Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 56. (Read 288375 times)

No, because our knee-jerk reaction is to just move on to consume other stuff in the same way we did with the old stuff.
The whole market works this way.
It is why we have fished too much, simply because there was a way too big demand.
It was only after we created international agreements to limit fishing that it became more sustainable.
The market would have hunted for every single fish in the oceans simply because there is a large enough demand for food.
As i said, the only way to change the market is to change the participants.

What do you think the market is? It is humans.

Sure, laws and government are institutionalized forms of these changes. They serve as the compass.
The point was that the changes are not caused by a market correction but by humans.

And a rising price is the signal to do both.

No, we need a sustainable use of resources. That's the situation humanity is in at the moment.
Efficiency can in some cases be enough to achieve sustainability but not always.
No matter how efficiently you use the oil, it WILL run out.
So the actual solution is to use the natural resources efficiently and with care while we look for an alternative way that is sustainable.

You want the most efficient use of resources, yes? Low price means more efficient. If you switch away from one resource while using it is still the more efficient option, you're acting against your stated desire. So, which would you rather have, a big, inefficient stockpile, or efficient use?

On the contrary, The use catalytic converter and the phaseout of Tetraethyl lead was already in progress when those regulations came in. Advances in fuel technology would soon have made TEL completely unnecessary. Laws have always lagged behind societal changes.

Sure, but it was education and awareness that brought us electric cars on an industrial scale.
The economic reality of change is that there needs to be a driving force for it. But by just waiting to let the market correct for it in the case of resources you will make it nessesary to compete with the price of these resources untill they are depleted enough to be more expensive then the new tech.
That is not what you want...
You want to prevent the exhaustion of a resource.
And the market does not help us prevent that.

If we didn't change society to prevent air pollution in the 70s then we would all live in smog everywhere. Such changes are not brought about by the market. They are real changes in society and expressed in laws and governance.
Government is not all bad. Not all institutions are useless.
In fact, i'd say most institutions are important for society.


Edit:
Also, cars change because car use changes.
Things like road quality, population density, income, work habbits, etc etc all decide how a car sits in the market.
Please explain to me what the 'recent' wave of SUVs was all about and then tell me again that the market would be able to regulate something like an oil resource.. 
The so-called self regulation of the market would just take the resource from the people that cannot pay for it and leave it as a luxury for the people that can. Even if the people that cannot pay for it need it more.
We have a market for electric cars becasue we taught enough people that we should make a change.
The market doesn't care and serves what we whish for as long as it can provide.

Sure, but i'm not sure sound money will still our hunger for resources.
The 'continual growth' is in fact a 'slippery slope' that maintains a certain balance in the world, like salmons swiming against a stream.
It provides stability in the sense that power is pretty centralized and almost noone can accumulate so much money that they can threaten stability. So it is a two-edged sword in a way.

When you put a bottom to inflation suddenly you will see an anormous divide between rich and poor because the rich will be able to generate money much more efficiently simply because they have more of it.
That will make for a big upper class that will start fighting and making wars and whatnot untill the lower class (or maybe this time the middle class) will revolt.
It has been done and it is a boody mess...

And a rising price makes people care. Look at the 60s vs today (in the US). In the 60s we had huge muscle cars, with gigantic engines, roaring out pure, unadulterated power, and eating up prodigious amounts of fuel to do so. Today, we're starting to see smaller, European-influenced cars, even hybrids and full electrics. Why? Price of gas went up. It's not all gone, but we've already decided it would be a good idea to reduce our usage.

and that's exactly why i don't think it will work.
The market can be efficient at connecting a seller to a buyer but it doesn't care about humans.
The humans participating need to care about that. That is the only way the market will ever care.

I'm sure the market will find a balance, just not sure it will be a balance that makes us consume less. Unless the whole process crashes.
It realy is a sort of a runaway train thingy at the moment and for humanity to be safe we need to step it down over generations. At least, that's how i see it.

I get the analogy, but I wouldn't take it too far. They aren't equally indisputable. Also, solipsism is a priori to anything you can think about God. Regardless of what God is, or whether it exists, you came here first.

Wow, this was really off-topic, sorry.

Just as indisputable as the theory of the existence of a god... and equally irrelevant.

The subject is surely changing fast.


Hmm, I now get where you are coming from. "specific information flows" or "specific to humans" don't mean much to me, but I guess you were originally discussing something else and they may be relevant.

However, I need to point out that what "emotion" means to me is the sensory feedback you get as your body reacts to chemicals released by your reptilian brain. They are indeed qualia, just as any other sensory experience is qualia, and nothing more. Qualia in turn is how data is locally represented, and nothing more. So, I don't see why emotions in general would be specific to humans or "living" things.

Then again, I get what you mean when you say that trying to replicate "human emotion" is pointless, although I can't agree with how you describe the situation. We actually don't and can't know qualia, because it's not "human specific", it's "subject specific", so actually you can't replicate them at all.


Well, as I said, I neither get what you mean by simulated emotion, nor true emotion. We can only judge by the resulting phenomena, so there cannot be objective criteria for authenticity.


I humbly think the contrary, solipsism is as logically cogent as it can get. We just need to stop fighting it and accept it as an indisputable metaphysical perspective.

The market doesn't "describe" the relation between supply and demand, it brings the two together and finds a price.

It does "care" about the resources running out in the sense that it sends a "price signal" as resources become harder to extract. The higher price has at least 2 positive effects: It decreases demand and it triggers investment into looking for other solutions.

I agree that it's the demand that has to change. I've come to the view though that the easiest way to do this is to have the consumer pay a higher price, the "REAL price" as myrkul said, the one determined by a market that uses unprintable money. A free market economy will make efficient use of the resources. It will also look into the future and foresee resources being used up and take action (for profit, of course).

I'm not saying all is great as it is, in fact I'm saying we don't currently have a free market: all the fiat printing is effecting malinvestments and pushes consumerism. It pumps money into conserving existing structures that should long be gone. The "continual growth paradigm" has to fall. The simple solution here is sound money.

Introducing sound money seems to me much easier than somehow "providing sufficient amounts of people that want to change".

The point is more that emergent behaviour can solve problems.
There is not much intelligence in the way the mould finds the path.
It simply makes lots of random connections and those that transport the most grow stronger.
It leads to optimal solutions that are hard to grasp by mathematics. It's a bit of a fishing-net strategy. You throw out a net and see what sticks.

Edit: and i would also like to add that the mold map is a lot less optimal for humans than the real map.
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/8/2010/01/slimevtokyo2.jpg
It makes you travel way further in some cases. For the mold it's not a problem that the distribution is a bit slow as long as it is energetically cheap.
For humans, well, if you depend on the train to go to work every day then you don't want to take a detour.

You didn't read the article, did you?
Yes, we did know that. In fact, the slime mold showed us a few spots where there was room for improvement. They're thinking of using it to plan future networks.

Sooo...  Slime mold says we're right, so we should pat ourselves on the back?  Did we already know that slime mold always takes the most efficient routes to food?

Or just hole up in a cave with the largest amount of uranium anyone has ever been in possession of, hit play on the Mayhem discography, and start building that 50,000 megaton doomsday device.

The potato chip that looks like Lincoln was an accident of nature. The slime mold is intentional. They placed food at the relative locations of the cities surrounding Tokyo, and allowed the slime mold to determine the most efficient and resilient paths between them.

Sorry to go off-topic ( ), but this reminds me of potato chips that look like Abraham Lincoln...