Ah, today was a good day. Plenty of berry picking, lots of sunshine (on unprotected skin! Call the skin cancer police)

I thought about scarcity and abundance a lot because a) that's my econ brain, and b) that's all we talk about in these AI-infused times #1486740, #146703;.

The berries out here exist in extreme abundance, limited in reality by my perseverance only: I only have so many hours in me of sitting down, hunching over, fingers purple from juicy berries. Gotta go home and shitpost on SN! And yet, I was struck by the same fascinating I had all these years ago... where is everybody?!

There's free blueberries in them hills!

It reminded me of this great article that I wrote waaay before SN times, and that I still recall fondly. I had totally forgotten the term "Fortune of the commons"; so funny, so clutch, I'm a genius.

I live in quite a sparsely-populated place, with lots of wilderness and nature. This time of year, we have plenty of late-summer berries in season, and it isn’t uncommon to find stray hikers hunched over bushes eagerly picking blueberries and crowberries. This is what most people, economists included, would expect: Mother Nature provides us with free stuff, stuff that most people highly value, and all you have to do is reach out your hand and gather up the goodies.
About once a week for the last month, I have brought Tupperware containers to the mountains closest to my home and returned an hour or so later with more blueberries than I could possibly eat. Surprisingly enough, I rarely meet other blueberry fanatics with boxes filled to the rim of this deep purple gold. If we look at the free stuff awarded to anyone who picks them from an economistic tragedy-of-the-commons point of view, this is very odd:

"if human nature, human greed, and the capitalist spirit inevitably are to blame for the general exploitation of the world’s commons, then why are there still blueberries in the fields?"

Why have enterprising individuals and utility-maximizing agents not vacuumed the bushes clear of berries? Especially when these same individuals are likely to buy imported blueberries at the supermarket for quite a lot more than Mother Nature charges.

And let me tell you that blueberry in the local stores were not cheap in 2021 but have gone berserk since then. Imma snack on these free puppies until winter covers us 10ft deep in snow!

Although there are free blueberries on the mountains of practically unlimited quantity, and the ones consumers get in the store come in small boxes, with high price tags, and the occasional mold – the combined price of zero plus the effort and time it takes to weather the elements and actually pick them, is too high for most consumers. Zero can actually be more expensive than what the store charges, because it requires the consumer to make a physically demanding additional trip.

Also, the new spot I'm ravaging today lies across a muddy swamp which conveniently keeps out most tourists and stray hikers... too soggy, too messy. But Den doesn't mind... barefoot is great. Feels good, man.

And so I'll make many return trips there and stock up on aaaaalll the yummy berries, obviously pondering the meaning of life and scarcity pricing and value of free goods.

It's not much but it's honest work. Peaceful life