this jumped out at me too. What counts as "abandoned"? How do you know the goal was not simply met?

I have longer threads that I don't want to pollute with side quests. I will pull up multiple other chats and ask one or two questions about completely tangential or unrelated things.

Scarcity and affordability are different things; that’s the whole point. Scarcity is physical. Affordability is the social mechanism governing who gets it. We choose. Money, property rights, divine right, strength, moral frameworks. All of those are human agreements, not physical laws. Roenxi, you keep conflating the two. Nobody is claiming scarcity is a social construct. The claim is that how we allocate scarce things is. Those are separable questions.

Scarcity is a physical phenomenon. Only one $thing exists and more than one person wants it. Scarcity. The agreement to transfer that $thing to someone is based on humans respecting made up rules. Society. Social constructions. How we define affordability is different. You can "pay" in different ways, some that don't have physical mapping t real world like "social standing."

The laws of supply and demand and scarcity still apply, yes. But how that plays out is social. People have to agree or fight. "Affordability" is based on what we agree is worth an exchange. You may value the approval of the recipient more than money. What does affordability mean here? To curry favor later with someone else or because your moral framework lets you sleep better (they were a hungry kid and you don't want kids hungry - another kind of scarcity where we define affordability by how hungry you are).

Like you said, unless we redefine words. Then you can have affordability and scarcity mean the same thing.

Edit: snark reduction

Next you're gonna tell me that applications run on text you can write by hand. Pffft. Ain't no way

You chose to sell the apple. The most eager and capable buyer buys it. Capitalism.

You could choose to give the apple to the hungry person. You might choose that because you want their help in a different way. Or because you feel it is right. Or they are your kid. Or you give it to the strong person to have a better alliance.

Or you could have the apple taken from you. You might even have more taken, like your life. The other side has a say too! They both might believe that you shouldn't have it and (might makes right, right?) capitalism wont save you there.

That we don't (or do) take by force is a social construct. That we choose to instead honor an imaginary dollar tied to the intrinsic ability of our government to service its own debts is a social construct. Or the idea that maybe we should split the apple or plant it to make more apples. I can imagine a parent with two kids: "fine, nobody gets an apple, it goes in the trash since we can't agree." Nothing here is "one natural order." It is what people decide. And why they decide is based on squishy human reasoning. Social constructs.