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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

It's simple, valuable work is work that people are willing to pay for with currency that can be used for food/shelter/whatever.

It seems arbitrary, but if some billionaire pays you a million dollars to bite her toe off, that's still immensely more valuable than the 10 years spent in the article because a million dollars worth of obligations were just released to someone who will (on average) spend them.

Money is just a note of a generic obligation (aka debt) from the rest of society in that currency.

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I don't have the answer, but it's certainly not simple. I'm not willing to pay you anything for participating in this HN discussion. That doesn't make your contributions worthless. Some people pay millions for a useless piece of canvas with some blobs on it, but this crazy minecraft construction or that webcomic that I'm enjoying for free is supposed to be worthless? No way.

The need for food and shelter only requires a small percentage of our collective time these days. The much larger part of our economic activity is not grounded in that need, though it may be convenient to make other people think that working 40 hours a week is just barely enough to earn the right to exist.

The value in HN comments is high. Just because they don't show ads doesn't mean they aren't able to capture that value either.

HN is not free in the purest sense. Companies/ideas/agendas are presented to you. It a way it's a platform and platforms are usually free and offer at least some network effect value.

> It's simple, valuable work is work that people are willing to pay for with currency that can be used for food/shelter/whatever.

So, "valuable work" is just work with financial benefits? If I save 100 poor people's lives it's worth less than if I drive a millionaire around for $10?

A narrow way to look at it.

Loyality gained from those 100 poor people could allow trust between you that allows you to gain additional value (100 poor people trained becomes a powerful army). While the 10 dollars you gained while driving around someone you missed 100 dollar opportunities.

We're talking about different kinds of value.

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