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| BAILING OUT THE IRISH - IT SIMPLY WORKS! | |
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OK, so it's supposed to be a joke, but...
...the problem is: all those people in the example actually created some sort of value in the process of running up their debts.
In the 2010 reality, no value was created at all other than creating a real-estate bubble in the late 90s and early 21st century.
Though the building might have been "worth" 500k at some point, nobody is going to pay more than 200k for it now simply because it is not worth more, because there was no more than 200k in value created by constructing it (ignoring the land-scarcity/abundance factor for a moment).
So, at some point we will have to face the reality that a lot of the high-paid jobs we have don't actually create value in the sense that a pig-farmer raises piglets etc. to sell them to the butcher.
So, I setup and maintain servers etc for people so they can have email and web-pages and databases etc - but does that actually create value?
Nothing is "produced" (even though, we like to refer to the "production environments" we setup, in contrast to "test" and "stage"....).
Just bits shifted, bytes shuffled. A billion times a second.
Is that "creating added value"?
Deep inside me, I'm afraid that it is in fact not - and at some point, all the other people will realize that, too.
Then, I'll have to look for a job in the primary sector ;-/
I'd go for baking, if only it wouldn't require getting up so early....