The dollar can be used once a day. It has to be a dollar’s worth of a product, service or use of a product. For example, A dollar’s worth of a $100 TV would be the life of the TV divided by 100. You would get to enjoy the TV for that amount of time. The product or service is instant and doesn’t require any preparation. It just appears and disappears. Or you could have a TV permanently that is worth one dollar.
I get the idea, but how do you determine the X amount of minutes?
If a TV lasts 15000 hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), and the TV costs $1000, and I choose to pay $1, I’ll be able to have 15 hours of use for a dollar. If that’s the case, I’d probably aim to pay for the TV to last a year with my typical use-case since by that time newer TV models will take their place and I could either get a discount for the same TV the following year, or get an upgrade for roughly the same price.
Or is it irrespective of how much I use it and it takes average duration of ownership with typical use into account, like if a TV model lasts 10 years on average, and I paid 1/1000 of its price I’ll get 3.65 days of use regardless of how many hours it was on or not? In that case, I’d probably spend a fraction of a dollar to buy a TV for the duration of the movie I’m going to watch every time.
About the gold, it will easily last quadrillions of years so it would mean I could borrow that gold bar for a few billions of years, license the use for the same amount of money (since it’s virtually infinite), and basically have unlimited amounts of money.
For the TV it is the second scenario you explained. It’s like you are renting it based on its overall price. For the gold, it is not yours, you can have any amount for a price negotiated by the seller. Then, it disappears OR you have one dollar’s worth of gold. Essentially the gold would be useless to rent so save up money each day and then buy the gold to keep. You are basically never really buying anything of value just renting it for whatever the seller decides is a fair amount of time worth a dollar. To illustrate, Rent a center could charge you to use a TV by the day, week, month and you make payments until you own it. The difference here is you don’t rent to own, but the calculations are the same. If they charge 100 per month to rent something you have one 1/100th of that month. But the dollar is mysterious so you could theoretically ask the magic dollar to just have the TV or gold appear for whatever is a fair amount of time to use it for. You can do the calculations or just see what the dollar calculates is fair. But if you want to keep the gold, it is 1 dollar of gold. And if you want to keep a TV, it is however big a one dollar TV could be. It’s magic, it defies normal conventions. You could ask to have one dollar’s worth of a gourmet meal if you want and it appears.
OK, so if I borrowed $1000 worth of gold with one magic dollar, how long would I have access to this gold for? How do I calculate it for items that don’t die?
If I pay a gourmet meal with one dollar, does that mean I can eat it without gaining weight because these calories will disappear after I eat it? Because honestly that would make cheat days consequence free.
For gold that practically lasts forever, you use how much longer you have in your lifespan, by average. Like how much longer could someone live to.
The gourmet meal would be the meal divided into a part equal to one dollar. Calories won’t disappear. I just realized I forgot how to do math so I am looking up how to convert it, lol.
That’s cool. So assuming I have 50 years left to live (for easy math) the $1000 worth of gold with one magic dollar would mean that I will get to keep it for 18 days and 6 hours. Or a million dollars worth of gold for 65 seconds. Honestly, if I were a performing magician, it would be a heck of a trick to perform. Hold a bar of gold and make it disappear, letting the audience try to find it.
If I were a crook I could sell the gold and the person who buys the gold would be screwed, but I wouldn’t do that since that’s fraud.
But you know what’s the real benefit here? Not needing to ever maintain or clean anything. I need to cook? Take a $100 pan that can last for 50 years, pay 0.2 magic cent and I get to use it for 10 minutes to cook my omelette, then it disappears and I won’t need to wash it. Use a chefs knife that disappears and I don’t need to sharpen it. Need a car? I don’t need to own it, but if I need a car for an hour, sure I’ll pay 5 cents and not even need to pay for parking. Assuming you drive for 20 hours a year, that’s 1 dollars per year.