Money, along with religion, is one of the worst inventions in history.
As long as human nature exists, there will always be money and religion. Even if humans live in a post-scarcity economy, some form of money will still exist. After all, due to laws or rarity, not everything will be available for free. Becoming part of the Borg Collective would make money worthless, but the religion of the Borg Collective will still exist.
More artificial scarcity......
To be artificial scarcity requires there to be an excess that goes unused.
The reason it works on 25th century Earth is that food and clothing are such a tiny expense as to be inconsequential to the planetary energy consumption. This is actually what "post scarcity" means when talking about the UFP. It's not that the UFP doesn't have a budget, just that the budget is huge, and living expenses for citizens are a tiny piece of it.
Well, I mean artificial scarcity as in keeping the status quo going.
Remember the so-called 'energy crisis' of the early 70's, saying oil would be gone by the early 80's?
Several decades later, we still have it, and paying whatever the oil pimps demand.
Plus Stan Meyers dying under questionable circumstances kinda adds to it.
That is what I mean. The few on the top play a metaphorical chess game, with all us peons being the table for it, as it were.
All the peons needs to do it simply stand.
The "oil crisis" of the 1970s was a manufactured crisis. We knew it at the time (yes, I was around then - I'm 55 years old, after all). OPEC had drastically cut production in order to increase worldwide oil prices. Detroit exacerbated it by insisting that they couldn't possibly produce safe yet fuel-efficient cars (as that would have led to needing to spend lots of money on R&D, which they wanted to avoid). This was part of what led to Japanese dominance of the automobile market in the early '80s, as Japanese manufacturers just went ahead and started making the cars anyway (their quality control was not the best at first, but improved over time, particularly after they began moving manufacturing to the States - their old engineers just weren't used to the concept of how far Americans drive).
Peak oil, however, is a real thing; it's the reason we started fracking oil wells, because all the easily-recoverable oil in those wells had already been pumped. New petroleum takes geologic time to make, and we're outstripping that by many orders of magnitude. If we had continued to suck down oil at the rather prodigious rate common back in the '60s and '70s, the Resource Wars of Fallout fame would have been quite real. And even at our modern reduced rate, it will happen eventually. Really, burning petroleum for fuel is the wrong thing to do entirely - it's far too valuable for chemical production.
The OPEC crisis was also in large part a response to geopolitical events of the time, which I won't go into so as to avoid bringing politics back into things. (And no, I wasn't there, but I have studied it as an undergraduate of history.) The situation was so dire as a result of the OPEC crisis that the US Government started stockpiling large quantities of fuel in the aftermath to try and carry America through any future shortages (this surplus import makes up a large part of US expenditure).
Resource shortages are real. The fact that coal and oil still makes up a large part of US (and European) energy production is one reason why electricity, and thus all manufactured goods produced domestically, are so expensive: these resources are not only limited, but as a result they're expensive. Hindered access to these resources in the form of sanctions and trade tariffs (justified or not) on their primary producers does not help matters. France circumvented these issues in the '60s by transferring most of her energy production to atomic energy, being one of the only countries to be almost totally nuclear-powered, but this is of limited use in the first place for much the same reason France went to nuclear power to begin with: France lacks natural resources with which to produce goods. Its raw materials and finished goods tend to be imported (except those finished goods manufactured domestically with imported materials) and as such are subject to prices relating to the original producer's energy costs.
Virtually every consumer good we rely on as a society is dependent on energy production, and the hesitancy (or pig-headedness) of world leaders to transition to more sustainable, and thus more cost-stable and -efficient, sources of energy than fossil fuels is a big factor in the stagnant (at best) living standards of much of the population.
Yeah, artificial scarcity is more like the "Disney Vault," where Disney and stops producing recordings of its films so that when they "open the vault up again," prices are higher. In fact, if you look at the Wikipedia page for artificial scarcity, it links to the page on the Disney Vault.
You could make the argument that because a government can print as much money as it wants, a failure to continually churn out as much money as it can is a form of artificial scarcity, but limiting the amount of money in circulation at any given time is necessary because diluting the pool of money reduces the value of each unit of currency, which can lead to runaway inflation and economic collapse.
The "oil crisis" of the 1970s was a manufactured crisis. We knew it at the time (yes, I was around then - I'm 55 years old, after all). OPEC had drastically cut production in order to increase worldwide oil prices. Detroit exacerbated it by insisting that they couldn't possibly produce safe yet fuel-efficient cars (as that would have led to needing to spend lots of money on R&D, which they wanted to avoid). This was part of what led to Japanese dominance of the automobile market in the early '80s, as Japanese manufacturers just went ahead and started making the cars anyway (their quality control was not the best at first, but improved over time, particularly after they began moving manufacturing to the States - their old engineers just weren't used to the concept of how far Americans drive).
Peak oil, however, is a real thing; it's the reason we started fracking oil wells, because all the easily-recoverable oil in those wells had already been pumped. New petroleum takes geologic time to make, and we're outstripping that by many orders of magnitude. If we had continued to suck down oil at the rather prodigious rate common back in the '60s and '70s, the Resource Wars of Fallout fame would have been quite real. And even at our modern reduced rate, it will happen eventually. Really, burning petroleum for fuel is the wrong thing to do entirely - it's far too valuable for chemical production.
Telsa felt the same. Thank JP Morgan and Edison for stopping something that should have been allowed to happen.
Also, there IS a policy that the govt has, where they confiscate new technology that offers technology better than oil. They either buy it from the maker, and then lock it away. It's a term known as "Black Shelving"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sef0nTEL8U
Or other, even more despicable techniques our illustrious utility overlords like to do can be summed up with Stan Meyer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg_haZ955Gw <
Funny how a guy who made a car that happens to run on water, managed to die under rather questionable circumstances, no? And one does not need a formal conspiracy when interests collide.
And if one thinks that is far fetched, or that those in power, as Barbra Walters (which she shows that one can be educated, yet unintelligent at the same time) said "I can't believe our own government would be so evil to do such a thing to their own people"....remember the following:
The Gulf of Tonkin (which was declassified in 2005 and stated that the events that led to Vietnam were, in fact, a LIE...and one that cost the lives of 50,000+ Americans and lord knows how many Vietnamese)
Watergate
"Weapons of Mass Destruction"
And so many investigators who died under questionable circumstances investigating heinous scandals and crimes....such as the ongoing pedophilia/sex trafficking that seems to be going on with various politicians, businessmen, clergymen and celebrities (once again, I am looking at you, JEFFERY EPSTEIN *cracks her knuckles*)
And why? Because money talks...and is another weight I put on the CON side of money on the proverbial scale.
And as Dr Greer once said, it's time these technologies be released, otherwise will be will killing each other over the last barrel of oil.
Time mankind WAKES UP.....and soon, or, instead of a life like Star Trek, we'll have a life like Mad Maxx.
Yeah, artificial scarcity is more like the "Disney Vault," where Disney and stops producing recordings of its films so that when they "open the vault up again," prices are higher. In fact, if you look at the Wikipedia page for artificial scarcity, it links to the page on the Disney Vault.
You could make the argument that because a government can print as much money as it wants, a failure to continually churn out as much money as it can is a form of artificial scarcity, but limiting the amount of money in circulation at any given time is necessary because diluting the pool of money reduces the value of each unit of currency, which can lead to runaway inflation and economic collapse.
The dollar is worth nothing. Why ya think so many countries are trying to escape it and the petro dollar...which is akin to 'protection money', similar to what the Mafia were known for. The us is gonna have a collapse at some point. It's the fall of Rome, and I say karma can be a b**** goddesses. And I won't be weeping when it happens. I'll just say, "told ya so!"
The OPEC crisis was also in large part a response to geopolitical events of the time, which I won't go into so as to avoid bringing politics back into things. (And no, I wasn't there, but I have studied it as an undergraduate of history.) The situation was so dire as a result of the OPEC crisis that the US Government started stockpiling large quantities of fuel in the aftermath to try and carry America through any future shortages (this surplus import makes up a large part of US expenditure).
Resource shortages are real. The fact that coal and oil still makes up a large part of US (and European) energy production is one reason why electricity, and thus all manufactured goods produced domestically, are so expensive: these resources are not only limited, but as a result they're expensive. Hindered access to these resources in the form of sanctions and trade tariffs (justified or not) on their primary producers does not help matters. France circumvented these issues in the '60s by transferring most of her energy production to atomic energy, being one of the only countries to be almost totally nuclear-powered, but this is of limited use in the first place for much the same reason France went to nuclear power to begin with: France lacks natural resources with which to produce goods. Its raw materials and finished goods tend to be imported (except those finished goods manufactured domestically with imported materials) and as such are subject to prices relating to the original producer's energy costs.
Virtually every consumer good we rely on as a society is dependent on energy production, and the hesitancy (or pig-headedness) of world leaders to transition to more sustainable, and thus more cost-stable and -efficient, sources of energy than fossil fuels is a big factor in the stagnant (at best) living standards of much of the population.
And Tesla, I feel, could have changed EVERYTHING.
IF he was wrong....why did JP Morgan, and that other overrated PRAT, Thomas Edison (who was merely a shrewd, greedy businessman first, and a so-called man of science second) go out of their ways to stop him? And why, almost immediately upon Tesla's death, the govt had agents raid his apartment, and take his notes and papers...and not give it to his family or other kin?
Once the energy issue is nipped in the bud, mankind will be released from the yoke of slavery, which comes in form of the public utilities/energy cartels.
As the fourth Doctor once said regarding oil in Terror of the Zygons, DOCTOR: Oil an emergency? Huh! It's about time the people who run this planet of yours realized that to be dependent upon a mineral slime just doesn't make sense.
The OPEC crisis was also in large part a response to geopolitical events of the time, which I won't go into so as to avoid bringing politics back into things. (And no, I wasn't there, but I have studied it as an undergraduate of history.) The situation was so dire as a result of the OPEC crisis that the US Government started stockpiling large quantities of fuel in the aftermath to try and carry America through any future shortages (this surplus import makes up a large part of US expenditure).
Resource shortages are real. The fact that coal and oil still makes up a large part of US (and European) energy production is one reason why electricity, and thus all manufactured goods produced domestically, are so expensive: these resources are not only limited, but as a result they're expensive. Hindered access to these resources in the form of sanctions and trade tariffs (justified or not) on their primary producers does not help matters. France circumvented these issues in the '60s by transferring most of her energy production to atomic energy, being one of the only countries to be almost totally nuclear-powered, but this is of limited use in the first place for much the same reason France went to nuclear power to begin with: France lacks natural resources with which to produce goods. Its raw materials and finished goods tend to be imported (except those finished goods manufactured domestically with imported materials) and as such are subject to prices relating to the original producer's energy costs.
Virtually every consumer good we rely on as a society is dependent on energy production, and the hesitancy (or pig-headedness) of world leaders to transition to more sustainable, and thus more cost-stable and -efficient, sources of energy than fossil fuels is a big factor in the stagnant (at best) living standards of much of the population.
nuclear aint that better.
This might anger some, but as my man, Dr. Greer said,
A nuclear reactor is just an 1800's steam boiler with a radioactive source heating water, and the steam moving the turbines, etc. And it leaves horrific waste products that will not break down for millennia. And my relatives in Poland still remember Chernobyl well.
Anyone who think nuclear is an advanced answer to the energy topic needs their heads examined.
The energy cartels, as I call them, are LAUGHING at us. Laughing all the way to the bank.
The OPEC crisis was also in large part a response to geopolitical events of the time, which I won't go into so as to avoid bringing politics back into things. (And no, I wasn't there, but I have studied it as an undergraduate of history.) The situation was so dire as a result of the OPEC crisis that the US Government started stockpiling large quantities of fuel in the aftermath to try and carry America through any future shortages (this surplus import makes up a large part of US expenditure).
Resource shortages are real. The fact that coal and oil still makes up a large part of US (and European) energy production is one reason why electricity, and thus all manufactured goods produced domestically, are so expensive: these resources are not only limited, but as a result they're expensive. Hindered access to these resources in the form of sanctions and trade tariffs (justified or not) on their primary producers does not help matters. France circumvented these issues in the '60s by transferring most of her energy production to atomic energy, being one of the only countries to be almost totally nuclear-powered, but this is of limited use in the first place for much the same reason France went to nuclear power to begin with: France lacks natural resources with which to produce goods. Its raw materials and finished goods tend to be imported (except those finished goods manufactured domestically with imported materials) and as such are subject to prices relating to the original producer's energy costs.
Virtually every consumer good we rely on as a society is dependent on energy production, and the hesitancy (or pig-headedness) of world leaders to transition to more sustainable, and thus more cost-stable and -efficient, sources of energy than fossil fuels is a big factor in the stagnant (at best) living standards of much of the population.
nuclear aint that better.
This might anger some, but as my man, Dr. Greer said,
A nuclear reactor is just an 1800's steam boiler with a radioactive source heating water, and the steam moving the turbines, etc. And it leaves horrific waste products that will not break down for millennia. And my relatives in Poland still remember Chernobyl well.
Anyone who think nuclear is an advanced answer to the energy topic needs their heads examined.
The energy cartels, as I call them, are LAUGHING at us. Laughing all the way to the bank.
But nuclear is the best option we have especially with the current hatred toward fossil fuels. Wind and Solar are too unreliable. Then there is the hazards of using wind and solar such as mining the rare earth materials used for solar. With nuclear, we just have to worry about storage which is dependent on whether nuclear waste is recycled or not. Recycling nuclear waste can reduce its radioactivity time from a millions of years to hundreds of years. As far as Chernobyl goes, it was due to poor design and management. Therefore, if the world actually wants to combat climate change, then it needs to rely on nuclear energy and not 'green' technologies.
The problem with nuclear energy isn't the nuclear part, it's the Breeder Reactor design. Breeder Reactors were designed to create more heavy fissile materials for the specific purpose of making and maintaining nuclear weapons arsenals. That plutonium they use in the big bombs is good for about five years, then it's used up its high energy half-life and is well on its way to being uranium again. It's not a product you can find lying around: there are no plutonium mines.
Breeder reactors are very high pressure systems with very dangerous elements in them. They are extremely high maintenance and when they fail they do so catastrophically.
But the first ever nuclear power generation system was not a breeder reactor. It was a pile of bricks in a science lab in the University of Chicago. It was as safe as a pile of bricks, so long as you didn't crawl around on them. It's actually where the term 'pile' comes from when discussing the core of a nuclear power plant. That Chicago Pile #1 couldn't have blown up if you'd have dropped an A bomb on it, and as for its ability to disperse radioactive waste, well, I guess you could physically pick up bricks and throw them, but you weren't going to get radioactive steam clouds. Radioactive puddles maybe.
So, we move forward to the second generation, in which a molten salt reactor was constructed at Oak Ridge. It ran long enough to prove the technology, then was turned off because they needed the fissile materials so they could use them in a breeder reactor to make the material used to create the first four nuclear bombs. Molten Salt Reactors don't create higher radioactive elements like Breeders do, they simply use the natural decay of radioactive materials to generate heat. They are 'low pressure,' so instead of exploding they leak. In fact, Molten Salt reactors can be used to 'use up' those nuclear wastes which are so difficult to dispose of, simply by incorporating them into the feed mixture.
But both of these types of reactor are viable sources of nuclear energy, and they don't have the potential to create a Chernobyl or Fukushima or even a Three Mile Island disaster. So, why aren't we using them?
1) Nuclear power originated as a way to make fuel for atom bombs. Neither the brick pile nor the low pressure salt reactor can do this. In both of these processes you get nothing but the waste heat from nuclear decay. In the beginning of nuclear power every government funded nuclear reactor the purpose was to create higher radioactive elements, and electricity from the waste heat of the process was just a bonus.
2) The dangerous nature of these early Breeder Reactors was such that nuclear energy regulation and legislation was written for these types, (because they were the only ones being used at the time.)
3) The fear of nuclear materials in 'the wrong hands' has been pervasive since the Cold War. Thus governments around the world attempt to control the distribution of nuclear materials.
4) Public fear of nuclear power, (justified given the results,) have limited where nuclear facilities can be built, and such facilities need to be able to put out significant power, thus need to be large, thus need to be high pressure type facilities even when not used as breeder type reactors.
There are a lot of other reasons, the list is long, but it's not a conspiracy of men in dark room deciding how to profit. Indeed, if profit were the motive, a stack of thorium laced ceramic bricks would cost a whale of a lot less than the boatloads of fuel oil currently being used, and you'd get fifty to a hundred years of use of each brick.
Where's the thorium going to come from? Well, it's in the dirt you're standing on now. But don't worry, they won't be be digging up your house for it: it's a waste product of many types of mining, and there are massive piles of it waiting to be shoved back into the holes they came out of and paved over. It would require refining and processing into ceramic bricks, but brickmaking is an old art, and mostly done by robots and automated machinery now anyway, so nobody has to breathe thorium dust in brick factories.
But this cheap, efficient, and virtually foolproof method of harvesting nuclear power will never be realized so long as people hear the word Nuclear and think of the films of Bikini Atoll. And after that obstacle, we still have 80 years of legislation to rewrite.
It's the same reason we don't fly dirigibles: no matter how economical, safe, and green they are, images of Hindenburg lurk in the public mind. It is a conspiracy, but not of the boardroom: it is a conspiracy of public perception.
But this cheap, efficient, and virtually foolproof method of harvesting nuclear power will never be realized so long as people hear the word Nuclear and think of the films of Bikini Atoll. And after that obstacle, we still have 80 years of legislation to rewrite.
It's not just public perception, nuclear power IS dangerous to use even when you don't have a reactor meltdown. that said, the current focus of legislation seems to be preventing weaponization and air/ground contamination to such a degree as to effectively strangle development. The best idea I've heard of doesn't require specific elements for the nuclear fuel. With it you can basically throw in random radioactive stuff and get electricity out of it. That design basically just has the radioisotopes molded into lumps, then the lumps of radioactives are embedded in balls of graphite. The problem? In theory you could take the used balls and refine plutonium out of them.... realistically the amount of plutonium would be tiny and require an actual refinery to extract since it's mixed with dozens of other elements. Another issue is that you could just blow them up as part of a dirty bomb, but... that's true of literally everything radioactive.
It's the same reason we don't fly dirigibles: no matter how economical, safe, and green they are, images of Hindenburg lurk in the public mind. It is a conspiracy, but not of the boardroom: it is a conspiracy of public perception.
Actually the concept of lighter-than-air flight wasn't abandoned. We just don't call the dirigibles. Blimps are used quite a lot. It's not just a semantic thing. Dirigibles used a metal frame with the lifting bladders inside the frame. Blimps have a gondola slung under a collection of bladders that don't have a metal frame around it.
dispensing with the frame actually makes the craft a lot lighter and makes hydrogen unneeded for lift.
Standard nuclear reactor design isn't "breeder" either; breeder reactors are actually relatively poor at producing energy. And despite the implication above, no nuclear power plant, not even a "breeder" reactor, can explode. It uses the wrong isotope of uranium for that. (The explosion that happened at Chernobyl had to do with a pressurized-water system that was poorly maintained, and run briefly at full power because someone had to demonstrate to a Soviet official that the plant was capable of running at full even when it wasn't. At Fukushima, there was an explosion in an outer section of the building, where hydrogen had built up due to a lack of coolant, but it didn't even touch the containment vessel.)
Solar isn't all that dangerous, really, especially given recent breakthroughs that may make it practical to produce solar cells that don't require rare-earth elements; however, ground-based solar installations do tend to take up rather a dramatic footprint, because they have to generate all the power they can during the day and store a great deal of it for overnight usage. Wind can be good, except that for reasons I don't really grasp people object to seeing wind farms. As for fossil fuels, coal is filthy ("clean coal" is a marketing term; there's no such thing by normal human standards), and petroleum is far too valuable to such chemical processes as the production of plastics to burn it as a fuel. Overall, if we want to maintain what we in the West would regard as a decent standard of living (and I'm rather fond of the idea of doing so, and spreading it as widely as possible), there may be better solutions in the future, but until they come about, a combination of solar, wind, and nuclear is our best bet.
Standard nuclear reactor design isn't "breeder" either; breeder reactors are actually relatively poor at producing energy. And despite the implication above, no nuclear power plant, not even a "breeder" reactor, can explode. It uses the wrong isotope of uranium for that. (The explosion that happened at Chernobyl had to do with a pressurized-water system that was poorly maintained, and run briefly at full power because someone had to demonstrate to a Soviet official that the plant was capable of running at full even when it wasn't. At Fukushima, there was an explosion in an outer section of the building, where hydrogen had built up due to a lack of coolant, but it didn't even touch the containment vessel.)
If plutonium is a possible byproduct of the reactor's operation, then it is indeed a breeder type reactor. This is not the same as those plants built to create nuclear fuel pellets, but the effect of neutron bombardment of certain elements creating higher elements is what is referred to as 'breeding.' Fuel plants are designed to do this more efficiently, while power plants just have it happen, and then disposal of the higher radioactive 'nuclear waste' materials becomes an issue.
The opposite of a breeder is the burner type reactor in which the byproducts are degraded rather than enriched. This goes back to the pile of bricks under the stadium in Chicago: radioactive decay creates waste heat which can be used. Burner reactors also have a unique property: they can run on virtually any radioactive material, even nuclear waste. Yeah, instead of putting that stuff in a mountain, why not make it work double duty generating electricity?
The difference in operating temperature is 1500C (2700F) in a breeder or 600C (1100F) in a burner. The old 1800s steam engines could handle that, (usually!) Low pressure, low temperature nuclear reactors can't be used to create fuel for bombs, and they don't have the phenomenal temperatures and pressures which make the normal power reactor so dangerous when it fails. Are they dangerous? Oh yes. You don't want to go swimming in a cooling pond of a burner reactor. Radiation, even a low power dose, is dangerous. but they never build up the pressures which result in vessels rupturing or operators pulling the emergency relief valve to prevent a rupture. In fact, the molten salt type can be built over a mold, and when the core is dumped due to an emergency, the material simply divides itself as it spreads out like waffle batter in an iron.
While potentially capable of eliminating the need for fossil fuels for electricity generation, nuclear power also uses a finite resource for fuel. There's only so much uranium and other radioactives on the planet, and even breeder reactors use up more uranium than they create. We do need an alternative.
While potentially capable of eliminating the need for fossil fuels for electricity generation, nuclear power also uses a finite resource for fuel. There's only so much uranium and other radioactives on the planet, and even breeder reactors use up more uranium than they create. We do need an alternative.
But the issue is that we can use nuclear power until we develop unicorn farts as a clean renewable energy source. Fusion and Vacuum Energy might be possible forms of unicorn farts, but it still takes time and intuition to develop them as valid possibilities to replace Fossil Fuels and Fission.
Solar is very good at personal power generation to reduce the energy costs of households, but it doesn't work well as a major power generation facility due to the amount of surface area required to generate. For a 1000 MW solar power plant, it requires about 25 square kilometers or about 10 square miles. For a 1000 MW nuclear power plant, it requires about 3.4 square kilometers or 1.3 square miles. For a 1000 MW wind power plant, it requires at least 160 square kilometers or 100 square miles. Then there is the issue of reliability. A nuclear power plant can be used all the time while a solar power plant or wind power plant requires a higher capacity to generate the same amount of energy since they can only be used when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. So to match the power generated by a 1000 MW nuclear power plant, a 3000 or 4000 MW solar power plant might be required. For a supposedly 'green' technologies, it destroys the usability of the land. Therefore the only reasonable place to put solar panels is in cities and in deserts. Although, putting it in a desert could cause extensive maintenance costs due to sandstorms.
The urban rooftop should, and soon will be, covered in solar panels. You get a lot of electricity generation right where it's used, which reduces the demand on the aging grid. Solar power, though, is not 'as cheap' as fossil fuels yet. It's getting there, but without government subsidies nobody would be going solar.
The danger posed by the 'Solar NOW!' crowd is that when a technology is subsidized, the incentive to improve it is diminished. I'll give you an example:
Back in the 1890s AT&T ate up the various telegraph and telephone networks and became a communications giant. It could out-compete anyone and didn't have to cooperate with local startups. It was then regulated as a utility, with guaranteed profits and all the benefits of a government backed bureaucracy, but with a huge annual bonus check.
In the 1940s the Westinghouse desktop telephone, (and its wall-mount sibling,) was issued with the standard lease. It came in black. By the 1960's, over 20 years later, it was renovated: you could get it in tan or green! By the mid 1970s you could get one in a French or Princess style, but the internal components would have fit in that 1940s basic black desktop.
For over 40 years AT&T, later split into regional Bell Networks, (but still AT&T,) sat on products developed in the 1930s. The technology which would later evolve into Cell Phones was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, but Cell Phones didn't come out until the 1980s, with only limited, and urban, use of automobile phones in the 1970s. Battery size was an issue, as was the need for cell towers, but the primary reason this technology didn't go anywhere for so long is because AT&T had a lockdown on communications, with a guaranteed profit. They had no incentive to spend money on research.
Then in 1974 or so an antitrust suit was filed, and AT&T finally brokered a split-up in 1982. The Baby Bells were born, and suddenly were competing. (Verizon was one of those, by the way.) The foundation was laid for anyone to get into the communications market, and cell towers were cheaper than miles upon miles of land-lines.
BOOM!
Competition spurred innovation, innovation changed the battlefield, and spurred even more competition. In a cycle that has fed on itself for about the same amount of time now that we had the old Model 500, we've gone from WW2 era portable radio-sized phones to computers more powerful than the old IBM office machines which can fit in a pocket. (In fact, we have them in watches and jewelry too!) And coverage? You can make a call from the middle of the desert in Arizona, from a mountaintop in Colorado, or even from an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. (Do I miss those old radio-phone calls home? Umm, nope!)
The thing that frightens me is that we're over half-way there. If we demand government subsidies to do 'renewable energy' now we risk stagnating innovation and being stuck with a process that is more expensive, and thus consumes more resources, while at the same time stifling any incentive to improve.
Greed can be a bad thing. But it's a human thing. Whether you have money or not, everyone always works on a profit motive. Changing the currency, even to an ideal like 'community approbation,' doesn't change this motive. So why not harness that greed and put it to work?
Greed need not be a miser in his vault counting pennies: he can work hard and earn too. Give the problem to 100 greedy inventors to go out and do better than the other guy, and thus become the next Steve Wozniak. But when the government gets involved it takes over, sets rules, established policies to guarantee profit, and thus stifles all competition through regulation.
Do yourself a favor: look into the commercialization of space, and compare what has happened since to what we had when NASA was the king of Low Earth Orbit. Profit motive FTW!
The urban rooftop should, and soon will be, covered in solar panels. You get a lot of electricity generation right where it's used, which reduces the demand on the aging grid. Solar power, though, is not 'as cheap' as fossil fuels yet. It's getting there, but without government subsidies nobody would be going solar.
But is covering the urban rooftops with solar panels, the most effective use of urban rooftops? For sloped roofs, then there is no other choice other than serious renovations, but for flat roofs, then a garden might be a better use.
> @renata666 said: > Not sure if this is the right spot for this question but, I was working some fan fiction centered around one of my STO toons. Part of the story takes place on Earth. And I suddenly was struck by the idea that not only "how" but "why" would anyone go out to eat, or go window shopping, or look for collectibles in a society where money doesn't exist? > > With replicators all over the place, who would go to a fancy restaurant for a good meal? > > With out money, why would you go looking for souvenirs or collectibles to buy? In fact, why would anyone sell collectibles or souvenirs? > > Many of what we look at today as enjoyable activities today would be gone in a world where money didn't matter. Granted, you could probably come up with other activities but many of those that take us out and about among other people would be gone. > > This makes some scenes I've seen in TNG and other versions of Star Trek questionable.
I think people would go out to restaurants for the atmosphere
The urban rooftop should, and soon will be, covered in solar panels. You get a lot of electricity generation right where it's used, which reduces the demand on the aging grid. Solar power, though, is not 'as cheap' as fossil fuels yet. It's getting there, but without government subsidies nobody would be going solar.
But is covering the urban rooftops with solar panels, the most effective use of urban rooftops? For sloped roofs, then there is no other choice other than serious renovations, but for flat roofs, then a garden might be a better use.
The two may not be mutually exclusive. There are people working on solar windows. Now, my understanding is that these work by letting visible light through and absorbing IR and other such wavelengths, which wouldn't be good for plants since it would block some of the wavelengths plants like best, but if you were to invert the window so it lets the wavelengths through that plants like while blocking the ones they don't you could have a rooftop covered garden (or rooftop greenhouse) that still generates power. You could even get decorative with the panel boundaries so it's like gardening under a stained glass window.
Greed can be a bad thing. But it's a human thing. Whether you have money or not, everyone always works on a profit motive. Changing the currency, even to an ideal like 'community approbation,' doesn't change this motive. So why not harness that greed and put it to work?
Greed need not be a miser in his vault counting pennies: he can work hard and earn too. Give the problem to 100 greedy inventors to go out and do better than the other guy, and thus become the next Steve Wozniak. But when the government gets involved it takes over, sets rules, established policies to guarantee profit, and thus stifles all competition through regulation.
Greed is always a bad thing. Prevents progress, maintains artificial status quo.
And the competitive, dog-eat-dog, get them before they get you mentality won't work, it will stagnate us, as it does already, and make a handfull of greedy power mongers, who think they are god like.....richer and more powerful.
One time Telsa was making some deal with someone, and when he heard his work there would put many men out of work, he ripped up the contract.
Also, when any of you help poor or homeless people (that's assuming any of you actually do that), do YOU expect to be paid back, or compensated? I sure as hell hope not. I don't when I help others.
And if you DON'T regulate companies and businesses, they will do whatever they want....honesty and safety be damned is their motto.
> @brian334 said: > Greed need not be a miser in his vault counting pennies: he can work hard and earn too. Give the problem to 100 greedy inventors to go out and do better than the other guy, and thus become the next Steve Wozniak. But when the government gets involved it takes over, sets rules, established policies to guarantee profit, and thus stifles all competition through regulation. > > Do yourself a favor: look into the commercialization of space, and compare what has happened since to what we had when NASA was the king of Low Earth Orbit. Profit motive FTW!
That's capitalist steamy fantasy. "Competition" does not regulate the market to the point the product/service is at it's 'best' but at it's cheapest. You do not maximize profits by having the 'best' company, but by cutting costs so much it's still functioning and when it becomes unprofitable it is ditched. For every SpaceX, like your example, there are 10 railway, postal or water services which are in a sorry state since they were privatized.
Socialism has never been tried in a democratic society because it's just "left daydreams". Capitalism has proven to be harmful for so many people so many times, yet we still hear the fairytale of competition leading to the best possible outcome and the wealthy being inherent good people for providing a living for the ungrateful working class.
Star Trek tried to change that and just make you think about abandoning the strive for profit as mankind's driving force. Of course it didn't create a manifesto to change the world, it's a TV show. But it was brave for it's time.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
> brian334 said:
> Greed need not be a miser in his vault counting pennies: he can work hard and earn too. Give the problem to 100 greedy inventors to go out and do better than the other guy, and thus become the next Steve Wozniak. But when the government gets involved it takes over, sets rules, established policies to guarantee profit, and thus stifles all competition through regulation.
>
> Do yourself a favor: look into the commercialization of space, and compare what has happened since to what we had when NASA was the king of Low Earth Orbit. Profit motive FTW!
That's capitalist steamy fantasy. "Competition" does not regulate the market to the point the product/service is at it's 'best' but at it's cheapest. You do not maximize profits by having the 'best' company, but by cutting costs so much it's still functioning and when it becomes unprofitable it is ditched. For every SpaceX, like your example, there are 10 railway, postal or water services which are in a sorry state since they were privatized.
Socialism has never been tried in a democratic society because it's just "left daydreams". Capitalism has proven to be harmful for so many people so many times, yet we still hear the fairytale of competition leading to the best possible outcome and the wealthy being inherent good people for providing a living for the ungrateful working class.
Star Trek tried to change that and just make you think about abandoning the strive for profit as mankind's driving force. Of course it didn't create a manifesto to change the world, it's a TV show. But it was brave for it's time.
Competition results in businesses becoming more efficient. The more efficient the assembly process, the cheaper it is for the business resulting in more profits. If a company can create a product for a tenth of the cost compared to the rival company creating a similar product of similar quality for a quarter of the cost, then the first company will be making more of a profit or could reduce the consumer cost of the product and crush the competition as a result.
Competition results in innovation while communism and perhaps socialism results in stagnation. If someone is an extremely hard worker and gets paid the same as someone that sleeps on the job, then why should the extremely hard worker work hard?
Greed is always a bad thing. Prevents progress, maintains artificial status quo.
And the competitive, dog-eat-dog, get them before they get you mentality won't work, it will stagnate us, as it does already, and make a handfull of greedy power mongers, who think they are god like.....richer and more powerful.
You are confusing capitalism with Imperialism. What you describe is what happens when corporations get into bed with politicians and they begin to carve out sweet little deals that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. This is not Capitalism!
In a capitalist society, when a handfull of power mongers try to stagnate markets, a hundred guys pop up and create innovative ways to take part in that lucrative business, and then everyone is forced to compete, thus breaking the power mongers' control of that sector of the market. It is only government regulation which prevents this!
One time Telsa was making some deal with someone, and when he heard his work there would put many men out of work, he ripped up the contract.
Tesla died broke.
I see no nobility in putting an existing job ahead of future jobs. In that case, why don't we get rid of all the automobiles because of all the carriage-makers who were left jobless? And horse breeders: the auto industry ruined them. And let's not forget all the whalers put out of business by Standard Oil. And all the butchers put out of business by Winn Dixie. And all the chemical plant workers laid off because of automation. And elevator operators. Oh, and the commodores who used to hold doors open before automatic door openers. And let's not forget the TRIBBLE coal miners who were replaced by machines.[/quote]
Also, when any of you help poor or homeless people (that's assuming any of you actually do that), do YOU expect to be paid back, or compensated? I sure as hell hope not. I don't when I help others.
Once upon a time, before 'The Great Society' the United States had the world's premier medical system. It was foremost in research access, and standard of care when compared to the rest of the world. People all around the paid great sum of money to get to the USA for medical treatment because there was nothing like it anywhere else. This is not to say there weren't problems. There are always going to be problems.
But doctors were contractors, no employees, and they usually billed by the capacity of the patient to pay! If you were rich yu paid more for the exact same service as the poor guy. This allowed doctors to be able to treat anyone who came into their office and still make a buck. (Sixteen years of education and training should be rewarded; that's a lot of hard work invested in anticipation of a future payoff.) Basically, anyone could go to a doctor and get treated, and pay cash for services rendered.
At this time medical insurance was something the big companies paid for out of their profits in order to entice workers to stay or hire on, but it was not necessary because anyone could afford basic medical care. There were even clinics and hopital which served the very poor, and these 'Charity' services were paid for by wealthy donors! The government paid nothing. The poor and middle class weren't required to spend anything, even through diversion of their taxes, (though they were asked to donate if they could.)
Then the government took over. In spite of the massive government bureaucracy devoted to health care, (which doesn't provide a single patient with any care whatsoever,) we still have very poor people going untreated because they cannot access services in their area, (one of the things TGS was supposed to fix,) and now we also have middle class people who cannot afford medical care because they have to spend money on an insurance policy which leaves them with no money to pay for the deductible portion of their policy. They are basically paying twice: once for insurance which doesn't serve their needs, and once for the actual services they need.
Set up any example of a well-run government program and I can show you how capitalism and charity working together can do it better, cheaper, and with far less useless paper-pushing which accomplishes nothing but to force taxpayers to pay more for less.
And if you DON'T regulate companies and businesses, they will do whatever they want....honesty and safety be damned is their motto.
I don't advocate not regulating companies and businesses. The role of government is exactly that. The business of Congress is business My issue is when the regulations exist to eliminate competition and stifle investment. Crony Capitalism is the phrase they use now, but it is simply modern Imperialism. And when it's done 'for your own good' it's simply fascism. (When did the state ever get the power to make me do something for my own good anyway? I thought I was a citizen, not a subject.)
That's capitalist steamy fantasy. "Competition" does not regulate the market to the point the product/service is at it's 'best' but at it's cheapest. You do not maximize profits by having the 'best' company, but by cutting costs so much it's still functioning and when it becomes unprofitable it is ditched. For every SpaceX, like your example, there are 10 railway, postal or water services which are in a sorry state since they were privatized.
You do realize your examples are all of highly regulated industries which are guaranteed profit by law? But set that aside for a minute, and let's look at the first part:
Competition is not designed to be an optimal solution. It is designed to be a workable one. Managed economies have always proven to fail, an the reason for that is simple: a politician cannot take risk. Risk usually ends up with the politician unemployed, and sometimes headless too. Without risk you cannot innovate. Someone has to put up money and roll the dice, and taxpayers don't like that done with their taxes. Not even a little bit.
But society keeps growing, and without innovation you can't even feed everyone, much less give them a decent way of life. Modern examples include China in the 1960s and 1970s and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In order to sustain a growing economy, innovation is required. There is no stable state.
But, innovation requires risk, as I've said. Someone has to take the chance, and those people are capitalists. They put money into companies like Tesla and SpaceX hoping to see a return on their investment. Sometimes they lose their money. When was the last time you rode an Escalator? No, not an Otis brand moving staircase. I mean an Escalator Brand product. They invested a huge sum of money at the dawn of the 20th Century and created this fabulous idea that is still used in malls and airports around the world, but never realized a return on their investment and they went broke.
How long as it been since you saw a Yugo? The government that invested in that is now dissolved. I won't say the Yugo caused their downfall, but it serves as an example of why governments do not innovate unless they are desperate. And the history of business is full of examples of marginal or defunct businesses which invested huge sums and got little to nothing out of it.
Sometimes we remember the failures because they failed spectacularly. Sometimes we never know about them. Tucker Automobile, which innovated auto safety, went defunct after making 50 cars. McDonalds was a marginal business stolen from its owners and turned into a powerhouse megacorporation based on the founders' original investment in innovation of the fast-food concept. (They were allowed to keep their restaurant, but had to change the name!)
Market regulation, as I mentioned elsewhere, is the business of government, but government should be a referee, not a partner to one faction and an opponent to the others. Fair, equally applied, and only necessary regulation is a good thing, so long as it doesn't require onerous burdens of reporting to bureaucracies which serve no interest but the maintenance of the bureaucracy.
Companies are ultimately run by people. People who want jobs and job security. The Gordon Gekkos of the world can make a big splash buying up dysfunctional companies and selling them for scrap, but the vast majority of capitalists are small business owners who live for their dream, be it as a construction contractor, dress shop owner, restaurateur, or whatever. They are in it for the long haul. Going out of business when their company is not profitable is bad because it inevitably leaves them owing the bank, which is unlikely to offer them a loan for their next startup.
Socialism has never been tried in a democratic society because it's just "left daydreams". Capitalism has proven to be harmful for so many people so many times, yet we still hear the fairytale of competition leading to the best possible outcome and the wealthy being inherent good people for providing a living for the ungrateful working class.
Both the Soviet Union and China are democratic countries. They are Democratic Socialist countries, and everyone gets to vote. What they were not is individualist countries. They are examples of Collectivism, in which government interprets the will of the people and then enforces that will upon the people. Needless to say, both were no only economic failures, and neither, until they began to show tolerance toward capitalists, could even feed their people. (Most people aren't aware that US grain exports were what kept the Soviet Union alive through the entire Cold War, at a time when the USSR controlled the largest piece of wheat-growing ground in the world.)
It's not a fairy tale. Unbridled capitalism has flaws, but so far it's beat the socks off of every other economic system ever invented everywhere. Is it the perfect, ultimate system? Well, no. But it beats Imperialism, Marxism, Monarchies, and Anarchies.
Until something better comes along it's our best bet. Socialism isn't something new and untried. Read Benjamin Franklin's concerns about Socialism, then realize that the idea was already old in the Age of Enlightenment. It's been tried, often, and it only works when society is still at the tribal stage because once you don't have to look your neighbor in the eye when you come to take what he's worked hard to get, it's easy to take your neighbor's stuff, which de-incentivises your neighbor from generating surplus which you can then plunder 'for a good cause'. It's a downward spiral which always ends when you run out of rich people to take stuff away from.
As for capitalism being harmful, umm, what? Poor people have always been a problem. It is only in the age of capitalism that we've actually made inroads into eliminating real poverty, (not presumed by contrast, but real as in you don't get to eat today.)
The poor in Calcutta think the poorest American is rich, and they are right. Our poor, unless they have mental disorders like drug addiction, have a roof, clean drinking water, access to food and medical services, and usually electricity. The aveerage poor American is middle class by the world's standard.
Can we do better? Oh yes. But if we turn off the faucet that creates the money, (capitalism,) we won't be able to afford to. We have a large segment of our population depending on government funds, and they aren't going to like it, (or be prepared,) when the money runs out. Capitalism has been the road out of poverty for over 200 years. It works. And it works better than any competition. Look at the world. The proof is right before your eyes.
Star Trek tried to change that and just make you think about abandoning the strive for profit as mankind's driving force. Of course it didn't create a manifesto to change the world, it's a TV show. But it was brave for it's time.
Trek didn't eliminate the profit motive, they just changed the currency. Kirk, for example, valued starship command. He worked very hard to achieve it, (investment,) and he got a return, (a ship to command. Actually, several ships.)
Trek implied that the new currency was knowledge and expertise, and it paid dividends in respect. This is actually an old system that dates back to before even socialism. Before money, even. In that model, the successful hunter, the successful farmer or herder, was a person of status in the community. It earned him and his children special treatment in the society: opportunities not granted to the lazy or the foolish. In such a society the ability to offer a feast, to give away what one owns secure in the knowledge that one can then go about getting new stuff, afforded that individual respect.
Trek uses this ancient form of currency. Respect, like money, has to be earned. Respect is not based on flimsy evidence or a stroke of luck; respect is earned through a repeated pattern of hard work and success, like money. Respect is honest: it can't be stolen or bartered or given away.
I can't wait for the day when respect is the currency most valued. I probably won't be rich, but I think I'll do okay.
Privatisation produces cabals that artificially keep prices high and costs down. That's all the free market does for markets like energy or transport. They offer the exact same services with different logos and undercut each other by fractions of a pound simply because they're beholden to the shareholder and not the public as the State would be.
Now I don't believe that, in the present, any State is able to provide an idealised social democracy because healthcare will always take up the majority of any State's expenditure due to aging populations and complications arising from inactivity (due to automation) meaning relying on the free market is a must for less 'important' things like transport (though the State should always regulate the hell out of them).
But the State is always willing to improve efficiency because it makes it cheaper for them unlike the free market who have a vested interest in things not changing once their profits outweigh the cost. Obviously this goes down the swanny when the State outsources the efficacy drives to the free market and the rest of the private sector because they see Government contracts as blank checks.
Hell, the cost to the State is increased when more industry is flogged off to the private sector because their internal agreements leaves more workers earning less than they can live on meaning the State has to step in to make sure their populus can actually survive.
Development vs. stagnation can come from necessity but it can also come from boredom. A society with all its basic needs met will always look for new things to do. A society that has to choose between paying for the train to work or asthma medication so they can work have no free time to innovate anything. To pretend that capitalism will drive innovation by communism will lead to stagnation is a remarkably stupid concept that went out of date as soon as we invented robots and automation.
Obviously if you have a disproportionate number of obscenely wealthy corporations then you can brute force your way into modernity in such a way as the social cost can be overlooked leading to a false impression to the benefits of the free market to those who are reasonably comfortable.
It'll take until automation replaces all basic level jobs before socity starts to cotton on to the fact they should probably look at reforming economic models to compensate when it finally gets to the point that obscene wealth is no longer a adequat buffer from real life.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though. JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
Privatisation produces cabals that artificially keep prices high and costs down. That's all the free market does for markets like energy or transport. They offer the exact same services with different logos and undercut each other by fractions of a pound simply because they're beholden to the shareholder and not the public as the State would be.
Now I don't believe that, in the present, any State is able to provide an idealised social democracy because healthcare will always take up the majority of any State's expenditure due to aging populations and complications arising from inactivity (due to automation) meaning relying on the free market is a must for less 'important' things like transport (though the State should always regulate the hell out of them).
But the State is always willing to improve efficiency because it makes it cheaper for them unlike the free market who have a vested interest in things not changing once their profits outweigh the cost. Obviously this goes down the swanny when the State outsources the efficacy drives to the free market and the rest of the private sector because they see Government contracts as blank checks.
Hell, the cost to the State is increased when more industry is flogged off to the private sector because their internal agreements leaves more workers earning less than they can live on meaning the State has to step in to make sure their populus can actually survive.
Development vs. stagnation can come from necessity but it can also come from boredom. A society with all its basic needs met will always look for new things to do. A society that has to choose between paying for the train to work or asthma medication so they can work have no free time to innovate anything. To pretend that capitalism will drive innovation by communism will lead to stagnation is a remarkably stupid concept that went out of date as soon as we invented robots and automation.
Obviously if you have a disproportionate number of obscenely wealthy corporations then you can brute force your way into modernity in such a way as the social cost can be overlooked leading to a false impression to the benefits of the free market to those who are reasonably comfortable.
It'll take until automation replaces all basic level jobs before socity starts to cotton on to the fact they should probably look at reforming economic models to compensate when it finally gets to the point that obscene wealth is no longer a adequat buffer from real life.
Again, confusing Imperialism with Capitalism. Most professors get the two mixed up, so don't feel bad about it.
I agree that this is what you've been taught to believe, but this is simply not the way the world works. It's the way the Collectivists view the world.
Imperialism allows giant corporations to stifle innovation and opportunity. Capitalism breaks up those mega-corporatations through competition, and the reason why is simple: Pyramids.
No, not ancient structures, modern ones. You see, a supervisor can only supervise so many people efficiently. When you grow beyond a certain size you need more supervisors. And you need someone to supervise them. Then, when things get going really well, you need several supervisors to supervise the supervisors, and someone to supervise them.
Like a pyramid, each layer requires a smaller layer above, and they begin to stack up, layer upon layer, each devoted to nothing but supervising supervisors. They don't generate useful work that helps their customers, but at each level they get costlier to maintain in salaries and benefits.
Without laws to protect them from competition, such companies would collapse like a house of cards because ten smaller companies could do what they do faster, better, and cheaper.
There are certain minimum sizes required for certain businesses. You aren't going to build jumbo-jets in a two-mechanic garage, for example. But even there, farming out the work to other companies who compete for the business can help reduce costs. Boeing doesn't make tires for is jumbo jets, for example, it buys them.
But when a company grows too big it invites competition, and that competition comes with a smaller pyramid to maintain, and thus can do the same work for less money.
The pyramid problem isn't unique to business either: it's why government costs so much. The majority of government employees serve only to supervise lower-level employees. The bulk of the money spent on a bureaucracy goes into paying for the bureaucracy, and because the higher the pyramid, the more money the guy on top makes, there is zero incentive t streamline the workforce. After all, taxes just magically appear out of thin air, and it's 'Government Money' that doesn't cost anybody anythng, right?
I'm enjoying the debate, but I may be beyond the original topic which is Federation Economy. Real World economy is fun, so if you want to continue, please PM me and I'll be happy to respond. But these last posts remind me why I was reluctant to get involved in this thread in the first place.
[Mod Hat] Okay, we're done here. Didn't I specifically say to turn the topic back to Star Trek? [/Mod Hat]
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Comments
Well, I mean artificial scarcity as in keeping the status quo going.
Remember the so-called 'energy crisis' of the early 70's, saying oil would be gone by the early 80's?
Several decades later, we still have it, and paying whatever the oil pimps demand.
Plus Stan Meyers dying under questionable circumstances kinda adds to it.
That is what I mean. The few on the top play a metaphorical chess game, with all us peons being the table for it, as it were.
All the peons needs to do it simply stand.
Peak oil, however, is a real thing; it's the reason we started fracking oil wells, because all the easily-recoverable oil in those wells had already been pumped. New petroleum takes geologic time to make, and we're outstripping that by many orders of magnitude. If we had continued to suck down oil at the rather prodigious rate common back in the '60s and '70s, the Resource Wars of Fallout fame would have been quite real. And even at our modern reduced rate, it will happen eventually. Really, burning petroleum for fuel is the wrong thing to do entirely - it's far too valuable for chemical production.
Resource shortages are real. The fact that coal and oil still makes up a large part of US (and European) energy production is one reason why electricity, and thus all manufactured goods produced domestically, are so expensive: these resources are not only limited, but as a result they're expensive. Hindered access to these resources in the form of sanctions and trade tariffs (justified or not) on their primary producers does not help matters. France circumvented these issues in the '60s by transferring most of her energy production to atomic energy, being one of the only countries to be almost totally nuclear-powered, but this is of limited use in the first place for much the same reason France went to nuclear power to begin with: France lacks natural resources with which to produce goods. Its raw materials and finished goods tend to be imported (except those finished goods manufactured domestically with imported materials) and as such are subject to prices relating to the original producer's energy costs.
Virtually every consumer good we rely on as a society is dependent on energy production, and the hesitancy (or pig-headedness) of world leaders to transition to more sustainable, and thus more cost-stable and -efficient, sources of energy than fossil fuels is a big factor in the stagnant (at best) living standards of much of the population.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
You could make the argument that because a government can print as much money as it wants, a failure to continually churn out as much money as it can is a form of artificial scarcity, but limiting the amount of money in circulation at any given time is necessary because diluting the pool of money reduces the value of each unit of currency, which can lead to runaway inflation and economic collapse.
Telsa felt the same. Thank JP Morgan and Edison for stopping something that should have been allowed to happen.
Also, there IS a policy that the govt has, where they confiscate new technology that offers technology better than oil. They either buy it from the maker, and then lock it away. It's a term known as "Black Shelving"
Or other, even more despicable techniques our illustrious utility overlords like to do can be summed up with Stan Meyer
Funny how a guy who made a car that happens to run on water, managed to die under rather questionable circumstances, no? And one does not need a formal conspiracy when interests collide.
And if one thinks that is far fetched, or that those in power, as Barbra Walters (which she shows that one can be educated, yet unintelligent at the same time) said "I can't believe our own government would be so evil to do such a thing to their own people"....remember the following:
The Gulf of Tonkin (which was declassified in 2005 and stated that the events that led to Vietnam were, in fact, a LIE...and one that cost the lives of 50,000+ Americans and lord knows how many Vietnamese)
Watergate
"Weapons of Mass Destruction"
And so many investigators who died under questionable circumstances investigating heinous scandals and crimes....such as the ongoing pedophilia/sex trafficking that seems to be going on with various politicians, businessmen, clergymen and celebrities (once again, I am looking at you, JEFFERY EPSTEIN *cracks her knuckles*)
And why? Because money talks...and is another weight I put on the CON side of money on the proverbial scale.
And as Dr Greer once said, it's time these technologies be released, otherwise will be will killing each other over the last barrel of oil.
Time mankind WAKES UP.....and soon, or, instead of a life like Star Trek, we'll have a life like Mad Maxx.
The dollar is worth nothing. Why ya think so many countries are trying to escape it and the petro dollar...which is akin to 'protection money', similar to what the Mafia were known for. The us is gonna have a collapse at some point. It's the fall of Rome, and I say karma can be a b**** goddesses. And I won't be weeping when it happens. I'll just say, "told ya so!"
And Tesla, I feel, could have changed EVERYTHING.
IF he was wrong....why did JP Morgan, and that other overrated PRAT, Thomas Edison (who was merely a shrewd, greedy businessman first, and a so-called man of science second) go out of their ways to stop him? And why, almost immediately upon Tesla's death, the govt had agents raid his apartment, and take his notes and papers...and not give it to his family or other kin?
Once the energy issue is nipped in the bud, mankind will be released from the yoke of slavery, which comes in form of the public utilities/energy cartels.
As the fourth Doctor once said regarding oil in Terror of the Zygons,
DOCTOR: Oil an emergency? Huh! It's about time the people who run this planet of yours realized that to be dependent upon a mineral slime just doesn't make sense.
nuclear aint that better.
This might anger some, but as my man, Dr. Greer said,
A nuclear reactor is just an 1800's steam boiler with a radioactive source heating water, and the steam moving the turbines, etc. And it leaves horrific waste products that will not break down for millennia. And my relatives in Poland still remember Chernobyl well.
Anyone who think nuclear is an advanced answer to the energy topic needs their heads examined.
The energy cartels, as I call them, are LAUGHING at us. Laughing all the way to the bank.
But nuclear is the best option we have especially with the current hatred toward fossil fuels. Wind and Solar are too unreliable. Then there is the hazards of using wind and solar such as mining the rare earth materials used for solar. With nuclear, we just have to worry about storage which is dependent on whether nuclear waste is recycled or not. Recycling nuclear waste can reduce its radioactivity time from a millions of years to hundreds of years. As far as Chernobyl goes, it was due to poor design and management. Therefore, if the world actually wants to combat climate change, then it needs to rely on nuclear energy and not 'green' technologies.
Breeder reactors are very high pressure systems with very dangerous elements in them. They are extremely high maintenance and when they fail they do so catastrophically.
But the first ever nuclear power generation system was not a breeder reactor. It was a pile of bricks in a science lab in the University of Chicago. It was as safe as a pile of bricks, so long as you didn't crawl around on them. It's actually where the term 'pile' comes from when discussing the core of a nuclear power plant. That Chicago Pile #1 couldn't have blown up if you'd have dropped an A bomb on it, and as for its ability to disperse radioactive waste, well, I guess you could physically pick up bricks and throw them, but you weren't going to get radioactive steam clouds. Radioactive puddles maybe.
So, we move forward to the second generation, in which a molten salt reactor was constructed at Oak Ridge. It ran long enough to prove the technology, then was turned off because they needed the fissile materials so they could use them in a breeder reactor to make the material used to create the first four nuclear bombs. Molten Salt Reactors don't create higher radioactive elements like Breeders do, they simply use the natural decay of radioactive materials to generate heat. They are 'low pressure,' so instead of exploding they leak. In fact, Molten Salt reactors can be used to 'use up' those nuclear wastes which are so difficult to dispose of, simply by incorporating them into the feed mixture.
But both of these types of reactor are viable sources of nuclear energy, and they don't have the potential to create a Chernobyl or Fukushima or even a Three Mile Island disaster. So, why aren't we using them?
1) Nuclear power originated as a way to make fuel for atom bombs. Neither the brick pile nor the low pressure salt reactor can do this. In both of these processes you get nothing but the waste heat from nuclear decay. In the beginning of nuclear power every government funded nuclear reactor the purpose was to create higher radioactive elements, and electricity from the waste heat of the process was just a bonus.
2) The dangerous nature of these early Breeder Reactors was such that nuclear energy regulation and legislation was written for these types, (because they were the only ones being used at the time.)
3) The fear of nuclear materials in 'the wrong hands' has been pervasive since the Cold War. Thus governments around the world attempt to control the distribution of nuclear materials.
4) Public fear of nuclear power, (justified given the results,) have limited where nuclear facilities can be built, and such facilities need to be able to put out significant power, thus need to be large, thus need to be high pressure type facilities even when not used as breeder type reactors.
There are a lot of other reasons, the list is long, but it's not a conspiracy of men in dark room deciding how to profit. Indeed, if profit were the motive, a stack of thorium laced ceramic bricks would cost a whale of a lot less than the boatloads of fuel oil currently being used, and you'd get fifty to a hundred years of use of each brick.
Where's the thorium going to come from? Well, it's in the dirt you're standing on now. But don't worry, they won't be be digging up your house for it: it's a waste product of many types of mining, and there are massive piles of it waiting to be shoved back into the holes they came out of and paved over. It would require refining and processing into ceramic bricks, but brickmaking is an old art, and mostly done by robots and automated machinery now anyway, so nobody has to breathe thorium dust in brick factories.
But this cheap, efficient, and virtually foolproof method of harvesting nuclear power will never be realized so long as people hear the word Nuclear and think of the films of Bikini Atoll. And after that obstacle, we still have 80 years of legislation to rewrite.
It's the same reason we don't fly dirigibles: no matter how economical, safe, and green they are, images of Hindenburg lurk in the public mind. It is a conspiracy, but not of the boardroom: it is a conspiracy of public perception.
dispensing with the frame actually makes the craft a lot lighter and makes hydrogen unneeded for lift.
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Solar isn't all that dangerous, really, especially given recent breakthroughs that may make it practical to produce solar cells that don't require rare-earth elements; however, ground-based solar installations do tend to take up rather a dramatic footprint, because they have to generate all the power they can during the day and store a great deal of it for overnight usage. Wind can be good, except that for reasons I don't really grasp people object to seeing wind farms. As for fossil fuels, coal is filthy ("clean coal" is a marketing term; there's no such thing by normal human standards), and petroleum is far too valuable to such chemical processes as the production of plastics to burn it as a fuel. Overall, if we want to maintain what we in the West would regard as a decent standard of living (and I'm rather fond of the idea of doing so, and spreading it as widely as possible), there may be better solutions in the future, but until they come about, a combination of solar, wind, and nuclear is our best bet.
If plutonium is a possible byproduct of the reactor's operation, then it is indeed a breeder type reactor. This is not the same as those plants built to create nuclear fuel pellets, but the effect of neutron bombardment of certain elements creating higher elements is what is referred to as 'breeding.' Fuel plants are designed to do this more efficiently, while power plants just have it happen, and then disposal of the higher radioactive 'nuclear waste' materials becomes an issue.
The opposite of a breeder is the burner type reactor in which the byproducts are degraded rather than enriched. This goes back to the pile of bricks under the stadium in Chicago: radioactive decay creates waste heat which can be used. Burner reactors also have a unique property: they can run on virtually any radioactive material, even nuclear waste. Yeah, instead of putting that stuff in a mountain, why not make it work double duty generating electricity?
The difference in operating temperature is 1500C (2700F) in a breeder or 600C (1100F) in a burner. The old 1800s steam engines could handle that, (usually!) Low pressure, low temperature nuclear reactors can't be used to create fuel for bombs, and they don't have the phenomenal temperatures and pressures which make the normal power reactor so dangerous when it fails. Are they dangerous? Oh yes. You don't want to go swimming in a cooling pond of a burner reactor. Radiation, even a low power dose, is dangerous. but they never build up the pressures which result in vessels rupturing or operators pulling the emergency relief valve to prevent a rupture. In fact, the molten salt type can be built over a mold, and when the core is dumped due to an emergency, the material simply divides itself as it spreads out like waffle batter in an iron.
While potentially capable of eliminating the need for fossil fuels for electricity generation, nuclear power also uses a finite resource for fuel. There's only so much uranium and other radioactives on the planet, and even breeder reactors use up more uranium than they create. We do need an alternative.
But the issue is that we can use nuclear power until we develop unicorn farts as a clean renewable energy source. Fusion and Vacuum Energy might be possible forms of unicorn farts, but it still takes time and intuition to develop them as valid possibilities to replace Fossil Fuels and Fission.
Solar is very good at personal power generation to reduce the energy costs of households, but it doesn't work well as a major power generation facility due to the amount of surface area required to generate. For a 1000 MW solar power plant, it requires about 25 square kilometers or about 10 square miles. For a 1000 MW nuclear power plant, it requires about 3.4 square kilometers or 1.3 square miles. For a 1000 MW wind power plant, it requires at least 160 square kilometers or 100 square miles. Then there is the issue of reliability. A nuclear power plant can be used all the time while a solar power plant or wind power plant requires a higher capacity to generate the same amount of energy since they can only be used when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. So to match the power generated by a 1000 MW nuclear power plant, a 3000 or 4000 MW solar power plant might be required. For a supposedly 'green' technologies, it destroys the usability of the land. Therefore the only reasonable place to put solar panels is in cities and in deserts. Although, putting it in a desert could cause extensive maintenance costs due to sandstorms.
The danger posed by the 'Solar NOW!' crowd is that when a technology is subsidized, the incentive to improve it is diminished. I'll give you an example:
Back in the 1890s AT&T ate up the various telegraph and telephone networks and became a communications giant. It could out-compete anyone and didn't have to cooperate with local startups. It was then regulated as a utility, with guaranteed profits and all the benefits of a government backed bureaucracy, but with a huge annual bonus check.
In the 1940s the Westinghouse desktop telephone, (and its wall-mount sibling,) was issued with the standard lease. It came in black. By the 1960's, over 20 years later, it was renovated: you could get it in tan or green! By the mid 1970s you could get one in a French or Princess style, but the internal components would have fit in that 1940s basic black desktop.
For over 40 years AT&T, later split into regional Bell Networks, (but still AT&T,) sat on products developed in the 1930s. The technology which would later evolve into Cell Phones was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, but Cell Phones didn't come out until the 1980s, with only limited, and urban, use of automobile phones in the 1970s. Battery size was an issue, as was the need for cell towers, but the primary reason this technology didn't go anywhere for so long is because AT&T had a lockdown on communications, with a guaranteed profit. They had no incentive to spend money on research.
Then in 1974 or so an antitrust suit was filed, and AT&T finally brokered a split-up in 1982. The Baby Bells were born, and suddenly were competing. (Verizon was one of those, by the way.) The foundation was laid for anyone to get into the communications market, and cell towers were cheaper than miles upon miles of land-lines.
BOOM!
Competition spurred innovation, innovation changed the battlefield, and spurred even more competition. In a cycle that has fed on itself for about the same amount of time now that we had the old Model 500, we've gone from WW2 era portable radio-sized phones to computers more powerful than the old IBM office machines which can fit in a pocket. (In fact, we have them in watches and jewelry too!) And coverage? You can make a call from the middle of the desert in Arizona, from a mountaintop in Colorado, or even from an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. (Do I miss those old radio-phone calls home? Umm, nope!)
The thing that frightens me is that we're over half-way there. If we demand government subsidies to do 'renewable energy' now we risk stagnating innovation and being stuck with a process that is more expensive, and thus consumes more resources, while at the same time stifling any incentive to improve.
Greed can be a bad thing. But it's a human thing. Whether you have money or not, everyone always works on a profit motive. Changing the currency, even to an ideal like 'community approbation,' doesn't change this motive. So why not harness that greed and put it to work?
Greed need not be a miser in his vault counting pennies: he can work hard and earn too. Give the problem to 100 greedy inventors to go out and do better than the other guy, and thus become the next Steve Wozniak. But when the government gets involved it takes over, sets rules, established policies to guarantee profit, and thus stifles all competition through regulation.
Do yourself a favor: look into the commercialization of space, and compare what has happened since to what we had when NASA was the king of Low Earth Orbit. Profit motive FTW!
But is covering the urban rooftops with solar panels, the most effective use of urban rooftops? For sloped roofs, then there is no other choice other than serious renovations, but for flat roofs, then a garden might be a better use.
> Not sure if this is the right spot for this question but, I was working some fan fiction centered around one of my STO toons. Part of the story takes place on Earth. And I suddenly was struck by the idea that not only "how" but "why" would anyone go out to eat, or go window shopping, or look for collectibles in a society where money doesn't exist?
>
> With replicators all over the place, who would go to a fancy restaurant for a good meal?
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> With out money, why would you go looking for souvenirs or collectibles to buy? In fact, why would anyone sell collectibles or souvenirs?
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> Many of what we look at today as enjoyable activities today would be gone in a world where money didn't matter. Granted, you could probably come up with other activities but many of those that take us out and about among other people would be gone.
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> This makes some scenes I've seen in TNG and other versions of Star Trek questionable.
I think people would go out to restaurants for the atmosphere
The two may not be mutually exclusive. There are people working on solar windows. Now, my understanding is that these work by letting visible light through and absorbing IR and other such wavelengths, which wouldn't be good for plants since it would block some of the wavelengths plants like best, but if you were to invert the window so it lets the wavelengths through that plants like while blocking the ones they don't you could have a rooftop covered garden (or rooftop greenhouse) that still generates power. You could even get decorative with the panel boundaries so it's like gardening under a stained glass window.
Greed need not be a miser in his vault counting pennies: he can work hard and earn too. Give the problem to 100 greedy inventors to go out and do better than the other guy, and thus become the next Steve Wozniak. But when the government gets involved it takes over, sets rules, established policies to guarantee profit, and thus stifles all competition through regulation.
Greed is always a bad thing. Prevents progress, maintains artificial status quo.
And the competitive, dog-eat-dog, get them before they get you mentality won't work, it will stagnate us, as it does already, and make a handfull of greedy power mongers, who think they are god like.....richer and more powerful.
One time Telsa was making some deal with someone, and when he heard his work there would put many men out of work, he ripped up the contract.
Also, when any of you help poor or homeless people (that's assuming any of you actually do that), do YOU expect to be paid back, or compensated? I sure as hell hope not. I don't when I help others.
And if you DON'T regulate companies and businesses, they will do whatever they want....honesty and safety be damned is their motto.
> Greed need not be a miser in his vault counting pennies: he can work hard and earn too. Give the problem to 100 greedy inventors to go out and do better than the other guy, and thus become the next Steve Wozniak. But when the government gets involved it takes over, sets rules, established policies to guarantee profit, and thus stifles all competition through regulation.
>
> Do yourself a favor: look into the commercialization of space, and compare what has happened since to what we had when NASA was the king of Low Earth Orbit. Profit motive FTW!
That's capitalist steamy fantasy. "Competition" does not regulate the market to the point the product/service is at it's 'best' but at it's cheapest. You do not maximize profits by having the 'best' company, but by cutting costs so much it's still functioning and when it becomes unprofitable it is ditched. For every SpaceX, like your example, there are 10 railway, postal or water services which are in a sorry state since they were privatized.
Socialism has never been tried in a democratic society because it's just "left daydreams". Capitalism has proven to be harmful for so many people so many times, yet we still hear the fairytale of competition leading to the best possible outcome and the wealthy being inherent good people for providing a living for the ungrateful working class.
Star Trek tried to change that and just make you think about abandoning the strive for profit as mankind's driving force. Of course it didn't create a manifesto to change the world, it's a TV show. But it was brave for it's time.
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Competition results in businesses becoming more efficient. The more efficient the assembly process, the cheaper it is for the business resulting in more profits. If a company can create a product for a tenth of the cost compared to the rival company creating a similar product of similar quality for a quarter of the cost, then the first company will be making more of a profit or could reduce the consumer cost of the product and crush the competition as a result.
Competition results in innovation while communism and perhaps socialism results in stagnation. If someone is an extremely hard worker and gets paid the same as someone that sleeps on the job, then why should the extremely hard worker work hard?
You are confusing capitalism with Imperialism. What you describe is what happens when corporations get into bed with politicians and they begin to carve out sweet little deals that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. This is not Capitalism!
In a capitalist society, when a handfull of power mongers try to stagnate markets, a hundred guys pop up and create innovative ways to take part in that lucrative business, and then everyone is forced to compete, thus breaking the power mongers' control of that sector of the market. It is only government regulation which prevents this!
Tesla died broke.
I see no nobility in putting an existing job ahead of future jobs. In that case, why don't we get rid of all the automobiles because of all the carriage-makers who were left jobless? And horse breeders: the auto industry ruined them. And let's not forget all the whalers put out of business by Standard Oil. And all the butchers put out of business by Winn Dixie. And all the chemical plant workers laid off because of automation. And elevator operators. Oh, and the commodores who used to hold doors open before automatic door openers. And let's not forget the TRIBBLE coal miners who were replaced by machines.[/quote]
Once upon a time, before 'The Great Society' the United States had the world's premier medical system. It was foremost in research access, and standard of care when compared to the rest of the world. People all around the paid great sum of money to get to the USA for medical treatment because there was nothing like it anywhere else. This is not to say there weren't problems. There are always going to be problems.
But doctors were contractors, no employees, and they usually billed by the capacity of the patient to pay! If you were rich yu paid more for the exact same service as the poor guy. This allowed doctors to be able to treat anyone who came into their office and still make a buck. (Sixteen years of education and training should be rewarded; that's a lot of hard work invested in anticipation of a future payoff.) Basically, anyone could go to a doctor and get treated, and pay cash for services rendered.
At this time medical insurance was something the big companies paid for out of their profits in order to entice workers to stay or hire on, but it was not necessary because anyone could afford basic medical care. There were even clinics and hopital which served the very poor, and these 'Charity' services were paid for by wealthy donors! The government paid nothing. The poor and middle class weren't required to spend anything, even through diversion of their taxes, (though they were asked to donate if they could.)
Then the government took over. In spite of the massive government bureaucracy devoted to health care, (which doesn't provide a single patient with any care whatsoever,) we still have very poor people going untreated because they cannot access services in their area, (one of the things TGS was supposed to fix,) and now we also have middle class people who cannot afford medical care because they have to spend money on an insurance policy which leaves them with no money to pay for the deductible portion of their policy. They are basically paying twice: once for insurance which doesn't serve their needs, and once for the actual services they need.
Set up any example of a well-run government program and I can show you how capitalism and charity working together can do it better, cheaper, and with far less useless paper-pushing which accomplishes nothing but to force taxpayers to pay more for less.
I don't advocate not regulating companies and businesses. The role of government is exactly that. The business of Congress is business My issue is when the regulations exist to eliminate competition and stifle investment. Crony Capitalism is the phrase they use now, but it is simply modern Imperialism. And when it's done 'for your own good' it's simply fascism. (When did the state ever get the power to make me do something for my own good anyway? I thought I was a citizen, not a subject.)
You do realize your examples are all of highly regulated industries which are guaranteed profit by law? But set that aside for a minute, and let's look at the first part:
Competition is not designed to be an optimal solution. It is designed to be a workable one. Managed economies have always proven to fail, an the reason for that is simple: a politician cannot take risk. Risk usually ends up with the politician unemployed, and sometimes headless too. Without risk you cannot innovate. Someone has to put up money and roll the dice, and taxpayers don't like that done with their taxes. Not even a little bit.
But society keeps growing, and without innovation you can't even feed everyone, much less give them a decent way of life. Modern examples include China in the 1960s and 1970s and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In order to sustain a growing economy, innovation is required. There is no stable state.
But, innovation requires risk, as I've said. Someone has to take the chance, and those people are capitalists. They put money into companies like Tesla and SpaceX hoping to see a return on their investment. Sometimes they lose their money. When was the last time you rode an Escalator? No, not an Otis brand moving staircase. I mean an Escalator Brand product. They invested a huge sum of money at the dawn of the 20th Century and created this fabulous idea that is still used in malls and airports around the world, but never realized a return on their investment and they went broke.
How long as it been since you saw a Yugo? The government that invested in that is now dissolved. I won't say the Yugo caused their downfall, but it serves as an example of why governments do not innovate unless they are desperate. And the history of business is full of examples of marginal or defunct businesses which invested huge sums and got little to nothing out of it.
Sometimes we remember the failures because they failed spectacularly. Sometimes we never know about them. Tucker Automobile, which innovated auto safety, went defunct after making 50 cars. McDonalds was a marginal business stolen from its owners and turned into a powerhouse megacorporation based on the founders' original investment in innovation of the fast-food concept. (They were allowed to keep their restaurant, but had to change the name!)
Market regulation, as I mentioned elsewhere, is the business of government, but government should be a referee, not a partner to one faction and an opponent to the others. Fair, equally applied, and only necessary regulation is a good thing, so long as it doesn't require onerous burdens of reporting to bureaucracies which serve no interest but the maintenance of the bureaucracy.
Companies are ultimately run by people. People who want jobs and job security. The Gordon Gekkos of the world can make a big splash buying up dysfunctional companies and selling them for scrap, but the vast majority of capitalists are small business owners who live for their dream, be it as a construction contractor, dress shop owner, restaurateur, or whatever. They are in it for the long haul. Going out of business when their company is not profitable is bad because it inevitably leaves them owing the bank, which is unlikely to offer them a loan for their next startup.
Both the Soviet Union and China are democratic countries. They are Democratic Socialist countries, and everyone gets to vote. What they were not is individualist countries. They are examples of Collectivism, in which government interprets the will of the people and then enforces that will upon the people. Needless to say, both were no only economic failures, and neither, until they began to show tolerance toward capitalists, could even feed their people. (Most people aren't aware that US grain exports were what kept the Soviet Union alive through the entire Cold War, at a time when the USSR controlled the largest piece of wheat-growing ground in the world.)
It's not a fairy tale. Unbridled capitalism has flaws, but so far it's beat the socks off of every other economic system ever invented everywhere. Is it the perfect, ultimate system? Well, no. But it beats Imperialism, Marxism, Monarchies, and Anarchies.
Until something better comes along it's our best bet. Socialism isn't something new and untried. Read Benjamin Franklin's concerns about Socialism, then realize that the idea was already old in the Age of Enlightenment. It's been tried, often, and it only works when society is still at the tribal stage because once you don't have to look your neighbor in the eye when you come to take what he's worked hard to get, it's easy to take your neighbor's stuff, which de-incentivises your neighbor from generating surplus which you can then plunder 'for a good cause'. It's a downward spiral which always ends when you run out of rich people to take stuff away from.
As for capitalism being harmful, umm, what? Poor people have always been a problem. It is only in the age of capitalism that we've actually made inroads into eliminating real poverty, (not presumed by contrast, but real as in you don't get to eat today.)
The poor in Calcutta think the poorest American is rich, and they are right. Our poor, unless they have mental disorders like drug addiction, have a roof, clean drinking water, access to food and medical services, and usually electricity. The aveerage poor American is middle class by the world's standard.
Can we do better? Oh yes. But if we turn off the faucet that creates the money, (capitalism,) we won't be able to afford to. We have a large segment of our population depending on government funds, and they aren't going to like it, (or be prepared,) when the money runs out. Capitalism has been the road out of poverty for over 200 years. It works. And it works better than any competition. Look at the world. The proof is right before your eyes.
Trek didn't eliminate the profit motive, they just changed the currency. Kirk, for example, valued starship command. He worked very hard to achieve it, (investment,) and he got a return, (a ship to command. Actually, several ships.)
Trek implied that the new currency was knowledge and expertise, and it paid dividends in respect. This is actually an old system that dates back to before even socialism. Before money, even. In that model, the successful hunter, the successful farmer or herder, was a person of status in the community. It earned him and his children special treatment in the society: opportunities not granted to the lazy or the foolish. In such a society the ability to offer a feast, to give away what one owns secure in the knowledge that one can then go about getting new stuff, afforded that individual respect.
Trek uses this ancient form of currency. Respect, like money, has to be earned. Respect is not based on flimsy evidence or a stroke of luck; respect is earned through a repeated pattern of hard work and success, like money. Respect is honest: it can't be stolen or bartered or given away.
I can't wait for the day when respect is the currency most valued. I probably won't be rich, but I think I'll do okay.
Now I don't believe that, in the present, any State is able to provide an idealised social democracy because healthcare will always take up the majority of any State's expenditure due to aging populations and complications arising from inactivity (due to automation) meaning relying on the free market is a must for less 'important' things like transport (though the State should always regulate the hell out of them).
But the State is always willing to improve efficiency because it makes it cheaper for them unlike the free market who have a vested interest in things not changing once their profits outweigh the cost. Obviously this goes down the swanny when the State outsources the efficacy drives to the free market and the rest of the private sector because they see Government contracts as blank checks.
Hell, the cost to the State is increased when more industry is flogged off to the private sector because their internal agreements leaves more workers earning less than they can live on meaning the State has to step in to make sure their populus can actually survive.
Development vs. stagnation can come from necessity but it can also come from boredom. A society with all its basic needs met will always look for new things to do. A society that has to choose between paying for the train to work or asthma medication so they can work have no free time to innovate anything. To pretend that capitalism will drive innovation by communism will lead to stagnation is a remarkably stupid concept that went out of date as soon as we invented robots and automation.
Obviously if you have a disproportionate number of obscenely wealthy corporations then you can brute force your way into modernity in such a way as the social cost can be overlooked leading to a false impression to the benefits of the free market to those who are reasonably comfortable.
It'll take until automation replaces all basic level jobs before socity starts to cotton on to the fact they should probably look at reforming economic models to compensate when it finally gets to the point that obscene wealth is no longer a adequat buffer from real life.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Again, confusing Imperialism with Capitalism. Most professors get the two mixed up, so don't feel bad about it.
I agree that this is what you've been taught to believe, but this is simply not the way the world works. It's the way the Collectivists view the world.
Imperialism allows giant corporations to stifle innovation and opportunity. Capitalism breaks up those mega-corporatations through competition, and the reason why is simple: Pyramids.
No, not ancient structures, modern ones. You see, a supervisor can only supervise so many people efficiently. When you grow beyond a certain size you need more supervisors. And you need someone to supervise them. Then, when things get going really well, you need several supervisors to supervise the supervisors, and someone to supervise them.
Like a pyramid, each layer requires a smaller layer above, and they begin to stack up, layer upon layer, each devoted to nothing but supervising supervisors. They don't generate useful work that helps their customers, but at each level they get costlier to maintain in salaries and benefits.
Without laws to protect them from competition, such companies would collapse like a house of cards because ten smaller companies could do what they do faster, better, and cheaper.
There are certain minimum sizes required for certain businesses. You aren't going to build jumbo-jets in a two-mechanic garage, for example. But even there, farming out the work to other companies who compete for the business can help reduce costs. Boeing doesn't make tires for is jumbo jets, for example, it buys them.
But when a company grows too big it invites competition, and that competition comes with a smaller pyramid to maintain, and thus can do the same work for less money.
The pyramid problem isn't unique to business either: it's why government costs so much. The majority of government employees serve only to supervise lower-level employees. The bulk of the money spent on a bureaucracy goes into paying for the bureaucracy, and because the higher the pyramid, the more money the guy on top makes, there is zero incentive t streamline the workforce. After all, taxes just magically appear out of thin air, and it's 'Government Money' that doesn't cost anybody anythng, right?
I'm enjoying the debate, but I may be beyond the original topic which is Federation Economy. Real World economy is fun, so if you want to continue, please PM me and I'll be happy to respond. But these last posts remind me why I was reluctant to get involved in this thread in the first place.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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