I've been kind of scratching this thought around for a while now:
In a New Economy autonomist or argonaut (the two groups being pretty linked...) habitat, what kind of items would cost anything beyond a Trivial pull of energy and raw matter? What items, even if High cost in hypercorp space, would simply be "oh, go ahead and download the blueprint that 1337nerd cracked two weeks ago, it's on hir server?" in Locus?
Similarly, what kinds of software would...let's rephrase, would [i]not[/i]... be freely supported and available no-favors-asked to anyone with any access whatsoever to r-net?
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New Economy and Item Cost
Sat, 2009-10-10 06:41
#1
Ramidel
New Economy and Item Cost
I'm thinking along the lines of your second question: things that are not freely supported and available.
Well, the one that jumps out at me is anything that threatens the habitat as a whole. Chemical weapons, larger-than-a-firecracker bombs, and any weapon capable of penetrating the outer hull of the hab. For example, even if your research legitimately demands a 20 petawatt laser, the fact that it could, if pointed at the outer wall, kill everyone in the hab will cause it to be "expensive", in terms of requiring a high social standing and/or significant regulation.
For that matter, any weapon larger-than-reasonable for personal defense will at least raise some eyebrows, if not be forbidden.
Beyond that, even if your autonomist hab is all for cracking the newest clothing schematics, I would speculate that things designed by people within your particular community would not be okay to crack. Sure, in some communities no one would ever make a blueprint then keep it to themselves, but I'd bet that a fair number of autonomist communities still have and respect the copyrights of particularly clever designs which were developed within their community.
Of course there are the things that no fabrication technique can steal the value of, such as live performances or (if you value such things) old artifacts or hand-made creations.
Some things simply do not have a trivial pull of energy and/or matter. For example if you want to build yourself a little spaceship, that is a seriously non-trivial pull of matter, which (depending on the habitat) might actually use up a significant supply of some of your elemental raw matter. I could be wrong, but I don't think a standard cornucopia machine splits atoms, so if your custom doodad requires a ton of Tungsten, a million tons of carbon won't help. As another example, my petawatt laser mentioned above. That's a trivial energy cost as long as you're firing it for a nothingth of a second, but if you want to keep it on for any amount of time you're using a significant amount of your habitat's power. Also, if your doodad requires antimatter, pretty much any amount of that is non-trivial, not to mention falling under the weapon of mass destruction category.
The last thing that I can think of is, in a reputation-based economy, anything that hurts your reputation becomes inherently expensive. For example, if your economy is based on reputation, and your beyond-socially-acceptable porn collection causes your reputation to drop, then that item is de facto expensive. So anything that is distasteful, stigmatized, or wrong in your particular neck of the solar system would be expensive, but only if someone knows you're acquiring it or its blueprints.
That's all I can think of for now.