300 million lbs of fireworks and 2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.

  • blazera@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Money was used to pay workers to extract, refine, and process resources. Absolutely none of the money is gone.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      The money itself? Sure. But that’s not what people talk about when they talk about money, they are usually referring to what the money represents, i.e. resources, which were all burnt up and used to create that fire work when they could have gone to something else.

      i.e. if we spent some huge proportion of our money on fireworks every year, we would still have the same amount of money on paper in the economy, but absolutely everything else would cost far more. From our actual lived perspective we would be poorer.

      • blazera@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Thats just not how money works. We did spend a huge amount of our money on fireworks, things didnt become more expensive.

        • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          That is absolutely just how money works, if that same money had gone to say, healthcare companies instead of fireworks companies, we would have the same amount of paper money, and we wouldn’t have fireworks, but we’d have lower healthcare costs since we already paid some of them.

          • blazera@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            You’re bringing up a lot of examples that literally happen in reality and do not have the results you are claiming. Healthcare companies have been both steadily receiving more money and increasing their prices.

            • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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              4 months ago

              Assuming you’re talking about American healthcare companies, thats because you have a broken nonsensical healthcare system filled with middlemen who will suck up profits.

              That has nothing to do with the concept of opportunity cost. Pick a different industry, like agriculture / food then. If you spend $20 on food every month instead of fireworks, then feeding yourself the rest of the food you need is $20 cheaper.