fusion economies?

Post Reply New Topic

I only wish it had broken down. I'm afraid the machine continues to function as its designers had intended.

Lol, I never denied that they made some really messed up decisions, its just not part of the equation that I put forward earlier. My thought on it though - they needed to just keep laws that made sense rather than rolling them back. The obvious 1) floating quasi-governmental agencies like Fanny and Freddy on the stock market was something that well informed five year old wouldn't fall for - its just too stupid 2) the decision to role back Glass-Stegal was easily as bad. Like baseball at that point, all it takes is a few players juicing and the whole industry follows to keep up. It's exactly why you need the laws written right and need to keep lawyers in Washington from pecking holes in them to begin with.

As I tried to indicate, the functions of the legislative representatives is to see to the benefit of the people who can get them re-elected. Theoretically the people who vote are aware of their problems and are smart enough to elect representatives who pass legislation to get the country moving to benefit those who elected them. The way things are set up now the very wealthy control the bulk of the media and the people who vote respond to the information they get on the media. If the voting citizenry are too dumb or misinformed to elect representatives that act in their welfare then the system ceases to function as a democracy. At the moment the bulk of the funding for re-election comes from the people who have all the money and that is why the legislation to benefit the wealthy and not the bulk of the citizens gets passed. How to rein in the power of the super rich is a problem yet to be even approached, not to get into solutions. At the moment things have to get bad enough for a bloody revolution before any real change is possible and not only has that time not arrived, but the chaos of a revolution is no guarantee that a decent outcome will result.

That's great but its beside the point. I'm really looking at theory, implementation (if its even a good idea to begin with) is a different topic for a different time.

Only because stupid American voters allow it.

ruveyn

There was a rather long novel based exactly on that concept: Atlas Shrugged which was originally titled -The Strike-.

ruveyn

the largest companies in denmark have an individually negotiated tax rate.
to be honest i think companies in the form they have today, cant be controlled by laws alone.

What would you recommend?

ruveyn

The tax rate for high wealth is currently well below ~100% but even so the super-rich find ways of not paying those taxes. I do favor tax breaks for re-investment, but I think that making the tax rate basically say "you can't ever keep more than X$ income per year" will just mean they get even more inventive in hiding the money.

I don't think it's so much the disparity in spendable income that hurts people with less. I think far more damage is done to local economies by outsourcing to cheap foreign labor. If you put the tax disincentive on outsourcing to cheapest labour rather than on being super-rich, I think local ecomomies benefit more.

i hope that human perception can be shaped through good education but that is just a hope.

i dont think we should encourage limitless growth like we do today,
it will always end in the runaway train scenario, unfortunately i dont have any viable alternatives seeing as its the basic mentality thats at fault.

I completely agree with the runaway train scenario. I explain it in one of my podcasts. And I agree we need a steady-state economy coz the only thing that grows and grows consuming and consuming and eventually kills the host is cancer.

When it comes to viable alternatives we should be heading along these lines. Please place ego, projections and bias aside:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mkRFCtl2MI[/youtube]

I find it hard to disagree, I mean conditions for US citizens would have to be rotten for the motivation to occur, and welfare could be used to pacify the disenfranchised. When I finish my education, I'm going to reconsider whether I'd want to stay in the US.




I like the RBE because it favors sustainability whereas Capitalism favors profits. Our oceans already have "dead zones" full plastic bottles which could be recycled if it were more "profitable"

The problem I see with the RBE is that there are a lot of roadblocks towards getting there. Even though automation and energy production technology are improving, both require human imput to run. Renewables like solar and wind take enormous amounts of capital and don't produce enough electricity to sustain human activity. Then you have areas of work that people don't generally like doing, but can't be automated (plumbing). I've spent some time on TZM site and the people who are interested in implementing this have virtually no resources to start it. And an RBE would have to provide all of the basic needs on maslow's hierarchy if it wanted to have any kind of independence from our current economy. That's water production, waste managment, agriculture, and all the logistics in between, coming from a limited group. IMHO, I think that if RBE advocates focused all there efforts on one thing (like sustainable energy), and only give that energy to other group members and ideologically supportive groups, it would be a stepping stone, but it would still take a lot of motivation and problem solving.

Then you have the issue with human behavior. This ideology assumes that people will want to contribute to their society in the absence of having to work, such a prediction could easily backfire.

Overall, I think the RBE is an ideal and can be worked towards, but not achived in reality. I like it much better than I like capitalism (in theory anyway), but I think any progress towards it will only happen in small steps and with a lot of effort.

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.



That is true to a certain extent. Coz of course if we put all the available thought and motivation towards automating as much as possible, the economy would have collapsed decades ago since too much human labour would be displaced. Therefore we are trying to slowly ease into as much automation as possible, but at the same time we are stuck in having to account for the fact that it is human labour, not machine, and hense the currency that circulates because of that, that keeps the economy going.

This is why automation is such a sticky issue. Coz it is FAR more efficient, cheap, fast, productive and simple to automate, and this translates as more profits and savings, but at the same time the more you automate, production and efficiency are going up, but general human purchasing power is going down.

In an RBE, the automated systems will have human supervisors who most likely will live close to the systems that they supervise and they would be like on-call doctors in the sense that it is the systems that calls them when something is going wrong or wearing out etc. The technology exists where certain cars like BMWs automatically call the dealership when something is about to go wrong coz the car's on-board computer is overseeing the differing systems in the car and notifies the dealership. Very much like a car's oil level, or a printer's ink level. It tells you when it's gonna break. So yea, those supervisors will oversee and tend to any hick-ups that may occur.

Human input can only go so far. When we look at resource-management we see that it, like virtually every problem we have is of a technical nature. And thus needs to be approached to be solved by technical means.



Not necessarily. By their very nature they aren't more expensive in terms of either resources or money, however they are considered a threat to the hydrocarbon establishment hense why the technology is hamstrung, and knowledge of it and it's potential is suppressed and distorted. Take for example what happened to the EV1 the electric car. (See the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?")

I'm not in the least worried about energy, we have TONS of options. Solar and wind are the only publically touted renewables, however they don't tell you about space-based solar, spherical solar cells, tidal, wave, thermal differential, the Bloombox, and not to mention Geo-Thermal, which by the way can provide 4000 times what the entire planet uses and it already provides the majority of Iceland's power.

For more information on the potentials of our technology, my Friend Doug Mallette's second film deals with this very subject:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqv0Y1t1bNw[/youtube]

Also, for my next podcast on or around June 5th I'm gonna be interviewing Doug. We're gonna be getting technical. So if you have any questions for him, by all means let me know. Doug works for Boeing as a systems engineer and he used to do the same job for the space shuttle program working alongside NASA. Endeavour was his baby.



Depending on the actual task at hand there's no reason why we can't automate, or in the very least integrate automation to aid human beings very much like a nurse uses a Sphyg to take obs. There's no reason why man and machine can't work side by side for certain aspects of plumbing. At least for the time being. For one thing the reason why we need plumbers as much as we do right now is because irrigation systems are inneficient as hell. They're not designed with much durability and simplicity in mind either. Especially when people seek to alter their houses to their own personal desires and needs, you find that holes have to be drilled, and things need to be changed around and it's just way too much hassel. If your home was designed with your needs in mind to begin with, then all of this hassel would be circumnavigated. And we have the technology to do that today.



That is coz we're aiming to get as many people on board as possible who actually do have access to such resources. We can't build this on our own. And for another thing we're not about building communes coz we're not just out to save ourselves.



Absolutely. It's about human needs being met. Not wants. Wants are auxillary at first when we're considering how to provide for all humanity at a high standard of living. As far as we're concerned the monetary system's days are severely numbered and it may have to take something as bad as a complete, global economic collapse to slap humanity in the face hard enough to realise that they can't grow and consume infinately on a finite planet. That is why an RBE is a steady-state economy. Actually a TRUE economy, because it actually ECONOMISES. lol.

If I'm understanding you correctly when you say "limited group", when it comes to actually putting an RBE into physical reality with physical infrastructure it won't necessarily be a limited group since there will be enough people who have suffered by this system and are willing to help, either that or during or after the collapse the feasability of an RBE is recognised by governments and/or companies who realise that we need to work together if we hope to survive.

Either way, the transition is a complex question since there are so many variables and hense you can't predict into it since the kind of collapse that is upon is is unlike any kind of instability we have ever experienced. Coz it is in part driven by the overwhelming debt causing global bankruptcy, and the expiration of a resource that is crucial to the vast majority of our means and methods. Oil.



Excellent idea. And I completely agree. Such proposals are already in development. For example Doug is working on starting a non-profit food production company that provides food to people using hydroponic/aeroponic vertical farming technology. That reminds me, I'll get him to talk about this project when I interview him.

Also TZM are now embracing numerous charity pursuits and in fact our main events such as Z-Day and also I think the Zeitgeist Media Festival coming up this september are also gonna double up as food and clothes drives.



Not necessarily. If someone told me that I didn't have to worry about bills or travel expenses or paying for anything anymore, and that I could just do what I wanted, the LAST thing I would do is laze around on my arse and not do anything. And I dare say that will be the same answer if you did a major survey. Sure people would also say that they would take an extended vacation, however that is because they realise that they can relax from the slavery that is forced upon us today. But what about after that? You can ask them. I dare say a lot of people would travel the world. They would enrich their lives in ways that they never could before coz they simply couldn't afford the time, or the money.

Also when you tell people that in such a system it'll be far easier, efficient and free to study any area of expertise they wish and gain the knowledge of higher disciplines that they couldn't afford before, I can guarantee you that a lot of people will actually jump head first into study to become particle physicists, doctors, engineers, the kinds of things they REALLY wanna do with their lives but couldn't today coz we are forced to go through so many years of stringent, regimented education that constantly cranks up more debt so you have to accept mcjobs in order to pay off your student loans when you finally finish university, and alas, you find there are no positions available for people with your qualifications.

In an RBE people would just go off and learn how to become the people that they aspire to be. I myself have a deep-seeded passion for psychology, however I can't pursue lines of accreditted study coz it would entail too many years of study and too much money to pay.

Not only that, but in an RBE, only around 5% of the human population would be required to "work", so realistically speaking 95% of humanity COULD be dead lazy and the system would not suffer at all. However I know for a fact that in such a system, people would be volunteering left, right and centre. I speak more about the issue of incentive in my "Dispelling Myths" podcast. The second question.



I completely agree that it will not happen quickly. And I also completely agree that it will take a lot of effort to achieve. Afterall, the proposal of an RBE is something that we as the human race have never done before. We have always moved INto monetary systems, however we have never globally moved OUT of a monetary system, especially since the indoctrination that keeps people perpetuating the current system and demonising alternative systems is so damn strong. I guess its down to a case of whether you think it can happen or not. If we all took the mentality that it can't then it won't happen. However if a big enough percentage of people think that it can, then it will. If you think we can’t change the world, It just means your not one of those that will.

Also, an RBE is not an ideal. Its not perfect since there's no such thing in an emergent universe where everything is in constant transition. As Jacque Fresco said:

"It's not perfect, it's just a hell of a lot better than what we have today."