Topic: Economic Devastation - page 150. (Read 504776 times)

Except technology is not meant to be a substitute to thinking. Google, calculators, encyclopedias, computers, machines; they are tools. Their main purpose is to make work more efficient for the average person, but that is not a substitute for abstract thought and knowledge.  

We used to have to calculate everything using paper and pencil, and memorize multiplication tables. Now we have calculators. We used to have to memorize facts, encyplopedias, and history. Now we can easily look up those things through google and wikipedia. I don't understand why with computers becoming ever more advanced, we won't just continue to use them to supplement our own thinking the same way we did with calculators, google, etc.

Not certain what you mean by that one, so could you please elaborate a bit?

Thanks in advance.

I'm...not exactly sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying the world will slowly turn into the Matrix and we'll have to eventually fight the machines and become their slaves? And then be harvested for battery power and have to save Zion?

Very interesting; well-written and cogent.

Thank you for your post.

My $.02.

Increasingly unlikely over time.  Too many humans, too much technology.  Value of labor tends to zero.  Education exists to indoctrinate and remove surplus labor supply.  To pay for it, the products become wage slaves, but it is mostly make-work, pushing paper, or light servant work.  Most of the working people in the economy are already superfluous.  That situation is getting worse, not better. 

I am one of the elite knowledge workers.  I am still a wage-slave and a servant, but my work is interesting, stimulating, pleasant, and my compensation includes first-class travel, and about 10x the average worker in fiat.  Very few people can get into this sort of arrangement.

I used to be a dirt farmer.  The work was hard and life was rich, but I was poor.  Eventually it became untenable to farm except on a very large capital-intensive scale, and I had to do something else.

Most service occupations (the largest sector in the developed world) will be obsoleted soon, by automation.

Manufacturing is done in the third world.

What is left is finance (autophagy, slave-raiding), logistics, and security (defending the oligarchs from the masses).

Knowledge work is being commodified as well.  Soon a machine will be able to do any knowledge work better than a human.  Probably during my lifetime.

When every job is done better by a machine than by a human, humans have no jobs.  It's that simple. The social contract must adapt, will adapt, either by evolution or by revolution.

Any job they are willing to train for.

Automation is good thing for production, and all those workers will just naturally migrate to other fields over time as different jobs become available. This is very old news

They will work part time while taking college and university classes in the evenings or weekends, and then have middle to upper class level employment opportunities in whatever they studdied and got degrees in. That's what I did when I worked in fast food.

Around 4.1 million people work in fast food right now just in the US.

What sort of "unforeseen job opportunities" will be awaiting them? 

And how will most of them increase their IQ enough to obtain such jobs?

Rome was in constant civil war, run by the military, which was constantly infighting.  Diocletian is generally blamed for debasing the currency, in the 280s.

This chart is very interesting. Never seen it before. Basically it says that everything started go very badly for Rome back in 241 and it was pretty much all down hill from there.

Any Roman history buffs out there? I thought Rome fell to barbarians around 400AD. What was going on in  241 AD?


Edit: minor-transgression posted an excellent Summary of Roman History that describes in detail the gradual decline of its currency.

Embodied (in prior post) is the implication that local politics a la Catherine Austin Fitts is more resilient due to the Dunbar limit wherein humans can handle the trust issues more accurately on the local community scale.

If humans are not expending their effort to accumulate tangible items, because they are simply not that essential to survival, i.e. the 7 lean years become a non-issue, then we will have moved to a higher plane.

> Thanks, I know.  I believe we could achieve that end now if humanity was
> more rational. The knowledge and information is there.  Only 1% of the
> population uses it effectively.

---

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/12/09/taxes-alter-behavior/

"It is time we seriously look at ending the income taxes and stop the borrowing funding government by just increasing the money supply keeping it within 5% of GDP which a central statistical agency calculates for ALL nations eliminating political manipulation."

Your response to the problem of a power vacuum is to increase the economy-of-scale for the vested interests in Brussels!

This really looks like you are working for them! Did you become corrupted in order to get out of prison?

You are a very smart man, so how is it that you believe we can hold a global authority accountable to only calculate 5% of per-nation GDP as tax and force the nations to adhere to it?

Think it out! In order for the global authority to have the power to enforce it, then it also has to power to control the 5% of the GDP tax, meaning it effectively is the beneficiary of the tax. Meaning it can change the rules with the power and resources we've handed to it in your proposal.

This is utter BS!

What we need instead is to remove that power vacuum. It is a very difficult problem to solve, and the solution is technological if any. Not political.

blablahblah, I will try to find some time to reply to you later.

Something from my private email:

 

 

This is still wrong. Anony uses "can not" to mean "should not, but might" because if it does, then bitcoin is vulnerable to attack. I, and all empirical evidence, suggest that security literally can not be tiny compared to the market cap. Market cap goes up > mining profitability goes up > miners chasing profits enter and security goes up. Market cap goes down > mining profitability goes down > miners avoiding losses leave and security goes down. This applies even if there is no more block rewards, as increased market cap = increase in bitcoin value = increase in transaction fees OR increase in economic activity and thus increase in number of transactions with fees. So as market cap goes up, governments, cartels, and everyone else will all be chasing profits, increasing security against each other.
And sorry if this is an oversimplification - yes, there are some feedback loops from miners that affect the price as well - but in general that's the way it is, with other thiings being mostly glitches, such as lack of hardware, or long delays after preorders.

From "Way of The Gun"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0202677/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu

"Parker:

 "There is a natural order. The way things are meant to be. An order that says that the good guys always win. That you die when it's your time, or you have it coming. That the ending is always happy, if only for someone else. Now at some point it became clear to us that our path had been chosen and we had nothing to offer the world. Our options narrowing down to petty crime or minimum wage. So, we stepped off the path, and went looking for the fortune that we knew was looking for us. Once off the path you do what you can to eat and to keep moving. You don't blow your ghost of a chance with nickel and dime. No possessions, no comforts. Need is the ultimate monkey. A pint of your blood can fetch you fifty bucks. A shot of cum, three grand. You keep your life simple and you can literally self sustain."

I think survival has become the ultimate monkey and crypto can help us all survive.

Think about it.

My $.02.

I have praised the genius of proof-of-work. I am criticizing design choices other than that.


I don't know what causes you to equate entropy (or more saliently here equivalently degrees-of-freedom) with lack of free-will. It is precisely the opposite. Without degrees-of-freedom, i.e. some free-will, we couldn't exist. As I have written that without friction (chance or free-will or imperfection), the future and the present would be the same, because there would be no other possibility. I think you are misunderstanding what entropy means, and that it is irreversible, i.e. coinductive. I will quote myself from that link:


For further insight, I refer myself and readers to the prior discussions between blablahblah and myself in the other thread.

I actually picked up that idea from franky ("you've been franked") in the past week or two. I did not verify if it is true, I took his word for it.

But now I am going to piss all over Rassah's silly little thinking. I don't know why I bother (he is on ignore because he speaks only noise, meaning a low signal-to-noise ratio meaning a huge waste of my time and also he boasts about his noise and doesn't even frame it as a cordial discussion).

I never argued that one follows the other, just that they are in fact so far correlated. My stance is that if the security of the network can not be incredibly tiny compared to the market cap*, because otherwise there is too much incentive to not buy up 51% of the hash rate and take over the coin. Governments for one have this compelling incentive, because they don't exist if they can't tax and regulate money creation. Cartels another. Competing altcoins another.

* yet another reason we need a CPU-only coin, so the currency users (i.e. spenders) are the miners. That is another hint for you CoinCube.

Not most of them no. But I am sure a few are.

Thanks for posting all of that supplementary info above. Good stuff there I am going to have to work my way through it this weekend.

Your work stands on its own merits. If a majority don't understand so be it. As the saying goes you can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink. To be honest I am happy just to get a large number of people to read them. The audience will never be ready.

P.S. When you have time consider publishing you thesis in a formal journal.
It is my opinion that this idea ranks on par with the invisible hand in terms of importance