13 KiB
[RST][WIP][FF] The Universe Is An Optimisation Problem -- Chapter 4 – A Really Big Supermarket
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Author: u/imasentientantcolony Sunshine Regiment*
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12299677/4/The-Universe-Is-An-Optimisation-Problem
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Score: 31
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Created: 2018-01-31T00:34:47
Post:
Comments:
u/imasentientantcolony [+6] Sunshine Regiment (13 minutes later)
for people who are encountering this for the first time and want to get a general overview, this is an hpmor fanfanfic which draws on significant digits and to a lesser extent, orders of magnitude.
it takes place in 1995, in an alternate universe (well, not quite) where the department of mysteries has discovered an almost unlimited well of magic (with consequences), muggleborns are prevented from attending hogwarts until their fifth year and often learn to control and develop their accidental magic, wizarding society has experienced an incomplete industrial revolution, illicitly financed by contracts with muggle governments and corporations.
the first chapter is confusing but it'll be a while until i figure out how to reorganise it.
feel free to pm me if you're interested in being a beta for this fic – i'm just in the process of soring out a way to do that without using ff.net's system.
u/CreationBlues [+3] (4 hours later)
What's your update schedule going to be like? I really like this, it's super dense and obtuse while also implying that it will make sense in all the right ways, but I checked earlier today and was surprised to see it started in 2016.
u/imasentientantcolony [+2] Sunshine Regiment (2 days later)
sorry for the wait in my reply – it started in late december 2016, and it took me about twenty days to put out chapter two. chapter three took 6 days, and chapter four took me 14 days. i realised that my earlier plans probably weren't viable, because chapters two and three were 20-30% material that i'd written before.
the current update schedule is every two weeks on wednesdays (in new zealand). it's torturously slow, i know, but it's really the best i can do right now.
u/CreationBlues [+3] (2 days later)
Honestly even bi monthly updates are pretty standard for people who aren't wildbow. What's more important is letting people know when delays are coming up and letting them know when you're letting the serial go. People are willing to wait, just take a look at half the serials people follow on here.
u/rekIfdyt2 [+8] (2 hours later)
This is brilliant! The world-building is truly magical. You've somehow managed to capture the whimsical spirit of Rowling's universe while dramatically increasing its breadth. The fact that you have a looming (existential!) danger somehow works well with the light-hearted tone in this chapter.
FWIW I had found the first two-and-a-half chapters slightly jarring, due to the many jumps in perspective, if still interesting. OTOH they did successfully serve the purpose of setting up the background for the story — I have no idea whether and how this could have been done better.
u/imasentientantcolony [+3] Sunshine Regiment (2 days later)
his is brilliant! The world-building is truly magical. You've somehow managed to capture the whimsical spirit of Rowling's universe while dramatically increasing its breadth. The fact that you have a looming (existential!) danger somehow works well with the light-hearted tone in this chapter.
thanks!
FWIW I had found the first two-and-a-half chapters slightly jarring, due to the many jumps in perspective, if still interesting. OTOH they did successfully serve the purpose of setting up the background for the story — I have no idea whether and how this could have been done better.
yup i'm still figuring out a way to reorganise those chapters in a less jarring way – in the meanwhile, i've added an author note up at the top of chapter one mentioning that.
u/MaddoScientisto [+7] (6 hours later)
Amazing, when HJPEV made his cameo I was squealing like a little girl.
Also
"Um, just a Moggley saying."
Is this a Horry Patter reference?
u/htmlcoderexe [+5] (19 hours later)
Yesssss another chapter I'm gonna report once I read it lol busy day ._.
u/Sonderjye [+2] (a day later)
Interesting story.
How is wizard money worth anything? If I took things from the supermarket, sold them for muggle currency, and then exchanged that currency to galleons, I would have a money making machine.
The time loop seems... convinient. If I want to reach immortality, real immortality as in can't be killed, I would just have to consistently time loop such that time would make sure I wasn't killed such that I could go back in time to do the thing I wanted.
u/Gurkenglas [+3] (a day later)
Future you might get killed, though. And if you only do a dangerous thing if you know you won't die, Time might do something less improbable to arrange you not going back in time, or scaring yourself into not doing it anyway. And if you interact with yourself too much to ascertain you also aren't permanently injured or the like, you might get Deutsch'd.
u/imasentientantcolony [+3] Sunshine Regiment (2 days later)
How is wizard money worth anything? If I took things from the supermarket, sold them for muggle currency, and then exchanged that currency to galleons, I would have a money making machine.
this has happened in the past and lead to a semi-major expansion in the money supply (followed by a deflationary spiral managed by the concerted efforts of lucius malfoy, the ministry, and gringotts – all of whom have antiquated sensibilities about the role of inflation in an economy). the ministry enforced laws concerning commercial ventures with muggles (i.e if you haven't filled in the forms and gotten it stamped, you can't – a fairly expensive process) as a legal extension of the statute of secrecy, and since then, nobody has done it. the penalties for violating the statute of secrecy are much too high for something that involves carting food out of public entrances and selling them to muggles (apparition is unreliable and dangerous in the supermarket). people do take food from the supermarket to share with their muggle families, but anything which could be viable as a commercial venture is much too obvious.
The time loop seems... convinient. If I want to reach immortality, real immortality as in can't be killed, I would just have to consistently time loop such that time would make sure I wasn't killed such that I could go back in time to do the thing I wanted.
you could create a time-turner schedule so that you would consistently see your older self in the morning at a certain meet-point, and perhaps exchange a limited amount of information, which would mean you getting killed (or rendered unable to time turn) in the next six hours would be inconsistent. your future-copy wouldn't have the same guarantee, and you wouldn't have the same guarantee any other parts of the day.
based off my understanding of the mechanics of time travel as outlined in hpmor, you dying sometime later in the day would just mean your future-copy just wouldn't appear at the meet-point. if you were to take an unbreakable vow to consistently time-turn according to schedule (which is probably a reasonable thing to do), that would mean only three things could happen in the next six hours: your time-turner breaks, you die, or you are rendered incapable of using your time-turner. using a time-turner in the way you described would mean these possibilities would become unavoidable.
the time loop that appeared in this chapter is in essence the same as the time loop that appeared in the prank chapters in hpmor.
e: i made a basic economics error, multipartitemind is right.
u/MultipartiteMind [+2] (2 days later)
(Why would the money supply expand, if the muggles are paying for the free food with their own notes and goblins are paying for the notes with their own gold, both remaining constant? If anything, wouldn't muggle food prices drop as the food supply expanded with other goods and services holding steady for a mostly-constant amount of money?)
I find myself more curious about the note of the type that Ozland exchanged; if that sort of time-limited power expires without being presented (to the church) and used, then whoever holds it will have suffered a loss while Ozland will have permanent (until used) gold. Are the goblins going to seek out and sell that note (at a profit) to someone who has a use for (/can make a profit by) using the motorway at those times, or is this a way to bankrupt the goblins by getting them to exchange all their wealth for promises which will go unclaimed with expiry dates?
(*contemplation of the difference between 'measurement of absolute value' (to everyone) and 'measurement of absolute value to you, specifically, the goblin who will be attempting to use a certain set of methods to get value out of it'* That would be interesting when it comes to the stockmarket--measuring how much something will be worth if sold an hour/day/week later, say, and deciding to buy it (or short-sell it) according to whether one would make a profit or not.)
u/None [+1] (8 days later)
If the value-o-meter creates a stable time loop by sending back the value of the note at the time the goblins sell it, probably minus some commission/interest, that's perfectly reasonable. The goblins have an incentive to find a market for the promise, and have an assurance that they will be able to find a buyer. If they willn't had been able to find a buyer, the note wouldn't clear in the present. They want to be able to clear arbitrary things of value, after all, that's how they turn a profit.
So, in theory, the time-limited power could expire without the goblins profiting, so the value at sale goes to 0, so there is no sale. Presumably, playing the stock market this way just breaks everything really quickly, and a lot of weird cosmic coincidences start happening to ratchet everything back on track.
u/MultipartiteMind [+1] (8 days later)
...given that the sale takes place, if they're really able to sell it to someone (someone who will likely in turn sell it to certain muggles who own cars?), exchanging things with goblins sounds like an amazing way of extracting all sorts of value out of things normally unimportant to oneself... Granted, most would only be able to sell passage through their garden, rather than (for instance) passage through an entire city's sewer system.
(For the stock market, perhaps instead what would happen is that goblin trades would return stock prices to their true-value-reflected value hyper-efficiently, reducing the profit gainable when the hand is overplayed? Remembering a certain fiction about a character called Flicker doing a similar thing and potentially ending the world upon suddenly stopping.)
A sudden question--what ties/couples market cap to equity? Other than a person with >50% of shares who can order a company to give themselves money directly, what is the gold-backing of a single share to make people compete for it and elevate its price? Is there an option to redeem shares through the company itself, getting a guaranteed (equality-related?) payout, thus providing incentive for people to buy a share in the hope that if the company does well it will have a higher guaranteed-minimum redeeming price?
(That is, if share price were completely uncoupled to actual financial utility, bought and sold only between shareholders with no way of selling them back, I would imagine the price would fluctuate unrelatedly either unrelatedly low or unrelatedly high, like art... or, rather than redeeming at the company itself, is it to do with 'if someone wants to do a hostile takeover, they'll have to buy up the shares'--but again, what actually links that to true company value? ...it feels as though I'm missing something absolutely critical in the chain of causality, something which has bothered me on and off for years about my mental model of what the stockmarket is...)
u/htmlcoderexe [+1] (3 days later)
Heyooo I got around to finishing that, I especially liked the time tricks from the twins! The balls punchline was amazing.
Please keep writing if you can and enjoy.
u/Prezombie [+1] (14 days later)
Please update the Ao3 version, that site is so much better IMO. Also the last scene was never added to the Ao3 chapter 1.