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Grrl Power #1250 - Orderly friday
🕑 Added 2024-04-18 10:00:09 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys are awesome!
Gellen is supposed to look like a (very tall, buff) yaoi pretty boy, but man, I am not practiced at drawing that.
I've talked extensively about money in a post scarcity society, and generally came to the conclusion that the only things that would be of value would be information, energy and probably time. Something that takes the same amount of energy to create on the matter replicator but takes longer to form because of... delicate molecular lattices or some other science words, would be more expensive because of the opportunity cost. So yeah, time would probably be a factor.
However, since buying groceries with a thumbstick that has the 3D model of a '92 VW Bug transmission on it, or handing over a brace of D-Cell batteries probably wouldn't really be viable as currency for a number of reasons. So really, a post scarcity society would probably still have money, but it would be imaginary money like any country that's moved past the gold standard uses.
Nothing has value unless people agree it does. When the 2008 toxic CDO's and CDS's blew up the economy, it's not like any dollar bills or gold doubloons burned up in a fire or anything. Some numbers on a lot of computers went down, and we all "agreed" that it was bad. Honestly I'm not really sure why instead of bailouts, the government didn't just go, "Look, this one time, you can type a few extra zeros back in." Besides setting a terrible precedent, obviously. More terrible than bailing out billion dollar banks and not even breaking them up into smaller institutions and implementing a bunch of regulation, I mean.
But my point is that despite "money" having no real place in a post-scarcity society, I think it would still unfortunately be kind of a necessity. Otherwise, wouldn't everyone be like Scotty and have a boat? If it truly cost nothing to have a boat because "cost" is a depreciated concept, it seems like most people would keep a pretty nice boat around, just in case they decided they wanted to spend the afternoon lounging on the deck of a boat. But... where would they keep them? I guess if money really was no object, then you could build massive underground boat garages and you could retrieve it by pushing A27 like you're getting a Zagnut bar out of the vending machine. Well, presumably, engineers would have better things to do than to build boat garages for 380 million boats, so, money.
As far as Scotty "buying" a boat... Honestly, there's three ways to look at it. 1) In the Federation, you can just Matter up a boat, and what Sydney said is true, that he was using holdover slang. 2) The other, more likely explanation was that the writers didn't know/care about the Federation supposedly being post scarcity. 3) The other other explanation is that they did, but they didn't have a graceful way to have the line "I just replicated a 40 meter schooner." without making their test audiences go, "Uh, what?" So they sighed a heavy sigh and changed the dialog to lowest common denominator for brevity's sake, even though they wrote a really deep in the weeds 17 pages of dialog between Scotty and the whale doctor lady from Star Trek 4 who was at that meeting for some reason, but the real reason was so she could act as the audience exposition surrogate when she asks Scotty to review the finer points of 24th century economics with her. Because I definitely would have written that, then gotten all sullen when the studio execs were like, "What the fuck are you writing about? You turned in a 1,500 page screenplay! Cut 93% of it!"
Comments
Greg Morrow
The crash of 2008 was in a lot of ways, exactly the government writing a bunch of zeroes in -- the Fed invented a bunch of money out of nothing to keep the economy going. It didn't take the form of pretending the worthless CDOs and CDSs were worth anything, but it wasn't far off -- the stuff the money was used for was basically just as pretend. The reason you don't do this very often is inflation; if you create a lot of money out of nothing, things start costing more to absorb it. The reason that didn't happen in 2008 was largely that there was a big hole of imaginary finances that you could shovel the money into so that it didn't escape into the economy of real things. At least, that's my understanding from a couple of decades of reading Paul Krugman.
DakkaDakkaWAAGH
My assumption was that there had been a Marxist takeover between OT and TNG, hence the comparative poverty we see in places like Sisko's accommodation, the painfully 'I made it myself' gift-giving, and the utter failures when it comes to transport and distribution. Cassidy Yates was the Master on a transport ship, but she wasn't part of the Federation and was trading with the Bajoran-owned DS9 rather than the Feds who were currently running it. So, the question becomes WHY were there so many people willing to live outside of the UFP? Could it be because the UFP are willing to throw them to the wolves (read: Cardassians) when they become inconvenient? Will abandon colonies to the encroaching Dominion with little to nothing ever said about recovering them? My impression of the ST universe was that after TNG and the final seasons of DS9, the UFP was ramping up to triggering a Civil War. Sure, it could be argued that Starfleet's betrayal of the Marquis was done to buy them time, and this probably worked, but wouldn't have resolved the underlying issues. Going back to Kirk and completely re-imaging Trek was probably their only option at this point. That, or accept that the experiment had failed.
