Thoughts on time vs money. (Money in a closed ecosystem)

Interestingly, I have a friend who did a year at antarctica (at a station roughly 300 miles from McMurdo). Cash moeny isn't even available :-( Pity. As for "growth", or "increase in value", these are concepts not totally out of place in the vaccum of what amounts to self-imposed isolation for your *own* research goals. The closest thing to money down there is time, which is traded much as we trade the tokens of bills and coin. And time is fixed in quantity: everyone has the same fraction of the total to start with, the total cannot grow or shrink, but it can (and does) rise in value as the distance from the start of the "shift" gets longer. //Alif On Sun, 24 Oct 2010, Morlock Elloi wrote:

Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 21:27:55 -0700 (PDT) From: Morlock Elloi To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: Money in a closed ecosystem

I think that the term "growing" was misunderstood - it refers to a certain floral activity, and I'll bet that there's not export, it's all consumed internally.

...

...

Growing, however, creates real value that would need to be balanced with external cash inflow (a very useful indicator of how much is being grown, BTW.)

I disagree. While the total value of the system compared to the external world can indeed grow (and be balanced by an outflow of some saleable resource, either physical or not) the amount of needed in-circulation cash is going to be pretty close to constant, if you can disregard inflation.

//Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech