Resource based economy, would it work? | The Coffeehouse

androidi

I like the pretty CGI. I've not watched this to the end yet, so far this hasn't answered the questions of motivation and control of things that don't exist abundance, I hope those are answered in the later parts. I personally know all type of people but in the current system it's hard to say are there enough self driven people to maintain such a system presented here and what about the rest who just choose to party all the time? Suppose 80% of world population would just party their entire useful lifetime Is that a good system considering we could if not educationally, genetically modify people such that they would instead do whatever is deemed to be better than just partying all night along?

That was part 8/13, the preceding stuff is mainly the Ron Paul type whine about the current system.

evildictaitor
if( !succeed( try() ) ) { while(true) try(); }

Sounds like communism to me, and it didn't work out so well.

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

It's circular logic:

If energy was so abundant, we wouldn't need a profit-based economy
If we're not in a profit-based economy, the automobile industry can't hold back those secret patents that lets us drive 100 mpg cars
If we had 100 mpg cars, energy would be abundant

...and there's that obvious Marxist angle...

evildictaitor
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In reply to Minh

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 6:20 AM

It's also a load of *, because if Shell had a magical energy serum they wouldn't hide it to protect their current oil profits, they'd invest heavilly in the magical energy serum so that they can release it and be king of the energy sector. Oil's going to stop being profitable as oil supplies run out, so Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Cinopec and Gazprom are all looking into alternative energies not because they want to stifle them, but because in 50-100 years their only source of income won't be there, and with a capital investment time of 20 years, if they don't look at alternative energies now, they go out of business (and they _are_ looking at alternative energies).

The reason they're looking at biofuels and not solar is because biofuels already has a distribution network, provides safe hydrocarbon-based energy, is proven to work and is relatively cheap, whereas solar power is expensive, unproven, and provides less energy per hectare than rape-seed oil.

Ironically, if we drop capitalism then we become prone to making arbitrary choices - wind is better than solar today, and tommrrow we're going to say nuclear is the future. If we let capitalism get involved (which is damn good at optimising for profit) and we define a relationship between the resource we want and this profit, we can just let capitalism optimise it, which optimises for the resource we're after at the same time. It's why capitalism works better than any other system. Capitalism might support greed or whatever, but if you want something done on a society-wide level you can do one of two things:

1) Regulate it, i.e. make things mandatory or illegal. This is ok for things like fraud or monopolies or paying taxes, but it sucks for optimising stuff.

2) Define a conversion between the resource you want and capitalism, and then let go. The conversion rate gets set by the markets, and the markets optimise for value, which is (by definition) the optimal production of the resource you want.

So basically, because energy is the resource we want, we define a conversion rate (price per kWh) and say that people can purchase some amount of energy. Because of capitalism, if someone can make energy cheaper than someone else, they win (optimising production) and if I can buy appliances that are more efficient, then I win (optimising demand). Overall, capitalism is driving efficiency in production and demand of energy.

If you wanted to make pollution the issue, you just tax emissions (optionally putting a final cap through the markets and turning it into a zero-sum game). This means that if someone can make energy cleaner than you, they win, and if someone else can capture the pollution, or make it safe, they have a business model that capitalism can use.

The point is that capitalism is the only non-arbitrary system for regulation of these things, and if you throw it away, you put yourself at the mercy of the whims of government, which is by and large uninformed and stupid compared to the fine-tuning effect of capitalism.

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

If we have reach a technological singularity we're all human labor is obsolete, there will be no need for an economy at all. Anyways I think Marx was right, his ideas where just implemented 300-400 years too early.

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

If we have reach a technological singularity we're all human labor is obsolete, there will be no need for an economy at all. Anyways I think Marx was right, his ideas where just implemented 300-400 years too early.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

In the video: "We don't pay for air or tap water"
I don't know where he lives, but here, we pay for tap water. Water is abundant. Potable water is not.

Anyway, the society they are advocating is basically Star Trek. Smiley

As with all these kinds of videos, there is no mention whatsoever of the negative sides. The high costs of building solar, wind, wave and geothermal power stations. The landscape pollution from the huge amounts of solar and wind stations you would need to get enough energy. Etc.

Also, electricity generation isn't the only use of oil. Let's take aircraft as an example because I know a lot about that. There are three major engine types in aircraft today: piston, turboprop and jet. An electrical engine would serve only as a replacement of the piston engines, and probably wouldn't even get the same power that current piston engines give (to say nothing of what the weight of the batteries or fuel cells would do to the performance of the aircraft; I don't have figures so I could be wrong of course). For long range travel, we depend on jets. Jets by their very nature require fuel, they cannot be driven electrically. So naturally, jet engine manufacturers such as Rolls Royce, General Electric and Pratt & Whitney are looking into using biofuel for jet engines. Meanwhile, they are also working to make their engines use less fuel (this also involves the aircraft manufacturers since aircraft aerodynamics are a strong factor in this). This is largely driven by the increasing oil prices that weigh more and more heavily on the airlines' profits.

Either someone invents a completely new type of aircraft engine that's just as good as jets, or we will need fuel to run aircraft, whether fossil or biofuel or something else.

magicalclick

Nah, it is not going to work at all. Why? Because people are flawed and greedy. Sure some people are not greedy, like when I see Mexicans, I see them hard working, peaceful, and not greedy at all. But sadly, you can't expect everyone to be like that. There are people constantly taking advantage of others. Even just like some cheer leaders, fame becomes the trophy of greed. It is simply imposible to make people equal even though no one needs to work at all. People wants to step on other people to make them feel superior and make them feel good. It is no longer about money. Even if they have money, they want to have power and fame.

I only watched the first part of the movie. It is quite naive. Talking about Solar, Wind, Water. Yeah sure, it can produce a lot of power, but sorry dude, we don't have super battery to store it. When it is not used, it is gone, wasted. We simply couldn't store it. So, lets see, I want to use computer at night, sorry, not sun. This is why those alternative are not practicle, not stable. We need a way to constantly generate power 24/7. Not something I have to pray to God for good weather.

Don't want to see the rest at all. The project is not flexible at all anyway. It is a single fixed ideal way of life. Sorry, if I don't want to waste gas on my car, I will move to tiny crowded New York or San Fransisco. I want to have my garden, my own garadge, where I can drive in and I am litteratly in my house. This is the way I want to live, thus, I have to drive a car no matter it is solar powered or not.

If they want utopia, they might as well develope a Matrix. Plug me in so I don't waste anything at all.

androidi

In reply to Sven Groot

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 9:34 AM

What is suggested is this 4000 mph maglev train to replace flying, the train will be floating in a vacuum.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-04/trans-atlantic-maglev

Also the geothermal energy suggested is not that far fetched, I just saw documentary detailing that it's already implemented on smaller scale for powering a city block by sunking 100 m deep "heatpipes" into the ground.

I think those could be feasible but there needs to be some regulation in place eg. having ability to model the whole energy efficiency of certain type of house or the local area and then put restrictions in building houses that are made purely the cost of building in mind rather than the cost of use / energy efficiency. Infact this is already being done but as long as there are no regulation on the minimum efficiency, there will be cheaper houses that don't use say geothermal energy and not enough demand for the more efficient technology to enable mass production of the more efficient technology.

evildictaitor
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In reply to androidi

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 1:20 PM

Uhuh. I suppose this is all going to be powered by a nuclear fusion generator with a recalibrated flux engine which will project anti-gravitons into a tri-lithium diode matrix that will stabilise the warp core?

If we venture back into reality rather than the nonsense of the "New Scientist" and other such populist fiction, we find that aeroplanes won't be disappearing anytime soon. Sven is right when he mentions biofuels in aircraft - in the EU for instance there is a minimum volume of biofuels requirement in all jet airliner fuel, but he misses the fact that the biggest consumers of oil are still power stations, followed by cars followed by the petrochemical industry, so migrating to an electrical energy system would help. The only downside is how you migrate that electricity into cars - hydrogen is too unstable - you really need to add some carbon to sure it up - but then you're back at oil again.

Basically nothing will happen unless there's financial insentive to do it, so until there's international agreement on a carbon emissions trading scheme, there will be no real engagement with the CO2 reducing agenda. We can expect a lot of doomtalk from the media and politicians, but if politicians don't bite the bullet and put money into the picture, industry won't bother, except perhaps putting on a show for PR reasons.

kurniad001

you cant genetically modify behavior, but you can condition behavior, the next generation will think differently if our society changes. its a way of life not a job to support our life. and no i don’t think 80% of the population will party all the time, people will get sick of it. i have had days when i got sick of sitting on my couch. plus the system is made so we have more time to party,

kurniad001

In reply to evildictaitor

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 8:46 AM

communism was not resource based, food was rationed. and people could not choose their jobs. shell CAN get access to the "magical serum". its solar power, wind power, geothermal power, hydroelectricity, etc.

but, lets put ourselves in their place.. say we spent most of our lives building the oil company, we're talking about trillions of dollars, and now in the last decade we find out now that its better to use electric cars powered by natural earth stuff, what do we do? what did they do? they bought the battery technologies and hid them. because with better batteries more people will use electric cars, they bought and crushed the street cars just so there are more busses, they took back every electric car sold and crushed them. if you watch the documentary "who killed the electric car?" you will understand more of what they did to keep to automobile industry.

if they lose the automobile industry, they might as well be an electric company. and no because oil prices increased it doesnt mean we are running out, our economy is based on scarcity, means less of what we have means more money for them. and they have us controlled because our world is so dependent on oil that if tommorow oil prices go up seventh fold they wouldnt loose much money, or possibly any. people will whine and yell, but they will still go out and buy that oil.

the venus peoject aims for humanity to improve on technology, and without money we can research as much as we want and without limit to how much we can find out and in turn it is better for us, we are only limited to our resources. solar power, wind power, etc can increase in efficiency with research. Capitalism is slowing research down, not speeding it up.

kurniad001

In reply to Bass

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 9:09 AM

human labor will not be obsolete, we can never reach perfection. Humanity can never be fully satisfied, if life here on earth is great, we will go to mars and live there. We will never be satisfied with doing nothing, which is what is so great about us.

kurniad001

In reply to Sven Groot

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 9:34 AM

I think he means that we don’t pay for the water its self, we pay for the filterization, transportation, and maintenance of the water. There will be no cost of building the power stations because it is a resource based economy. I think those windmills and solar panels are quite beautiful, I really don’t see it as landscape pollution. And if you worry about space, with no limit to how much we can research in a resource based economy the technology can increase in efficiency, meaning less solar panels, less windmills, less wave electricity generator. And for the aircraft part, again research will make lighter batteries, we do have the technology for lighter batteries, (e.g. Lithium Polymer Batteries, lithium-ions, etc) they are just more expensive too expensive to power an aircraft. With no money there will be no limit to how many expensive batteries you can put in.

kurniad001

In reply to magicalclick

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 12:18 PM

the conditioning of people will change the way people think, they way your family or your society raise you up is your conditioning, you learn your right and wrong from them. in the past many of the things we do is absurd, but it has changed and it will in the future. There will be no greed for power if there is no competition if we all work towards the same goal, it might sound like a fantasy world to us, but it is possible.

yes it is quite obvious you can run your computer at night. I live in Toronto and we have hydroelectricity and I’m on the computer right now when it is dark outside. I think you shouldn’t watch the 10 minute video, you should watch the full documentary, 2 hours and 3 minutes long, its called “zeitgeist – addendum” Google it (its free)

P.s. Matrix doesn’t give you food.

kurniad001

I have watched the whole 2 hour and 3 minute documentary and all the problems addressed in this post is already addressed in the video. I think the venus project would work and it would be great, the only problem is converting to it. its called "Zeitgeist addendum" I was lured into watching the video coz my friend told me that saddam is a good person and proved to me in the documentary. i recommend anyone who is interested in the venus project to watch the documentary, whether you are agaisnt it or for it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912

iStation
Fuujin

Solar!
...
So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, --

                  Men say they know many things;
                  But lo! they have taken wings --
                  The arts and sciences,
                  And a thousand appliances;
                  The wind that blows
                  Is all that any body knows.
...
Henry David Thoreau, "Walden," Economy
Smiley

ManipUni
Proving QQ for 5 years!

Total nonsense.

I'm not even going to explain why this is nonsense because I feel I would be insulting your intelligence. These people are so off into the clouds that it isn't even amusing.

evildictaitor
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In reply to kurniad001

#Oct 8th, 2008 @ 11:31 PM

Food was rationed because there was a finite amount of it, and it was evenly distributed. Since there isn't an infinite amount of food, food must be rationed under communism, and under a resource-orientated rather than wealth-driven economy, food must be rationed.

You say that solar/wind etc is a cheap energy serum for wiping away all of our problems, but on a cost-per-watt basis, that isn't the case, or if you use the generalization that cost is approximately proportional to the amount of human work involved in setting something up, society would progress slower under a solar based economy and would be less efficient than under an oil based one. This is trivially the case because capitalism drives human work down by optimising for cost, which is a function of human effort. They're clearly not hiding special free energy machines (as many conspiracy theorists would have you believe) because with free energy comes free money, and capitalism would drive them to exploit such technology.

Now you might (legitimately) argue that we should close down the sectors of the economy that are non-essential and gain productivity in this direction - so we'd stop producing sports cars and expensive clothes and TVs and shut down the non-essential parts of the software industry; and using the productivity gained from those areas we could pump large amounts of effort into other areas of the economy such as agriculture, energy or technology -- an argument expressed by Marx himself no less. The problem with this view is that at some stage or other you end up with a group of people deciding somewhere what and who should have access to which resources, and dividing them up on an arbitrary, potentially ill-informed and low-granular way, whereas under capitalism the fast trading of resources and the inherent interest in all of the various parties to obtain the best "price" for their good or service means that agreements have to be made, and where large numbers of parties are involved in the agreement process, an optimum agreement up to price would be formed -- thus forming an optimum agreement up to resource consumption.

It's not that a resource-based economy is _bad_ per se, it's that it's too ideal and it fails to take into account that the people managing it won't manage it with the same competence or high-granularity of distribution that capitalism can achieve.

androidi

In reply to evildictaitor

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 8:46 AM

If a very narrow focus, specialized company came up with something that would make the companys business obsolete, I think there's a decent chance that instead of just going ahead full steam with that, they would sit on it until they found a way to make money of it.

I'm not saying they wouldn't want to release it but they would look at the economic realities first. Think about music labels/RIAA here. If they invented a perverted type of Internet which initially was only good for distribution of unprotected music and had no methods to pay for the music, would they go ahead with it or wait until they found a way to make business around it? I think the answer is clear to this one. By "going ahed" I mean they might license the thing for enough $ if they had confidence it wouldn't pose a problem since it's not their specialty anyway.

iStation
Fuujin

In reply to evildictaitor

#Oct 9th, 2008 @ 11:46 AM

Hint!

[ ] is reserved solar energy. So, why not using solar energy directly?

Smiley

evildictaitor
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In reply to androidi

#Oct 10th, 2008 @ 8:21 PM

Oil runs out in the next fifty years, so the business model is going to disappear anyway. Believe me, the oil companies are looking for ways to make sure that in fifty years they still have a business model, and factoring in the research and capital investment time, they're starting looking now.

mariuspanajr

In reply to Sven Groot

#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 9:34 AM

"As with all these kinds of videos, there is no mention whatsoever of the negative sides. The high costs of building solar, wind, wave and geothermal power stations. The landscape pollution from the huge amounts of solar and wind stations you would need to get enough energy. Etc."

Try to wrap your head around this, I know its hard. THERE IS NO MONEY! Therefore there is costs, there are only resources and when we talk of resources these are in abundance! The current economic systems is nothing less than the enslavement of every participant.

I dont have to get into details but look into GM and how they killed the elctric car. Look into Romania and see how many engineers have built succesful prototypes of electrical cars only to be brought off and silenced by large corporations.

If we dont open our eyes soon and try to change in a different direction, I fear the consequences.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

In reply to mariuspanajr

#Oct 18th, 2008 @ 3:33 AM

It's a catch 22. We need those things to get the resource based economy, and we need the resource based economy to be able to afford to build those things.

evildictaitor
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In reply to mariuspanajr

#Oct 18th, 2008 @ 3:33 AM

Money is an abstract concept for the priority of resources. and the fundamental unit of trade. The only society which truly has no money is a society in which there is a total of no interaction between individuals. You might think of money as these bits of metal and paper, or as being abstractable only to the point where it's a number in a bank, but the laws of economics, finance and capitalism work with abstract money and can deal with any economy no matter what the fundamental unit of trade is - and there is always a fundamental unit of trade, even if it is purely abstract or never used.

Think about it this way. Even in a society where everything is trade between various goods and there is no "currency" and all trade is agreed by bartering. (Let's call them resource 1 2 and 3). Then there is a value ratio (between bounds) of resource 1 to resource 2, and between resource 2 and resource 3. The value ratio between resource 1 and 3 is determined by saying "swap all of your resource 1 to resource2, and swap as much of that to resource 3" - i.e. 1:3 = 1:2 * 2:3. This means that if the nessisary resource resource 3 becomes more scarce, the trading ratio between 1:3 and 2:3 goes up, and vice-versa. A little bit of looking might show you this is actually the law of supply-and-demand, but we're thinking in a hypothetical society that doesn't use currency! Furthermore, we can actually define an abstract currency for our model to be the number of resource 1 (in general any resource) that can be bought with some other resource.

If I have 1 unit of resource1 then by defintion I can trade this into 1 unit of resource1.

Value(resource1) = 1 Ms

If I have 1 unit of resource2 then I can trade this into 2:1 = 1/(1:2) units of resource1

Value(resource2) = 1 / (1:2) Ms

If I have 1 unit of resource3 then I can trade this into 2:1 units of resource2, and I can trade this into 3:2 units of resource1

Value(resource3) = 1 / (1:3) Ms

It's a bit abstract, but you'll see that despite the fact we're dealing in a society that trades with resources and never with money, we've managed to abstract a notion of money even though money is never "really" used in the society. If you want you can print tokens that represent Ms (we can even rename them, say, to "dollars" or "pounds").

There's two questions left though: If the relative value of 1 changes upwards or downwards with respect to every other resource, this can be seen (if you think about) to be deflation or inflation respectively. If the relative value of any other resource changes, it just changes the "price" of the resource.

So what was the point of looking at that? Well the point is simple. To show that even where you don't print cash, there's still money. Even in a society that doesn't THINK about cash, and simply trades resources, economics still applies and it's easy to contruct an abstract currency for which all of economic theory applies, even if that currency isn't actually used in the system.

So what does a resource-based economy actually involve? Basically it's about how the relative prices of things are set. There are three approaches:

1. All resources are dictated to be worth the same. This has a nasty side-effect that a loaf of bread "costs" the same as it's weight in flour. So there's no change in the baker's ability to obtain things via trade because his net "wealth" isn't changed by making bread. Indeed, if he has to go and make the fire that cooks it, he might be selling his life away. This is clearly unworkable.

2. All resources are dictated to be a fixed value either by public vote or by some committee in society. The committee in society approach is classic communism. The value of goods are set by the party and trading at other prices is illegal. This doesn't sound like a bad plan until you notice that there are hundreds or thousands of resources all with quite subtle interplay in the economy, and a the movement of prices by small amounts can cause rather large changes to the economy (and thus the ability of the people to eat and be merry). The voting system is interesting, but with people having other motives (i.e. there are more people eating bread in society than bakers) this will nearly always work against the producer.

3. The value of resources is determined by the most recent price traded, and there are no limits on what price a good can be traded for. This is classic capitalism. If resource B is in high demand, the value of resourceB goes up. If resourceA has a massive overproduction, the value of A falls.

If you want, you can think of money of the various resources as a quantitative measure of the resource's importance to society, and the reward for bringing more back. If you think of it like this, you'll understand that actually it doesn't matter HOW abundant resources are in society, always be priorities for resources, therefore trading, and there'll always be economists who think of things in terms of filthy lucre.