How To Exchange Money With Your Alternate Selves

Do you have more money than you need? Perhaps you've been the victim of some particularly good luck. Perhaps you spend all your time working, and don't have time to spend the money. Or maybe you're dead and don't really need any of it anymore.

You might think you should give this money to friends, family, or charity... but perhaps you should consider giving it to a less fortunate version of yourself instead. How is this possible, you ask? Well, it is slightly complicated but definitely within the capabilities of current technology. Let's walk through an example. Say you've just inherited a great deal of money from your rich uncle, who flipped a coin to decide whether you or your cousin would get it. As you may know, the marginal value of wealth decreases the more you have. Do you really need $6 million? Isn't $3 million enough? It is, and this is why you may be inclined to give some of that money to the alternate you - the one who lives in the universe where your cousin won the money.

Sending money between universes is tricky. Since they are closed systems, they are subject to rules about conservation of energy and all that. So for the transfer to work, you need to find someone in the other universe who wants to send an equal amount of money in the other direction. This is often difficult, but luckily not too hard in this case: your alternate cousin has the same problem as you (too much money)! Now you just need to negotiate a deal with your alternate cousin, who is unfortunately currently in an alternate universe. Well, that's inconvenient.

The trick here is bring in an intermediary, a third party to communicate with both of you. A good choice is your past self - specifically your past self from before the coin flip. Your past self has the ability to send messages to both your present and the alternate present. Additionally, your cousin may wish to have his or her own past self represent them. All that's left at this point is to negotiate the exact terms. (Since you both know it's a 50/50 shot, this should be pretty simple, I hope.)

However, there are a couple more complicated cases worth investigating. First, what if you don't know the likelihood of various presents? Maybe you are living in a world where a certain party won some parliamentary elections, and you just know they're going to cause massive devaluation of your currency. So you want to send the money to your alternate self who is living under a different government, because it will literally be worth more to that you. Well, you immediately run into a problem, because you don't know the ratio of presents with the crappy government to presents with the good government. And to extrapolate, your negotiations with your business partner in the alternate situation are going to be based on guesses. If the pair of you end up overestimating the prevalence of the bad government, then you will end up sending out less money than you predicted, and receiving more. Meanwhile your counterpart will be losing money! So naturally, all parties involved have incentives to exaggerate their own situation's ubiquity. Often, if you (well, your past self) is the one proposing the deal, your counterpart will be suspicious that you have some inside knowledge of the ratio. There's not much you can do about this. You'll basically have to pay a premium proportional to your potential ability to have that knowledge. Think of it as an interuniversal tariff.

There's one other situation worth discussing, and that is death. Wouldn't it be useful to be able to will your money to your alternate selves? Well, there is one problem with this, and it is also related to the universe ratios. But instead of being an issue of uncertainty, it's an issue of being able to influence the outcome. Making a deal like this, where you send your money from presents where you are dead to presents where you're alive, requires someone else to be receieving money in the presents in which you're dead. This makes them want to increase the prevalence of universes which kind of suck from your perspective, due to your deceased status. Let's just say this is not a good incentive to give somebody.

I hope this quick guide gives you a basic idea of how you can organize your finances across multiple presents. And I also hope that you can think of some other interesting events you could transfer money over. The sky is really the limit here. You could even base it one something silly like the outcome of a horse race. (Yeah, I know. Good luck finding someone will take the other end of that deal!)

Have fun.

No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood

I finally watched these two movies in the past two weeks.

No Country For Old Men surprised me by being an excellent movie. I had read somewhere that it was about a drug deal or something, and took place out in the country or something, and I didn't think I would like it that much.

In fact, the movie is about this this go-it-alone Texan who finds $2 million versus a genuinely scary sociopath who's trying to track him down. It's gripping, goes by quickly, and is fairly amusing in parts. One recurring feature I particularly enjoyed was how the characters kept pulling out or acquiring these interesting props, for example a set of tent poles. You keep thinking "what's he going to do with that?"

I can only recommend this movie.
Cost*: 2/5
Payoff: 5/5

There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, was a bit of a letdown. I was really looking forward to more Daniel Day-Lewis, who was awesome in Gangs of New York, but the point of this movie was somewhat lost on me. The plot in the first half was pretty cool (mesmerizing, in fact) but it didn't really go anywhere worth going. In addition, the soundtrack was downright distracting at times (it was very dissonant). Still, it has interesting subject matter (turn of the century oil prospecting and screwing over of the people who live there) and Daniel Day-Lewis, so it's not all bad. Probably worth watching if the trailer looked cool to you. I'm glad I saw it.

Cost: 4/5
Payoff: 4/5



* I was thinking it would be interesting to rate movies not only based on how "good" they are, but on how much time and effort and sanity you have to spend watching them. The ideal 1 on this scale is "completely engrossing and leaves you feeling refreshed" while a 5 means "requires endurance and leaves you feeling exhausted".

Zombies

So, I was going to have my first blog post explain the meaning of life, but a mere day after I registered this blog, it was marked as spam. This is because it had no posts. The reason it had no posts is because the meaning of life takes a long time to explain.

So instead, I'm going to change tactics here and instead have my first post be completely pointless. Together with the above story I think that makes some sort of symbolism, possibly related to life. Or... death. Yes, today on the television I heard Hillary Clinton give a rather disturbing answer to a debate question about using former presidents as U.S. emissaries:

"...When they're all together, representing our country, that sends a strong message. And I would look for a way to use all our former presidents..." (transcript).

I just want to say that I think that would be scary but also kind of cool.