Who find their skills degraded from six years of doing minimum wage jobs for a living. The problem with creative destruction is that there isn't always creation along with the destruction. Why should anybody trust the IT sector for a primary wage now, when the management has failed us so many times in the past?
The problem isn't a lack of privacy- the problem is too much privacy. I say, the new law should be an utter *lack* of privacy in financial matters- an open records law. Then we can simply hire government auditors to watch for fraud patterns and punish only the criminals.
There are also semi-natural air conditioners whenever you dig down 10 feet, put windows high up in a desert building to achieve convection cooling, and the like. I suspect that on this scale, you can even consider light colored cloth (as used by the Bedouin tribes) to be a form of air conditioner.
Don't know that 50,000 years makes a whole lot of difference. We're talking hundreds of millions of years here.
Well, actually, it depends upon who you talk to. But I thought that the split between mankind and chimps was only 5 million years ago, not hundreds of millions of years? Also, genetic evolution goes in spurts- when the environment changes- not steady all the time. Our closest homo relatives, Homo Neanderthalis, died out a mere 200,000 years ago. And now that I think about it, my 50,000 is probably wrong too- we were probably doing primative cave housing LONG before that, as even Homo Neanderthalis left behind cave paintings and indications of religion in the form of decorated graves.
I don't think that counts when it's your species domesticating your local environment to fit your current genes. The rest just makes sense- the chimps, without major building projects and air conditioning, were forced to evolve to fit local conditions. Mankind, who had these luxuries in various forms over the last 50,000 years or so, didn't need to evolve-he changed his environment instead of changing his body.
My point was- much as the Zionists have been about kicking out the Palestines to form Israel, nobody ever claimed to want to extend Israel to say, the Indian Ocean. MOST Islamic countries are quite safe from Zionist invasion....regardless of what you read in the Islamic Press.
In any given human conflict, the attacked side will end up mirroring the enemy to win. The Bolsheviks are the most obvious case of this- attacking the Czar for classism and his secret police, then setting up the NKVD/KGB and creating a two-class society of party members and dead people. But also look at the American Revolution- setting up the Constitution in reaction to what they saw as broken about the Magna Carta. The Islamic extremists are mimicing thier mythology about what the Zionists want to do to them. Evil always begets evil, no matter what.
A small packbot with a rotating head. In the head are six devices:
1. Riot control microwave pain gun.
2. Taser
3. Machine gun
4. Small missile launcher
5. Anti-tank Grenade thrower
6. Mine dropper
1 is for a crowd of humans. 2 is for a single human. 3 is for a small weapons outpost or another robot. 4 is for a flying vehicle or robot. 5 is for an armored vehicle. 6 is to help defend an area or when the robot is being chased.
The idea is of course, robots are extremely good at being given an area to defend, and defending it. They're really BAD for offense, they're great at defense. So give them what they need to defend, give them the GPS coordinates of the rectangle to defend, and leave them to kill or stop anything that moves.
Umm. You are working under a completely wrong assumption about the meaning of that declaration. The equal part is equal under the law.
The poor are not equal under the law to the rich; the rich can break the law with near impunity due to being able to litigate until all participants are dead.
Now there are examples where wealth has protected people from the law, but overall, jurys do a pretty good job. Stastically people with only a public defender do well.
If you believe that, then what you're basically doing is accepting the statistics the justice department keeps on itself. And gee, they wouldn't have any reason to lie, now would they?
It is not fraud. It is two parties agreeing on terms. Fraud only occurs when one party lies about an aspect of the transaction.
And if you haven't informed the buyer the full cost of creating and shipping the product (including the costs to the environment) then you've lied by ommission about the transaction. Almost every transaction in any market today has a serious lack of information; the anonymous nature of the market guarantees that the ONLY real information the customer has is price information. That is not "two parties agreeing on terms", that's a con artist taking advantage of being relatively anonymous to cheat people.
It is not *just* creation of wealth. In the case of the colony, it was the will to survive.
Why would we need a will to survive if the computers are programmed to make sure there is a surplus of goods at all times?
Even is you take away the possibility for a person to better themselves over others financially, us humans will still be jealous of what we don't have.
Only if we are allowed to know what we don't have.
For example, people would still lust after another person's spouse or girlfriend. Thus is the human condition. How will communism help the Ugly-American?
Who ever said that it should? If anything, it should PROTECT the Ugly-American; a lack of anonymity means that you can settle such things face to face and violently, instead of stewing about it.
Will the state pay for all cosmetic surgery so we can all become models? Probably not, because there will never be enough supply to meet demand.
One day, with nanites in the bloodstream, we'll all be walking around with internal plastic surgeons. So you can't say there will never be enough supply to meet demand- it is in fact inevitable that one day there WILL be more supply than demand. Unless, of course, you let the con artists in the marketplace artificially limit supply- like diamond dealers do today.
With rules on price there will be overwhelming demand and thus people will have to live the rest of their lives ugly. Even though the state guarantees equality in beauty. In a free market, cosmetic surgery can be expensive and limits the demand. This is how a free market works and how a market that cannot automatically compensate for supply and demand will always be an utter failure.
The problem is you're still assuming scarcity. Scarcity is largely artificial already; with robotic labor it will become MORE artificial in the future, not less.
Someday we might live like the characters in Star Trek.
Yes- and given the state of tabletop fabrication machines and on the job automation today, I'd say that will be within my little Christopher's lifetime- he's 4 now.
For now, we have reality.
And the reality is- unless we engineer the economy starting now, we'll need genocide in the next 30 years to deal with all the useless people thrown out of work by automation.
Reality is limits on resources, flawed people, fads, etc.
None of which will BE reality 20 years down the road- when you can basically make ANYTHING you want out of kitchen waste in your tabletop fabricator.
The funny thing about your ideal is that the only way to reach it is
All men are created equal, but that does not mean that all are equally smart or driven, etc. The government is not meant to guarantee outcomes, it is only there to keep people in line (laws).
We don't even have equal creation, let alone outcome- some are born into social circles that allow them to succeed, some are born into social circles that guarantee failure. The ONLY way to fix this is to end the freedom to oppress other people- take away that freedom, and things even out- we get an equal *starting* line. Outcomes should be up to the individual, but it's simply stupid to make unequal creation.
When you introduce a law that says that a person can only sell something for what it cost to create (labor theory of value, Marxism), the government is inserting itself into *every* transaction.
Good. Given the evil done in the name of freedom- given the basic fraud in selling something for less or more than it costs to create- that's something I want the government inserted into *given a government that has omnipresent knowledge of the transaction*. That last is very important- it's what no government so far has ever had.
Two people independently deciding what value some service or item has is freedom and is the natural way things have always been done (bartering).
True enough- it's the freedom to commit fraud. That is EXACTLY the freedom that I want ended.
It was only more recently that some people decided that a free transaction was somehow immoral.
And it's only EXTREMELY recently that there was anything we could do about it. Without perfect knowledge of cost of creation, the freedom of fraud was the best way to set prices, because there was missing information.
They thought, incorrectly, that by doing this they could cause everyone to be equally wealthy.
That is correct. Without perfect knowledge of the costs involved, any attempt to set prices is going to be an approximation. As a rule, the freedom of fraud is *better* at setting prices than setting prices based on incomplete information, if for no other reason than some other fraudster can gain your customer by accepting less profit. However, we no longer need to accept imperfect information as a given.
The problem is that people are flawed. Wealth creation is what drives people.
Only the retarded are driven purely by wealth creation, for they do not understand that wealth is a myth.
If you take this carrot away, people do not have any incentive to create wealth.
Why would we want them to have an incentive to commit fraud?
That is exactly why the colony almost died out. The free market is designed to work off people's flaws, but the Labor Theory of Value is designed to work off people's goodness.
And the Perfect Knowledge Theory of Value is desinged to make the machines our slaves, and turn over the job of governing to AIs that aren't bothered by such idiotic and outdated motives.
The problem is that people are not good. No tweaking will fix inherent human traits. Putting some chairman in charge only makes the impact of the flaws more dramatic.
Which is why I wouldn't. At least, not a human one. Machines don't have that idiotic problem of needing to be "motivated" to make something happen.
Economics is an invention of mankind that can be tweaked, not a law of nature. Therefore, this is an incorrect statement- there will only be poor people as long as there are rich people- only when you allow differences between people do differences between people exist. All men are created equal- isn't it about time we made that reality?
Why do you want to push for something that is provably broken?
Because I know WHY it's broken- and how to fix it. Once again, we've only really had the technology in hardware to fix it in the last 15 years; in software in the last 2 years. It is now possible to create a truly non-representative democratic government with more than 500 citizens; it's now possible for EVERY member of a community to have an equal amount of power under the law. This is something that "N. Korea, Cuba, or any other place this has been tried" did not have. It's something that "Even with the imperfections of the free market, the US has a very nice standard of living" is only begining to have- and the rich are fighting the advent of a true electronic democracy every step of the way. Rightly so, because no truly free people would ever put up with inequalities in the marketplace OR the law. The tyranny of the mob would rectify that problem. It would also mean fewer minorities getting special attention; but we're moving past a time when a man is anything more than the words he writes in cyberspace.
SO, you are saying that you are not motivated by reward?
Not very well. The disconnect between job and reward is almost nonexistant anyway- as Maslow showed. I'm motivated by complexity and obsession.
You would work as hard as you possibly can for no reward of any kind, just the satisfaction of a "job well done". Your employer must love you since you work so cheap.
Yep- till they found somebody who worked cheaper. I'm now unionized and my employer has NO say whatsoever in what I am paid. As it should be.
You are claiming that you are better than the "norm", that is pride. Pride is as serious a vice as greed.
Actually, I'm claiming that autism in the next stage in human evolution, and I'm not the first to do so.
There was an similar experiment. In the cooperative system the people almost died out completely. So by next Winter they required each person to grow their own food and barter with others in the colony. The abundance of food was so overwhelming that its impact is still known to this day. We named a day for it: Thanksgiving. It was when people were required (as in do or let yourself die) to work in their own self interest did everyone benefit.
As I remember, they also failed to take into account the stores and supplies that they'd need. They believed the idea of America as a land of Eden- where food would already be planted for the picking.
If you can not see the how a free market benefits everyone participating in the economy, then you are blind. How long did the Soviet Union sustain more than a year of economic growth?
Never- but once again I consider the Soviet Union to be the ultimate example of a monopolistic free market- a single owner, 50 million consumers. We're not as unbalanced as that- but communism it ain't. Communism is ideally the tyranny of the majority- that was the ultimate tyranny of the minority.
Denying that a free market benefits everyone in the market is like trying to deny gravity.
And yet, the homeless are still with us, the hungry are still here, and 40 million people are going without basic preventative medical care that they'd get anywhere else in the world. If this is free market benefits- then there's a lot of people the free market has to answer to.
Having said that, I think the real problem is communication- you can't have a society of more than 500 people where everybody loves and knows each other well enough to take care of each other- at least not with one-to-many mass communications or worse yet, nearly no communications at all. To get more, you need many-to-many mass communications- of which we're only now just begining to experiment with blogs.
Yes, I strongly suspect that it is. Markets are unavoidable- man is a social animal. But money and ownership aren't actually preconceptions of a market- just preconceptions of a few particular types of regulated markets that are designed to give some people power over other people. Feudalism, Capitalism, laisez faire, even Soviet Communism, were all designed to preserve the right of the nobility to oppress their neighbors. A big part of this was due to an extreme lack of communication; you may not be young enough to remember the 1970s before widespread electronic text communication, but I do. We've got something MUCH better now- a way for people to *actually* be equal and have equal say, not just be on representative committees making decisions that affect the lives of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of strangers. The tyranny of the mob is indeed something that those who have money are afraid of- because if they lose control, we'll quickly have a market of surplus, where money will be almost as anachronistic as telephones and fax machines.
Sorry, I think you are a fool. There is no way to get around that people are people.
Not all people are people. I should know- I'm one of the 1/186 people who aren't. Autism is considered a defect by the rest of you- but I know better. My lack of empathy allows me to see things in a VERY different way- and not take stupid emotions like greed into account. We're already superior to you NTs who lie, cheat, and steal.
In a free market, people don't have to go to some venture capitalist or some state party chairman. They are free to go to family, friends, a private bank, or take a mortgage out on their house for funding.
Only if their family & friends are wealthy, their banker is into lending money to small business startups (9 out of 10 fail, remember), or they are stupid enough to want to take a big chance on losing their house. MOST people don't have those advantages in a free market- most people barely make enough to live on in a free market.
And your idea for a central AI is terrible. There is no way a central anything can effectivly allocate resources since there is no way for it to measure the subject value judgements of a society's participants. It has no way to objectively compute the utility of any allocation decision.
Tell it to Wal*Mart- who has effectively been using a central AI to make stocking decisions for it's stores for the past 5 years, based on a huge amount of sales data. It's possible, it's happening even in the "free market".
The problem is I don't have the level of expertise necessary to tell if the code does only what you say it does. Sorry, I'm not going to take your word for it.
Ignorance can be remedied- it just takes study.
Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect the majority of people to have the expertise to review the code?
With a truly open system where knowledge is free for the taking? Only if they're not lazy. But then again, I bet you don't know how the computer module in your car works either- yet you trust it with your life every day.
If they don't aren't you afraid that they will accept your idea of this computerized system...and then choose the one that you don't like?
So what? As long as I'm free to leave and emmigrate to somewhere else, what does it matter to me? I can let other people live their lives just fine.
The one that some other "expert" claims is better and cleaner than the one you favor? You know, sort of like the way that most people choose to use MS Windows?
Fine with me- let other people go to hell in their own way. The neat thing about a computer being in charge of government is you can actually have a distributed COUNTRY.....
On the other hand the free exchange of products and services (including labor) and the private ownership of property have created huge economies that have benefited a great many people.
I've actually yet to see this exist. Or rather- it existed at one time in my country, but 150 years ago it largely disappeared.
No system will turn out perfect results (depending on how you define "perfect"), but the free market made up of many distributed thinkers (a distributed supercomputer) can get closer to perfection than one single chairman can.
On that, you and I agree. I just think ownership and money sometimes gets in the way of that. I'd like to try two experiments: One, a small distributist colony, say 500 people arranged according to the Rule of St. Benedict. The other- a truly free market unencumbered by money or ownership, with a perfect computerized communication system to supercharge the connections between distributed thinkers. I think we'd end up with both groups achieving a level of happiness that other communities can't even approach. The first from the joy of KNOWING one's place in the universe- the second from the joy of CREATING one's place in the universe.
and that is why we have LED's in almost every stinking electronic device these days. Motivation to sell something and the consumer's desire to buy something. No oppression, just blinkenlights! Oh yeah!
And we would have had it 40 years earlier with a better system.
You are asking for a HUMAN to design a system that doesn't have the flaws of humans??????
Actually, no- we already have expert systems that do data mining on their own to find new efficiencies. This can either be used to increase oppression or dcrease oppression. But it will be done eventually because the decisions politicians and bureaucrats make are low skilled decisions- not much different from any other if-then-else tree.
You mean you are going to trust that Tom(or Dick, or Harry, or whoever) over there didn't put something into the computer system to favor him and his over you and yours?
Open Source Software shows how to take care of THAT problem.
Or are you asking me to trust that you didn't put something into the system to favor you and yours over me and mine?
I don't, I'm asking you to peer review the code and insist that this be open source. If you don't, it will happen anyway- but it will be closed source and you won't be able to do anything other than trust the guy at your door with the gun who has been ordered there by the machine.
Even if they didn't put something in like that, how do you know that they got it right?
By actually looking at and reviewing the source code yourself?
I'm Pres4242 over there as well....and if you look at the time stamps, the article I wrote there and this comment were within a few minutes of each other- and this comment was written FIRST!
Isn't it your theory that people should isolate themselves in communities of 500 and not benefit from each others work (ban trade of services and goods)?
One of many theories- I don't pretend to know which is correct. The one I'm working on now is the "pool resources to buy a commune" theory.
And yeah exchanging ideas is a form of service trade, taking away jobs from LED inventors.
Yes it is. I didn't say that the inefficency is neccessarily bad, just inefficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Who find their skills degraded from six years of doing minimum wage jobs for a living. The problem with creative destruction is that there isn't always creation along with the destruction. Why should anybody trust the IT sector for a primary wage now, when the management has failed us so many times in the past?
The problem isn't a lack of privacy- the problem is too much privacy. I say, the new law should be an utter *lack* of privacy in financial matters- an open records law. Then we can simply hire government auditors to watch for fraud patterns and punish only the criminals.
There are also semi-natural air conditioners whenever you dig down 10 feet, put windows high up in a desert building to achieve convection cooling, and the like. I suspect that on this scale, you can even consider light colored cloth (as used by the Bedouin tribes) to be a form of air conditioner.
Don't know that 50,000 years makes a whole lot of difference. We're talking hundreds of millions of years here.
Well, actually, it depends upon who you talk to. But I thought that the split between mankind and chimps was only 5 million years ago, not hundreds of millions of years? Also, genetic evolution goes in spurts- when the environment changes- not steady all the time. Our closest homo relatives, Homo Neanderthalis, died out a mere 200,000 years ago. And now that I think about it, my 50,000 is probably wrong too- we were probably doing primative cave housing LONG before that, as even Homo Neanderthalis left behind cave paintings and indications of religion in the form of decorated graves.
I don't think that counts when it's your species domesticating your local environment to fit your current genes. The rest just makes sense- the chimps, without major building projects and air conditioning, were forced to evolve to fit local conditions. Mankind, who had these luxuries in various forms over the last 50,000 years or so, didn't need to evolve-he changed his environment instead of changing his body.
My point was- much as the Zionists have been about kicking out the Palestines to form Israel, nobody ever claimed to want to extend Israel to say, the Indian Ocean. MOST Islamic countries are quite safe from Zionist invasion....regardless of what you read in the Islamic Press.
In any given human conflict, the attacked side will end up mirroring the enemy to win.
The Bolsheviks are the most obvious case of this- attacking the Czar for classism and his secret police, then setting up the NKVD/KGB and creating a two-class society of party members and dead people.
But also look at the American Revolution- setting up the Constitution in reaction to what they saw as broken about the Magna Carta.
The Islamic extremists are mimicing thier mythology about what the Zionists want to do to them.
Evil always begets evil, no matter what.
This just allows them to switch from spending their time burning DVDs to spending their time cutting the heads off of US Servicemen in Iraq.
A small packbot with a rotating head. In the head are six devices:
1. Riot control microwave pain gun.
2. Taser
3. Machine gun
4. Small missile launcher
5. Anti-tank Grenade thrower
6. Mine dropper
1 is for a crowd of humans. 2 is for a single human. 3 is for a small weapons outpost or another robot. 4 is for a flying vehicle or robot. 5 is for an armored vehicle. 6 is to help defend an area or when the robot is being chased.
The idea is of course, robots are extremely good at being given an area to defend, and defending it. They're really BAD for offense, they're great at defense. So give them what they need to defend, give them the GPS coordinates of the rectangle to defend, and leave them to kill or stop anything that moves.
Umm. You are working under a completely wrong assumption about the meaning of that declaration. The equal part is equal under the law.
The poor are not equal under the law to the rich; the rich can break the law with near impunity due to being able to litigate until all participants are dead.
Now there are examples where wealth has protected people from the law, but overall, jurys do a pretty good job. Stastically people with only a public defender do well.
If you believe that, then what you're basically doing is accepting the statistics the justice department keeps on itself. And gee, they wouldn't have any reason to lie, now would they?
It is not fraud. It is two parties agreeing on terms. Fraud only occurs when one party lies about an aspect of the transaction.
And if you haven't informed the buyer the full cost of creating and shipping the product (including the costs to the environment) then you've lied by ommission about the transaction. Almost every transaction in any market today has a serious lack of information; the anonymous nature of the market guarantees that the ONLY real information the customer has is price information. That is not "two parties agreeing on terms", that's a con artist taking advantage of being relatively anonymous to cheat people.
It is not *just* creation of wealth. In the case of the colony, it was the will to survive.
Why would we need a will to survive if the computers are programmed to make sure there is a surplus of goods at all times?
Even is you take away the possibility for a person to better themselves over others financially, us humans will still be jealous of what we don't have.
Only if we are allowed to know what we don't have.
For example, people would still lust after another person's spouse or girlfriend. Thus is the human condition. How will communism help the Ugly-American?
Who ever said that it should? If anything, it should PROTECT the Ugly-American; a lack of anonymity means that you can settle such things face to face and violently, instead of stewing about it.
Will the state pay for all cosmetic surgery so we can all become models? Probably not, because there will never be enough supply to meet demand.
One day, with nanites in the bloodstream, we'll all be walking around with internal plastic surgeons. So you can't say there will never be enough supply to meet demand- it is in fact inevitable that one day there WILL be more supply than demand. Unless, of course, you let the con artists in the marketplace artificially limit supply- like diamond dealers do today.
With rules on price there will be overwhelming demand and thus people will have to live the rest of their lives ugly. Even though the state guarantees equality in beauty. In a free market, cosmetic surgery can be expensive and limits the demand. This is how a free market works and how a market that cannot automatically compensate for supply and demand will always be an utter failure.
The problem is you're still assuming scarcity. Scarcity is largely artificial already; with robotic labor it will become MORE artificial in the future, not less.
Someday we might live like the characters in Star Trek.
Yes- and given the state of tabletop fabrication machines and on the job automation today, I'd say that will be within my little Christopher's lifetime- he's 4 now.
For now, we have reality.
And the reality is- unless we engineer the economy starting now, we'll need genocide in the next 30 years to deal with all the useless people thrown out of work by automation.
Reality is limits on resources, flawed people, fads, etc.
None of which will BE reality 20 years down the road- when you can basically make ANYTHING you want out of kitchen waste in your tabletop fabricator.
The funny thing about your ideal is that the only way to reach it is
All men are created equal, but that does not mean that all are equally smart or driven, etc. The government is not meant to guarantee outcomes, it is only there to keep people in line (laws).
We don't even have equal creation, let alone outcome- some are born into social circles that allow them to succeed, some are born into social circles that guarantee failure. The ONLY way to fix this is to end the freedom to oppress other people- take away that freedom, and things even out- we get an equal *starting* line. Outcomes should be up to the individual, but it's simply stupid to make unequal creation.
When you introduce a law that says that a person can only sell something for what it cost to create (labor theory of value, Marxism), the government is inserting itself into *every* transaction.
Good. Given the evil done in the name of freedom- given the basic fraud in selling something for less or more than it costs to create- that's something I want the government inserted into *given a government that has omnipresent knowledge of the transaction*. That last is very important- it's what no government so far has ever had.
Two people independently deciding what value some service or item has is freedom and is the natural way things have always been done (bartering).
True enough- it's the freedom to commit fraud. That is EXACTLY the freedom that I want ended.
It was only more recently that some people decided that a free transaction was somehow immoral.
And it's only EXTREMELY recently that there was anything we could do about it. Without perfect knowledge of cost of creation, the freedom of fraud was the best way to set prices, because there was missing information.
They thought, incorrectly, that by doing this they could cause everyone to be equally wealthy.
That is correct. Without perfect knowledge of the costs involved, any attempt to set prices is going to be an approximation. As a rule, the freedom of fraud is *better* at setting prices than setting prices based on incomplete information, if for no other reason than some other fraudster can gain your customer by accepting less profit. However, we no longer need to accept imperfect information as a given.
The problem is that people are flawed. Wealth creation is what drives people.
Only the retarded are driven purely by wealth creation, for they do not understand that wealth is a myth.
If you take this carrot away, people do not have any incentive to create wealth.
Why would we want them to have an incentive to commit fraud?
That is exactly why the colony almost died out. The free market is designed to work off people's flaws, but the Labor Theory of Value is designed to work off people's goodness.
And the Perfect Knowledge Theory of Value is desinged to make the machines our slaves, and turn over the job of governing to AIs that aren't bothered by such idiotic and outdated motives.
The problem is that people are not good. No tweaking will fix inherent human traits. Putting some chairman in charge only makes the impact of the flaws more dramatic.
Which is why I wouldn't. At least, not a human one. Machines don't have that idiotic problem of needing to be "motivated" to make something happen.
There will always be poor, always.
Economics is an invention of mankind that can be tweaked, not a law of nature. Therefore, this is an incorrect statement- there will only be poor people as long as there are rich people- only when you allow differences between people do differences between people exist. All men are created equal- isn't it about time we made that reality?
Why do you want to push for something that is provably broken?
Because I know WHY it's broken- and how to fix it. Once again, we've only really had the technology in hardware to fix it in the last 15 years; in software in the last 2 years. It is now possible to create a truly non-representative democratic government with more than 500 citizens; it's now possible for EVERY member of a community to have an equal amount of power under the law. This is something that "N. Korea, Cuba, or any other place this has been tried" did not have. It's something that "Even with the imperfections of the free market, the US has a very nice standard of living" is only begining to have- and the rich are fighting the advent of a true electronic democracy every step of the way. Rightly so, because no truly free people would ever put up with inequalities in the marketplace OR the law. The tyranny of the mob would rectify that problem. It would also mean fewer minorities getting special attention; but we're moving past a time when a man is anything more than the words he writes in cyberspace.
SO, you are saying that you are not motivated by reward?
Not very well. The disconnect between job and reward is almost nonexistant anyway- as Maslow showed. I'm motivated by complexity and obsession.
You would work as hard as you possibly can for no reward of any kind, just the satisfaction of a "job well done". Your employer must love you since you work so cheap.
Yep- till they found somebody who worked cheaper. I'm now unionized and my employer has NO say whatsoever in what I am paid. As it should be.
You are claiming that you are better than the "norm", that is pride. Pride is as serious a vice as greed.
Actually, I'm claiming that autism in the next stage in human evolution, and I'm not the first to do so.
There was an similar experiment. In the cooperative system the people almost died out completely. So by next Winter they required each person to grow their own food and barter with others in the colony. The abundance of food was so overwhelming that its impact is still known to this day. We named a day for it: Thanksgiving. It was when people were required (as in do or let yourself die) to work in their own self interest did everyone benefit.
As I remember, they also failed to take into account the stores and supplies that they'd need. They believed the idea of America as a land of Eden- where food would already be planted for the picking.
If you can not see the how a free market benefits everyone participating in the economy, then you are blind. How long did the Soviet Union sustain more than a year of economic growth?
Never- but once again I consider the Soviet Union to be the ultimate example of a monopolistic free market- a single owner, 50 million consumers. We're not as unbalanced as that- but communism it ain't. Communism is ideally the tyranny of the majority- that was the ultimate tyranny of the minority.
Denying that a free market benefits everyone in the market is like trying to deny gravity.
And yet, the homeless are still with us, the hungry are still here, and 40 million people are going without basic preventative medical care that they'd get anywhere else in the world. If this is free market benefits- then there's a lot of people the free market has to answer to.
Having said that, I think the real problem is communication- you can't have a society of more than 500 people where everybody loves and knows each other well enough to take care of each other- at least not with one-to-many mass communications or worse yet, nearly no communications at all. To get more, you need many-to-many mass communications- of which we're only now just begining to experiment with blogs.
Yes, I strongly suspect that it is. Markets are unavoidable- man is a social animal. But money and ownership aren't actually preconceptions of a market- just preconceptions of a few particular types of regulated markets that are designed to give some people power over other people. Feudalism, Capitalism, laisez faire, even Soviet Communism, were all designed to preserve the right of the nobility to oppress their neighbors. A big part of this was due to an extreme lack of communication; you may not be young enough to remember the 1970s before widespread electronic text communication, but I do. We've got something MUCH better now- a way for people to *actually* be equal and have equal say, not just be on representative committees making decisions that affect the lives of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of strangers. The tyranny of the mob is indeed something that those who have money are afraid of- because if they lose control, we'll quickly have a market of surplus, where money will be almost as anachronistic as telephones and fax machines.
Yes, but greed does exist.
Greed exists for those who allow it to exist. Like any other emotion, it's just a shared mythos among the Neurotypicals.
I am sorry that you think you are not a person, but you are. You are neither more nor less than any one else.
What an extremely Neurotypical thing to say- assuming that everybody else's motives are as base as yours.
Sorry, I think you are a fool. There is no way to get around that people are people.
Not all people are people. I should know- I'm one of the 1/186 people who aren't. Autism is considered a defect by the rest of you- but I know better. My lack of empathy allows me to see things in a VERY different way- and not take stupid emotions like greed into account. We're already superior to you NTs who lie, cheat, and steal.
In a free market, people don't have to go to some venture capitalist or some state party chairman. They are free to go to family, friends, a private bank, or take a mortgage out on their house for funding.
Only if their family & friends are wealthy, their banker is into lending money to small business startups (9 out of 10 fail, remember), or they are stupid enough to want to take a big chance on losing their house. MOST people don't have those advantages in a free market- most people barely make enough to live on in a free market.
And your idea for a central AI is terrible. There is no way a central anything can effectivly allocate resources since there is no way for it to measure the subject value judgements of a society's participants. It has no way to objectively compute the utility of any allocation decision.
Tell it to Wal*Mart- who has effectively been using a central AI to make stocking decisions for it's stores for the past 5 years, based on a huge amount of sales data. It's possible, it's happening even in the "free market".
The problem is I don't have the level of expertise necessary to tell if the code does only what you say it does. Sorry, I'm not going to take your word for it.
Ignorance can be remedied- it just takes study.
Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect the majority of people to have the expertise to review the code?
With a truly open system where knowledge is free for the taking? Only if they're not lazy. But then again, I bet you don't know how the computer module in your car works either- yet you trust it with your life every day.
If they don't aren't you afraid that they will accept your idea of this computerized system...and then choose the one that you don't like?
So what? As long as I'm free to leave and emmigrate to somewhere else, what does it matter to me? I can let other people live their lives just fine.
The one that some other "expert" claims is better and cleaner than the one you favor? You know, sort of like the way that most people choose to use MS Windows?
Fine with me- let other people go to hell in their own way. The neat thing about a computer being in charge of government is you can actually have a distributed COUNTRY.....
On the other hand the free exchange of products and services (including labor) and the private ownership of property have created huge economies that have benefited a great many people.
I've actually yet to see this exist. Or rather- it existed at one time in my country, but 150 years ago it largely disappeared.
No system will turn out perfect results (depending on how you define "perfect"), but the free market made up of many distributed thinkers (a distributed supercomputer) can get closer to perfection than one single chairman can.
On that, you and I agree. I just think ownership and money sometimes gets in the way of that. I'd like to try two experiments: One, a small distributist colony, say 500 people arranged according to the Rule of St. Benedict. The other- a truly free market unencumbered by money or ownership, with a perfect computerized communication system to supercharge the connections between distributed thinkers. I think we'd end up with both groups achieving a level of happiness that other communities can't even approach. The first from the joy of KNOWING one's place in the universe- the second from the joy of CREATING one's place in the universe.
and that is why we have LED's in almost every stinking electronic device these days. Motivation to sell something and the consumer's desire to buy something. No oppression, just blinkenlights! Oh yeah!
And we would have had it 40 years earlier with a better system.
You are asking for a HUMAN to design a system that doesn't have the flaws of humans??????
Actually, no- we already have expert systems that do data mining on their own to find new efficiencies. This can either be used to increase oppression or dcrease oppression. But it will be done eventually because the decisions politicians and bureaucrats make are low skilled decisions- not much different from any other if-then-else tree.
You mean you are going to trust that Tom(or Dick, or Harry, or whoever) over there didn't put something into the computer system to favor him and his over you and yours?
Open Source Software shows how to take care of THAT problem.
Or are you asking me to trust that you didn't put something into the system to favor you and yours over me and mine?
I don't, I'm asking you to peer review the code and insist that this be open source. If you don't, it will happen anyway- but it will be closed source and you won't be able to do anything other than trust the guy at your door with the gun who has been ordered there by the machine.
Even if they didn't put something in like that, how do you know that they got it right?
By actually looking at and reviewing the source code yourself?
*cough* The Australia Project *cough* One doesn't have to make the same design mistakes as the dystopian version, you know.
I'm Pres4242 over there as well....and if you look at the time stamps, the article I wrote there and this comment were within a few minutes of each other- and this comment was written FIRST!
Do you really think government control can match money and brains any better?
:-).
Only if anonymity was illegal and that government control was a nearly omnipresent artificial intelligence programmed to treat everybody equally
We can barely get politicians smart enough to wipe their own asses, but you want to turn over the economy to them?
A government doesn't need to be made up of human politicians.
Isn't it your theory that people should isolate themselves in communities of 500 and not benefit from each others work (ban trade of services and goods)?
One of many theories- I don't pretend to know which is correct. The one I'm working on now is the "pool resources to buy a commune" theory.
And yeah exchanging ideas is a form of service trade, taking away jobs from LED inventors.
Yes it is. I didn't say that the inefficency is neccessarily bad, just inefficient.