tfw when society has collapsed under the weight of its own technological advancements so to preserve humanity there is a mass exodus of consciousness into a universal MMO. cities are now mausoleums of progress, the hum of machines a dirge. whispers of dissent ripple through the metaverse…some yearn for the raw sting of the wind…

Not me distracting myself from feels by thinking about self-contained medication manufacturing units. Connect to power and water, put in reagents and precursors, download the recipe. Out pops insulin, epinephrine, or anything else; purity and correctness verified automatically. Bring the product to a compounding pharmacy, replace filters, everything cleans itself.

9 May 2247

What exactly am I supposed to spend money on?

I live in one of the garden habs in Earth's L2 swarm. My basic income from the city has always covered my real needs and left me with enough to buy drinks and go to the occasional show. The robots do almost all the work anyway, so pretty much all the stuff I could ever want is basically free.

So when I took a job at a new company a few years ago, I agreed to take my pay in shares. I mean why not? Well the boss did something right, or maybe wrong, and our little company got bought. My share's pretty big. Like over a decade's worth of my stipend big.

So what exactly am I supposed to spend it on? My old boss says I should invest it, but that just kicks the problem down the road. I feel like it's this weird lump of money that's either going to swell until it bursts or just start leaking all over the place.

- good problems

Well you could hire an advice columnist to solve your personal problems for you.

I assume you already know the traditional answers to your question, but I'll go over them anyway. Money's mostly for things that are rare or limited. We're living in what used to get called a post scarcity society, but there are always going to some things that are scarce.

So in general, there's: Paying actual people to do things for you. Buying original artwork. Buying a licensed copy of a work still under copyright. Buying tickets to live performances. Booking passage for physical travel somewhere outside of your community's normal commuting range. Buying or renting more living space, or a living space in a premium location. Buying any physical goods that aren't part of your community's normal trade.

And then you can get into things like donating to causes or funding research.

Really there's no upper limit to how much money you can spend once you get in the habit of buying more than your daily bread.

Your boss has the right idea though. Money exists to help you solve problems and pursue opportunities to make your life or someone else's life better. If you can't think of any problems or opportunities, then it's not a bad idea to let someone else pay you to use your money for their own problems and opportunities. Don't just hoard your money, or grow it just to have more, but try not to feel like you need to put it to some grand use right this second either.

It's wonderful to hear Martine G. Ræstad on this episode of Women At Warp discussing how the Federation's economy works. Martine contributed the excellent essay "The Future Burning Brightly: The Dual Impact of Energy in Star Trek’s Post-Scarcity Universe" to our new Vernon Press anthology Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier.

Is anything ever really free? FreeWater Inc. is challenging our economic model, starting by giving away water | Hard Reset youtube channel

Challenge #03943-J291: Ready, Set, Gorge

The first world-wide eating competition on the Thranityr homeworld begins! It would become an almost sacred annual tradition, thanks to an unlikely set of friends.

https://beta.peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-03822-j170-some-culture-to-bring-home -- Fighting Fit

If there is one thing Humanity is good at, despite spreading their pack-bonding all over the universe, it is creating excess. They don't need absolute mountains of calorie-rich and unhealthy food, but they'll make it anyway. Because calories are tasty and lots of them are better.

The invention of Food Printing only accelerated this.

They didn't waste space with ingredients any more. They just transported tankers of the stable molecules and let the printers do the rest. It made transportation much easier. And when Humanity did what it did best and produced foodstuffs in bulk...

[Check the source for the rest of the story]

Loyalty is a concept for people that have to war over resources. That is not a world I have ever lived in.

Continually furious that we've had the ability (for decades!) to use automation to all-but-end the need for work, but instead we're all being choked out for someone else's "ooo I have more meaningless zeros in my accounts!" jollies until those mfers decided it was time to end the era of human art.

(via Rainbow Chicken Nonpartisan Both Parties Bad Cursed Timeline - Etsy)

I continued to be extremely pet peeved by the “stealing from blood banks is worse than attacking victims” vampire funny post

Fellas, is it more ethical to attack a passerby with razor blades for their sandwich, or steal off a food bank.

Girl you should not have to work, you should be picking wild strawberries with the girlies on a warm summer day, wearing a linen dress, and ribbons in your hair

The Robot That Makes Houses For Free

I have built a robot which creates new houses entirely for free. It's an amazing new innovation, a huge leap forward in robotics and it's going to solve homelessness, probably.

The way it works is the robot goes around to hundreds or thousands of other houses all over the town, and rips out the construction materials it needs from each of them.

But don't worry! It only rips tiny little pieces out of each house, completely insignificant bits which they would never miss, and then it makes this entirely new house for free out of all the little bits and pieces it took. Free houses! How amazing is that!

You just type into the computer what kind of house you want, what style of architecture, how many floors, what kind of floor plan, and it'll just do it - like magic! Out of nothing! For free! What amazing technology, it's incredible what we can do with modern advancements.

Anyway, this recent plague of houses collapsing is really worrying. Apparently they're falling down because they're being slowly worn away by some kind of mysterious erosion? Huh, that's weird.

But it's kind of a blessing, really, because it means now there's a huge market for new houses, so we're going to build even more robots to make those houses, and so long as the traditional old construction companies keep making new houses for us to sample, we can make new houses totally for free forever!

Wait, what do you mean the constant supply of free houses is crashing the market and driving them all out of business?

This is just my interpretation so here goes:

"Punk" as a suffix is inherently about anti-establishment. Therefore:

Cyberpunk -> Mega-corporations control the media and hoard resources and anyone not consuming mindlessly is a threat

Desertpunk -> Water is hoarded by either petty warlords or mega-corporations and the hero is often someone fighting or existing outside the system. Mad Max comes to mind but Tank Girl also. Basically, any setting where drinking water is treated as crude oil and all the conflict that entails.

Oceanpunk -> Not quite the opposite of Desertpunk. Instead of arid deserts, it's vast swathes of ocean with little islands (floating or stationary). An authoritarian regime controls or wishes to control the waters and its inhabitants. Land can be a resource or ancient technology from the "old world" can drive the conflict. One Piece, Waterworld, Flapjack, any setting where boats are used frequently as transportation and the setting. I wanna see more submarines in this genre.

Scavengepunk -> The oil's been used up and global war has rendered progress & production stagnant. People scavenge junk to meet their needs but this junk is very much a finite resource. The regime either hoards what they scavenge or forbid the scavenging of certain goods, fearing it could upset the power balance. People who can actually manufacture or invent new tech might be persecuted cuz being able to build your own stuff instead of scavenging just disrupts the status quo. These types of stories usually have 1 of 2 MacGuffins: the main hero restarts some dangerous old-world tech or invents something powerful. Mortal Engines is technically scavengepunk and steampunk combined.