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Complementary Currencies

Complementary currencies are meant to work in tandem with the main currency in an economy. The main idea of EconUnleashed is that companies could create their own complementary currencies to donate to charities, so the charities could then purchase products from the companies. This would mean that companies would profit from the transaction and could increase their production, to the benefit of themselves, their workers, and the charities.

The theory

The idea is based on how free economic systems work and what gives currencies value, and it solves the problem that is created when there is too little currency.

First, free economic systems work because the freedom to make your own economic choices means that people only buy or sell when they believe that a purchase/sale will be a positive for them. This ensures that the overwhelming majority of transactions in a free economy are good for the people making them, and that these many positive transactions add up and grow with people’s desire for ever more economic improvement.

Second, currencies ultimately have value if people believe they can use them to buy things. A complementary currency would be backed by a company saying it could be used to make purchases from the company.

Putting these two ideas together, complementary currencies could be used to create positive transactions when there is not enough of the main currency available to facilitate the transaction. This would benefit the company, the workers that produced the products, and of course, the recipients of the products.

The practice

The truth is that I don’t know how every company should be run, you’ll have to ask a congressperson for that. Really, companies would need to work with charities in order to find out what is needed. The interests of companies to produce in a manner that is economical to them, and the interest of charities to receive only the things they can use, will have to combine to create the many positives that are possible.

The main goal of this blog is to get some companies to experiment with this idea and see if it can grow into something big. Any suggestions from people with expertise in any area involved with this (mine is limited to finance and economics) are welcome, as is any help with spreading the idea. Thanks for reading and sharing!

Notes:

This post will be updated as more is learned about the idea and how people are reacting to it.

This is not a call for companies to pay their employees or suppliers with scrip.

You’re Probably Thinking About Time Travel Wrong

There are two known methods of time travel into the future. In fact, we all use them to travel extremely slightly into the future all the time. One of the methods is to move at an extremely high speed, and the other is to be in a massively powerful gravitational field. However, the idea that you are the one traveling into the future is not exactly correct, and it leads to some bad thinking about traveling into the past.

The way that you get into the future with these two methods is through a relativistic effect known as time dilation. Basically, your clock will slow down if you are traveling at a significant percentage of the speed of light, or are in an area with extreme gravity (think black hole type gravity).

Now, what is really happening is that you are almost stopping your travel through time while everyone else is moving into the future. If they could see you in your spacecraft, you would look nearly frozen* to them as they went about their business. Once you became “unfrozen”, it would appear that you had travelled into the future, but really it was everyone else that did.

This is where the bad thinking about backward time travel comes in.

Some say that If you could travel faster than light then you would go back in time. The problem with that idea, and all other reverse time travel methods that I have seen, is that only your own clock would be going backward, and the rest of the universe would still be going forward. So you do not end up in the past at the end of your travels.

Admittedly though, I have not read every one of the proposed ideas involving wormholes or quantum effects.

So, is there a method to travel back in time? The only method I can currently conceive is some sort of reset for the universe back to a particular time, with the time traveler not being involved in the reset. Those people who believe we live in a simulation might get excited about that idea, because it makes time travel seem like it could be done with a simple click. And for all we know, we may have lived through countless resets already.

*Assuming an extreme time dilation, a lesser time dilation would lead to a slow motion effect

How Complementary Currencies Can Improve Monetary Policy

No currency can perform perfectly for everyone living in the currency zone. Some areas will need easier access to money, while others would benefit from tighter monetary policy. Complementary currencies can help different parts of an economy receive the monetary policy that best suits them, even when the overall economy is going in another direction.

One of the well-documented problems with the Euro currency (there are also many good things, this is not about bashing the Euro) is that different countries may need different monetary policies at different times. When a country is in recession, it needs easier access to money, and a country with a booming economy may need to tighten the money supply in order to avoid inflation. The European Central Bank (ECB) has to balance these needs when creating policy and thus many countries end up with a monetary policy that is not ideal for them.

The same problem exists for geographic areas or economic sectors of any large economy. There will always be sections that need different policies.

Complementary currencies can help ease this problem. When a company could benefit from monetary easing then it can do that for itself and not suffer with a bad policy from central planners. The same is true when a company could benefit from a tighter policy, it can just decrease the amount of its own complementary currency that it is using. The companies that do this well will receive great benefit from it, as will their workers and all other stakeholders.

These benefits from the individual components of an economy can add up and result in an overall economy that is functioning at a higher level. Thus, a monetary system that uses complementary currencies can produce better policy that leads to more stability and greater growth.

Possible Physical Laws in the Multiverse or Simulations

We’re all familiar with the laws of our universe and how they affect our daily life. Things fall if you drop them, it takes energy to move things, etc. What we don’t often think about is that the laws of our universe do not have to be the way that they are. In fact, we may live in a multiverse where infinitely many other rules of physics might exist. This post will focus on the first law of motion in our universe and how it could be different in other universes, as well as the sometimes bizarre effects of those different laws.

The first law of motion states that objects will move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an outside force. This means that our universe offers zero resistance to velocity. If something starts moving in empty space then it will move in that same direction at the same speed forever.

Now, it does not have to be that way. A universe could exist that had a gradual* resistance to velocity. In that case, something moving in empty space would gradually slow down and come to a stop. This is familiar to us on Earth, and is actually the way people thought our universe worked for much of human history.

There could also be a universe with an immediate* resistance to velocity. This would be very weird to us because objects, no matter how fast they were moving, would stop immediately when you stopped applying a force to them. This would mean that any motion would require enormous amounts of energy, and depending on the other properties of that universe, it could end up becoming completely frozen. Maybe that one wouldn’t be such a great place to live.

Returning to our universe, acceleration is very different from velocity. The first law of motion implies an immediate resistance to acceleration. No matter how high an object’s rate of acceleration, if you stop applying a force, then that acceleration will instantly cease and the object will just move with a constant velocity. This is why a ball that you’re spinning on a rope above your head will fly away in a straight line when you let it go. Once there is no force to keep it turning (accelerating), it just continues at a constant velocity (speed and direction).

Again, it does not have to be that way. There could be only a gradual resistance to acceleration, where the rate would gradually slow before an object came to rest at a constant velocity. This would mean that the ball released from above your head would continue turning for a while before it straightened out. Baseball pitchers would appreciate the ability to throw the ball faster and with much greater amounts of curve in this universe (although hitters wouldn’t like it so much).

There could also be a universe with zero resistance to acceleration. This would mean that once something began accelerating, it would accelerate at that same rate forever. In that strange universe, the ball released from above your head would continue spinning forever, and if you threw the ball it would eventually approach the speed of light.

So, changing just one physical law can have large effects and different areas of the multiverse could exhibit some very strange types of motion. I think I would like to see some of those. Perhaps we will simulate some of them one day, or invent video games where people could play with different physical laws. Or perhaps we’re already in one of those simulations, and people from a different universe are observing the effects of our laws right now.

*The description of certain terms will serve as their definition in the context of this post.