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From: Radey Shouman <shouman@comcast.net>
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.tech
Subject: Re: bike light optics
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2024 10:55:08 -0400
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Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> writes:

> On 4/9/2024 4:41 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
>> Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> writes:
>> 
>>> On 4/8/2024 2:08 PM, Radey Shouman wrote:
>>>> Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> On 4/5/2024 12:36 PM, sms wrote:
>>>>>>    What would be nice is a higher-end battery powered light that could
>>>>>> be charged with a dynamo, and operate at lower power directly from
>>>>>> the dynamo, but there is no such animal.
>>>>>
>>>>> ISTM that the market generally finds a way to fill almost all real
>>>>> needs. If such a thing doesn't exist, it's probably a signal that the
>>>>> benefits are too minor to make it marketable.
>>>> That's just silly.  Do bicycles fill a real need?  If so, why did it
>>>> take millennia for the market to produce them?
>>>
>>> Are you serious? The answer is blatantly obvious: Because the science
>>> and the technology were not yet present to allow manufacture of
>>> bicycles.
>> It's funny how needs become "real" only when they can be satisfied.
>> I'm not sure what the alternative to "real" is, maybe "fake" needs?
>> Maslow claimed there was a hierarchy of needs, from basic food and
>> shelter on up to less pressing desires.  They're all real, but some are
>> more easily deferred than others.  Markets provide solutions for needs
>> when money can be made by selling them; that seems an odd way to define
>> reality.
>
> I think the market can be a useful tool to evaluate needs, albeit not
> a perfect one. This is part of the concept, or maybe a corollary, of
> the "Invisible Hand," is it not?

What is the difference between a need and a desire?  Nothing, as far as
the invisible hand can tell.

> First, as I said, technology or its lack is obviously also
> relevant. (Many people will say they "need" their smart phone, their
> computer, even their ancient land line. Nobody said those things in
> 1850.)

Thoughtful people say they need their smart phone *in order to* do
whatever they do with it.  

> But did people "need" bicycles in, say, 1750, when they were
> impossible? I'd say no. Those people had other needs that were great
> enough that they made the need for personal human powered mobility
> (beyond walking) fairly negligible.

But if they had become available, with the roads on which to use them,
people would have "needed" them quickly.  Absent lithium ion batteries
and cheap microprocessors no one would "need" a smart phone today.

> And society back then was obviously set up so a person could live
> without a bicycle. Come to think of it, society today is also set up 
> that way.

Society back then was obviously set up so that a person could live
without antibiotics ... or not.