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Fantasy Wasteland - 18 - HD
🕑 Added 2019-05-16 03:00:01 +0000 UTC"Not... Great...?"
Commentary
After the previous comic, multiple people suggested golden bottle caps as the currency.
I'm not doing that, as the time to make that joke has past, but this was my immediate response when that was first suggested:
"That's it. That's the joke I should have done."
I might have a golden bottle cap show up later in honor of it, however.
I never really thought about it much before now, but from what little I've seen of (functioning) vaults (complex underground bunkers) in Fallout games, they're more communist than capitalist. I'm not sure money even matters within them unless trading with the outside, and jobs are assigned by the people in charge.
This is somewhat ironic given the prewar conflict and the capitalist vs communist propaganda. "American capitalists live on! ...In underground communist vaults."
Comments
Jared Fattmann
Morbo: METAL DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY
Dan Shive
I must admit, it is a somewhat interesting experience if read as though they're Carol's lines.
John Trauger
Communism starts to scale badly once an individual loses the ability to see their impact on the whole. People can be both community-oriented nice people and self-centered jerks at the same time. One thing that keeps people nicer is understanding that what I do has direct value to the group.
Stephen Gilberg
Only now do I notice the lack of word balloon stems on the right and realize that that's probably still Phil talking.
Jared Fattmann
*gives self a cookie for suggesting gold bottle caps*
Joshua Brumley
My understanding was that, gold, while pretty and rare, is worthless as a metal to make tools, like plows and weapons, which was far more needed at the time of Post-Cataclysm than a pretty, but soft metal. So it was that reason why steel coins were valued as they can be coverted rather directly as a result.
Daryl Sawyer
In addition, any sufficiently small society is likely to be engaged in a fair amount of informal allocation of resources, no need for accounting to keep people honest since there are few enough people to keep it all in your head on an ad hoc basis.
Daryl Sawyer
That didn't really make sense. Steel is more valuable... as weapons. Why would they be wasted on coin? And would a sword not be worth more than it's weight in steel coins? Gold, on the other hand, is a luxury good. Only the wealthy can afford to waste their surplus on objects of gold. And the wealthy *are* wealthy because of their control over vital resources others must have access to, especially land. It isn't strictly necessary, but it's nice to have, and if you can do nothing else with gold, your landlord is likely to accept it for rent. Or someone's lord, at any rate, which means just about anyone will accept it in trade.
John Trauger
Any authoritarian system is going to resemble communism far more than capitalism. Capitalism requires the freedom to make choices that count. Authoritarian systems, regardless of the details must remove that choice to maintain power. They all start to look the same after a while.
Lucas
Hm... Now I want to check how vault 13 handled things be vault 101... TO THE COMPUTATOR!
Thisguy
Spoons! And Smaller Spoons!
James C
Of course they don't weigh you down - corks float!
Joshua Brumley
You could always use Steel bits. It's what they used in Dragonlance as Steel was more valuable Post-Cataclysm than Gold. Alternatively, you could use corks as the bottle cap stand-in and they somehow don't take up mass or volume in your pockets because, Logic! (Of video games)
James C
Alternative currency: Glass bottles (i.e. the ones that the bottle carries come from)
Kenneth A Graves
Instead of the "normal" gold coin > silver coin > copper coin, you could have gold coin > gold bottlecap > gold paperclip.
Dan Shive
That's what I meant by "functional". Vault 101 was the main example I was going by, really.
Copper Hamster
I've remarked on that to others, they are very communist collective dictatorship rather than capitalist democracies.
extantCadence
The vaults are all just locations where experiments were run on people, and what the experiment was varied greatly from vault to vault. That said, when vaults do actually have something resembling a society, they seem to tend towards communism.
