Comment:

This is part where you say "Tailsteak, how much is a credit? Is it about a buck?". And the answer to that is... complicated.

You see, while the Canadian Consumer Credit is the primary unit of currency that Lee and Zoa and most people use in this setting, it hasn't entirely replaced the dollar - it's a secondary currency that exists alongside it. The dollar, like most official currencies, is fiat money produced and managed by a nation. The cred, on other hand, is tied to over a thousand consumer price indicators, with its value in dollars being evaluated and adjusted automatically once per second. As of this moment in the comic, it's worth about twenty Canadian dollars.

At the time it was introduced, the phrase people used to describe it was "a currency based on the Life standard". The cred is designed to be inflation-proof... so yes, its value in dollars does tend to rise over time... but the way in which creds are used is regulated. Buying a cred and holding onto it is not exactly a sound investment.

Just so you get a sense of scale... Lee's basic income (which is also evaluated and adjusted once per second) is about three hundred creds per day, which they receive at a rate of about 0.0035 creds per second. Roughly a quarter of that is earmarked for investments and insurance policies, and another quarter or so goes to rent. Of the remaining 0.00175cps, about 0.0005cps goes to various continuing services, such as the media aggregator from which Lee streams their Martian cartoons. Everything else goes to Lee's debit account, where it accumulates... and where it gets taxed at a rate of about 0.001% per second, leaving Lee with about 125 creds of regenerating spending money at any given moment.

The buying power of those creds is hard to measure directly, because different things cost different amounts depending on who's buying them - which you'll see later on. If Lee wanted, say, a full-sized candy bar (which would be near-instantly delivered via a chute in the kitchen and carried over to them by a butlerbot), it'd cost them about 1.0134 creds.

So yeah, assume a cred is about a buck.

Transcript:

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0017 - 2167/07/05/18:11 - Lee Caldavera's apartment, living room
Zoa: Y'know what? No.
LC: Excuse me?
Zoa: You wanted me to simulate a conversation with a real person, here's where a person with personhood and a spine would express an opinion. No, I do not want to watch this show with you. Convince me otherwise.
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LC: See, this is what I was afraid of. Conversations like this always turn hostile. Why do you have to attack me like this?
Zoa: I'm not attacking you, Lee, I'm attacking Gu Gu JaxxonFive. If I were out there suckin' dick, I'd make an average of a sixty credits a day. Convince me that watching this show will be worth ninety credits to me.
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LC: You only make sixty credits a day?
Zoa: Average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes nothing.
LC: Mm. Well, I guess you don't need to eat food, that must be really nice.
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Zoa: Are you kidding? What I wouldn't give to be able to eat! To just pick things up off the ground or out of the trash and metabolize them into energy and spare parts? You bio-organisms have it so good!
LC: Zoa, I think you and I have very different definitions of "so good".
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