At 15/05/2014 13:50, you wrote:Has there been any (non-electronic) good in human history whose cost has dropped a million-fold? Maybe aluminum.Tulips, although the history is murky, according to one of Wikipedia's less bad articles. Mackay has two separate citations showing 2500 florins for a single tulip bulb around 1635. The purchasing power of such a florin is said to have been appx 10 Euros as valued in 2002. So: 1 tulip for 25,000 euros. It would be inconvenient but not at all impossible to buy tulips at the rate of 40 per Euro today, so there's your million.
That's not *my* million, the bursting of the tulip bubble has nothing in common with the lowering of costs of production for hard drives and for electronics generally. One was a return to reality the other is a vastly improving reality.
Orchids that are easy to mass-propogate are an excellent example of a commodity where the first, unique, example, is worth a vast amount of money, compared to what might be charged within a year or so for subsequent identical replicants.
That's much closer: a difficult creation easily reproduced. But still, in electronics, we are dealing with the new.