@detroitmechworks
fundamental in my opinion. It's called the Labor Theory of Value. Many people think Marx invented it. He didn't. It has a much longer history. Adam Smith tosses it off as a commonplace.
I think about it this way: The actual, real value of money is that money can compel labor. That's the root of it. The value of a good or service is based on the hours of human labor it takes to produce it.

Of money as representative of Labor, period.

Going to go into a little explanation of a concept that I incorporated into my CNU series, for a little more elucidation, and of course the fact this is an OT.

I like the idea of an Hour's labor being a cost. (Please note, I do not differentiate between types of labor. Skull work and Sweat work, and Love Work are all valuable. Playing Magic Numbers is not.) After all, everything boils down to the time and effort you need to put in, in order to achieve the end result. If you want a computer, and were forced to individually mine the metals, build the machines to make the components, assemble the components, and then write the codes to see this page, it would be nearly impossible. It's the result of millions of hours of human labor.

And yet the cost is not reflective of that, because the base labor is written off, or subsidized by the labor of past workers. In many cases the labor was not even recognized or valued at the time, therefore the cost of labor is not computed and not taken into account. But with all hidden costs, this one will probably bite us in the ass, since I know for a fact that the vast majority of people who maintain computers wouldn't know the first thing about how to start from basic binary and turn those calculations into machine language.) When you don't acknowledge or think about the labor that would go into creating even ONE computer from scratch, it's easy to write off the value.

So, IMHO, that's why politicians can think that we're all rich and just whining about it. Some see the decades of labor and infrastructure, and realize that so much has been built up to this point, that in some ways, even the homeless are rich. And then Others see the same structure, and wonder how many bars of gold they can smelt that statue into. The problem is that as the former became the latter, they kept the mindset. As they keep looting the civilization, less and less of that stored labor remains. Soon there may be none left, and the value of being an American will be a net labor negative.

So, that's the LONG version of why my CNU professor always refers to costs as "Hours of Labor". It's taking into account how much work will need to be done to complete a task, on average. It's not a perfect system, of course, but I think the fundamental concept is sound.

Edit: Forgot a song
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq7Eki5EZ8o]

@detroitmechworks but think you might enjoy some novels by Sean McMullen, one "Soul of the Great Machine" that has dueling librarians and the need to build a computer of hundreds of math skilled slaves in a society severely limited in energy usage, to compute and mimic flip flops and shift registers. They're fun reads.

Of money as representative of Labor, period.

Going to go into a little explanation of a concept that I incorporated into my CNU series, for a little more elucidation, and of course the fact this is an OT.

I like the idea of an Hour's labor being a cost. (Please note, I do not differentiate between types of labor. Skull work and Sweat work, and Love Work are all valuable. Playing Magic Numbers is not.) After all, everything boils down to the time and effort you need to put in, in order to achieve the end result. If you want a computer, and were forced to individually mine the metals, build the machines to make the components, assemble the components, and then write the codes to see this page, it would be nearly impossible. It's the result of millions of hours of human labor.

And yet the cost is not reflective of that, because the base labor is written off, or subsidized by the labor of past workers. In many cases the labor was not even recognized or valued at the time, therefore the cost of labor is not computed and not taken into account. But with all hidden costs, this one will probably bite us in the ass, since I know for a fact that the vast majority of people who maintain computers wouldn't know the first thing about how to start from basic binary and turn those calculations into machine language.) When you don't acknowledge or think about the labor that would go into creating even ONE computer from scratch, it's easy to write off the value.

So, IMHO, that's why politicians can think that we're all rich and just whining about it. Some see the decades of labor and infrastructure, and realize that so much has been built up to this point, that in some ways, even the homeless are rich. And then Others see the same structure, and wonder how many bars of gold they can smelt that statue into. The problem is that as the former became the latter, they kept the mindset. As they keep looting the civilization, less and less of that stored labor remains. Soon there may be none left, and the value of being an American will be a net labor negative.

So, that's the LONG version of why my CNU professor always refers to costs as "Hours of Labor". It's taking into account how much work will need to be done to complete a task, on average. It's not a perfect system, of course, but I think the fundamental concept is sound.

Edit: Forgot a song
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq7Eki5EZ8o]