Imagine yourself on a large island with limitless money. You can buy anything you want, online, it will be air dropped magically. You can have the coolest house, the best sports car, its a large island with paved roads like the Isle of Man, and you have an endless food supply & fresh water supply, but you are the only person alive. You cannot share your experience with anyone else. No friends & no family, all alone in this universe, on your private island. What value does money have in this context? Can you enjoy existence isolated from other people?
Electricity, fuel & heat are the real money, the real value to "Do" with what we "think" of to manipulate manufactured landscapes with human activities. Consider the caloric energy value of food or value of water for drinking to stay hydrated as other "real money" since people cannot do anything if they cannot eat, excluding that adult human people are able to water fast for up to 7 days without too many complications in most cases, though I highly advice that you consult a doctor about fasting for more than 1 day if you are taking any prescription medications. Water is more important than food in this context, the human body becomes very weak without ongoing water intake after just 3 days without water consumption.
To understand why electricity so important, consider what society would look like if a giant solar flare electrical storm killed all electrical systems & devices at once. The US government intelligence community estimates that within 6 months of a total power system failure nationwide, up to 90% of the human population inside the USA would die from the deleterious effects of losing access to electricity. Even winter storms systems that knock out utility power distribution systems for 1-8 days results in some customers dying. People on critical life support systems usually only have enough UPS or uninterruptible power supply backup for 4 hours or less. Even if they have a generator that can run for 9 hours on one gallon of gasoline, that does not give multi-day electrical backup. Most ovens & microwaves & fridges used at home for food processing & preparation, will not work without persistent always on electricity. Most appliances used in most homes will not work without electricity. This is known as the fragility of modern civilization, people are integrally depended on electrical, natural gas & water connections to live, without which life dies off. So electricity, fuel & water are the real value, other than life itself that produces food, air & water in nature. That's why protecting nature so important. Without natural ecosystems life on Earth as we know it would die off quickly. The biosphere of Earth still teaming with life despite humans polluting the air & water & land with industrial pollution & trash & plastic waste & other funky toxic, radioactive & heavy metals. Lead bullets & batteries SLI SLA, copper smelters, coal power plants, industrial chemical plants & other sources of toxic emissions like oil refineries, human activity is degrading ecosystems, but there is a renewed interest in eco-friendly living. The US State of California for example banning the sale of gasoline passenger cars in 2025 & after which they announced this, the State of Washington jointed the 2025 new gasoline car sale ban program. The push is for non-locally polluting vehicles. When gasoline or diesel fuel burned in a conventional vehicle, the tail pipe emits noxious & toxic exhaust gas components. Home backup generators for example, advise end users to use them in well ventilated areas because if they are operated indoors, the accumulation of carbon monoxide & CO2 will use up the indoor oxygen & poison the people inside with CO that becomes deadly if CO levels rise. Most homes have a carbon monoxide detector for example to warn the occupants of an increasing CO level since CO very toxic when inhaled, as CO displaces oxygen on blood cells, causing widespread hypoxia & brain death in short order.
Probably just imagination, but I have memories (probably false memories) of living a previous life as a Persian nobleman in antiquity. Specifically I have these memories of feeling a deep loneliness as an old man, wanting only a sincere relationship with a real love or real friend, with more money & power than I could ever make good use of, isolated & alone slowly dying of old age, waiting to die, feeling sadness & depression since the people I had known in live had all died, my parents had died, my brothers & sisters had died. I never married or ever found anyone to share a sincere loving relationship or marriage with. I never had children & left my estate to the state. I had this inner burning want to live as a normal person, a commoner, just a regular guy.
Sometimes being famous or rich can be a loner existence, depressing & stressful. Noteworthy people are sometimes targeted by bad people who execute fraud or violence against the celebrity, politician or plutocrat. To be famous has hidden costs of being followed around by tabloid photographers looking to get a special picture of you doing normal things to sell for high value. Consider what these low brow publications do to slander the image of normal A list actors & actresses for example. On YouTube & elsewhere, being famous itself does not bring your life sincere or honest friendships. Superficial fake people often flock to people on the up & up, seeking to glean benefit from these interactions, but no sincere friendship exits, just compliments & other fake pomp with ulterior motivations. My childhood best friend Matt Mayo for example, before sustaining life long serious injuries in a motorcycle accident, had dozens of so called friends. Most of them never visited him in the hospital when he was injured with life threatening damage from the motorcycle accident. Most of them never visited Matt in the long term care facility where he was in a coma for 6+ months. I did, because I loved Matthew as a friend. If you are lucky enough to have one sincere friend, you are exactly that, lucky. High quality people & lasting friendships are rare. Look at the the divorce rates in the world increasing. People stay together when times are good, but peace out as soon as something goes south or becomes harder. The death of a child, financial problems, psychological or emotional turmoil, changes in carrier or interest changes or lifestyle changes, irreconcilable differences that ultimately form the legal basis of marriage divorce proceedings. Splitting up of those financial assets, homes, vehicles, furnitures, jewelry, & other high value things, things can get dirty, especially over custody of the children or pet; ie who gets to keep the dog.
When you make purchases with credit cards online, that provides a level of safety with the transaction since the bank regulates how that money is transacted. So with cryptocurrencies its the Wild West, with debit & credit cards its 20th century networked commercial banks & the Federal Reserve in the USA making it happen. Printing cash monies & mining coins at the Beauro of Engraving & Printing costs around $200 billion annually due to the complex intensive processes used to high volume print copy resistant bank notes or paper cloth bills of denominational value.
Abstraction of fiat currencies reveals that all time, money & energy are interrelated. There are only so many hours in a day. Human intellectual & labor capital costs are highly localized to specific nearby market conditions that vary considerably throughout the world. For the same work, a worker in Norway might be paid $45 per hour while someone doing the same work in Venezuela might only get paid $0.25 per hour. The consumer price index of gasoline similarly carries, for example gasoline might sell for $3.185 per liter in Norway while a similar liter of gasoline sells for $0.05 per liter in Venezuela.
How much you get paid at work strongly depends on what you are doing for work, but more so on where you live. Local economic market conditions also strong affect property rental prices, the retail sales prices of single family or multifamily homes - you rent one way or the other because of REET or real estate excise taxes. Even if you "Own" your "House" you are legally required to pay the city. You have no choice about who you buy your electricity or natural gas or water from. In advanced society, regulated private utilities are normal, not market options. Many have tried to argue that the internet itself should be protected as a utility because of its special "something for everyone" value & critical value if someone applying for a job or even for students to go to school. Without email, many jobs would be impossible. Working from home would be impossible without high speed internet. Net Neutrality means that your internet service provider would treat your network connection as a "dumb pipe" willfully "ignorant" of what you are doing with your internet connection, be that posting a blog like this, social media interactions, watching content videos, listening to streaming music, doing online banking, shopping online or doing investing online. When I said the internet something for everyone, I was really talking about wikipedia, with knowledge in nearly every domain of life, its a pseudo priceless repository for knowledge that's constantly updated. Any real scientist (like me) knows that the chemistry & physics & medicine articles on Wikipedia are accurate & contain real scientific facts, but that other political & social article entries contain factual inaccuracies & other bias & noise (fake news) such that its not a reliable accademic resource in all domains of knowledge. Google Scholar search (more ... tab) provides a person the ability to query research articles, white papers & other academic resources available online. JSTOR & other private information journal article companies have "opened up" a little more to allow non subscription access to their publications, ie. scientific journal articles where the emergent real science facts are published.
Money is a 4th order derivative of NERI or net energy return on investment. When a nuclear reactor is build with government funding over a 20 year period, its does not make any electricity that entire time & costs tens of billions to build. Private equity putting up that kind of funding wants to see ROI or returns on their investments in the 5 year or less horizon. This is why nearly all commercial nuclear reactors in the world were paid for with public government funding. Now consider that most commercial nuclear power generating reactors have achieved ROI of 9000% or better, once the went critical & started making heat to boil water into steam to blow past power generating turbines to make electricity that utility companies then purchase & sell to end user customers, you & me & everyone else who makes use of electricity, in their fridge, to charge their phone or electric vehicle batteries, to power their internet router gateway modem or TV box, their washing machines, lights bulbs & lamps, to energize their vacuum cleaners, freezers, ovens & microwaves, to power AC systems for cooling or heat pumps for heating. Electricity is what is needed in highly precise arc furnaces to make better quality metal alloys. I use electricity to power my Purse Mini FDM printer, that takes 1kg spools of PLA or PETG plastic filament & shoves it through a hot glue gun like heating nozzle, where a cooling fan cools both the heat break & emerging filament, so the hot end stays hot while the extruder drive stays cool, while servo motors controlled by a microcontroller push & pull belts connected to the extrusion head & printing plate to take g-code exported by the Prusa Slicer software, created from 3D design files, such that the 3D design then materializes line by line & layer by layer into a functional part, though not a strong as injection modeled parts, the ability to make anything on demand, at home, means you can print plastic objects into existence. With other technologies people are printing rocket engine parts with titanium alloy powders, organs with biological gels containing stem cells & similar biochemical nutrient components, even homes are being printed with giant construction 3D printers. All of these printers use electricity to control the deposition of materials & the heating & movement of the materials. With applied intelligence, energy become energized to manipulate materials. During the 3rd industrial revolution, that was mostly limited to subtraction manufacturing like machining, where a solid block of metal put into a multi-axis lath or mill where spinning cutter tools precision remove sections of the block to realize the creation of functional parts designed in 3D software or sometimes by hand by experts in machine who can take the idea out of their mind or from sketches on paper & manually control the lath or mill in an analog knob control input symphony.
Computerized mills & 3D printers are part of the Information Age or 4IR or 4th industrial revolution, think energy blending with intelligence & thinking in increasingly novel & many more ways that are emergent, creating new products & services without historical precedent. We are forging our way forward faster & this leaving nearly everyone in the dust. Our social, moral, philosophical & family traditions, even our DNA, not able to keep up with the ways agriculture is changing with GMO to cope with climate change & to make food for an increasing human population. The world as we know its today only able to operate because computers enabled corporations to coordinate tens of thousands of employees, at Boeing for example to realize the creation of aerospace vehicles like the 787 for example. Look at how a helicopter is made & why they cost so much. Tens of thousands of parts, assembled in low volume, with expensive high quality components, the critical of which have to have mechanical & electronic redudancy, since a critical part failure of a non redundant part would cause a loss of control, literally giving rise to a helicopter accident, the majority of which are fatal since the malfunction helicopter falls out of the sky.
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