Mezametara Saikyou Soubi to Uchuusenmochi Datta node, Ikkodate Mezashite Youhei toshite Jiyuu ni Ikitai - Vol. 3 Ch. 11.2

[tonie]

@Lexical I dont say that it changes his "purchasing power" or that it changes the value of enel.
What I say is that he compares how much a bottle of water costs in that station and how much it costs on earth.
If the price of water changes on the station, the water price that he remembers from earth didn't change.
He compares it like this: I go to USA and compare how much bottle of water costs in USA compared to Japan.
I get n$=100 yen.
Then I move to Sudan and I use that the n$ = 100 yen, but reality turns different.
He assumes it doesn't change and the price of water stays the same because he doesn't compare it once again.
Also, no supply fluctuations? With so many pirates out there? I bet that after the large pirate suppression the prices lowered quite a bit.
You can't ignore supply costs for a simple reason.
There's a reason why a bottle of water costs 1$ in super market and in your local neighborhood small shop it costs 1.5$. that's 50% change in value just because supermarket buying in bulk lowers supply cost while small shop can't even store that many water bottles so they can't hope to buy like that.
Pirates increase the shipment cost due to cost of mercenaries protecting it. The more pirates the more mercenaries needed, the more it cost to deliver goods and it costs higher.
The problem.with this all is that author just ignores this fact.
This is what annoys us. If you still choose to ignore it you're just a troll. 🤪

 

[Lexical]

@tonie, err I’m the one trying to say that it’s the purchasing power that changes while the exchange rate can stay stable.

I apologise if you think i’m trying to troll. As you may have noticed by now, I kind of suck at trying to explain things. Orz.


If you don’t mind one last attempt...
Also I’m also caught up to the webnovel translation so I’m cheating a bit with foreknowledge

Taking your supermarket analogy , say the two stores accepted euro, dollars, and gbp. It would take the equivalent amount of each currency to buy the water at the first store €0.83, $1, ¥104, and £0.69 and at the small shop €1.24, $1.50, ¥156 and £1.12. If we take, $ and ¥ to be Enel and ¥ the same principal would apply which goes back to the post questioning “ A million enel is a hundred million yen right?” And I say “Yup checks out!”

Even though there is a supply and demand fluctuation at the small shop causing an increase in the cost of the goods the basic ratio between currency pairs remains steady. . If he arrived at the small shop first and said hey! $ 1.50 = ¥ 100 and set that pricing as the initial valuation, if he then travels to the supermarket he’d find water to be at 1$ = ¥66

To my understanding, This is similar to how all the currencies transitioned from the gold standard ( 1 money = 1 gold ) to fiat currency. First you start with something you have, 1 money = 1 gold (or in MC’s case food and drink), and then you exchange the gold value to a fiat value ( where value is not dependent on its weight in gold but rather the understanding of how much that unit of money should be worth[ in relation to the average cost of everything] by the nation or the MC -a-nation-of-1)


in a way paper money functions in the same way.
We consider a bank note of £10 to be worth that amount because the MC/Gov says “it shall be so” (-fiat), despite having no further physical proof on that scrap of paper/polymer besides the £10 printed on it.

 

[tonie]

@Lexical well I understand what you mean, but it's just too much of simplification of economy to just say "it works so it's fine". He doesn't re-evaluate it basing on water or anything else ever again so he just assumes it's everywhere the same thus oversimplyfying. In the first place the isekai stories are always lazy in thinking: 1 bronze coin = 100 yen. 100 bronze coins = 10 silver coins = 1 gold coin = 10 000.
Some even add large and small coins in between to lift it up higher and it's all because otherwise they'd have to go into spice and wolf route and that would change the whole point of a story so my reason for this all is to say the author the:

Spoiler

They just want an easy story with simple stuff for simple people otherwise it will be too difficult for their brains and quit reading 🤣
So since if he can't do any good job at it anyway, why does he still try slip the yen thing over and over?
It's just for his japanese people to be able to relate into the story better so it sells better but it's just wrong and lazy.

And sorry about that purchasing power. English isn't my primary language so I didn't understand that too well and probably said it wrong before.

Also 50% change in value is a HUGE difference, just look at the price of gold between now and december 2019 xD
Sell all your gold and don't buy it now! It will only go down from now on!

Spoiler

2021: Third world war begins. The price of gold oil and water jumps by 300% xDDD

As well I don't get why my previous comment was "moderated". Is it because I said "You are a troll"? I didn't mean it as offensive thing. In the first place trolls are fine, they just make you realize to not go too heated in debates over the internet like a holy crusaders with keyboard in your hands because that's just silly.

 

[Novak_Vai]

The memory loss is technically half truth since he has no idea how he got into this predicament in the first place, his so called "hyper drive accident" might have been real.

 

[Lexical]

@tonie Sorry for getting you into trouble!

Oddly enough, I’m also not a fan of the platinum-gold-silver-copper fantasy-money systems even though I’ve been fine with the Enels. Maybe it’s because the MC is well on the way to becoming filthy rich causing some extravagant price tags to pop-up later on?

Eh, If I don’t encounter you again on one of the forums, have a (early) Merry Christmas and wishing you a happier 2021 that’s much better than 2020! -Cheers

 

[Gtcvenkai]

I don't really get why people are so hung up about the Enels to Yen comparison. It's really there to demonstrate how out of touch Hiro's sense of money is in comparison to your average Joe in this society. Hiro's point of reference is the cost of a simple meal and simple lodging when he compares the buying power of Enels to the Yen. Basically we have 2 average Joe views, we have Mimi, who was a normal teenage girl in universe, who is obviously not used to the amount of money being thrown around for ships, rewards, etc, and Hiro's, being a normal salaryman from our universe. Mimi shows the reaction of how a normal person would react to the amount of money being thrown around, and Hiro translates it for JP readers with his simple comparison. It is not meant to say the absolute buying power of the Yen converted to Enels. It is simply a frame of reference to give context to the story and topic.

 

[InsaneAwesomeTony]

Thanks for the chapter 😆👍🏼

 

[tonie]

@Lexical no worries; merry christmas to you too
Let's hope that 2021 will be better.

Spoiler

Actual 2021, January 3rd: Aliens invade. Fuck 🤣

 

[MelonReads]

Elf girl best girl
The smart, responsible, and brutally honest ones get me weak

 

[toppoyiyo]

Just here to make it 69 comments

 

[Kynnath]

I'm bothered by the conversion to yen as well, not only because of how often he does it, but because the fundamental issue is not price fluctuation but that the relative prices of things would make the approximation useless. You could maybe make an approximation based off of salaries, like "middle class is this much, rich is this much" and so on, but then he moves one system over and all the prices jump, so that breaks too. But even in a single system, the problem is that for example, things that are commonplace for us are rare there, and things that are commonplace there are rare for us. Like weaponry, he can cite the price in enel for weaponry and convert to yen, but good luck finding an anti-capital ship missile in Japan for even ten times that much yen. Not to mention the spaceships themselves. I'd sure be happy to be able to buy one.

Since the things that matter aren't even available for sale, trying to relate the price of everyday living to the price of spaceship maintenance is silly. He could make one of two points: either spaceships are super cheap (relatively, say about as expensive as cars), or ships are super expensive relative to everyday necesitties. Or even that living in orbit is super expensive compared to living on the ground, but considering you have slums in orbital habitats that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems the opposite actually, that living on the ground is far more expensive than living in orbit. And it seems more like ships are about as expensive as cars. They're relatively expensive, but having and maintaining one doesn't mean food expenses are a rounding error compared to ship equipment.

 

[Latarus]

my guy trying to make sense of basic manga economics

gl homie

 

[Silwith]

@Kynnath Well, first, you are right obviously, this conversion doesnt make sense, since the whole economy works so differently. but on the other side it makes it just easier for the reader to understand the disparity, so...

(Slight Spoiler? But not really, still do it in Spoiler)

Spoiler

Looking at the WN, yes, living on a Planet is extremly more expensive (aside from the fact that you need a high citizen class to be even allowed to buy property on a planet), Ships are maybe somewhat like cars, but only if cars only started at Supercar level... so, a normal colonist on one of the station could never dream of buying one, even a cheap one, aside from Mercenaries ships (and captured ones most pirates use) seem to be overwhelmingly owned by corporations and only nobles are really depicted as having personal ones. Because of the quality of the stuff Hiro buys it seems like "not a rounding error", but for normal mercenaries it is just that (and even for him a single of his torpedos still costs overwhelmingly more then two luxury dresses for the girls later )

 

[valconius]

Reminder that in EVE Online, 1 ISK = such an unfathomable amount of money to a planetary inhabitant that you might as well be high nobility, and ship kit typically starts at 40,000 ISK all the way up to 2,000,000,000 ISK per piece of equipment. In this world, it's reversed!

Also space elf best girl. But why are there space elves?

 

[Pallington]

@valconius oh glorious voice of reason! prayse be the founders!

oops wrong game

 

[kiwiflyjr]

First isekai I've seen mention going to a hospital. Now all we need is one where the mc kills the starter town because of their foreign bacteria that they brought with them

 

[AlmondMagnum]

Shouldn't he consider the possibility that he is, in fact, brain damaged? That his life on Earth was an hallucination and that he's really lost his memory?

 

[dementati]

I think his enel to yen comparison works perfectly fine, at least as an approximation. Both yen and enel are stable currencies, since they are adopted and maintained by large political bodies (Japan, and the Empire/Federation respectively), that means that there exists a fairly stable exchange rate between them, even if we don't know exactly what it is. He can make simple approximations based on common goods that he's familiar with and arrive at reference frame that's good enough for every day use. It doesn't mean a 10 million enel space ship would cost a billion yen in our world, because that is a good that's not widely available in our world, but for goods that are widely available in both, the price correlation will be decently stable. If trade between the worlds started happening, it'd normalize eventually. As for price differences between stations, yeah, pirate threats and wars etc. do create supply fluctuations, but those fluctuations also create the opportunity for merchants to make money from arbitrage trading, which has a normalizing effect on those fluctuations, so all fluctuations will stabilize over time. This happens in real life as well, that doesn't mean it's impossible to estimate exchange rates between currencies. Yeah, the accuracy of the estimate is debatable, but it's not COMPLETE NONSENSE like some people here seem to think.