Questionable Credit Licenses
I don't know that Questionable_Credit_Licenses caused the Toothpaste_Disaster, but I believe they played a huge role in the cover-ups that followed.
For what it's worth, I am all for appropriate credit licensing. If I provide the Bio-Horrors Lab at Syntelligent_Systems with an 8,000 credit petri dish budget, I want to know that those credits are going to be spent on petri dishes. Not on explosives. Not on black market cone rifles. Not on a mercenary army, led by my former assistant, intent on blasting me into small chunks. I learned this the hard way, people.
However, if the Toothpaste Disaster proved nothing else, it demonstrated how credit licensing practices have become predatory, manipulative and abusive. And I don't mean predatory, manipulative and abusive in a good way. In the months after the disaster, PLC Master Accountants tried valiantly to "follow the money"; to figure out what person or persons funded the traitors responsible for the Disaster. The trouble was, most of the credits in circulation at that time had been licensed, de-licensed, and re-licensed so many times (often with the assistance of Cash Hackers) that there was no way to trace any of it. Hence the term Questionable_Credit_Licenses.
Even worse, those same accountants discovered a pernicious new abuse of our monetary system. It started with a relatively benign (albeit illicit) form of currency trading. Let's say John-B-DOE finds himself stuck with 500,000 credits that are only good for purchasing Sourcreem and Onyn flavor Algae Chips. But John-B doesn't want Algae Chips, he wants a TacNuke. So he tracks down Jane-B-DOE who happens to have 300,000 credits licensed for TacNuke purchases, and they arrange to exchange possession of those credits through a third party (again, very likely to be Cash Hackers). Seems innocent enough. However, this sort of money trading quickly led to the creation of large quantities of "Metacash": credits licensed only for the purchase of other credits. The real-world value of Metacash fluctuates wildly, and if enough of it gets into circulation at a given time, it threatens to collapse the value of our currency.
There is a name for people who want to destroy the value of money. That name starts with the letter C and ends with the letters O M M U N I S T and S. Questionable Credit Licensing may well be a Commie plot to destroy our way of life!
---Circ-U-LAT-23
Commentary:
Thanks for the quick and thorough investigation, Circ-U! A joint task force from IntSec and Armed Forces are now tracking down John-B-DOE and Jane-B-DOE for interrogation.
-- Jan-U-ARY-31
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