Inflation mystery. An Aha! moment for me.

[--Pete]

Hi,

You can't decrease prices so much that prices increase.

I don't understand where this is coming from. The spiral I was speaking of is:

• Not enough demand for a product at a given price. Cannot drop price because it is already at break even -- product sells for the cost of the materials and energy needed to make it.
  
• Production is cut back to reduce existing surpluses. However, there are fixed costs (taxes and insurance on the manufacturing facilities, etc.) that now have to be spread over a smaller number of items. Since the item was at break even, either the price goes up or the loss kills the company.
  
• Increased price puts the product out of reach of even more people, thus further lowering the demand, thus starting another cycle.
  

Whatever is left for humans to do, will be incredibly valuable (measured in robot-produced goods) because it's all we have to do.

And what would that be? Punctuation poems? Covers of 4'33"?

We simply work at producing something else, ...

"We'll just take shelter under this tree until it is soaked, then we'll just move to another."

Really?

... It is no different from very poor countries today ...

It is very different. Right now we have a heterogeneous system. It's like a box of gas that is warm in some spots and cold in others. There is heat flow, but the heat flow is a transient phenomenon. Eventually, it will be homogeneous, and the heat flow will end.

Agreed, although space is *big*.

Yeah. The landfills of today will become the oil fields of tomorrow -- if by tomorrow you mean a few hundred million years from now. The thing is, solutions requiring eons and galaxies are not too practical for the problems of an entity that lives decades and occupies about 25% of one planet.

--Pete