basically make decisions that make no sense but benefit you financially. Sample. you run a printing business. you dont own it just run it. you sell your main printer and assign a performance bonus to your self. next month your business is closed because you dont have equipment to print, but you also have your bonus in pocket.
As an analogy, you can pump the yield of your crop fields by 50% if you are willing to deplete the soil and cash in on 100 years of careful building of the topsoil layer. The person doing it wins out in the short term 10 years, but society loses out long-term when they gotta spend another 100 years of much lower yields to build the top soil back up to healthy levels. Meanwhile the 10 year guy already made his money and sold off whats dregs are left to seek the next snatch and grab operation.
Not really. It has more to do with gold is now worth almost 3x what it was 2 years ago.
And before you get too excited, this "news" from the World Gold Council. A consortium of gold mining corporations. Clearly it's a pump article "have you bought gold yet? everyone else is! why not you!?!?"
Not really. It has more to do with gold is now worth almost 3x what it was 2 years ago.
It's not like we've suddenly found new and exciting uses for gold though. The reason the price has gone up is because the demand for it has gone up, and the reason why demand has gone up is because people want an alternative to U.S bonds. A bunch of pump articles wouldn't be enough to lead to a 3x price increase.
> the reason why demand has gone up is because people want an alternative to U.S bonds
That makes no sense since the amount held in US bonds is not that different.
The only change is that the gold that people held has gone up in value.
It's not different than holding Google and Apple stock, and when Apple stock goes up people say "oh, it's because people don't want Google stock". That's not true at all.
There is a good case to be made that if it weren't for the consistent pressure, sanctions and assassinations from US/Israel, the moderates would have prevailed in Iran.
The original post was talking about the scenario of third-party reservations trading marketplaces. In that scenario, reservations become financialized derivatives of the underlying supply of food at a restaurant. But this is being done in a really dumb way where fake demand is being injected to make the reservation independently valuable from the underlying.
To be perfectly clear, bots don't eat food, and we don't need a market to tell us otherwise. Even an individual having Google Duplex reserve ten tables in advance isn't going to be able to eat ten dinners. But if reservations actually cost money, then any restaurant doing the smart thing of just skipping no-shows to keep the kitchen running is now defrauding reservation holders. Capacity has to be reserved and left fallow for the sake of optionality.
Bringing this back to market terms: if reservations are so in demand that restaurants have to charge for them, why don't they just raise the prices on the actual food instead?
Just because a particular market is free doesn't mean it's useful to society at large.
If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it. If it indeed benefits a few individuals massively while on net reducing utility to society, an argument can be made that society has a moral imperative to ban it. Hence the limitations on gambling, on alcohol and tobacco marketing/sales, etc.
But then you don't need to have the restaurant at all, you just need to have the idea of a restaurant that sells the idea of a booking. Someone decides they want to pay £100 for a booking at Restaurant A, which actually only exists on paper, so now they have a restaurant booking. They can then trade that booking to you for some other amount of money, if they want to make a profit on it. How badly do you want to have a booking at Restaurant A?
And now, you want to actually go to Restaurant A and eat a curry, but they look at you like you've grown an extra head. Eat Food? What, here? In Restaurant A?
Congratulations, you've just invented banking, where people look at you similarly if you attempt to actually go and collect the gold that your bank says represents the money that's actually stored as a series of north and south magnetic domains on a thin sheet of rust painted onto a rapidly-spinning aluminium disk.
Meanwhile I ring the guy at the restaurant started by his grandmother when she fled Pakistan at the end of the Second World War, about ten minutes before we show up, and when I get there I've got a pint of Guinness, a menu, and some chapatis and chutney already on the table.
I prefer it that way. The food's better, for a start.
I don't need the menu, the guy's just going to bring me the desi shit from the family meal.
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