Saturday, September 08, 2012

laws

I have so many thing to do I do none of them. I've been thinking about the spatial aspect of the law of diminishing returns. This law was formulated by mm fuck Ricardo. It's very simple. Add more labor to any task and with each new labor unit the useful output will decrease. If I need someone to dig a hole in the ground I could hire one worker and give him a shovel and it would be a great help compared to no workers and no hole at all. Get another worker and they would dig it twice as fast. Third one - they'd probably already begin slacking off, having smoke breaks and playing table tennis. Four, five - and they would just start getting in each other's way. Every new worker is less useful than the previous one. What is fascinating, I think, is the pure spatial dimension of such interaction. I always imagine like 20 people thrown in a pit, swarming like a bunch of worms, doing nothing, of course, just trying to disentangle their puny 3-dimensional bodies. Now if we have learned anything from modern physics this need not be the case on all levels of the material world: particles fly through walls like there's no tomorrow, electrons end up in a few places at the same time, some even say there's just one electron to all there is, whizzing around in time and space. Humans bump into each other all right, but that need not be the case universally. I couldn't find any formula on the Internet for the law of diminishing returns that takes mass into consideration. Midgets would obstruct each other's movements twice as little probably, and you can fill a hole in the ground with much more cats than humans, and probably on a certain level the law would not be applicable at all.

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