Re: OT Hot paper

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Reply to Harry,
> There are other important factors, too. For example, the need for
corporations to occupy a workforce steadily. Supposing the ten-year
light bulb could be made profitably, as Harry describes. Supposing it
would require some slightly longer amount of time to build one of them
than to build the sort which lasts only one year. What is the workforce
going to do the rest of the nine years waiting for the first generation
of bulbs to burn out? The manufacturer is going to pay them to sit
around on their buttocks?
I don't follow you here. Light bulbs aren't sold to only one customer.
There's no waiting around, it's a permanent change in the structure of
production. If it takes less labor to make the more durable light bulb,
that's a *good* thing. The labor that had to be used in the production
of light bulbs is not available for the next-most urgent task (as
signalled by the wage rates, according to supply and demand). <
Let's suppose the market in some region is for 100,000 bulbs or
automobiles or whatever. Once you've sold that many bulbs, the market is
saturated. You can sell 100,000 bulbs once in 2000 and again in 2010
when they all burn out, or 100,000 bulbs each year for ten years,
depending on how durable you make them. If you sell them yearly, you
have steady production; if you sell them only once every ten years, you
have an idle workforce. Of course, this is an artificial example, since
it does not take a year to make either a bulb or a car, and no company
sells its total production on one day, but the principle of continuous
production, as opposed to fits and starts, is the issue here (not the
actual time period). If a company saturated its market in the first year
of production with a product that lasted ten years, it would make itself
redundant. Of course, it would have to seek new markets, but all
companies do that anyway, whether their products last a minute or a century.