest “perhaps I'm missing something important”. One might disagree over what is important and how important it is, but to claim global irrationality is a much stronger statement.

    FWIW, there's good experimental evidence that people really value social status, and that it has a substantial effect on things like the activity level of people's immune systems.



  • @lightsoff said:

    Doing research when naming products appears to be hard.

    Indeed.



  • I find it's more useful to think of rationality as something a person has or does than a fundamental property of the person. It's appealing to think of such things as a binary or continuum, but in practice a person's susceptibility to specific emotions or irrational impulses has little bearing on their capacity for rational thought. My opinion is that such simplified thinking is the cause (and result) of many intelligent people refusing to ask questions that would reveal their stupidity, thinking (quite rightly, tbh) that people would consider them less intelligent if they do.

    Anyway, under the proposed model, pointing out a specific type of irrational behavior that we are all familiar with, there's a word in every dictionary, etc., doesn't require much of a leap at all.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Buddy said:

    I find it's more useful to think of rationality as something a person has or does than a fundamental property of the person.

    Almost everyone usually tries to do things that seem like a good idea at the time according to their own prioritisation scheme, that is, they're immediately rational. We can debate whether their prioritisation scheme is weird (or distorted by intoxication), but we can usually understand what they were thinking.

    Long term rationality is more about that prioritisation scheme. Is it sensible to assume that everyone else has it wrong (after substituting the obvious personal aspects correctly, of course)? It does make predicting the behaviour of other people rather more challenging to work that way, and requires an assumption of some kind of conspiracy of erroneousness that would seem bizarrely energetic…



  • Wait, so I'm describing a process by which easily observable facets of human behavior work together in well-known ways to produce an unsurprising result, and you're calling that a conspiracy theory? Have you met my friend @xaade?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Buddy said:

    you're calling that a conspiracy theory?

    Nah. I'm saying that it isn't a conspiracy. 😄 I'm quite happy with the idea of simple things interacting in unexpected ways. I just wish the unexpectedness would be in my favour more often…



  • @Buddy said:

    human behavior

    illogical, typically.

    @Buddy said:

    conspiracy theory

    If people are conspiring to be stupid.

    Conspiracies are for people who don't want to admit that they benefit from the problem they see.

    For example. "Bush invaded Iraq for oil for his companies to benefit."

    Well, I don't see people lined up to pay $10-20 a gallon for gas.

    Organizations (nations, corporations, etc), are not moral entities. Left unchecked, they will always opt for survival, much like an animal. Individuals are moral entities, and can choose to act in ways to prevent immoral decisions.

    But often people still choose personal survival and benefit.

    Example. The growing welfare becoming taxing on our deficit. The growing defense budget. Both of these are tuned to survival.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @xaade said:

    Example. The growing welfare becoming taxing on our deficit. The growing defense budget. Both of these are tuned to survival.

    It probably makes sense to looking at capping those (as well as a number of other things) at fixed percentages of GDP. We shouldn't be just working to pay off the welfare budget, or just to pay off the defence budget, or really any other area of endeavour either. Yes, this will mean that there are things we don't do. So? It will also mean that there are other things that we get to do instead, and it makes planning the overall national budget straight forward.

    We might not agree on what the actual relative levels of funding should be, but having to argue over the level of funding each year is just plain dumb. (Oh well, I suppose it keeps politicians from rioting on the streets from having too little to do…)



  • @dkf said:

    It probably makes sense to looking at capping those (as well as a number of other things) at fixed percentages of GDP.

    You mean.... actually budget?

    @dkf said:

    from having too little to do…

    It's a part-time job, not a career.

    @dkf said:

    this will mean that there are things we don't do

    gasp


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Gaska said:

    They're expensive because they're rare, and you want rare things because they're expensive. Yeah, totally rational.

    And so makes a good medium of exchange, if nothing else. Just because you can't figure it out doesn't make it wrong.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @RaceProUK said:

    …OK, you're gonna have to explain what you're on about there.

    :trollface:


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Gaska said:

    Your argument is sound only if desirability is rational, which you haven't proved yet.

    People desire something that can be used as a medium of exchange. Gold can be mined, but it's not terribly easy to disrupt the existing stock (though it has of course happened a few times historically, of course). It doesn't tarnish or otherwise degrade over time (in a noticeable way, not counting stuff like platinum evaporating).

    Your provincialism is reaching blakey levels here.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Gold was desirable...

    Ah crap...I had a feeling that I walked into this discussion. Your appearance seals it...


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Gaska said:

    So by this point, by a series of logical conclusions, we've proven that "rare things are expensive" is equivalent to "rare things are desirable". Don't you agree?

    Not to the general statement.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Gaska said:

    ...things I consider irrational.

    :rolleyes:

    This is a good summary of all the nonsense you posted in here.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Buddy said:

    Sure it's rational to count on cupidity always to be a thing for humanity. That doesn't make the emotion itself rational though.

    Doesn't mean it isn't, either.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    Long term rationality is more about that prioritisation scheme. Is it sensible to assume that everyone else has it wrong (after substituting the obvious personal aspects correctly, of course)? It does make predicting the behaviour of other people rather more challenging to work that way, and requires an assumption of some kind of conspiracy of erroneousness that would seem bizarrely energetic…

    And that's not counting things that are rational at a micro but not macro level. And vice versa.


  • BINNED

    @xaade said:

    It's was originally meant to be a part-time job, not a career.

    FTFY

    Good luck getting that genie back in the bottle.



  • The problem is that their third wish was to wish for more wishes, and the genie forgot the rules.


  • Banned

    @boomzilla said:

    And so makes a good medium of exchange, if nothing else. Just because you can't figure it out doesn't make it wrong.

    Again - I'm not saying it's wrong; I'm saying it's irrational. Irrational doesn't always mean wrong.

    @boomzilla said:

    People desire something that can be used as a medium of exchange. Gold can be mined, but it's not terribly easy to disrupt the existing stock (though it has of course happened a few times historically, of course). It doesn't tarnish or otherwise degrade over time (in a noticeable way, not counting stuff like platinum evaporating).

    That's a good argument. So is @HardwareGeek's one. Too bad @RaceProUK couldn't provide one.

    @boomzilla said:

    Your provincialism is reaching blakey levels here.

    Excuse me? What do you mean by provincialism?

    @boomzilla said:

    This is a good summary of all the nonsense you posted in here.

    Then please explain how status symbols are rational. And I mean status symbols, not having status symbols - which is indeed rational, considering how our society works.

    I must admit that "promises attached to them" is a rational explanation for value of some things. It was 2AM by when I posted it, however, and I was too tired to think through my posts well. The third argument, "because other people value them", works only in isolation of a person, and doesn't hold when you think of society as a whole (not alone, anyway).


  • FoxDev

    @Gaska said:

    Too bad @RaceProUK couldn't provide one.

    Except I stated all of those things at least once, if not several times.


Log in to reply