SFDebris: Booby Trap

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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Tyyr »

GrahamKennedy wrote:Wow, there's a thought. No money in the future... everyone strives to improve themselves. So the only porn stars will be the ones who do porn because they find it a fulfilling and enriching life. Gotta wonder at the kind of person that will be.
Exhibitionists?

And there might not be any money but "resource credits," or something that's functionally money. We know Picard is full of shit on that statement anyways.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Mikey »

You don't have to wonder at that sort of person. Sex is fun, no doubt about it. If the morals of the future are really so advanced compared to our own, then what's the problem?
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Tyyr wrote:
GrahamKennedy wrote:Wow, there's a thought. No money in the future... everyone strives to improve themselves. So the only porn stars will be the ones who do porn because they find it a fulfilling and enriching life. Gotta wonder at the kind of person that will be.
Exhibitionists?

And there might not be any money but "resource credits," or something that's functionally money.
There isn't, no.
We know Picard is full of shit on that statement anyways.
Well that's a big topic. There are certainly big inconsistencies in the way it's been handled. But when they DO say the "no money" thing, they very clearly state that it's not just money in the casual sense of folding paper stuff as we have it. It's the entire system of currency based economics that is gone.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Teaos »

The episode with Jake "buying" the card for his Dad shows this.

Although the officers on the station get Latinum somehow to gamble with. WHich is ironically, one of the worst uses for currency but the only use we see it used for usually.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Tyyr »

And we've also seen Beverly purchasing items in a bazaar, Tom Paris turned replicator rations into a form of currency, references to not being paid enough. Picard has made a lot of grandiose claims about humanity in the future and been proven wrong time and time again. Why is he suddenly right about money?
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Teaos »

Well Tom can be explained away easily by Voyager being strandard and making its own currency.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Coalition »

McAvoy wrote:To me that would be exactly the problem with interactive solid holograms. Being able to scan anyone you want and design a personality to it and then... date it. For example, I could scan or make an approximation of a celebrity or even a porn star I like.

In my eyes, it is creepy because it is believable.
You mean like in Hollow Pursuits, where the physical body and mental attitudes were a bit different? :mrgreen: Or the comparison when Geordi got to meet the real Leah Brahms, and her personality was a bit different?

The other fun is that since it is an image with a personality, technically you can copy-paste a few times for more fun (as Barclay did in Hollow Pursuits).
Teaos wrote:Well Tom can be explained away easily by Voyager being strandard and making its own currency.
It was a way to measure access to a limited resource. If you thought something else was worth more than a replicator ration, you traded your ration for that (if possible). If you were willing to part with an item in exchange for a replicator ration, you did (if possible). Welcome to the free hand of the market in Star Trek.

Janeway never had to deal with it, all she had to do was measure out a certain number of replicator rations each (time period), and issue them to personnel. As you use the replicator, the rations are removed from the economic setup of the ship. If Janeway makes the rations only good for a specific duration (like WW2 ration cards), that provides another way to remove them from the ship's economy (use it or lose it).
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by RK_Striker_JK_5 »

There have been, what 3-4 'no money' statements and how many actual transactions? I'll take the actual transactions as more solid.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

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RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:There have been, what 3-4 'no money' statements and how many actual transactions? I'll take the actual transactions as more solid.
Actual transactions between one Federation citizen and another, within the Federation, in the TNG era?

Damn few that I can think of, actually. How about you?

Actual transactions between one Human citizen and another, within the Federation, in the TNG era?

Not one that I can think of, actually. How about you?
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by RK_Striker_JK_5 »

They had money to buy stuff. Beverly bought that damned bolt of cloth in 'Encounter'. And for my proverbial money's worth, doesn't matter who it was to, just that she bought it. Or the drinks in Quark's on a Federation-run station.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Graham Kennedy »

RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:They had money to buy stuff. Beverly bought that damned bolt of cloth in 'Encounter'. And for my proverbial money's worth, doesn't matter who it was to, just that she bought it. Or the drinks in Quark's on a Federation-run station.
But neither Quarks nor Farpoint are Federation facilities.

When Picard or others speak of "we" not using currency based economics, they refer to humans specifically. Clearly others like the Ferengi do, and clearly humans sometimes use money in their dealings with them. One can only speculate where they get it from.

But one TNG era human engaging in a monetary transaction with another? I don't know of a single example, myself.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

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GrahamKennedy wrote:
RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:They had money to buy stuff. Beverly bought that damned bolt of cloth in 'Encounter'. And for my proverbial money's worth, doesn't matter who it was to, just that she bought it. Or the drinks in Quark's on a Federation-run station.
But one TNG era human engaging in a monetary transaction with another? I don't know of a single example, myself.
What about the human weapons dealer who worked briefly with Quark? A point could be made that we don't actually see him trade with other humans, still....

Or what about all those humans working with thr orion syndicate, for example the chap who is befriended by O'Brien? I'd imagine he doesn't engage in criminal activity to better himself and the rest of humanity.

What about Riza? There is a whole planet who doesn't produce ANYTHING and relies exclusivly on toursim, however, if said tourism produces nothing you can use to aquire all the other essential stuff a planet needs to survive.....




In short, imho (and really just mho) the idea of a society without anything resembling money in one way or another is incredibly stupid. A functioning monetary system is a cultural achievement and doing away with it is like saying, look at us, we are so advanced we don't need the alphabet (or something similar) anymore since we don't write stuff down anymore. (I vaguly remember learning about the early high cultures like egypt or babylonians etc. in school and what marks a cutlure as advanced. Having developed money and writing is on top of the list. It is there for a reason)

What they SHOULD have done is not doing away with money, but SHOWING us that ressources are more effectivly and justly distributed, that they did away with poverty and all the misery that stems from it and that GREED isn't longer THE MOST strongest driving force of humanity like it is nowadays and that because of that, our society has matured greatly and is capable of better decisions. All that wouldn't make money obsolete.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Atekimogus wrote:
GrahamKennedy wrote:
RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:They had money to buy stuff. Beverly bought that damned bolt of cloth in 'Encounter'. And for my proverbial money's worth, doesn't matter who it was to, just that she bought it. Or the drinks in Quark's on a Federation-run station.
But one TNG era human engaging in a monetary transaction with another? I don't know of a single example, myself.
What about the human weapons dealer who worked briefly with Quark? A point could be made that we don't actually see him trade with other humans, still....
Precisely. We don't ever see him dealing with other humans.
Or what about all those humans working with thr orion syndicate, for example the chap who is befriended by O'Brien? I'd imagine he doesn't engage in criminal activity to better himself and the rest of humanity.
But again, these are people who are like the Humans on DS9 - they've left the Federation and are operating in alien territory.
What about Riza? There is a whole planet who doesn't produce ANYTHING and relies exclusivly on toursim, however, if said tourism produces nothing you can use to aquire all the other essential stuff a planet needs to survive.....
Again, not a human planet.

The best way I can figure that the Trek system works is this - and this is entirely an after the fact rationalistation, not at all what I think the writers intended...

The "no money" thing of the future is a 24th century, human thing. And not even something that applies to every member of the human species as such, but an aspect of how Earth and some other human governed planets run themselves. Earth runs without the benefit of money, probably some sort of quasi-communistic society. Planets colonised by Earth are mostly run on the Earth model, though there's no reason a colony might not adopt some other model for government - Picard himself said that creating new ways of living is one of the reasons people colonise, after all.

Earth and the other "communist" human planets are net producers, and the government sells their surplus to the rest of the Federation or to alien cultures for money. This goes into a central pool. When a human needs some money to deal with aliens, he requests it from the government. So for example say Picard wants to visit Risa. He contacts the government, asks for some money for his holiday, it's given to him, and off he goes. But if Picard decided to go to Earth for his holiday there'd be no need, because there'd be nothing to pay for. He'd just go and hang out and do whatever.

There would need to be limits to what you could request of the government - you couldn't just say "I want a billion bars of GPL please, so I can live like a king on the Ferengi home world" because they'd just say "no, that's unreasonable."

You'd need a thousand little wrinkles to make all that practical... but then that's true of capitalism, too.
In short, imho (and really just mho) the idea of a society without anything resembling money in one way or another is incredibly stupid. A functioning monetary system is a cultural achievement and doing away with it is like saying, look at us, we are so advanced we don't need the alphabet (or something similar) anymore since we don't write stuff down anymore. (I vaguly remember learning about the early high cultures like egypt or babylonians etc. in school and what marks a cutlure as advanced. Having developed money and writing is on top of the list. It is there for a reason)
A functioning money system, like an alphabet, is not a thing of goodness in and of itself. It is there because it serves a purpose, and if the purpose becomes obsolete then yes, it would be discarded. I can easily imagine a future in which the alphabet - and writing as a whole - became an obsolete thing of the past.
What they SHOULD have done is not doing away with money, but SHOWING us that ressources are more effectivly and justly distributed, that they did away with poverty and all the misery that stems from it and that GREED isn't longer THE MOST strongest driving force of humanity like it is nowadays and that because of that, our society has matured greatly and is capable of better decisions. All that wouldn't make money obsolete.
My biggest issue with the no money thing is not how inconsistent they are with it, but rather that they clearly never thought it out or set out to give it any context or background.

TNG did this a lot... they would preach about how stupid the problems of today are, looking down their nose snottily at us primitives - but at the same time never giving any hint of the actual solutions they employ to solve these problems, or what the cultural landscape is that made them any different. A society without capitalism would have to be fundamentally different, and function with fundamentally different values, than ours. It would be great to see TNG explore just what those differences are... but they never bothered. They just depicted a society that's exactly the same as ours in virtually every respect, only people don't use money. They treat it as being as significant as whether people wear hats or not.

I've said it before... read the Culture books by Iain M. Banks. The Culture is a society that operates without money, and he goes into considerable detail about how it's possible and what the ramifications are. He points out that money is a form of rationing, and as his characters put it, "money implies poverty". The Culture is able to operate without it because they have sources of material wealth and energy supply so vast that the means of productions "comprehensively outweigh the demand of even the most imaginative citizens". There's no money because nothing is worth anything, because there is no shortage of anything. A "post scarcity society".

He even depicted a situation in one book where a famous composer was going to give a live performance, and there was so much demand for actual "in the concert hall" seating (rather than attending through VR connections as most do) that the population began to trade favours to get tickets... and some enterprising souls even came up with IOUs containing lists of favours to help with the trading. Essentially reinventing money, because there was for once something that there was a shortage of. Which everyone involved thought was hilarious and all part of the fun of the concert. :)
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by McAvoy »

It could be also the human worlds are so developed that humans can have or do anything they want.

I don't think if there was a money pool people would be calling or talking or what not. I think it would be like a system where people have their own accounts that they are allotted per year. Special requests for more money can be reviewed.

The best example I got was my government credit card. That card would have a limit placed depending on the situation. It could be $500 for food while at Top Gun or it could be $2000 for a new tool chest I had to pick up.
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Re: SFDebris: Booby Trap

Post by Atekimogus »

GrahamKennedy wrote: The best way I can figure that the Trek system works is this - and this is entirely an after the fact rationalistation, not at all what I think the writers intended...

The "no money" thing of the future is a 24th century, human thing. And not even something that applies to every member of the human species as such, but an aspect of how Earth and some other human governed planets run themselves. Earth runs without the benefit of money, probably some sort of quasi-communistic society. Planets colonised by Earth are mostly run on the Earth model, though there's no reason a colony might not adopt some other model for government - Picard himself said that creating new ways of living is one of the reasons people colonise, after all.

Earth and the other "communist" human planets are net producers, and the government sells their surplus to the rest of the Federation or to alien cultures for money. This goes into a central pool. When a human needs some money to deal with aliens, he requests it from the government. So for example say Picard wants to visit Risa. He contacts the government, asks for some money for his holiday, it's given to him, and off he goes. But if Picard decided to go to Earth for his holiday there'd be no need, because there'd be nothing to pay for. He'd just go and hang out and do whatever.

There would need to be limits to what you could request of the government - you couldn't just say "I want a billion bars of GPL please, so I can live like a king on the Ferengi home world" because they'd just say "no, that's unreasonable."
Here is what is bothering me. As soon as you need a "system" to keep track of foreign "spending" - like you said noone can just request a billion bars of GPL or make holiday all the time - you basically just invented money again. Money IS the system by which one keeps track. Sure, say it is not money and call it "Federation Duty Achievement Bonds" or whatever, which can then used for buying GPL for use in trade with offworlders, but all you did is slap a different label on basically the same thing.
GrahamKennedy wrote: A functioning money system, like an alphabet, is not a thing of goodness in and of itself. It is there because it serves a purpose, and if the purpose becomes obsolete then yes, it would be discarded. I can easily imagine a future in which the alphabet - and writing as a whole - became an obsolete thing of the past.
But here is the thing....it never went obsolete, not even in the paradise-world of star trek. Some ressources are still limited and even if they were not, some things like living space still are. By your own admission you would need a system to keep track of how many ressources every person needs and uses, as to limit misuse and waste.

Now if everyone is getting the basic amount of "ressources to use" or if you get only a little to cover your basic needs and get more when you "get a job" doesn't really matter. You basically have money by any other name. (And it takes probably a whole nano-second before someone trades in some of his "ressources" to get someone else to paint a fence white, or starts trading with it.............BAM...money, right then, right there.)


GrahamKennedy wrote:I've said it before... read the Culture books by Iain M. Banks. The Culture is a society that operates without money, and he goes into considerable detail about how it's possible and what the ramifications are. He points out that money is a form of rationing, and as his characters put it, "money implies poverty". The Culture is able to operate without it because they have sources of material wealth and energy supply so vast that the means of productions "comprehensively outweigh the demand of even the most imaginative citizens". There's no money because nothing is worth anything, because there is no shortage of anything. A "post scarcity society".
Precisly the only scenario where a "no-money" society could work. But Star Trek isn't such a society, hence it wouldn't work. More or less my point.
GrahamKennedy wrote: He even depicted a situation in one book where a famous composer was going to give a live performance, and there was so much demand for actual "in the concert hall" seating (rather than attending through VR connections as most do) that the population began to trade favours to get tickets... and some enterprising souls even came up with IOUs containing lists of favours to help with the trading. Essentially reinventing money, because there was for once something that there was a shortage of. Which everyone involved thought was hilarious and all part of the fun of the concert. :)
A good illustration why this will never work and is a nice thought experiment without any practicallity. (Mind you, I replied quote per quote to you, so I am quite pleased to find that the culture books you recommend basically have the same arguments I brought up.)
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