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Money is not bad... (Score:1)
The availability of a fungible storage mechanism for effort and energy within a collective is a massive boon. It acts as a major influence on efficiency.
If it wasn't so useful, it wouldn't be reimplemented over and over and over again.
Even Star Trek has _something_ related to money. The small glimpses we get into the lives of the non-government sector in Star Trek suggests that the ordinary populace doesn't get to just tra
Re:Money is not bad... (Score:2)
To be fair, I think that's a bit of a retcon that originated around the time DS9 started, possibly a little bit earlier. The early TNG episodes are pretty clear that "scarcity has been eliminated" and "there is no such thing as money," both of which are pretty much economically ridiculous. As you said, money is invented over and over again. If whatever we use for money now were eliminated (or, equivalently, all held by one person), something else would emerge as money.
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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Re: (Score:1)
Eliminating scarcity is not just ridiculous but in fact impossible. In a finite universe, creating an abundance of some resource inevitably creates a dearth of complementary other resources.
Re: (Score:1)
That's certainly true even in the Star Trek universe: creating an abundance of perfect, godlike humans created a dearth of interesting stories.