Re: Kicking a few ideas around in my head (SF), would like to get feedback

On 15 Aug 2009 13:47:57 GMT, Tim Little <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2009-08-15, Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yeah, but you are looking for ways the scheme wouldn't work.

Can you, instead, find ways to make it work?

I don't see any reason why it couldn't work, I just don't see the
point of tracking air consumption separately from food. The two are

To discourage smoking? :-)

so directly connected and it's much easier to track food. Related to
this, the other side of the coin is that manufacturing food in a
substantially closed environment is going to involve recovering carbon
from carbon dioxide, and so liberating oxygen. So the air is a
by-product of food manufacture anyway.

So it's the same thing, unless you have something like "free air" as a
perk to employees working in an office. You could compare that with
air-conditioning on present-day Earth. If you live in a climate which
needs it. How much does your employer deduce from your salary for office
air-conditioning/heating?

A more interesting problem, if air is not free, would be a shopping
mall... and if you were too poor to afford enough air for a day's
breathing, would there be places you could go (like soup kitchens) to be
able to breathe for free? How do you gain entry to a shopping mall... it
surely wouldn't expect its customers to wear breathing masks...?

As far as the energy (or power) currency itself goes, it seems viable
as a theoretical backing for a currency that hardly ever gets used,
much as gold and silver used to be. However, I'm guessing that you
want something more direct.

For SFnal purposes, yes. A fiat currency might work in reality, but it's
not interestingly *different*. That's not a problem if your[anyone's]
interests in SF lie only in other directions.

I can't really believe in Iain Bank's "Culture" total lack of money,
even in a society where there's no shortage of goods, I think there's
always going to be a shortage of *something* - even if people have to
give it an artificial value.

As a present day example, I think "genuineness" is an artificial
property. If we could make an exact replica of an antique, would you pay
the same for it as a real antique? Most people wouldn't -- which pleases
me, as if I wanted an antique, I'd be just as happy with a fake (for
much less money) as long as it was a *good* fake (i.e. I couldn't tell
the difference). I don't mean I'd be happy with plastic instead of wood,
but a wooden reproduction would suit me fine if not better [not that I
actually want antique furniture, I'm just making a point].

But most people don't feel the same: they think they genuine antique is
more valuable. (Similarly for modern artists' work etc. The genuine
painting is more valuable than the forgery, even to non-experts who
can't tell the difference. Ditto genuine v. synthetic diamonds.)

So even in the Culture, surely real, genuine antiques would have value,
and that translates, for convenience, into some kind of monetary value?

The difficulties of actually using energy itself as a medium of
transaction appear to be enormous. For example, the energy required
to maintain bare survival for a day is on the order of 15 MJ. I would
hope that our hypothetical citizens would be paid a lot more than
that; at least 100 MJ. So a fortnight's wages would be something like
1400 MJ. Gasoline (ignoring the air required to burn it) is an
extremely energy-dense storage medium, but even then a fortnight's
wages would require a tank with at least 28 kg of fuel in it. That
seem extraordinarily unwieldy for a standard pay packet.

Yeah, but that's why IOUs were invented. You carry around an IOU made
out to whoever is carrying it. Paper is much lighter than gold. Or you
could have a digitally authenticated IOU on a memory stick.

None of the attempts at creating e-cash have worked, so far, but I
wonder how much that's because governments *like* the idea that all
financial transactions are becoming traceable...? [Ok, probably just
incipient paranoia... but when I'm world dictator I shall abolish cash
in favour of everyone using credit or debit cards.... :-) ]

This sort of ties into the discussion by asking what money *is*. We may
be using different concepts of money. (And when economists talk about
the money supply, they have half a dozen different measures of how much
"money" is in circulation. On some counts, if I lend you $10, I've just
added $10 to the money supply. On others, I haven't.)

Jonathan

--
Never try to baptise a cat.
.

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