Topic: Occupy Round Table on Bitcoin - page 5. (Read 10880 times)

It still seems hard for you to imagine there being no money. You can't extort money from the populace if there is no money. No one owns anything either, all the resources would be the common heritage of all people. This does not eliminate personal possession though, you could still have and keep whatever you need as long as you need it. But possessing a lot of things that you don't need at the time is simply a burden in this kind of environment, but it's your burden if you want it.

For a change we should start from computerizing and automating most of governmental tasks; the more we could optimize it, less it will cost us to run it, less taxes, everyone's happy.

5-sigma? Cleanliness? Not following.

Technically I could imagine this happening by voluntary work but I see it as unrealistic in the large scale. One possibility is that resource-based communities and ways of life start to pop up independently. Self-sufficient villages are a good example of this, it's resource-based thinking in a smaller scale. This could eventually lead to larger scale changes. I also think that capitalism will eventually lead to this type of system because of two things, it gets so cheap to produce everything and there's not enough payed work for people anymore. Unless we destroy the world before that, which I see as a very real possibility.

No, you are a human being. I'd imagine a lot of the products would have very advanced customization features because it wastes less resources than creating 100 different products to satisfy every need. If the kind of product you're looking for is still missing, you can take part in the designing process of products. All production would be done in an open source, patentless environment. Anyone can take part and if you input the design of a smart, clean product into the system and it calculates that there is expected demand for such a product, then the production and distribution of such a product would start immediately, no questions asked.

Again, because the culture has different values the educational system would make sure that everyone knows it takes 10 times more resources to produce a steak than it takes to produce vegetables of similar energy value. This does not mean that there wouldn't be meat on the menu, it wouldn't be banned. But the system would have to put some kind of limit on meat usage if the resource usage of meat production compromises the supply of food in a way that there wouldn't be enough food for everyone.

As I explained before, needs go before wants in RBE. We would first make sure everyone has the basic needs covered, this includes food, before we start taking into account the special demands of what kind of food. But I really can't imagine meat being a problem. We eat WAY too much meat right now not only from resource perspective but HEALTH perspective. Our diet as cavemen is the one our body is meant for and we didn't eat meat every day back then, it was a rare treat. Education would also have a strong focus on healthy eating habits, because that reduces the cost the society has to endure from diseases based on a wrong kind of diet.

There is no money so it can't be too expensive to you, but it can be too expensive for the system to produce. Expense would be resource usage and energy usage etc. Creating a TV that lasts forever would probably be inpractical for many reasons, but we would try to find the perfect balance to achieve the best resource efficiency for the long term. I'm pretty sure it would be a hell of a lot efficient compared to how we produce televisions today.

As I said, the products would be highly customizable so it would not be a problem to get a Hello Kitty television. Only one model needed for this, the surface of the TV could be made in a way that it can be anything you want. This is much more efficient than creating different models for everyone. If you want to create a new kind of television you can take part of the designing process, I explained this earlier.

The whole society would be built on sharing, including the information related to production. Everything would be open source and without patents. I imagine this would help innovation quite a bit because nobody would need to start developing from scratch, the current state of science and technology would always be there for everyone to use. The reason people would actually like this and accept that their inventions are shared "for free", is that everyone else does the same and it benefits everyone. You give to others and they will give back to you, someone can develop something even greater using your invention as a start.

Try doing sociology and economics at the 5-sigma level. It is not feasible for the foreseeable future.

Exactly. But try telling this to a physicist. All science has chaos. We are barely beginning to understand the fractal universe. However, we are developing algorithms to filter the noise and find useful data to make predictions.

Science is based off data. Most data is noisy. So noisy that most of the time even if you get stat significance and did it yourself you still don't trust it 100% until multiple other groups have replicated it. There is no replication in sociology or economics (and this is the noisiest data of them all). So there is no way to be confident in your science-based decision in the same way you would in an experiment involving a simpler system. Every time a government employs a political or economic policy it is basically experimenting on its citizens. Think about it that way.

Children are not private property. They are new members of society to which you contributed genetic material and space for incubation. Treating them as private property, allowing only parents to be responsible for them, is largely the reason we have the society we have today. A society and a culture that cared for all children and nurtured them as citizens and participants in society would have a better understanding of what it means to care for each other and be responsible to all others who share the same planet. It would not allow children to be warehoused in child prisons, being taught useless irrelevant information and be indoctrinated to support false authority. Forcing parents to separate from children and seek employment for monetary gain in a contrived competitive environment that promotes artificial scarcity allows for the "re-education" that some here so easily deride. Start looking at the fundamental assumptions in your society and realize that it is not in your best interest to continue in our current direction.

Maybe their will be willfully ignorant people. My friends an I would (hypothetically) be proposing scientifically supportable designs for some extraordinary capitalist* venture. We would be adding great value to society by developing useful tools that benefit everyone. My friends would have excellent track records for such successful ventures in peer reviewed communication channels. If you properly educate yourself, perhaps you can participate in such ventures. BTW, RBE is not much different from the capitalism you understand, but industry is managed by logic, not nepotism and corruption.

*Capital as in aggregated material resources

I actually feel the same way. "Your plan is too complicated, therefore, it will fail." That is why I asked for the comparison between the complexities of the human brain and society.

This is a prime example of inside-the-box thinking. No one would ban barter in a resource-based and it's perfectly possible that there would be trade for certain items and services, but the main bulk of the economy would work without money or trade. I see it as beyond baffling that people can't even imagine this happening, when it is actually technically possible anytime we want.

We have gotten very far from the days where economists claimed resources can't be distributed with computers as efficiently as the price mechanism can. This argument is still used but I think it is a very outdated view. Questionable to say the least. As someone with IT knowledge, I don't find it at all impossible to computerize and automate the entire process of international trade. And the numbers we base everything on would be more advanced than price, instead of a one-dimensional model (price) we would have a multi-dimensional model where we take account things that price is incapable of telling us.

"The signal to noise ratio is higher in the brain than in society"

What makes you say that? Also, what do you mean by "signal" and "noise" with respect to each? Further, what are you referring to when you say statistically insignificant error?

Technology doesn't need money. Inventing a new razor, toothbrush or a vacuum cleaner with no meaningful advancements needs money. Real science doesn't advance because of money, there are more meaningful incentives. Go ask any famous scientist why they do what they do and you will understand that money is a false motivator. Money is only needed today because people's livelihoods are dependent on it. And there's also the fame and success factors of owning a lot of wealth. And the actual power that comes with it, because in this system you vote with your money.

The world of open source and freeware applications/services that are created in the computer world is one good example of different type of motivations. And when you automate all the monotone jobs, which is possible btw, all we are left with are jobs where monetary rewards do more harm than good. This is proven.

Heh, what would you produce that anyone would want?

I wrote a different book. Don't put words in my mouth. BTW, did you read Bellamy yet?

Think again. It's not human nature to be greedy or to hoard things. It's human nature to the extent that we are all capable of that. This way we are all killers as well. But as with killing, greed and hoarding doesn't just magically come about by itself. The reason why greed and hoarding is thought as universal is that we've lived for thousands of years in a world with scarcity and pricing. This creates entire cultures of greedy people because it's how you survive and succeed.

Build a different kind of system where success is not dependent on your wealth and you don't work to gain wealth or livelihood but you work to do something meaningful and to better yourself. A system where you simply get what you need without a price tag. And there is enough for everyone. The mindset of greed and hoarding does not come in if you have a society like this.

I have to agree that in the short term this is utopian because you can't simply take people who are used to living in this sick environment and put them in a RBE environment, they wouldn't know how to behave. It would be a disaster. That is why change to this type of system is so difficult.

Forget the "re." Back of the class.

I can almost hear the steam blasting from Atlas' ears.

That's at one time. People come and go. Kareem claimed 10,000 women, heh.

hes referring to a post I made elsewhere about dunbars number:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number