[p2p-research] Marginalism - the religion

[Patrick Anderson]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Diego Saravia <diego.saravia at gmail.com> wrote:

> "production" (duplication)

There is far more to production than duplication.

There are Wages and other Costs associated with the initial
Investment, Installation, Operation, Maintenance, Housing/Storage,
Insurance, Pollution of the Physical Sources (Material Means of
Production) required to *host* any and all information production.

There is also the special cost of Exclusion that users inflict upon
each other when too many try to use these finite resources
simultaneously.  Scheduling and allocation is therefore just as much
of an issue for information goods as it is for physical goods.  They
both require a physical substrate to exist.

Living things such as a Strawberry plant can be thought of as pure
design (DNA) that has been applied to the minerals and organic matter
causing the plant to grow and reproduce (duplicate).  I'm no
Christian, but it may be worth noting this is spoken of in a literal
manner in the Holy Bible (Sun Book) when it is suggested that life
comes "from the dust" or the 'clay' or 'ashes'.


> of info goods is only a copy of bytes, 0 marginal cost

We cannot ignore the ecologic Costs of even 1 bit!

Are costs Marginal for moving 64k from one memory location to another?
 Would a programmer agree with you?

Are TeraBytes across the globe Marginal?  What is BitTorrent?

Is sharing copies locally cheaper?  Are those savings always only Marginal?

In either case, do the copper wires cost nothing to mine, smelt,
purify, cast/form, finish, cover, ship, store and sell?

What about the electricity?  What about the noise?  What about the
heat?  The pollution?


> if you have internet

That's no small if!

Who gets the internet for Free as in Beer?

This view of reality is so perplexing to me.

How can such barriers to entry be so ignored?

Price matters!  And we are all being overcharged.


> the only scarcity is "artificial" , copyright law

Copyright and Patents are primarily used in an attempt to make the
holder Royal - in that the rest of us must then pay Royalties.

But it is possible to use Copyright and maybe even Patents in our favor.

The GNU GPL uses Copyright to require Users receive at-cost access to
the "informational" Sources of Production such as source-code, build
scripts, CAD designs, VLSE.

Without Copyright there could be no Copyleft, and without Copyleft,
users could not be guaranteed the 4 freedoms in perpetuity because
some future developers would build upon those informational commons
while making the result proprietary for the purpose of increasing
profit (scarcity measures profit).

When users (consumers) have "at cost" access to the sources of
production (both informational and physical), then competition is
maximized because every potential worker can vie for that job without
external 'owners' getting in the way - for in this case the user and
owner are the same.


> so info goods are not economic goods

This is what I don't understand.

What about the owners of the physical sources needed to *host* those
informational goods?

Are the cost of creating and maintaining Google's server-farms marginal?

What does this guy [
http://www.alex-reid.net/2009/04/from-immaterial-labor-to-immaterial-profits.html
] mean when he says:

"... the costs associated with maintaining all that user-generated
content continue to rise. The article reports a Credit Suisse estimate
that YouTube lost $470M last year."


And $470M is just the *loss*.  What about the *gross* costs before the
ad-revenue paid for some of it?  Is $1 Billion dollars marginal?


Patrick