It doesn’t until there’s a possible exchange between them and me. If their motivation is primarily to get their hands on my money (as opposed to real mutual benefit), I may be deceived into trading my money for goods of dubious quality or sub-par services. Even worse, I may be robbed outright.
Of course, it’s “buyer beware”, so I should be on the look-out and avoid such exchanges, but the more sophisticated or systemic the deception, the harder that gets.
[quote=“davep, post:83, topic:5373”]
t doesn’t until there’s a possible exchange between them and me. If their motivation is primarily to get their hands on my money (as opposed to real mutual benefit), I may be deceived into trading my money for goods of dubious quality or sub-par services. [/quote]
You should spend some time on understanding the economic nature of trade (exchange).
Of course their motivation is to get (anyone’s) money in return for their product or service, what else could (or should!) be the purpose for the seller than to get money?
The real mutual benefit is NOT decided by the seller. It is decided by the seller and buyer - the deal is good for the both if each is happy with the trade (and we know they always are, otherwise they wouldn’t make the deal).
Deception: it has nothing to do with their appreciation of money. You can be deceived by a lazy cook who doesn’t get any money from you directly, or someone who gives you free advice. Or even by someone who in exchange for deceiving your gets a free lunch or massage, and not money.
Hey janitor, I’ll nitpick for argument’s sake.
Purchasing something doesn’t necessarily determine satisfaction. In fact that is a pitfall of capitalism, in that you may not have bought what you thought you were buying.
Also buying out of scarcity and/or impulse buys are common regrets of the consumer (ever wonder why the candy bars are always in the checkout lane?).
I think davep is suggesting that there are very loose systems (if at all) to educate the consumer of the full cost/benefits of all their purchases. Although you could argue it’s the consumer’s responsibility to fully understand the purchase before forking over your cash (and I’d agree with that).
That’s okay, good!
I agree with the first part - the deal may turn out to be bad. I was (and am) typing on iPad so I wasn’t enough precise in what I said - the moment the both sides agree to make a deal, that is where they both think it is for their own benefit. A think it’s good for A, B think it’s good for B.
Sure the deal can turn out to be crap for either or the both, but it’s not a fault of capitalism. The same mistake can, and does, appears in any other voluntary exchange, or even when there is no exchange (“Man, I got too drunk last night”).
I would also add that in capitalism each party may not go with the deal with the other out of concern for the other guy because the free market motivates you to have satisfied customers. No other system does that, because deals are not done on a voluntary basis. In communism I will take your corn or whatever every time and be rude or deceitful as much as I possibly can be, because I know you have no choice (there’s a 5 year plan or my cousin is party Secretary in your Unit).
I know that sellers entice buyers to buy and some think that’s tricky. But that is what creates new and satisfies existing needs and how we always get more jobs and higher living standards. Who has a real need for MP3 player? No one. But thankfully people think they do, so thousands of miners, drivers, designers, and others have jobs.
You are correct. What I meant was buying something of less value than you thought disrupts the capitalist idea of “vote with your dollars for what you want in the market place”. You already voted but you no longer want that item in the marketplace. Refunds would be nice but especially in distributed markets around the world where you can haggle, they don’t offer refunds.
Yeah that’s generally it, people do not like feeling like they are so easily influenced (but you are! muahaha… ehrm.)
Not sure of any way around that because you have to tell people about your product, I guess some people think the sellers often lie in advertisements, and that instead of explaining their product they put cute girls and hip hop music in their beer commercials.
True. But I think the point I was getting at before is if you are flat out lied to and hand your money to SnakeOil and Co. for their magic potion, you’re still keeping them in business even though their product shouldn’t be on the market, but they keep lying, change the label, move to the next town, and they keep generating revenue.
I’m not sure what I’m arguing I’m just kind of talking out loud, haha sorry. Interesting to think about though that without rigorous policies both ends of the good/bad spectrum will be found in any economic system.
Actually refunds are one interesting phenomenon.
It used to be harder to get one, and so people were generally more careful about buying expensive shit they didn’t need (small shit you just junk - no issue there).
And sellers knew that say only 2% of people returned scissors, so that was added to the cost of the other 98% sold.
Then social media appeared and now any retard can cause PR damage 100x bigger than the value of his business ( power to the customer - yeah!). And the other part is many people are abusing it, partially because of nanny state laws and the crisis (can’t afford to turn off a customer even if he is a moron).
Now probably 10% of people return small shit and that cost is covered by honest buyers (if I bought crap I didn’t need, I will never return it just because I can). And even when the seller knows they are dealing with a scumbag buyer, they cannot refuse to serve him because they might be accused of “discrimination” (more bad PR, possibly fines, class lawsuits, you name it).
I am not against refunds, but in general free market incentives ensure good behavior of all involved and certainly does it better than the the current customer protection and anti-discrimination laws.
Also it has to be said that most sellers calculate their costs closely and obviously can economically justify their no questions asked policy - it lowers the anxiety of buying online or remotely in general. Bottom line is, the freer the system the better it works.
With distributed markets you may not get what you delivered and it’s much harder for a P2P seller to return the product on somebody’s behalf. It is complicated… Even now on Amazon, if you buy a 2nd hand book, returning a book can cost more than the book (and it usually does, particularly if you count the cost of your time). P2P markets won’t solve this for a while. Partially because protectionist lobbyists make it difficult to trade across borders.
Interesting viewpoint on it! You are absolutely correct that the seller will offset their costs for the refunds, and even then they often refurbish and repackage (albeit at a cost).
In terms of P2P markets and refunds, this will be very interesting to see how it plays out. On the one hand you can have reviews from confirmed buyers. But then how do you mitigate the seller buying from himself to post positive reviews (the cost of transaction even for 20 false purchase orders will probably be quickly offset by the flood of new orders).
Additional information from buyers may be required, picture/video proof (write down this random sentence and post it in front of the product), shipping confirmations that include weight.
There were a lot of scams on the P2P marketplaces as of recent years, and there doesn’t seem to be a better solution than trust the reviewers, expect to lose your money, pray that you won’t.
I don’t want to write too much off topic stuff here so very briefly, there are new decentralized reputation systems that live on the blockchain (not yet proven) and also ways to arrange multisig transactions so that the parties lose if they don’t complete the deal (be depositing into multisig address more than the cost of the item). Maybe in 1-2 years that will work a bit better.
@anders just wanted to say I really liked the sentiment behind the OP. @luckybit humans could evolve even if not cybernetically, but without a leap looks like we get overtaken.
OK. Maybe I’ll start again… and hopefully tie this back to the OP in the process.
The value of anything is the result of the productive time, talent and resources required to acquire that thing. Money is just a tool that has no inherent “goodness” or “evilness”. One of its basic characteristics is that it enables us to represent the value of all things in common terms and move past the barter system.
Now throw supply and demand into the mix and we have a basic free market economy.
Money itself doesn’t do me a lick of good directly – it can’t feed me, clothe me, or shelter me. I have to go trade it for those things. Ownership of money is not the end game. Having more than is required for food, shelter, clothing and my own pursuit of happiness until I die is really pointless. As someone else put it – money is the oil for the engine; the life blood of an economy.
Using money, we can now measure one’s credits and debits to and from the economy. If I’m very productive, I’ll be rewarded with more money than someone who’s less productive. At some level, and in general, you’d have to admit that it’s dishonest for those with productive capabilities to go through life with a negative balance.
Honest people understand (at some level) the sequence that happiness comes from acquiring things beyond the necessities; that it takes money to acquire those things; that money is acquired by trading something of value; and value comes from productive use of time, talents and resources. These people set out to produce something that someone else finds valuable. And yes, they trade that for money, but that is simply an intermediate step of the process.
Dishonest people approach this thinking “I need more money.” and they allow themselves to take moral shortcuts to acquiring money without being productive. This is the starting position for fraud, like the contractors that take your deposit and never return, or the driveway sealer that takes your money and coats your driveway with used motor oil, or the guys that make “NIKF” apparel and “Bolvia” watches, etc.
It’s also dishonest for someone to contribute $1 into the economy by buying a bullet and “contributing” 10 minutes of their time for a hold up claiming he deserves to be the beneficiary of all your productive time as is currently occupying your wallet. Sure, he’ll trade it around for something, but this leaves the economy as a whole in the red (I suggest Henry Hazlit’s “Economics In One Lesson” for an exploration of this).
It’s even more dishonest to expect to acquire anything without any exchange of value.
When people expect services on the web to be free, they might as well say “I invested enough time to download a browser (for free from storage paid for by someone else), so now I deserve to be the beneficiary of everyone else’s productive contributions (also from storage paid for by others).”
It may very well be the case that lots of content on the network is the product of peoples pursuit of happiness and they happily absorb the costs of providing their contributions for free. A lot of static content maybe?? That doesn’t feel to me like it would work as a general model, but who knows…
Pay-for-value is a reality of economics. There are real expenses to store and exchange ideas and information across a computer network. I agree with the OP that exchange of ideas and information can be free, just not on SAFE. Actually, I’d say idea exchanges can’t be truly free no matter what – your always spending part of your finite time that could have been spent on something else.
Direct barter is impossible in the SAFE model as far as I can reason about it, so in some form or another, money is necessary. And it’s not evil.
Direct barter is impossible in the SAFE
I beg to differ, anything is possible. Tokens can be used as a serial number, tagged on the product. Once it is scanned, the token returns to the producer as a proof that the product was delivered. Tokens are useless but it is the serial number inside of the token that makes it valuable.
Couldn’t the cost reduce in many instances to the cost of the safe mesh hardware and the time/attention costs of the communication and free(dom)/open software development that gets used and all the opportunity costs? That would seem a pretty minimal cost stack.
It just occurred to me that money as an incentive for tasks can be beneficial when the result of the performance is in line with earning money. The problem is that in many if not most cases, the money incentive is largely unrelated to what is produced by the task itself. Even when there is a long-term incentive to do a good job in order to be able to earn more money in the future, money is still often an artificial “carrot” since it’s more like a stick than a carrot.
People have to earn money in order to survive. Therefore money is more like a stick than a carrot. If we were to ask someone: “Would you do the same task and in the same way without having to earn money?” And people would reply: “No, but I need to put food on my family…, I mean on the table.”
If people were paid a lot of money to post on Facebook and reddit, would their posts be better? I doubt that.
This means that money often steers the incentive into a bad direction. The really bad direction is to earn money through spam, phishing and other shady means like that. Celebrities often produce excellent results, such as in movies and music, but that’s just because people with massive amounts of money have picked talented people to become stars rather than money being the intrinsic incentive who made the celebrities themselves successful.
Would Linus Torvald have made a better Linux if he was working with money as the main incentive? Would David Irvine have developed a better SAFE network if earning money was his main goal? I doubt that. The opposite would more likely have happened.
@Artiscience @Blindsite2k please take this personal interchange to PM it isn’t relevant to the OP and is obscuring the relevant content in the thread, including your own.
Of course. Barter apps would certainly be useful.
I was thinking at the direct storage level, where someone might try to offer up “I’ll trade you space in my vault for a peek at your blog”. You can’t do that as far as I can tell.
Even if that was economically possible, a storage app with a free quota would essentially be the same as Google Drive today, a centralized system owned by someone who could mess with your private data, change terms of service, remove the free quota and do all kinds of nasty things like that.
However, in the future, when data storage and bandwidth will become essentially free (because of exponential improvement of price/performance) then free storage could perhaps be added as a core functionality in the SAFE network itself. Then the storage would still be decentralized. And by then, abuse would be an insignificant problem because the data storage would be so dirt cheap that few people would bother abusing the system just to grab lots of free quota.
Some may wonder: why the need for free data storage? My answer to that is: would you want to have to pay for the air you are breathing? You would find it really awful to have to ensure all the time that you have enough money to be able to breathe. In the past you would have to pay a lot of money for an encyclopedia, or have to go to a library in hope that they had an encyclopedia there you could use. Today people can donate money to Wikipedia so that billions of people can use it for free. And even though the quality of the articles in Wikipedia may be less than say in Encyclopedia Britannica Online, it’s good enough for most people most of the time.
Another question is: will not people need to produce value even in the future? The answer is yes, but what is considered valuable will change a lot and very quickly from a historical perspective. Robotics and artificial intelligence will be able to do basically all jobs we humans do today. So what is considered valuable contributions by humans today measured in terms of money will become obsolete in a near future. This also means that the need for having to earn money will drop away. Money will become an option instead of a requirement in order to “earn a living”. Most people are still caught in a 20th century belief in jobs and money. They fail to take exponential progress into account and the radical change that means. And believe me, it will be YUGE. That I can tell you.
Some people may believe that money frees them from having to return favors, frees them from having obligations because of things and services others have given them for free. But that’s a mistaken notion. If I do you a favor for free, but implicitly have the belief that now you owe me something, that you need to be prepared to return a favor to me, then that’s blackmailing, that’s extortion. The social “norm” of being in dept like that is sociopathic, a pathological cultural conditioning. If I give you something and expect something in return, then that’s an attempt of a one-sided business deal, not a favor. It’s like the childish notion of: I loved you yesterday, so now you must love me back. Or else. Ha ha.
Dude what? No. It’s on SAFE. That’s not how SAFE works remember?
I don’t get it. How could someone develop a storage app on SAFE with free quota without being the owner of that app and the data? What would prevent the owner from some day just deleting the whole app or some or all data stored in the app?
Depends if the APP stores the data under its ID or facilitates the storage under the owner’s ID.