Alpha Centauri Forums
Strategies and Tactics
How on earth (and/or Chiron) could you use energy for currnecy?!
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Alpha Centauri Forums
Strategies and Tactics
How on earth (and/or Chiron) could you use energy for currnecy?!
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| Author | Topic: How on earth (and/or Chiron) could you use energy for currnecy?! |
| Natguy |
posted 04-22-99 11:01 PM ET  
I was just recently playing a lovely game of SMAC when a thought struck me... how do you use energy for money? I mean do people take a couple D-cells to the store to get something (When its something big do they go for the car batteries?) If people had a generator, are they counterfeiters? (sp) Would there be a such thing as inflation? Just something to ponder. |
| Plato90s |
posted 04-22-99 11:34 PM ET
Well, consider the basic concept of money. What is money? Money is the physical manifestation of time, because time is actually the most valuable thing in the world. When you buy food, you are paying for the time the farmer and distributers spent getting food to you, including time on capital equipment like trucks, tractors, etc... So energy credits are the same thing. If energy is the most valuable commodity on Planet, then energy credits is the currency of exchange. You need energy to run a factory, a terran farm on Planet, etc... |
| Nell_Smith |
posted 04-23-99 12:17 AM ET
I think the idea of energy as "currency" works pretty well. I've always visualised the factions on Planet having developed a network system kind of like the Internet is now, but using advanced technology to transfer energy packets instead of data packets : from the solar collectors into a central energy storage bank, where it is then used to run the network, fuel the machines that build the base facilities, equip the troops and so on. I don't really imagine the people of Chiron going to shops and buying stuff, but rather envisage each base as a great community of people, with central supply points for things like food and other commodities. (Silly thought: new base facility: liquor store: all units in city gain +3 morale but have 50% chance to fall over during their next turn) One thing I really like about SMAC is its imaginative futuristic base facilities - I especially love Lal's voice-over from his "Social History of Planet" (I think?) when he mentions Yang's "feeding bays"... it conjures up a great image of a mass of people diving into huge troughs of food! Nell PS: Plato90 - you old Marxist, you!! That was straight out of "Das Kapital"... |
| mrdeath |
posted 04-23-99 05:00 AM ET
You pose a very interesting question here. I think that "energy credits" is just a convenient term that the bankers of Chiron use to disguise the fact that it's just money. After all, there's always going to be some medium of exchange. Trell |
| Plato90s |
posted 04-23-99 06:35 AM ET
Well, Marx did do a pretty good job of describing existing conditions. His big problem was that he had no idea how to actually put together a new system. Marx also made a crucial mistake in his inability to recognize that some labor are worth more than others. After all, a doctor spent 20 years of his life training to do his job. An experience plumber may spend 10 years to get to his level of expertise. When you pay high rates for skilled labor, you are not just paying for the time he spent fixing your problem. You're also paying for the training and the investment in capital for equipment. Logically true, and it does form the basis for economics. |
| sandworm |
posted 04-23-99 09:38 AM ET
The US used to operate under a gold standard (later silver) - for every piece of paper money, there was an equal amount of gold(or silver) in the federal stockpiles. You could think of Chiron as operating under an Energy standard instead of Gold. - for every unit of currency produced there's an equivalent value in energy in a faction's reserves. My piece of rectal speculation for the day, i.e., I pulled this answer out my *** |
| Ravenloff |
posted 04-23-99 02:20 PM ET
The concept of money as a concrete form of the abstract idea of time is absurd. It was absurd when it was written and it's even more so now. It's not valid to say that a doctor charges more for his time spent. He charges more because his training costs a certain amount. The more accredited the school, supposedly the better his training, and the more he can charge. If two doctors have equal skill, but one completed his training in less time, how would the concept of money-for-time work there? Sandworm came the closest in the energy-for-money concept. ANYTHING CAN BE USED FOR MONEY, as long as it is universally valuable, i.e. rare or simply desirable. Consider grain. If grain were the commodity, you could issue paper money, for instance, in 1 bushel, 10 bushel, or 20 bushel notes. It would simply be necessary to have a reserve of grain to back up the paper. One step further, and this is how banks got started, is to issue more money than you have reserves, against the faith that not everyone will cash their paper at the same time. Energy can function the same as grain. One more thing, only a communist-like society would have central depots for goods and services for its population. This doesn't work as a society template. I think history has finally proven that in order to prosper, a civilization's people must own their own property. Ravenloff |
| ApcJK |
posted 04-23-99 02:22 PM ET
I think using energy as currency is quite clever. For example, you have energy in store as money, but you're using it also for lighting, heating etc. It all costs money (=energy, from your stores).I hope you undestood what i meant. Anyway, energy has some real value of its own, unlike money which hasn't got anything to back it up. |
| eNo |
posted 04-23-99 05:57 PM ET
Back to one of the original questions: If people had a generator, are they counterfeiters? I don't think so because counterfeit money is an imitation of the currency, where the imitation is worth less. Counterfeiting energy currency is would be like trying to pass of infared energy as electrical energy. |
| ApcJK |
posted 04-24-99 04:17 AM ET
Possiby no, since the generator needs fuel to make that energy, so you don't get that energy for free. If you have fuel, you can sell it, or you can use it to make energy. Both ways work. I think, if you own the thing you're making energy from, it's ok. |
| ApcJK |
posted 04-24-99 04:18 AM ET
Hey... I love this topic! |
| Beta1 |
posted 04-24-99 09:20 AM ET
Ravenloff - interesting idea using carbon for currency. But if you consider carbon as the physical material for building an object and energy as the power needed to drive the construction of the object perhaps carbon equates better to the manufacturing potential of a base (the shield thingies). However I suppose that could be traded as currency as well. Possibly in SMAC2 the ability to trade both energy and manufacturing ability - like renting your production line to someone else!! |
| Schoop |
posted 04-24-99 10:58 AM ET
The economist's definition of money is (A) a medium of exchange, (B) a unit of value, and (C) a store of value. Anything that fulfills these three functions in a society is money. The energy credits in SMAC are just fine, whether people are actually transferring stored electrical energy around, or credit chips based on some form of "energy standard." The example of the man with the generator being a counterfeiter: if he is making energy off the land, he is no more a counterfeiter than the gold miners of earth history. Personally, I believe that the credit chips on the energy standard is much more likely than transferring around actual energy. The most efficient form of money is something that's not good for anything else. Transferring raw energy around is silly, since it cuts down on your society's output--that energy could be being used for something... |
| Nell_Smith |
posted 04-24-99 08:30 PM ET
Plato90: I meant it as a compliment, if anything... Marx and Engels had a lot of good things to say, and plenty of people who automatically hate all things Marxist would do well, if you ask me, to actually read The Manifesto of the Communist Party (the original one, not the current one - if they even have one any more!) and/or Das Kapital. Time really is money, as Marx realised, and the only strictly valid way to value an item in terms of any other item is to calculate the amount of human endeavour (in terms of initial expertise + actual time spent) that has gone into its creation. This, however, is an idealist's point of view, and, as Marx discovered to his great regret, greed is a greater driving force in this world than egalitarianism, and market forces will always trample their way to predominance - well, as long as we allow them to, which will be a long time if present trends continue. Thus you have the situation where a tiny fraction of the world's population consumes 90% of its resources, and where half the world starves while the other half spends its money on dieting aids. Where Marx went wrong was not in his basic theories, or even in his application of them to the creation of a better future society, but in his inability to realise that he was an idealist, and that "real" people, i.e. pragmatists, would distort his concepts of equality and use them to carry on doing what most people have always done and always will do, which is to "look out for Number One and let everyone else go jump". Sad but true. OK, I'll put myself back in my box now. Nell PS: One of Marx's less well-known pleas in The Manifesto was for "all women to be held in common", i.e. for the institution of marriage to be abolished and for everyone to indulge in a lusty free-for-all (based on his observation that this is what most married couples do anyway, so let's "make it official"!). Maybe Marxists would win more converts if they emphasised that bit of his philosophy instead of the "share all property and money equally" bit... PPS: I freely admit that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of energy credits, or SMAC in general. Perhaps I could sneak it in under the heading of "an abstract from the darned commie philosophical musings of Chairman Yang"???? |
| icosahedron |
posted 04-27-99 03:26 PM ET
Time and money are not equivalent. If you can produce the same value in half the time as me, then your time is worth more than twice as much as mine! Think about the computer analogy -- a 500Mhz machine is more than twice as valuable than a 250Mhz machine, ceteris paribus. What money really measures is wealth, which is an integrated combination of physical resources (time, energy, minerals, food, labor) and technological cleverness. Better technology means more with less, and the effect is not simply linear. In the context of SMAC, the effect of technology on wealth is proper if simplistic. |
| Goobmeister |
posted 04-27-99 04:10 PM ET
If Person A pays me $30 for service rendered over the cousre of an hour, and the same Person A pays you $18 for servces rendered over a similar hour, then presumably Person A felt that my time and services had more value than yours. This is in a Free Market realm. If I go from being a certified teacher to an MCSE then my time will be better compensated as an MCSE than as a elementary school teacher. Even though arguably the job of teaching 2 dozen or so youngens is more important than monitoring the network of some Fortune 1000 company. (please don't anyone tell me that teachers work fewer hours, because I will have to send one of Trippin's Woodchucks after you.) This happens because Teachers do not work within a free market economy. The value of someone's time and services is based as always on supply and demand. The number of Doctor's and Lawyers are kept artificially low (not low enough in the case of the latter) thus there is enough demand that they can keep there prices up. Public service employees, such as Police, Firemen and Teachers have a artificial demand limit in a sense thus keeping their pay low in relation to the importance of their jobs. Money isn't the physical manifestation of time alone, it is the manifestation of value. Money/Currency has value only as long as people believe that it has value. When the faith in the value of the ruble went down so did the value. The worry about the introduction of the Euro was that people would have little faith in it and thus it's value would go down creating a death spiral in it value/faith continuum. The gold standard existed because people had faith in the value of Gold. The SMAC Energy standard exists because the people of Planet have faith in the value of "energy" on Planet Well my little economic diatribe woke me up at least. More SMAC means less sleep... Goob |
| Darkstar |
posted 04-27-99 04:22 PM ET
*Your* time is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Its that simple. Before taking my current permanent position, I was a contractor. At times, one hour of my *time* was worth more than others. That is a MARKET thing. Money is a unit of value that is representative of stored time AND energy. The time factor is a RELATIVE thing, as the rate that you bank $1 and I bank $1 is probably different and based on local economics and the roles we play in that economy. If both of us are manufactories producing Rovers, and you can produce a Rover in 5 Turns/hours/whatever, and I in 10 Turns/hours/whatever, is your Rover worth only half of mine? No. Your Rover is worth whatever the market will pay for it (or "willing to bear"). Its just that you can make TWICE as many Rovers as I, and have the potential to make twice the money. If your company is named Volkswagen, and mine Rolls Royce, the market won't pay for your Rovers what it will pay for mine due to Perceived Economic Value. If my company was Ford and yours Chevolette, then we are on more equal footing in the eyes of the fickle market. There have been many suggestions and speculation that as future world economics become more enterchangable, that a single world economic exchange unit will emerge. And as we expand beyond Earth's gravity well, the only real exchange value will be energy, as that is what it will take to transport matter OUT of that gravity well. If you have problems with visualizing SMAC using energy as their standard though, think about Star Trek. The Federation pays its personel in Synthesizer/Replicator rations. They can make anything that they have the pattern (software/information) for, and therefore the only thing that has TRUE value to them is the amount of energy they have to use for producing Replicated items, and information. Information requires energy to store, process, and use, and is of situational value to those who have it or don't have it. Thus making the lowest common denominator energy. Since the amount of Energy required to Replicate a particular item is quantifiable, that is the measure of their currency. While other cultures in Star Trek may use different standards (ie Ferengi use Latinum) their is certainly an exchange rate at work to allow commerce. -Darkstar |
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