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Money doesn't "keep track of resources." If it did, the Fed would not have been able to create $2 trillion in "Quantitative Easing."

It's an imperfect analogy, but I think dollars are more like inches - useful to measure and compare things, and subject to redefinition at the whims of power. (Imagine a carpenter telling you he can't finish building your bookcase because he's "run out of inches." They are not the things they measure.)



The fact that the underlying number of resources changes dynamically is not related to whether money keeps track of those resources. The quantitative easing is akin to when an OS overcommits memory and starts doling out more memory than actually exists in response to malloc() calls.

This works because people (programs) aren't going to start using the money/memory right away, or even necessarily at all. Yet, it prevents the system from locking up (or crashing). The fact that not that much memory exists doesn't mean that your malloc() call doesn't let you keep track of how much memory you are allocated. You can't just start writing to memory that hasn't been allocated to you, in essence. The memory (and money) put a bounds on what kind of behavior you can do, what kind of resources you can use.




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