Grrl Power #1250 - Orderly friday (Patreon)

Thank 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!"