The Coal Standard

Here's a thought: maybe we could buy off the simplistic goldbug-minded "money is a commodity" thinkers by proposing a coal standard? That is: treat burnable fossil carbon as money? Like BTC, there's a finite amount of it remaining to be mined. Like BTC, mining the last reserves gets incrementally harder over time. Unlike BTC, if you burn it, it's gone for good, so there's an incentive to stockpile it and not burn it (ideally by stockpiling it in the ground, where it comes from, by buying lan...

 Time is the Most Precious Commodity

Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry. ... In your world, people are used to fighting for resources, like oil, minerals, or land. When you have access to the vastness of space, you realize that there's only one resource worth fighting over--even killing for--more time. Time is the singlemost precious commodity in the Universe.

 PhD Leaves You Unprepared for Non-Academic Work

The truth is that a life science PhD leaves you poorly prepared to get a job doing anything else: 1) Grad programs put very little emphasis on developing writing skills – you maybe write 4-5 documents (proposal, 2-3 papers, plus thesis) over seven years of grad school, with very little feedback on quality of the writing itself. 2) Life science PhDs lack quantitative and computer skills – your physicist or comp sci peers will leave you in the dust when it comes to filling non-science ‘...

 Value is Based on Utility, Not Price

The determination of the value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility it yields. The price of the item is dependent only on the thing itself and is equal for everyone; the utility, however, is dependent on the particular circumstances of the person making the estimate. Thus there is no doubt that a gain of one thousand ducats is more significant to a pauper than to a rich man though both gain the same amount.

 What If People Stopped Valuing Money?

Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt--and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the San Mateo, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizenes as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for mo...

 How An Idea Makes Something Valuable

White people discovered the Galapagos Islands in 1535 when a Spanish ship came upon them after being blown off course by a storm. Nobody was living there, nor were remains of any human settlement ever found there. This unlucky ship wished nothing more than to carry the Bishop of Panama to Peru, never losing sight of the South American coast. There was this storm which rudely hustled it westward, ever westward, where prevailing human opinion insisted there was only sea and more sea. But when...