Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

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A more wild and outlandish thought experiment: would you become infinitely indebted for infinite reward? Imagining some cyberpunk wasteland where every commodity, pastime, medication, and media content is wildly expensive but offset by huge subsidies from complicated conglomeration of other corporations and government entities. Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically complex and intractable balance sheet of funny money, credits, discounts, loopholes, taxes, rebates, free services, restrictions, obligations.

Watch Spider-Man 87 for $1,340,233 but receive free Chex-mix for life, $3000 off each gas purchase at qualifying locations, in-home massages, the ability to use highway 37 from 11:30-3:30 without charge from Nov 23rd 2043 to Oct 18 2067, increased inspections from police, tutoring for your next born child, and 34 trees are planted in your name in Nigeria.

This obviously grows necessarily from an economy focused on increasing GDP and maximizing the effectiveness of financial instruments :)

Haruki Murakami's novel 'Dance Dance Dance' has a character who is in a similar situation. He's a movie star who because of circumstances related to his divorce has acquired a stunning amount of debt. So most of his income goes into covering this debt. He is very bad with numbers and money, this character, and so he cannot ever figure out how much he owes and how long will the situation last.

However his movie studio rents him a high-class apartment, gets him cool cars to drive, covers various bills from shops and restaurants and whatnot as 'the entertainment expenses', can send him on the high-profile vacations, etc. They can even get him the expensive escorts, because absolutely anything can be worded to fall under the umbrella of the 'enterntainment expenses'. So in short, he can 'have' anything as long as he does not actually own it.

In the end this character kills himself, due largely to the inability to exert agency over his life. And that if you read the book in the face-value 'no-mystical' mode, otherwise the outcome is rather worse.

So to answer your question, going into the infinite debt for infinite reward does not really sound attractive.

Additionally, infinite reward is a risk: what happens when your debtor doesn't pay you?

Your debts don't disappear, but when your Ferrari rental is late to appear, you maybe will realize the hole you've accepted to be dug around you.

> Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically complex and intractable balance sheet of funny money, credits, discounts, loopholes, taxes, rebates, free services, restrictions, obligations.

Sounds like buying an airline ticket. No thanks.

> Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically complex and intractable balance sheet of funny money, credits, discounts, loopholes, taxes, rebates, free services, restrictions, obligations.

You might enjoy the TV show The Good Place.

Are they fungible? Do secondary markets exist? The whole promise of money is that you can just add and subtract the value of all those things to get a number in a reasonable range. With money you can meaningfully compare "a pound of gold" and "two pounds of silver," and you can settle a debt you owe Alice via a debt Bob owes you instead of keeping both imbalances forever.

Maybe this is me being broken by working in finance (even if just SRE for finance), but your example doesn't seem too far off from the problem of valuing ETFs or options or currencies or cattle futures (in theory, if you buy one and forget to sell it in time, some cows show up at your office...).

The effectiveness of sci fi is the extent to which it exemplifies problems in the real world!

In the future which is rapidly closing in, everything is a "license." You own nothing. Nothing is transferrable or resellable by you. Things will feel like you own them, but you will not. Despite all the marketing and advertising telling you that you are "buying" something, you will actually only be able to secure a license to possess and use it. These licenses will restrict how you use the thing, and circumventing them will result in federal charges of violating the DMCA. These licenses will also not obligate the seller to anything whatsoever and be voidable at any time with no notice for any or no reason. This is already the case with most peoples 'ownership' of most media, and it is already spreading into other products. Farmers have had to fight John Deere for the right to repair their own tractors (they won temporary special exemptions which can only exist for 3 years at a time and have to be re-fought-for every 3 years) but still can't prevent their own tractors from reporting soil data back to John Deere which the company then sells to Monsanto and other companies.

None of the things you 'buy' will be fungible because they will all be discrete licenses locked to you personally and have no actual 'value.'

Sounds like the American drug market.

Another HN commenter wrote about how if you use a Gilead card they will pay the deductible for their HIV medication.

They wanted insurance to pay the high discounted negotiated price of their high price HIV med.

Creative Fiction calls one in a thousand, but only a handful actually hear the calling

>but receive free Chex-mix for life

I might make that deal...

I'll take a cabin in the woods.

This is awesome.

Love it. This is like the hacker news version of Late Night Imgur.

It's already there. Known as medicare currently :)

This comment takes the cake for me

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