This story is a sequel to Barnyard Barge-Ins
It's essential for a business owner to stay connected with the public. Isolation leads to loss of empathy -- and besides, you never know where the next great idea is going to come from. And now Mr. Rich has custody for the newest. A sort of prespent money which can only be redeemed in a predetermined location -- or, for Barnyard Bargains, up to fifteen of them. The basic concept is so simple!
But few things are ever simple when it comes to innovation. Especially when the consequences of that idea start to pile up.
Along with the crimes.
He really didn't anticipate the crimes.
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Chapters (3)
Added to
Triptych Continuum Rebooted (group)
Filthy Rich and/or Diamond Tiara (folder)
There's no way this can go badly.
oh, that reminds me of a silly character in the story "Changeling Space Program":
a Changeling named "Occupant".
Typo
Should be "complaint"
Typo
And then he invented gift cards... oh I can see the fraud coming from miles away.
You have me hooked.
Your take on Mr. Rich is really compelling. I've only ever read stories with him as a distant, capatalist mogul.
I evidently need to read more of his character.
I wait excitedly for what comes next!
Very difficult to acquire. You have to convince the elephants to part with it. The phrase “Over my dead body” gets thrown around a lot…
I’m looking forward to seeing how damaging the concept of gift certificates turns out to be.
Gift cards. An idea that is honestly a solid one. Yes, it comes with issues but normally those issues are caused by people who were going to try causing problems anyway.
I never before realized how awesome must be to be able to introduce yourself as Mr Rich.
Woah, Celestia and Mr. Rich?!
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Heh, Rainbow Dash and Mr. Rich's views on offices!
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heh
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Ivory tower joke. heh.
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awwww!
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Cost wordplay!
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heheh. Historical Wordplay!
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Ha!
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Cool!
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heh.
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Classic thoughts!
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awesome!
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heh
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HA!
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heh
Good Idea plus Herd Instincts plus All-Too Human Stupidity equals FUBAR. No wonder Dulcinea is a seething cauldron of rage......
And given how your ponies feel about name changes, this raises some concerning questions about the parents' intentions.
I imagine the elephants have strong opinions about that, yes.
This seems perfectly reasonable at the moment. I can only imagine how ponies are going to ruin it. Looking forward to finding out.
The big trick with any form of promisarry note isnt making it unable to copy, because if it can be made, it can be made twice, the trick is making as sure as possibible that there is only one valid version at a time, and thats the one that was paid for the way it was supposed to be paid for.
Think about if you really wanted to make fake copies of Pinkie Pies party invite to Pinkie parties which Pinkie wasnt told about, and why was she standing behind you breathing down your neck?
Or Twilights research into Highland Terrier security.
Signed by Dog.
There Can Be Only One.
Ooh, He's trying so hard! The dramatic irony~!
My bet, ponies are gonna use this like paper money, either that, or the main issue is people asking for refunds, turning Barnyard Bargains-es into basically bank tellers?
Typo:
pegsaus > pegasus
This idea reminds me of Making Money (Terry Pratchett)
However
Voice of Experience
Not all coupons get used
.
Especially if you time limit them. This will be Pure Profit.
I wonder what's going to go wrong? I mean, the gift certificate idea works in the real world, so is it going to be a matter of economics? Pony psychology? Something else?
And this is the second story where listening to his mark got Mr. Rich in trouble....
Teh probleem with a fixed value gift certificate is its just like paper money, except more prople will take less care keeping it in a secure wallet etc?
And Flim Flam employee with a cutimark in forgeries will be able to throw simpler quality items out that pass at a glance, just like paper money?
By the time Twilight came up with a Spell Forge capable of working on the store stuff, even Banks wouldnt pay that much for the legal tender of the crown?
Just go into any corner shop today and look at teh wall of prepay cards for gifts, items, online gaming etc, and think about how they are a sucess. Massive network of fast communications origionating in fast mail transfers and that delay is your losses, dedicated telegraph wires are pretty much uncostable until shared phone lines came out and even then multiple deaprtments shared those dedicated lines.
A quick example. In the late 1990s, I got on the net with dialup at my mums house. It locked up the phone line because the phone company refused to support the SVD Simultaneous Voice And Data modem, because they offered a second dedicated digital phone line by reconnecting the second pair of wires they disconneccted when switching over from the Bell style system, for only the same price of fixed line rental and cost per minute as the origional line. Say $30 a month. they wouldnt give me internet account as theiy claimed the loq line quality wouldnt support it. I went with a third part company that offered small office home office, and tthat worked. They offered a Dedicated SOHO buisness line if you wishe.d For $6000... A Month. The modem I ended up using at the end, full speed, Had a far more powerful CPU than the computer I was happily connecting to the net with, and more annoyingly, couldve run the computer if I could just get it in the accelerator card socket.
Telegraph ended up using what we call Morse Code, which used what we would call much later on Lempel Zipf Huffman equivalent data compression . for a gieven number of readable symbols, the data transmitted was pretty much as compact as it was going to go. Then they sent extra signals to and fro to acknowledge reciept and extra transmissions for double checking in various ways. All these take time, and its very easy to create a self stimulating data feedback loop?
Ohhhhh..
So Thats how the information theory of the Event horizon works.
Um, doc? Got a spare seat? I sort of need to be off planet for the next week.
Keeping counterfeiters from ruining the scheme will be pretty hard without card readers or computers
I find this intresting. In general you seem to keep marks on the morally neutral side, that you are not destined to be a bad pony because of who you where when you got your mark. But considering how impactful marks are in the Trypch Verse, they cannot be fully morally neutral. Filthy Rich's mark pushes him to put profit over people, and Dr Gentle's mark pushes him to heal children. The average ponies with their respective marks would be diffrent from the characters we saw.
Just intresting how marks are almost morally neutral but they are too powerful to be fully such.
The problem with gift certificates is
The recipient knows EXACTLY how much you spent.
My mther used to sell Avon (1960s, 1970s)
The way Avon dealt with this problem was to sell gift assortments. That is, they'd send a list of eligible products & the recipient would pick the one they wanted & wouldn't know how much it cost.
Its the little touches that makes it.
In Canterlot.
Someone in Canterlot, say the Flim Flam borothers are, helping Canterlot Barnyard Bargins brance get ahead in production, or even helping the company in getting a branch there by selling certificates that can be claimed in any other branch, existing or otherwise?
Something complex to make thats simple to use would be a greatly improved version of the Z Lok? system used in mid 80s games? It was a simple plastic lens grid that obscured certain pixels and bent the light from other pixels to form new character shapes or colour patterns and you had to enter that on the keyboard to unlock the game. At the time I was thinking if it was possible to have spectacles to do the same, then another techniocal article went on about iris recogniton and retinal imaging, and to me it was a pity you couldnt take that image and combine it with the spectacles to make a decoder that would only decode for that eye? For places where you didnt have computers or power?
But these only have a chance to work if theres been a chance to create the ideas to think of them, and someone will always be trying to make a second set of spectacles and contact lenses, which is even mroe difficult due to the extreme sensitivity of the light passing through anything else. you dont want your optilok spectacles being made when you have watering eyes from hayfever etc.
And then theres the Polish optilok, where the two spectacles see differet things, but the mind between sees something else, and if it doesnt match the other parts, well, somethings wrong?
I prefer the Stainless Steel Rat method of security. His handheld duplicator created a perfect copy of the paper money, but he was caught out by the bank because it was being too smart. the security numbers on the notes were generated by an algorithm that included the year. And his forged notes had Next years date encoded in them.
These notes havent been issued yet.
Pony Resources Is Still Waiting For Ms. Termi Conditions To Apply
heh
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It's also a series of increasingly-concerning questions. Such as 'But do carefully-timed indoor sand squelches fit better with brass or woodwinds?'
Ha!
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the ocean is so changeable as to have Discord grant it a touch of respect...
WOW!
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With salt water, of course. She's going for the authentic experience. And few things are more authentic than drowning.
heehe. ah.
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Because that way, all of the fallout was his.
(It wasn't.)
And it would be funny for just as long as it wasn't happening to them.
Dramatic irony!
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ruminated (and the few cattle employees tended to make that part private, as some of it got a little gross)
heh
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(If he had...)
oooh
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In fact, when examining the range of ethereal creations permitted by strategic touches of magic, they were going to be Extremely Paper.
Fun phrasing!
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two foreign nations used 'Bucks' in conjunction with their own currency, and he'd taken a long moment to think about all of the word's many local use cases before giving up forever
heh. Really leaning on that "It's gonna basically be the creation of paper money" idea!
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The snort was soft, sharp and, because a female had made it, technically qualified as 'ladylike'.
Ha!
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For her own part, Rarity paused, and then did something which relatively few ponies believed she was capable of: let others talk.
heh
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Absolutely nothing felt safe to say and when it came to future discussions with adolescents, a sudden internal review of Diamond's upcoming birthdate now had her father rather worried.
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Mr. Rich briefly considered that she was getting in some good practice for the dating life.
META! Oh, wait, you mean Unnamed Female, not Diamond.
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The gift certificate, not quite right in any way, had been purchased at Barnyard Bargains.
In Canterlot.
Oh shit.
Hey, I called it!
Burma? As in Burma Shave ads? Now there's a call back to ancient times...
Very intrigued already through this chapter! Especially since the idea of a gift certificate seems to work on paper...though it wouldn't be a story with (eventual) screaming if this doesn't backfire somehow. (Maybe if Mr. Rich spent more time working out the details before jumping right in and giving one to this pony...)
Hmm. Even with the complications pointed out, they're actively working on trying to make it work (and figure out the weak points)...still waiting for the other horseshoe to drop on this one. Very curious about how this will all play out.
And I must say, I love your characterization of Filthy Rich, with a focus on supporting the company because of how many employees count on him, and being willing to take blame for decisions he makes.
So some of the minor issue (logistics of making the things, customers trying to find loopholes in use) are already coming to light. And oh boy, way to end the chapter on a major issue being revealed. If I'm understanding correctly, stores besides the Ponyville one shouldn't be selling their own certificates yet...which would be just one miscommunication problem. Even if the sales are valid and meant to be happening...with each store keeping their own separate ledgers, this is going to cause a lot of problems, isn't it? The question is just how many other certificates have been sold in other locations...