Yonosa Wrote:By the way, I was an Austrian Economist supporting Libertarian but I am now an advocate of the Venus Project. Enjoy.

Yonosa Wrote:By the way, I was an Austrian Economist supporting Libertarian but I am now an advocate of the Venus Project. Enjoy.

Blahah Wrote:Because of this film? Either this a damn powerful film, or you're a damn powerful moron.

edit: I'm actually going to watch it to find out.

Quote:In this capstone talk from YUIConf 2010, Yahoo! JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford reflects on the life of Walt Disney, who dreamed of creating a ‘City of the Future’ in Florida as part of the project that became Disney World. (This is not a technical session, but rather one about big dreams and the life lessons we can draw from them.)

nadiatims Wrote:This is precisely why we now have things like super fast internet, airplanes and air conditioners. Zeitgeist movement is all about making people more free by working together but under a capitalist system people already do that when it's in their own interest. I don't see how the Zeitgeist movement can achieve anything without having some kind of centralised decision making core, and that would only lead in the opposite direction of it's stated goals. The road to people living freer and better lives lies in the constant invention/refinement and price reduction of labour saving devices and methods of providing essentials like food/shelter and energy.

thecite Wrote:Even if you accept that some sort of capitalist system is the most effective way to achieve technological innovation, we simply cannot carry on the way we're going. With private tyrannies (corporations etc) controlling the world's resources and environment, we'll simply destroy ourselves in the very near future. This isn't a radical view, this is a basic principle of capitalism. Any society based on material wealth and personal gain will destroy itself in time. If we want a sustainable, more free society, we need resources to be in the hands of the people: we need a far more democratic society.

the cite Wrote:Well, our super fast internet and airline services are also greatly due to government subsidising/ research programs (e.g. the pentagon program) which actually goes directly against the idea of free market capitalism. Funnily enough, Obama even mentioned this in his state of the union address.

thecite Wrote:Even if you accept that some sort of capitalist system is the most effective way to achieve technological innovation, we simply cannot carry on the way we're going. With private tyrannies (corporations etc) controlling the world's resources and environment, we'll simply destroy ourselves in the very near future. This isn't a radical view, this is a basic principle of capitalism. Any society based on material wealth and personal gain will destroy itself in time. If we want a sustainable, more free society, we need resources to be in the hands of the people: we need a far more democratic society.

Tzadeck Wrote:And actually, I think there's no reason to think that some dreamed-up freer society would last longer. How do you know? That's what Marxism was supposed to be, but it went all awry for reasons that people didn't predict. We can avoid the problems that Marxism had, but that doesn't mean there isn't a whole host of other problems that are impossible to predict and may cause the whole thing to not work.

nadiatims Wrote:But how can we prove that the results are better than if everyone was just taxed less and thus less in need of research programs and subsidising etc? I guess you could probably argue the aviation industry advanced rapidly thanks to high military spending during ww1 and ww2 but these wars also destroyed value on a massive scale.

thecite Wrote:Yes, you could make some hypothetical argument that all societies will destroy themselves in time (this isn't necessarily true, if humans get to the point where we can explore space meaningfully, our species could last hundreds of thousands of years by moving around and spreading out through the universe); but any society based on personal gain/ greed and material wealth will destroy itself swiftly. Not a controversial view.
By Marxism, I'll assume you mean socialism (which are actually two very different things). Well perhaps we could make some very insightful judgments on the sustainability of socialism if it had been meaningfully practiced in any nation on Earth, which it hasn't. Soviet Union - Totalitarian/ capitalist. PRC - Totalitarian/ capitalist. Cuba - Totalitarian, slowly becoming more capitalist.
The whole Leninist notion that you need a 'vanguard party' to usher in socialism goes directly against the idea of socialism; that is, that people should be in control of the decision making in society, and control the resources and means of production.

Like I said in another thread, I think a great example of socialist/ democratic success is the Spanish Revolution.

Tzadeck Wrote:I do think the capitalist system will fall, but I think that it doesn't really have anything to do with capitalism itself. With the human population as high as it is, I don't believe that there will ever be a feasible system that will prevent humans from causing massive environmental damage. You want a feasible system for not causing vast environmental damage? How about 95% of the worlds population dying out? Seems like the only solution that will realistically ever happen.

thecite Wrote:

Tzadeck Wrote:I do think the capitalist system will fall, but I think that it doesn't really have anything to do with capitalism itself. With the human population as high as it is, I don't believe that there will ever be a feasible system that will prevent humans from causing massive environmental damage. You want a feasible system for not causing vast environmental damage? How about 95% of the worlds population dying out? Seems like the only solution that will realistically ever happen.

This ignores how inherently wasteful capitalism is, and the fact that it's actually only a small amount of the world's population that is consuming the large amount of resources.
The system we have is about using as much resources as possible, as quickly as possible, to gain the maximum profit, this is diametrically opposed to sustainability.

Blahah Wrote:That's a problem with how we source our resources, not with capitalism

Blahah Wrote:

thecite Wrote:

Tzadeck Wrote:I do think the capitalist system will fall, but I think that it doesn't really have anything to do with capitalism itself. With the human population as high as it is, I don't believe that there will ever be a feasible system that will prevent humans from causing massive environmental damage. You want a feasible system for not causing vast environmental damage? How about 95% of the worlds population dying out? Seems like the only solution that will realistically ever happen.

This ignores how inherently wasteful capitalism is, and the fact that it's actually only a small amount of the world's population that is consuming the large amount of resources.
The system we have is about using as much resources as possible, as quickly as possible, to gain the maximum profit, this is diametrically opposed to sustainability.

That's a problem with how we source our resources, not with capitalism. Energy is a prime resource, can generate capital and you can use it until the cows come home as long as you have a sustainable source of it. We've been using fossil fuels - thats unsustainable. If we find a sustainable means of energy provision (we have several) and start using them universally, capitalism becomes sustainable (at least for energy). Other resources can similarly be made sustainable, for example making various materials which currently use mineral resources from various forms of carbon (e.g. nanotube materials). Space is a finite resource on the planet, so is water (at least for now) but that doesn't make capitalism unsustainable. As long as there are some essentially limitless resources, you can continue to use them to generate value.

Tzadeck Wrote:

thecite Wrote:Yes, you could make some hypothetical argument that all societies will destroy themselves in time (this isn't necessarily true, if humans get to the point where we can explore space meaningfully, our species could last hundreds of thousands of years by moving around and spreading out through the universe); but any society based on personal gain/ greed and material wealth will destroy itself swiftly. Not a controversial view.
By Marxism, I'll assume you mean socialism (which are actually two very different things). Well perhaps we could make some very insightful judgments on the sustainability of socialism if it had been meaningfully practiced in any nation on Earth, which it hasn't. Soviet Union - Totalitarian/ capitalist. PRC - Totalitarian/ capitalist. Cuba - Totalitarian, slowly becoming more capitalist.
The whole Leninist notion that you need a 'vanguard party' to usher in socialism goes directly against the idea of socialism; that is, that people should be in control of the decision making in society, and control the resources and means of production.

Like I said in another thread, I think a great example of socialist/ democratic success is the Spanish Revolution.

I'm not sure you have realistic expectations about how hard space travel is. It's feasible that we could establish a colony on mars, but that's pretty much the limit. Even the nearest star to us is four light years away. The nearest extrasolar planet that could sustain humans is likely to be thousands of light years away. If you can figure out how to get a group of humans to live on a space ship for, say, ten thousand years (way longer than recorded history), be my guest. Ten thousand years being an underestimation of how long it would take, of course (after all, we'll never make a spaceship that can go anywhere near the speed of light).

I'm not saying that it's NECESSARILY true that all societies will destroy themselves in time (very few things are necessarily true--one might be "There are no square circles"). Almost all human knowledge is in degrees, and we know very few things for certain. I'm making an argument from induction: Every civilization before us has fallen in a relatively short amount of time. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that that will continue to happen. Just like it's reasonable to assume that when I drop a pencil it will fall to the floor and not the ceiling--that's how it's always happened. We're more sure of the pencil falling, but both are based on the same type of inductive reasoning.

I agree that what you're saying isn't a controversial view. People say it all the time. That's what makes something not controversial. I think it's not well thought out. It's just a popular meme--it's not based on any real theory.

No, I don't mean socialism, I mean Marxism. A big part of　Marxism is the belief that a proletarian revolution will take over the government and change the economic framework to socialism, with proletariat control of the means of production and private property in general under state control. That's what I'm talking about, that's what went awry. It seemed like an awful good idea, but once people tried to put it into action, the countries basically became capitalist dictatorships, as you said (although for a short amount of time the People's Republic of China actually was socialist). The whole point of what I was saying is that you can't plan some big societal change in advance because it won't turn out how you expect it to. Society is a very complex system. Simple theories, like those in Marxism or The Venus Project, just don't apply to it.

ファブリス Wrote:

Blahah Wrote:That's a problem with how we source our resources, not with capitalism

You could say the same about guns, nuclear bombs, heavily processed foods, and such. Guns don't shoot by themselves do they? Capitalism per se is not directly the problem, what it represents is.

I think what's at stake here is a necessary shift in people's motivations and consciousness about others.

This discussion is pretty pointless imho unless we acknowledge the current paradigm, its problems, and the need for a new one.

That's what these movies are good for. Getting stuck in the minutiae of captialism, or other systems, is missing the point imho.