this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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The first thing I learn to replicate: coffee.
My cup gets empty, just point a finger in and squirt out another cup.
This is going to be followed by water and various food items and gasoline. My wife would be in on the secret, I'd keep the kids in the dark as much as possible. Now it's time to try and generate a living. Creating cash is a no-go as it's serialized and someone is going to notice bills showing up with the same numbers. I'd also avoid most high value, finished goods, as those also tend to be serialized and might get noticed. It's not that I wouldn't catalog them, but that would be for emergencies. For a while (probably years), life would continue as normal. I'd just be saving a lot of money by not buying groceries, sundries or most things I could get by handling it in a store and replicating it at home. Anything big or obvious gets bought normally. This is things like cell phones or cars. But, by shaving a lot of the regular costs, I suspect I could save up a good bit in a reasonable amount of time.
Once I have the funds, it's time to move to phase two. Locate a claim in Alaska which is both somewhat likely to have gold, is close enough to a town to visit with a short drive, and has a scenic spot to build a house. Buy a nice R/V and spend a few weeks every summer prospecting on the land and building out a homestead. I'll need to start visiting home improvement stores to catalog the materials along with visiting conventions and the like to handle samples of other stuff needed to build. I'd be aiming for as much of a net-zero, off-grid home as possible. Internet would be via Starlink (which would be bought and paid for). And most of the other stuff (food, materials, etc.) get's zapped into existence.
The "prospecting" part of the trip would be real enough. The finds would just be padded, a bit. The first few summers will result in finding nothing but gold dust and maybe a nugget or two gets added over time. Nothing big, nothing notable. Just enough that it makes sense for me to keep going back. This trip would be a family tradition (I'm sure the kids would hate it), but it's how we spend a couple weeks every year. This goes on with finds being padded out more over time with most of the money going into stocks, bonds and other investments. My paycheck would also be mostly used this way, keeping enough to pay for unavoidable costs like taxes, trips and services. When the home is ready, sell the R/V and use it as the base of operations for prospecting. This all goes on until the kids are grown and moved out. We continue to live in our current home, the kids keep going to school and doing the normal growing up and getting prepared for life. Nothing changes for them and they get a normal, stable childhood. Once they are on their way, the wife and I move to Alaska permanently. I continue working (I already work remotely) and prospecting until the investments are big enough that we can live off the interest comfortably with the principal growing 3-5% per year to keep up with inflation. Though, I kinda suspect this would happen before the kids are fully grown. With my ability to just create the food, sundries and fuel we need, we'd be saving money pretty quick.
And then, we just live. I'm not going to save the world, I don't think I can. If I can generate enough money, I would start donating to worthwhile causes. Things which provide water, food and micro-business loans. I really want to avoid discovery and ending up as a lab rat or having my family ripped apart as various government agencies try to figure out if my ability is genetic. Anything I do, which gets me noticed, results in my kids not getting to have normal lives. And that is goal number 1, my family gets to live a normal, happy life. Depending on how the ability works, I might go for a MAD style option over this. If I can create objects very fast and at far enough distances, I'd work to learn as powerful of explosives as possible over the years (nuclear weapons if the option reasonably presents itself, not sure how it would). If I am discovered, the threat becomes "leave my family alone or I blow the fuck out of everything, everywhere, all at once".
But ya, that's basically it. My kids grow up and have a trust fund waiting for them when my wife and I kick it. My wife and I get to retire as far away from other people as possible. We grow old hiking and playing video games together. Considering family history and actuary tables, I'll die first and she can spend her last years (possibly decades, based on her family history) dotting on grandkids and hopefully finding someone else to be happy around in those years.
I apologize now for the hostility I'm about to through your way, but this is probably the post the upsets new the most on this thread. You have 4 paragraphs and 864 words, explaining a fantastically well thought out premise and long term plan that is so absolutely achievable that you could literally do this right now with a like $100k extra.
With a mix of imagination and diligent scanning you could make yourself your own distinct content with no long term tectonic impact on the planet and a technocratic government that runs everything with a goal of perfect balance between human comfort and long term global stability. You could retire there with your family within the first year to watch your children grow up as the first generation of a true utopia.
You could populate the universe with so many tardigrades that the simulation you exist in crashes, or place a bowl of soup on the head of every cat on the planet, or make a new constellation to name after your wife, but instead the real life version of God mode isn't actually part of your 10 year plan. It's just a well managed lottery win. It's this what those wackos are talking about when they preach about internalizing the system? Because if so they're a lot less nuts than I originally thought.
Get off lemmy, do some research into properties in Alaska and gold speculation. This is so genuinely possible of a life goal that I genuinely believe you deserve to achieve it.
Can't say I really felt your reply was hostile. But, I appreciate that you tried to prevent and bad feelings.
I mean, I already live semi-rural in a good place for the kids to have friends close, go to good schools, and still have a bit of separation from the neighbors. When the kids are out on their own, we'll probably sell this place and buy a smaller home on a larger plot of land further away from people. Having the passive income setup for retirement may already be in the cards, though certainly not at the level I could pull off by being able to create objects out of nothing. Also, without that ability and the need to hide it, rural Virginia is plenty far enough away from other people for me. Part of picking Alaska for that scenario was accepting that you don't want to get noticed, ever.
Utopias have a bad habit of falling over when you get humans involved. I'd love to believe that, with a human replicator running about, we could end all suffering and bring world peace. I actually believe that the usual mix of greed, ego and self-centered-ness would result in just as many wars and strife as we see today. Hell, if you sit back and take a cold look at reality as it exists today, we should be living in a time of unparalleled peace and abundance for all. As a species, we have plenty of resources that no one should be hungry, no one should be without a roof over their head and no one should be worried about a bomb being dropped on them tomorrow. Yet, here we are. Now, this isn't to say things are all doom and gloom. For all the news reporting to the contrary, we are actually living in an incredibly peaceful time, historically. Even with the invasion of Ukraine, the civil wars in Somalia and Yemen and the genocide in Palestine, the world is actually really peaceful, by historic standards. But, the wars that are going on are driven by assholes who feel they should be in control and that some group of others is less deserving of the right to live in peace. Adding a human replicator to the mix would just mean people fighting to get control of that human replicator. If the US Government discovered a human replicator today, you can bet they would be scooped up and be chained inside a warehouse tomorrow churning out 155mm shells for the war in Ukraine. Rights of that person be damned. Better to hide and just let the world keep spinning.
Maybe. I think it's mostly just a matter of getting older and having perspectives change. I'm not going to say the world is perfect by any means, or that there isn't a lot which needs fixing. But, I think that the world is also not all that bad. Certainly not as bad as the folks screaming on Twitter would have you believe. Sure, I'd change a lot of stuff, had I the power. But, I don't and I don't see it as worth it to wring myself out trying to pretend I do. I'd rather spend my time and energy just trying to make a small corner of this world comfortable for my family. If that means I'm uncaring or a terrible person, because I don't seem to care about everyone else, then fine, I'm a terrible person. Good luck saving the world, I'll be over here eating popcorn and watching you slam your head against a wall. My skull just won't take that sort of punishment anymore.
The thing is, "the system" is rigged and we could do a lot better. And I'll certainly vote and maybe argue a bit online, to push it towards my view of "better". At the same time, "the system" could be way, way worse. And this is one of the problems with people who talk about "blowing up the system" or similar revolutionary language, they usually have a very poor understanding of what comes after. People like to pretend that there is some glorious path from tearing down the system to some sort of utopia. Anyone selling you that bullshit is either lying or has never picked up a history book. The French Revolution was followed by the Reign of Terror. The October Revolution was supposed to lead to a Marxist style utopia, instead they got the USSR and Stalin. The Chinese Communist Revolution was again supposed to lead to a people's utopia. Instead, they got the Great Leap Forward into mass famine, followed by the People's Republic of China we all know and love today. Simply put, most revolutions just end up shifting which horrible group of people get to do horrible things to the other group.
This isn't to say that people should try to overthrow really bad governments. In every one of the examples I listed above, what came before really did need to be torn down. But, I think the Douglas Adams quote is quite apt here, "it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it." Unfortunately, the folks who tend to lead revolutions also tend to be exactly the people you don't want in charge. You get ideologues who then seek to purge the "bad group" for whatever definition of "bad group" they have decided to come up with. Usually, said the Venn Diagram of the "bad group" and "people who question the leader's actions" looks a lot like a single circle. It can go the other way, but it can't be premised on any sort of ideological purity, or you just get The Reign of Terror. You need a really special set of people who are willing to tear down the bad system and then walk away from power. That is really, really rare. And I doubt you can really tell who would actually do that and who would descend into paranoia, once they had power, and refuse to let it go.
So all this is to say that yes, I probably have "internalized the system". Because, sure it sucks, it just sucks less than most of the other options.
Once again, I think history is pretty instructive here. If you ever read about the California Gold Rush it wasn't the prospectors who got rich. Sure, some got really lucky, most toiled for decades to just scrabble out a living. Gold speculation in Alaska is actually really hard and down to a lot of luck. Sure, my current living of working for some faceless corporation may not be glamorous, but it provides a comfortable, reliable living. I'd much rather have stability than roll the dice on picking the right plot of land. Also, I'm lazy. Doing gold prospecting for real requires tons of hard work and physical labor. Without the magic ability to just spawn gold, it's not worth currently worth it for me.
I grew up in a time before Twitter. I'm used to longer form discussion boards. While "brevity may be the soul of wit" it's also often a sign that someone hasn't put any thought into what they are writing. The world is a messy place, it's very rare that the reality of a situation can be crammed into 140 characters or less. Also, arguing with people on the internet is my version of "drinking my morning coffee while reading the newspaper". I can wake up, sip mu coffee and pretend the world gives a damn about my opinions. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. But, it's now used up a bunch of electricity getting spewed about the world. And I'm much better caffeinated.