Re: OT: In Praise of Dos-Based Word Processors
- From: Bill Troop <billtroop@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 16 May 2014 14:39:24 +0100
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.
There must be hundreds (at least) of other
examples throughout human history, though the
vaguaries of ancient economics make it difficult to compare.
In 2008, at a country auction, I witnessed the
sale of approximately 300 new ultra-high-quality
percale sheets that had originally sold for over
£1,000 each. The entire lot went for £80. My
ex-wife, upon whom I then doted, stayed my
avaricious hand, and I cannot say I ever entirely forgave her.
David Austin has valued his 'Juliet' rose at
several million. (It's not worth it, experto
crede). That is just marketing fluff, but
certainly in the orchid world, a newly-bred
phalenopsis could sell for a huge amount of
money; it could then be propogated in the
hundreds of thousands or millions, and sold for
pennies to growers in Asia (though it might cost
$10 by the time it reaches your supermarket).
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.
There must be countless other plant and food
items that cost fortunes before they were cultivated widely and cheaply.
Many luxurys car that cost 50,000 when new can be
bought for 500 ten to fifteen years later (in actual working order).
Of course you will have read of the Faberge
easter egg that some fellow in the midwest bought
for a couple of thousand and sold for many
millions. Admitted, that was a rise in price, but
when he bought it, there had been a substantial drop.
Apols for acute example of off-topic blathering!
(Cannot resist asking: would manuscripts by
contemporary authors which have sold for millions
and then flopped, count? A recent example would be the Knox memoir.)
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