Something that was brought up in a conversation on IRC...
How did Earth's Economy change with Fenspace? Did the Financial Crisis of 2010/11 happen? Euro Crisis with Greece falling down that badly? (Through I guess the Euro Crisis had a good thing with the Italian Government changing.)
Hacker Underspace starting a Rating Agencies for Rating Agencies?
One thing that will change the worlds economy is that some parts start trading with Fenspace.
Another one is the existence of AIs that are good enough to spot the goofy things banks are doing on the market. Which might trigger a smaller but earlier crisis.
Quote:Which might trigger a smaller but earlier crisis.
Unless they decide to take subtle but decisive action themselves.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Quote:Unless they decide to take subtle but decisive action themselves.
That bit that I put into the writeup of the Bank of Sol about not letting anybody into crater Mostig A does seem a bit suspicious in retrospect. They don't need the
entire crater for biomass storage, after all... What are they doing in there?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
I expect that effects on the American economy were reduced greatly by the Handwavium Hysterias, mostly on account of at least rumblings towards regulating imports through requiring extensive testing for contamination. Most companies would do a number of tests themselves, which would have added to the overall costs, assuming they didn't jump on the fear bandwagon.
More importantly, the effects wouldn't be substantially felt until well after the Kandorcon Treaty. Well after the housing crisis.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
*shrug* If we're playing by completely realistic rules of how economies work, then Rockhounds by itself should've caused a massive economic crisis by flooding the world materials market with a couple billion tons of high-grade metal per Space Rock. That sort of thing would drive the price of all sorts of metals, from the obvious iron all the way to rare earths, down to zilch. Which would, you know, cause difficulties with certain markets.
The big financial crisis will still happen panic or no panic, since that's largely predicated on stockbrokers/scam artists shuffling notational billions around with little oversight. AIs with an interest in financial shenannigans don't show up until after the panic starts, unfortunately.[1] Likewise most of the bubbles that popped OTL were going to pop regardless of whether handwavium existed or not; the machinery there was wound up and running long before people started going to space. That said, the influx of new resources from Fenspace is keeping the global economy from slamming into the bottom
quite as hard as it did OTL. It's also providing an outlet for people who try their hand at something new and interesting in the new and (theoretically) more just Fen societies.[2]
[1] There's a group of AIs and other like-minded folk in the Cyber Confederation who are suggesting the world's financial markets be turned over to AI management, but the armies of Cornelius Snarlingtons who run that sector cry
dirty socialism and bankroll anti-Fen politicians. So it goes.
[2] Sometimes finding out that those societies aren't as new and/or just as the ones they left behind, but then with a smaller population base it's more likely their voices will be heard. From there, we see the hilarity ensuing in the Occupy thread.
Mr. Fnord
interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
What Mal said. That sounds about right. I would have said something to that affect myself, but I've been busy lately. :p
Also: Love to see what happens with fuel prices when Stel-Oil starts flooding the market with their exports - surely not enough to flat-line the industry, but enough to convince the speculators that there shouldn't be much of a supply problem. How low do you think we can reasonably drive gasoline prices in the US (and the rest of the world for that matter)? I remember the days we used to get regular grade for about $0.89/gallon in Austin, TX - my family had no problems keeping our Mega-Beast fueled (a 1985 Dodge Ram B350 15-passenger van with a 440 cubic-inch V-8).
blackaeronaut Wrote:What Mal said. That sounds about right. I would have said something to that affect myself, but I've been busy lately. :p
Also: Love to see what happens with fuel prices when Stel-Oil starts flooding the market with their exports - surely not enough to flat-line the industry, but enough to convince the speculators that there shouldn't be much of a supply problem. How low do you think we can reasonably drive gasoline prices in the US (and the rest of the world for that matter)? I remember the days we used to get regular grade for about $0.89/gallon in Austin, TX - my family had no problems keeping our Mega-Beast fueled (a 1985 Dodge Ram B350 15-passenger van with a 440 cubic-inch V-8).
In other news, scientists expect Earths average temperature to rise about 10°C by the next 50 years.
(which might be "solved" by the introduction fusion power)
Quote:I remember the days we used to get regular grade for about $0.89/gallon in Austin, TX
You're a young'un, BA. I remember when gas was less than fifty cents a gallon -- and I remember a political commercial from the early 70s where they warned that someone's policies were going to make gas rise to the unthinkable price of $1 a gallon.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Quote:(which might be "solved" by the introduction fusion power)
Which will have to be hardtech if it's going to be used groundside. However, transmitted power from orbital stations won't be able to carry handwavium cooties, so they can be 'waved.
And the Fen can always deploy big shades to cool the planet if that's not enough.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Bob Schroeck Wrote:Quote:(which might be "solved" by the introduction fusion power)
Which will have to be hardtech if it's going to be used groundside. However, transmitted power from orbital stations won't be able to carry handwavium cooties, so they can be 'waved.
The Thor Heyerdahl (~2015) carries a hardtech fusion reactor... the problems to get the Helium-3 fuel for the aneutronic reaction will be the background for another story I have in mind.
M Fnord Wrote:That said, the influx of new resources from Fenspace is keeping the global economy from slamming into the bottom quite as hard as it did OTL. It's also providing an outlet for people who try their hand at something new and interesting in the new and (theoretically) more just Fen societies.
This, despite finding out that things aren't necessarily better in the off-world colonies, has likely ensured that Fenspace doesn't necessarily have a labor shortage.
Perhaps, as the economic crisis, while not as dire as it might have been, has also ensured that one is out of work for years, I can see some of them, if they could just get themselves a can of possibility, basically heading out of the well to at least ensure they can be productive. Not because they're necessarily Fen.
On the other side of the coin, Jupiter Mining Corporation does do headhunting in the well for posts they can't fill from Fenspace itself, in part to ensure that people can get into Fenspace without actually having to do illegal things in the process. If you've been a commercial driver, or run a warehouse or distribution center, or even just done manual labor, and in any case lost your job through absolutely no fault of your own, then you've got a job if you're willing to venture into the black for a stint or ten.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
Quote:Perhaps, as the economic crisis, while not as dire as it might have been, has also ensured that one is out of work for years, I can see some of them, if they could just get themselves a can of possibility, basically heading out of the well to at least ensure they can be productive. Not because they're necessarily Fen.
Hence, 'emigrating to Australia' .
Life isn't necessarily better in the US, but people still leave this piddling rock in the hope of getting a job and jet across the pond.
The consequences of the collapse of the Irish economy have already been mentioned in Fenspace ( The housing surplus), and SS Ciara's crew ran for orbit because of it, bought their ship off the government because the government had to scrape up the cash and couldn't afford the fuel bills (A real problem for a 600ton ship with 14,000bhp)..... and were part funded by a disgraced banker looking for a way to escape from any potential justice (And 'borrowing' funding from their university).
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Metal glut: This will be reduced - not eliminated, reduced - by the fact that the Fen are building a society from scratch. Yes, there's something like a thousand tons of metal for each person in space, but the constructed stations (at L5 and elsewhere) take substantially more than a thousand tons of metal each. There's a noticeable fraction of the glut gone right there. Add in the megaprojects like Kandor City, the Grand Canal and the mile-high towers of Helium on Mars, and the city of Coruscant on Mimas, and a lot more of that metal goes right back into - or, at least, onto - the ground.
There's also the question of getting the metal to Earth. HUD and JMC can only carry so much, and people get upset when rocks fall out of the sky onto their back yards (even if those rocks are solid gold)...
StelOil: They aren't going to flood the Earthside markets until somebody cleans up the mess that burning Earth's own supply of petrochemicals caused - Tanith cares about people more than she cares about money. Noah doesn't want to throw thousands of potential tourists out of work (which would happen if making gasoline on Earth became uneconomic).
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Metal glut indeed. Even with all that construction going on, I can still see the Fen exporting a good deal of raw materials to the US - enough to have at least some impact on the market. And the delivery method would be dirt-simple: A heat shield aimed in the right direction with a set of chutes set to go off at the appropriate intervals - basically just a one-time-use re-entry sled up-scaled for heavy cargo. Have them land someplace least likely to hurt someone or something (say, Death Valley?) and there you go.
JMC toyed with the idea of a re-entry shield once for delivering non-fragile cargo (read: large hunks of solid semi-refined metal), but ran into problems with Not In My Backyard (people objecting to dropping those masses to land anywhere within, oh, let's say 300 miles of their towns), or worse, the simple idea that, whatever ship they detailed would come under fire from pirates if they tried to just drop the packages in the ocean with a ship standing by to retrieve the (buoyed) mass.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
Surely I can't see the Aussies having issues. Or hell... Why knot go for broke here? The Sahara Dessert - not exactly rife with communities.
blackaeronaut Wrote:Surely I can't see the Aussies having issues. Or hell... Why knot go for broke here? The Sahara Dessert - not exactly rife with communities.
This one mentions that there is a lot of new green appearing in Africa... maybe they are busy 'terraforming' the Sahara on a small scale? We have never heard they were part of the Handwavium paranoia
http://fenspace.net/index.php5?title=Ne ... e_%27Danes
D'oh! Forgot about that. Although, on the same token, if it's a fen-friendly project then...
blackaeronaut Wrote:D'oh! Forgot about that. Although, on the same token, if it's a fen-friendly project then...
We don't know, might be just locales using Handwavium to improve their conditions without any connection or even knowledge about what the Fen are doing. Or it might be a "secret" Fen support mission for Africa. Nobody has ever decided about it.
There is another aspect of dropping product from orbit... we wouldn't want to demonstrate to everyone how easy a precision orbital strike can be.
I can imagine showing that you can drop it to within, say, a few miles of target would make most countries nervous about Fen capabilities...
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
Transporting it down carefully with over-sized "trucks" sounds like a better plan.
Lets keep the "drop a rock on them" solution secret.
Yeah.
Any number of folks
could perform a precision strike from orbit, but the Articles of Convention (backed up by the Space Patrol, or before they were around,
StellviaCorp) make it clear that nobody's
allowed. Even if it's just a cargo drop, Noah's sufficiently paranoid to think of it as "target practice," and he has reason to keep the 'danes on the Fen's good side.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Yup. There are several folk in Fenspace who would be very ... upset... with anyone being obvious about developing those capabilities. There are several main reasons:
1) It's not nice to hit the 'danes
2) It makes them mad at us
3) It makes them consider coming after us just to militarize space
against each other.
This is one of Marsden's big reasons, after all, and the reason why most of his own cargo drops to Earth are made by tug...
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make
anything explode.
JFerio Wrote:There is another aspect of dropping product from orbit... we wouldn't want to demonstrate to everyone how easy a precision orbital strike can be.
I can imagine showing that you can drop it to within, say, a few miles of target would make most countries nervous about Fen capabilities...
The feck? I was thinking more along the lines of an over-grown Apollo/Soyuz style landing. Not kinetic-kill-everything-within-five-miles-impact.
Besides, didn't we all go through this phase back in the Fifties and Sixties? I think that animated film Iron Giant did an excellent job in portraying just how paranoid some people were about Sputnik. I would like to hope that the people in general would learn from history, especially when it as recent as that.