Topic: Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it - page 12. (Read 17723 times)

Most people think the same, but the reality is not quite that. In most jurisdictions the law guarantees that with the national currency (called legal tender in this case) you can only pay taxes and debts to the state. This means, for example, that a buyer may not insist on settling accounts in "legal tender" with a seller ("the right of a seller to refuse doing business with")...

What people really care is not the money, but the things that the given money can buy. You can have some other kind of securities like bond, stock or option, but you can not bring any of these securities to a restaurant and order a pizza. The universal acceptance in commercial is the key for money. Since fiat paper is guaranteed by law to settle debt throughout the whole country, it automatically become the best form of money domestically

In fact, if something is universally accepted in commercial, it will automatically become some sort of money to clear the debt between different entities, even without government/central bank backing

An example is restaurant/supermarket coupon, often used as a replacement for fiat money in a small area. These coupons have a valid period, before they expires, they must be used to redeem the product/service from the issuer. And they become useless if the issuer went down . For fiat money, they are valid until the government went down, obviously much longer than those coupons, but still not as long as bitcoin or gold

We are talking about high productivity here, with the help of technology, Bob does not need to cooperate with Alice, but he need Alice to buy his products with money, this is a strange but prevail culture on this planet

Two people's island is just a metaphor, it involves the basic elements in today's society: Production, exchange and consumption. In such a society, each one must find his customer to sell his products/services, a model of two person is enough to represent the whole society

I trade TSLA regularly and I know their financials well.  Elon Musk is not someone I want anywhere near our financial system.

First if all the guy is a stock manipulator.  He might be a brilliant engineer and maybe even a great showman/ marketing hype man.  But all he does is pump his stock before a debt raise and dump it when it gets too frothy.  You know he did a $3B convertible w Morgan Stanley for his so called "gigafactory". They timed a pump where MS did an upgrade w a $300 price target.  And like a few days later they announced the raise and dumped the stock from $265.  If I was an investor, I'd be pissed.



LOL if you believe Tesla has 25% margin w NON-GAAP

On a thread where there is criticism given to a our monetary system and money itself, and your input about an example for technological innovation and automation is about money and profits, then you likely missed the point.

Tesla is not profitable and doesn't plan to be profitable for the next few years.  They are having to invest in infrastructure to grow production capacity and distribution, which Tesla has explicitly mentioned takes precedence to being profitable.  He mentioned they're making about 25% gp, which is very profitable for the auto industry.

You've made it clear that you're not a fan of Tesla, but no one needs you to be one.

I always thought it was incredible how someone changed the mind of the masses to use this flimsy piece of paper, that holds no true use to its name to being the most dominant trade item in the world.  Think about it, You literally can't do anything to money except destroy it and trade it, and it has no use beyond what we make it.  Same goes with bitcoin though, they are not actually worth anything to our survival, but they have this invisible worth and we all kind of just accept it. 

Robinson Crusoe fallacy.

If they are only 2 people or even a hundred people.  They are going to collaborate not compete if they want to survive

Oh please.  Elon Musk can't even make Tesla profitable.  Have you ever looked at their financials?  Terrible

The rational solution for Bob, is to spend 10 time less time at work than Alice, so he maximizes effort/money.
Government intervention or not, it would not change the rational decision.

In fact the productivity is already enough high for most of the people to retire early, but due to the existance of money and exchange, this can not be done

Imagine an island with two people Bob and Alice. Bob is very smart and can produce 10 times more products per year than Alice. In today's monetary system, we suppose that Bob will earn 10 times more money than Alice (Money is used as a unit of value)

But that is simply not possible, because Bob's income can only come from his sale to Alice, and Alice have much less productivity thus much less income. As a result, Bob's income is limited by how much Alice can spend

The current solution is government charging heavy tax on Bob and give them to Alice so that she can buy more Bob's products. It also means that Alice get more income than her production, because of Bob's high productivity

Or, government take loan to run infrastructure projects, give Alice enough income to buy Bob's products

Anyway, the core of the problem is: High productivity people can not fully utilize their efficiency due to low demand from low productivity people. Unless they give up some of the productivity for free, there is no way to reach 20% employment

If Bob is not profit oriented, he can max out his production thus maximize the social wealth, but he won't have enough motivation to do so, since redistributing his products to Alice is more like a donation. Money is that motivation: If Bob can exchange all his production into money, he has some motivation to produce more, since money will store value and delay his consumption until a later time. Unfortunately, since Alice have little access to money, Bob can not make money by himself alone

So there are a few issues keeping us from going towards this automated economic model.

1) We don't have enough people on the tech/r&d/engineering side currently, so we would need many more people to be educated (in or out of school) in coding, software development, robotics, engineering, etc.
2) What happens to the rest of the people that are useless in the new system?  They are the majority.
3) In this system, only companies that actually produce or optimize goods/services are useful - so things like financial services, which don't really produce anything but take a cut from everyone that does produce, will need to
4) How are resources distributed for production?  Ideally it should go to the most productive and beneficial options.  Then once goods are made, how are they distributed if the majority of the population doesn't make income?

We are currently so primitive compared to the type of world we're dreaming of...I mean like you said, we have the money printer going and engage in war.  Could you have any stupider people leading the world?  Once you've conditioned an idiot to think he's doing good by killing another person that he's never met, something's very wrong.  In the new world, that idiot would need to be programming a manufacturing robot. /end rant.

For the transition, I think the tech companies will have to set the stage and compete solely based on technological innovation.  Elon Musk is making a huge push for tech companies to expand into other industries, and I really think when you have brilliant minds, they can take over whichever industry they please. 

Another thought: This imaginary concept (money is a standard unit of value) is unconsciously used by even the most famous economists throughout their works, all their formulas and calculations are based on this simple assumption, which is just a wishful thinking

Similarly, all the science is based on two unconsciously accepted prerequisites: Space and time. Without space and time, there is no science.

Without money, there is no economics. However, unlike space and time, which we can not remove as prerequisites for the world, money can be avoided. The true economy theory should not use the concept of money, that will make it much easier to see the truth behind all economy activities: Desire

True, automation require a lot of R&D, and when complexity raised above certain level, the cost will be higher than the gain. In a highly  complex system, a small bug will cause days of delay in automated system, which could trigger a chain of reaction.

But anyway that is the trend, maybe not 5%, but 20%, there should be a framework that can be adjusted based on how much labor is needed to re-allocate the resource to those redundant people. Current solution is printing lots of money to create lots of useless job just to make people get something to do, not a bad idea but far from efficient

We are still quite far from the type of automation that will allow for 5% employment.  Even if the majority of production is automated, there are still many other components of a goods producing business that may not be automated if they are competing in a relatively free market.  Procurement, logistics, marketing, sales, support, R&D, etc. would still require a human component without AI right?  Then there are service industries.

I consider Tesla to be one of the most technologically advanced companies, where a large portion of their production is automated, but they still need to employ a ton of people, not only in production, but for the other components of running a business.

To your point, there would need to be a better way of distributing resources aside from time-based income though.  Almost sounds communist.

Is it possible that today's highly concentrated industry structure is caused by the fiat money system (Large enterprise get larger loans thus expand much faster than small enterprise and wipe them out by economy of scale)? Would bitcoin make things better because there will not be an easy way to get financing through credit expansion?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/reputation-coin-or-the-passing-of-greed-vs-money-and-anonymity-998993

Those opposed to welfare are Fucked. We are headed towards a future where automation will allow for 95% of people not needed, and 5% of human labour will be all that's needed to generate the world's GDP. When we get there... you either give the people that "aren't needed" a welfare or prepare for a total catastrophe.

This, right here. The money supply is insulated from the supply of goods, those are generally determined by disposable income as per inferior goods and what not. Overall, money supply economics are far more complex than a few theories can describe, simply because there's so many factors to take into account. It's constantly changing, unpredictable, and a clusterfck at best.

There exists a need for regulation and centralization; the Libertarian's wet dream of decentralized EVERYTHING would fail because it would require people to act not on impulse, but for the greater good.

That borders on socialism, no? And look how successful that's been in history.

We need wages being paid in bitcoin, having to convert your fiat into bitcoin monthly to use it it's annoying.