Pew Research: Media ignoring Ron Paul

[Kidlicious]

Price is what the store is charging me, a price that the store believes to be fair value for

No. The percieved value is less than the price. This is the absolute most basic economics. I could teach a 9 year old this.

[Aeson]

Ecofarm's ~9 sq m could "work" in a year round growing environment, at least until you depleted the soil or had a bad crop. It wouldn't be a good diet, you'd have to be very careful about what you grew both from a yield and nutrition standpoint, but you could survive on it. Depending on the initial fertility of the soil, the irrigation source, fitting legumes (which have average to poor yields) and deep root system plants into the rotations, factoring in immigrant pest populations that you could "harvest" to protect your crops and increase overall fertility of your system, and how well you compost, you may be able to go almost indefinitely on average yields.

You could take soil depletion out of the mix completely by a bit more than doubling the area (say, 20sq m) so you can grow valuable compost materials like rice and wheat, nitrogen fixing legumes, and at the same time raise the amount of food you can grow.

Even if you triple that 20 sq m to allow for bad harvests, that's 60 sq m. (Although if it's in the same general area it won't really mitigate a bad harvest. This holds true for living off any area of land within the same general area though.) Even if you triple it again to account for a 4 month growing season that's 180sq m.

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700sq m (.07*10000) can easily produce 700kg of food per month in a year round growing environment. You wouldn't even have to take much care in what you grew from a yield perspective. (You still would need to from a nutrition perspective of course, eating just watermelons probably wouldn't work very long, regardless of how many hectares you've planted.) Focusing on highly productive crops (potatoes, squash, onions, carrots, radishes, trellised tomatoes) you could push that to 2Mton of fresh produce per month, maybe more.

So the minimum is closer to the 9sq m than the 700sq m. Though none of them are very realistic since no one who has the knowledge to live that way would ever choose to, and people who are forced into sustenance situations tend to no know how to do it, or be in situations where it couldn't be done.

[Ben Kenobi]

No. The percieved value is less than the price.

They have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

Price has several constraints. What does it cost to make the product? What does it cost to package and ship the product to the store? What are the margins that the store wishes to operate in order to earn a profit? What is the market position of the store? What items are the customers demanding and what are the competitors charging.

All these factor on price.

Perceived value has everything to do with the customer. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you start to understand how economics works. Perceived value may have absolutely nothing to do with reality, or with the actual value of the item, but it has to do with what is the value of the item to the customer.

Case in point. A business prospers when it can identify the needs of their customers, and understand that not all customers are looking for the same thing, or even looking for the same thing out of a product. People are willing to pay a premium for an item that matches their needs over an item that may cost less, but doesn't meet their needs.

A rational economic actor starts with the very first step, "what are my needs?" Then they go and look for the best product out there to fill their needs. This relies on product knowledge, something that a customer may not know. Sometimes a customer will be willing to experiment with a different product, if and only if their basic needs are met. Oftentimes a customer will stick with what they know, even if a competing product has more value because of what they already know. Product A is good, does what they want and meets a customer need. The customer is taking a risk to experiment with a different product, one that may not meet their needs. If it works out the customer is more likely to stick with the new brand, but if it doesn't work out then the customer will shun the other product.

Then there's the whole question of perceived needs. Does a personally really know what they really need? Or do they just think they know what they want.

Another basic fact,

All trades benefit both parties Every single one.

Another fact:

All trades have a winner and a loser Every single one.

A trade will only happen if both conditions are met. One, that a person will make more money off the trade and two, both participants will come out ahead. Every single trade.

[KrazyHorse]

All trades benefit both parties

[Ben Kenobi]

Easy enough to disprove. Show me one, KH, where one party did not benefit from the trade.

[KrazyHorse]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Minuit#Purchase_of_Manhattan

[KrazyHorse]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trading_losses

[KrazyHorse]

Sometimes this is too easy

[Dinner]

The argument isn't that some people don't make bad trades or even that they fail to maximize their return on trades (clearly that happens all the time) but that if they didn't think it was the best they were likely to get then they wouldn't make the trade at the time they did. Clearly they thought they were getting something out of the trade (even if it was just cutting their loses) or else they wouldn't have made the trade.

[Ben Kenobi]

Clearly they thought they were getting something out of the trade (even if it was just cutting their loses) or else they wouldn't have made the trade.

Exactly. And as for the 'beads for manhatten' trade, that has to do with assymmetrical needs. What use was Manhatten to the tribe? Did they own the land? Did the Dutch have any means to confirm that the land was theirs in the first place?

What was the value of a single bead at the time? That's one thing that is difficult for us to understand the value of certain things after mass production that we take for granted today. Stuff that we literally toss out on the trash would in fact, be far more valuable to people in the 18th century than some worthless land in the middle of nowhere.

The conclusion that trade procures the efficient allocation of capital revolves around this one premiss, KH. It seems counterintuitive, but both premisses must be true for trade to occur. One party must benefit more than the other, even if it's not necessarily clear to any observer at the time, that one person will come out ahead. This is how you explain stratification. That both parties benefit, explains the rising standard of living for everyone.

The only caveat is that trade must be voluntary. Involuntary trades hinder the efficient allocation of capital. Every single time. This is why theft doesn't work. If what you had to offer was worth the trade, then you wouldn't need to rob the other person. Same with taxation.

[Kidlicious]

The argument isn't that some people don't make bad trades or even that they fail to maximize their return on trades (clearly that happens all the time) but that if they didn't think it was the best they were likely to get then they wouldn't make the trade at the time they did. Clearly they thought they were getting something out of the trade (even if it was just cutting their loses) or else they wouldn't have made the trade.

Which is the same as saying that traders try to buy things for less than they think the' re worth.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Ecofarm's ~9 sq m could "work" in a year round growing environment

No it couldn't.

[Ben Kenobi]

Which is the same as saying that traders try to buy things for less than they think the' re worth.

Traders try to buy things for less than they can sell them for at some point in time. If they believe that the price of the item is going to go up, then it makes sense to pay more than the item is worth at present in order to purchase the item now.

What the trader personally believes an item is worth is meaningless. What the customer of the trader believes the item is worth means everything. If you are ever doing this for business, this is probably the most important thing to remember. You cannot care about what you want, it's all about the customer.

This is why it's generally bad to do this to things that you value personally, because you'll put a higher value on an item when you purchase it than what the item would be worth to someone else.

[Kidlicious]

The buyer pays less than he thinks its worth. No one goes to the gas station and pays what they think the gas is worth, but they pay less because they can. It's called CONSUMER SURPLUS. You should look it up.

[Aeson]

No it couldn't.

Yes it could.

5kg/sq m/month is doable with a few high yield crops like certain types of squash, you could go higher than that if you transplant, container plant, repot, and trellis intelligently. Those are yields of marketable fruits, which don't include rejects (which you'd eat) and don't allow for growing them larger for the the absurd yields (as it makes them tougher and less pleasant to eat, which if you have no choice, you aren't going to worry about). Carrots and onions can both be in the same range counting their tops as well as roots, and both can be transplanted to save time "in the field" (meaning they'd take up less space for much of their growth).

At the high end (no tricks) you have radishes where you can incrementally harvest leaves to eat, and roots at as early as 22 days. It was our first crop here, and having never planted it before, with crappy soil (6" deep and just plowed from 100s of years of pasture), we got 5kg/sq m in roots. No market for the leaves so we didn't weigh them, but it was close to the same. That's 13kg/sq m/month there, and while radishes aren't terribly fun to eat, they are rather nutritious. Repot/transplant them and you could drop the average area they take up by close to half, meaning you could hit 26+kg/sq m/month with radishes... with yields a newbie like me got on rather terrible soil.

If you're tricky about it you could even go higher than that. Utilize vertical space and shade tolerant/loving plants. For instance, trellis tomatoes on malunggay (moringa) along the N edge (in N hemisphere), with shade tolerant plants and/or seedlings in pots underneath. Mushrooms could be grown even under the pots.

You eat the edible pests that try to eat your plants. You eat rejects (generally not counted in yields). You eat the edible weeds you clean. (We get absurd yields of one of the native crops here... as weeds). Of course the 9sq m is your life so you can give it plenty of attention to get optimal yields.

Until you have a bad crop you could survive. Going over the numbers more in-depth, it might even be a pretty good diet. The hard part would be the crop rotation wouldn't be very good for the soil. Which is why you need that extra 11sq m for it to work "indefinitely" (till bad harvest).