Bitcoin Forum

This is a really good video on the future of jobs and work.  Douglas Rushkoff presents his view of where we're going economically and why corporations and the federal government won't be able to help us much in the future.  He talks a lot about local, peer-to-peer economic activity and local currencies.  He doesn't specifically mention Bitcoin, but I think a combination of Bitcoin, Open Transactions and Ripple could really enable his vision of the future.

http://online.wsj.com/video/does-america-really-need-more-jobs/E49FDEC2-1596-4A1B-970D-486CBDF1FE5C.html (http://online.wsj.com/video/does-america-really-need-more-jobs/E49FDEC2-1596-4A1B-970D-486CBDF1FE5C.html)

i take this one step further, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFVz6TXSN0U

"saint douglas rushkoff explains why you should quit your job and exchange things of value and love with your community" (church of stop shopping NYC Earthalujah

Money unfairly benefit the banks, but it is also works as a benchmark to the value of goods

And as we all know benchmarks are flawed. ;)

No, seriously... the problem with the benchmarking is that values aren't something defined. Take bread for example. It can be worthless, because you don't like it and live saving, because it prevents you from starving. I don't think there are really more extreme differences, yet this is true for a lot of things. Also there are a lot of things that are more or less impossible to value. Oh and there are markets that are mostly based on psychology. In general things are a lot about imagination, which makes sense, because the world is based on what the people's brains imagine.

These things are interesting, because it makes markets, values, etc. perfectly valid, reasonable and add lots of logic, while it is still imagination. It's similar to persons playing any kind of games. There are rules and you can analyze stuff. You can program a computer to play again, you can create theories, find paradoxes and explore everything (has been done with all kind of games) while still being pure imagination. This is something a lot of philosophers have been interested in. The fact that everything is pretty much an interpretation/imagination of data that your sensory organs provide to you brain (but you can't even know that for sure) has even lead to the question for existence and the famous "Cogito ergo sum" by Rene Decartes, who was a mathematician btw.

So a lot of things can and should be questioned. The fact that something is in a certain way doesn't necessarily mean it has to be that way. Also the theory determinism was (possibly!) wakened by quantum physics.

+1

Reminds me of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QNwkR4HU8Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07-cpKE9bUw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eim4cpBmShA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsH1atj4Tsg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lBIETTmSXU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P0k0Z2oLG4

Same stuff in a more serious theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w

The most obvious reason that money exists is because it is very simple to use and understand, and most of the people prefer simple things at the first place. Just like computer, no matter how many times you tell most of the people that command line is much more powerful, they will still prefer a mouse and GUI

The analogy falls apart when barter really isn't that much more powerful. It takes more time to get desires met. Massive value is lost in inefficiency. The command-line can be efficient and powerful.

I blame the bailed out industries and the destruction of savings by the government.

I can't watch this video, but if the general argument is that a "job" is a daily defined working arrangment with a legally established company, then the answer to the question posed in the title is "no".

The official metrics are flawed, in many notable ways.  But significantly in error as the "unoffical" grey market increases in relative size.  This has been the trend since the commercial explosion of the Internet since 1992.  For example, many people for the past decade or so have made a part time job out of Ebay dealings.  A minority of these people have lost their "offical" jobs in the recent recession, and are thus offically unemployed.  But if your side job was selling locally made knick-knacks on Ebay prior to the pink slip, what would you do?  I live in a city that has a local artist industry centered around glass, but for the most part the artists themselves don't sell their art on the Internet.  Several fans have filled that niche over the past several years, and I'd bet that more than a few have made a full time income out of their hobby. 

Another example is my nephew.  He recently turned 18, and like many his age have trouble finding "offical" work because they have to compete for those entry level labor jobs with older and more experienced adults who were laid off from higher skilled jobs.  That is not to say that he doesn't work.  He takes one off labor jobs from myself, neighbors, and strangers via a website called Taskrabbit.  It's not as easy or dependable as an "official" job, and he would prefer a regular scheduled job, as there are many advantages; but he doesn't go hungry and he manages to earn enough to pay for the things that he really wants, such as gas in his car, insurance, cell service and bowling fees.

I blame technological advancement.
We live in an age where most people in 1st world countries do not work in a job that we 'need' to survive.  All of you on here who have jobs, think about what you do and how important you are in society.  Think about how few people it takes to do the core activities in everyday life that keep us alive: agriculture, sanitation, construction, manufacturing industry, medical, etc... the only necessary field that continues to grow is medicine/health care and this only because we keep ourselves alive so long - yet even medical business still is facing certain areas of employment obsolescence.

I'm probably one of the few on here that believe, although I consider myself a form of a libertarian, that the age of working for income in a market system is coming to an end.  Up to 25% of all US citizens who could be employed are not, and its certainly not for lack of trying.  Sure, the debt system we've created along with regulations and market distortions affect employment, but no way can we deny that we are innovating ourselves out of a job.  Just think about what a college degree gets you today (or what not having a college degree gets you today, on average).

When it is impossible for a significant portion of our population to find a job, where do they get money?

Imagine the extreme: A small population somehow becomes so efficient that it is almost completely automated to the point that all jobs - agriculture/service/medical/technical/managerial whatever - are all done by less than 1% of the population.  What do the other 99% do for money?

Obviously that won't happen, but there is some point between full employment and this that we are at now.
Think of every piece of technology/innovation creating and replacing jobs.  You create a deep-frier/burger-flipping machine that replaces 10 fast food workers and creates jobs for 1 technician to service it and on average 2 innovators/managers working for the corporation that sells it somewhere along the line.  That 'creates' 3 new jobs and 'replaces' 10 on average for every machine made.  We're net -7 jobs for every machine.  You can try and justify where jobs will be created along the line from those corporate managers/technicians/etc but in the end it is not zero-sum.  Jobs are lost and are lost to the lowest sector.  
We're well past the breaking point where this replacement breaks even in the economy.  Wages for work seem like an outdated idea, suddenly.  I have no idea what the alternative is.

Machines actually create wealth and make things less expensive in society and free up innovation to fill more desires. As long as people want something, there will be jobs to fill. That also answers the question, "What do 99% of people do if 1% maintain the machines?" Well, first of all, they have to sustain the machines by having them fill their desires. You've created a paradox where you think everyone would die because they somehow are forced to buy from machines. It would balance out and in the end, in such a world, goods would be nearly free. It would be a post-scarcity situation. Very utopic actually.

Anyways,the only reason there is unemployment now is because nearly all of society's savings have been destroyed by government and there is nothing to feed innovation.

Most notable in that by definition they exclude many people who are unemployed but for the sake of official 'unemployment' are not.  Our definition for 'unemployment' becomes more strict - excluding more people - so that in reality 10% reported unemployment is really closer to 20+% unemployed in the population - those actually able to work but are not employed.

Your examples are trivial - the types of income/employment that you list have always been in existence, they just take a different form these days thanks to computers.  Freelance income still is reported to the government - its not like officials and economists are blind to the fact that people sell shit on ebay.

That first sentence made me go a little  :-\
What you say is not universally true.  It is true that we find jobs in other areas when one starts to become obsolete - that is why the service sector grows in post-industrialized society.
Without government intervention, yes, people can always find a job.  Lift the minimum wage and everyone could find a job - but the disparity in income would be so huge that it would hardly matter.  I'm no fan of the minimum wage, but the way our society has structured itself it is completely unrealistic to think that we could ever have a situation where everyone works, has a job, a house, and is happy and safe.  THAT is utopic.  What you will have instead is the spread of becoming heavily weighted to one side, spreading thinner and thinner for those unlucky enough to be the least desirable for jobs. 
Would I pay someone $1/hr to clean my messy room?  Sure.  Is that a job?  Sure.  Is that fair and reasonable solution to the 20%+ of the population without jobs? 

You can blame the FED, corporatism, the welfare state, regulation, whatever you want, but in the end there is something else that is driving this disparity, something naturally occurring in a market situation.  The question is what to do about it.

Your idea of income disparity has never found a place in reality.

Do you think the person who would work to clean your room for a dollar an hour has a better place in society right now? Think about what you are saying for a second.

The guy in the video is all buzzwords and feelgood and no actual economic clue. Hey, it's not like that ever stopped anyone from writing public policy.

One of the schemes he's suggesting, where a website tracks everybody's skills and express them in time-dollars is basically a disguised form of communism, the notion that everyone has equal rights to the economic outputs of the society regardless of his contribution. By fixing an hour of baby-sitting to equal an hour of computer programming you can pretty much guarantee no programming services will be available on the market, just a glut of baby-sitting, garden-mowing and grocery-buying offers. Scarcity is the natural effect of intervention in the process of price discovery - the undervalued good or service is sold on the parallel or black market.

For the sake of argument, let's assume the townspeople reach an agreement on an "unit of account" to be used, and devise a pricing scheme that everybody accepts as fair (yeah, right), for example 100 points = 1 hour of accounting by a CPA = 5 hours of baby sitting = 2 hours electrical work. Well then, when all townspeople enter their service offers in the web interface, the server will only be able to do crude barter matches - since nobody has done any work everybody has a big fat zero points in his account, there's no purchasing power.

To move beyond barter to an actual economy you need to inject liquidity in the market via two main mechanisms:
 - some trusted entity is able to spend points into existence for example the City Hall or a community charity
 - accounts are allowed to have negative balances, effectively a credit facility

Does all this sound familiar ? Well it should, since it's exactly what the government (via bond issuance) and the Fed (via QE) are doing. So we have free prices and a fiat currency - the exact same way the real economic system works. A fat lot of good did that do !

Trivial to whom?  They are not trivial to those who engage in free agency in order to earn an income.  And the addition of the Internet into the mix ultimately only makes free agency more efficient, otherwise it wouldn't happen.  Higher efficiency and effectiveness in the realm of using the Internet to match up individual desires with individuals willing to fill those desires (be it shippable products, or personal labor services) only increases the market share that free agency can effectively provide.  In the beginning, the new 'TaskRabbit' type people who can make a real living will be rare and annecdotal, but over time those jobs will increase with the increasing public awareness that such a system can satisfy their needs in less expensive or less frustrating ways than are presently possible.  A decade ago, anyone making a living from home via the Internet who wasn't an accomplished author was a news article.  Today most people know someone who does or could make a living solely from home via the Internet.  Craigslist is another example of the improvement of efficiency of the Internet altering an existing market, resulting in it's massive expansion compared to the prior model.  In the case of Craigslist, the local market of used goods is what changed.  Not only did Craigslist improve the advertising of yard sales, it permitted sellers of single used items to avoid the need for a yard sale or the purchase of a classified ad in a local newspaper.  Thus allowing those people looking for a deal on a used item that is impractical to ship (think used refrigerator) to find sellers locally.  I have an android app that scans Craigslist for me, looking for items that match keywords, so that I can be quick to reply to any such ad that I should be interested it within a few minutes.  I know that I'm not the only person to use such a thing, because I've been beaten to the item by a matter of minutes in the past.  Search Craigslist for refrigerators and you will find a number of ads that ask too much for what they are selling, because the good deals are claimed quickly and those ads are removed.


Sure, they are aware that stuff sells on Ebay, but that is only an example.  The second hand market is legally taxable, but let me know if you find anyone who sells stuff on Craigslist in November that will even consider reporting that to the IRS come April, assuming that they even remember the transaction while sitting down to do their tax forms.  If there wasn't a check or a credit transaction involved, something I would presume to be very rare with regard to Craigslist transactions, then it didn't happen as far as the IRS will ever know.  It's only because of the third party issue that Ebay transactions are more likely to be reported and taxed.  This is the killer consumer app for Bitcoin anyway.  Whether or not Bitcoin is used in a manner intended to be anonymous by both parties, it's going to be a lot of work for a agent to tie a particular transaction to a taxable event even after identifying both parties to a BTC transfer.

You assume that the 'something' is a naturally occurring force in a market situation, but you can't offer any evidence to support that.  You can't, because it's not true, and it's provablely not true.  The 'something' that is driving disparity presently isn't a naturally free market mechanism, but the long predicted side effects of intervention into the free market.  It's just taken this long to accumulate to the current crisis.  I can actually support this premise, but I don't have the time and you wouldn't likely accept it anyway, so take the above however you wish.

This is dead on correct.  By hindsight, we now know that the most important change in society that led to the equal rights of women was not the Women's Sufferage movement.  It was the invention of the automatic washing machine.

Those who are wealthy enough to afford a maid to clean their homes pay them because they favor their free time over their money.  The maid cleans the home because they favor the money over the free time.  It's a difference in wants and values.  The wealthy don't value money as much as the poor, because they have more than enough to satisfy their primal needs.  Thus they are willing to pay the poor woman to be their maid.  So who benefits most from the advancements in consumer technology?  The middle class and the poor.  Because of the inventions of washing machines, vacuums and automatic dishwashers; both middle class housewives and those nearly destitute maids of the rich are better off then their predecessors a few generations ago.  If a man is wealthy enough, he didn't have to labor to meet his own needs even back in Roman times, since he just had to hire more servants (or by more slaves).  The modern maid, however, directly benefits from the effectiveness of labor saving devices designed for the American middle class homemaker.  Because of a washing machine, the maid does not need to commit so much time or personal effort into the washing of clothes.  Because of the Roomba, she might be able to vacuum personally in one room while the robot vacuums in the next room; so that the maid only need to check the robot's work and finish up the details.  To sum it up, machines don't actually displace workers unless you are looking at a particular subset of work.  Before the machines, the maid did the work while her employer (or a manager) surveyed the results.  Now the maid has taken over much of the tasks of the manager, while the machines do much of the labor.  Thus she is more productive overall, and can earn more money (by doing the same work that would have required many more maids two generations ago, perhaps by freelancing and cleaning a different client's home each day of the week rather than laboring all day every day for one rich guy) while her employer benefits from lower labor costs as well.  This doesn't actually remove jobs, because although there is less need for professional maids, the rich man still has other unmet desires.  For example, since he doesn't have to pay two maids because one is enough, now he also hires a gardener (or a landscaping company, same principle) so that he doesn't have to worry about the yard work either.  Or a poolman.  Or he buys a home theater, which employs not just engineers to design the thing, but also those factory workers; who now rather than standing on an assembly line driving two screws into the product 1000 times each workday monitors three or four screw driving robots.  Now he is an 'operator', or a 'tech'.  So the employee makes more money, performing a less (physically) demanding task; while the consumer gets an improved product at a more affordable cost.

Literally everyone in society benefits from the improvements in productivity that automation provides, from the wealthiest industrialist down to the unemployed drunkard whose beer costs half as much because the brewing process is now controlled by a computer rather than a trained brewmaster.

The only real problem appears to be energy. It is a bit like a currency (well, it is in the science fiction genre). It isn't just the availability of automation. Sometimes machines even get replaced by people, because they are cheaper and from an economic POV there is more supply than demand.

So if you want to make things better that's probably your best bet. Without wanting to go into conspiracy theories it is clear that a lot of people who benefit from a low supply and high demand of energy fear to loose power (money). I don't even think this fear is valid, because if the whole society that profits it's usually better for them, because it means new technologies (entertainment, medical, ...), more automation, more free time, etc.

It would be an important step to start investing resources into the future of energy supply. There are MANY serious projects that could potentially "solve" (create a MUCH bigger supply) the problem. Japan for example contracted a company for solar-based solar power (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Space-based_solar_power). There are multiple companies waiting for first deployments of their technology. Also there are way more serious projects for wind power, that are ready to be deployed. Not just these ineffective (land and offshore) wind farms. Than there many different ways to use waves, the difference of pressure, temperature, ... in the depths of the ocean. The wind and partially the shore based power plants also have the huge benefit of not requiring a lot of maintenance. They work pretty much without anyone caring. All these projects are real and are offered at trade shows, so I don't really understand why no country invests into these things. I mean if just one of them can be successfully deployed it this will be a huge improvement for countries - in many ways.

Knowing nothing about the projects that you are referring to, the fact that no one is interested in investing in these projects suggests that their application is limited.  Nations shouldn't really be investing, anyway.  The US "invested" into the Apollo program in order to be the first to put a man on the Moon, but the goal there was a display of technical superiority, not profit or sustainability.  One of the greatest projects for public investment in the US would be a right-of-way, pipeline and pumping station on the Mississippi River to force water up, through or over the Rocky Mountains in order to supply freshwater to populations beyond such as Los Vegas.  Or simply a pipeline from San Diego to siphon seawater to refill the Death Valley Basin, which was an inland saltwater sea (like the Dead Sea) up until about 800 years ago that provided rainwater (via the natural water cycle) to the entire area up until the last of the water dried up and left the salt flats.  Those would be investments worth of a national effort, but they are never going to happen due to interstate political issues and environmental issues.  A power plant is something that the private capital markets handle best. 

I mostly agree with your view, and recently I have some other observations:

Since the automation is happening so fast, sooner or later there will not be enough intelligent people that can keep up with the technology advance, that means either you are clever enough to deal with super complex and fast changing automation envrionment, or you totally unqualified for any kind of job thus lost your income


I call this "Robbing by intelligence". Up until now, there are laws to stop people robbing others by using force, but there is no law to stop the robbing by using intelligence (through job)

Basically there are 2 alternatives:

Heavy tax the higher income people and return the money to those who lost the job due to automation
Reduce the working hours to 4 days a week (and salary of course) so that labor become scarce again

It seems government are just ignore such very obvious solution

There is no savings, those money you put in the bank are just "proof of work", like bitcoin, it proved that you have done some amount of work, but in reality they do not have anything corresponding to their value, since those products you have created have been consumed long time ago

The money in the bank is put in an investment fund used towards capital for innovations and businesses. Of course savings produce incredible value. Savings are essential.

There is an obvious third solution.

Educate yourself and/or your children to be able to compete in a rapidly advancing economy; or die off and make room on this planet for those who can.

It's called evolution, and it's one reason that ethnic Jews are the most intelligent race on average.  Because for hundreds of years, ethic Jews had neither a nation of their own, nor the basic right to own property in either Old Christiandom (Europe) or anywhere in the Middle East.  If you couldn't farm to feed your family, you and your children would have had to become the best businessmen around just to be able to feed your family as well.

Artifical support of those who cannot support themselves in the human race is counter evolutionary, and sooner or later nature is going to revert to the mean.  And it will be 'mean' in every sense.  When the USSR broke apart, leading directly into the collapse of the Russian economy, the life expecency of a Russian male was already much shorter than in the US and many "Western" democracies.  But it still dropped significantly in the next two years.

I think just like last great recession, we need world war III to wipe out excessive production power and useless people who are not able to compete with super intelligent guys due to their brain is not optimal when they were born

Oh, good God!  Not the "the war pulled us out of the depression" BS again!  You learned this economic "theory" in public school, didn't you?  War doesn't improve economies any more than a rock throwing vandal improves the GDP when a glazer has to fix the baker's shop window.  The US pulled out of the depression because, 1) the busybodies in Washington were too preoccupied with war issues to worry about "regulating" industry to death and 2) we bombed our biggest industrial competitors back 10 years or more all across Europe & Japan. 

Again, those money in the bank does not correspond to any tangeable products, they are just a credit that can drive some business activity

Then, in a recession/high jobless/saving era, with decreasing demand and dropping confidence due to higher risk and mature market, who dare to do those investment? If you borrow 1 billion dollar, could you make some profit if everyone is saving and not spending?

War is a natual result following your way of "evolution" thinking, if some people can not compete with Jews in intelligence, they can choose to compete with them in brutal force, that is Hitler did.

Competetion has a tendency to develope into a war, either in physical form or in mental form, why do you need a war when today's technology is more than enough to let everyone live a good life?

Yes, thinking that we somehow need to control evolution (eugenics) has resulted in some of the most cruel actions that humanity has ever done to each other. We should be very careful here. I believe we should optimize for the good of the people currently alive (and upcoming generations), not some far extrapolation/prediction, either biological or sociological. Predictions rarely work out as expected, and also you'll not be alive to see the "result", so why bother at all?

I believe the 4 things to end unemployment are balanced budgets, full reserve banking, ending minimum wage, and ending unions.

You need a free flow of labor.  Norway, although it has high taxes has been running 10% surpluses and does not have a national debt.  They have a national surplus and have the highest gdp on earth.  You cannot have a climax community in division of labor without balanced budgets or surpluses.

All depressions/recessions result from credit expansion.  Full reserve banking will end that.

Minimum wage prevents the free flow of labor.

Unions prevent the free flow of labor.  The union worker might do a job for $40 per hour that someone might want to do for $20 per hour.  Unions prevent people from the right to work.

War is a natural state of mankind, regardless.  It's a peaceful civil society that requires effort on the part of people.  If you don't consider the riots happening in Europe a form of war, you will.  That said, I'm not advocating eugenics.  I'm just pointing out that there is a third option of simply letting things take their course.  That is the most likely possibility in any event.  Sometimes these things just have to follow through.  And if we are heading towards a Hobbesian limit (I don't know that we are, I don't know that we're not) would rather risk death in conflict, or simply watch your children starve?  If you're not continueously educating yourself and your children, your complacency is going to be your undoing one way or another.  At a minimum, learn how to grow a garden.  You don't need a job for that, just a backyard.

Ending minimum wage laws or unions is unneccessary.  Minimum wage laws really don't have a huge effect upon employment, except for the lowest skilled labor pool.  And unions are a valid use of the right to assemble and engage in contract.  What might need to change is the laws that compel individuals (who own companies) to engage in contracts that they do not wish to participate in.  Corporations, however, are not people; and thus have no rights, only legal privilages.  If the governments that establish limited liability corporations as 'legal entities' independent of their investors wish to impose rules such as required recongnition of collective bargining representatives; then those are the rules.

Unions are heavily government-empowered. The unions of today are the not the unions of yesterday.

In addition, minimum wage laws hinder manufacturing. There's no way I can get an assembly line of basic assemblers for cheap goods profitably while paying them over $8 an hour. We would see a lot of innovation and lower-rung jobs opened and made with no minimum wage. There will be a more skilled labor pool in the end since people don't have to jump to reach the ladder in the first place.

Well, I don't disagree.  It's just a matter of degree.  There are much bigger issues to be delt with than the minimum wage.  And unions in bed with governments, which isn't all of them btw, will continue to lose influence as the governments that they depend upon continue to lose authority.  Thus, if you wish to make them your pet issues, feel free.  But they are both issues that will lose relevence in their own time.

This is not really feasible in today's society, in order to get the ownership of that backyard, a normal people have to loan from the bank and work most of his life to pay back the loan. He will be throw into a "profitable" game from the beginning and how big a chance he will have against most of those specialized corporations?

Besides force, intelligence and money, ownership difference is another factor that contribute to the high unemployment

I disagree in this case, because I am talking about pretty much solving the energy problem, which means there is enough for everyone. I think it is a good thing if the state handles stuff EVERYONE needs. Compare it with water. In countries where there is an unlimited supply you receive it for for free. Not really an unlimited amount, but more than you would ever require for private use.

For a _big_ energy project that would basically be beneficial for ALL humans - it is one of the biggest problems in is close related to the climate - it would make more sense to work together. Maybe you can also compare this with stuff like GPS. I mean if we think about Space-based Solar Power (http://Space-based solar power) (Japan works on this) then I don't even believe there could be a capital market. It would most likely be too small and therefor would become a monopoly. Also if we think about systems that require a lot of space or for example a coast it would be better to give the people (voting the government) control over this. I know, you can also vote via money, but that's often very unfair. Especially in case of power plants. Everyone living far away from a power plant doesn't really care about environmental damage, but for cheap energy. A government is usually better in even out these things.

However, it REALLY depends on many things, like the technology and stuff. Maybe it should be a bit like most telephone networks with the government caring about infrastructure. I don't know and I didn't really think a lot about it. The thing I worry about is that technology with a lot of potential is overlooked. This really shouldn't happen.

No solution is going to be feasible for everyone.  But it's still a good idea to know how to tend a garden, even if you live in a high rise condo.  You might not always.  Some skills are life skills, that parents need to teach children as insurance against the worst possible futures that child might face.  An example is learning to swim, even if you live in a city many miles from any accessible body of water.  I was in the USMC, and in boot camp I encountered people from big cities that have never learned to swim.  I was shocked.  Really, you grew up and never event went to a pool?  And then the joined the US Marine Corps.  Common sense would say that boot camp isn't going to be the ideal enviroment to learn to swim.  I (actually mostly my wife) teach my homeschooled children to swim before they are 5 (currently my 2 year old, who is a natural born swimmer, and I mean that literally.  He has zero fear of deep water, and is such a strong swimmer he probably doesn't need to.) and continue to teach this as a 'life skill' for ten years.  Odds are against them ever turning pro, but if they are ever in a flood, or take a cruise on the Titanic II, their odds of survival are vastly higher knowing how to actually swim.  Likewise, knowing how to plan, plant and tend a simple garden might prove to be useful life skill someday.  Ever hear of urban gardening?

What defines 'enough' in this context?  The private markets and the free market pricing mechanism is what tells the investor how much power is needed, and he takes all the risks on behalf of his customer base (society) so that they don't have to.   If he judges the future needs accurately, he is well rewarded by the profit that success should bring.  However, if he is a poor judge of what is 'enough' then he either over invests and loses his ass, or under invests and other investors eat his market share.  How does a government judge how much electric service, or anything else, is the right amount?  They have never been able to do this in the past, and that is exactly what ultimately led to the economic (and then political) collapse of the Soviet Union.  Central economic planning was a core function within the Soviet Union.
 

I don't think that the state handles stuff anyone needs very well.  I shutter to think what would happen if they actually handled water in scarce environments.  Some of the most unjust things happen in Nevada and California over government granted "water rights".  The government doesn't really 'manage' water in areas of abundance, because there isn't really a need to manage it beyond preventing people or companies from contaminating it.  I can, quite literally, drill straight down into one of the largest replenishing freshwater aquifiers in the US from my back yard.  The state expects a "permit" to be filed, so that they know where it is and can add it's presumed value to my property taxes next year; but that doesn't stop me or anyone else from actually doing the drilling should there be a crisis of water issues around here.  And this helps to keep water rates low, because the water utility knows that, even though they hold a state provided monopoly on water distribution, if they tick off their customer base too much they might just find that their customers suddenly don't need quite so much water.


Only if that can practically be done.  Just because it makes more sense from a certain perspective, doesn't mean that it's a problem that can be accomplished in a collective manner.


Every decision making model is unfair to some person or group at some time.  Expecially democracy.


By what metric do you judge this?  IT's long been established that the US feeral governemnt and state and local governments are, by a wide margin, the worst cronic pollutors in the history of mankind.  The entire fleet of vehicles owned and operated by the US military are now and forever exempt from EPA regulations.  There is not a single humvee in the fleet that has a catalitic convertor, and they run convoys across the US freeway system regularly.  The USPS's mail truck fleet is also exempt, BTW; although many of them has pollution controls on them only because they are often built from regular SUV's these days.  The older trapazoidal, right hand drive mail trucks never had such controls, and is one reason that they couldn't be sold to the public.


Dude, you don't know how things happen do you?  The government doesn't build the communications infrastructure in the United States.  And unlike the public roads, the government doesn't even plan for, nor pay for, the public communication infrastructure.  That is done entirely by private industries, whether they hold a state monopoly or not.

Touching on the first page of this thread, YES. We need more jobs.

Sure, the feds can't help in the FUTURE. This is not the future. This is the present, and more jobs are required to get us to that future.

I strongly agree with the core view that the guest is putting forward in the video. People do not want jobs, they just want the aspects of life that will always give a base level of survival and then add a regular level of enjoyment. I do believe that modern machines make it so that we need only 10% of the population doing "a job" to give this to people. I kind of take this in a different direction than the guest though: my feeling is that this should push retirement age down, or possibly push the accepted date to enter the market up.

There is a large amount of arbitrage and other free stuff in our system. There are cases where you can buy games new at one store, return them legally through a used game program at another, and get gift cards for more money for the other store. I participate in the super-couponing thing and I will often get shelves of food for anywhere from cash back to $20. I know people who do the travel hacking and take a few trip a year first class for next to nothing. All of this represent inefficiencies in our economy, because it's clear that people can exploit out cheap stuff and yet everything still works as well as it does. Most people still buy pickles for $3 a jar even though I get mine for 18 cents.

This is showing up again in a new phenomenon: Early Extreme Retirement (http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2011/08/11/extreme-early-retirement-in-practice-how-two-people-did-it/). It combines frugal living with financial savvy with opportunity seeking to allow people to save and retire comfortably in 10 years or so, or about 14% of an average life span.

It does seem to me that there is a layer of consumerism that exists that keeps people from breaking out. I'll admit, I have succumbed to this a few times in my life, but as each year goes by, I'm able to close out old expenses and instead of respending that money, just putting it towards savings. If I actually keep on this pace until a retirement age of 65, I'll have an extremely large amount saved, as well as pension and possibly social security.

And yet the politicians are arguing about how much to raise retirement age. That's the effect of the elite trying to hold on to the notion that everyone must work and produce to keep the world going. That everyone must slave to them even to age 67 or higher. Next they'll try to raise the contribution amounts because if they keep more of your retirement money, they can then mismanage waste into that and prevent people from retiring so early.

I agree that we should all learn some useful skills for life, but that does not solve the ownership problem

Gardening require a piece of land, and if that land is so good and the value of your harvested goods are much higher than the rent of the land, big capitalists have already claimed it and growing plants out of it, since that is an investment which brings profit. So the only lands available are those unprofitable lands, which means: You could grow enough vegetables out of the land to support your own life, but you won't have money to pay the rent of the land by selling those vegetables, so unless you invest big and bought this land (then tax is coming), your chance of utilizing the land to support your life is quite small

I think early retirement is also one of the solution to give more jobs to people who need them, this works exactly like reducing working hours, very scaleable

But currently the government goes the opposite direction: They extend the retirement age because they are in debt and can not pay the retirement money to people!

There must be something very wrong in the system, due to the concept of money. Again, those retirement money in the bank account do not corresponding to consumable goods, they are just a credit which can generate future purchasing power. Those credit has got lost due to the wrong investment of pensionfunds etc...

I sure as hell don't need any more jobs.

I've gardened on land that I never owned, and never paid a cent to use.  And I did have permission.  City gardening can be done on vacant lots, simply by locating the owner and asking for written permission to do so.  Perhaps as a rep of a local urban gardening group, or with the backing of a food charity.  Most of the time, the owners don't care if a garden is started on their property, as long as they are not responsible for it and they can reserve the right to tear it up should the property be sold or developed.  Most such lots sit empty and idle for years before a development plan is funded, so that isn't much of a risk.  The only time that I ever tried this and was denied was when I was trying to do it on a lot next to an airport, that was legally owned by the FAA.  It was in a sound abatement zone, but it turned out that it was already slated to be leased to FedEx as an overflow parking lot for their extra trailer trucks.  It was no longer empty one year later.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bernanke-calls-unemployment-a-national-crisis-2011-09-28-1911220 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bernanke-calls-unemployment-a-national-crisis-2011-09-28-1911220)

Obviously, even FED can produce lots of money, they can not force the banks to loan out them to create job, since banks are limited by "profitability" rule in market, and in a highly automated society, only small amount of people can be profitable

Actually "profitable" means income > spending, it has the same effect of saving, which will drag the economy. If they play the game in the other way around, e.g. "unprofitable", then the economy will back on track right away, although with lots of wasted resources

Like a fat man, the best the way to keep him health is not diet, but heavy motion to exhaust extra energy