In practice there is though. If something is going to happen regardless whether you take advantage of it or not and you manage to benefit from it, then it basically was a free lunch for you.
One example of this is hydro power. Once you build a water mill on a river you don't have to do any work to keep it going. The sun heats up the water downstream from the waterwheel and it falls down as rain upstream. The river keeps flowing whether you take advantage of it or not. Eventually the sun will stop shining, but in practice that's so far away that it doesn't matter.
The point isn't about dams. The point is that what generates electricity in a dam is water flowing downhill. However, we don't have to do any work ourselves to get the water back uphill. Effectively it's a "perpetuum mobile" from our practical perspective. It is, in essence, a free lunch. The water evaporates due to the sun and rains down in the hills whether we take advantage of it or not.
The Wikipedia article gives an extremely strained explanation of why TANSTAAFL still holds true in that case by referring to open vs closed systems, but at that point it's just thermodynamics. In practice, solar energy (whether directly or via evaporation) is "free".
I think how most people understand TANSTAAFL is that if it's free, there are always strings attached. This holds true in many situations (owing favors in return, free food being salty so you order more drinks, free trials encouraging vendor lock-in, etc). But it's not true in all situations and stretching the definition so it covers those makes it useless.
Sure, but that's kind of missing the point. We're taking advantage of rain and rivers with the water mill. The water flows downhill and we benefit from it, yet we don't have to do any work to get that water back uphill. We gain more energy out of it than we put in.
This is an adage that toes the line between a deepity (something that sounds profound but is entirely trivial) and genuinely profound truth. In many cases it's worth remembering TANSTAAFL because agents under capitalism will try to advertise something as "free" when it has hidden costs (either financial, or by using your data/input for profit). On the other hand, outside capitalism it's often a trivial retelling of thermodynamics: there's no free energy, everything has to come from somewhere.
Interestingly, although TANSTAAFL can be summarized as "everything is a zero-sum game", the core tenet of modern economy is that the economy is not a zero-sum game and eternal growth is possible. So as much as TANSTAAFL has been characterized as "libertarian", it's also a refutation of libertarian narratives like "trickle-down economics" and perpetual economic growth.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 33.5 ms ] threadOne example of this is hydro power. Once you build a water mill on a river you don't have to do any work to keep it going. The sun heats up the water downstream from the waterwheel and it falls down as rain upstream. The river keeps flowing whether you take advantage of it or not. Eventually the sun will stop shining, but in practice that's so far away that it doesn't matter.
I think how most people understand TANSTAAFL is that if it's free, there are always strings attached. This holds true in many situations (owing favors in return, free food being salty so you order more drinks, free trials encouraging vendor lock-in, etc). But it's not true in all situations and stretching the definition so it covers those makes it useless.
Interestingly, although TANSTAAFL can be summarized as "everything is a zero-sum game", the core tenet of modern economy is that the economy is not a zero-sum game and eternal growth is possible. So as much as TANSTAAFL has been characterized as "libertarian", it's also a refutation of libertarian narratives like "trickle-down economics" and perpetual economic growth.
Nothing about TANSTAAFL implies what you claim it does and I am quite perplexed how anyone could read this into it. Must be the ideological specs.