Liz

My powers are limited. This is the best you're gonna get. :P

I got you, fam.

I mean in the case of the comic, yeah the reason for the behavior actually is tied to pretty much the same principles, but the generalized statement you made isn't, well, generalizable.

One of my great regrets in high school chemistry was that I was born too late to discover some pattern and have it called Liz 's Formula or whatever.

When you section off a small part of the universe and try to model it, there's little reason your model should look like a model for a completely different small part of the universe. Not unless they share fundamental characteristics that you're trying to model. The math that describes permanent deformation looks nothing like fluid dynamics.

Money is necessary if you have specialization. You can't keep track of who has done what favor to whom or how much that favor is really worth. Money is the thing that makes extreme specialization possible.

Question: what fraction of bits do you need to randomly flip to ensure the data is unrecoverable?

Modern civil wars look nothing like the American civil war. What you're imagining is probably within the scope of the book.

The thing is it's actually not inevitable. I suggest you read "How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them," which is about exactly what it says it's about.

I do wonder what fraction of .ml actually tries to unionize their workplace or start a cooperative. Probably higher than most groups, but I'd wager it's still embarrassingly low.

Without specialization the effectiveness of trading labor doesn't go much beyond just doing favors for each other. I don't get much value out of having you do a task for me if I can do it comparably as well as you can. I have to weigh the benefit of having someone else work for me and building mutual trust against the cost of being indebted to someone else and the risk of them doing differently to how I would have wanted. If we each specialize, now other people can offer labor that I can't perform myself, and when they get good enough at their specialty it really starts to outweigh the negative sides of having someone else do the work for you.

I mean, it turns out that if we all specialize in one type of labor or another we each become significantly more productive than if we all tried to provide for ourselves as individuals or even small collectives. If we use money as a rough way of storing the value of our labor, we can use that layer of abstraction to trade labor with each other at impersonal scales, benefitting even further from specialization and organization.

I, for one, am glad someone else has gotten super good at growing food and building shelter so that I can concentrate on other things as I desire. I could even become a farmer, if I wanted!