Sumerian Cow Tokens

So what is the value of an Ur Cow Token?

Sorry, I can’t get a market price for Ur per se so you’ll have to settle for a Sumerian one from around 1953 – 1935 BCE backed (and baked) by the Royal mint itself which in “very good” condition fetches around $1200 in Federal Reserve notes good for all Debts Public and Private.

Or a Cow if you have a TARDIS, market value for one of those is $1642 and you get the income from the meat and milk and manure and the little baby Cows which over a 4.7 year lifespan (oh, don’t get sentimental on me, we’re talking about an imaginary Cow from an economic standpoint and you can keep it in a feedlot so you don’t have to do any of those icky pitchfork thingees).

The cool mist settled in the hollows of the night as the idiot stood by the fence contemplating (as well as his child-like mind could) the bovine somnolence that stood before him, serenely dreaming lactative 4 stomach dreams of endless fields of daisies, yes daisies for that was her name- Daisy, bright as the summer sun, long slow munching of grass and partially digested grass, methane producing, global warming Daisy. She smelled of the earth and as he approached her side, careful not to disturb her gentle ‘earth gifts’, he could feel the heat of her fermentive power, the transformation of cool clay, the wetness of spring floods, and the greenness, the awesome greenness of the whole valley.

Gently he pushed her and she collapsed, even now unconscious, the pastures of her youth playing in her mind as the idiot re-crossed the boundary between what was her and her kind’s alone, back to the mundane reality that waited for him, back to his own kind and their cruel taunts.

As the sun rose the mist fled. Daisy, startled, rose to her feet and resumed her life as if nothing had happened. The idiot, wracked by guilt, finished his undergraduate degree in English Literature, not only never forgetting his youthful indiscretions but in fact REVELING in them as he said to me-

“Do you want fries with that?”

Anyway it’s $2582 in net income at least which is more than twice as many green pieces of paper as that dried out piece of dirt.

Wait ek. I can monetize that future income and invest it in something with a higher return!

Sure, at a discount, and please tell me what other investments are going to yield 20% per year?

Uber stocks?

What if Uber Is a Joke?
By Dean Baker, Truthout
Monday, April 24, 2017

While Uber’s impact on the taxi industry is clearly not a joke, the market valuation of the company may well be. Uber is not yet publicly traded, but its market value has been estimated as being as high as $70 billion. That compares to a market value of just $51 billion for auto giant GM and $44.6 billion for Ford.

These are longstanding companies that both make close to $10 billion in annual profits. By contrast, Uber is losing billions of dollars a year.

Investors are not ordinarily prepared to pay large amounts of money for the stock of companies that lose money. The stock certificates might be pretty, but presumably at the end of the day investors will want to see profits.

There are two stories whereby Uber turns itself around and becomes a hugely profitable company. The first is that it will soon drive out enough of its competition so that it will enjoy near-monopoly status in many markets. This will allow it to raise its prices enough so that it can then turn large profits.

There are two problems with this story, one technical and the other legal. The technical problem is that it is not clear whether the technology of the taxi industry lends itself to monopolies. It’s not that hard to have an app for calling cabs, nor is it hard to hire drivers. If Uber were to up its prices by 20-30 percent, it would likely find many new competitors in the market.

Let me stop right here and admit I wrote a term paper in Economics that argued Monopolies were unstable in the long run because the threshold price for their products was just below a level that would attract competition. It’s true enough but I grossly underestimated that threshold.

The other problem is the legal one. Predatory pricing to gain a monopoly is textbook anti-competitive behavior. This should lead to anti-trust action by the government and lawsuits by competitors. This is undoubtedly a major reason that Uber has staffed itself with former top Obama administration officials. Of course, Donald Trump has probably never heard of anti-trust laws.

The other turnaround story for Uber is that it was never really about taxis, but rather self-driving vehicles. Uber is going to be the behemoth of the self-driving vehicle industry and dominate this market the way IBM once dominated computers and Microsoft dominated software.

The problem with this story is that Uber would have to beat out a large number of major competitors, including the existing auto companies, Apple, Google and undoubtedly many smaller tech companies. That seems like a long shot.

So let’s try alternative number three — Uber’s stock is nearly worthless, but for now people are willing to pay lots of money for it. This shouldn’t sound far-fetched if you have heard of AOL, Priceline or more recently Groupon. In each case, stock valuations soared into the tens of billions or even hundreds of billions before plunging to a small fraction of this amount.

In such cases we see a massive redistribution of wealth, often from pension funds and other institutional investors to the “visionaries” who were able to sucker them. Folks like Steve Case, the former CEO of AOL, are incredibly rich today because of their talents in this area. Perhaps Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is following in his footsteps.

I, for one, am always willing to trade magic beans for live jive Cows. Hope you get lots of golden eggs before the traitorous harp calls the Giant on you.