People have living expenses in autonomist habitats too. Somebody has to do the topiary in the garden labyrinth (if only by programming the gardener nanoswarm) and serve the formal dinner to you. Sure, they do it because you are amazingly cool and it is an honor to wait up on you, but it still takes a lot of rep to maintain a high lifestyle. Conversely, if you are of no use to anybody, why should the community allow to take up that morph that somebody productive and liked could use? I think one could just use the Moderate/High/Expensive costs. A poor lifestyle has a Moderate cost per month, a nice middle class runs into High, and once you start the status game the sky is the limit. I can imagine that you can survive on a Low cost, but it would really be roughing it. Some places are cheaper than others. Elysium might bring up costs one level, while living at some orbital commune might be one level cheaper for a normal lifestyle.

Arenamontanus wrote:

I can imagine that you can survive on a Low cost, but it would really be roughing it.

I disagree, as long as you're sleeved in a synthmorph. If you're in a bare-bones synthmorph sleeve, you can literally live in a closet. In fact, I was reading a neat little futurist piece earlier that made me think of the Robot Arms Apartments from Futurama, and it's relevant here too: If you're not one of the hyper-elite who has to keep up with the Joneses, and sleeved in a synth, why keep a physical home? You could quite literally just have a closet where you can put your body while you recharge. The rest of the time, you are mobile. The exception to this is synths with synthetic masks, but you could just fit the building with a communal showering facility (wouldn't really need to be used that often, since synths don't sweat or shed) and a small nook in your closet for storing things like personal weaponry, alternate smart clothing, and so on. In synth-friendly habitats, and especially Extropia, I can imagine such living conditions being not just common but popular. Why bother with the expense and hassle of a full-sized home in meatspace when you can carry a constantly clean one in simspace wherever you go? Cheaper, more space-efficient for the habitat, and thus better for everyone.

Medichines and their synthmorph equivalents more or less eliminate the necessity for maintenance in the conventional sense, I'd imagine. Exercise is unnecessary when you have machines able to keep your body in top condition by artificially stimulating the effects of a work-out for your benefit, though I can't see that stopping people from doing it for the pleasure of it and to simply get used to their body. Synths, meanwhile, likely don't need maintenance much but most probably take a trip to the mechanic's once every six months to a year or so, probably at the same time or even place they go to drop off a backup. The exceptions to this rule, of course, are Flats, Cases, and so on.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

I would tend to classify 'living in a closet' as 'roughing it' - not necessarily starving on the street, but certainly not comfortable.

But that's just my point: It is comfortable. In your mesh inserts, you can run the simulspace of a grand mansion. The home you come back to in meatspace is literally just a recharging hub; your actual home is a significantly fancier little cyberspace world. If you want to get really interesting, every apartment's recharging dock could also include a fiberoptic link for access jacks that lets the user tap into the community server, where the inhabitants of the apartments spend their off-hours in the astonishing comfort of their deluxe cyberspace community. Why pay for space that you're just going to sit around in and have to clean, when you can pay for exactly what you're going to use it for anyway with no loss of enjoyment?

As Arenamontanus put it, the living costs could be easily separated to different levels, but I'd propose following: *Low-cost lifestyle is possible only for infomorphs or synth sleeves. Biomorph living costs have to include things like food, air reprocessing, etc. which inevitably bump the total to Moderate and up. Even a Moderate-cost lifestyle for biomorph is spartan and includes stuff like Capsule-hotel cabin, bland food, etc. *There is very little you can do for creature comforts after that private asteroid / martian palace / whatever. Thanks to modern technology the curve of diminishing returns hits faster than today. After that point, money is just one of the score displays in the Great Game. (Game: Aside stuff like frequent resleeving, egocasting etc. which should be accounted separately, maximum lifestyle cost is Expensive.) *Biomorph is a Luxury Item with large maintenance costs. Hypercorps promote them because they're a profit source. Most people desire them because even best synth sleeve or simulspace is not quite the same. (Let's face it, transhumanity has millions of years of evolutionary baggage regarding the issue.) *Synth with a synth Mask is the AF10 equivalent of "counterfeit consumer good". While legal, hypercorps spend large amounts of money and effort on memetic campaigns to discourage them because of their negative impact on biomorph market. For anyone high-status, especially glitterati, getting caught sleeving into masked synth is the moral equivalent of Hollywood star getting caught with fake brand-name clothes. (Read: She'll never hear the end of it...)

Arenamontanus wrote:

But that cyberspace also costs you. Sure, you can always use your Hanging Gardens of Babylon simspace, but sooner or later you will want to have some new flowers, new courtesans, some interesting books or XPs to read, or maybe some custom additions to the palace. That takes creds and rep.

Open source stuff (does that cost rep?), personal-use coding and illegal downloading could account for most if not all of people's digital content, so would finances have much of an impact at all on the quality of one's virtual existence? It's already easy enough to enjoy almost all of your culture for the low cost of a monthly ISP subscription; the only other cost is storage space, and we're told that in the era of EP data storage is practically limitless and free. Hell I don't even work and my computer is a far more exciting place than my richer friends' setups. I'm shocked at the money they squander on things I regularly enjoy for free, sometimes even legally.

CodeBreaker wrote:

There is going to be some cost, minimum, for having your living space be set entirely within a Simulspace. Simulspace programs can only be run on servers, which are expensive, or you have to pay a monthly subscription that has a moderate/month cost. For that cost you can probably rent a fairly decent apartment.

Depends on how you run it. Some simspaces, like MMOs today, are probably free and require no subscription to be a part of them. They might even have internal currencies, which would allow someone to be a permanent part of them without interacting with an external economy.

Arenamontanus wrote:

But that cyberspace also costs you. Sure, you can always use your Hanging Gardens of Babylon simspace, but sooner or later you will want to have some new flowers, new courtesans, some interesting books or XPs to read, or maybe some custom additions to the palace. That takes creds and rep. I would argue that the middle class infomorph lifestyle isn't much cheaper than the physical middle class. Sure, the infomorph doesn't have to pay for the material stuff, but that is also a minor part of the physical person's expenses (just as today in developed countries food has become a fairly minor part of our expenses). What really cost you is services.

Ah, but that's the beauty of it all, isn't it? Assume an apartment building, containing apartments with roughly a square metre of floor space and two and a half for wall height. Let's assume the building itself is a square, roughly 30m long across a side. The insides are fairly cramped and confined, with the same low roof height as the cubicle apartments. Not counting the first floor, you could probably fit around 200-250 apartments per floor, and still have room to spare. Alternatively, you can halve that amount and double the size of apartments. Roof height can be increased for aesthetic reasons in either case, since that's sort of arbitrary. Now, the building I live in has 13 floors, not including the car garage basement. Let's assume that about 25% of these rooms are occupied (in a standard apartment building, it's significantly more, but let's just say that this amount is the norm, since this is a far higher density apartment building). In the "luxurious" 100 person per floor buildings, that's 25 people a floor, so, let's say there's 250 in a 10 floor building. For 40 credits each, they can create a pool of 10,000 credits, or enough to buy an Expensive item (the price of a server is never listed, but even multiplying the number provided per person by 10 as a one-time payment means there's 100,000 credits for a top of the line server). This is the power of pooled resources. The cost of building a new apartment block is not trivial, so an owner buying a server hardly strikes me as out of the question. Then then merely charge new residents a one time sum of, say, 400 credits as a "server access fee" and maybe a tiny portion of their rent goes to the server's power bill and maintenance. As such, the server itself is taken care of. Then comes in the power of community resources once more. See, it's not just one person's Hanging Gardens of Babylon, it's everyones, and the power of community resources is obvious here as well. A trivial amount of credits, ten a month, goes to the apartment's equivalent of the homeowner's association, which then uses the money to buy new things for the server. Individuals can also contribute their own creations or bought items, and there's always Open Source items to boot. In short, for what amounts to a few trivial expenses a month, an individual really can live large in cyberspace... As long as they're a synth. It's easy to even just give individual members their own partitioned simspace, while still sharing the benefits of purchased items on the server.

[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3O52gK6c2A]Welcome to your new apartment![/url]