Topic: Economic Devastation - page 142. (Read 504811 times)
I'm not sure if you can use traditional economy concepts for this problems. I guess we need one more step forward.
Generally speaking, the point of life (at lower levels) is to make more life. This is someways is explained well in The Selfish Gene. It will do this by any means necessary and those means often mean creating gradients. So life doesn't reduce gradients, it creates them.
Maximizing entropy (disorder) is the maximization of the number of equiprobable outcomes, i.e. maximizing degrees-of-freedom. Btw, degrees-of-freedom is potential energy. Creating more unique (every human is!) instances life increases diversity, granularity, and degrees-of-freedom. Procreation is breaking down the concentrated gradient (order a.k.a. kinetic energy) incoming from the Sun into maximum entropy or potential energy.
I got into this in the Information Is Alive! and The Universe essays at my blog (see my signature).
Schneider is semantically incomplete though on one point. jabo38 is correct, the goal of life is to maximize the instances life, yet life goes hand-in-hand with death because if nothing dies then procreation rate has to diminish. So in that sense Schneider is correct as quoted.
That was appreciated but let's not discuss that philosophical tangent further in this thread, so we don't bury the main point of this thread. We've already built a sufficient case for the point w.r.t. to stated goals for crypto-currency. I strongly urge to move further discussion on that to the Dark Enlightenment or Economic Devastation thread. I will copy this post there. You can click "Quote" then copy+paste into a Reply at any thread.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-481122
I assume your implied point is that as knowledge moves more freely then no one can build a Buffet-esque moat to defend profit. Your correct use of the term "middleman" goes to the heart of my counter-logic. Remember I wrote upthread that knowledge creation isn't fungible. So when you need something created based on an existing body of work, you need an expert. Let me distill that for you. As the transactional costs of knowledge sharing decreases, the profit moves closer to the producer of knowledge and away from the rent-seeking middlemen. Diversity of creation and the maximum division-of-labor guarantee that moat but where it is rightfully deserved personal property. People will finally own their expertise and creative energy.
Eric I continue to honor you. Peace.
Quote from: AnonyMint a.k.a. whodat? a.k.a. Jocelyn a.k.a. JustSaying a.k.a. Shelby
Quote from: Christopher Smith
Decreased transactional friction leads directly to elimination of the opportunities for arbitrage. I can buy plenty of products and services directly from Shenzhen, and there’s no profit for a new middleman.
I assume your implied point is that as knowledge moves more freely then no one can build a Buffet-esque moat to defend profit. Your correct use of the term "middleman" goes to the heart of my counter-logic. Remember I wrote upthread that knowledge creation isn't fungible. So when you need something created based on an existing body of work, you need an expert. Let me distill that for you. As the transactional costs of knowledge sharing decreases, the profit moves closer to the producer of knowledge and away from the rent-seeking middlemen. Diversity of creation and the maximum division-of-labor guarantee that moat but where it is rightfully deserved personal property. People will finally own their expertise and creative energy.
Eric I continue to honor you. Peace.
What exactly is he afraid of?
Jabba the Hutt who wastes all my time and doesn't even address the salient point about relative scaling rates between knowledge networking and vertical integration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabba_the_Hutt
In economics, there is no such thing as intellectual capital. It is work, capital (not money, but tools and commodities and partly produced products) and land factors (resources of nature) that are limited in supply.
Your antiquated indoctrination will be swept away by reality. Maybe you are Jabba's slave-driver assistant pictured above. Perhaps you didn't read the following.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479742
Quote from: AnonyMint a.k.a. whodat? a.k.a. Jocelyn a.k.a. JustSaying a.k.a. Shelby
We will be able to produce all the food, raw materials, and energy we need with robots. There is no reason the price shouldn't trend towards zero, once the robots can build more robots.
The activity that can't be automated is creativity and knowledge creation. Thus it should rise in relative value.
The activity that can't be automated is creativity and knowledge creation. Thus it should rise in relative value.
In economics, there is no such thing as intellectual capital. It is work, capital (not money, but tools and commodities and partly produced products) and land factors (resources of nature) that are limited in supply.
this is where they fail I thinkIf they don't take into account the intellectual capital, or the cultural capital, or the human capital. Those things don't translate into $ easily and are conveniently left out of the equations.
EDIT: But if you pause and think what kept empires like, Rome, Byzantium, China, USSR, 3rdReich, and US currently going is the Dominion in the Arts and Culture
In economics, there is no such thing as intellectual capital. It is work, capital (not money, but tools and commodities and partly produced products) and land factors (resources of nature) that are limited in supply.
Ideas, procedures for production, those kind of things, are practically limitless. When more capital is accumulated, enabling higher productivity, the ideas on how to use it come more or less automatically. You see this in paralell inventions, all coming independently at about the same time. There are something we can call real inventions, that skew the timeline a bit. An invention can come too early, which happens all the time (maybe bankrupting the optimistic investors), or maybe to late compared with what is natural, unleashing a new industry.
The patent system is an idea (!) to turn inventions into assets mimicking capital. I don't say it is inherently evil, but the economy would function just as well without it.
Ideas, procedures for production, those kind of things, are practically limitless. When more capital is accumulated, enabling higher productivity, the ideas on how to use it come more or less automatically. You see this in paralell inventions, all coming independently at about the same time. There are something we can call real inventions, that skew the timeline a bit. An invention can come too early, which happens all the time (maybe bankrupting the optimistic investors), or maybe to late compared with what is natural, unleashing a new industry.
The patent system is an idea (!) to turn inventions into assets mimicking capital. I don't say it is inherently evil, but the economy would function just as well without it.
Eric presented his refutation and I replied. This pretty much cements it for me.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-480217
Mea culpa I haven't read the book. I indicated in my linked refutation, that I wouldn't agree with any Communist basis and agree with Eric's critique on that aspect. For the conceptual idea to scale, there must be symbiosis between individual gain and collective gain, per the Eric's Inverse Commons in the Magic Cauldron.
For example, one could argue that any initial start-up cost for a creation couldn't be offset by the knowledge network value of incremental edits because the initial creator is not directly receiving the return on investment. My counter logic is there may be business models dealing with modularity or diminishing trail of appreciation (citation) that when combined with micro payments can route remuneration backtracked to the creators. Moreover the non-monetary square law scaling of the Inverse Commons applies in that participants gain the return of the creations and incremental improvements of their brethren. It is a mesh topology N-highway of sharing. My belief is that according to gift culture Eric outlined, the community is aligned towards acknowledging sources especially when the act of doing so is only an insignificant (automated) micro payment or other remuneration models the ingenious may develop. Insignificant micro payments then aggregate to the creators at the rate of the participants squared. The squared law seems to be so powerful and at the heart of why the Inverse Commons is the "only known positive scaling law of software engineering" as so eloquently and astutely noted by Eric. That audio of Eric is permanently imprinted in my primary consciousness. I can never forget random "monkeys beating on the code" can outperform the cathedral of closed source (which I want to extend to vertical integration in general).
Also I noticed in the Bitcoin and now especially in the Dogecoin community, there is much more tipping and donations than I know about in the fiat world. The participants understand that to make their ecosystem grow, they need to reward participation. That is not Communism because it is an individual decision, no Max Weber central authority is holding a gun to each of our heads. You can see in my linked discussion thread, the participants are rallying the concepts and refining them perhaps better than I could, or at least differently and scaling requires diversity.
Atoms are heavy but that is lacking information. How heavy? Relativity is all the matters here. I never wrote zero, I wrote relative value is trending asymptotically towards zero.
In fact food declined from say a third or half of someone's income to something on the order of a tenth now in the developed world. The third world didn't industrialize so was devalued. The industrial economy was more valuable than the agricultural economy, and to survive the agricultural economy had to move to higher economies-of-scale and automation, thus significantly lowering relative prices.
And now the Knowledge Age economy is devaluing the Industrial and Agricultural age economies. Food is maybe a hundredth of my income and that is the future.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-480286
I am in the Lazarus Long camp that says there is nothing the government can't unimprove if it can touch it. Plumbing is not an extremely highly skilled activity, at least without the kafkaesque, labyrinth of building codes that must be navigated in some jurisdictions. Of course I am not arguing that building best practices aren't a good idea if done in the free market. I strongly suspect the supply of plumbers is restricted by the onerous licensing requirements which mismatch the education level of someone who wouldn't be bored out their freakin' mind to pursue that career. I was an autodidact plumber when I was 5 years old. Currently it is difficult to find a plumber in the post-BRICs NICs portion of the developing world, because the debt was driven sky-high by the Fed's ZIRP carry trade and uneconomic construction is going full tilt (to implode globally 2016 in a massive conflagrapocalypse).
I expect the discussion will likely digress to the usual pissing politics, so I won't participate further unless there is a solid refutation of my salient point about knowledge networking scaling faster than vertical integration.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-480217
Quote from: AnonyMint a.k.a. whodat? a.k.a. Jocelyn a.k.a. JustSaying a.k.a. Shelby
Quote from: esr
> For Rifkin’s predictions to come true it would not suffice for knowledge creation to rise in value. For his predictions to come true, material goods would have to fall to zero marginal cost. That will not happen, because atoms are heavy.
Mea culpa I haven't read the book. I indicated in my linked refutation, that I wouldn't agree with any Communist basis and agree with Eric's critique on that aspect. For the conceptual idea to scale, there must be symbiosis between individual gain and collective gain, per the Eric's Inverse Commons in the Magic Cauldron.
For example, one could argue that any initial start-up cost for a creation couldn't be offset by the knowledge network value of incremental edits because the initial creator is not directly receiving the return on investment. My counter logic is there may be business models dealing with modularity or diminishing trail of appreciation (citation) that when combined with micro payments can route remuneration backtracked to the creators. Moreover the non-monetary square law scaling of the Inverse Commons applies in that participants gain the return of the creations and incremental improvements of their brethren. It is a mesh topology N-highway of sharing. My belief is that according to gift culture Eric outlined, the community is aligned towards acknowledging sources especially when the act of doing so is only an insignificant (automated) micro payment or other remuneration models the ingenious may develop. Insignificant micro payments then aggregate to the creators at the rate of the participants squared. The squared law seems to be so powerful and at the heart of why the Inverse Commons is the "only known positive scaling law of software engineering" as so eloquently and astutely noted by Eric. That audio of Eric is permanently imprinted in my primary consciousness. I can never forget random "monkeys beating on the code" can outperform the cathedral of closed source (which I want to extend to vertical integration in general).
Also I noticed in the Bitcoin and now especially in the Dogecoin community, there is much more tipping and donations than I know about in the fiat world. The participants understand that to make their ecosystem grow, they need to reward participation. That is not Communism because it is an individual decision, no Max Weber central authority is holding a gun to each of our heads. You can see in my linked discussion thread, the participants are rallying the concepts and refining them perhaps better than I could, or at least differently and scaling requires diversity.
Atoms are heavy but that is lacking information. How heavy? Relativity is all the matters here. I never wrote zero, I wrote relative value is trending asymptotically towards zero.
Quote from: esr
> You are just as wrong as anyone who around 1900, observing the steep fall in marginal cost of manufactured goods, predicted that food would become effectively free.
In fact food declined from say a third or half of someone's income to something on the order of a tenth now in the developed world. The third world didn't industrialize so was devalued. The industrial economy was more valuable than the agricultural economy, and to survive the agricultural economy had to move to higher economies-of-scale and automation, thus significantly lowering relative prices.
And now the Knowledge Age economy is devaluing the Industrial and Agricultural age economies. Food is maybe a hundredth of my income and that is the future.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-480286
Quote from: AnonyMint a.k.a. whodat? a.k.a. Jocelyn a.k.a. JustSaying a.k.a. Shelby
Quote from: Greg
> We’re still a long way from solving the shortage of skilled labor, as anyone who has ever needed a plumber can attest.
I am in the Lazarus Long camp that says there is nothing the government can't unimprove if it can touch it. Plumbing is not an extremely highly skilled activity, at least without the kafkaesque, labyrinth of building codes that must be navigated in some jurisdictions. Of course I am not arguing that building best practices aren't a good idea if done in the free market. I strongly suspect the supply of plumbers is restricted by the onerous licensing requirements which mismatch the education level of someone who wouldn't be bored out their freakin' mind to pursue that career. I was an autodidact plumber when I was 5 years old. Currently it is difficult to find a plumber in the post-BRICs NICs portion of the developing world, because the debt was driven sky-high by the Fed's ZIRP carry trade and uneconomic construction is going full tilt (to implode globally 2016 in a massive conflagrapocalypse).
I expect the discussion will likely digress to the usual pissing politics, so I won't participate further unless there is a solid refutation of my salient point about knowledge networking scaling faster than vertical integration.
Can we just blame the Gov and talk about basic libertarian solutions?
The Libertarian platform advocates for:
Minimally regulated markets
A less powerful federal government Strong civil liberties
Separation of church and state
Open immigration
Non-interventionism
We had a government like this at one point (the US government circa 1800). Unfortunately it spontaneously degenerated into what we have today.....
..spontaneously degenerated?
The Federalists won out over the Anti-Federalists; I wouldn't call it spontaneous.
Everything will be solved once you have even 1% of humanity doing autonomous knowledge production full-time.
The first computer was so clunky that they had to test 1000s of vacuum tubes if one malfunctioned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
We are at the cusp.
And you are going to swept away.
The first computer was so clunky that they had to test 1000s of vacuum tubes if one malfunctioned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
We are at the cusp.
And you are going to swept away.
blablahblah, 3D printers can print themselves. Grow up man.
It's called debate and I'm not letting this point slide. Please show evidence of 3d printers that can fully self-replicate, including printing their own embedded electronics, or your claim is busted.
I've seen the cool viral advertising where they print replacement plastics which are then assembled with manual labour, but AFAIK the only fully self-replicating things in existence, which are integrated enough to call machines, are biological. Or virtual.
Come on. You're talking about "material production at the asymptote" and stuff. This one should be a breeze.
Graphene may change that, and nano-printing, but it's not that what bothers me...
If you take a look at current printing market status you will see that the printer costs as much as a ink cartridge replacement.
I have refined my theory. Here is discussion:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-adoption-slowing-coinbase-bitpay-is-enough-to-make-bitcoin-a-fiat-557732
blablahblah, 3D printers can print themselves. Grow up man. You can't even understand the point, that chemicals don't allow you produce creations. The computer and the 3D printer change the landscape of what individuals can produce. Don't come in my thread. I will not allow you to post there. You are permanently banned from my life. Talk about garbage out. Everything you say is complete garbage. And that attack is intentional. Because it is true. I don't have time to respond to all your garbage drivel.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-adoption-slowing-coinbase-bitpay-is-enough-to-make-bitcoin-a-fiat-557732
blablahblah, 3D printers can print themselves. Grow up man. You can't even understand the point, that chemicals don't allow you produce creations. The computer and the 3D printer change the landscape of what individuals can produce. Don't come in my thread. I will not allow you to post there. You are permanently banned from my life. Talk about garbage out. Everything you say is complete garbage. And that attack is intentional. Because it is true. I don't have time to respond to all your garbage drivel.
If we see capital as "the means of production" then in modern economy capital IS knowledge and the knowledge worker, and the Banks are the Patent Offices. Problem is for Industry as we know it is that the Machine stays where you put it, while a Knowledge worker can move to a higher bidder. True they try to pin them using NDAs but that goes against the principles of free-market.
If we take this situation to the extreme where everyone offers services instead of employed work then the only barrier is a discovery, scheduling and transaction platform for the vast network services, cryptos can help here. Still I think groups will arise in order to have some result guaranties, and fixed networks that have achieved optimality or have broken through a new scape.
Corporations will hang around I guess as long as they can hold on to finite resources, or operate complex processes that will lose efficiency in a decentralized network. But for the Knowledge workers I think it will be the norm.
I think Steam shows a future here.
If we take this situation to the extreme where everyone offers services instead of employed work then the only barrier is a discovery, scheduling and transaction platform for the vast network services, cryptos can help here. Still I think groups will arise in order to have some result guaranties, and fixed networks that have achieved optimality or have broken through a new scape.
Corporations will hang around I guess as long as they can hold on to finite resources, or operate complex processes that will lose efficiency in a decentralized network. But for the Knowledge workers I think it will be the norm.
I think Steam shows a future here.
This universal trend towards maximum independent possibilities (i.e. degrees-of-freedom, independent individuals, and maximum free market) is why Coase's theorem holds that any cost barrier (i.e. resisting force or inefficiency) that obstructs the optimum fitness will eventually fail. This is why decentralized small phenomena grow faster, because they have less dependencies and can adapt faster with less energy. Whereas, large phenomena reduce the number of independent configurations and thus require exponentially more power to grow, and eventually stagnate, rot, collapse, die, and disappear
That trend is not universal take a look at the insides of corporations. Free market is not optimal in efficiency simply more adaptable
And in the end everything dies, But Large Bodies tend to be more efficient and live longer.
Can we just blame the Gov and talk about basic libertarian solutions?
The Libertarian platform advocates for:
Minimally regulated markets
A less powerful federal government Strong civil liberties
Separation of church and state
Open immigration
Non-interventionism
We had a government like this at one point (the US government circa 1800). Unfortunately it spontaneously degenerated into what we have today. The problem with the Libertarian party is not that they are wrong, but that they have no realistic strategy to accomplish their goals.
The libertarian typically believes the current system can be reformed from within. In reality the system is terminally ill. It is slowly dying and likely too far gone to save itself through gradual reform. The probable future is systemic collapse followed by massive social change. As individuals we should plan and prepare so we are not crushed in the death throws of the dying order.
In the wake of the Great Depression the leading economists of the day recommended a transition to full reserve banking. It was called the Chicago Plan. Sadly the power of finance was far too strong and the Chicago Plan was never seriously considered. We now live in a world without a single country city or state that mandates full reserve banking. In a world with vastly different cultures, traditions, and religions that seems odd doesn't it?
Theft via fractional reserve is the single greatest force driving us into collective systemic failure. Any platform that does not address this root cause will not succeed.
Too many long words. Any chance of a summary?
Sadly the links above are a summary. That's why we are so screwed. The problem is sufficiently complex and subtle that society as a whole and most individuals will never understand it.
Essentially society is trapped in a cycle of ever increasing economic inefficiency. Our collective lack of understanding of the fundamental cause will result in attempted "fixes" that will worsen the underlying problem. The end result is economic collapse. The world will not end but we are facing something that is likely to exceed the Great Depression.
To understand why, and why society cannot avoid it (although individuals can) you have to understand the linked works. It's not an easy read.
Can we just blame the Gov and talk about basic libertarian solutions?
Blame is not required but Libertarian solutions work well.
My $.02.
Too many long words. Any chance of a summary?
Sadly the links above are a summary. That's why we are so screwed. The problem is sufficiently complex and subtle that society as a whole and most individuals will never understand it.
Essentially society is trapped in a cycle of ever increasing economic inefficiency. Our collective lack of understanding of the fundamental cause will result in attempted "fixes" that will worsen the underlying problem. The end result is economic collapse. The world will not end but we are facing something that is likely to exceed the Great Depression.
To understand why, and why society cannot avoid it (although individuals can) you have to understand the linked works. It's not an easy read.
Can we just blame the Gov and talk about basic libertarian solutions?
Please show your calculations for a different amount of time, then.
The answer is infinity as the debt can never be paid off. It is mathamatically impossible under the current system.The debt in agregate can only grow. I will show why this is the case and why the hotel room example you cited above is wrong when I have more time.
Yet real world debts are paid off every day, and even loans that go into default must somehow be satisfied. Therefore, there must be an average loan repayment time, like I said in the first place. Sure, all it takes is one outstanding loan and mean repayment time becomes indefinite, but that's not the same as infinite. And a mean is just one type of average statistic.
When a bank makes a loan it must be paid back with interest. This interest must be drawn from the larger economy. Every time a bank creates a loan it creates more debt than money and the overall debt burden relative to money grows. How is this debt paid? It can only be paid via two mechanisms. Someone somewhere in the economy must take out even more debt to pay the initial loan (delay), or debt must go into default and the underlying collateral seized (eventual guaranteed outcome).
Selling assets to pay debt does not change this. A specific individual debt may be satisfied, but that money is then removed from circulation resulting in even less money to pay other debts. Banks create a false boom via sustained periods of money printing. This results in an unstable and volatile imbalance between saving and investment. Low interest rates by a central bank stimulate the creation of money by the banking system. This leads to increased capital spending funded by newly issued bank credit. This debt induced boom results in widespread malinvestment. When credit is cut off there is a massive bust as assets are liquidated at fire sale prices in an attempt to service an ultimately unserviceable debt burden. Rinse wash and repeat and you have a parasitic cycle. I will explore this cycle in depth in part II of my analysis of the banking system ETA 2 weeks.
You are correct that the there is an average loan repayment time and that this average loan repayment time does not go to infinity. However, average loan repayment time can only be kept constant if the loan default rate gradually and cyclically climbs towards 100%.
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