526 Reply by The Great Eye (edited by Zarf BeebleBrix 14-Apr-2009 02:49:58)

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Re: Resource-based economy

Page 22, post 1



But as for the information issue... two problems here:
A: People only need certain resources at certain times.  I only need a diamond when I'm proposing to someone or during some other really special occasion.  So I have to spend hours doing research online for something that will take five minutes.
B: Then you have the problem of communication with the computer.  Let's take the diamond example.  I want a diamond that is most appealing to me.  How do I enter that into something for the computer to understand?  How do I say "supercomputer, what is the most beautiful diamond I can buy?"  Hell, I can't even do this asking another person at a store.  We just use trial and error... going through the diamonds at a store until we find the one we want.  Or going to a restaurant, ordering a dish, then if we don't like it, not eating that dish again.  That's what a computer can't do.  A computer can think.  It can't feel.  If you prick it, it does not bleed.  If you tickle it, it does not laugh.  If you poison it, it does not die.  And if you wrong it, it does not revenge.



No response.  How is this argument not sound?




Next up on the docket, same page:


"Why can't pegging the currency to gold do this?"

> Why limit your portfolio to merely gold?  Not smart; not as stable as diversifying.


Okay.  So you concede this does 100% of what your currency does in terms of everything else.  The only thing I have to do is answer this argument.

First, currency is, and never was, meant as an investment.  It's simply a medium of exchange.
Second, pegging currencies to gold/silver/other precious metals does not prevent people from buying non-food commodities.
Third, your society has a uniquely more unstable currency, because it's backed up by degradable resources.  Gold doesn't fall apart.  Potatoes degrade after a few months.
Fourth, this system has been empirically used in society for hundreds of years, and it proved stable.  The tiebreaker in this issue will be that gold has been empirically used in society, and has proven success.



My gold suggestion was unanswered at this point.  It is a sound suggestion: It pegs the currency to a resource, instead of letting it float.





Then there's the issue of the value of cities.

You assert that cities are a bad thing.  I indicted this claim quite extensively, and challenged the viability of transitioning out of cities.  The post is below, to refresh your memory.  Page 22, post 1.  You answered maybe 2 lines of this, and did not indict the core arguments:





>Here's the problem: Cities have three characteristics which makes them extremely problematic for a transition:
A: High population size and density,
B: Lack of access to food by the merit of the region being a city, and
C: Generally, built on crappy land.,

The problem arises because agriculture requires vast amounts of fertile, yet empty land in order to be effective.

So let's assume your society takes place.  Everyone in cities is told on the news, "By the way, you guys won't be getting any food while you're living there because it's too far to ship things there.  Now back to your regular programming!"

Result?  A massive exodus from the cities.  I live in a large city, and there's no way I would live here if grocery stores decided to stop shipping stuff here.  We would be forced to move to rural areas.  City dwellers would need to find areas with farming and go there.

What results when tens of thousands of people decide to move to the few remote farms in various regions?  Those rural areas become urban areas.    Twenty million people live in New York City alone.  Another 20 million in Mexico City.  I believe 15 million people live in Tokyo.  The list goes on.  All these people would be forced to abandon their homes and move into the farming communities.

This would degrade the farmland in those regions.  We can both agree that cities, in general, are pretty polluting places.  Lots of cars driving around.  Garbage everywhere.  Industries polluting.  All these industries would be FORCED to move out of the far away cities and into the farmlands.  This is extremely bad, because the most important land on the planet is polluted the most.  In short, part of the idea behind the city's existence is because we WANT it isolated from important resources.

Then you have issue #2: The amount of industries that would be lost by abandoning cities.  Cities aren't meant to be centers for harvesting natural resources.  Rather, they are centers of manufacturing, refining, and distributing resources to the people.  Some examples:
Tokyo... hell, all of Japan (Japan has no agricultural sector.  At all.  By your argument, they would have to abandon the entire country): Huge center for production of electronics, such as the computer you're using right now.  Oops!  No more software is produced, and your resource-based economy falls apart immediately!
Detroit: Auto manufacturing center.  Oops!  The amount of vehicles produced and sold is cut in half, and we can't ship resources that are backing up the resource credits anymore!  Your resource-based economy falls apart immediately!
New York: Extremely important center for shipping goods and services across continents.  Another cause of how you destroy international trade, just in case we weren't sure.

These are only a couple examples.  I promise you that any person in this forum who is living in an urban area could probably point out a major industry in their city.  You lose ALL these industries.  That's an IMMEDIATE economic collapse, xeno.

Now for issue #3: Even if we disregard both arguments 1 and 2, your society would require that we rebuild every city on the planet, or start massively killing urban populations.  Either there's another economic collapse from the massive costs associated with rebuilding these cities and keeping refugees alive at the time, without the resources being produced from cities to provide capital for these new cities, or you just caused a massive genocide hundreds of times worse than the holocaust (I don't say this lightly, and I'm willing to bet you will argue that we will rebuild the cities in other locations.  Consider this a preemption in case you say that we should not have as many people on the planet).

And finally, issue #4: If you do decide to argue that we should all live in rural societies, many professions in the world simply are not adequately able to survive in rural societies.
Some examples:
Advanced medicine.  Medical equipment is extremely expensive, and the amount of medical experts in each field is limited (I'm not talking about just "doctors."  I'm talking about different specialties within the field... brain surgeons, heart surgeons, etc).  A heart surgeon in New York, with a population of 20 million people, will have more patients than he can possibly handle.  A heart surgeon in a population of 20,000 people will spend most of his time sitting around and rearranging chairs in his office.  That's a massive waste of resources, that probably would cause hundreds to die with each wasted doctor.
Law: Same thing as above.  Specialized field with a limited amount of people working there.  We want them to be able to handle the most people possible.
Same would hold true for fields like accounting, finance, plumbing, research and development, and basically any field that requires an education.  Each of these fields would be a waste of potential resources and thus a loss in economic growth.
Oh, and I forgot to mention something: Your resource banks would also be one of these specialized fields.  smile

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527 Reply by Xeno

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Re: Resource-based economy

> "This puts you in a double-bind: Either pegging the currency, which removes those 1's and 0's, solves your harms, or it does not, in which case removing the 1's and 0's does not solve the problems you highlight, which proves your plan does not work."  -  proves nothing


How so?  Try backing up your argument.<

I did so in the rest of my argument.

"
>I'm not saying "this is the issue in our lives."  I'm saying "in this particular circumstance, this becomes a problem."  You can't just disregard that people have wants, unless you want to become the Borg or something."<

Well, the fact of the matter is that needs take priority over wants.  In the economy of the future, prices will be deflated for those resources that support basic needs FIRST (water, food, concrete fro homes, etc.), and then only after that happens will prices deflate for resources that people merely want (gold, diamonds).  Personallly I think this will be good.  It will set our priorities straight, which is NOT the situation nowadays.

>"Then I have a question: Where do these saved resources go right now?"<

These resources are not stored as much as they should.  And the little that is actually stored is stored by cartels (especially in the case of diamonds) in order to create artificial scarcity, in order to create inflationary trend in prices.

>"The problem arises because agriculture requires vast amounts of fertile, yet empty land in order to be effective."<

No, it does not.  The way in which people have chosen to do agriculture is part of the problem.  There are more efficient ways of doing agriculture, namely in vertical gardens, whereby let's say crops with deep roots like carrots, yams, potatoes, and beats could be grown under the surface, the each taking nutrients the others do not need, and the bio degradation of a portion of which would provide nutrients for crops grown above them: small shrubs (low-light-growth), like lettuce and cabbage, squash, pumpkins, mushrooms, rice, again, the bio degradation of a portion of which would provide the nutrients for not only the below surface, deep rooted vegetables, but your taller, (high-light) crops as well, such as your banana, and corn, and wheat.  These 3 layer gardens are common in your so called 'under-developed' countries, from which you in the west think you have little or nothing to learn.  LOL.  You have no idea how screwed you people are, do you?  You don't know how to grow enough food for even your small, what 500 million pop.  Embarrassing. 

"Cities aren't meant to be centers for harvesting natural resources."

Exactly.  Isn't that silly?

"Person A is a medical researcher in a large city. " - not representative of typical (majority of) city dwellers.

"CAFO was built a mile away from his farm, "  again, not representative of a typical problem faced by typical (majority of) rural communities.

Believe it or not, Zarf, I have responded to anything that was even remotely relevant in your post, and covered all of your arguments.

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528 Reply by The Great Eye (edited by Zarf BeebleBrix 14-Apr-2009 02:40:58)

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Re: Resource-based economy

Page 22, 3rd post on the page is the devastator.



> xeno syndicated wrote:

> > "This puts you in a double-bind: Either pegging the currency, which removes those 1's and 0's, solves your harms, or it does not, in which case removing the 1's and 0's does not solve the problems you highlight, which proves your plan does not work."  -  proves nothing


How so?  Try backing up your argument.<

I did so in the rest of my argument.


Lies.  You have not explained, even remotely, the difference between your resource-based economy and currency pegging.  In fact, you didn't answer that until the post right before the most recent, and that argument does not answer this at all!



No answer to this.
Now, you're also in a contradiction here: By putting an answer on the original post, you have affirmed it as "sound."  Either your definition of "sound" and "unsound" is purely subjective (and thus, most likely used to dodge arguments you don't want to, or can't, answer), or it isn't subjective and it was affirmed as sound originally, and you ignored it when I asked you to answer it specifically instead of just saying "I did it earlier."

And no, saying "I addressed this earlier" isn't an adequate response.
1: I don't know where you answered it.
2: It's a simple thing to do.  Just copy and paste the old post to show you made that argument if you don't want to type it.




Same post, devastator number 2:




>"Then I have a question: Where do these saved resources go right now?"<

These resources are not stored as much as they should.  And the little that is actually stored is stored by cartels (especially in the case of diamonds) in order to create artificial scarcity, in order to create inflationary trend in prices.


I didn't ask that.  I asked... where do these resources that would be saved under your economy go?

So if there are 500 barrels of oil in the world, and your society would result in 100 additional barrels saved... under the current economic system, where are those resources currently distributed?



A simple question.  Unanswered.  I dare you to say this one was not sound.




Next one... same post



>"The problem arises because agriculture requires vast amounts of fertile, yet empty land in order to be effective."<

No, it does not.  The way in which people have chosen to do agriculture is part of the problem.  There are more efficient ways of doing agriculture, namely in vertical gardens, whereby let's say crops with deep roots like carrots, yams, potatoes, and beats could be grown under the surface, the each taking nutrients the others do not need, and the bio degradation of a portion of which would provide nutrients for crops grown above them: small shrubs (low-light-growth), like lettuce and cabbage, squash, pumpkins, mushrooms, rice, again, the bio degradation of a portion of which would provide the nutrients for not only the below surface, deep rooted vegetables, but your taller, (high-light) crops as well, such as your banana, and corn, and wheat.  These 3 layer gardens are common in your so called 'under-developed' countries, from which you in the west think you have little or nothing to learn.  LOL.  You have no idea how screwed you people are, do you?  You don't know how to grow enough food for even your small, what 500 million pop.  Embarrassing. 


1: How does vertical gardening deal with sunlight issues?
2: If it was more efficient, why isn't there any example of it in practice outcompeting current agricultural practices?
3: We in developed countries have more than enough food to provide for our people.  The issue isn't one of supply, but distribution.



Three questions:
One a simple question asking to better understand your advocated farming method.
One asking about empirical evidence.
One indicting your claim that the developed world doesn't produce enough food to feed its own people.

Sound?  Um... yes!  There's no argument in most of these in the first place!




More to come.  Have fun explaining yourself.

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529 Reply by Xeno

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Re: Resource-based economy

"You picked THE worst off person in a city."

lol

  no homeless people in your city, i suppose

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Re: Resource-based economy

Yes, but you picked the best of the country people.... neither of your examples are "average" or even realistic.

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Re: Resource-based economy

perhaps during the day people could become "the comunity bank" and everyone could send everythign to that person who would then give out stuff to the rest when people ask for it. And when that person goes to bed that person would then send everything to someone else who would becom "the comunity bank"

For example, if i was a farmer every hour i mite send some crops to the "comunity bank" but because i want to build more fences i would then ask the "comunity bank" for some wood and the "comunity bank" would send me the wood. Now if the "comunity bank" went to sleep then he may send evrything to me because if people wanted some of the stuff which "the comunity bank" and the "comunity bank" was asleep they might get cross.

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532 Reply by Xeno

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Re: Resource-based economy

lol @ Lord Ven

SS pwns Fambank

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533 Reply by Xeno

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Re: Resource-based economy

@Fool

"average" or even realistic."

Sure they are.  There are farms like that in most countries.  Most farms are NOT intensive, mega-factory farms like you have in the US.

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Re: Resource-based economy

me US? what?

And Xeno, there are family run farms... but at 25 someone starting one doesn't have the shit you are talking about... maybe at 40-50. Your city guy is wrong too. YOu are being too optimistic with your farm and too pessimistic with your city

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535 Reply by Xeno

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Re: Resource-based economy

It is perfectly fair to be pessimistic about cities.  I mean, look at them.

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Re: Resource-based economy

Yeah, such awesome places and stuff... where you can do so many different things, work in the area you are most suited too, get a good education and generally live the best life you can..

As opposed to a farm, which has the benifit of being outdoors and "good" air and stuff... but generally far from other people (Humans ARE social animals after all.) Only entertainment is what you make yourself, unless you want to travel to a CITY to have some fun...

More money to be made in a city too, no matter what you want to think about the farm life guy...

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but i am Jesus"
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Re: Resource-based economy

Now he's hating on the "mega-factory" farms that cut production costs and give us cheaper food.

[I wish I could obey forum rules]

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Re: Resource-based economy

despite wanting robotic farms that give us food for free?

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but i am Jesus"
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Re: Resource-based economy

Yup. It's things like this that remind us that he's not supporting any ideals or ends here, just whatever stupid nonsense he's been indoctrinated with. Fully automated magical robotic farms that produce food for free are good, but largely automated factory farming that produce food for low costs are bad!

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540 Reply by Xeno

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Re: Resource-based economy

http://www.magazine.ucla.edu/exclusives/air-pollution_cholesterol2.jpg

http://javajune.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/slum-detroit.jpg

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Re: Resource-based economy

It's obviously my problem that there are crack heads and crack whores in detroit. What a sinner I am if I take care of my family over people who will piss and shit on anything given freely to them that they cannot sell for more drugs.

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Re: Resource-based economy

I actually fail to see how anything about detroit matters to me?

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but i am Jesus"
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543 Reply by Xeno (edited by xeno syndicated 31-Mar-2009 16:19:56)

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Re: Resource-based economy

Cities have always been inhumane.  Why people insist on living in them, and buy into the indoctrinations of the rulers of such cities (like MONEY), is beyond my comprehension.

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Re: Resource-based economy

because they actaully do more good tahn evil. Countryside does just a smuch evil and is just as 'inhumane' but you want to be blind to that.... you are just plain stupid... go pla in the schoolyard now... maybe eat some mud cakes

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545 Reply by Xeno

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Re: Resource-based economy

You_Fool, it is a fact that cities do far more evil than good, and are far more inhumane. 

And that's the last word I'll bother expressing to you.

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Re: Resource-based economy

You don't know why people live in urban areas. You don't know why many ignorant and uneducated residents of urban areas embrace the promises [indoctrination] of politicians who use them as a base of support for their power. You're 5. Wait a few years, your brain has a lot of development to do before you can grasp these basic concepts and attain this basic education.

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Re: Resource-based economy

Xeno: what Kemp said... The fact that you think that shows your youth... you are so wrong in so many ways, but because you are young and stupid (oh so stupid) you fail to see them...

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548 Reply by Xeno

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Re: Resource-based economy

I'm not done with this K. William Fancsali, on the other hand, though. 

"You don't know why many ignorant and uneducated residents of urban areas embrace the promises [indoctrination] of politicians who use them as a base of support for their power."

You admit, then, just what I was saying:  people (predominantly in cities, but pretty much everywhere as well) have had donned upon them the blinders of 'false promises' by their centralized governments.  You claim to have insight into why it is this indoctrination occurs time and time again in history, always resulting having the majority DEPENDENT on the centralized government for the fulfillment of their basic needs.

Why does the majority, from age to age, civilization after civilization, tend to place themselves (or allow themselves to be placed) into this state of dependence on a centralized government for their survival, Kemp?

Why does the majority continue to make the same mistake time and time again? 

Would you suppose it is because the majority are simply stupid blind sheep that need to be led by those with more superior intellects, like yourself?

Or could you possibly fathom that there is a more complex reason?  No.  I would suppose you could not.

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Re: Resource-based economy

Xeno, if cities are so evil, why the hell didn't you answer my shit when I said they were good?  tongue


Debating with you is now starting to seem like debating Gene Ray.  hmm

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550 Reply by V. Kemp (edited by Blind Guardian 01-Apr-2009 17:59:20)

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Re: Resource-based economy

People end up being ruled by an all-powerful central government because government only creates more government, never less. Those in power always seek more power, never less. That's why America's founders did all the work they did to LIMIT federal power. The problem is, it is up to an educated populace to keep them in check and not let them shit all over the laws in this country. Sadly, our populace is NOT an educated one [just as many others are not]. They're MORE attracted to promises of hand-outs and completely idiotic policy proposals than strong values and good ideas that actually work [just as many others are attracted to the wrong promises]. It's not a secret. It's not a conspiracy. It's a bunch of greedy people in power (they're the ones who seek power. shocking. I know.) seeking more power to no end. And a willfully ignorant populace giving it to them continually.

The point of this is not that the people need to be self-sufficient. Yes, that would be nice. But the technology you speak of (the existing technology, not magical, mind you) is very expensive. It takes a lot of resources and skilled labor to produce. And it needs to be maintained/repaired/replaced, so even with it no one is fully self-sufficient. People are never going to mine and refine all of the varied materials and learn everything there is to know about maintaining and repairing microelectronics or even regular electronics and mechanical devices. People are never going to all own the necessary machinery to work on microelectronics, regardless of their know-how. The point is that humans are social creatures, and naturally so. No one with a standard of living above that of Robinson Crusoe (not saying that's a bad option, just that the majority will never choose it) will EVER be fully self-sufficient. The problems with ignorant people and centralized power are NOT going to be solved by an autonomy of individuals we will never reach. More autonomy wouldn't hurt. It might help. But the level of it is not the problem and more of it, however good, is not a solution to the problem.

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