WE'RE BAILING OUT THE BILLIONAIRES AGAIN It’s getting to be rather a bad habit around here. And it all started with the Magna Carta. Bear with me. Many more qualified people have explained the ins and outs of the recent bank failures in our crazy financial system, here and here. I also have talked about the energy implications of money before. I don't want to talk about FDIC insurance. I want to talk about story. MONEY IS A STORY It's a story we made up when we moved beyond a barter economy. It's a brilliant story! I make cloth, and you grow apples. I want apples, but you don't need cloth. So I give you a tiny piece of metal instead, trusting that eventually somebody is going to need cloth and will replenish my stores of metal. None of us need the metal for anything, but it stands in for everything we do need. Evolve that miracle system long enough, and apparently, you get pure imaginary money where we don't even need the little pieces of metal, and we just tell each … [Read more...] about Why Money is Just a Rollicking Good Story
Politics
How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy
A scientist made a tiny sun on earth a few days ago, and it took less energy than it produced. It's been all over the news with good reason. It's huge. Endless energy for everyone! Well, maybe. Someday. It's important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away. If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let's do a little world-building, shall we? One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it. Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants. What does a world like that look like? POWER INDUSTRY I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn't fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for … [Read more...] about How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy
How do you Tax a Made up World?
Photo: ArtGrafx Authors of science fiction and fantasy have cultivated a special skill (beyond the ability to torture characters and be tortured by commas all authors acquire). Simply, we speculate. Yes, all authors need to build a world, but we spend hours (or months, or years...) creating an internally consistent alien species or a complete currency and economic system to back it up. Put more poetically, it’s the ability to see the water we are swimming in and imagine something different. How we pay for things is one of the biggest rivers One of the things I’ve been doing more recently is using these world-building skills on the real world. It’s so hard to get out of our bubble without jumping into someone else’s that may be even more bizarre. Deconstructing the world in the same way you can construct a fake world is a way to pop the bubble, at least for a few seconds. What a society is willing to pay for collectively, to tax, and what it insists is an individual … [Read more...] about How do you Tax a Made up World?