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Rescource Scarcity

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ZeConster

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« Reply #15 on: <12-11-13/2021:20> »
even the drek in a fast food burger is real food
I guess you're a glass-half-full kind of person. :)

Imveros

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« Reply #16 on: <12-11-13/2213:38> »
In SR terms, even the drek in a fast food burger is real food, compared to what everyone else is eating.  It has 3 vegetable products, and real meat!  Our version of fast food is a luxury for the majority of the sixth world.

I dont know about you but The Beast™—triple soyburger with processed cheese-flavored food and fried egg substitute makes my mouth water, and i cant even think about The Beast Deluxe™—The Beast™, now with three strips of bacon substitute! without my stomach grumbling
No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

"normal speech" thought "Matrix"   whisper "Subvocal" "Foreign Language"

ImaginalDisc

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« Reply #17 on: <12-16-13/0033:49> »

I dont know about you but The Beast™—triple soyburger with processed cheese-flavored food and fried egg substitute makes my mouth water, and i cant even think about The Beast Deluxe™—The Beast™, now with three strips of bacon substitute! without my stomach grumbling


baronspam

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« Reply #18 on: <12-16-13/0101:53> »
Meat would be expensive.  Low lifestyle you eat meat on your birthday.  Middle life style you get a steak on payday(and some other luxuries, like real coffee on Sunday morning and some fresh produce now and then).  High life style or better you get fresh, real food frequently.

Paper?  Not commonly used for writing, but probably not expensive.  They likely don't make it out of timber any more, but I am sure there is an engineered hemp that grows in hydroponics bins like crazy.  You can make textiles out of it as well.

Whiskey?  Most likely a huge price range.  Low end corn whiskey is almost an industrial byproduct.  At the upper end  its artisan barley malts aged in charred oak barrels made from wood grown on a special preserve in North Carolina.  Price goes from 5 nuyen per bottle to 500+. 


Mithlas

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« Reply #19 on: <12-20-13/1506:29> »
1) Meat
Meat is something that has traditionally been available only on rare occasions for the non-super-wealthy. Society goes through cycles between what we want and what we can sustain, and in the 80s we thought that was going to collapse. It was actually just a down-slope that we're still on and probably won't come off until a new balance is achieved. In the Shadowrunverse, it's become something that should be available on a monthly basis easily, but the companies that can aren't putting enough effort to fill demand. Raising chickens and rabbits indoors was considered impossible two hundred years ago but can be done in a modest-sized flat now. Now that's not saying that everybody's eating steak every night, but you could get an expensive, mostly-real meal with steak every month if you wanted to save up through that month and splurge on your food expenses. Or you could buy organic food every meal and have real meat once every couple of weeks and steak twice or so every year.

2) Paper
Paper hasn't been the crude wood construct people learn about in school for years, as technology improves we're only finding new ways to get more paper out of less (and different) materials. As J. Michael Straczynski wrote in Babylon 5, "Every time someone says we're becoming a paperless society, I get ten more forms to fill out." Despite promises of removing hardware and hard copies, we're just too attached to the physical aspects and objects and I don't think paper is ever going to be ousted. Successfully doing away with that is more of a utopian than dystopian idea in my opinion.
Paper is just too important, cheap and flexible a material in too many products to simply vanish just because people don't write as much anymore.
ImaginalDisc already went over everything else I was going to say.

3) Alcohol from traditional sources (beer made with barley, whiskey made with rye, etc.) rather than soy substitutes
Alcohol is not very difficult to manufacture, hence why America had such difficulties in its poorly planned and executed "Prohibition Era". Alcohol is part of almost every human culture on earth and many are selective about the source matter (rice, hops, wheat, etc). Orson Welles and Aldous Huxley both predicted plausible societies that both still relied on alcohol to help control the populace. I think that it may be difficult for everybody to be selective about it, but I doubt that any general kind is going to be out of any individual's reach, particularly after the globalization we've already achieved and will never go back from.

Companero

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« Reply #20 on: <01-24-14/1002:06> »
You could go the other way with paper and say that it's become a cheap all purpose printed material like in a couple of cyberpunk novels like Virtual Light and Heavy Weather. Paper frame bikes, paper refugee clothing, paper frame housing...  it's cheap, can be made fairly durable with the right treatment, strong, and easy to recycle! (this post brought to you by the Paper Advertising Committee, apparently...)
http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/ RPG blog! - cyberpunk gaming blog!

ImaginalDisc

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« Reply #21 on: <01-24-14/1521:59> »
The comedic dystopian novel "Hard Sell" had almost everyone wearing paper clothes.

The main character becomes so broke he has to go naked as he can't afford a day's clothes out of a vending machine.