Conversation

Replying to
So crap properties in urban cores are caught between depreciation through blight versus appreciation due to uninformed demand. Right now, knowing how to use less developed land is more valuable than having the money to win bidding wars for developed land.
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Owning things is a skill. Inventory management is a skill. Inventory is not rotting, depreciating, work-in-progress tied to a single use or market. It’s a kind of complex potential that can be more or less fungible than money in certain conditions.
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We all got a shock lesson last year that under certain rare but foreseeable scenarios, toilet paper. PPE, and sanitizer have higher fungibility than cash. I bet Wall Street quants are brilliant at modeling scenarios and identifying things *worth* holding. But they stop there.
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Nobody wants to actually acquire the skills of holding things. Just the skills of betting on representations and passing on the actual things as quickly as possible. Preferably not touching them at all. So we buy oil futures with nowhere to put the oil if forced to take delivery.
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There’s a broader economic-philosophical point here. Lean is a natural expression of growthism, which is growth-for-the-sake-of-growth *as measured by money* because in a time-averaged sense, under low-uncertainty conditions, money is the most fungible asset *on average*
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Money is the best way to hold wealth if there’s a veil of ignorance on future. Yes, sometimes for days/weeks, hand sanitizer may be more liquid (heh!) but on average you’re best off holding money. But what if... the veil were not opaque? And what if days/weeks turn into months?
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If the future is such that you can expect the world to be in unusual regimes for long periods (months, even years), and you can partly predict it, you think of holding wealth differently. Like they did materials in WW2, or the way governments think about food/energy security now.
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Replying to
The hard part today is that the stuff we need to stockpile is more ephemeral. Stockpiling chips doesn’t work because they go out of date. Fabs aren’t much better, need constant updates. You have to stockpile fab-creation expertise, effectively.
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