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On Tuesday 12 October 2004 20:39, Neil Williams wrote:
The distinction here is that your logic assumes that only one task can be done at a time.
Assumes that there is contention for resources in the brain, which is true, (as anyone with a positron emission tomograph can demonstrate). While two dissimilar tasks can run together, and all sorts of weirdness does pop up from subconscious processing, I suspect that writing the novel cannot proceed at the same time as purposeful coding. Thus the opportunity cost of a program may be a novel. People buy books, sometimes, and therefore a novel will commonly have a monetary value.
Otherwise, what did we do before money was invented?
Maintained a very sophisticated and far more complex shared reckoning of debts and credit. handling that sort of thing might give an evolutionary advantage to the possessors of the wetware and software structures in the brain which nowadays are used in cryptography and programming.
Anyway, that exchange may exist but it does not have a financial cost - the absence of expenditure is not income.
It shows up in the profit and loss account in very similar ways.
There's a lot of confusion here about terms
Yes. Economists have tried for some time to deconfuse people on these. -- Adrian Midgley Open Source software is better GP, Exeter http://www.defoam.net/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.