If you mine for 3 hours for one min, you'll have a fair sized basket requirement to consume your gathered portion. ie you'll need 100mil+ to consume 30mil.

If you take the other approach - ie you sell to a buy order most of your gathered portion, and then buy from a sell order a basket the size of your gather, then you've just gone and created negative trade profit in order to manufacture. Given non hubs have slow sales movement, you'll just be tying up that mined capital along with extra working capital for days to wait for it to exchange if you try to access the proper sides of the spreads when converting to a basket for manufacture.

Finding the local maxima and having several reliable belts BM'd with various balances of roids that you can recheck quickly is a once off investment that lasts pretty much forever. My alt created in 2009 has BMs created in 2009. I'm always vaguely amused to see them showing in context menus as I fly past.

You might want to log in once after a DT respawn to see what is supposed to be where, and then vague mental empirical records will do for the rest of your playing career.

The scenario you put forward didn't have "cans" or "mays", it had obvious problems.

Depending on your preferences for how to spend your time in game, it can actually be worth it to place items on the market for less than the mineral value.

Some people aren't interested in making big piles of ISK. They just like mining/manufacturing/selling. They're just enjoying the process. They're just enjoying the game.

There are always new players joining the game, so I don't see this dynamic changing any time soon.

No matter how much you complain, there will always be players who undercut the market at a personal loss. When they run out of ISK, they just go back and mine some of those free minerals everyone gets so upset about.

It's a bit of a shortcut that people take to make the statement about "the minerals you mine are free" when they really mean that "the minerals you mine have a market value".

Or you can just plain out mine and sell the ore and minerals for pure profit.

The minerals you mine are free... until you decide the value of your time.

Anyone who thinks the argument against MIMAF is due to supposed undercutting has an 1D10T error loop in their brain.

People who sell under market value are basically giving us (the savvy industrialist or trader) their profitls. And how can you really be against that in the slightest? I love it.

However, there is the matter of the MIMAF simply be untrue. Not only are there opportunity costs, but it also costs isk to train for, buy, and replace mining ships/equipment. This is a basic fact.

The annoying bit is where they only undercut by a percent and a half. Makes it harder to buy and relist for a profit

what is money
money is your work expressed as a number, in this case isk

miners will mine lots of ore, then refine with low refine skills ( losing profit)
they then use a bpo to make some sort of ship or module, probably not researched ( losing lots more profit)
they then UNDERCUT everyone to try and sell their stuff faster

so if they mined 30mil in ore
they lose 10% from refining
they lost 10% from using a unresearched bpo
they lose some from the actual manufacture
they then undercut everyone possibly losing even more.

In most cases, mostly newbies or people not understanding mathematics, this is true.
But when you maxed out refining skills?
Have the standing for 0% refining tax?
Have at least a researched BPC?
So the losses between teh moment you mine to the moment you produce are at minimum. At that moment you get to the point you as a producer have to decide what your time is worth.
Or find some one with to much money willing to pay to much.

The minerals always have a value, which the MIMAF crowd generally disavows. They consider anything they make to be pure profit, and there's little you can do to talk them out of that belief. The only thing you can do usually is to atleast get them not to list something under the mineral value of the reprocessed goods.

The "it's just a game" crowd is even worse, because they know what you're saying, but will still actively work against a profit model. They are like the suicide gankers of the marketplace, where their own fun is more important than other people's fun, and enjoy the tears they produce.