Johanx64

> On this we agree, but, of course, my point was that when I say "value" I don't mean monetary value.

Value and monetary value represent almost essentially the same thing. There isn't some other "pixie" dust version of value, for which - people for some reason - refuse to give money for. If people aren't willing to pay money for something, oh the odds are it's worthless - in every sense of the word.

> A person's value is intangible.

No, it isn't, person without assets (and money) is worthless and their value is selling their labour like a slave directionally proportional how valuable their labour is, or they sleep under a bridge and starve. And this is exactly what happens in reality.

That's unless they have friends and family that assign some value (monetary!) to them, and are willing (and able!) to buffer the expense of getting them of the street, etc. This expense can be directly translated to money of the fiat kind.

> What a woefully capitalistic perspective. I wish the best of luck to you and your shareholders.

The perspective is either true or it's not. I couldn't care less what label you assign to it.

If a person is starving and sleeping out on the street, or has health issues. It will cost money to feed them, house them and cure them. A broke person is literally incapable of providing this in any sustainable way.

Some pedantic "akshually-ing" about "exchange debt owed by the issuing state" isn't helping anyone.

> Decades ago, money had a concrete value in that you could request the issuing government to take your dollars and give you gold at an established exchange rate. When we abandoned the gold standard (and all forms of fiscal concretization), money became inherently abstract.

This is nothing more than redditor type - "akshually" yapping - nitpicking on terms being used rather focusing on the semantics they were used to convey in an argument.

The argument stands whether or not you're using gold backed dollars, fiat (that gets constantly devaluated by incessent printing), or gold coins directly.

It's currency - nominated in some units, and those units will be a proxy and close approximation to value it represents.

> the value of my work does not lie in the amount of money that can be gotten in exchange for it.

What do you think money is?

It's a rough proxy approximation for value. So yes, the amount of money you can get for your work is rough approximation of its value.

You can also have a precious pet rock that you personally hold very dear and well "valueable" - but valuable to nobody but you only. So realistically it has zero value to everyone else.

If you don't care about creating value, you don't care about people.

As, ultimately, it costs money to care for people, and if you don't have it - all you have are prayers and best wishes, and you functionally can't help anyone.

Ethics, what's that?

Ethics in era of vibecoding?

Ethics - for better or worse - is for suckers.

When a company hires people, will it take in just anyone with a pulse?

Tech people look at things in terms of - is this true or not.

And "Quality of People" is perfectly accurate description.

How it makes you feel about it completely irrelevant.

Where are you getting your numbers - profit over 700%? If so I want in!

Unless you know how many units they sell per month, and what are their expenses exactly, and how many people are employed, and amortized cap ex and R&D cost, you're just making shit up on the spot.

Lets say this thing moves two units per month, and each brings $4000 in pure profit (costs per unit $1000). If company has one employee. Now you've made $96000/yr.

Which is way less than a single competent engineer or entrepreneur in US is worth. Ie. they are losing money.

This is fundamental quality of very low-volume, very niche products. They are almost never priced anywhere near their bill-of-materials cost.

> micro-tonal instruments are prevalent in various cultures which weren't flooded by Europe and then North America by hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. it's pretty easy to find examples on countries inside Africa and Asia

So buy one of those then?

Lets presume this thing retails at - very unrealistic low price - of $500.

How many people would buy this weird thing per month - even at this low price point? 10? 50? 100?

Imagine you're an engineer and your competency is worth $200,000/year. If this retailed at 1/10th - as you suggested - so $500, and lets generously say you make $100usd per unit at this price point.

You have to atleast sell ~166 of these "weird" niche things per month, every month, no exceptions to match. And you're probably not a single person, so way more.

Can you? And why bother?

More importantly, can you even make these things for $400usd when your order quantity is only 166units per month?

And this is after spending years(?) in development, and some non negligible amount of cap ex.

What does it have to do with "Capitalism" per se?

If you have a well made, but very niche product that sells in very small volumes it will be expensive.

If any of the labour & assembly happens in US that turns it into unavoidable inevitability.

If it was cheaper, it would be a loss making hobby.

A country without "capitalism" wouldn't make such product for sale to begin with.

If China government kickstarted their EV sector (along many others) and enabled them to be competitive, strong and dominating.

That means the Chinese government is doing a really good job.

I really hate this argument where every government across the globe have to basically be a drag which sucks the life out of an economy and wastes extracted resources (taxes) on bullshit instead of putting them to good use.

This is what winning looks like fellas, and you're just losing. Get used to it as there's only going to be more of this.

Difference between $1 and $.10 is always irrelevant unless you're mass manufacturing, which I presume you aren't on a remote island.

Plus, arm cortex-m0+ cores aren't $1, they are also available in $.15-$.30 range.

Westeners like to buy the $.10 CH32V003 as an exercise in minimalism, after all its refreshing to work in an environment with very limited resources. For the same reason people enjoy 1KB demoscene categories.

There's no economics behind it.

Authors argument almost entirely leans on Aliexpress shipping things for "free" to his island. It also has arm cores, but I suppose RISC-V MCUs have smaller odds of being fakes/clones.

> When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free.

China has amazing prices for genuine electronics components from every manufacturer. Including stm32, NXP as well as local arm32 licensees gd32,hk32,XHSC. From which you can buy Cortex-M0+ down to 10-20cents per piece.

Literally anything you can buy in the West, you get for fraction of the price in China, even in small volumes.

If you live in the third world you wouldn't even think about ordering from "western parts supplier", everything is expensive and overpriced and selection is shit (compared to China).

No, the currency has value only in as so far as you can buy stuff you need with it.

Lets say you're Germany, US imports make up only 6.9% of total import value(Netherlands is 7.1% and China 12.5% on top) closely followed by Poland with 5.9%.

Take most countries in Europe, US imports are a rather small very modest portion.

So it doesn't make that much sense that US dollar would be particularly valuable.

After all - you really don't actually even buy that much stuff from US, thus the need for the US dollar isn't particularly large, and why would it be?

On the other hand, if you want to buy oil however, you need the dollar. That is what makes the dollar valuable.

Now if you can buy oil from Iran, Russia or whatever in some other currencies, why would you need the stinking dollar?

I mean, you do import some US goods, but not that much really.

Why would you have confidence in an economy that regularly has insane trade deficit (1 trillion now)?

Once the petrodollar goes, thing will go tits up. And it will, because there's only 60years of oil left in the global oil reserves in the tank.

US monopoly money has value mainly because of petro dollar.

Once that wraps up, US money will be not much more than toiletpaper.

And that is wrapping up because world has like ~60years of oil left at current consumption rates.

I wish we were at the level where some doofus has red too many "Gang of Four" "Design Patterns OOP" bullshit books and gone to town. Because that would be way better than what we have now.

Whenever I run a thing and it's unbearabily super duper slow, when you look at the process lists the thing will have spawned bunch of chromium instances - on top of probably making bunch of internet connections. Delegating some of the work that can easily done on my PC to "cloud" instead.

What we have now is way worse - it's electron and webshit technologies on desktop. Like you couldn't make software of worse quality even if you tried. The performance way worse than PCs of 1990s. It's almost like using software that's running from a floppy disk.

And now this trash is probably getting generated with LLMs.

> Thanks to heavy subsidization of the industry by Chinese government to gain an competitive advantage.

You can't have a functional government that serves the interests of it's people and enables the country to dominate increasingly more sectors!

It's basically cheating!

The government has to be dysfunctional, and should only collect disproportionate taxes with the idea that they'd be wasted extremely inefficiently.... on god knows what, some bullshit, some "social programmes" and "culture" and the dumbest things imaginable - whatever they might be, but not anything that's actually ... you know good for the country!