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SkyDK comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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Idea: Making the money back will be much more difficult than most people anticipate, including Harry.
Reason: Many wizards are highly motivated towards finance and would exhaust every opportunity to generate infinite gold. The rich wizards of the Wizengamot considered 100,000 galleons to be a lot of money.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market. Use a time turner and win the super-lotto. Imperius (or love potion, false memory charm, groundhog day attack, etc) any billionaire and take part of their fortune. Mind trick some bankers with fake documents (as Dumbledore does in book 6). Go rob some banks with invisibility and teleportation (and/or a time turner). Use magic to secure a job with a 50 million dollar golden parachute with very generous terms. Make huge amounts of drug money as a courier via teleportation/portkey. Sell 5 galleon trinkets to muggle collectors for millions of dollars each. Etc., etc., etc..
Some of them are more risky, some of them are less risky, but I bet that any member of these forums could get at least $50 million in a week if we were wizards.
And yet, when they mention a price of 100,000 galleons people are shocked. The reaction does not look like it's 1/15th of a week's worth of effort he's got to worry about. Dumbledore views it as a major problem that Harry is 60,000 galleons in debt. We know from chapter 70 that it's a known thing that witches and wizards will trick a muggle with a love potion and rape them. Yet nobody thinks to slip Bill Gates a love potion, convince him to part with $2 billion, and blow Lucius out of the water with 100 million galleons. And these are among the most financially motivated people in all of wizardry, not the common population, who consider 2 million pounds as more than weekend spending money. I notice I am confused.
I'll brainstorm some possible explanations:
Gringotts won't mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.
Gold isn't available to purchase with muggle money: Wizards could own the gold exchanges and gold mines. They do nominal trading for electronics and jewelry, but the vast share of gold goes to the wizarding world. Possible, but it would drastically change the face of the real world (eg World Reserves would be a lie, and Ron Paul is a wizard).
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is way more effective than I imagine: They can find and intervene in not only all cases of magic misuse (eg imperius or bank robberies), but check other means like love potions. Seems unlikely, considering the current crime investigation and how the last war went. Result - Arbitrage and stock/lottery manipulation work.
The wizarding world is full of complete inverse-omega class idiots: Always a good theory. But it doesn't sound right for the entirety of the wizarding world (including a ton of muggle-born) to act so completely stupid.
The financial tycoons on Wizengamot actually do this: Maybe most of the Wizengamot fortunes exist due to questionable sources. That would explain the majority of evil people doing the voting. Still, that doesn't explain the reaction to the 100,000 galleons.
The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This... actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn't a great job market for muggle-born.
Something doesn't add up. The Wizengamot is full of bright, ambitious people, most of whom have dedicated their lives to finance (makes 4 unlikely). If they're arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they've already figured out arbitrage. They wouldn't worry about importing ink, if they weren't leveraging different prices between the market where they're purchasing ink and the market where they're selling ink. Something as simple as triangle arbitrage should be figured out immediately. If wizards already discovered arbitrage, but they don't try and arbitrage in the muggle markets directly, it would be evidence that 1 or 2 is in play. 3 and 5 are already unlikely, so I guess 1&2 or 6 make sense.
I'd be interested to see if Harry actually manages to make infinite money, and if so what it means about the world.
I disagree. Harry can do partial transfiguration. If he cannot figure out ways to earn insane amounts of cash just through that then he is too retarded to be called rational (remember that he can actually extract resources in ways the wizarding world cannot - as I write in another place: mining ++).
Plus you underestimate the degree of separation between the two worlds plus the extreme lack of respect the wizarding world holds for muggles.
And about the 100.000 galleons: well if they're bright, ambitious and socially aware plus they're using questionable sources they SHOULD act surprised. Not acting surprised would give away their game to the idiots remaining.
I will be severely disappointed if EY will waste time on the money issue. It doesn't deserve much more than a paragraph. Perhaps two just to let us know that Harry won't abuse it, because he doesn't want to call too much attention to himself.
I really hope Eliezer doesn't spend more than a sentence on that - and even then I would want the sentence to be mild. Any more than that and it would strike me as too much use of explicit sloppy thinking to justify narrative convenience.
How would one legally extract money from partial transfiguration? If you have a large object you want transfigured, is it cheaper to hire the only wizard in the world who can do partial transfigurations, or a team of powerful wizards who can just work on the whole thing? And how often does that happen anyway? He could make money from teaching it, but that'd be slow.
Eliezer seems to believe that wizards are selectively stupid about economics, so you're probably right about the general issue. They could need to import it because they can't produce it locally at all.
Also, please don't use slurs.
I think partial transfiguration gains power by being a literal carving device. Normal transfiguration can force an object to take a shape, but they always revert. Partial transfiguration can carve pieces off selectively and have it be permanent. Eg, "the sculpture was always in the block of marble, I just removed what was not the sculpture." Although you'd need to set up incredible safety protocols. Presumably you'd transform the waste into a non-evaporative liquid while keeping a bubble headed charm on until you finite'd everything.
Harry Potter is his own little subtractive universal CNC machine. He's infinite axis; he can work on any material; he can work on any size. A mail order service could be a multi-million dollar a year business, depending on how tight he could control his tolerances. This goes doubly so because it's in 1991 compared to modern day.
Edit: Actually, I suppose sufficiently powerful wizards could do this too. They would just transfigure the whole block of steel into an engine+oil, drain it all, then finite it back so just an engine remained. And I don't think there's a big enough market for Harry to work exclusively on sculptures in the sides of the mountains or anything. Drat, foiled.
Slurs? (oh you mean "idiots"? I'd refrain from that in the future; I didn't mean to be offensive EDIT: later clarified to referring to retarded which I'll also refrain from using in the future... me not being a native speaker will end up being expensive karma-wise).
Transfiguring a whole mountain would: a) take more magical energy than most wizards could muster. b) not extract any resources.
Partial transfiguring has the distinct advantage of not having to transfigure entire objects (such as mountains). Perhaps a spell could also help with actually finding valuable resources.
Besides that partial transfiguration is an excellent break in/out spell (as seen earlier in TSPE) and I do not recall saying that Harry had to stay legal. He's shown already his ability to disregard the law (again TSPE) if he thinks it's worth it.
MixedNuts meant "retarded".
... I need a slur to describe how dumb I feel now...
"Slow"? Edit: or no, that's the same thing, isn't it. Um. Probably a dumb question, but what's wrong with "dumb"?
Dumb used to mean mute. Personally, I think that's going a little overboard with the political correctness, though. (And this from someone who doesn't use retarded as an insult, or even crazy.)
(Basically unrelated, but: Do you or does anyone reading this know of anywhere online to read lots of case studies of schizophrenics, ideally without selection effects for "interesting" cases?)
No, but my local library has two autobiographies. Both seemed interesting to me, though.
Maybe you could look for internet support groups or forums or something. Stuff people write about themselves is probably more useful than stuff doctors write about them if you're looking to learn about their thought processes.