X-Message-Number: 10876 Date: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 07:57:58 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #10872 - #10875 Hi everyone! First of all, to EVERYONE ON CRYONET who may wish to contact me one way or another. I will soon be changing my main net node to one in Australia, rather than Compuserve. The net address will be: I would like my Cryonet postings to go to that address. I will not give up my Compuserve address, so that if you must use it for some reason then your message will eventually get through. However I will look for messages mainly on the dialix address, so that Compuserve will NOT be the best way to send email to me. The frequency with which I look at Compuserve for any email will go down over time: I know that some of you, and others who are not on Cryonet, will probably not notice this announcement at first. As for George Smith's message about the demise of money, I have several comments. First of all, so long as there is trade of any kind, even in a) "luxuries" ie. items not necessary for "survival", and b) commodities ie. basic materials needed to make anything (so far as I know, nanotechnology does not promise the ability to transmute, nor the ability to make matter out of energy) then there will be something which serves the role of money. That something may very well not be recognizable by us as money, but it will serve that function. We're seeing right now, I think, the demise of coins and bills, as credit and debit cards take over more and more functions, but we'll continue to need means to settle accounts between us. Moreover, trade does not involve trade only in "necessities". Anytime you have something I want, and I can offer something to you that you want, then we will consider a trade. The major advantage of money in ANY form is that I don't have to search out the exact person who has something I want and wishes to trade for something I have. Instead I leave that to a professional trader (who takes on many roles, right now: there is the supermarket, the auto seller, the electronics shop, and so on and on) and merely hand him or her my money in return for what I want. They go out and find these things. Furthermore, the notion of "necessities" just doesn't parse. I remember (the price has probably gone up by now, but the basic issue is the same) reading someone who worked out the minimum diet that would give us all the nutrients we needed for survival. At the time it came to about $1.50 per day. He gave an explicit list. However I have not noticed many people who eagerly decided to start buying and eating this minimum diet. We're already many miles past minimum ANYTHING, most of us in the developed countries, and for some reason we still have groceries to provide us with what we want, either in processed or unprocessed forms, and restaurants that will serve it to us, too. If properly handled, we may reach a time in which no one starves --- though a lot of starvation happens because of political reasons, not because there is an actual scarcity of food. But that hardly means the end of trade or money. And with time, in a reasonably well-ordered society, the minimum standard considered for any human being will very likely rise --- eventually to levels which puts the possessions of anyone currently wealthy to shame. But that will happen not because everyone ends up with the same things, but because there will still be many things no wealthy person of today even dreams of --- and it will be these things that people work for and want to have. (You get to suggest your own here: I have ideas too, but then I doubt that anyone in the New Stone Age (neolithic) could have imagined all the things we have or want to have today). And finally I will state that if we ever DID become totally satisfied with what we had, we would have ceased to be human at all --- not in the positive way the extropians talk about, but in the negative way: the Eloi in Wells' TIME MACHINE. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10876