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Spot on, and it forgets the creative aspect, it‘s like estimating the cost of reproducing all of the world‘s widely read literature. Who could recreate a Shakespeare from scatch, who a van Rossum?

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"We estimate the supply-side value of Shakespeare's works by estimating the cost of paying an author to write the approximately 884,000 words in his collective works. We therefore calculate the value of Shakespeare to society at $320,000, or approximately the same as the value of 3 Tesla Cybertrucks."

-- MBAs, probably

nobody because the times and places either of them lived in no longer exist. surely the places and the geographical locations and buildings are still there, but the people are all different, so it's not the same place

That's important in literature in a way.. But does it matter to the economy if POSIX were created as it is or if some OS slush fund created a different computing model obsessed with some other primitve besides the file?

In our values a lot of literature is valuable because of how it came about. If Shakespeare never existed and someone wrote like him today we would just lock them up.

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