Eclipse Phase: Frosted Glass Discussion

[Dracorion]

Hey, Ellen is rooting for the Immortals.

She's got no problem with getting to live forever without going through the trouble of making backups and resleeving when you do die.

[rapter200]

Sorry I haven't posted yet, just move back home from college, let me catch up and then I'll post. Also this weekend I am being forced into a camping trip so I won't be able to get internet access until Sunday night or Monday night at the most. I am sorry for this, but they told me about it at the very last minute which just happened to be today...

[krogothwolf]

Duuude, camping is awesome! Don't be sorry for camping. You should have fun in the great outdoors! Just watch out for lions and tigers and bears!

[Overcast]

How about the wondrous mother load of resources that will ultimately be at your disposal by earning a stellar reputation from doing very likely just what you are good at.

Daniel is really a poster boy for the faction, he is radically old but hasn't developed a lick of immortal blues demonstrating the ideal psychology of a human, always in love with the next new thing and always looking to enter some new experience. Yet at the same time maintaining a morphological freedom to continually try to make the shell that holds it that much stronger. So you don't have to question what you may have lost.

It is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body.
Ask for a brave soul that lacks the fear of death,
which places the length of life last among nature’s blessings,
which is able to bear whatever kind of sufferings,
does not know anger, lusts for nothing and believes
the hardships and savage labors of Hercules better than
the satisfactions, feasts, and feather bed of an Eastern king.
I will reveal what you are able to give yourself;
For certain, the one footpath of a tranquil life lies through virtue.
~Mr. T American Actor

[Krylo]

Mr. T pity's the foo' who don't live through virtue.

[Dracorion]

What're we using for dice rolls, anyway?

[Geminex]

I'm guessing that PF generates our rolls online.

Posting in a minute, by the way.

[krogothwolf]

I thought PF said that she was using random.org earlier

[Krylo]

Originally Posted by Rapter

Years, Decades, Centuries, Millennium filled of war and its consequences. Hell they also destroyed Earth.

.

[Arhra]

Hey raptor, I was going to stay quiet but your guy has an 80 in economics so he should really know this stuff:

First off, we're in an outer system habitat. There is no money really. The rep system is essentially very abstracted barter, where you trade services.

There are some limits of course. The 'currencies' can be summarised as energy, materials and time.

First off is energy. A station can, at any time, only produce goods equal to it's energy production minus ongoing running costs (the life support, the computers, etc). Energy's pretty tight in the Kuiper Belt since you can't rely on solar so you need to use fusion or something similar, importing fuel for it. Something that takes a lot of energy to make is therefore more 'expensive'.

Most objects are made of very common stuff. Some need stuff that's hard to get however, like radioactive isotopes. Location's a factor too. There's plenty of water and decent volatiles in the Kuiper Belt for example, but not much in the way of metal. The asteroid belt is kinda the opposite. This relative rarity may create problems if you want to, say, produce a lot of complex electronics.

Finally, we have time. In an ideal post scarcity society, the first two factors are non-entities. But, there's still only so much a person can get done in a day. The time taken to produce something like Daniel's sculptures is one of the main things that makes it valuable.

If he wanted, it would be easy to get a nice slab of marble produced (somewhat less easy for a large piece that needs a larger nanofabricator). It's only calcium, oxygen, carbon and magnesium after all.

Of course, his point seems to be producing art out of authentic rocks, with real rockish features and flaws, not ones that came out of a nanofabber.

Information's an interesting one. It's valuable when you first find it, but once it gets widely released, not so much. Although it's the old question - would you rather get $100 from one guy or $2 from one hundred guys? It's a form of currency, but not quite in the same way the others are, because it's so easy to reproduce.

EDIT: To sum it up, wealth is based on two factors in a post scarcity enironment: What amount of the base resources you control (energy, matter, time, information) and the quality of work you can produce with it.