economics of second-hand produce

I think it's like this. The farmer's market on Hannover Street in the North End of Boston is not the 'farmer's market' concept I'm familiar, ie, farmers drive into the city to sell their wares.

No, it's not. What it is is farmers selling what they couldn't sell at the local grocery store and grocery stores dumping their shelves' produce for the starting week. It sounds disgusting until you realize that the produce is still within its freshness range, though on the lower end. It's not different from you buying some produce on Saturday (that's your grocery day) and not cooking it till Thursday. Some of the produce is farm fresh, but it's hard to tell.

Because food isn't always a black and white issue. There's some grey area there where what is acceptable for poor people is not so acceptable for rich ones. I'd rather buy 2 heads of 2-day old spinach then one 1-day old spinach (more likely, I'd buy a pound of carrots with the extra dough). The richer you are the less that kind of compromise you're likely to make.

Hungary is acting as Austria's second-week produce market. Some of that produce was probably produced in Hungary, shipped to Austria, sat on shelves/wharehouses, shipped back to Hungary when it wasn't sold in time, and is being sold in Hungary.

(Also the sellers at the Hannover St market are like village farmers - both extra nice 'here, have an apple pretty lady' and extra assholish, 'no you can't pick out which apples you're buying, I decide'.)

food free riding

http://reddit.com/goto?id=w3n5

Darn Mormons. Always being goodie-too-shoes.

Also I don't understand why the restaranteur approached a party that didn't pay and cojoled them into paying. If her policy is "Pay as much as you can," who is she to judge how much another can pay? Perhaps they all got laid off from work, perhaps this was a meeting of the divorcees club of Greater Utah. Perhaps they are sociopaths who can't pay more because of psychological problems (ie, they cannot not free ride when the opportunity presents itself). Who knows.

Darn Mormons. So judgmental.

values in a nanotechnology world

What an awesome thread. It ain't about the minutiae of the science, but about the way humans will deal with a diff environment. Psychology, economics. Very Margret Atwood, very Ursula LeGuin.

I do think that 'rights' will expand. Just like a right to clean tap water and sanitation grew in the 19th century (if your home doesn't have those, expect your children to be taken away by the state). And we may see a right to Internet (if you don't have net access, you children will be taken away to somewhere that does).

What becomes so cheap that it becomes a right, not a luxury?

What becomes valuable? I guess it's like a chemical reaction. The limiting factors determine the size of the output (if you have 5 times as much hydrogen as oxygen, you can still only make one molecule of water per atom of oxygen). So on the material level, certain atoms - titanium, germanium, polonium - become more valuable than others (especially carbon, silicon and nitrogen).

Nitrogen, yeah, it's like what the German scientist did during WWI. Faber (great name)? Found a way to extract nitrogen out of thin air. Before that Germany had to export nitrogen for its agriculture and explosives industries from Chile. You can see why the latter was a problem during the a war.

Plus I wouldn't expect every home to have every needed atom. A T-bone steak dinner 'grown' in a nanoven? Sure. But cobalt or molybdenum or other trace minerals will have to be picked up at the local store. (Expect too the diet moralizing to continue, and parents to fret about what they put into their kids mouths. And for anti-technology reactionaries like today's organics, anti-McD's, slow-foodies, etc.)

But in general. Yeah, design swamps out cost of production, or cost of materials, as the most significant part of a product's cost. So, it will be defended more. Why shouldn't it? We s/w developers charge for our code not for the copies that it gets distributed on. Nanocoders will do the same (and, sure, the Gnostic open sourcers will come out again, saying design is infinitely valuable (like love or music) and so should be given away gratis).

Example, expect celebrity cannablism - meat grown from a famous person's DNA ("I'll have the braised Jolie breasts with alfredo fettucine, and she'll have the coq au Brad Pitt"). 60% of the price of the meal is in copyright fees (just like you pay extra for 'farm fresh' or 'raised wild' foods today).

Land prices will probably fall as more of the earth is opened up to real estate inventory (deserts, oceans). If you can make anything anywhere you can live anywhere. So the concentration of high priced real estate (cities) may become more evenly distributed (of course people said that about the Internet 15 years ago, yet major cities are doing better not worse - sometimes a good pint of beer with friends is unreplicable on the net, or in a bottle).

externalities determin moral

A society with no externalities in its markets is one which has traded in all its moral values for economic ones.

We, the collective we, get to choose our externalities. They determine our morals/market boundary. (If kidneys are sellable why not hearts or brains? It must be because life is worth some incalculablely high moral value. An externality-free economy would not care one bit.)

normative versus market values

They present a view that if you remove the lens of morality and how things "should be", many phenomena can be explained through basic economic principles.

I think that's the point of morality. To prevent markets from entering certain spheres of life that a society values of infinity worth, ie, too sacred to price.