I just finished "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and something doesn't quite make sense to me.
Spoilers ahead.
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Debra decides to take out Julius as part of her plan to take over the Haunted Mansion. Dan tells her he'll do it in exchange for getting a lot of Whuffie.
Dan contacts Jeanine, who whacks Julius for love of Dan, not money. The inference is that, since there was no Whuffie transaction between Dan and Jeanine, it couldn't be traced. This makes sense, and ties into the theme of love and friendship versus the Whuffie economy.
However, there was a Whuffie transaction between Debra and Dan. Wouldn't somebody look at Debra's tranactions (and Dan's too) and see a big transfer "For services rendered" to Dan, and be suspicious?
I had the impression that if you pinged somebody's Whuffie, you wouldn't just get the raw numbers, you could get an itemized list of what that person had done to get that Whuffie. If a person can accumulate Whuffie without anybody knowing _why_ he got it, doesn't that undermine the whole concept that a reputation/esteem-based economy is supposed to keep people honest?
Spoilers ahead.
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Debra decides to take out Julius as part of her plan to take over the Haunted Mansion. Dan tells her he'll do it in exchange for getting a lot of Whuffie.
Dan contacts Jeanine, who whacks Julius for love of Dan, not money. The inference is that, since there was no Whuffie transaction between Dan and Jeanine, it couldn't be traced. This makes sense, and ties into the theme of love and friendship versus the Whuffie economy.
However, there was a Whuffie transaction between Debra and Dan. Wouldn't somebody look at Debra's tranactions (and Dan's too) and see a big transfer "For services rendered" to Dan, and be suspicious?
I had the impression that if you pinged somebody's Whuffie, you wouldn't just get the raw numbers, you could get an itemized list of what that person had done to get that Whuffie. If a person can accumulate Whuffie without anybody knowing _why_ he got it, doesn't that undermine the whole concept that a reputation/esteem-based economy is supposed to keep people honest?
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Re: "Down and Out" question
Mon, February 16, 2004 - 6:33 PM>If a person can accumulate Whuffie without anybody knowing _why_ he got it,
>doesn't that undermine the whole concept that a reputation/esteem-based
>economy is supposed to keep people honest?
The way I understand it, you _always_ get and give whuffie without knowing it. I can't find any textual proof from the novel to back this, but I seem to remember that it happens automatically. And no, that wouldn't undermine the whole concept. The opposite, I think. If it was voluntary it wouldn't really work. You could just horde all your whuffie. I don't know. *shrugs*
