If you think that having a massive bureaucracy that controls the economy will lead to an utopia, read Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr: http://amzn.com/0809039435 According to him, Japan is already a country run mostly by the bureaucracy and it leads to all sorts of problems: environmental, financial, cultural, corruption problems, etc.

A bit off-topic, but it's a good book about Japan's "dark side", and I would recommend it to anyone. Most books are about how Japan is great and successful and this one is about how Japan fails.(Note: If you live in Japan I would suggest that you move far away from any nuclear plant)

I was gonna post criticism, but you know what I will just sigh and say, Jackson was a good man, and I wish there were many more like him.

thecite Wrote:Remember, we're talking about a money-less economy here. If people wanted a self-cleaning toilet, and the necessary resources were available, they would get it. I didn't say money was man's reasons for living, just that it's supposedly the main incentive in promoting work and productivity.

This is just so completely ridiculous I'm having a hard time thinking up a response. It's like arguing against 'If people wanted to jump to the moon, why don't they just ignore gravity and do it?'.

If self cleaning toilets were economical, then people would buy them. But they aren't, because it's cheaper to either hire cleaners for public toilets, or to clean yourself. Now self cleaning toilets can be made, but they're more expensive. This is because it requires more workers to produce, design, develop etc, and I'd imagine it needs raw materials. Why would people suddenly be motivated to produce these, when the profit incentive is taken away?

Money isn't there for no reason/to enslave us. People don't work for other people for no reason. This isn't part of the evil system the government has throw upon us. It's how humans behave. While I'm sure the few advocates of the Venus Project and a few others would be working hard designing self cleaning toilets, 99.9% of the human population will be doing what unpaid humans do best: chilling at home. Home being a cave, when the national product falls to around zero.

Honestly, you seem like a smart enough guy. The Venus Project is a load of bull. It's the fantasy of one mans mind.

While we are on the subject of crazy social projects, check this out:

Seasteading.org Wrote:"Seasteading" is homesteading on the high seas. In other words, building permanent dwellings on the ocean. [...] We believe that current political systems are outdated and work poorly, for two reasons. One is the lack of a frontier - a place to go try out new forms of government. [...] The other is the lack of mobility on land that happens because people are tied to buildings and buildings are fixed in place, which makes it hard to change states or countries, let alone pioneer. Seasteading fixes both of these. It opens the oceans as a new frontier for pioneering, a frontier with a fundamentally different quality - fluidity - that lets entire cities be rearranged and reshaped constantly. If you don't like your government, you can literally "Vote with your house" by detaching your seastead and sailing off to another city.

http://seasteading.org/learn-more/faq

thecite Wrote:I am an economics student (at a high school, final year level).

I don't want to be rude, but... no subject you do at high school makes you a student of that subject. Many of us went through a phase around your age where we thought we knew everything. We were wrong and so are you. Humility is a virtue.

The fact is, the modern world, for all its faults, is the greatest society humankind has ever achieved. It is the culmination of the hard work of billions and the intellectual power of more than a few geniuses (yes, people smarter than you). If you think you can do better with a couple of months of thinking (or regurgitating the thoughts of other radicals), think again. Go read the history of how every single attempt to eliminate capitalism ended in utter failure (hey, north korea's still going strong, right?).

People who are willing to put serious thought into how the problems that exist in the world can be realistically solved or reduced have my respect. People whose train of thought goes like "you're all wrong, scrap it all and start again with X"... well, don't. It's simplistic and extremely indulgent. Even if you were right, there is zero chance we would take the risk on something so completely unproven. I prefer not standing in bread lines, personally.

thecite Wrote:Generally, technocracy is founded upon the concept that most of the world's problems are technical, and therefore scientists and engineers should be the ones directing society, rather than politicians. There is no centralised power like in today's democracies; technology is used to identify and solve problems, rather than the mere opinion and laws of politicians. Technocracy proposes an abolition to monetary systems, and instead proposes a 'resource-based economy', in which technology is used to accurately measure the world's available resources, and thereby we are able to sustainably distribute them equally among the population.

I shudder at the thought of putting scientists and engineers at the helm of everything. And I'm not some luddite hippie--I work at NASA for christsake. Anyone who thinks that science and engineering is free of politics, subjective norms, and the other 'evils' of our capitalist, representative democratic society is either ignorant, naive, or disingenuous. Believe it or not, political science and capitalist economics are the logical, time-tested constructions of a long history of rational, free-thinking individuals that have honestly tried to understand and solve the problems of this world. Why trade all that for the blind hope of an unrealized idea?

Poor thecite. He's a good, innocent high school boy who has studied economics more seriously than his peers. But evil adults who lost their innocence long ago all hurl the harsh reality at him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged

shadysaint Wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged

I had a feeling that was going to come up...

I just love when loonies predict the end of capitalism. Its like saying "I predict people will stop being dicks to each other".... Its in our DNA to behave like that and so is supply and demand. What your technocracy proposes is just an invitation to chaos, how those people would be motivated to do anything is beyond me (since everything is done by "scientists"). How would you motivate the only people working (again scientists) to work, so that the rest of humanity can sit on their butts and watch TV (resources are being alloted free)? Utopia "created" on paper by some nuttjobs with too much time.

To understand it better and since its high school, I propose watching South Park, the one with hippies concert. There is this one guy that "knows" how things should work but is being obliterated by 2 short sentences. Watch it 10x and start thinking. I'll give you a hint, zigmonty already talked about it.

If anything we need more capitalism and more free market. Less lobbyists, subventions and generally less politicians messing with economy.

zigmonty Wrote:

thecite Wrote:I am an economics student (at a high school, final year level).

I don't want to be rude, but... no subject you do at high school makes you a student of that subject. Many of us went through a phase around your age where we thought we knew everything. We were wrong and so are you. Humility is a virtue.

The fact is, the modern world, for all its faults, is the greatest society humankind has ever achieved. It is the culmination of the hard work of billions and the intellectual power of more than a few geniuses (yes, people smarter than you). If you think you can do better with a couple of months of thinking (or regurgitating the thoughts of other radicals), think again. Go read the history of how every single attempt to eliminate capitalism ended in utter failure (hey, north korea's still going strong, right?).

That's a very simplistic view of the world. You're pretty much saying that capitalism is the only way human society can function. Why even bother proposing anything else? I never proposed that I am some economics whiz, nor do I wish to, you don't have to be a genius to see that our current society is so terribly wrong. The earth will be dead for humans in a few hundred years if we don't seriously change the way our society functions, you can sit back and refuse all change with a closed mind, or consider a new way of living.

lagwagon555 Wrote:

thecite Wrote:Remember, we're talking about a money-less economy here. If people wanted a self-cleaning toilet, and the necessary resources were available, they would get it. I didn't say money was man's reasons for living, just that it's supposedly the main incentive in promoting work and productivity.

This is just so completely ridiculous I'm having a hard time thinking up a response. It's like arguing against 'If people wanted to jump to the moon, why don't they just ignore gravity and do it?'.

If self cleaning toilets were economical, then people would buy them. But they aren't, because it's cheaper to either hire cleaners for public toilets, or to clean yourself. Now self cleaning toilets can be made, but they're more expensive. This is because it requires more workers to produce, design, develop etc, and I'd imagine it needs raw materials. Why would people suddenly be motivated to produce these, when the profit incentive is taken away?

Money isn't there for no reason/to enslave us. People don't work for other people for no reason. This isn't part of the evil system the government has throw upon us. It's how humans behave. While I'm sure the few advocates of the Venus Project and a few others would be working hard designing self cleaning toilets, 99.9% of the human population will be doing what unpaid humans do best: chilling at home. Home being a cave, when the national product falls to around zero.

Honestly, you seem like a smart enough guy. The Venus Project is a load of bull. It's the fantasy of one mans mind.

No, money is there because it was a necessity for a certain part of human history, we have outgrown the need for money. Money now only gets in the way of sustainability, quality of human life, societal improvement etc.

I completely disagree. I'm not sure, how far you have looked into the ideas of Jacque Fresco, but you've missed many things. Fresco proposes a complete redesign of culture itself. People today say "I won't do it because I won't get paid", but that's purely because they've been conditioned in an environment to hold those values. If a person grew up in a money-free society where they had the necessities of life and academic excellence was encouraged, that person's value system would be completely different. They most likely would aspire to solve problems without monetary gain, merely because that's the value system they have grown up with.

magamo Wrote:Poor thecite. He's a good, innocent high school boy who has studied economics more seriously than his peers. But evil adults who lost their innocence long ago all hurl the harsh reality at him.

What you're saying is nothing new to me. But thanks for the mock-sympathy shtick.
I think the reason that younger people bring these issues up more often is because they have more of an open mind and aren't as conditioned as the older generations.
Then again, Noam Chomsky is 81 and still going strong in his criticism of capitalism.

thurd Wrote:I just love when loonies predict the end of capitalism. Its like saying "I predict people will stop being dicks to each other".... Its in our DNA to behave like that and so is supply and demand. What your technocracy proposes is just an invitation to chaos, how those people would be motivated to do anything is beyond me (since everything is done by "scientists"). How would you motivate the only people working (again scientists) to work, so that the rest of humanity can sit on their butts and watch TV (resources are being alloted free)? Utopia "created" on paper by some nuttjobs with too much time.

To understand it better and since its high school, I propose watching South Park, the one with hippies concert. There is this one guy that "knows" how things should work but is being obliterated by 2 short sentences. Watch it 10x and start thinking. I'll give you a hint, zigmonty already talked about it.

If anything we need more capitalism and more free market. Less lobbyists, subventions and generally less politicians messing with economy.

Yes, because 'capitalism' is an ingrain part of human nature. Greed is not an inevitable part of human nature, it is brought about purely by the environment a person is conditioned in. There are very few inevitable traits of human nature, for the most part our way of thinking is determined purely by the environment we are conditioned in. You only have to look to different societies such as hunter-gatherer tribes, to see that greed certainly is not natural. Every societal system in human history has either been overturned or undergone significant change, what makes you think for one second that 'capitalism' is so perfect? The state of our world would point to the exact opposite.

If people today were transported instantly to this new system, a fair amount of people most likely wouldn't have any motivation. That's because it's the way they've been conditioned. If there's nothing in it for me, I won't do it. If you create a society that fosters academic endeavour without the need to work for the necessities of life, people will have an entirely different way of thinking.
The greatest minds in history weren't motivated by money. Einstein, the Wright brothers, Edison, Newton etc, didn't achieve what they did because they were after some cash.

I'm not a big fan of South Park ever since they started focusing purely on insulting people, whether it be celebrities, minorities etc.

thecite Wrote:you don't have to be a genius to see that our current society is so terribly wrong. The earth will be dead for humans in a few hundred years if we don't seriously change the way our society functions, you can sit back and refuse all change with a closed mind, or consider a new way of living.

Compared to which previous society is ours so terribly wrong? What is your basis for comparison? We are animals who can be extremely selfish and illogical at times, and yet we have accomplished wonders that would be beyond the comprehension of people who lived just a few hundred years ago. It is through recognizing that your average person cannot be trusted to act altruistically if left to their own devices that our society functions as well as it does. That is why we have police, and yes, it is why we have money.

"Let's pretend the world is perfect and humans act only out of altruism for their fellow man" is not a campaign slogan that would sway many voters. Oh, i forgot, in your Utopia, we don't vote, right? Because that would involve politicians? Or are you proposing direct democracy? In which case the middle east would have ceased to exist about 20 minutes after 911.

What if the technology that will govern your world decides that the wholesale elimination of a group of people is in the best interests of society? Naturally, it will be done humanely. Gas chambers are traditional i hear.

zigmonty Wrote:Compared to which previous society is ours so terribly wrong? What is your basis for comparison? We are animals who can be extremely selfish and illogical at times, and yet we have accomplished wonders that would be beyond the comprehension of people who lived just a few hundred years ago. It is through recognizing that your average person cannot be trusted to act altruistically if left to their own devices that our society functions as well as it does. That is why we have police, and yes, it is why we have money.

"Let's pretend the world is perfect and humans act only out of altruism for their fellow man" is not a campaign slogan that would sway many voters. Oh, i forgot, in your Utopia, we don't vote, right? Because that would involve politicians? Or are you proposing direct democracy? In which case the middle east would have ceased to exist about 20 minutes after 911.

What if the technology that will govern your world decides that the wholesale elimination of a group of people is in the best interests of society? Naturally, it will be done humanely. Gas chambers are traditional i hear.

In comparison to human morality and common sense, not any previous society. Funny that you mention police and money in the same sentence, as money is one of the main causes of the need for police. When people rob, they're often doing it because they need the money to live. When people sell drugs, they do it because they can earn money. When people murder, greed and money are often a deciding factor. When a corporation decides to dump waste into the environment, they do it to save money - greed is necessarily a consequence of capitalism. Instead of punishing people for committing these acts, wouldn't it make far more sense to eliminate the underlying problems?

This is not 'utopia'. Utopia is an impossibility, as a society can always improve. By no means would a technocratic society be perfect, just a lot better than what we have today. This isn't a society that could just be elected and concocted in a day. It would entail an absolute overhaul of every aspect of today's culture.

Your last part kind of sounds more like capitalism to me, where humans are casually killed in the pursuit of profit.

Humans aren't going to work for eachother for no reason. Humans act alruistically to the communities they are bought up in, but its only with capitalism that tribes have stopped butchering eachother. If humans were as altruistic as you claim, they would have been working together. Saying 'capitalism has conditioned contemporary society' is a quick and easy answer to all those who think that humans will work together in socialist paradise. But it really doesn't hold any water at all. For example, I've read a book called North of the DMZ, about the everyday lives of North Koreans. They behave 90% the same as us, although they hang portraits of the Kims in their houses, and are subject to a more brutal indocrination routine over working for the greater good and their fellow countryman. Despite all this, the average North Korean goes around living their life much as we do, each concerned with their own goals and aspirations. Humans are humans, it's too easy to say 'humans are a product of their environment, if they were brought up in a moneyless environment they would be completely altrusitic'.

Besides that, what's the chances that all the other great minds of our world have it wrong, yet somehow Mr Fresco has it all figured out? As someone has said earlier, regardless of your views on capitalism, an ageing man who claims he knows the solution to everything via radical reform based on conjecture with no reliable evidence really should set of warning bells in your brain's rational department.

nadiatims Wrote:The problem with technocracy/communism/fascism and doing away with the monetary system is that you're essentially promoting a massive government that decides what you ought to be doing, and how the resources should be used, which ultimately makes the individual less free. The way to utopia is in small government and giving power to individuals.
What Jacque Fresco (venus project guy) ought to do, is demonstrate to the world that he can live sustainably with complete independence from the outside world. If that demonstrably provides a higher quality of life than people will follow.

The point of using technology to balance resources is that it's unbiased, governments don't decide how we should be using resources, technology and scientists devise the most logical way to sustainably use resources.

lagwagon555 Wrote:Humans aren't going to work for eachother for no reason. Humans act alruistically to the communities they are bought up in, but its only with capitalism that tribes have stopped butchering eachother. If humans were as altruistic as you claim, they would have been working together. Saying 'capitalism has conditioned contemporary society' is a quick and easy answer to all those who think that humans will work together in socialist paradise. But it really doesn't hold any water at all. For example, I've read a book called North of the DMZ, about the everyday lives of North Koreans. They behave 90% the same as us, although they hang portraits of the Kims in their houses, and are subject to a more brutal indocrination routine over working for the greater good and their fellow countryman. Despite all this, the average North Korean goes around living their life much as we do, each concerned with their own goals and aspirations. Humans are humans, it's too easy to say 'humans are a product of their environment, if they were brought up in a moneyless environment they would be completely altrusitic'.

Besides that, what's the chances that all the other great minds of our world have it wrong, yet somehow Mr Fresco has it all figured out? As someone has said earlier, regardless of your views on capitalism, an ageing man who claims he knows the solution to everything via radical reform based on conjecture with no reliable evidence really should set of warning bells in your brain's rational department.

And it's easy to discredit someone without seriously analysing their ideas. Fresco's ideas are relevant purely to the position we are in with today's modern technology and science. For the 'great minds' 100 or 200 years ago, a technological society would have been an impossibility. To argue that your environment hasn't conditioned you is far more ignorant. There are reasons people fight, whether it be bigotry, greed, desperation, repression, intolerance etc. These are values that a person learns through experience, they aren't born with them ingrained in their thinking. A person brought up by dogs will act like dogs, a person brought up in a violent family will likely become violent. A person brought up in a greedy society where greed is encouraged, will very likely become greedy.

thecite Wrote:The point of using technology to balance resources is that it's unbiased, governments don't decide how we should be using resources, technology and scientists devise the most logical way to sustainably use resources.

Have you read The Republic by Plato? This sounds like a repackaged version marketed to the 21st century. Many kings in antiquity read this work and used it as a basis for shaping their governments. Give it a read.

vileru Wrote:

thecite Wrote:The point of using technology to balance resources is that it's unbiased, governments don't decide how we should be using resources, technology and scientists devise the most logical way to sustainably use resources.

Have you read The Republic by Plato? This sounds like a repackaged version marketed to the 21st century. Many kings in antiquity read this work and used it as a basis for shaping their governments. Give it a read.

Perhaps I will, but I strongly encourage you to go and read some information on technocracy or one of Fresco's books to form an opinion on your own, don't take me as an authority on this idea.

thecite Wrote:The point of using technology to balance resources is that it's unbiased, governments don't decide how we should be using resources, technology and scientists devise the most logical way to sustainably use resources.

Why should i? The iron ore is in territory i control. For what possible reason would i be motivated to do all the work of digging it out of the ground, only to give it to another group of people without benefit to me? Because a computer thinks it's a good idea? The only way you could enforce this is through military conquest and subsequent brutal occupation. Sounds very much like the colonial days actually. Some guy sitting in London figuring out how best to distribute 1/4 of the world's resources.

Who controls the computer that makes these decisions? I *am* an engineer, a computer engineer at that (sort of). Maybe i think my particular region of the world needs a bigger chunk of those scarce resources. After all, can't have the guys making the technology go hungry, right? The computer will do what the guy who programmed it tells it to do. At least in the colonial days, if you were oppressed, you knew who to hate.

thecite Wrote:A person brought up by dogs will act like dogs, a person brought up in a violent family will likely become violent. A person brought up in a greedy society where greed is encouraged, will very likely become greedy.

Except all knowing Fresco and his wise disciples.

zigmonty Wrote:

thecite Wrote:The point of using technology to balance resources is that it's unbiased, governments don't decide how we should be using resources, technology and scientists devise the most logical way to sustainably use resources.

Why should i? The iron ore is in territory i control. For what possible reason would i be motivated to do all the work of digging it out of the ground, only to give it to another group of people without benefit to me? Because a computer thinks it's a good idea? The only way you could enforce this is through military conquest and subsequent brutal occupation. Sounds very much like the colonial days actually. Some guy sitting in London figuring out how best to distribute 1/4 of the world's resources.

Who controls the computer that makes these decisions? I *am* an engineer, a computer engineer at that (sort of). Maybe i think my particular region of the world needs a bigger chunk of those scarce resources. After all, can't have the guys making the technology go hungry, right? The computer will do what the guy who programmed it tells it to do. At least in the colonial days, if you were oppressed, you knew who to hate.

'Territory i control' now this is the kind of territorial, nationalist conditioning that I'm talking about. This is where technology comes in, you personally wouldn't go to all of the effort, technology could be used to do most of the mining; of course human work would be needed somewhere or other but this would decrease over time as technology improves, just as we're seeing in today's society.

If you were a greedy nationalist, you might think like that. It's not as if the computer system would be centralised in one location, every place in the world would have access to this information. I can only speculate on how such a computer system would operate.

thecite Wrote:Yes, because 'capitalism' is an ingrain part of human nature. Greed is not an inevitable part of human nature, it is brought about purely by the environment a person is conditioned in. There are very few inevitable traits of human nature, for the most part our way of thinking is determined purely by the environment we are conditioned in.

Yes 'capitalism' is an ingrain part of human nature. We are driven by our desire to eat and do stuff that in our minds gets us to that goal (be it work, steal or kill). Possessing stuff was added later but same rules still apply. Greed is also a part of human nature that existed long before (have you ever taken a history lesson??) and will exist as long as we do.

thecite Wrote:You only have to look to different societies such as hunter-gatherer tribes, to see that greed certainly is not natural. Every societal system in human history has either been overturned or undergone significant change, what makes you think for one second that 'capitalism' is so perfect? The state of our world would point to the exact opposite.

Yes we should all point our ways to those mighty hunter-gatherer tribes. They are after all, the peak of human civilization and are responsible for our greatest achievements... They also didn't have their assess handed to them around 500 years ago...
Even if in some of their societies greed didn't develop it doesn't mean its good thing. If they live day by day and sell this crap to every hippie thats out there ("we only take from nature what we need etc.") it only means they are stupid for not planning ahead in case something bad happens (less crops/animals). Eventually this "gathering" thing will lead them to "hey I gathered X but I needed Y and now I'm hungry, but Steve got X+3 and now his family is happy and well fed. Next time I'm going to get X+4 just to be safe, I don't need it but you never know".
How about this greed being natural thing: you mean that if 98% human tribes developed greed but there are some societies where it doesn't exist it must mean that being greedy is unnatural?? Can you SEE the HUGE HOLE in this films plot????? It's Glenn Beck insane!!!!

thecite Wrote:If people today were transported instantly to this new system, a fair amount of people most likely wouldn't have any motivation. That's because it's the way they've been conditioned. If there's nothing in it for me, I won't do it. If you create a society that fosters academic endeavour without the need to work for the necessities of life, people will have an entirely different way of thinking.

Seriously, this discussion is pointless since its obvious you've yourself been conditioned by media/friends or some other entity (parents are my last guess) to your way of thinking and there is nothing that will change it. After all you've never given it any thought yourself, so you will never realize its faults.

thecite Wrote:The greatest minds in history weren't motivated by money. Einstein, the Wright brothers, Edison, Newton etc, didn't achieve what they did because they were after some cash.

Care to share your intimate and time bending relation with those figures that gave you this insight? From what I remember Einstein was big on fame (and fortune probably too), Edison wasn't exactly poor either and Newton is a really hard case to judge. So how do you know their motivation for things they accomplished?? Talked to them recently?

thecite Wrote:I'm not a big fan of South Park ever since they started focusing purely on insulting people, whether it be celebrities, minorities etc.

Yeah, recently they overdo it sometimes. But still there is more wisdom and common sense in there than most TV that gets shoved into peoples throats.

To sum up. Have you ever lived in a communist country yourself? Have you ever waited for a package from your relatives in some "capitalistic" country, just so you can taste oranges or cocoa? Have you ever been in a society where things are distributed centrally and "equally" amongst them? Have you ever seen what it does to a human mind if you live in such country for a long period of time? Have you ever felt sociological effects of getting out of communism into a normal and stable economy?
I'm sure you haven't, because you wouldn't be spewing your nonsense so carelessly.