Ask Lemmy

I'm sure you could write an entire collection of books on the irrationality of Brexit.

As James O'Brien graciously puts it: "We are the first country in history to have placed economic sanctions upon itself"

Gawd forbid people actually enjoy the things they produce rather than sell them abroad.for maximum profit.

This.

It's irrational to consider maximum monetary gain to be the only best outcome. Why? What's the goal? Money is only means to an end, not intrinsically worth anything.

Put another way, if the Argentinians cherish good wine, how are they better off with slightly more money and mediocre wine? (I guess they could use the profits to buy good wine?)

Many governments cut social programs that would result in net benefits economically for society (e.g. disability services that mean more people can maintain jobs, education, family planning, public transit, all mean more money is being made overall including more taxes going to the government). But it isn't a direct enough benefit and it's hard to quantify, whereas slashing funding feels like immediate savings.

Imagine no longer paying for your phone service in order to save money, then being confused about why none of the jobs you applied to are calling you back. Same logic.

Modding in general, most of us never profit from it at all.

Besides the dumbass tariffs imposed by the US on everyone, including an island that only has penguins?

Both of those seems very rational in term of maximazing value.

Germany does the same with wine to the point where Brits go to Germany and wonder why they're sending us all the shit stuff

The UK under Thatcher utterly anihilated its own manufacturing sector at a huge longterm economic detriment seemingly just to destroy labour unions.

A friend from Italy told me that they keep the best cheese for themselves and export the rest.

Trump.

Gambling.

I don't know if they still do it but when I was a kid in the 70's they would dump semi trailer tanks of milk in the ditch to maintain pricing and supply.

I can go to Starbucks and pay $5 for a coffee, or I can make better & get higher on at home for 25 cents.

Heard the same (keep the best for themselves, only sell the inferior stuff) about Spanish olive oil, Italian pasta, and Chinese everything.

My state has free school lunch for all kids. However it’s typical school lunch quality and quantity

My kid’s high school wants to install a fingerprint system to keep hungry kids from cheating by using the code of someone who brings lunch. You want to install an expensive system to collect biometrics n kids to save like $2 per instance, or whatever pittance goes into school lunches?

Buying locally will always be better than what you get in the supermarket. I think that's true for any country.

It's the stuff that's produced on a smaller scale and can be harvestet ripe.

My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I'm going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.

To a lesser degree, I've been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don't hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they've all got motors in them, but they don't give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it'll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it's getting to the point where it's "we installed the option in the car, it's hooked up, it's perfectly functional, we've already put in the expense, and we'll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.

Actively ruining the ecosystem and the climate, two things we probably cannot survive as a species without them working smoothly, so we can all buy new phones and clothes and help less than a handful of us to become even richer than they already are.

Imho, that's an impressive demonstration of our stupidity and one of the most impressive species-level suicide I can think of. Even dinosaurs were not that stupid and they needed a meteor to hit the planet for them to be wiped out from its surface. Something we humans are working real hard to manage doing all by ourselves.

To our credit, I should say those few already very rich people will indeed be reaching unheard-of levels of richness. And while helping them do so we will get our new shiny phones and new fashionable clothing. Yeah, I suppose.

You can only get the best result in the prisoners dilemma by working with others.

Believing that humans make rational economic decisions is pretty irrational economically.

As is centering economics on a theory that ignores the means of production.

It's only irrational to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma game if the rewards are set appropriately for that.

If you raise the individual rewards of the cooperation above those of the individual rewards people would get for defecting, people will in fact cooperate.

Subsidies on consumer goods. You do not want to be in Bolivia right now.