Re: [OPE-L] 2/Reliability of Price channel

[Paul Cockshott <wpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Alejandro Agafonow
Then, it could be the properly context of my question: Could price channel reliably report the revolutionary technological change emerging at that time?
  

Paul Cockshott
The answer has to be no.

How much information does a price encode?
I reckon it encodes about 12 bits of information ( assuming you express the price
as a binary logarithm, and take into account the rounding that exists for all real
prices ).

How many bits of information are required to

a) specify the design of an Apple Mackintosh?
b) encode the TV advert that you describe?

Answer

a) taking into account the CAD systems available in the 80s I would suggest that the Schematic design alone for the Mackintosh would have required or the order of a few million bits. The same
order of bits would have been required for the ROM containing the graphics library that was its unique feature.

b) A standard television channel encoded using MPEG ( not then available ) takes about one
million bits per second of transmission.

It is clear from these figures that the price channel has a bandwidth many orders of
magnitude too low for the task you envisage.