Bitcoin Forum

Well I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but anyway.

The world is in a serious serious mess. I don't think anybody understands, or will admit, HOW bad things are now (but they will soon). Even the more enlightened on these forums. The problem is, when you realize that the last 10, 20, 30 years - even more - have not been normal, you have to realize that there is no normal anymore. Markets of all nature have been propped up by governments everywhere. Markets are at the root of modern day capitalism, which is the systematic process that allows 6 billion humans (which share 99% of their DNA with a chimp) to exist together peacefully on earth. What governments have been doing in recent history is not normal and is not right. It appears that now we are at the beginning of the end of this "phony capitalism". It sounds almost out of this world to be talking about things like this.

How will the end look like? I really don't want to find out. I guess it's normal to fear the future - but, when the present looks this bad. It's almost better not to think of it. Capitalism has been the driving mechanism for human society, progress and prosperity in modern history. It is this driving engine that is now about to fail completely.

At the very minimum, I think every good thing that we have taken for granted in our western lifestyle - and there are so many things that it's almost impossible to imagine how we would live without them - will soon come under question. At the maximum, we are looking at total social collapse in all countries, anarchy and war never seen before on this planet. It's my opinion that every one of us will feel the effects of the coming economic and social meltdown. What is coming could easily be worse than anything seen before in modern history. The only comparison we have is the 1930's or early 1940's .... well, things can get alot worse than that.

What did we all do to deserve this? Nothing. We just had the misfortune to be alive on planet earth during this deeply troubling period.

The world is starting down the barrel of a loaded gun right now. Every human being is on the verge of having his/her society and social fabric completely destroyed and (taking an optimistic view about the future) re-written.

I really hope something good comes out of all of the pain and suffering that is about to arrive on our doorsteps.

Not sure what good can come from posting this message of doom here on the forums. I guess I'd like to be proved wrong.

Yes, you are preaching to the choir; but those in this world who have studied Praxeology have seen this kind of breakdown coming for some time.  Ron Paul has been quoted as saying that this is the kind of stuff that prompted him to run for congress, back in 1974.  There is an entire book, website and newsletter series that I know of devoted to investing under these collapsing conditions, and thus profiting from the misfortunes of society at large; and they have been around for some time.  One such website is http://www.chaostan.com/

While none of us knows quite how the 'great correction' is going to play out, some things are certainly predictable.  One such thing is that Americans are going to throw a hissy-fit once they learn that they can no longer afford to drive their pretty SUV's everywhere they go.  Another is that particular classes of investments are forever; such as alcohol, guns, ammo and uncontaminated land.  And strange as it may seem, common table salt if you live more than 100 miles from a shoreline.

Gold, on the other hand, is pretty much useless unless you already have at least one of the first four things above.  It's also wise to stock up on gardening books, and perhaps take up beekeeping as a hobby.

Personally, I've already done all of these things.

Don't worry, bitcoin come to rescue  ;D

The sooner the collapse of the society, the better for the planet. A breakdown of the whole infrastructure today is not the same as it was in ancient Aegypt, Rome or the Maya Culture. A breakdown today means 500-fold Fukushima, with 500 nuclear reactors blowing up its inventory around the northern part of the planet, but without being cooled down with the energy of other power stations.
Anyway, it is still better it will collapse today (500 reactors) than tomorrow (5'000 reactors), which would destroy the southern part of the planet as well.
Survivalists, Gardeners and Praxeologists are dreamers.

Society and Progress - a System that works! Ha ha ...

Look, I know what you are talking about.  I've been worried for quite some time.

I don't want to spread alarm needlessly.

But our beer supply may be threatened.

What's more worrying is that we share around 50% of our DNA with bananas!

Just saying...

I think we are getting close to the precipice again ...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-21/chart-scared-bernanke-straight (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-21/chart-scared-bernanke-straight)

... the last two time fails-to-deliver spiked was the Aug '07 credit market seizure and Sep '08 money market seizure ... either of those two events, if allowed to run their course naturally, would have been "the end".

The US treasury market is the big pole in the main tent and the rest of the circus is looking pretty tatty, basically it is the last thing holding it all up ... and the entire capital market 'sentiment' is now hinging on utterances from the lips of fed chariman on whether he will be buying or not buying in this market. After the recent sustained buying to prop this market up the Fed now holds over 25% of the outstanding treasury stock.

The big problem that is out there, and has been for over a decade is the billions in ghost treasuries that are in the electronic form that do not exist in any legal reality. No one is quite sure where all these ghost treasuries come from but think it is mostly naked short selling of treasuries that went into the system, possibly from now defunct institutions, or even just simple criminal treasury counterfeiting. When fails-to-deliver spikes it means that the treasuries market is no longer clearing/settling. It would be like if transactions on the bitcoin network stopped getting confirmed into blocks.

Imagine that the treasuries are the money stock (bitcoin) of global commerce and they have no legitimate mechanism for verifying creation (coinbase) transactions and no reliable means of clearing/settling transactions in such a way that you can prove there are no bad actors gaming the system.

That is what they are trying to stabilise and the fails-to-deliver spike whenever they lose control.

What's even more worrying is some scientists even believe that DNA is deterministic of human behavior.

While they may be half banana, and behave like bananas, they don't taste or act like bananas.

Just saying ...

Actually, it's those who keep voting for the idiots that have been elected to political office who are ultimately responsible for what lies ahead.

I am guilty too.
Until I figure out why my customers were allowed to go bankrupt, and I had to eat the loss, (I.e. the banks were offloading there moral hazard on me) I kept using Fiat, knowing it had problems. You can't blame the voters you need to blame the users too, most are still oblivious to the problem.

Democracy is the idea that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

It does not matter who you elect, always will end up like this, maybe some entropy related phenomenon

Indeed.  Government is the disease that it attempts to cure.

For some reason, it's encouraging to find this thread, despite the sad theme.

I feel like I've been holding my breath about this stuff since about the turn of the century.
Amazingly, most systems muddle along so far, with one unbelievable patch pasted over another.
Even non-economic crises like Fukushima or Hanford are playing out in very slow motion. Time has stopped, but for how long? (to coin a paradox).

I take some comfort from Bill Bonner's observation "just because something is inevitable does not mean it is imminent."

We may muddle through for many more weeks yet.       :)

Carpe diem.

The amazing thing about such things is the amount of inertia that faith in the system has to keep things going for a time, yet when faith in the system is lost change happens quite rapidly, and sometimes violently.  Look at Brazil over the past several days; they've been having economic issues for a long time, and have a government openly determined to suppress the trade value of the fiat currency for well over a year, but in the end it was a 10 cent hike in the price of public transit that was the trigger.  No leadership to arrest, no common theme, just a million people across the country that suddenly all had enough crap at once.  The United States has been running on public faith inertia since at least 2000, but the rash of federal scandals is severely undermining that faith.  When that 'faith bubble' finally pops, what happens next is anyone's guess.

There have been viable options in the USA for quite some time now.  The voters just keep ignoring these options and instead insist on electing politicians that want to create a collectivist/socialist/nanny state that provides for their every need, funded with colossal debt and currency debasement.

Like who?  Mitt Romney, John McCain, or maybe you mean Al Gore?  Or was George Bush the right answer in that one and the US managed to get one right?

Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Michael Badnarik, Harry Browne....

Agreed, but although one of them got my vote last election (I'll let you guess which one) they didn't have a shot in hell of winning.  90% of people probably went to the polls as said "who the fuck are these guys?".  Unfortunately, in America if you aren't Democrat or Republican you are a fringe nut job and the media will paint you as such at every opportunity.

Yeap what calender are you using?  If according to Mayan, we were gone in May

Just because the long count resets to 0 doesn't mean time ends.

I agree that these guys don't have a shot in hell.  That's why I've abstained from the last few elections.

The OP is claiming that "we" have done nothing to deserve what's headed "our" way.  While you and I can have a clear conscience when the SHTF, those who vote for large, unsustainable government--and the large, unsustainable debt that comes along with it--will not be able to claim that they had nothing to do with it.  In fact, they will be completely responsible for it.

Capitalism, as in free trade and voluntary interaction, is not going to fail. Much of the establishment of corporatist inefficiency will be in turmoil and the collateral damage for everyone may be severe, but eventually the natural order will recover better and stronger than before.

Bitcoin may well be an integral part of that recovery process, but the Internet most definitely will. For whether Bitcoin plays a big role it's all a question of timing. And timing-wise we are in an odd position: every estimate of when the collapse will happen has been premature, yet when it actually does happen it will surprise in the opposite direction - earlier than we expect. That is, we are always expecting a collapse within 1-2 years, but 10 years later still nothing. Yet when the collapse finally does happen, it will blindside us because we'll still be expecting it not to happen for another 1-2 years, or maybe even 3-6 months, but not on a dime.

Well, I've been expecting it within the next couple years for a decade already, and recent events make me wonder if we have more than a couple months.  But again, we never know in advance what the 'last straw' will be.  For the Brazilians, it was a 10 cent bus fare hike; for the founders of the United States, it was a 3 pence per pound tax on tea.  When a society is being attacked with a thousand cuts, it's hard to tell when you hit that last one.

You always have a responsibility to vote! Even here in Canada prominent community leaders take your attitude and it is sad.

Not voting is called voter apathy and says I'm happy with the status quo. You have a responsibility to spoil your vote.

In apartheid South Africa where the election districts were rigged whites were told by the passive liberal educators to spoil there vote as a form of protest. It wasn't untilled the apartheid government had overwhelming spoil voters did they hold a referendum, to compromise on principles and negotiate with terrorists. 

Would you tell atheists they have a responsibility to "spoil their prayers" too?

Lol, no atheist prayers = willing for luck.

Sounds like you've bought in to the propaganda of the politicians.  When you participate in the democratic process you are only helping to legitimize it.  As far as I'm concerned, only when a libertarian-leaning candidate has a chance of winning is it worth my while to vote.  Otherwise, I agree with Doug Casey--it is my duty to not vote.  (http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/doug-caseys-top-five-reasons-not-vote)

Agorism is a much more productive way to bring about change.  From the Wikipedia article on Agorism:

I am a flavor of librarian, I can't in good conscience vote for some one unless I agree 100% with them. To date it has just been me.
There is no more of a clear signal to politicians than a majority of voters choosing not to vote by spoiling the ballot. (Abstaining says voter apathy and that = keep doing what we're doing) so as long as we have a vote I will always spoil it. IMO Spoiling is a vote for Agorism and Abstaining is a vote saying I'll follow whoever wins.

Because of this very long delay, lots of folks that would maybe start and listen to the preachers, just won't now.
The the main stream media basically ridicules these preachers because they have been saying it for so long .
The collapse could be postponed even a few more years which makes it even harder to convince anybody to prepare.

Ive come to support the argument that society has traded convenience & safety for freedom. Meaning that the world over, the middle classes (baby boomers in particular) have struck some kind unspoken deal with the ruling classes. They get their creature comforts, expanding waistline, money in the bank and a belief that things always go up and in return they give away incremental amounts of liberty - things that would not have been stood for a short generation ago. Now everyone has big screen tv's, iphones, cars with tv's that broadcast mindless reality shows and no one worries about creeping deregulation, lobbying or the revolving government / corporate door. Wealth has risen and even though stocks and homes may have dropped they think they are always about to go up again soon. And of course, we're safe from the terrorists and criminals. That's why all these blatant scandals, rigging and schemes go unpunished.

Still, I just don't see a western nation having a Brazil moment just yet. The narrative and delivery by the MSM is just too strong. :)

But you just never know. As said change usually comes from a minor event unleashing a bigger force: Rosa Parks, the Tunisian who self immolated, bus fare hikes etc. What will be the tipping point in the West?

How true.

Here's the thing... I don't think it's actually going to be anything spectacular. There will be a very brief period of time where sane people hide in their cellars while the 'average citizen with a firearm' plugs into his local community and helps defend it from the roaming gangs from the large cities. But after a few weeks/months all the idiots will have been shot or starved to death.

Then society will resume. It will be an utterly sane culture backed by morals and the willingness to respond with lethal force. Most of the creature comforts will return at that point, and people with the skills will step up to get everything working again.

OR

it could just end, and everyone could go on with their daily lives and be completely unaffected.

~

Take your pick.

It's obvious I'm missing something here because nobody ever can predict the future. And that has to be a good thing. This post is about as pessimistic as it gets; I have to admit. I apologize for that.

What is the optimistic point of view? I guess, there's a crash, some temporary chaos and then things quickly return to normal (hopefully with new, more integral politicians), except that maybe we all have a lot less wealth. Still, less, or even zero, wealth is better than having negative wealth (debt) which is all we have now. I guess things end up better in this case.

Probably there are many difficult things coming on the horizon, but probably also there are many good things to come out of it as well. Given all of this, I guess it's still better to be alive in 2013 than in 1213.

/end optimism, return to doomsday predictions ???

No, no; this wasn't it.  If there is nothing else I'm sure of, it's that the FedReserve will not do anything that will end the game early.  They know the con at least as well as outsiders, and they are dependent upon it's continuance.  They will do and say anything they can to fix it, even if that means completely backtracking on prior statements and actions.  If the trigger is monetary in nature, it can only be because Congress did something to deliberately disrupt the Fed's power, and I think too many of them know the score to consider such an action either.  Whatever the trigger is, it won't be directly due to monetary policy of the US.  Much more likely is that the trigger be related to the monetary policy of Japan or China, either of them could break the US Treasury now, it's just not been in their interests.  The Failure-to-deliver chart for US treasury bonds has tripled in the past three weeks.  The last time that has happened, Leaman Brothers was hung out to dry.  And that distraction barely worked the first time.

This :

http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/quickstart

Couple things.

First, the present system will keep going on for much longer than you think. The US dollar will be propped up worldwide because it's in everyone's interest to keep it there, since it's the reserve currency. Good for the US, bad for the world. Eventually countries holding dollars will cut their losses, let the dollar float, and the dollar will be screwed. Some speculate China is even planning to engineer this situation so as to offer the yuan as a replacement reserve currency.

But it's perhaps more likely that this would backfire and bitcoin could become the global reserve currency, since government control of currency would be what got the dollar into that position in the first place.

And you won't want to be in the US when the dollar tanks. It will be an entire generation of wealth lost or more than that. All fiat currencies eventually hyperinflate and fail and the US dollar will be no different.

However, there are always pockets that escape the turmoil of the day. I don't mean within the US, I mean places that thrive nonetheless. Like Venetia during the chaos of Constantinople being sacked; the Roman empire went down, Venetia lived on.

What we need is a new Venetia to the US's failing empire.

I suggest that the way forward, and what should give everyone optimism, is to build seasteads (/r/seasteading), free communities on the water, places where bitcoin will be a native currency and where political experimentation can flower into new desperately needed forms, forms that move beyond democracy, perhaps even abandoning it as the political crutch it was, now outdated, outmoded, discarded. The future belongs to political individualism, and abandoning democracy will mean abandoning the last element in society that clings to collectivism: politics. It will in fact mean the end of politics and the end of politicians, for political individualism constitutes a rejection of the idea that anyone should have the power to force laws on anyone else. Choose laws for yourself, each human a sovereign over their own life and own property.

That is a way forward that is truly new. And it's in such a society that people can prosper while Rome is burning.

I suspect we have at least a decade before any coming crash truly hits, and possibly more like 30 years before the crisis is unavoidable entirely.

if this is true then most of the leaders of the world today couldn't give a crap...  nobody will blame them ( at least not while they are still alive...)

Yes, without the state, inefficiency will be eliminated. That means, that nearly nothing will be produced, as it was the case within stateless communities in the whole history of mankind. But that wasn't Capitalism. The austrian anarchocapitalists believe, that we will produce even more without the state. That's the greatest economic joke I ever heard.

I don't believe the end is near.

There will soon be new cheap energy sources which will help a lot.

Computers will be smarter and we will come much more efficient.

Internet is empowering individuals more than even in the history of mankind.

I believe the future is going to be great. Of course there will also be problems to solve. Bitcoin might help with that.

I don't know where you got this idea, but that's not true.  I know of no argument to imply that a free market would produce more than the current market. It might, or it might not; depending on the desires and needs of the people.  The difference would be that productivity would not be siphoned off by an ever more needy state, and those who are dependent upon the state would have to learn how to produce something of value as well.

Yes. There are actually tremendous reasons to be optimistic.

If we can please get through the current period without major turmoil, it appears we can reach a new phase of unprecedented economic activity fueled by cheap & clean energy.

At that point, governments would be able to rescue themselves by taxing some of that vast newly created wealth -- even as they become much less relevant because everyone's needs will become so much easier to meet.

We will also be able to significantly reverse environmental degradation (including, as a minor aside, powering bitcoin on equipment that is no longer coal-fired).

Pessimism right now can be needlessly destabilizing.  It can be cured with knowledge of such likely solutions as lattice-assisted nuclear reactions aka low-energy nuclear reactions.

We need to get past systemic risks such as our inflationary financial systems and melting ice/permafrost so they don't halt our progress just short of the goal, then we can celebrate in due course.

It's unfortunate that governmental missteps have caused decades of delay, wasted so many resources, and favored the appearance of prosperity over sustainable economics, edging us towards catastrophe just as we seem about to triumph.

Wider awareness of the spectacular future we're building will help get us there.

We've had the technology to do this for forty years.  It's just not being developed, and it won't in the current geopolitical environment.  It's wishful thinking to believe that wind, water and solar are ever going to be able to run our modern industrial economies.  Nuclear power is simply required if we really desire to move away from using coal.

Nuclear power creates waste though, it's an unrealistic solution for the very long term. It's certainly better than the fossil fuels used now but the waste has to go somewhere. I don't think storing trillions of tons of nuclear waste underground is in humanities best interest. More efficient methods of solar, water and wind energy can be created. Baby steps man, these problems aren't going to be fixed overnight. It's going to need to take some effort from everyone of us.

Oh and this guy disagrees with you. Not saying you don't know what your talking about but i don't know where you came up with that conclusion. I also think this man has a little more experience in the area. Not to say people haven't been wrong before.

Do you actually know anything about nuclear power, or do you just recite talking points?

I have a small understanding of nuclear power. I know about the onkalo storage facility in Finland. I was just trying to make a point by citing someone with a better understanding then me.(i guess not you?, and is that not allowed here?) As i said before i don't know where either of you came up with the conclusion that solar, water, and wind(geothermal?) aren't enough to sustain humanities energy consumption. I'd like you to inform me though. In my opinion the cons of nuclear power far outweigh the benefits for very long term. The risk of disaster may be very small but it still is there, so why not make use of safer resources? I suppose I’m wrong though.



Let me recite someone else just because. As if what you're telling me was all information you automatically were born with...I generally read to inform myself. Believe it or not i look at both sides to try and avoid a biased opinion.

When i said inform me I was serious, i wasn't trying to be sarcastic. Maybe you should try informing people instead of seeing if they qualify to talk to you. I guess it's the low post count that shows I’m unworthy?

I wasn't talking about the uranium fuel cycle, I was talking about the thorium fuel cycle.  Even with U235, up at least until the latest screwup in Japan, and likely even afterwards, all of the radioactive materials released into the environment by all of the nuclear power facilities, all over the world and since the dawn of the nuclear age is less than the radioactive materials that are released into the environment every single year bye the burning of coal worldwide.  Yes, burning coal is known to be worse for ratioactive waste materials than the entire nuclear power industry, and that doesn't even consider all of the other bad effects of burning bitumous coal for power.  The accumlation of nuclear waste is a well known problem; and is handled (or not handled, as one may look at it) in the US the way that it is for a particular, strategic reason.  Europe and most of the rest of the world will generally "process" spent fuel rods to remove the 'hot' fission byproducts from the fuel, and then recycle the remainder of the useable fuel back into their domestic fuel cycle; as a typical reactor fuel rod will still be about 1.5 to 2% fissile U235 when the critical reaction can no longer be maintained for useful power production, no matter what the concentration was at the beginning of the fuel rod's service life.  So Europeans generally encase the fission products into leaded glass balls about the size of a softball, and store those products forever.  The amount of long term storage space, using this method, is incrediblely small; however the term period is incrediblely long, considering the high concentration of risk.  In the US, we (deliberately) don't process spent fuel rods, instead we just pretend to store them forever.  The reason for this is strategic, not economic.  You see, the US does not have any viable uranium mines from which to extract weapons fuel in the (considered rather remote at the time, and it still is) event that we are cut off from our primary source allies, Canada and Australia.  The massive 'long term storage facility' that has never been opened in Nevada isn't really intended for storage of materials for 10K years, nor would that be neccesary.  The storage facility is basicly an artificical mine, that the US military could draw upon under such very unlikely conditions.  If those conditions are never met, it's highly likely that the US nuclear power industry would demand access to the stored materials in the future, in the event of some 'uranium energy crisis' if the cost of refining and importing refined fuel from other nations ever exceeds the cost of simply processing and re-refining the stored 'spent' fuel.

However, since thorium is three times as abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust, and 100% of thorium is fissile (compared to roughly 1.2% of uranium) switching to a thorium fuel cycle, again a tech that we have known about for 40 years, would easily power our modern industrial economies for 10's of thousands of years at the current burn rate, even if every human being on earth today consumed energy at twice the rate of the average American today.


Actually, that's generally true; there are no technological (and likely no economic) barriers torunning the entire world on renewable resources.  But while there are no barriers, that doesn't mean that there are no limits.  The greatest issues are political & social.  While it is scientificly possible to power all of the world using only a km wide band around the whole of the equator of solar cells, it's not actually possible to build that many solar cells using the science that we have and the resources that we are aware of.  The problem here is that almost all electronics require trace elements commonly called "rare earth minerals" in order to manufacture the semiconductors required.  Solar cells, and some kinds of modern batteries, require an awful lot of these rare minerals.  This is one reason that China is the only place affordable solar cells are produced, because of all of the "rare earth" mines in the world, over 90% of the known resources happen to exist within the borders of the Middle Kingdom.  If you thought our dependency on oil was a geopolitical conundrum, this is way bigger.  NASA literally cannot build a spacecraft without underpaid miners in China, and no one else can either, because the "rare earth" mines in the US, Europe and Russia are tapped out or nearly so.  The problem is similar for windpower, due to the need to use fancy inverters to produce mains power from unpredictable wind resources.  Waterpower isn't so affected, but then the 'low hanging fruit' of productive capacity in this arena has long been utilized; and further projects face a case of diminishing returns, particularly with regard to the popularity of harming natural ecosystems with flooding for reserviors for power storage.  Some site can, and many already do, use 'run of river' waterpower methods, but these suffer from the similar issues with weather unpredictablity as windpower.

And none of that even considers the NIMBY social issues that any grand scale geoengineering projects would have to overcome first.  One of the most promising wave energy sites has been tied up legally for over a decade because construction would disrupt the view from the beachhouse of a US senator.  Renewable energy projects of the scale required would, quite literally, be everywhere.  Good luck with that.

You mean like building solar panels in africa for renewable energy in europe?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Fullconnection.jpg

Ohh and they made solar panels in germany, too. Afaik the only resource not available here where cheap workers.

Existing nuclear power plants are based on designs that were created back when computers were still made out of vacuum tubes and took up entire buildings.

The difference between what is possible fission, but blocked for political reasons, and what is currently allowed to be built out is nearly as great as the difference between your smart phone and ENIAC. Civilian nuclear power plants are basically bomb material factories that just happen to produce electricity as a side effect. They produce large amounts of waste because they are supposed to.

State-of-the-art 1970s molten salt reactors would be a huge improvement. That would give us reactors which create 1 ton of automatically processed waste per GW-year of electricity produced, that would only need to be stored for 300 years (instead of 10000), and using a fuel supply that would provide 350 million BTU per person per year of energy for a 10 billion person populations for 1.1 million years before we'd have to mine thorium on the moon, Mars, and other bodies in the solar system. Also the design has no possibility of a catastrophic meltdown because it is based on stable chemical salts instead of water, high pressure, and flammable metals. (Did you know that zirconium, the metal used in the cladding of all solid fuel designs, is flammable? And that it produces hydrogen gas when exposed to water at high temperatures? That's why all existing power plant designs are dangerous.)

Remember that when you're talking about nuclear power as it is currently deployed that no significant advancements have been allowed ever since the 1960s. There are no technological or physics reasons we couldn't do a lot better now, just political and bureaucratic ones.

Oh, don't get me wrong.  They can be made elsewhere, just not in any volume, nor at any price, that works economicly.  There are also other techniques, but they are more expensive, too bulky or otherwise have some other downside to their employment.  Which is why we use photovoltics as the most common method of solar power, it's the best choice among known techniques.  Solar power will come when it's economicly competitive, but for many reasons (including resource availability) it's not possible to do more than about 4% of the US total grid in solar.  In most counties, the 'net metering' laws that exist to favor the small, home solar installation are void if more than 1% of productive capacity is solar; because beyond that point the negative effects of distributed and unreliable power sources upon the grid become too large for the power company to ignore.  They would either have to have control of those power sources, able to disconnect them; or at least be able to highly predict their total output capacity at least an hour in advance.  Look up the term 'spinning reserve' with regard to grid power systems, and you might understand the problem with unpredictable renewable power to the power company.

It is not the stupidity of voters that gets bad politicians elected, we all vote for the illusion, that one thing they say that gives us hope that the world will transform into a place where we can simply be happy.

I believe that the real mistake is thinking that voting people into office is the way to create change.

We the people have to get involved in our countries, not just by voting, but by being proactive, take the initiative to solve the problems we need to fix. We have to take what we want and not expect it to be handed to us.

I DO NOT mean, starting riots, getting violent etc., I mean we have to get our hands dirty digging into the bureaucracy ourselves. We have to be our own lobbiests, write our own bills, and push them through. It is not easy because the powers that be make it very difficult, but there are bureaucratic ways of interacting with every governmental office, program etc. it just takes an extreme amount of work.

I propose we address this issue the same way we would a large open-source project. Something like Github could be used to organize the research, write bills, prepare and file paperwork etc. A module similar to Kickstarter could be used to raise funding for things that would require marketing (campaigning) or other resources. We already have the proof of concept within the two systems I mentioned, crowed sourcing works, so lets crowd source government.

I cannot imagine any other way that people will get their voices back, or that the world can be saved from the greedy.

Ohh i hear this (Dual/Two)Fluid Reactor Stuff often, but actually none of the countrys considering it nowadays are even behind the "paper-reactor" status yet, so we are talking about 5+ years before the first prototype bugs are all run out, it probably could be a competition for fusion reactors. I would be quite happy if iam wrong tough.


I still think they gonna kick of this Desertec Project i linked before, they allready racked up marocco and egypt plants are builded, too. In general iam no fan of this stuff, i think to many dangers are just comin from running your energy-production offsite. ( Its like outsourcin support to india ... ) And yeah issues with saving energy, they probably just build up tons of pumped storage plants to solve that, i can allready see them lurking in the place like all the stupid windmills.

The whole build solar panels on your roof stuff is just ok for heat-production and saving. ( Get a 40.000l Water in the middle of the house which gets warmed up over the summer and produces heat in the winter ... not in every region of the world tough )
Beside it makes the old-style house look stupid, architecture should ban them on standard roofs :p

Your reply is a textbook example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc) fallacy.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory ran a successful prototype in the 1970s. All the research has been done, prototype bugs found and solved, all the theoretical work complete.

Building large scale models would of course involve some more design work, in the same way that every highway bridge needs some site-specific design work, but as far as the basic theory of operation, metallurgy, nuclear design factors, all that theoretical work is complete and tested.

Only bureaucracy and entrenched interests stand in the way.

Succesfull, like the following up problems off the saved salts which wasnt stored correctly and could reach critical mass? And in general this was not the concept lots of engineers would like to run nowadays. Infact till today not one dual-fluid reactor has been builded.(The Oak Ridge one didnt had a second fissile fluid.)  Lots of projects are just stuff that uses the salt as coolant, but still relie on solid fuels.

Hmm lets start with materials then, i guess you readen the "not-yet-released-paper" of Phd. Steven Boyd regarding the problems of using Silicon Carbide for the fuel pipes in Molten-Salt Reactors? You might seen his presentation on TEAC5, too.
Like i said i would be quite happy if iam wrong, but i dont see this technology civil-ready in the next 15years.

So is this the year bitcoin will see some action? Its seems the US is trying to give pressure to bitcoin.

Your are telling ahistoric stories. There has never been a capitalist free trade in stateless, self-sufficient communities. Self-sufficient communities are called self-sufficient because there is no need to trade on a market with strangers beyond themselves.

You are right that we are seeing tremendous progress in many areas.  But traditionally, going back at least to Adam Smith, economists have acknowledge that technological progress led to lower labor demand, increased production, and ultimately lower prices (deflation) in the short term.  Sound familiar?  After some time, things settle out, but the only lasting gains are funneled to landlords.  Deflation makes sure any of the capitalist and the laborer's gains are erased.  So remind me again how technological progress is going to break this historical trend and save the markets?

So this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

And this http://mises.org/daily/1121

Or this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_anarchism#Religious_Jewish_anarchism

or this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_culture#Culture_and_trade

Are not both capitalisitic and stateless socieites?  A note on that last one, since it's not widely known.  Not much is known about the Hallstatt culture, mostly due to the combined effects there being now known written language associated with the culture and that history, while not really written by them, is heavily edited by the victors.  The Hallstatt were not victors.  But two thinkgs are known to be hard facts about the Hallstatt culture, 1) they honored no rulers and thus were leaderless, and during the age that also made them stateless by the dominat definition (they respected no king, paid no taxes and fought no wars) and 2) they traded with their neighbors, particularly mined salt.

All Patriarchy, which is the collectivist opposite of the non-collectivist Anarchy.
Patriarchal, federalist chiefdoms are not stateless.

Kowloon: Ruled by patriarchalic chiefdoms under chieftains:

"From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was controlled by Triads and had high rates of prostitution, gambling, and drug use"


Iceland: Ruled by patriarchalic (hierarchic) chiefdoms under chieftains:

"Iceland did not have an executive branch of government. Instead of a king they had local chieftains."
"Then there was the National Assembly or the Althing. Each quarter was represented by their own Althing. If a dispute was not settled by the private courts, the dispute would go up the ladder to the next highest court until the dispute was resolved."


The Jews: (thats the best joke)
Ruled by patriarchal gods and their patriarchal representatives.
In contrast of that the anarchist slogan: no gods, no masters!

Hallstatt culture:

"The material culture of Western Hallstatt culture was apparently sufficient to provide a stable social and economic equilibrium. The founding of Marseille and the penetration by Greek and Etruscan culture after ca 600 BC, resulted in long-range trade relationships up the Rhone valley which triggered social and cultural transformations in the Hallstatt settlements north of the Alps. Powerful local chiefdoms emerged which controlled the redistribution of luxury goods from the Mediterranean world that is characteristic of the La Tène culture."

I wholely reject your absurd distortion of the terms in use. 

But even then, I can lay one down for you...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois

Yes they were a matrilineal society (and a matriarchial one, IMHO) and yes they did trade internally and externally.

They were stateless, both by the true defintion of the term, and your's as well.

Man, you forgot about THIS:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s2-X9Xth210/TaO6vrY7eJI/AAAAAAAAACE/sAwXOyQl4yQ/s1600/lata-de-atun.jpg

:D

Each expression of archy is by definition the opposite of Anarchy. That's an 'absurd' definition to collectivists, I know that.
"After becoming united in the League, the Iroquois invaded the Ohio River Valley in present-day Kentucky to seek additional hunting grounds."

Being united means being collectivised, governed.

Does it look like they give a crap? Doesn't look like it to me. All politicians worry only about their term of office, so 2-6 years tops, at least here in the US. They wouldn't be piling debt on debt if they did care.

You have a strange conception of the state's role in production.

To be more exact, you're conflating property and rights protection (law and police) and dispute resolution (courts) with the state.

But you don't need the state to provide any of those things. Law can be crowd-source or agreement based, ie: polycentric-law. No societal entity needs to have a monopoly on law production, that's just the way things have been largely until now. There's no reason for it to stay that way, and an alternative may (and probably will) be far better.

Similarly, courts and police can be privately provided on the market and due to changed incentives of the market will probably be far better.

Stateless communities often also had no rights protection, law, or courts. But it's possible to create not a state nor a stateless community, but rather the ideal is a self-governed community, and by that I mean one where each individual rules himself and himself alone. Not a community which uses a collective body to govern the whole--no, I mean a community where each individual has sovereign control of himself and no one else. A truly individualist society. This has never existed because we never had the ideas explicit to try it until modern time.

The fact that a free market wouldn't have taxation means it's virtually guaranteed that it would produce more than the current managed market. Because there'd be a lot more wealth available for investment. Governments cannot invest, despite their ridiculous attempts to do so, because it costs them nothing for those investments to fail and the incentive structure makes them far more wasteful than an investing private individual.

Yes, and it's those people who will fight tooth and nail to continue the system until it crashes irrevocably, and why political change in the US prior to a major economic disaster is not likely to happen.

Solar offers more power than we can use. We can even move to harvesting solar in space for literally the foreseeable future.

It will begin to be used when it's cost-effective against other forms of electricity. Which won't likely be very long now. We already have perfect solar antennas that pickup solar energy like an antenna rather than like photosynthesis, and can thereby capture a large percent of the energy efficiently, like 99.5%. What we lack are transistors that can switch fast enough to turn light's AC current into DC current.

So, by roundabout method, the microchip industry will ultimately solve our power problems :P

Long term, fusion may pan out also. But I think solar will bridge the gap.

What you really need is to change the frequency of the AC current.  Most homes and transmission lines use around 60Hz AC, not DC.

Also, thorium is far more realistic than a power generating fusion process on Earth.

Solar may offer some energy but takes up a lot of surface we aren't necessarily willing to give. And power system requires that in each moment power generation equals consumption. Therefore, energy market values coal and nuclear, whose generation can be foretold a year in advance easily, unlike solar, for which even a day is a long time to forecast. The problem would be perhaps solved if techology would be found to store energy efficiently and cheaply. That technology isn't there.

Wow. You're response is to cite a theoretical method, and present it as a near term viable solution.  Solar antennas might one day power nanites, but even then the tech might be a bit out of reach.


You're dreaming.  TAbletop fusion is closer to a productive stage than solar antenna tech.

I think we have plenty of space on the ocean's surface, we're not even using it.

Yes, a problem, but a solvable one.

OTEC or ocean-current generation could perhaps supplement for night-time, as well as the further development of supercapacitors or molten-salt power storage. It's not insurmountable.

For that matter, one solution is to build caissons on the ocean floor and use power during the day to pump water out and air in to these giant caissons. When you later need that power back out, you start letting water in which pumps air out at very high pressure, driving a generator. Voila, constant power as needed.

Solvable technically? Of course. Solvable economically? I doubt very much.


You are talking about some very big complexes that cannot be as economically efficient as a simple nuclear (think thorium, perhaps even polywell...) plant that produces power when it is needed and can strike a deal for a period of time a year ahead. Those things are higly valued on the power market. Market value of todays wind and solar power is therefore practically zero, lifted only by state interventions that limit on communism...

I didn't read all the comments here. But it is pretty damn obvious things are getting ready to happen especially here in America.
Even the blind and sleeping are waking up and opening their eyes.

My mom cursed me out for saying this, but my opinion is capitalism sucks a big one.
Not only does it make it so the heads of big corporations super rich while paying the people who actually produce the product very crappy wages,
but it also spams the day to day environment with ad after ad. Does anyone step back and realize how many advertisements for worthless crap is crammed down your throat every day? thousands.

I don't think socialism is the way to go, but maybe it is best in a world where we are all lazy asses who like robots to do things for us.

Someone said new technology is gonna save us. I just read an interesting article about this in a magazine (Not on the internet? Wow).
It said that everyone thought that at the turn or the century. The economy would be saved by the internet because of online shopping and all that stuff.

I think things are gonna get really bad. I've seen too many YT videos about the FEMA camps and how China got pissed at us, and rescinded their rule of no first strike.

I will just barricade myself inside as if there was a zombie apocalypse and hunker down with my canned veggies.
I am gonna be super depressed when the internet goes out though.

Another solution would be to build huge culverts to funnel the Pacific Ocean from San Diego to the Salt Flats, which happens to be about 200' below sea level and was an inland sea itself that finally dried up a few thousand years ago.  A few water turbines near the Salt Flats, and with the evaporation rate of the area, easily 100 Megawatts or more for as long as we like.  More, if we decide that an inland sea would be a good thing to have there.  It would alter the immediate environment, increasing humidity, cloud cover, and rainfall for several hundred miles around.

Not that the NIMBY crowd would let something like that happen either.

I want to warn you about all these gloom and doom predictions.

If you would have followed these doomsday preachers you would have missed out on the huge rise in the markets and you would have bought gold at its peak. There are still people saying "buy gold and run from the stock market". These people are screwing you over. Gold is going down to $1000.

I love Max Keiser's show, but don't follow his advice.

Yes, we are in dire straights. Yes the numbers are ALL bad. We are in for a volatile year. But this paper game goes on because no one can pull the plug. You panic - you are personally doomed.

It looks like I'm in the minority here.

Things are messed-up and they always have been.  Human beings are running the show, ad that's messed-up by definition. 

The markets are not about to collapse.  Leaders are making poor decisions, and we pay for that through the erosion we see.  The erosion will continue.

Even places where things are truly bad (and there are many, Syria for example) have not collapsed.

If you live in a relatively safe part of the world you need to worry more about your individual collapse than the world around you.  The fear of the outside is always greater than the reality.  And the fear on the inside (self) is never high enough.

Here in the USA you see doomsday preppers stocking-up on food, guns, bug out shelters.  They see the solution as having a year of food and guns.  Yet many are over-weight and in poor physical condition.  What they should really consider is that if society breaks down enough to require a year's worth of food, how will they physically and mentally survive the ordeal.  Their prep solution is to spend money on outside things instead of strengthening from the inside/

Any way, I am an optimist and see the future as far brighter than the past.  The good old days are always right now.

"The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - This quote is probably the only useful think Keynes ever contributed. The fact is, I believe these people like Max Keiser are right about their predictions. It's just things take a long time to play out. The fact is, logically what is happening in the global economy is temporary in nature and cannot continue for ever. Logically, there is going to be a big crisis. Markets can remain irrational for a short period, but eventually mathematics rules.

I don't think it's going to be a 30 year wait before a big readjustment. I am betting strongly it's no more than 2 years.

I am not a doomsday preacher, but I do believe there is a big crisis on the horizon. I am positive we'll get over it, but I do believe it's going to be worse than anything experienced in modern history.

That's not the only contribution Keynes made, but politicized neo-Keynesians like to forget he said that you should tighten your belt and reduce debt during boom times.

I suppose that it really matter what one means by "collapse".  I'm of the opinion that markets can't collapse by their nature, they either grow or decline, but never cease.  Even the classic 'buggy whip' market never completely died after the invention of the "horseless carriage", as there are still niche markets such as hobby mini-horse carriage racing and the Amish/Anabaptists that require them for practical transportation.  The survivability of markets notwithstanding, your own personal economy could very well 'collapse' if one is not careful.  And there is some risk that it could collapse even if one is careful.  When the bovine fecal matter finally makes contact with the rotary cooling device, I doubt anyone west of The Hamptons is going to completely avoid it.

You are a dreamer. This is science fiction, written by austrian aristocrats. I know these theories very well, and in my former life I was an Austrian as well, until I realised that it is ahistoric science fiction. Real stateless communities in the rain forests 'produce' about the same amount as they did 10'000 years ago. Governed, collectivist societies produce about hundred fold the amount which was generated only 100 years ago. That's the difference, which the dreamers suppress. As I explained in another thread already: Any society is by definition collectivist. The opposite of society and collectivism is the self-sufficient community. A self-sufficient community is called self-sufficient, because they do not economically interact with strangers, aliens and foreigners.
But the hominidae can not live 'alone'. An 'individualist' life is possible within a collectivist, materialist society only. To live a non-collectivist life, the homines sapientes need the organisation of the non-patriarchal, anarchal, consanguineal community, which was organised non-monogamous, matrilineal (female choice), wherever it existed in the whole history of mankind, and which have been destroyed, slowly starting about 10'000 years ago, by organised violence of a complicity of priests and militarists, which is terrorising the planet until today.

Not voting is not saying you are happy with the status quo.  Quite the opposite, it's a refusal to give your consent.

It will end as all civilised societies ended: with a collapse. I call it Tainter's Law. It ends by the diminishing return on additional investment in additional complexity. The difference to earlier collapses is the fact, that today 500 nuclear reactors will blow its nuclear inventory around the northern part of the planet as soon as nobody will cool them anymore.

The system has to die to be reborn.  It's doing that now.  Vote, don't vote, no matter.

Recent post by Dmitry Orlov, highly relevent to this thread.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2013/06/life-outside-mental-comfort-zone.html#more

EDIT:  A quote highly relevent to those who engage in this thread, perhaps myself included...

"the brain of the body politic seems to have had its corpus callosum severed (that's the crossbar switch between the two hemispheres of the brain that allows them to act as a unit). Each side thinks that it represents the whole even as the two sides have all but lost the ability to communicate with each other"

This is a rediculous idea.  Again, nuclear power industry accidents across all of the history of the world do not exceed the amount of radioactive material that is launched into the atmostphere by the worlds coal plants in a single year, and we have been burning coal for almost 200 years, and seriously powering industry with it for over 100 years.  Modern nuke plants don't really 'blow', and even if 100 of them had leakage accidents similar to what happened in Japan (very, very unlikely) we still wouldn't exceed what humanity has already dosed our environment with over the past 100+ years.  That plant had a quadruple redundant emergency cooling system, which we now know isn't quite good enough for a 1:10K year tsumami wave.  It's certainly more than enough for a global economic breakdown, since the idea is to give the enginneers time to put the reactor and hot fuel rods into a longer term stable state.  For some designs (undamaged) this simply involves lowering a neutron shield that waits inside the reactor, and the heat level will slowly reduce to the point that additional water supply is no longer pressing.  For some designs this actually requires that some (all?) of the hot fuel be removed by very well trained operators and placed into open storage pools, with or without neutron shielding between the rods.  Most of the open storage pools are not designed to collect rainwater for level maintaince, but do you really think that should it become obvious, the engineers can't arrange such things for most or all of the power plants?

Furthermore, not all radiation, or radioactive materials, are equal risks.  There is a persistant background radiation in our lives that is completely natural, and it's certainly higher than a layman would assume.  All concrete is mildly radioactive for the same reason that all coal is mildly radioactive, because all rocks contain some trace amount of thorium.  It's just that common.

In the longer term we've got to stop encasing the fuel and fission products inside a flammable metal (zirconium) and surrounding them with a ready source of hydrogen (water). Commercial reactors and the waste they produce really are a disaster waiting to happen.

Switch to a liquid fuel design using stable fluoride salts as a medium and you get fuel and waste that requires higher temperatures than decay heat can produce to stay in liquid form. In the event of an accident the entire mass cools and freezes into an inert solid instead of catching on fire.

We seem to have a problem deciding on how it will happen. But at least we can all agree that we have hopelessly screwed up the world.  ;D

Nah, you're wrong on that score. Your mistake is to think that what you're seeing in the US is capitalism / a free market. It's not. You're seeing crony capitalism, ie: business allied with lawmakers for their own advantage. And yeah, it sucks, but don't blame capitalism, if anything blame government collusion with business. If you removed government there could be no cronyism, thus it's government, not capitalism, at fault here.

Any such prosperity will be produced by a free market, not socialism.

Yeah, that's the main issue there. You can also do that with large bays that have a narrow inlet.

You are a dreamer. This is science fiction, written by austrian aristocrats. I know these theories very well, and in my former life I was an Austrian as well, until I realised that it is ahistoric science fiction. Real stateless communities in the rain forests 'produce' about the same amount as they did 10'000 years ago.[/quote]
They don't have advanced specialization or any concept of capital investment. Of course they produce little to nothing. What relevance does that have, at all, to what I'm talking about here. Correlation is not causation. I'm not talking about a stateless society, I'm talking about a society where every-person is their own state, their own sovereign. It's a subtle difference but try to catch the rub. Stateless clans in rainforests typically operate in a form of savage socialism--not extreme political individualism such as I suggest. They are virtually opposite situations.

No, we've had governed, collectivist societies for literally thousands of years and they never produced what we have now. It was economic individualism that produced the modern world, not government action on society as you seem to suggest. Name a place more governed than ancient Egypt or China--these places didn't produce highly.

Deny is a better term. I don't think you know your economic history.

That's far too general a statement. A society is collectivist when it holds that the group must be put before the individual. A society is individualist when it holds that the individual's rights can stand against group desires.

A society is either or, it is not innately either. Rights protections are innately individualist, for instance.

False. You've stated one of the common misconceptions about anarchy. Anarchy is not against cooperation, it is against compulsory cooperation. Thus anarchy is not against division of labor and cooperation in terms of companies, it's against being forced to work with X and the like.

The rest of your quote is useless to respond to since it's predicated on this misunderstanding, so I'll ignore it.

You're talking about tidal power generation, I'm not here.  Still, tidal generation is an excellent example of what I'm talking about.  The few naturally occurring ideal places to put a tidal generator are all owned by people who don't want you to touch their ocean view.  They don't want you blocking their yachts from entering or exiting the bay either.  And the environmentalists don't want you to alter the shape of other coastlines, even if the benefits could possiblely outweight the massive costs of construction work on any foreseeable timescale.

What I was taliking about was literally a controlled drain of the PAcific Ocean into the saltflats.  No dependency on weather patterns or the orbit of the moon.  24/7 power generation so long as the output water was at or lower than the average evaporation rate of Death VAlley, which is considerable.  Power forever, literally, so long as the pipes and gensets are maintained; in the same sense that most hydroelectric plants are power forever, so long as they are not damaged and the run of the river remains the same.  Difference only in which direction is the source and sink.  Again, it will never happen.  NIMBY all but garrantees that large scale geoengineering projects are imposssible, no matter the cost/benefit analysis of it all.

But who's going to scoop up the salt and put it back in the Pacific?  Or do we want to desalinate the oceans too?

This has now become an interesting conversation!

What about making a huge direct solar desalination plant at the output of the drainage - Then we don't mess with the humidity of the region or effect weather at all... and could pipe clean water somewhere...

Who cares?  How do you think the salt flats got that way to begin with?  It was once much like the Dead Sea.

Like Los Vegas? Nah, they don't really need drinking water that bad.

Not really.

All of that infrastructure and land for a measly 200 MW is insane. Even if it was 2 GW that would hardly be worth the effort.

Don't be so pessimistic, this is a good idea.

The real answer is we won't put it back, instead we'll collect it sell it on an exchange, create demand by promoting consumption and call it money. We can start a forum called sodiumtalk.org and blog about how it is the future of money.

And that is exactly my point.  200 MW is hardly worth the effort of all that geoengineering.  Despite the fact that it would pay economic and ecological dividends, both in actual power and in local climate mitigation, for 10K years or more.  We simply don't, as humans, think out that far.  We discount the value of such a massive construction to our great-to-the-power-of-whatever-grandchildren.  If we can't get a net positive return on investment within out own lifetimes, we don't see the value in it.  This is the short term thinking that afflicts the human race with some of it's greatest flaws.  There is a 'food forest' in Vietnam that has produced food for humans for 300+ years, almost without human labor to maintain it.  There is a theory that the Great Pyramid in Giza was not a burial site at all, but an elaborate water works construction; from an age prior to the Egyption culture when the local climate was much wetter.

http://atlaspub.20m.com/giza/pg5.htm

http://sentinelkennels.com/Research_Article_V41.html

http://www.thepump.org/

BAsicly a massive ram pump, used to send the water of the "Upper Nile" (which no longer exists) great distances.  A similar 'ram pump' construction was once proposed to push a portion of the water flowwing down the Mississippi River West across the Great Plains, although today the Mississippi River basin has enough trouble maintaining a shipping depth.

Humanity just has real problems thinking in such long range terms, even when the benefit to our decendents is certain.  One reason that a space elevator is never going to be built.

And the past of money.  There is a reason we have the term, "not worth his salt".

Salary is derived from earning salt, it was good money then and will be again. Money 0.7.9

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/220752

seems like we are at the endpoint of fiat system...

There seems to be strong consensus that the tools are in place to dismantle the largest banks and most of the congress people are urging the regulators to use them.

Without criminal charges for the long string of abuses, obscenely blatant wrong-doing and outright theft and transparently complicit 'regulators', the trust and faith needed for a functional financial system will be absent for a long while.

They were talking a lot about firing the board and replacing them with a team who's goal is to unwind the institution, but not much talk of criminal charges.

oh well, once the US is out of the way the rest of the world can start doing something useful.

Instead of our leaders doing whatever the United States what to do, we can have...
-a decent economy,
-stop spending money on useless american military bullying,
-stop filling our air with shit

How interesting is this really? When talking about progress and new types of governing we definitely have to look to the main problem out there: ENERGY! Look at where we are now? Applied science of producing energy comes forth with Carnot Cycle (1823) instead of ANY new direct type of converting mechanical/chemical/nuclear energy to electricity. Well. Are there any NEW ways?

Well... truth is; there ARE new INDUSTRIAL ways of producing energy efficiently:

Solar: http://www.infiniacorp.com/en/home/
Nuclear: http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/MIT-Develops-Meltdown-Proof-Nuclear-Waste-Eating-Reactor.html
See this also about new type of small nuclear FISSION reactors before Fusion comes along within 30 years from now:
http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_small_nuclear_fission_reactors.html

This late guy really got me you know. He's like 21? Watch the whole video. It worths it.

The answer to new governing techniques is ONE: S&T (Science & Technology).
I was born in Greece, studied in the US; (frankly I never stopped studying and I'm in my mid 40s). Greece is the place where democracy was first applied. I deliberately didn't use the word "invented". No one is able to invent a way for the many to be able to govern themselves... THEY CAN'T! Democracy, as any other good or bad way of governing is based in ONE thing: Supply.

If you're hungry, you cannot think. If you're looking for food, you don't have the time to study or observe. You don't get better. Ever wondered why the world became so fast, so advanced within the last 200 years? Because we solved the food problem. You think scientists really care about deflation or inflation of the economic system? THEY DON'T! They only care about their lab and their piece of work. Progress became available when we were able to produce energy and then found a way to produce food for the masses. This requires ENERGY!

Where do we go next?
I guess the next step is to tighten the energy production with our money circulation...

Rings a bell?  ;)

Great kid, very smart.  But that isn't an original idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

No, it's a bit different. The idea is to use depleted nuclear waste (ie: plutonium) together with its relevant salt (ie: Ca or Na). The metal forces the nuclear waste to form a high temperature which in a few minutes turns the salt to its liquid form. The heat continues on and a Stirling device converts the produced heat to energy via adiabatic process thus not losing energy. The reactor can go on for as long as 30 years...!

So basically it's a brand new idea... I hope he manages it to actually form it. He even hopes to release it as creative common or public domain. Amazing!

Nope, not a new idea.  The 4S was specificly designed to run unattended for 30 year refueling cycles, and is quite capable of utilizing downgraded weapons fuel.  It can also use a Strirling engine at the surface generator house, although it's actually desinged to use a liquid salt to boiling water heat exchanger.  Stirling engines are more efficient, but they are also more expensive to build, so the 4S can do either.  The early test version, such as may eventually be built for Alaska, assumes that the waste heat is used for municipal hot water distric heating.  This is more commonly called 'cogeneration' and the total energy efficientyc is much greater than that of a Stirling engine producing electrical power alone.  And the 4S is just one example of this style of small, unattended reactor design, other companies have similar designs.  Another design that aims towards similar ends, but uses a classic deep pool unpressurized light water design is the SLOWPOKE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLOWPOKE_reactor), intended primarily for municipal district heating and is largely incapable of electric power geneartion because it niether operates at a high enough carnot efficiency to use a stirling nor is it designed to biol water for pressure, since it's an open top design exposed to atmostphere at the top and boiling water is used as super-critical limiting feature in the core.  It's literally impossible to 'meltdown' the core in this one, because it depends upon the presence of a precise amount of water in the core space for the proper regulation of neutron flux, and either the presence of steam bubbles, or the pressence of normal air (in the event of pool water boil-off) permits too much neutron flux to escape the core to maintain a critical reaction.

No arguments there; old idea, somewhat different... what's the point? Bring it on!!  ;D

So what is so special with energy? As long as the market is allowed to be free, there will be just enough for everybody who wants it.

This has got to be the most entertaining thread I have ever encountered. Please do go on!  ;D

Until the end?

I think it is something like we can't define it, but you'll know it when you see it.

Dream on! (your ridiculous dreams).
 Fukushima blew out a significant part of its inventory. In case of a black out of the whole power grid, which is a question of when but not of if (sun storm, economic collapse and  panic/revolution etc.), it would have blown out its inventory totally, and so would have all the other reactors. Power grids become more and more fragile to maintain the 50 Hertz, totally depending on the computerised, hypercollectivised communication system.
 Societies collapse, because societies are problem solving societies (Tainter). Each solved problem increases the complexity in the system, and increased complexity generates diminishing returns until the end (bifurcation point), when additional investion in additional complexity generates negative returns. Forget at least the northern part of this planet if this society will not end the nuclear industry.
Probably it won't, because society means collective stupidity, which until today always ended collapsing. This society will also end abruptly in a worldwide, globalised panic with worldwide bank 'holidays' and nobody will go to work anymore; not to the banks and not to cool the nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors need each other to cool them, but after a black out you'll have to cool all of them. The collective stupidity will not be able to do this.

Yes, and the collectivised, civilised dreamers in the society still believe that 'engineers' - collectivised within a globalised hypercollective - will solve collectively those problems which they generate!
The problem of collectivised humans (society instead of self-sufficient communities) was never solved by even more debt and more complexity. That's an ahistoric, ridiculous vision, but it is the vision of the mainstream. Tainter's law prove(d) them wrong. Tainter's and Nature's law is at work and 'problem solving societies' disappear by an abrupt loss of complexity. The higher they climb, the deeper they fall.

I tend to agree to most of the part (and your pretty pesimistic point of view) but have to take a stand against you on the "engineers" part. The only colectivised in this world is the people who control the money flow. Engineers (and scientists in general) just produce. I really wanted to say this from the beginning; the question that tinkers my mind all this time is "what can we do to keep the progress going?"

The answer came some time ago; I believe it was Alvin Toffler who stated it first:
We need to expand our society to a hyper society. First we need to make a colony to another planet. Then to all the planets of our solar system. A hyper society will come forth when we will have the technology to control our star's energy.

You see; seing black is like observing the mud of a car which runs through a wet field. Yes; there is mud that leaves behind; but also there's a road ahead...

Just my 0.00000002BTC ;)

I think these are hybris fantasies. Society will collapse before leaving the Earth.
And I think, not only the rulers (who controle the money flow) are collectivised.
The voters in total are also ruling the collectivist society. There is a symbiosis between the rulers and the conquered.
It's like a tumor. It proliferates until the host dies.

One more correction: The voters are ruled by the media. Media is controlled by the government. It's an Aeneus cycle (since I figured you like greek words...). That doesn't give the people the "free of charge" card - we also have a lot on our side to blame. But surely it's not a tumor symbiosis relation. I'd propose a model of viral infection with the exelixis being a DNA/RNA mixture where the viral body (rulers) infects the cell (voters) and stores future previral bodies.

Again, one who governs the world has nothing to gain from the lytic cycle. He has to infect and ensure his future is there inside the cell. On the other hand, you may be right of a possible terminal solution where the cell cannot handle the viral infection and fires up the lytic procedure... I just have to hope we'll be around to see it, one way, or another...

Cheers for your thoughts.

Do you know why Fukushima "blew"? Just asking because it was quite a silly string of bad coincidences stringed together. A one in a billion type of thing. There is no reason for any other modern nuclear powerplant to end up in the same way and given any other day of the week Fukushima itself would probably have been shut down harmlessly.

You must not have been much of an Austrian if you didn't even grasp the basic point that individualism has nothing to do with isolationism. Also, it's a simple correlation-causation fallacy to claim that rainforest tribes are not advancing because they are anarchistic.

You obviously don't have an accurate understanding as to what actually went wrong with that reactor in Japan.  That reactor was designed with a multiplely redundant emergency cooling system.  It was specificly designed to suffer an earthquake of a power of 9.0 on the Riecther scale within 20 miles or so of the epicenter.  It was desgned to suffer through a tsunami.  It was designed to suffer though a complete failure of grid power support, as well as total failure of all of the AC water pumps.  What was never considered was the incredible odds that all of these things would happen in the same day.  It was a harsh lesson learned, and many heroic engineers and techs working for a private company lost some or all of their remaining lifespans in concerted efforts to save public lives.  It sucks to be that tech, when that crap happens at your plant; but just like joining the military, they knew what they signed up for.  If you don't thik that there are equally heroic corporate employees of every other nuclear powerhouse in the world, then you don't really understand why these men and woman get paid the salaries that they do.  But know that the nuclear industry knows that such a one in ten thousand odds event can happen, they are already reconsidering their own emergency cooling plans because reglatory agencies require them to and because they don't ever want to be the next set of guys to have to die to save humanity.  For that matter, the complete breakdown of civil society is one of the most common emergency scenarios that nuke plant disaster planners have long considered, and one of the easiest for them to plan for.  It's way harder to plan for a 35 foot high tsunami wave.   Fukushima power plant had diesel powered pumps that could run underwater, and generators that could survive an earthquake; but not both at the same time.  And furthermore, none of those failues would have mattered at all, had  Fukushima  not been involved in their once in a three year refueling cycle when the bovine fecal matter made contact with the rotating cooling device.  The other reactors were all automaticly in emergency shutdown stage 60 seconds after the earthquake was detected, and never caused any problems; but that one (number 4, IIRC) was not set for automatic shutdown due to being involved in a fuel rod exchange that very week.  Fresh, hot fuel rods were waiting in the storage pool, while engineers and tech were running all over a damaged and dangerous reactor trying to get the emergency neutron sheild down into the remaining core, and everyone managed to forget about the storage pool.  The water in the storage pool evaporated enough that the tops of the fuel rods were exposed to air, and then they caught on fire due to their own internal heat.  It was not really a 'mealtdown' in any practical sense, but radioactive smoke is no small thing.  To the best of my knowledge, Fukushima could still be in operation today, if the populist government had not halted all nuclear power in the nation, as teh damage to the reactor itself was not really significant.  Nothing like Chernobel for example, or even Three Mile Island (which didn't actually release any radiation BTW, but did damage the reactor)

They'll just nationalize the banks and then run them into the ground.

Oh it's one of these threads again. I swear people just copy and paste text from the last topic which was talking about this thing. This was send a year ago. We were predicted to fall at 2012, 2011. Oh and predicted to fall in 2013. The fact is, yes we will most likely fall. Doesn't mean it's going to be soon.

I'm impressed!


Designed!


Yes, I know: to collectivised Engineers the odds seem incredible. That the pools are still hanging around high above the ground must seem incredible to them as well.


Lesson learned? Hihiiiii! The nuclear industry is nothing private. It was military driven from the beginning. No private insurance company would ever insure this madness.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/community_images/88/2288/38766_73179.jpg

They learned nothing. In France, 80 % of the electric power comes from nuclear reactors. A black out of the hyper-fragile power grid (sun storm, revolution etc.) will be followed by armageddon. Nobody will cool the reactors and the fuel pools anymore, since the reactors need the power of each other to cool them, and in a revolution (question of when, but not of if) never ever.
Therefore, your heroic collectivist dreams rely on the functionality of the globalized hypercollective. I knew it: your are a collectivist hero by heart and soul.


Oh, a one in ten thousand odds event! 10'000 divided by 500 reactors worldwide =  a one in 20 event. Therefore, we are enjoying such events every 20 years. Yeah, Chernobyl and now some 20 years later Fukushima, and between the 2 events some almost-disasters. I'm impressed by the incredible intelligence of these engineers.


Regulatory agencies...., really funny.


Yes, planning is easy, but surviving is impossible with such planners. In a revolution, it is crystal clear that nobody will be able to maintain these 500 reactors worldwide anymore.



And not one of the great sun eruptions at another time, which will destroy the communications systems, the transformers and the grid systems, and nobody will be able to restart it.



If and if and if and if ....


Now they are still waiting in hanging pools high above the ground in a building, which won't survive the next earthquake.


Incredible, these one in 20 years events.


And they all lived happily ever after ...

I wrote nothing about isolationism. I wrote: An 'individualist' life is possible within a collectivist, materialist society only. Beyond the collectivist society, within the stateless community, there is no individualism.

Self-sufficient rainforest tribes are not advancing and producing surpluses within 1 million years, because they are not forced to produce surpluses (for the church and state mafia). To be forced is the only evident causal reason to produce surpluses. No state = no economy, no business.

- Yeah baby - there is no light without a darkness. :D

Before you jump to conclusions consider the prosperity we enjoy today is a result of the free market functioning despite collective political control (it is failing because of it)  

Human and all animals seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Innovation in technology and forms of government are a natural expression of evolutionary history. When there is lack of supply of whatever humans need suffering ensues, the low road is to use brute force to ensure you get, at the expense of others (collectivism is an extension of this principal). The high road is to find a replacement or or to innovate and create a better solution) market forces, price expression as a result of supply and demand is one such meme. Failing to abide by the meme doesn't need collectivism to enforce it, abuse is self extinguished (the goose that laid the golden egg)

Rain forest tribes - for a better metaphor, still live in Eden. They have a well developed system to manage need, they enjoy the full complete of human emotion suffer less depression and expense happens despite our judgments. The problem is they haven't evolved the tools necessary to interact with the barbarous western values.

Those tribes that evolved in close proximity like our ancestors evolved to be a new meme species, and we are on the precipice of revolving again.

Something is uneccesarily uttered twice on the Internet. Run for the hills!

The captain said excuse me ma'am
This species has amused itself to death
Amused itself to death
Amused itself to death
We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We ohhed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah
And when they found our shadows
Grouped 'round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry
No feelings left
This species has
Amused itself to death

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsspXqCe4kI

The end is coming in slow motion. It will be death by a million cuts.. not a big bang!

Hence the reason people have been talking about it for decades..


Its a game of musical chairs except only a few can hear the music!


 

Wow.. I kind've wish this thread would disappear.

Although I still feel very bad about the economy

Memo to avoid creating any similar threads

I would just post this for any similar Austrian economists, who haven't already heard it before. Or anybody who's just reading this from top to bottom. It gives you something to think about.

The owner of a ship noticed that his ship was filling with water. Being an educated man (if not nautically trained) he knew there were many possible causes for water in a ship: leaks in the hull, the bilge pump being broken, waves washing over, condensation, and even the crew urinating in the hold. He heard the bilge pump running, he saw water from waves pouring in the open hatches, but worst of all he smelled urine in the hold! Being sensible, he ordered the crew to shut the hatches and then gave them a lengthy, stern harangue on hygienic use of the head. While he was lecturing the crew, his ship sank due to a combination of causes: large, unobserved leaks in the hull, a bilge pump that was running but not pumping correctly, and condensation that had shorted out warning circuitry.

http://critiquesoflibertarianism.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/parable-of-ship-why-austrian-economics.html

Personally I reject this in the current economic situation..... but, things may just be more complicated than we all realize.

We are a bunch of frustrated people that are upset that it didn't happen yet.
We need to let out steam somewhere.
:)

You need to be aware of the people around you. Assassins can be kind, stupid can appear smart, honest can appear to be lying and friends could be foes. It is always an mistake to assume you know the people around you without ever having questioned them. But honestly when you open up with "perhaps I am preaching to the choir" you set yourself up for a rude awakening.

^^ i thought we were all kind, stupid, lying friends here?

Son of a *****! You mean to tell me.. there is a chance that there is a priest amongst us?


That changes everything! we must find him immediately! He knows secrets about the end!


Decepticons roll out!

EXACTLY!

What DIDN'T HAPPEN YET?

Take a bunch of economic crises and look at how they played out.

Zimbabwe, Weimer Republic, Spain mid 1950s, Argentina (numerous), Brazil, Cyrpus, Iceland.

So we're going to have some more?  Some bigger ones?  So WHAT?

Deaths of dissident journalists in mysterious car cashes, money printing without end ... Mugabe? .... no Obama.

I'd say the end is not too far away given the parallel historical precedents.

Its going down in Egypt right now.. supposedly one of the biggest protests in human history! The crowds are swelling.. I bet some of those people think the end is near!   

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/30/amazing-photos-of-egypts-massive-demonstrations/


http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/30/us-egypt-protests-idUSBRE95Q0NO20130630



Reuters reporting millions in the streets!

for human society? ROTFL
only for some human, the minority that lives in "g8"
the rest of us, live in conditions like war, starvation, pollution, no instruction...

Capitalism is not as good as you think if it comes to the point where 1% of the population owns 90% of the money. It's hard to find examples of honest trade, rather more and more poverty and slave labour while the fat pigs get fatter.

This sort of thing doesn't happen in capitalist systems.  It's socialist societies, like the USA, that have these issues.

So real capitalism is a myth because I live in the EU and, sadly, the situation is the same or even worse than in the US. Small businesses go bankrupt and slave drivers prosper.

I believe Bitcoin is going to lead the way to a free and thriving global economy.  It's just going to take some time for people to wake up and better understand how free markets lead to prosperity.  We are still in the early stages.  There will still be plenty of people that prefer to live in a socialist system, but that is what's so great about Bitcoin.  It allows those who don't to opt out of the fiat monetary system that socialism depends on and allows us to create a voluntary, free market economy.

Jost hope we live to see this. Now every time I watch the news it's all about government trying to force new taxes. Land tax was not enough, alcohol tax, income tax, outcome tax, tax for buying a car then for driving it, fueling it, selling it, even for having a dog! If that hasn't been ridiculous enough we have 'air tax' in some regions. Makes me wanna move to the woods somewhere, but that may be hard since even gathering firewood is forbidden...

Yes it does.  They are definitely not mutually exclusive.  Please look up what the terms mean. 

Capitalism involves, among other things, the private ownership of the means of production and private property (and accumulation thereof).  Whereas this is not the case with Socialism, strictly speaking.

As you may be aware the USA has a very strong history when it comes to protecting private property rights, likely stronger than any other country on this planet.  It's absurd to call the uSA a socialist society, as much as it is to call Cuba, for example, a capitalist society.

The USA was once a great example of capitalism, but that is no longer the case.  Private property is being confiscated, taxed, and redistributed.  Businesses are highly regulated and purchasing power is being stolen from the people by a banking system created by the politicians.  What we have now is a great example of socialism.  Karl Marx would be very pleased with the way things are in the USA now.

Anyone who thinks that the USA is still a capitalist country is completely clueless.

Capitalism and Socialism is Collectivism. It's the same Bullshit. Private property is always sub-property, which is guaranteed by the state, because with this private sub-property, the tax payer is able to generate taxed surpluses. Without a state, there is no such thing as a private property.

Sorry, Im not sure I understand what you're saying.

To be clear, I still believe things are in a very very big mess. I reject this situation above.

I didn't assume knowing anybody? Infact, I posted because I wanted to see if anybody held the same views.

I believe we could be , as Peter Schiff says, in the "eye of the storm". Things are not getting better in the economy, it seems to be the opposite. It's just a matter of time before people realize.

Having said that, the disclaimer above sort of says that I am not a professional economist, I do not spend hours looking at all the different facts and statistics. I am not qualified in economics and I have not experience working at a hedge fund or government department, although I do follow the news closely. I have worked in investment banking for a while, but I currently do not work as a market professional. Therefore I would be classed as an amateur speculator. Despite this, I believe that sometimes one can just use intuition and boldness to be right when other people are wrong. Technical analysis isn't everything. Sometimes the facts really are obvious. I believe now is one of those situations..

Sorry, but capitalism and socialism aren't even remotely similar.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_QICIsTzi-vs/TIlN-mWNyDI/AAAAAAAAAbE/gOQrf3-15PU/s1600/what-is-socialism50-percen.jpg

meen that picture is bullshit you are a fool

Sounds like someone can't handle the truth. :-*

The truth as in political slogans? I mean seriously what the hell do "punishes success" or "rewards laziness" mean? Its just something people say to get you riled up like "They are anti-*insert your country*!".

"Redistribution of wealth"... I do not see a problem if its necessary besides its not like it does not happen in a capitalist society. Inheritance being a key flaw in "To each according to his abilities" and "Rewards success"... or a wealthy father/mother. Poking holes is so fun :3

"Collective ownership"... Corporations, democracy and countries are all Collective ownerships. Dont see you complain about that.

"Large welfare systems"... Or small ones depending on how much your country sucks to live in. You know human rights is a need that should be filled regardless of the cost. If its too expensive for you then perhaps you are doing something else wrong.

"Large invasive government" Because socialism is all about looking in your mailbox? Really grow up.

You may actually want to educate yourself about what socialism and capitalism actually means because I do not think it means what you think it means if that makes any sense to you. Feel free to attack Socialism all you like since its not like its a perfect system but right now you are just uninformed and it makes me sad.


In every instance there are winners and losers. If America falls then someone else will raise and take its place just like when France,England and Germany fell America took their place. It is hardly unique for these events to happen and we are always taken by surprise for some reason.

Anyway I have to say there is still a few key events that has to occur before USA will fall from its throne. One would be the enormous economic advantage the dollar enjoys being the currency used in buying oil and China stopping giving loans to the American government because it fears they wont be paid back. There is allot of safety nets protecting USA right now which is why they can be this careless without much worry. Since im an outsider who will not be affected by any potential fallout this might cause I will be watching with popcorn at the ready. Have fun and good luck with your country.

- Yeah baby; exactly!

http://s018.radikal.ru/i526/1307/9e/e1fbcdd649a5.png

Huh.. I wonder what the solution to this would be, since just assigning the title of "government bureaucrat" to the ship owner, and giving him a badge, won't change the results. I mean, I guess the retort question is, if the owner doesn't even know these things, how would someone who's not even involved in it directly know them?

Sounds like the rest of you guys need something you are severely lacking: capitalism  :D

Utterly ridiculous.

People produce extra because it's in their interest to do so, so they can exchange it for other wanted goods or invest it, etc.

The nation-state actually circumvents this by siphoning off the extra production, reducing incentive to produce extra, since you won't get to enjoy it nearly as much, since they take it from you.

The middle class was created by capitalism, just look into history of the middle class, it arrived with the industrial revolution in Britain and followed from there to the world.

It is socialist states where income disparities are worst.

/r/seasteading, imo.

This has never been true and is an example one of the great falsities the leftist-anarchs believe. Not only does property exist without the state, animals act as if they own things, themselves, their herds of female, and territories even. There've been done some interesting studies on property ownership in the animal kingdom.

Some primitive tribes do live collectively, but in that case they live as if the tribe owns everything, not as if there were no property at all, which belies your point, since they are stateless.

Functionally it's impossible to live without property as a concept. Because if you can't be the exclusive owner of a thing, then you cannot even live. For to dispose of a bit of food and water is to sequester it away for your exclusive use, which is to own.

Those railing against property have completely missed the mark, and it's a shame that all of leftist anarchism and socialism is focused on doing away with private ownership of property.

It was never property that was the problem. Property is the solution! The problem is government itself interfering. The socialists then allied with government and became the very thing the left-anarchs had railed against.

Indeed. The real ideological battle going on in the world today is between two things:

The ideologies and forces of communalism vs the ideologies and forces of individualism.

This is the only lens in which to view the world which will make sense of everything happening around us. Capitalism is what results when you apply individualism to the economic realm.

For most of history our political institutions have been communal.

The trend was bucked strongly for the first time with early Britain during the Industrial Revolution and then with the Declaration of Independence, which is an individualist document.

Since then, communalism in government has gained strength in both Britain and the US. The very culture of individualism that created the modern world is now being threatened with extinguishing. Government has achieved near total power in both places.

The reason this happened is because any organization predicated on communalism is likely to tend towards greater communalism over time. The Founders of the US, despite their intentions, didn't understand individualism as a philosophy of freedom, and thus built a government which was freer than what existed elsewhere, but still predicated on communal principles.

The US constitution is inherently a communalist / socialist document. Socialism is what results when you apply the principles of communalism to the political realm.

So, what happened at last is that pure communalism in the form of socialism, in the 19th century, decided to try to apply communalist principles to the economic realm as well.

This effort created communism--the application of communalism principles to economics.

Communism failed for various reasons I won't go into, but suffice it to say that communism can never be as efficient as capitalism (see the "socialism's economic calculation problem" for explanation).

Capitalism is individualim applied to the economic realm.

Now, if you've followed me this far, you may have noticed that there's one combination which has never, in the history of the world, been tried. There are no outstanding examples of individualism applied to the political realm.

This is the road forward for the world. We must figure out how to apply individualism to the political problem of rights protection, law, law-enforcement, and dispute resolution.

I'm working on these concepts currently, having taken Robert LeFevre's term to head them under. He called this idea "autarchy," meaning "rule of the self, by the self."

To apply individualism to the political problem means first of all abandoning democracy. Democracy is easily seen as a communalist / socialist tool. It seeks to force the will of the masses, as obtained through a vote, on the minority parties.

Whenever you have a society that pushes aside the individual will for that of the majority, you have a communalist society. And whenever a society lets the individual will stand against all of society, that is an individualist society.

We must build an autarchist society where each individual is a sovereign over themselves and their property. Where we reject the principle that anyone should be able to force laws on anyone else. Where each person has total control over their personal set of laws.

With modern technology, this is completely doable. We no longer need representatives forcing laws on us. That is inherently unethical. If we are self-owners and self-rulers, let us truly rule ourselves. Not this sham called democracy.

That is the way forward for this world. I plan to build just such a society in a seasteading context within the next 10-20 years, and pave the way for mass migration into such a society. For if it works as I imagine it, it will be far more prosperous and free than these socialist societies, and people will flock to it thereby.

I agree.  I don't have a problem with socialists organizing and voluntarily forming their own collectivist societies.  Just don't force that bullshit on those of us that can see how destructive it is and don't want to have anything to do with it.

You are correct in looking to nature for a solution, I too look to nature for the solutions, but what I see reveals the non aggressive principal is not part of properly in nature.
  
All the territory or herd property, that exists in nature is defended by strength. Your property is challenged all the time, regardless of species. It can be claimed by whoever wants it, there is never a non aggressive principal to allow an imbalance to exist to the detriment of the majority in nature.

You need the "state" (or equivalent collectivist attitude) to perpetuate the private property meme.

Challenges to the territory in question are almost always called off before life threatening injuries, and never allow an imbalance of natural recourses to accumulate in one territory unchallenged.    

We must deal with nature by force because it lacks means of communication and negotiation. That does not mean we must deal with each other on that basis. It's self-evident that we all survive better when we avoid conflict rather than foster it, and that's what rights, laws, and dispute-resolution organizations produce. Thus we use them as conflict-reducing and eliminating devices.

You don't, actually. All you need for private property to exist is rights protection, which is easily divorced from the state.

It's possible to replicate this function of government without having it in place.

You don't need one territorial monopolist to ensure no one else becomes one. It's possible to have peace without a king.

I agree with everything in your post sampled above.  Actually I have come to the same conclusion, and I am teaching my children 5 and 7 to resolve their conflicts with this philosophy, and it starts with personal rights and the property they argue over every day, is immaterial, avoiding conflict is more to do with corporation that creating a property right to legitimise extortion. (all I do is mediate or threaten to create rules) 

Hence my only divergence is I see the meme of property as the catalyst for the evolution of the State. 

 The first time I was exposed to the idea of democracy being superseded by individualising was reading Douglas Adams, while I can't find the lecture he gave he defined every form of governance by the communication technology of the time and predicted democracy's demise with the interactive communication of many to many enabled by the internet. 

Re the above, I see it differently.
Managing slaves by force is inefficient, so too is managing millions of years of evolution by force.    

Just like In a free market price expression is information expressed by supply and demand in the market, it needs to be free to work, if and for whatever reason a monopoly should exist, and the market equilibrium mechanism is destroyed.
  
Just like there are those of us that are stronger and cleverer and better manipulators than others, there are those of us, who have different intelligences, the result is while collectively trading the variety of intelligences, we will create abundant prosperity, and for whatever reason if a monopoly should exist allowing the manipulation of labour/ intelligences, the market equilibrium mechanism is destroyed.

Rights protection is for the benefit of the individual, no right can be given to someone at the expense of denying it from someone else, and to do that requires an authority.  

My conclusion is the rights afforded to property can be no different from those inherent in nature, I see violence as an expression of an imbalance, I don't see violence as a threat like the early New World settlers see it, it is a Peaceful way to maintain checks and balances.  

Great idea! Mayby that's gonna be last resort for people like me, fed up with overwhelming taxation. Only thing is why do we, people who should have the power to change, have to run away from laws.
And to be clear I live in the EU - I wouldn't whine as much if I were in the US, you guys have a lot more freedom. Here the government knows best what's good for you. I feel like a slave in this system.

This is exactly what is happening. We choose a representative and few months later he shows us his middle finger with a smile. People hate him and have to deal with him for the next few years. Society has obviously forgotten who has the power. Sometimes I can't believe how ridiculous the law is. Few years ago, in my socialist country, there were elections and one party won with around 40% of votes. Soon after they did exactly the opposite of their political plan, killed the economy, closed every major industry in the country and sold most of the natural resources, increased the unemployment to over 20%, and forced 1/5 of the population out of the country. People hate them, they have maybe 20% of support and nobody can kick them out.

I hope you will succeed with the plan but some people don't like changes and have the resources to force their will on others so it is not gonna be easy.

Some tribes do live collectively? All tribes do live collectively, within Dunbar's Number! The capitalist and socialist collectivists live hypercollectively. Collectively living tribes do produce no surpluses, because beyond the governed society there is no need to produce growing surpluses, as it is the case in collectivist societies exclusively, where you are forced to pay protection money to the ever growing state mafia. Tribes beyond the state do produce about the same amount as they did 100'000 years ago. No growth, no economy, no market, but self-sufficiency. This is fact, and your stories are science fiction. That's the difference.

Dream on!

You are story-telling. Go out and check. A socialist US-Citizen produces hundred fold the amount of that, what a stateless tribalist does. A stateless tribalist is not growing economically, because he is not as stupid as the collectivist capitalist, who is producing rampant growing surpluses like mad.

You are right, of course. We don't need to produce surpluses, like sturdy waterproof housing, wide selections of cheap foods, fast methods of transport, electricity and all it entails, and things like computers and internet. We can all survive without them, producing only the minimum amounts we need to survive, as we did for hundreds of thousands of years.
But it's nice to have those things, anyway, especially since then you can sit in the safety of your home, warm and well fed, and spend your time on a computer, arguing about how we don't need any of these things, as opposed to busting your ass 4am to 9pm every day to grow food, or chasing down antelope, with not even enough time to say hi to your neighbor :)

Every end is a new begining.

We produce extra in order to consume. We don't produce extra because some state is compelling us too, that's ridiculous.

And the reason we can produce so much more than a tribal person is because we have so much more investment and capital goods multiplying the effectiveness of our work.

The difference between the tribalist and the modern worker is capital goods and investment.

Investment and capital goods can and do exist without the state, as long as rights protection and dispute resolution remain, which they can.

The great error of the modern era is to conflate the two and suppose that rights protection and DROs cannot exist without a state territorial monopoly of power.

If more people understood this, the world would be a much happier place.

Ahistoric Science Fiction. Fairytales.
The reason, why a tribal person does not 'invest', does not produce surpluses and does not grow economically, is the absence of the state and the absence of collectivism.

Not a single stateless community in the whole history of mankind did ever invest in capital goods multiplying the effectiveness of our work.
And therefore, the stateless communities are economically the same as they have been thousands of years ago. Zero growth.



Exactly. The collectivist worker is working with capital goods and investment! Thanks for disproving yourself! This collectivist investment story with capital goods began with the neolitic revolution: the patriarchal collectivisation of the animals and after that the collectivisation of the former anarchist human. Via animal farming to men farming.


Fairytales, written by aristocratic collectivists in Vienna, whitout any anthropological knowledge of the pre-patriarchal (non-collectivist) epoch. The real world is different. In the real world, there has never been an economy with growing investment and capital goods beyond a paternalised collectivist society. And that is still the case today. No state, no economy.

Exactly, within communities beyond the state, there has never been such a ridiculously wasteful system, which produces growing surpluses with mountains of accumulated material.

"Essentially, the economy is an engine that transforms resources into waste."

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7924

Zarathustra is a true believer.  He doesn't come here and make his statements because he needs to convince himself, he comes here because he thinks it's his duty to convince you.  I recommend use of the ignore button to the left.

Yes, that's the difference. Moonshadow is somebody who believes that he is writing to convince himself instead of others.
So funny.

Meh, let Zarathustra believe. He may even be right that tribal "natural" societies had no capital growth, and capitalism was a recent invention. He may even be right in saying that capitalism is a product of human collectivization, if by "collectivization" he simply means "humans willing to work and trade together." But so what? Things are a hell out a lot better now than they were when we were all stuck in forests. And there is no harm, or effect, of beliefs like his.

That is far from true, unfortunately.

Not quite, I just don't consider it my duty to convince you or anyone else of my position.

Not entirely incorrect, however.  I'm an INTP, and as such I'm ever capable of reassessing my position based on new information, and suffer little due to cognative dissonance.  As such, an INTP can't remain so flexible unless there is some degree of doubt in the validity of his/her position, and I'm no exception.  I have no problem admitting that I don't consider myself perfect, in thought or action.  I've changed my position on some things over the course of my adult life, including my position on economic theories.  That's why I'm an Austrian now, I used to be much more of a classic monetarist.  Although I can't recall holding positions similar to your own at any point in life.

People aren't going to give up their iPhones, facebooks, cars, and air conditioned homes to go live in the woods eating berries, no matter how convincing of a pitch Zarathustra tries to make.

Well, I personally was hoping BTC would take off so I could purchase an Earthship and ride out the tribulation (impending end) http://earthship.com/

I am half-way kidding BTW. ;)

The "earthship" beats living in the woods anyways!

Largely irrelevant.

The state "support" as you put it is in the form of the state's monopoly on police, law, and courts. However all three of those can also be provided on the market without state collusion, thus we don't need the state to provide any of those and therefore we don't need the state for capitalism to work just fine.

As for planned obsolescence, it suits peoples needs in some industries. The incentives on business are to maximize profit, and this leads to less overall waste rather than more as you suggest.

And if that's not true in any particular case, it's likely to be because business collusion with government has made entry and competition by market competitors very difficult or impossible, thus giving a de facto monopoly.

For instance, when meat-inspection laws were passed, the big supermarkets were very happy and lobbied for them, because they realized they could impose a cost of small meat markets and could themselves absorb the cost far more easily as large producers.

The laws passed and the result was just that, all the corner butchers closed down, no longer profitable, and now everyone buys their meat at supermarkets.

But that result is because of the intersection of business and government, and has nothing to do with market activity itself. If there were no government, it would be impossible for that to happen. Thus the problem is government activity in the marketplace, not competition, certainly not capitalism.

Hardly. It's completely historical.

It represents the transition from hunter-gatherer societies which invested and produced nothing, to farming communities which advanced culturally, societally, and in terms of wealth by inventing concepts of property, territory, and production, in terms of producing much more food than H/G'ing could, and producing more goods people wanted. Specialization took root as well and was the beginning of mass societies. Farming communities could support more people too.

It also was the beginning of both government, soldiers, and war, because by producing extra it became possible to support a full-time non-productive class of bureaucrats and soldiers.

This is like ancient history 101, and it's surprising to hear anyone contradict what should be well known by even jr. highschoolers.

The state does not create farming. Nor does it arise out of nowhere.

Of course they did. When one of them built the first house, the first granary, the first plow, all of these are capital goods, rather than living in caves, hand to mouth, with no tools at all. You are simply ignorant of early human history, apparently.

And why do you think this is? The answer is cultural, not political. And btw, while they may be stateless they are not without leaders that have the equivalent of political power, ie: chiefs and powerful persons.

I submit that the reason the savage communities don't advance economically is an ideology of conservatism in their way of life, and a cultural attitude of communalism.

What finally created the modern world was when one culture in the world, the British culture, broke away from their rulers, not because they embraced them! No one can say the Brits didn't have a state, they had kings, like everyone else. But unlike everyone else they were very independent, very--that is--individualist. Because unlike everywhere else they were ruled by foreigners, by the Normans, and no society in human history has liked to be ruled by foreigners. Thus the Magna Carta in the early, early days of 1215 which established rights and duties of the kind, etc.

The Romans too realized this, that whenever they tried to rule a foreign land with their own people they had nothing but insurrections and resistance, but put one of their own in power, a puppet ruler, like Pontius Pilate among the Jews, and people submitted to rule from one of their own. Arguably the USA still uses this technique.

In any case, this is what happened in England that arguably created such a different British culture than anywhere else in the world and finally allowed the industrial revolution to happen.

And btw, the government did nothing to make the industrial revolution happen--it was taken by surprise by it more than anything and has cracked down on it ever since.

Everywhere around the world we see strong governments, and yet this is not where the modern world was born, but in the one place that had a weak and distant government. This belies your thesis entirely.

Government has always been in the way of progress. If you think a strong state creates the modern world there have seldom been a stronger government than the total rulers of ancient Egypt or China, for whom their entire populace were slaves. Yet those places languished in poverty as nearly as everywhere else.

You are wrong.

I mean the former has capital goods and investment and the tribal worker does not.

Sort of. Concepts of property came into existence at this time, by necessity, which is actually a move away from collectivism. While some hunter gatherers had only a limited concept of private property, by the time they become farming communities they develop it fairly strongly, by necessity.

Early America was not collectivized nor had much of a state at all, and it's the most successful country the world has seen and invented the modern world. History belies your point again.

A great falsification of myer briggs is that you use it to dictate how you think and persuade yourself of decisions. Dont box yourself. You can with practice always become something u are not natively just that it takes effort and nothing great comes without effort. Infact effort and quality pf results are positively correlated.

Intp will only help you justify how others may think or feel as we are irrational beings it tries to give understanding of why we do the things we do. In reality its just a first step.

govt vs no govt its so simple guys dumb the problem down to a group of people and a mediator. The mediator assesses positions and gives the final say like a govt. The mediator cAn be wrong but if ppl believe in him then it works as some benefit while others do not. You must adapt endlessly ad it alwas has been survival of the fittest. Not sure why we would mend laws sacrificing growth and qualitynof life to those who cannot adapt and are not fit for survival. Its primitave but true.

On the other hand you dont let ppl die. Our govt has no accountibility because they donot have anyone watching over them thus are not real mediators. If politicians were led by the needs of the population then govt would ne forced to be accountable. The whole circle is scewed in favor of those who are in the know and we are left trying to adapt. So thats why we revolt or waitnfor someone like ron paul to enter.

I think you have to think through your position a little harder. The growth we have in the economy today is not natural, it is parasitic in nature firstly it consumes the productivity of the producers to benefit a small elite, and in turn the producers compensate by producing more efficiently allowing the parasitic (wilfully unproductive) members to persist in society, all at the expense of the environment.

The reason self sufficient "primitive tribes" don't grow is because they are in equilibrium. Not because they lack capital goods, they have all the capital goods they need. Nor are they suffering from depression and postal killings of rage out of frustration, it is just your judgment that makes them inferior to you, or the introduction of an imbalance into the community.

Had they evolved in close proximity to limited resources they too would be more like us.

Conflict is the result of the projection of blame for unfulfilled need, by contrast innovation is finding ways of fulfilling need by cooperation and creativity, a result of free individuals willfully cooperating.   

All States fail or will fail because the try to prevent conflict with force, at the expense of freedom and creativity the result is fostering conflict not cooperation.

We are at the tipping point, and force coercive or by consensus has the upper hand.

Ofcourse that statement you quoted is not sufficient to describe our society today which is more complex. But if you had read through the rest I said that it boils down to simply mediating society making decisions for the betterment of us all. Instead our mediator has no accountability and the whole social circle in politics is not lead by just decisions based on the needs or wants of the population. When the population or the herd of sheep say something is btter for us but the mediator says no without any notice or reason then we are at a crossroads there.

You need a mediator hands down, in order for chaos to be organized. Ever been to a meeting with 10 people all speaking about the same issues but ina different opinion? You need someone where to organize the discussion/decisions. Like I said dumb the problem down and you can see some sort of correlation with things in our lives with the larger picture

Dumb it down even further; do you need the mediator to be able to use force, to assert his opinion? Or is it feasible that even a mediator is fallible and lacks intricate understanding of how every action in the universe has an equal and opposite reaction and how they all interconnect and and as such is just another opinion.

Those 10 people in the meeting choose to corporate or not, no mediator is necessary, I think you may be confusing managing with mediation. All managers need to mediate to propagate there will,  If the 10 members in the meeting  are barbaric you need a manager to force them to behave, but that is not necessary if their participation is voluntary, the alternate to lack of corporation is coercion and force, if the outcome is unfair they will revolt, and you will need force to control them again.

The order in managing the complexity in natural systems proves mediation is not necessary. Nature is an infinitely more complex dynamic and functions perfectly without a mediator. (Admittedlythere is a God dilution; however there is no evidence of the all knowing mediator or judge)

Order created by willful corporation is what builds prosperity, Order by any other means is fallible to abuse and corruption.

It is evident that man is ineffective at managing dynamic complex systems (any ecosystem for eg) to manage effectively we need to simplify the rules and create clockwork / binary mechanisms / systems.

It is those systems that become the problem as with all man made designs eventually become obsolete as the inputs and outputs evolve.  

Yes I kinda of meant managing as to me in the large scope of things managing/mediating means the same thing. Maybe slightly different responsibilities but same meaning in the end.

So you are saying voluntary so if 5 ppl decide not to participate in the election and go off elsewhere, where would you go such that the system is different and you can find a place with no mediator? Remember its a global economy if you want to say inthe developed world, the rules are all the same. So your notion of voluntary cooperation doesn't apply. Everyone is forced to cooperate to give their oppinion, and it is chaos. With 100 million people there will always be a small pct that always wants to influence change and actually the people who cooperate are those who vote. However voting is like picking between lesser evils as like I said before the voice of the people is not heard anymore.

The manager/mediator will never get it right, as he/she is a human and is irrational him/herself. However what I'm saying is, society is more productive and more efficient at arriving at conclusions if this person or thing exists. If it didn't you wouldnt have managers/mediators the notion would not exist and we would find better ways to manage ourselves and run companies without the need of people being managed as we are all accountable to the balance sheet, in the end it doesn't happen.

I do see what your saying though and it is all theory, but in theory it may sound nicer that any choas at first will be resolved because of the dynamic complexity of nature itself, but I'm not so sure that the standard of living would be better off in absolute terms using that theory than what it is now, even in the long run.

We evolved to have the system we have, and we grow/prosper on every breakthrough technologically, so we strive for the next breakthrough and work towards holding politicians in power to be accountable. Maybe the next major breakthrough will allow for this and is what we need for the next phase of long term growth.

Be careful when predicting the end of the world...it only happens once in a lifetime :)

Growth is not the problem; it is the opposite, a lack of sustainable equilibrium that is the problem, the equilibrium that exists in unmanaged systems.

Our evolution over the last 3 thousand years has been governed by memes, and those memes had evolved to their final conclusion, much like the monster dinosaurs of the late Jurassic.  

Over 300 years ago those "5 ppl" who decide not to participate and went elsewhere, spread the memes, killing the local or indigenous ones. They colonised the New World, and started by allowing greater individualism (no managers) a new level of prosperity was born more free and more powerful nation. But because deep rooted memes persisted, this freedom and individualism quickly evolved to the same final conclusion we have today.

Now we are forced to corporate or control as there is no where else to go - no spaceship leaving for Mars and we don't need more managers.  

As an ideator, I know only one thing to be true, "people who have new ideas often just stop having old ideas".  

A lot of peoples augments around here are based on old ideas; the quote below symbolises the sentiment behind the biggest new ideas:
Whatever we had before is ending,  the change has started let's hope the managers choose rebirth individual freedom and creative progress - the life that emerges from kayos, as opposed to repression - coercion and control managed by the "capable"

and without fail and it afflicts us all.

I used to worry about the future... looking at all those Peak Oil documentaries, end of civilization stuff... the political BS campaigns in regards to Iraq and now the NSA spying of course... and yes, if one is so inclined, it is easy to conjure up a plot leading all the way to Doom.

But I am an optimist. Even looking at for example Global Warming... I believe that this phase (the massive industrial expansion and accompaning pollution) is a necessary step to the ultimate civilization - one where we have renewable, cheap, never-ending energy, and can build a society that is virtually pollution free. We could never have gotten to that stage without going through industrialization first. Imagine a mid-19th century society where electricty barely existed... and imagine how we could go from THAT to a truly modern age... it is impossible. Coal could never have cut it. Oil was the key, and Oil enabled us to make that jump.

It has caused us massive problems, the consequences of which (sea level rise, pollution, global warming) are still to be seen, and may be severe, but humanity will survive. All those doom scenarios about billions dying because of AGW is utter nonsense.

Something that ought to make you feel more positive... SO FAR... every last single person that predicted the end of the world was wrong. So you'd have to be pretty special to budge that trend ;)

And... if you look at the world objectively... by measures such as health, longevity, medical advances, safety and security, the world has never been better. Just two centuries ago societies were far more violent, getting sick was a casino, and medicial science did not exist. We had no idea why people became ill, how to fix them. We were so extremely ignorant... These are good times. There are a few possible roads to serious trouble, and some of them not even that unlikely, but overall, I am very positive and optimistic about the future. Human ingenuity will overcome!

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=24479 (http://www.acting-man.com/?p=24479)

Congratulations! Finally you realize it, while other collectivists here still believe in division of laber to be something non-collectivist, anarchistic, by telling aristocratic fairytales.



Humans are not willing to work and trade together. Humans are self-sufficient, Citizens are not self-sufficient and are therefore forced to work and trade with aliens and enemies. But a Citizen is not a human; it is a cartoon of a human.



That's an anthropocentric, criminal, socialist-capitalist-collectivist world view, that the great extinction is a lot better than an anarchist, sustainable, non-collectivist life beyond collectivism (business).
That shows how crazy, morderous and suicidal the capitalist religion in fact is.

Yes, they advanced societally! Anarchist, self-sufficient communities within Dunbar's Number became patriarchal societies, which is collectivism beyond Dunbar's Number. Animal farming and men farming on the ground of organised violence. Humans became citizens.
A human and a cow can only be farmed, if they are forced to or fully brainwashed, as the farmed capitalists here amazingly demonstrate.
Happy, non-self-suffient slaves who believe to be free. This is the tragedy of this first collectivist epoch in the history of mankind (pyrozen) that began about 10'000 years ago and is ending now.

I have seen a few aspects of your past arguments that I didn't find coherent, but before judging anything I thought I would like you to explain the above quote as I see some ideas in there I don't understand.

thanks.

It means that the first collectivist epoch (Pyrocene - the last 10'000 years) in the history of mankind is a tragedy, which is based on the institutionally brainwashed happy slaves who gave up their historic self-sufficiency in exchange to a 'life' as a divided slave worker within an unnatural construction of a monogamous pairing family, which they call a free life, while it is in fact an existence as a dependent dependant.

Throughout history there hasbeen end sayers... No the end is not near.

Can you describe how you believe your ideal society should lice? What exactly do we need to abandon, and change to be like what you think we should be like?

We should abandon the society.

People have been yelling "the end is near" a long time. I don't think you have anything to worry about.


 But then again, Im just a hopeless optimist who wants to believe the best in people.

This...

All depends what you believe "the end" is. Total collapse of humanity? Mad max style?  worse ? or just a major
change in the world as has happened over and over since the beginning of time.  I suspect the "end" is near but it will be a major lowering of life standards for most people for a long period of time . Eventually humanity will rebuild and get back on track.Recently I saw a documentary about a group of Jews that lived in a cave to escape the Nazis  for 18 months during ww2 (  http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/05/30/audio-no-place-on-earth.html (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/05/30/audio-no-place-on-earth.html) ). For those that don't want to  read about it, they basically lived underground while most of them never exited  at all for the whole period of time.

For them it was the end of the world but they survived and moved to the US and Canada and restarted their life.
Humanity will do the same when the time comes.

This has nothing to do with the end of bitcoin, but about things that are going to cause problems for the regular investor. I have been thinking about this for a while. Before starting, I assume the price of bitcoins has been lifted due to speculation.

First, the people selling asic machines in return for bitcoins are going to destroy bitcoins for a period of time. Think as a seller. You sell a bunch of miners for bitcoins and let the people attempt to reap the rewards of mining. Once price rises enough, you sell out and reap the benefits before miners can. What perpetuates the price rising is early adopters who spread word of their earnings bringing in more people who want to get rich. In order to sustain the price and continue rising, you need more people to invest in the currency and believe in it. once influx of people come, this is where as a seller of machine i'd sell out or the next big wave.

It is the greed in which people want to earn money that will make this system fall faster because everyone will invest in miners and coins and watch them rise. Which it will, no doubt, but at who's expense? You and me the regular investor. It's the same in stocks or our own market. Remember this - when everyone believes they can make lots of money, that is when you get worried. All it takes is one bomb (mass sell off) to start and then rest of the disaster starts. As many investors tell you - MANAGE YOUR RISK.

Spoken like a true investor. The thing is "Bitcoin" is just using you (the greedy investors) as a stepping stone. Remember Bitcoin wants to be more then just an investment opportunity like stocks. It want to become an actual currency that people use. To do that it needs a certain amount of backing to be a viable form of currency. This is where the greed of the foolish comes in. Yes you can make your investment and cash in your reward but by using you Bitcoin can become and established currency not prone to your average investment predictions.

Edit:

Also.. yeah... I do not think the companies making the miners have that elaborate scheme planned. That is just far fetched.

I'm sure most of this has happened already, in April? There seemed to be endless posts on the forums about how people were going to be the "new elite", how the price was going to $10,000 , etc.

Now it seems that we have the opposite, many threads about how price is going to $30.

Personally, I have remained bearish about bitcoin price in recent months but given these endless negative postings, I'm beginning to wonder whether this could still be a buying opportunity.

Having said that, the number of transactions on the network has crashed recently - but this could just be due to speculators loosing interest.

I'm not sure about the situation with ASICs. The whole thing sounds incredibly dodgy, there has got to be a scam there. However, this seems like a side show. How is it going to affect bitcoin (ie. the bitcoin protocol) itself?

Why haven't you done this?

Good point. I guess its not a plan scam us, but more a plan to protect themselves. I think Avalon has tons of bitcoins somewhere in the 50,000+ range. Some other smaller companies as well. I think one thing they've managed to do is play smart with cashing out. But in order to protect themselves, they will likely sell out on the next peak especially since AValon pulled a huge amount of Bitcoins sellign chips.

 He is waiting for We.
To be honest there is no where left to go so the only option is to fix it.

Honestly only accepting bitcoins might be one of the smarter things avalon has done. The payment system is ideal for companies since there are no funny business with charge backs and such. Guaranteed money direct into their pockets with no lose ends. Could not have asked for anything safer. As to where the bitcoins went I am sure they already traded in at least 1/5th or more to simply pay for the chips and shipping in the first place. It would be interesting to know if they are planning to keep the rest as bitcoins or cash them in as soon as possible.

Yes, you can't do this alone. Selfsufficiency beyond the state is forbidden. The truing of the children by the state mafia is mandatory.

well, you could send your kids to private school, or even home school them. You could farm 40 of your acres and graze another 100. Harvest firewood and hunt/gather from the forested acres. You could avoid getting SS#'s for the kids, and by the time they take over the estate they will have almost no dealings with the "state mafia".

Yes, if one is self sufficient, why would it matter what the state forbids?
The Amish have a different model, but they seem to be getting along alright.

The other question that comes to mind.  Why is Z. alone in this?  Isn't there likely a Dunbar number of folks that would join?  Why all the waiting and complaining?  If it is right and better, make it so, and others will recognize that.

People are lazy and being self sufficient takes work.

There certainly is, but they don't hang around a digital currency forum.

No, in Switzerland, you can't. And if, the rules for homeschooling (brain washing) are given by the state mafia.


1) The Amish are paying taxes to the state mafia.
2) The Amish have a state whithin a state (mafia within a mafia). Therefore, they are paying taxes (protection money) twice.
3) It's patriarchy (church and state). They do not live within Dunbar's Number, but within perverted monogamous pairing families, as all civilized 'humans' have to 'live' (except some civilized populace in perverted harem families).



Selfsufficient communities within Dunbar's Number are always nuclear, related by blood. But the civilizing of the homines sapientes destroyed these nuclear communities and replaced them with a Society (organised violence). To rebuild them would be a long, painfull process. Even in this forum you'll find collectivists only: trade-collectivists (homo oeconomicus), education-collectivists, progress-collectivists, capital-collectivists etc., but zero people who are interested in freedom and selfsufficiency.

While that is generally true, it's not absolutely true.  There have been some very real 'intentional communites' that have come together with only a common idea, and did fine.  Still, your opinion seems valid here, as any community with any staying power is certain to develop said blood relations over time, regardless of how they start out.


Once again, you have a strange notion of both "society" and of "collectivists", IMHO.

This thread is ultra depressing. :(

Even if the natural course of things has shown us that the powers that be are corrupt, can't we replace them with others that are honest? At some point "society" will start again, regardless of how much doom and gloom takes place, so I suppose my question is, do we really have to just give up entirely? Can't we just replace the trust using Bitcoin? There are plenty of people here on the forums I could say I "trust", and we even have a system for recording it, too.

Even if the elite aren't worth saving, isn't society itself worth it?

This is the trap of thinking we can hire better politicians.

The reason the outcome is always the same isn't because of good or bad people in politics necessarily, but rather that the system has constraints and incentives built into it, and this is why politicians tend to act as they do, and this won't change unless the incentives on politicians are changed, and that can only happen by a completely structural change in the system, by something radical like abandoning democracy. Trying merely to elect benevolent masters doesn't change the fact that they are being continually given illegitimate and arbitrary power over everyone. That they haven't yet chosen to create a total tyranny with the power given to them is purely due to momentum and tradition, and is slowly chipped away at every year and every election and every crisis.

We have a political system which is predicated on communalistic principles and thus tends towards communalism over time, regardless of the people running the system the structure itself is communalistic and will continue to produce communalist outcomes as time goes on. Isn't that after all why we went from Social Security to Obamacare. There was no major legal change needed in the constitution to make that happen, only the collection of enough political power and will to force it through.

Course not, but if you have a system falling off a cliff you can either try to save it and risk going down with it, most likely, or you can start a new society elsewhere. When Rome fell other societies were still on the way up, naturally.

Society is, sure, we derive many benefits from associating together, naturally. But it doesn't have to be in any one place. People have this attachment to the idea of America, but that idea is in today's world largely an anachronism. "Home of the free?" Hardly.

There is no correction without debt jubilee and a banishment on usury

JFK was America's last hope... Andrew Jackson was the last true American hero

JFK:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11110

Andrew Jackson; the only president to abolish the Central Bank and the only president who got rid of the national debt:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp

Satoshi is a global hero.

No, this has many elements of wrong thinking in it also. When the system becomes so corrupted and complex that it has to coerce and compulse to get work and effort out of individuals to contribute then the only action of defiance left is to dis-engage completely. Working within the dysfunctional system to make it better is actually only making things worse and prolonging the collapse and necessary carthartic events that will allow the new system to begin and rebuild.

It will only be when a large enough percentage of individuals take it into their minds and hearts that the collapse is a necessary evil we must go through before will it happen. We are now stuck in a twilight zone where there are still enough committed and enamoured with the bad old ways to prevent letting it go but a portion has awoken and see the way to future. We can't do much but wake others up to the necessity of the collapse and wait, when the threshold is reached it will be like a switch has been flipped and then no one will even remember what it was like now. Take a look at the events in Eastern Europe 1989 for how quickly the mindset of whole societies can change in weeks when the threshold of the wall of denial is breached.

Order through chaos.

The functional nuclear communities have been replaced by the dysfunctional society (collectivism/organised violence). Why should it be worth saving? The society itself is the problem and therefore the overcoming of it is the solution. It's that simple.
The End of the Citizen (who is a cartoon of the human) is the rebirth of the real human.

People just need to pull their heads out their asses. We can't just run off and complain about what other people are doing constantly. We all put an impression and intent on the Universe every waking (and perhaps unconscious) second. I know I'm guilty of not trying my hardest, and I'm sure everyone else here is too. Shit is just plain fucked up in the world because everyone has the same damn attitude towards everything. Everyone is void of hope, glued to some mysterious belief, and avoiding anything 'real' about the world.

We bitch about how ugly the world is becoming, then throw trash on the floor.
We say its sad that people starve, then we order fast food.
We say money sucks, then get sucked into a different currency.
We say people are mean, but then act completely hostile to new faces.

We have the power to change, it's just that we don't.

He is also the first president to introduce spoiled system in a major way (aka crony government appointee).

Another guy realising this......   Welcome to the party. Sit down. Get some bitcoins and popcorn. Lets watch the world burn together. Then lets rebuild it without all the shit the previous generations imposed on us.

BITCOIN FOR president, i love BITCOIN

facts or sit down....  and whatever facts you have let's test them against previous presidents. (since you also say first)

your move

Well, Andrew Jackson was responsible for the Trail of Tears... But I would still agree he was the best president for the right decision to end the central bank. Someone in the media once asked him after he was out of office what the best thing was that he accomplished in his administration, and before he could finish the question, Jackson interrupted him with "I killed the Bank!"

We need politicians that understand who the enemy actually is in this country. I don't think I'm willing to give up on the country itself. We just need to hold them actually accountable for breaking the law, something the Judicial Branch is sitting on its ass on right now for no clear reason. Maybe there needs to be 12 randomly-appointed "jurors" in this country that can unequivocally vote to fire any government employee for any reason whatsoever. It seems the democracy portion, the legislators, are now fully-corrupt, ala what Alexis de Tocqueville feared could happen with a Tyranny of the Majority. No one questions the Iron Triangle of bureaucrats, lobbyists, and lawyers, or realizes they work towards destroying the country instead of restoring it.

I guess I blame fundamentalism whether through God or in the name of equality. The only reason democracy worked in America for so long was because all the different Christian denominations hated each other. Once that stopped happening, seemingly around the time of Roe vs. Wade, they consolidated, then the left formed coalitions in opposition, and we have what we have today... This extremely absurd idea that the entire nation has to pursue some specified "moral good" be it "God" or "Equality", with next to nothing in the way of actually pursuing liberty for those subject to its laws.

+1

You need to read up more.. it takes a few years but if you study history, the expansion and demise of empires you will see where the rot comes from

there is a mighty reason why the christians banned usury for as long as they could...

The best cliff notes I ever read is this passage.. explaining how war & vices are controlled by finance to bring down nations..   from Rome to now you see the pattern over and over

"The mode of government which is the most propitious for the full development of the class war, is the demagogic regime which is equally favorable to the two fold intrigues of Finance (usury) and Revolution. When this struggle is let loose in a violent form, the leaders of the masses are kings, but money is god: the demagogues are the masters of the passions of the mob, but the financiers are the master of the demagogues, and it is in the last resort the widely spread riches of the country, rural property, real estate, which, for as long as they last, must pay for the movement. When the demagogues prosper amongst the ruins of social and political order, and overthrown traditions, gold is the only power which counts, it is the measure of everything; it can do everything and reigns without hindrance in opposition to all countries, to the detriment of the city of the nation, or of the empire which are finally ruined. In doing this, do not financiers work against themselves? It may be asked: in destroying the established order do not they destroy the source of all riches? This is perhaps true in the end; but whilst states which count their years by human generations, are obliged in order to insure their existence to conceive and conduct a far-sighted policy in view of a distant future, Finance which gets its living from what is present and tangible, always follows a short-sighted policy, in view of rapid results and success without troubling itself about the morrows of history." (G. Batault, Le probleme juif, p. 257; The Secret Powers Behind Revolution, by Vicomte Leon De Poncins, pp. 135-136)