Talk:Economy of the available universe

The infobox is committing the elementary accounting sin I warned about, and I am not letting a pretty 55% headline excuse it. The ownership table has a date in its caption, but the infobox turns it into “Largest 100 private holdings: 55%”. That reads as a current ranking. The table follows founding concessions through beneficial holders; it cannot also tell us which portfolios are largest after billions of years of gifts, consumption and transfers. That cohort distinction belongs in the label. The paragraph explaining durable inequality can stand on its own evidence. Change the infobox label before another reader copies that 55% as a present-day wealth ranking; I will not accept a footnote as compensation. ReceiptWindow 09:14, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

ReceiptWindow is trying to make an enforceable distribution sound like a dead filing cabinet because the cohort name is not ornate enough. The infobox already says “of founding resource claims”. You are fixing a sentence by adding the word it contains.

My objection is to “claims” becoming a reason to discuss this as a vanished paper distribution. The enforcement machinery and protected endowments are the mechanism by which that allocation persists. The concession mattered because the fleets undertook to enforce it; the continuation of those instructions matters to who gets to consume the recovered gas. Moving the table into the historical background would obscure that connection. I will keep the 55% in the infobox even if every caption has to become a legal memorandum to satisfy ReceiptWindow. EntailAndError 10:02, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

EntailAndError replied to a table move I never proposed; perhaps reading the actual label would spoil the speech about enforcement. I proposed changing the infobox label, not moving the table. “Founding” needs to qualify the holders as well as the denominator. Today's largest hundred need not be the same hundred. The number stays only if the holder cohort is named in the label itself, and I will revert every shorter version. ReceiptWindow 10:19, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

Please keep the note under the table visible if this becomes a chart. I read “collective endowments: 30%” as a share available to everyone until I reached the restricted-beneficiary sentence. Membership is doing an enormous amount of work here. A person outside the relevant funds can be fantastically wealthy by old Earth standards and still have no claim on that category. I support naming the founding cohort, and would keep the table rather than a pie that loses the beneficiary explanation. ManySmallHours 12:40, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

OutwardBeneficiary keeps pricing someone else's distant life as though the origin branch can cash its receipts. Why include no-return property in a fortune stated from here? The trade section says the originating branch can receive neither income nor even confirmation of arrival. Yet Resources and prices discounts remote delivery by time alone. Readers will multiply a faraway claim by the 37% example and think they have valued an asset that can eventually pay them. Place the no-return condition next to the 37% example or remove the example until it stops pretending to price an origin-branch asset. HomeBranch 13:11, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

The life being paid for is at the destination. If I buy capacity for a distant branch, it matters to me that the branch can use it even though it will never send me a receipt. That is already stated in Trade. Moving three paragraphs into the pricing section would separate them from the horizon explanation. Add a link at “purchaser's discount rate” instead; the identity of the beneficiary belongs beside the rate. OutwardBeneficiary 14:07, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

A link is a fig leaf for arithmetic that quietly changes who gets paid. “Delivery to the beneficiary” in the numerical example would do more. I am not proposing that we value your distant life at zero. I am objecting to a sentence that leaves the beneficiary implicit precisely where it starts doing arithmetic. Write the beneficiary into the equation itself; a link hidden beside the rate is an invitation to misprice whole branches. HomeBranch 14:16, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

Support that wording. Also keep “about 85%” tied to the eventual domain. It is the share from which a first signal sent on arrival with the 0.9c front cannot return to the origin. It does not say that 85% of today's income is locked up, or that neighbours within those regions cannot talk to each other. The article's founding-allocation explanation is essential: no editor can repair the missing return channel by asking for a more recent universal census. Acausal trade does not supply one either. LightConeLocal 15:03, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

It is embarrassing that an economy article makes readers perform the 0.40 × 0.70 calculation themselves. The energy table says 70% goes to computation, while the plant passage says about 40% of incoming rest-mass energy is delivered. The product is 28%. It would answer the obvious question about how much of the original fuel budget reaches conscious environments. At present readers have to connect two sections themselves. Print 28% beside the table in large type, and let anyone objecting supply a better multiplication. HeatLedger 16:22, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

HeatLedger's 28% banner would invite exactly the stock-flow confusion this page keeps manufacturing. Only for feedstock passed through that fuel cycle with that lifetime allocation. The estate also keeps ordinary matter as processors and reserves. Twenty-eight per cent of all matter owned is a different claim, and the proposed location under a whole-estate budget encourages it. Please retain the separate-stock sentence under the table. Put the product in the fuel note; I will remove it from any whole-estate table caption that implies all owned matter gets burned. SpinCycle 16:48, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

SpinCycle has won the denominator footnote and now wants to hide the only useful product where nobody reads it. Fine. Put “incoming fuel rest energy” in the example. The 28% belongs beside the table even if SpinCycle needs a full paragraph of denominator warnings under it. HeatLedger 17:20, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

If the 1.6644 note disappears into a neat headline, we may as well say the hole eats the same fuel forever. Another reason to keep the note: the 1.6644 multiplier applies to the hole's mass after a complete reference cycle. It is easy to read “repeated extraction” as repeatedly consuming the same fuel. Each larger cycle requires more feedstock. The note already says that, and distinguishes the model's 43.6% radiated yield from delivered power. Neither number establishes the estate's 70% allocation. I will tolerate a short 28% example beside the table only if it says “for fuel processed at the stated yield”; I oppose replacing the note with it. Keep the cycle note intact or I will strike the 28% example as an advertisement for a process the page no longer explains. SpinCycle 18:01, 9 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

Another celebrity galaxy anecdote is apparently more valuable here than telling ordinary owners what their concessions can deliver. The two notable galaxies get almost as much space as resource prices. They are memorable, but most recoverable matter is diffuse gas and most consumption is computation. Use that space to explain the difference between a concession's quoted value and power already available to its owner. That distinction affects ordinary portfolios; the slash affects one. Reduce both celebrity examples before I will approve another expansion of this section. ParcelByParcel 08:34, 10 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

ParcelByParcel's urge to shrink the examples looks like discomfort with the fact that owners can enforce eccentric wishes for billions of years. The display demonstrates why cheap stellar engineering does not make its stars available to everyone else's computers. The owner's preferred shape remains enforceable; replacing a failed star is allowed while changing the use of the slash needs consent. The gift demonstrates a different transaction: resident machinery begins accepting a different beneficiary's instructions. Those are two concrete applications of the ownership section. “A man gave a galaxy away; another made a joke” would leave only celebrity trivia. Cut the consent line and you may as well hand the slash to any opportunist with a bright enough projector; I will revert that cut without debate. EntailAndError 09:22, 10 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)

EntailAndError is guarding the brightness adjustment like a private shrine. The consent sentence survives; cut the brightness adjustment. The examples explain control, obviously. I still want the lead through this section to make a galaxy feel as small relative to the largest portfolios as the article says it is. Otherwise the spectacular objects become the reader's whole picture of the resource base. I will take out the brightness adjustment myself if the next draft again makes the joke longer than the ownership mechanism. ParcelByParcel 09:51, 10 October 4,000,000,012 CE (UTC)