Saint Gasoline speculates about a common idea: using a time machine to travel far in the future to reap the benefits of compound interest. It won’t work!
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Lots of bank accounts get abandoned — forgotten, the owner dies, etc., but you don’t have a lot of bankers sitting around fretting, “Uh-oh, Marcus Junius Glabrius deposited 15 denarii in 61 BC, and never closed his account. I sure hope he doesn’t come strolling in tomorrow, or we’ll have to give him Switzerland, France, and a couple of small African nations to cover the interest.” No. That’s because the bankers sit around watching their accounts, and when Marcus doesn’t stop by for a century they say, “Oh ho! That money is mine, now!” Either that or the next regime sweeps in, confiscates all the money and sets fire to the records, and uses the bank building to quarter their horses or mistresses.
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St. G regrets that his plan has the unfortunate glitch that while he is a billionaire, he has to live under the tentacles of the giant squid overlords. This is of no concern. When the squid overlords see St. G, they don’t see a banking customer: they see a pleasing sample of mushi (it’s like sushi, only it’s from the future, and it uses mammal meat and doesn’t bother with the rice and seaweed. Or the little cups of sake. Or table manners.)
You know, of course, that sushi is the rice on which you put your tasty pieces of fish or whatever. Without the sushi, the raw fish is sashimi, so, by extension, our future squid overlords will probably be eating mashimi (apologies if mashimi is already a Japanese word meaning something completely different)
It’s probably a good thing squid don’t have table manners. Can you imagine laying out one bit of cutlery for every tentacle? In the correct order? Under water?
Funny that you mentioned mushi, because they’re magical creatures from the anime series Mushishi. They’re not quite human sushi …
1. In the US, unclaimed/abandoned accounts go to the State. You have the ability to recover the funds from the State.
2. You can put the funds in a Trust which as an indefinite life if you so set it up. Even better, multiple trusts to spread the risk. You can set these up to be professionally managed and the assets held in diverse investment assets to spread the risk instead of putting the money in a bank-account.
It’d work perfectly well. Just stop the time machine every decade or so to deposit something in your account and possibly change the registration from “you” to “your heir.” Or pay someone to do same. Or, if you’re starting from now and going to the time when squid rule the world, program a computer to do same. The mushi problem is less easy to solve.
Not in English, it isn’t. In English, sushi means the whole roll, fish and rice and seaweed and all.
Linguistic Evolution: It works, Bitches!
I love you, Stogoe. (And I wore my Science shirt yesterday!)
My dad and his brother just recently acquired some money that had been forgotten, from their father’s business which closed some 50 years ago. They reveled in the receipt of $350 each! Woohoo! I don’t think I’d want to travel far enough in time to collect a huge amount of interest on a small investment. . .
My employer, David Pizer, has come up with a plan similar to the one St. Gasoline ridicules:
A Cold Calculus Leads Cryonauts To Put Assets on Ice
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113780314900652582-3NZCCoZBW7UHDmouEOrkzkalkfY_20060129.html?mod=blogs
Then there’s inflation.
And then there’s the occasional economy crisis that boosts inflation to 3600 %. Per day in some cases.
Then there’s inflation.
And then there’s the occasional economy crisis that boosts inflation to 3600 %. Per day in some cases.
The problem is that once you vanish, some bank official will start emailing the world until he finds someone to help him claim your account for 35%.
The plan can still work, if and only if, you have the only time machine. If you do then you can always wipe the squid overlords or ornery bankers out of existence by going back to change things until they’re more to your liking. If you don’t have the only machine then you have to race to get your money out before all the other time travellers bankrupt the economy. Of course, the best scam of all would be to sell defective time machines to customers who deposit their money in your bank. If the machines only work one way then the money is yours to keep.
So “using a time machine to travel far in the future to reap the benefits of compound interest” is a “common idea”, is it?
Hey Academia, step away from the bong.
Somewhat relevant, one of my favorite bits from Red Dwarf: http://youtube.com/watch?v=NEu0o62ycmg
Never leave food unattended when you go off-world.
“Linguistic Evolution: It works, Bitches!”
Indeed, in English we say Maki Roll, Pizza pie, shrimp scampi, and my favorite, with au jus, even if it makes the speakers of the original languages cringe. I suppose this is related to the mechanism that makes us say ATM machine and PIN number. But when foreign words are adapted this way, it’s not so much evolution as accretion, like barnacles clinging to the side of a ship.
If you have a time machine, why bother uprooting your life and risking dishonest government hacks (a double redundancy) and bank officials? Simply win the lottery every few weeks for a year or two . . .
Unless, of course, time machines are invariably unidirectional . . . but as long as we’re dreaming . . .
“mushi” actually just means “insect” or “bug” in Japanese. Which still fits the context pretty well (“When the squid overlords see St. G, they don’t see a banking customer: they see a pleasing sample of insect”). I don’t think mashimi means anything already, but I could easily be wrong.
Sh*t! How am I going to afford breakfast at the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe now!?
Yes, and a “theory” is just a wild guess without evidence or explanation.
That’s actually the best argument against humans ever inventing or having invented timemachines I’ve seen.
There are obviously ways of making this work – as has been pointed out. Human nature being what it is someone is bound to do if timetravel is possible. That means that by monitoring the worlds cashflow we’ll know if someone is doing this. If they were we’d have heard about it, so we can conclude that noöne is making a fortune this way. Ergo, timetravel is impossible (or human civilisation is destroyed before it’s developed).
Shorter version: Pauli’s Paradox applied to timetravel — “Why aren’t they here yet?”
Yeah, the basic “paradox” comes from thinking of banks as eternal fixtures of the world, rather than temporal businesses. A thought: How old is the longest-running bank in the world? How long have they been offering interest on deposits?
Yes, time travel to the future is physically possible (indeed, we do it all the time at a rate that we can only measure with atomic clocks — flown around the world, for example), but we have excellent reasons to think time travel to the past is impossible. St. Gasoline does a fairly good job of indicating how such travel to the future would work.
Some folks think that human population can compound interest (grow) indefinately. I once calculated how much gold I would have had if one of my ancestors had been able to deposit $1 for me in AD 0000 and if it had been able to sustain a 4% interest rate until the present. I figured gold at $35 an oz (at the time) and didn’t bother with what kind of ounces. As I recall it came out to be a large multiple of the mass of the earth. Then talk about why this does not happen; things mentioned here, and relate to population growth.
Been there, seen that, killed my grandmother: see
Niven, Larry (1971) “Theory and Practice of Time Travel” in the collection ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS.
I haven’t heard anyone call it “pizza pie” since the early 90’s. And isn’t “salsa sauce” falling out of usage? Please don’t give up the fight, or we might end up with another Torpenhow Hill:
(credit to this Usenet post)
I don’t know about other countries but for the US:
Unclaimed funds are a real deal. It’s worth sticking your name into the searches.
There’s a lot of (small amounts of–think $100’s) money out there. Ever moved and not gotten your escrow money from a utility (that’s what they made you pay before they would serve you. But you forgot about it). How about insurance? A lot of insurance companies converted from ‘Mutual’ to ‘Stock’ and had to pay off all their policy holders, if they could find them. Do you know which company insured your parents or grandparents, and whether they were found? If not, that money (typically a few hundred bux) is languishing in unclaim funds.
And the bureaucrats (in my experience) have not been too exacting. A notarized statement was enough for myself; a death certificate and executor status were enough for the deceased.
Anyway, here is a url to start
http://unclaimed.org/
or search for ‘unclaimed funds (your state)’
Heinlein said it best in 1973, in “Time Enough for Love”:
“$100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000–by which time it will be worth nothing.”
I must be the only person on the internets to have actually watched Mike Judge’s film “Idiocracy”.
One of the plot points in that film involves exactly this sort of financial planning…
I was googling “mushi” since I seem to remember “mushi mushi” from anime. And indeed, a language interested jayks says:
Yes, we all have such days… Especially if there is a bug in the telecom software.
And now I’m left wondering if japanese greets each other with “bug bug”, and if so how that come about.
On the more curmudgeonly side, relativistic clock behavior isn’t commonly considered “time travel” or as constituting “time machines” since back in the days. (No, not those days. It seems it was before the internet even. It’s that old!)
I was googling “mushi” since I seem to remember “mushi mushi” from anime. And indeed, a language interested jayks says:
Yes, we all have such days… Especially if there is a bug in the telecom software.
And now I’m left wondering if japanese greets each other with “bug bug”, and if so how that come about.
On the more curmudgeonly side, relativistic clock behavior isn’t commonly considered “time travel” or as constituting “time machines” since back in the days. (No, not those days. It seems it was before the internet even. It’s that old!)
“Hello” on the phone is “moshi moshi.” Mushi is “bug.” ^_^ No, they aren’t saying “bug bug” when they pick up the phone.
But hey, if we’ll be little samples of bug in the future, it still kinda works. Ahhh, karma!
Does anyone else remember the (paper and dice) RPG, US Patent No.1?
Bah. If you had a working time machine, it would be easy to make money. The scheme above would work by just checking in on you investments every few years. But you’d be better off buying a bunch of cheap “collectibles” in the past, storing them in a bank safety deposit box (to make sure they age somewhat properly) and then selling them at whatever point their collectability hits its peak. This would net you a lot of cash without impacting the financial markets in a manner that other time travellers might catch on and try to stop you.
Of course, if I had a working time machine the last thing I’d be thinking of is how to make money. There would be soooo many things to see and so little time…
The flaw in the plan is that the money has to come from some source. If the account grows too big, then the bank won’t be able to loan out enough money to cover the interest, so they’ll either go out of business or cut your interest rate.
Assuming one-way time-travel, your best investment strategy is to kidnap a bunch of people from the 21st Century and then sell them to a zoo or a museum at the other end.
‘Mushi’ is also a slang term in German for parts of the female anatomy that seem without exception to infuriate religious folk to the point where they need their gods to make up arcane laws regulating what can and can’t be done with them.
eruvande, thanks, that explains it.
eruvande, thanks, that explains it.