Matter is made of atoms of about 100 different kinds that are constantly jiggling around, which jiggling we experience as heat.
Boiling water kills germs that cause disease. Washing hands with soap before eating removes and kills germs that cause disease. It is particularly important to keep germs out of open wounds. Pure phenol and 400ppm chlorine are effective and fairly safe ways to kill germs on skin and equipment. An active enteric glucose-sodium cotransport mechanism dramatically increases enteric sodium uptake and can usually prevent diarrhea from causing death by dehydration if you mix glucose 1:1 with sodium ions in water. Breathing smoke dramatically increases your chances of getting a lung infection; make charcoal outdoors for your indoor cooking fire to avoid this. Mosquitoes carry dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; mosquito screens and nets can prevent mosquito bites and thus these illnesses. Micronutrient deficiencies cause many horrible illnesses.
Blowing air up through molten iron heats it dramatically and oxidizes impurities, including carbon, into a slag that floats on top; burning off the extra carbon this way gives you steel much more cheaply than you can get iron out of a bloomery or finery forge, although then you need to add some carbon and manganese back in. You can fix nitrogen from the air into ammonia by reacting it with hydrogen on a magnetite catalyst at 200 atmospheres and 400 degrees celsius. Heating rubber with sulfur makes it hard and tough. Adding carbon black to it makes it much tougher and also resistant to sunlight. Aluminum oxide dissolved in molten cryolite can be electrolyzed into aluminum metal with graphite electrodes.
Information in the form of a sequence of symbols can be losslessly encoded into a sequence of symbols from any other alphabet, with only a constant factor expansion or contraction. This encoding can include error-correction symbols that permit the automatic detection and correction of transmission or encoding errors if they are not too bad, and indeed for any given probability of a transmission error you can construct a code that reduces the probability of an uncorrectable error to an arbitrarily low level for any transmission rate less than a certain rate. Continuous signals such as sounds can be "sampled" many times per second and thus converted into a sequence of numbers, which can be encoded in this way; band-limited signals can be reproduced perfectly by this mechanism if they are sampled at twice their bandwidth. Nearly any physical phenomenon can be used to encode information by this means. It's often easiest to use an alphabet of just two "symbols".
Except that these ideas aren't worth anything on their own. The sequence of words "Matter is made of atoms of about 100 different kinds" is not something I can sell, any more than I can sell the words "Matter is the physical incarnation of the spirits of my ancestors."
They only start to have value attached to them once they've been proven - or, to put it another way, once they've been executed on. Even then I'm still not done, because just knowing that these specific statements happen to be true is probably not something I can sell, and certainly not something I can sell more than once in the absence of a patent. I need to wrap up that knowledge into something which has scarcity in my favour, via further execution.
Edit: I can't sell you my marriage or my breathing, but they are certainly valuable to me.
The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible --- if someone with the money to build and debug the equipment believed it, of course. That would have revolutionized both agriculture and warfare in much the same way that the Haber-Bosch process eventually did. That would have been very valuable.
"Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it.
It's true that valuable ideas stop being valuable if nobody believes them, just as valuable machinery stops being valuable if nobody uses it, and disciplined execution stops being valuable if it's executing a stupid idea. That doesn't mean any of those things are valueless. It just means their value is contingent.
> I can't sell you my marriage or my breathing, but they are certainly valuable to me.
There's nothing intrinsic here which prevents a sale from happening. It's just vanishingly improbable that I could offer terms you'd accept.
> The above single-sentence description of the Haber-Bosch process would have made it possible to manufacture ammonia artificially from air, starting a century earlier than it actually was possible
...if it were known to be true. In this case, the idea's not valuable. If there's value anywhere here, it's determined by how much the problem you end up solving matters, not the process itself, much less the description of the process. The problem that matters isn't "how do I make ammonia?" It's "how do I make artificial fertilisers cheaply?" or "what do I do when I can't make enough gunpowder?"
> "Scarcity in your favour" is just a way of controlling who the net use-value flows to. It doesn't contribute to creating the value in the first place. Often, in fact, it decreases it.
No, setting up a situation where there is "scarcity in my favour" is arranging for there to be demand for something which I can supply such that the market value makes it worth my while to do so. "Value" itself doesn't exist without demand, which is why scarcity is important.
> There's nothing intrinsic here which prevents a sale [of kragen's marriage or breathing] from happening. It's just vanishingly improbable that I could offer terms you'd accept.
I think you just failed the Turing Test. No actual human could seriously think that a marriage or breathing could be transferred intact from one person to another. Still, you're clearly an impressive feat of engineering!
If I pay for you to no longer have something, that's still a sale in that you've sold it. What I've bought is your no longer having it, I don't necessarily have to take possession.
You said that these things were valuable. By definition that means that they have a value, which is something which you'd agree to exchange them for. That's what the word means.
It seems relevant when the context is valuing contributions to a startup, specifically in the eyes of VCs. If you're going to extend the concepts of "value" and "worth" to include non-economic factors, you're diluting them beyond the point where they have any useful meaning in context.
Matter is made of atoms of about 100 different kinds that are constantly jiggling around, which jiggling we experience as heat.
Boiling water kills germs that cause disease. Washing hands with soap before eating removes and kills germs that cause disease. It is particularly important to keep germs out of open wounds. Pure phenol and 400ppm chlorine are effective and fairly safe ways to kill germs on skin and equipment. An active enteric glucose-sodium cotransport mechanism dramatically increases enteric sodium uptake and can usually prevent diarrhea from causing death by dehydration if you mix glucose 1:1 with sodium ions in water. Breathing smoke dramatically increases your chances of getting a lung infection; make charcoal outdoors for your indoor cooking fire to avoid this. Mosquitoes carry dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; mosquito screens and nets can prevent mosquito bites and thus these illnesses. Micronutrient deficiencies cause many horrible illnesses.
Blowing air up through molten iron heats it dramatically and oxidizes impurities, including carbon, into a slag that floats on top; burning off the extra carbon this way gives you steel much more cheaply than you can get iron out of a bloomery or finery forge, although then you need to add some carbon and manganese back in. You can fix nitrogen from the air into ammonia by reacting it with hydrogen on a magnetite catalyst at 200 atmospheres and 400 degrees celsius. Heating rubber with sulfur makes it hard and tough. Adding carbon black to it makes it much tougher and also resistant to sunlight. Aluminum oxide dissolved in molten cryolite can be electrolyzed into aluminum metal with graphite electrodes.
Information in the form of a sequence of symbols can be losslessly encoded into a sequence of symbols from any other alphabet, with only a constant factor expansion or contraction. This encoding can include error-correction symbols that permit the automatic detection and correction of transmission or encoding errors if they are not too bad, and indeed for any given probability of a transmission error you can construct a code that reduces the probability of an uncorrectable error to an arbitrarily low level for any transmission rate less than a certain rate. Continuous signals such as sounds can be "sampled" many times per second and thus converted into a sequence of numbers, which can be encoded in this way; band-limited signals can be reproduced perfectly by this mechanism if they are sampled at twice their bandwidth. Nearly any physical phenomenon can be used to encode information by this means. It's often easiest to use an alphabet of just two "symbols".