Shireroth

"You're a man who would look at the sun and say, 'I can't believe they give it away for free."

My first thought when I read this was "they do?" I don't know how to analyse this for things like farmland (or products of farmland for that matter) or for people putting solar cells on their roofs, but... suppose you were to buy land from Negev or Mojave or some other desert that's not really good for anything but just sitting there being sunny and hot, and to wait a couple of years for advances in photovoltaics and power transfer technology. Wouldn't you expect the land value to increase, mainly from the increased value of the sunlight falling on it (as more usable electric power can be produced from it)?

If it helps, in context it was on the [url-http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruentransfer/]Gruen Transfer[/url], an Aussie show that looks at advertising. They were discussing the selling of bottled water. One of them was observing that it costs 250 times the price of tap water and people can't taste the difference. One of the advertisers replied that that doesn't matter - people are buying it for the bottle and the style. Besides, utilities could advertise tap water but they don't - they're just lazy marketers (which got a big laugh). To which the response of the first guy was, "You're a man who would look at the sun and say, 'I can't believe they give it away for free.'"