The Exchange Bar

[nancylebov]

A new bar in New York has prices that go up for the more popular items and down for the less popular items.

The news reports didn't make it clear whether the prices are set when you order or when you pay, and, of course, it's impossible to tell yet whether people will want to patronize it.

It seems like a win for food neophiles and people with odd tastes.

The advantages to the bar are novelty so it's gotten a little free publicity and smoothing out demand so that less popular items don't build up in inventory or go bad. The latter could be handled by offering specials, but this is smoother.

I don't know whether popular items will become enough more expensive than the market price to drive people away.

NonOBSF: [1] Brunner's Born Under Mars-- the Bears (a happy-go-lucky human culture set in contrast to the rule-oriented Centaurs) had restaurants where people rolled double or nothing for their bills. I think that would be popular, but I doubt that it would be legal in most? all? parts of the US.

[1] OBSF is from the glory days of rec.arts.sf.written, an unmoderated newsgroup which worked pretty well anyway. However, there was a constant temptation to write about less important things than written sf [2], so there came to be a custom of appending a little something about sf at the end of a post.

This is no longer obligatory in a privately owned, multi-topic lj, but my mind defaults to pulling up associations with sf, and I'm fond of the custom.

Speaking as a person with mild ADD and an associational mind, I think it would be a good thing if people added stuff from the lens through which they view the world at the end of their posts.

[2] SF came to mean both science fiction and fantasy. This was to disambiguate it from the commercial category "science fiction", which includes both science fiction and fantasy. As far as I can tell, the real emotional boundary line isn't between science fiction and fantasy (a lot of science fiction is just making stuff up, with a hint of scienceness for flavor, but between hard science fiction [3] and the range from fantasy to science fiction which has little or no accurate science.

[3] Hard science fiction, like almost everything else [4], has a disputed definition, but I think "science fiction whose story is dependent on a high proportion of science which was accepted as accurate at the time it was written" is good enough.

[4] Rec.arts.sf.written came up with a definition of milsf which makes sense to me: science fiction about people in a chain of command. This explains why I like the Miles books while disliking most milsf-- Miles isn't really in a chain of command.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Well, if the prices go up enough to drive people away then they'll come back down again - the invisible hand at work!

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

The hi-lo Jamaican Eating House in Oxford used to add gambling to the dining experience: there were no prices on the menu, and they reputedly charged you according to how much they liked you: "from a penny to a thousand pounds" was written on their sign. I have no idea how the legality of this worked out, nor how it affected their sales. It seems pleasingly anti-capitalist, though: the sort of thing Mauss might have written about.

The bar could be called "the visible hand." Or maybe that could be a cocktail.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it means much to say that the real emotional boundary line isn't between science fiction and fantasy (a lot of science fiction is just making stuff up, with a hint of scienceness for flavor, but between hard science fiction and the range from fantasy to science fiction which has little or no accurate science. Are you saying that there is one category of "hard science fiction" and another category of "all other fantastic fiction"? Because I'm willing to accept the former, but not the latter; "not making sufficiently rigorous use of actual scientific concepts" is not a meaningful characteristic. (Compare traditional zoological taxonomy, which contrasted the one subphylum "vertebrates" with the garbage category "invertebrates," comprising not only a couple of dozen entirely distinct phyla with different body plans, but even a couple subphyla of Chordata, the phylum to which all vertebrates belong.)

If you just want to say that hard science fiction has a special appeal, I'll grant that. But it's equally true, for example, that alternate history has a special appeal, or mythic fantasy, or locked room murder mysteries; each of these is an identifiable literary form. And I think each of them has an identifiable emotional boundary line.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think of milsf as stories in which the weapons always work, and violence is always right.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

So "military science fiction" for you doesn't include the early Vorkosigan novels, or the Kylara Vatta novels? I tend to think of those as my primary reference points for the subgenre.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

No, I think of those as space opera--the focus on character and culture, though there is a strong military component.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I think I mistrust literary categories that carry a subtext of "every work in this category is bad." Your initial characterization sounds as if it might have such a subtext. Or am I misunderstanding your intent?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

But I didn't want to imply "bad." Just different types of stories.

Everyone has their own subsets that work in their heads. For me, military sf is about military action--the enemy is worth shooting down, the weapons always work, though you might find scummy officers the basic structure of the military isn't under question. I think of it as akin to playing computer games in which the fun and relaxation is in guilt free mowing down of enemies. I've read any enjoyed many--though as I get older I like a bit more character and humor.

Space opera, in my mind, is a bigger category, about different things, though there can be (usually is) a large military component.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Not so much that it's bad abstractly as that I'm so likely to be bored by it that I just don't bother looking at it. I'd make an exception if I got recommendations which looked promising enough.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I don't like arbitrary pigeonholes. crankyinfrance, maybe from her studies in criticism, told me of the use of "sf" to stand for "speculative fiction". While I dislike the ambiguity, I like the concept: it covers all the stuff.

[redbird]

That bar seems possibly appealing, though I tend not to want to spend time in most places that define themselves primarily as bars (as distinct from restaurants or concert venues that also sell alcoholic drinks).

I like your concept of "hard sf," but I think it rules out an awful lot of what is generally counted as "hard science fiction": anything written in the last hundred years that involves FTL travel doesn't qualify. Most stories with FTL depend on it to work, moreso than they depend on, say, their biology. Neither do Asimov's robot stories (I think it was Dave Langford who pointed that a positronic robot, as described, would have to shut itself down as soon as a human being came near, to avoid violating the first law by causing radiation sickness).

Another odd thought: what about continuing series that depend on science that was thought valid when the first story appeared, but no longer does? Do they get grandfathered in?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

a high proportion of science-- I phrased it that way to allow room for FTL and time travel. I wouldn't count Asimov's robot stories as generally hard sf-- IIRC, there's little or no science in them except for the robot on Mercury.

I'd grandfather in series where the real world science changed in the middle. Offhand, I can't think of any series meeting that spec.

[henrytroup.livejournal.com]

Heinlein often alludes to rolling dice for the tab. I'm sure I heard a reference in a folk song a week or two ago, as well. Was this a historical practice in the US once?

Poul Anderson wrote a story about a culture where many things were done by gambling, including your monthly salary and the equivalent of the stock exchange.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Jorge Luis Borges' Lottery of Babylon (IMHO one of his top half dozen stories) carries this social gambling concept to an interesting conclusion.

Gambling for the tab has been popular among seafarers for at least a few centuries. Rediker thinks binge drinking among mariners on return to shore is related to paying social debts accrued aboard. Gambling might be a neat way of canceling such debts without incurring new ones: leftover social credit is exchanged with the principle of chance, the result is social cohesion with reduced complexity/interpersonal history, a condition that could be termed camaraderie.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it's common, but there's a local bar-restaurant where ordering a meal or drink means you get one spin of a vertical gameshow-style wheel, and if the pointer lands on "Free", your meal or drink is free (other results on the wheel have no effect).

[captain-button.livejournal.com]

I recall that this was common in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" but don't particularly recall it elsewhere in Heinlein.

On the categorizing SF front I'm going to be a grouch and say that such stuff usually ends up being just elaborate codes for "stuff I like that they should publishing more of" vs. "Stuff I don't like which they should stop publishing". With a big side of variable constants like the "which was accepted as accurate at the time it was written" clause which only applies to stuff you like and not to stuff you don't.

I'll leave out my rant on the good/bad division is often based on stuff external to the story like the author's alleged personality defects or alleged politics. Or did I just put it in anyway? Oops.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

As it happens, I like both hard sf and the kind where the author is obviously making it all up. I wish there was more hard sf, but I don't want the squodgey soft stuff to go away.

Van Vogt/Alastair Reynolds and Hal Clement/Greg Egan write very different sorts of sf.

I don't see how you can talk about science in sf without allowing for what was known at the time it was written. This isn't an arbitrary variable-- science fiction authors aren't clairvoyant.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

This immediately calls for a derivatives market: I want to buy call options on the things I plan to drink for the rest of the night.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Wow. At some point I said that someone should open a Free Trade Coffee Shop somewhere near the University of Chicago, with a pricing scheme somewhat like that bar. But I was joking.