Quite an insightful post. I realized decades ago that things like electric lights, hot and cold running water, and cloth are incredibly undervalued today (or then, actually). 500 years ago only kings or the incredibly rich had much in the way of nice cloth, and not many of them had hot and cold indoor plumbing. No one had electric anything. They couldn't buy electricity at any price. That's amazing, and one of the most important things I learned from living innawoods for a while.
Indoor plumbing is very nice.
However, some of the things you say here aren't as true as they might appear, such as that inflation doesn't matter. It matters right now that your money you have in fiat is being eroded at ~10% or so. The price having inflated from 200 years ago, not so much, as you point out, but the inflation sucking the value out of your pocket today does matter. At least when I'm taxed I get to hand it over and bitch. Inflation is just sneaky theft.
Resources aren't fixed either. More people absolutely doesn't mean fewer resources for each of us. More people means more people inventing things, and that's how we get nifty new things like electricity. There isn't less electricity today than there was 500 years ago. Iron, copper, gold, food, anything you care to name that people mine or make isn't either reduced relative to how many people there are. People mine with far higher productivity today, and because there's more miners, there's more copper available to the billions more of us on Earth today - and even the absolute supply of copper has increased, though not one more speck of it has been created in the bowels of the Earth.
500 years ago we didn't know about the almost infinite supply of copper in space. There may be a fixed supply of copper on Earth, but no rational person thinks we're going to always be limited to Earth. How long do you think it will be before we start accessing that unlimited supply of copper in space? A decade? Two? Ten? I'll bet you everything I own it will be less than ten decades before we see copper mined in space.
It might actually happen very soon, as the sample return mission is going to collect stuff on Mars and send it back to Earth, which may well contain at least trace amounts of copper.
Living things? I think in the future the possibility to use aquaponics to feed ourselves will prove to work fine on Mars, or even just in space habitats, and that will be the beginning of exporting terrestrial life into the infinite barren universe. There may be fewer species today than there was 10 years ago, but I am willing to bet the blood in my veins there will be more species alive 100 years from now than there are now, because we're going to need all kinds of ecosystems to fit all kinds of habitats, and CRISPR means we'll make them as we need them.
Venus has a thick CO2 atmosphere, that is about room temperature at 50k feet or so, and 1 atmosphere of pressure of breathable gas on Venus at that elevation would float in midair nicely. There's also not insignificant trace amounts of sulphuric acid in Venusian atmosphere, and it just so happens that deep sea vent life on Earth, which lives at incredible pressure and temperature naturally, is actually chemosynthetic, not photosynthetic like surface ecosystems. The chemical it's based on is sulphuric acid, squirting out of the black smokers vent life clings to in the deep ocean.
Lots of tasty organisms might be very easily adapted to float around in Venus' atmosphere and process the CO2 and sulphuric acid into O2 and food, which colonists could live large on.
I'm long life. I think I just need to HODL long enough for better minds than mine to figure all this stuff out, so I can enjoy the fruits of their labor. And that's the real benefit of technology. It allows our forebears to build things that outlast them, and then we get to enjoy their hard life's work for free. Today, that makes me very appreciative of our hardworking ancestors.
Thanks!
All good points.
The reason I underplay inflation so aggressively is that I never hold any fiat whatsoever.
All the incentives align for me to spend any fiat almost immediately.
Sometimes my work will imply that others are doing this as well, even if they aren't.
This can lead to a certain friction that results in me being called out, and that's fine.
Although most people do seem to live paycheck to paycheck, so there is that.
I guess I technically do as well, if crypto is thought of as a product that we buy.
Not everyone can spend fiat immediately. I can't. While I do everything I can to barter and get others to pay my rent, I only managed that about 1/2 the months last year, and my landlady doesn't take plastic, Hive, or BTC. She'd take a check, but I'm not setting up a bank account just for her. I'd still have to have cash in it to float checks.
Nice thing about crypto is it seems to be readily sold for cash when you need cash. I have to say that I can only assume that is true, because I've never ever. Ever. I'm not against crypto as money. I just already have enough nontrustworthy banks and etc. to deal with, and see no good reason to add centralized exchanges.
If there were dexes that ignored KYC I could use without a bank, I'd make some effort. From time to time I am told there are, and I have a look, but there really aren't, and some detail or another means my deets would be attached to my ability to exchange currencies, so I don't. I do wish there were, because I would. In the meantime, cash transactions are anonymous, and that's what I do if I can't wangle someone else to pay my obligations.