Real money (value) isn't created (poof!) by the state.
Agreed. But in the current system, it isn't the state who creates money - it's banks, in the form of debt, via the mechanism of fractional reserve lending. Fractional reserve essentially creates negative value because all new money is created not just as debt, but as debt plus interest - so more money must be paid back than actually exists. Because of this, the amount of money in the system must constantly grow, regardless of the actual value of transactions occurring, or a systemic crash occurs. This distorts the true value of money immensely, and favours exploitative and abusive companies seeking short-term money extraction over long-term sustainable trading.
This distortion is not caused by the state but by the private banking and investment sector.
However, even if fractional reserve were to be abolished, and we went back to a gold-backed system, it would have its own problem, in that it pegs value to the extraction of a mineral - which has no logical connection to actual wealth either.
The problem is that all forms of 'money' are at best an abstraction several degrees removed from reality. Real wealth is the combination of the following:
* Breathable air * Drinkable water * Safe food * Living soil * A self-sustaining agricultural infrastructure * A healthy and educated population * Low crime * Low pollution * Low prison population * Tiny police and military * A thriving scientific establishment which is not producing weapons or destroying the environment * A commercial culture based on respect for human life and wellbeing over profits * Respect on the international stage (not fear but inspirational leadership) * A sustainable birthrate * A rich diversity of cultures
These things are true wealth. Money is only an honest reflection of wealth to the extent that it reflects these realities.
Look up Dee Hock, inventor of Visa, for some more ideas on how the current dysfunctional banking system can be improved. There were also some good ideas proposed at the post-WW2 Bretton Woods conference - such as the 'bancor', a neutral currency for international trade. But sadly, US voices prevailed and so the US Dollar was chosen instead, leading to international trade distortions which we're still paying for.
A 'basket of commodities' backed trade system, plus a 'genuine progress indicator' replacing GDP, would be a tiny start in the right direction, but these long-overdue corrections are still seen as overly radical by many.
There's a whole fscking Universe out there filled with value, if we can get to it.
And as environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon show, there are large chunks of the Universe which remain filled with value only if we don't get to it and destroy it.
Sure, but what general is going to fund something with 'Average' in the name?
I don't want any Average Power Laser sonny boy, no matter how high you are! I want a Massive Totally Awesome Laser on my battle sharkorillaphant and I want it on my desk tomorrow! In full dress regalia!
That dramatic patriotic music, shots of the President looking gravely into space, a roaring rocket and beeping pinging machines followed by a slow pan down to a squishy pile of wreckage with disturbing squelchy bits... doesn't make for good newscasts. Or job approval numbers.
Re:Planetary visits are an obsolete idea
on
Gardening On Mars
·
· Score: 1
(c) if we pushed on molecular nanotechnology just a little harder by 2030 we would be disassembling Mars for material to build the Matrioshka Brain
I think you misspelled 'huge Earth-melting nanotechnological accident' there.
At the moment, we do NOT need more land to colonize, so why colonize Antarctica?
If we don't need more land to colonise, then we certainly don't need space to colonise, do we?
Outposts in space are one thing, but the usual space future vision claims that 'we have to have outposts in space SO THAT we can colonise it'. But if there's no need for the colonisation then...
The big expense in space expeditions is the cost of sending everything up there. What we need is a place where we can start to manufacture things from the resources available, and that's not all that far off.
And who are you going to sell them to, in large enough numbers (or high enough per-unit prices) to pay back the trillions of dollars of up-front infrastructure investment?
Are you going to be able to get them down to Earth's surface for less than their weight in gold? If not, why would your customers on Earth buy goods they'll never use? More to the point, why should they buy expensive space-built stuff when they can get cheaper Earth-built stuff?
It won't be because Earth becomes uninhabitable, because (hereby declared Cull's First Law of Space Colonisation) any technology capable of making space habitable is also capable of making Earth more habitable, for cheaper.
About the only thing you can get in space that you can't on Earth is sheer mind-bogglingly huge amounts of raw gas and rock. But if it's too big to ship down, you'll have to sell it to people already up there, which means they have to find something else to sell to the people downstairs who are selling them oxygen and water and food.
We are starting to become a search mono-culture: Google is so good that everyone uses it, so everyone gets the same results. This makes it possible for some corporation or blogger with an extremist opinion to game the search results and draw unwarranted attention.
As opposed to the good old days, when everyone got their information from the same corporate-owned newspaper, radio and TV, which made it possible for some corporation or publisher to game the mass media results and draw unwarranted attention?
I agree that search monoculture is a problem, but it seems like there's a bit more randomness in the results than in the mass-media era.
that plagiarism is not a legal construct and should not be imagined in that way.
To a student, what is the difference between 'something that is illegal' and 'something that is a violation of school rules and will get you kicked out and disciplined'?
Well, to be fair, Europe has a long cultural history which was more at ease at government intrusion into people's lives. America has descendants of Europeans who got the heck out of there.
And during/after WW2, got the heck back into there in a big way. 'Freedom' started being spelled 'strategic dominance', weapons of mass destruction began being called a 'shield', and the War Department got renamed 'Defense'.
This observation seems so obvious there must be a formal science-fiction law for this somewhere. But in case there isn't:
Cull's First Law of Space Colonisation:
Any conceivable technology capable of making space even marginally self-sustaining is capable of turning Earth into an ecological paradise, for far cheaper.
So no-one gets to go into space to 'escape the crowded and over-polluted Earth'. We might have outposts in space, but compared to anything reachable out there Earth is already paradise. Those who do go into space will be living on Earth's handouts, knee-deep in zero-gravity sewage and CO2 poisoning and mutant space fungus. Space is Earth's basement. Someone living on a garbage dump in Kolkata is already far resource-richer than Heinlein Base and the entire L5 Federation combined.
Space Economics 101: You can't breathe vacuum, solar flux or nickel-iron. Space Economics 102: It's cheaper to get to Antarctica than Mars, and you get free penguins. Space Economics 103: Recycled urine is probably the most valuable resource in space.
It strikes me that the only possible argument which has justified the dream of self-supporting space colonies being much better places than Earth (instead of, as seems obvious from the above, far worse) is the Ayn Rand philosophy that enforced isolation from society is intrinsically ennobling, and that therefore the political act of breaking away from Earth would be enough to jump-start magic uber-tech capable of turning space into a garden, and space pioneers into instant rugged supermen.
The experience of the Back to the Land Movement in the 1960s-70s - and of many cults and intentional communities - suggests otherwise. Isolation is just isolation, and its effect is usually negative. I would therefore expect a lunar or L5 colony to be much less efficient at technological innovation than an equivalent Biosphere II type experimental lab on Earth.
And unless you had complete social isolation, any transmissible disease which threatened Earth would also take out all of the Solar System. But again, if you had space-hab technology, it would be deployed more cheaply first on Earth, and the bio-locks could be closed there just as easily as on Mars or Luna. Even an asteroid strike would be less damaging to Earth than to a space colony.
I really think the only thing that has kept the O'Neill Habitat dream alive is an anti-social philosophy which, of all people, Open Source and Free Software advocates ought to be able to recognise as false.
The Earth faces huge ecological and social problems in the short term, and a realistic view of the future suggests that we are going to face and overcome them right here on Earth. That's surely a vision to live for.
Right. So if we never spend the time and money to learn how to make it work right here in LEO with a small population we will never learn how to make it work on a larger scale. >
Make what exactly work? Self-sufficient sealed ecologies running on nothing but vacuum, sunlight, radiation and recycled water?
It seems like it would be a whole lot cheaper to learn to do that right here on earth where we have plenty of all those, plus gravity, plus lots of free rock, plus a huge margin for error if you screw up. All you'd have to do would be build some sealed domes like Biosphere 2. Build them in the Antarctic or Sahara, and if the technology works, build thousands of them. There's your O'Neill Colony right here on Earth. As a bonus spinoff, you get to save the world by creating lots of living space, energy and crops. With not a drop of propellant spilled.
Or are you assuming some magic LEO resource which will make something very hard achievable in orbit, yet will remain impossible (and not far cheaper) on the Earth's surface?
I don't see the economics working out in favour of orbit.
1 - to actually own the property I paid for... no your plot of land and your house are not yours, they belong to the feds,state,and city. any one of them can come and take it when they please.
I just want the Government to give me 3 things. A standing military... and to protect my ability to Pursue happiness.
Good luck getting those two to coexist.
The purpose of a standing military is 1) to route your tax dollars to defense contractors, and 2) to stop you from doing anything the military-defense complex doesn't want you doing.
Oh, you thought all those high-tech weapons would only ever be used against brown people in foreign countries, who don't count? And that building a highly armed totalitarian order-giving hierarchy would increase democracy in your country? You didn't want Iraq war graduates using their newfound urban policing skills in your malls and on your sidewalks?
Sorry, you might have wanted freedom, but you asked for a standing military instead, and that's what you're getting.
Slashdot Mirror
Real money (value) isn't created (poof!) by the state.
Agreed. But in the current system, it isn't the state who creates money - it's banks, in the form of debt, via the mechanism of fractional reserve lending. Fractional reserve essentially creates negative value because all new money is created not just as debt, but as debt plus interest - so more money must be paid back than actually exists. Because of this, the amount of money in the system must constantly grow, regardless of the actual value of transactions occurring, or a systemic crash occurs. This distorts the true value of money immensely, and favours exploitative and abusive companies seeking short-term money extraction over long-term sustainable trading.
This distortion is not caused by the state but by the private banking and investment sector.
However, even if fractional reserve were to be abolished, and we went back to a gold-backed system, it would have its own problem, in that it pegs value to the extraction of a mineral - which has no logical connection to actual wealth either.
The problem is that all forms of 'money' are at best an abstraction several degrees removed from reality. Real wealth is the combination of the following:
* Breathable air
* Drinkable water
* Safe food
* Living soil
* A self-sustaining agricultural infrastructure
* A healthy and educated population
* Low crime
* Low pollution
* Low prison population
* Tiny police and military
* A thriving scientific establishment which is not producing weapons or destroying the environment
* A commercial culture based on respect for human life and wellbeing over profits
* Respect on the international stage (not fear but inspirational leadership)
* A sustainable birthrate
* A rich diversity of cultures
These things are true wealth. Money is only an honest reflection of wealth to the extent that it reflects these realities.
Look up Dee Hock, inventor of Visa, for some more ideas on how the current dysfunctional banking system can be improved. There were also some good ideas proposed at the post-WW2 Bretton Woods conference - such as the 'bancor', a neutral currency for international trade. But sadly, US voices prevailed and so the US Dollar was chosen instead, leading to international trade distortions which we're still paying for.
A 'basket of commodities' backed trade system, plus a 'genuine progress indicator' replacing GDP, would be a tiny start in the right direction, but these long-overdue corrections are still seen as overly radical by many.
There's a whole fscking Universe out there filled with value, if we can get to it.
And as environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon show, there are large chunks of the Universe which remain filled with value only if we don't get to it and destroy it.
what's a paddock?
It's what you plug your Apple tablet into.
I didn't even know the Melbourn Cricket Ground was inflatable!
You're terrible, Muriel.
Sure, but what general is going to fund something with 'Average' in the name?
I don't want any Average Power Laser sonny boy, no matter how high you are! I want a Massive Totally Awesome Laser on my battle sharkorillaphant and I want it on my desk tomorrow! In full dress regalia!
The hope is that by understanding ignition other nuclear fusion projects will be able to make better progress..
And by 'other fusion projects' they mean H-bombs.
What's the big problem with risks?
That dramatic patriotic music, shots of the President looking gravely into space, a roaring rocket and beeping pinging machines followed by a slow pan down to a squishy pile of wreckage with disturbing squelchy bits... doesn't make for good newscasts. Or job approval numbers.
(c) if we pushed on molecular nanotechnology just a little harder by 2030 we would be disassembling Mars for material to build the Matrioshka Brain
I think you misspelled 'huge Earth-melting nanotechnological accident' there.
At the moment, we do NOT need more land to colonize, so why colonize Antarctica?
If we don't need more land to colonise, then we certainly don't need space to colonise, do we?
Outposts in space are one thing, but the usual space future vision claims that 'we have to have outposts in space SO THAT we can colonise it'. But if there's no need for the colonisation then...
Helium-3 for energy.
Assuming we get controlled fusion of any kind working first / at all, of course. Small matter of engineering, though, right?
The big expense in space expeditions is the cost of sending everything up there. What we need is a place where we can start to manufacture things from the resources available, and that's not all that far off.
And who are you going to sell them to, in large enough numbers (or high enough per-unit prices) to pay back the trillions of dollars of up-front infrastructure investment?
Are you going to be able to get them down to Earth's surface for less than their weight in gold? If not, why would your customers on Earth buy goods they'll never use? More to the point, why should they buy expensive space-built stuff when they can get cheaper Earth-built stuff?
It won't be because Earth becomes uninhabitable, because (hereby declared Cull's First Law of Space Colonisation) any technology capable of making space habitable is also capable of making Earth more habitable, for cheaper.
About the only thing you can get in space that you can't on Earth is sheer mind-bogglingly huge amounts of raw gas and rock. But if it's too big to ship down, you'll have to sell it to people already up there, which means they have to find something else to sell to the people downstairs who are selling them oxygen and water and food.
Can you breathe aluminium? Or eat pure gold?
The scale of 'precious and valuable' changes a bit in space.
We are starting to become a search mono-culture: Google is so good that everyone uses it, so everyone gets the same results. This makes it possible for some corporation or blogger with an extremist opinion to game the search results and draw unwarranted attention.
As opposed to the good old days, when everyone got their information from the same corporate-owned newspaper, radio and TV, which made it possible for some corporation or publisher to game the mass media results and draw unwarranted attention?
I agree that search monoculture is a problem, but it seems like there's a bit more randomness in the results than in the mass-media era.
that plagiarism is not a legal construct and should not be imagined in that way.
To a student, what is the difference between 'something that is illegal' and 'something that is a violation of school rules and will get you kicked out and disciplined'?
We are talking about software here not religion.
I don't understand this concept.
Well, to be fair, Europe has a long cultural history which was more at ease at government intrusion into people's lives. America has descendants of Europeans who got the heck out of there.
And during/after WW2, got the heck back into there in a big way. 'Freedom' started being spelled 'strategic dominance', weapons of mass destruction began being called a 'shield', and the War Department got renamed 'Defense'.
4: Better estimate of open space survival time of a human being.
I think the ethics board might have something to say about that one...
This observation seems so obvious there must be a formal science-fiction law for this somewhere. But in case there isn't:
Cull's First Law of Space Colonisation:
Any conceivable technology capable of making space even marginally self-sustaining is capable of turning Earth into an ecological paradise, for far cheaper.
So no-one gets to go into space to 'escape the crowded and over-polluted Earth'. We might have outposts in space, but compared to anything reachable out there Earth is already paradise. Those who do go into space will be living on Earth's handouts, knee-deep in zero-gravity sewage and CO2 poisoning and mutant space fungus. Space is Earth's basement. Someone living on a garbage dump in Kolkata is already far resource-richer than Heinlein Base and the entire L5 Federation combined.
Space Economics 101: You can't breathe vacuum, solar flux or nickel-iron.
Space Economics 102: It's cheaper to get to Antarctica than Mars, and you get free penguins.
Space Economics 103: Recycled urine is probably the most valuable resource in space.
It strikes me that the only possible argument which has justified the dream of self-supporting space colonies being much better places than Earth (instead of, as seems obvious from the above, far worse) is the Ayn Rand philosophy that enforced isolation from society is intrinsically ennobling, and that therefore the political act of breaking away from Earth would be enough to jump-start magic uber-tech capable of turning space into a garden, and space pioneers into instant rugged supermen.
The experience of the Back to the Land Movement in the 1960s-70s - and of many cults and intentional communities - suggests otherwise. Isolation is just isolation, and its effect is usually negative. I would therefore expect a lunar or L5 colony to be much less efficient at technological innovation than an equivalent Biosphere II type experimental lab on Earth.
And unless you had complete social isolation, any transmissible disease which threatened Earth would also take out all of the Solar System. But again, if you had space-hab technology, it would be deployed more cheaply first on Earth, and the bio-locks could be closed there just as easily as on Mars or Luna. Even an asteroid strike would be less damaging to Earth than to a space colony.
I really think the only thing that has kept the O'Neill Habitat dream alive is an anti-social philosophy which, of all people, Open Source and Free Software advocates ought to be able to recognise as false.
The Earth faces huge ecological and social problems in the short term, and a realistic view of the future suggests that we are going to face and overcome them right here on Earth. That's surely a vision to live for.
Right. So if we never spend the time and money to learn how to make it work right here in LEO with a small population we will never learn how to make it work on a larger scale. >
Make what exactly work? Self-sufficient sealed ecologies running on nothing but vacuum, sunlight, radiation and recycled water?
It seems like it would be a whole lot cheaper to learn to do that right here on earth where we have plenty of all those, plus gravity, plus lots of free rock, plus a huge margin for error if you screw up. All you'd have to do would be build some sealed domes like Biosphere 2. Build them in the Antarctic or Sahara, and if the technology works, build thousands of them. There's your O'Neill Colony right here on Earth. As a bonus spinoff, you get to save the world by creating lots of living space, energy and crops. With not a drop of propellant spilled.
Or are you assuming some magic LEO resource which will make something very hard achievable in orbit, yet will remain impossible (and not far cheaper) on the Earth's surface?
I don't see the economics working out in favour of orbit.
1 - to actually own the property I paid for... no your plot of land and your house are not yours, they belong to the feds,state,and city. any one of them can come and take it when they please.
I think you forgot 'landlord' in there.
That's an excellent analogy since the New World didn't have oxygen, water, plant life, gravity or indigenous lifeforms either.
I just want the Government to give me 3 things. A standing military... and to protect my ability to Pursue happiness.
Good luck getting those two to coexist.
The purpose of a standing military is 1) to route your tax dollars to defense contractors, and 2) to stop you from doing anything the military-defense complex doesn't want you doing.
Oh, you thought all those high-tech weapons would only ever be used against brown people in foreign countries, who don't count? And that building a highly armed totalitarian order-giving hierarchy would increase democracy in your country? You didn't want Iraq war graduates using their newfound urban policing skills in your malls and on your sidewalks?
Sorry, you might have wanted freedom, but you asked for a standing military instead, and that's what you're getting.
No two people should ever, under any circumstance, share passwords.
Good luck implementing that policy with 'root'.
Didn't Jebus say something about those without skin?
Not in my Bible, but after a Roman flogging he probably didn't have much left.