Work

[SgtSpike]

Actually, Dank is not so far off from reality.

I live in a commune, albeit a very small one. There are only five of us. We often need resources from outside, so I earn money at a day job (none of the other four people are employed.) Two of us are in school full time. One spends her time maintaining our commune and also does what she loves, playing the flute. The last guy just sits around all day (well to be honest, he can barely walk and can't talk yet). We never transfer money between ourselves, but work gets done because we want it to be done.

 

Yeah, what you described is pretty much a family. Whether you are actually relatives with those people or not, you are living together and providing for each other as a family would.  It works well on a small scale, but it doesn't work at all on a large scale.

The thing is, we are all brothers and sisters, why do we need any possession to trade rather than sharing our possessions?

Firstly because people would abuse it and secondly because appearing to be a good prospect for mating turns out to be something that gets selected for.

Wouldn't you appear bad to a potential mate if all you cared about were material possessions?  Shouldn't loving and sharing be a more attractive quality to a relationship, since love is the main ingredient to a relationship?

Yes, you would.  It's called "materialism", and it's a rather bad trait.  Fortunately, I care about both loving and sharing (with my family and mate) AND material possessions.

SgtSpike, that's simply not true, humans have existed for thousands of years by caring for their selves.  Is there not enough food?  Grow some yourself.  These things called regulations prevent us from caring for ourselves.

I agree.  But in today's modern world, with a population over 7 billion people, it is no longer possible.  When there were only 500M or 1B people in the world, then sure, I agree.

Also keep in mind that humans only lived to be 30 or 40 for those thousands of years as well, and pretty much had to toil from sunup to sundown just to survive.  If you want to toil long and hard homesteading (and it IS long and hard work), then by all means, go for it.  If you want to share the proceeds of your good work with anyone who asks, then by all means, go for it.  Just don't expect everyone to do the same, and don't expect that there won't be a long line of leechers at your door as soon as you start giving away to anyone without restrictions.

Who actually dreams to play video games 24/7?  I loaded up counter strike source, the other day, and it just wasn't the same.  Most people grow out of these phases and find something they enjoy that also contributes to others.

Some people do.  And I know I sure would have when I was younger.  I would have been a leech then for a good 5 years, at least.  And I'd still be a leech today, since all I would do is write music and eat all the food you toiled so hard to create.

Of course computers could have been created without currency, do you have to feed your computer dollar bills to turn on?  It's all metal.  It took the push of a little bit of greed to get technology as far as it is, in today's society, but it could have happened without.

Yes, and where did that metal come from?  You REALLY think that such organization and production could come from people working out of the goodness of their heart?  NEVER.  It won't happen.  Just looking at all the factories and machinery involved in refining metal and flattening it into the shape of a computer case tells me that.  And then you have the paint for the computer case, the electronic PCB's, the hundreds of millions of dollars put into fabrication of said PCB's and electronic traces, the chips, the R&D involved, the fabrication facilities for those chips, etc.  There is no possible way such things could happen without currency - there is far too much work involved that would never be accomplished because no one would have proper inspiration to actually see that it is accomplished.  Who is going to wire up an entire building with electricity?  Who is going to create those wires?  No one does that kind of work out of the goodness of their heart - not on the scale required for high-tech fabrication facilities that are required for creating computers.

It could NOT have happened without currency, and without people looking after their own self-interests.

Regarding electricity, that in no way destroys the environment, unless of course, we use coal and oil to generate electricity rather than clean, renewable, hemp biodiesel.

And we do use coil and oil to generate electricity.  Unless you have a hemp generator in your backyard, and you never use more electricity than you create, then you are destroying the environment by using electricity produced, in part, by coal.  Also, even if your hemp generator doesn't appear to be destroying the environment when you use it by yourself, figure out what would happen if EVERYONE in the world had a hemp generator and used as much electricity as you do.  Well, the world would be covered in whatever plant produces hemp in order to satisfy that need.  Forests would be destroyed to make room for hemp growth, because there is surely not enough current arable land to produce enough hemp to power the whole world.  In other words, you're helping to destroy the environment no matter which way you look at it.  Unless you are harvesting hemp where it naturally grows, and not to the extent that it cannot regrow or it causes other wildlife to have to search for food elsewhere, then you are aiding in destroying the environment.

Technology is very much possible without money, if you enjoy technology, you can work on it to further develop it, with like minded humans.

Sure you can.  But you won't get anywhere without the proper facilities to aid in said technology development.

[SgtSpike]

Nobody forces anyone to work today.  You're quite able to do absolutely nothing and die from starvation and/or exposure.  Unless you're in a prison or forced labor camp of some sort, you're working because you want to work.

Yes, and we have far too many leechers as it is because of it.  I can only imagine how awful the world would be if anyone could walk into my home and take/use/consume anything that I had whenever they liked.

[btcANGEL]

Wouldn't you appear bad to a potential mate if all you cared about were material possessions?  Shouldn't loving and sharing be a more attractive quality to a relationship, since love is the main ingredient to a relationship?

[dank]

Yeah, what you described is pretty much a family. Whether you are actually relatives with those people or not, you are living together and providing for each other as a family would.  It works well on a small scale, but it doesn't work at all on a large scale.

Humans are a family.  There is no reason it wouldn't work if everybody was on the same page.

It could NOT have happened without currency, and without people looking after their own self-interests.

This is correct.  It could not have happened any differently, for that is fate, but it can happen differently.  Money is not what created technology, will did.

And we do use coil and oil to generate electricity.  Unless you have a hemp generator in your backyard, and you never use more electricity than you create, then you are destroying the environment by using electricity produced, in part, by coal.  Also, even if your hemp generator doesn't appear to be destroying the environment when you use it by yourself, figure out what would happen if EVERYONE in the world had a hemp generator and used as much electricity as you do.  Well, the world would be covered in whatever plant produces hemp in order to satisfy that need.  Forests would be destroyed to make room for hemp growth, because there is surely not enough current arable land to produce enough hemp to power the whole world.  In other words, you're helping to destroy the environment no matter which way you look at it.  Unless you are harvesting hemp where it naturally grows, and not to the extent that it cannot regrow or it causes other wildlife to have to search for food elsewhere, then you are aiding in destroying the environment.

As I stated earlier, we can use 6% of the continental United States and produce enough hemp to power our entire country.  It produces a negative carbon footprint due to it's growing cycle.

btcANGEL, of course, gender is a human attribute, souls do not have genders.  Coming in touch with our consciousness is something humans drastically need.

[SgtSpike]

Yeah, what you described is pretty much a family. Whether you are actually relatives with those people or not, you are living together and providing for each other as a family would.  It works well on a small scale, but it doesn't work at all on a large scale.

Humans are a family.  There is no reason it wouldn't work if everybody was on the same page.

It could NOT have happened without currency, and without people looking after their own self-interests.

This is correct.  It could not have happened any differently, for that is fate, but it can happen differently.  Money is not what created technology, will did.

And we do use coil and oil to generate electricity.  Unless you have a hemp generator in your backyard, and you never use more electricity than you create, then you are destroying the environment by using electricity produced, in part, by coal.  Also, even if your hemp generator doesn't appear to be destroying the environment when you use it by yourself, figure out what would happen if EVERYONE in the world had a hemp generator and used as much electricity as you do.  Well, the world would be covered in whatever plant produces hemp in order to satisfy that need.  Forests would be destroyed to make room for hemp growth, because there is surely not enough current arable land to produce enough hemp to power the whole world.  In other words, you're helping to destroy the environment no matter which way you look at it.  Unless you are harvesting hemp where it naturally grows, and not to the extent that it cannot regrow or it causes other wildlife to have to search for food elsewhere, then you are aiding in destroying the environment.

As I stated earlier, we can use 6% of the continental United States and produce enough hemp to power our entire country.  It produces a negative carbon footprint due to it's growing cycle.

btcANGEL, of course, gender is a human attribute, souls do not have genders.  Coming in touch with our consciousness is something humans drastically need.

Families are people who know each other.  You don't know someone halfway across the world, or even many of the people in the same city.  Therefore, you do not care about them.  Or most people won't, anyway.  People need an emotional connection to others in order to care about them.  Sometimes, that emotional connection is brought about through successful marketing campaigns (i.e., showing hungry children on a commercial so you'll donate), but in general, people only have that connection with others that they know.

Studies have shown that it is not possible to "get to know" more than around 200 people, so I would say that is the maximum size of a village that could continue to successfully operate in such a communal way.

I disagree with you regarding technology.  I do not believe what we have today could have happened without the incentive of profit.  If you want to prove your case, show me the BEST technology that has come of people living in communal settings such as the one you describe.

Show your calculations for that hemp power, because I call BS.

[btcANGEL]

btcANGEL, of course, gender is a human attribute, souls do not have genders.  Coming in touch with our consciousness is something humans drastically need.

Did you even bother reading the link attached to that image? That's a female soul (Shannen Doherty, to be exact), who had to take on a male body to protect innocents (including the Cranberries) from a demonic serial killer. She woudn't even have known about the demon if her sister hadn't been "touched" by the demon's shared consciousness!

[repentance]

dank, there is absolutely nothing original about your ideas - including your idea that a whole generation should turn on and drop out - they were common in young adults 40 years ago.  Just because an idea, a realisation or an experience is new to you doesn't mean it's never been thought of, realised or experienced by others in the past - I belong to the Age of Aquarius generation and I can assure you that you're saying nothing which wasn't said by the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s.

[dank]

Families are people who know each other.  You don't know someone halfway across the world, or even many of the people in the same city.  Therefore, you do not care about them.  Or most people won't, anyway.  People need an emotional connection to others in order to care about them.  Sometimes, that emotional connection is brought about through successful marketing campaigns (i.e., showing hungry children on a commercial so you'll donate), but in general, people only have that connection with others that they know.

The reality is all humans are equal, if we weren't caught up by our differences, we could display empathy equally.

I disagree with you regarding technology.  I do not believe what we have today could have happened without the incentive of profit.  If you want to prove your case, show me the BEST technology that has come of people living in communal settings such as the one you describe.

I agree, what we have today could not have happened without greed, because that was our fate, there's no changing that.

We can, however, work without incentive of profit and become extremely more efficient.  If you're paying somebody to do a job they don't like, they aren't going to put their heart into it.  If everyone followed their heart and did something they love, we would all be doing our best in the most free way possible.

Angel, did not see the link.

Rep, the earth is becoming (re)awakened, as we once were.  The hippy revolution was a push of love from society, followed by a correcting shove from ego.  Now that we have global communication, our consciousness is realizing we only need love to be happy.

[bitcoinbear]

dank, there is absolutely nothing original about your ideas - including your idea that a whole generation should turn on and drop out - they were common in young adults 40 years ago.  Just because an idea, a realisation or an experience is new to you doesn't mean it's never been thought of, realised or experienced by others in the past - I belong to the Age of Aquarius generation and I can assure you that you're saying nothing which wasn't said by the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s.

So where did they go wrong? At what point did they stop dropping out? How can we learn from their experience to make it really work this time?

[Atlas]

dank, there is absolutely nothing original about your ideas - including your idea that a whole generation should turn on and drop out - they were common in young adults 40 years ago.  Just because an idea, a realisation or an experience is new to you doesn't mean it's never been thought of, realised or experienced by others in the past - I belong to the Age of Aquarius generation and I can assure you that you're saying nothing which wasn't said by the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s.

So where did they go wrong? At what point did they stop dropping out? How can we learn from their experience to make it relly work this time?

The idea that you can sit around all day while everybody provides for you only works until your parents kick you out.

[dank]

dank, there is absolutely nothing original about your ideas - including your idea that a whole generation should turn on and drop out - they were common in young adults 40 years ago.  Just because an idea, a realisation or an experience is new to you doesn't mean it's never been thought of, realised or experienced by others in the past - I belong to the Age of Aquarius generation and I can assure you that you're saying nothing which wasn't said by the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s.

So where did they go wrong? At what point did they stop dropping out? How can we learn from their experience to make it really work this time?

It wasn't really where they went wrong, it was more of it wasn't time for that change to incur.  Love did not reach far enough, but this was known to have happened, even in the 60's.

Not an inch of earth can hide from love, this year.

[SgtSpike]

Families are people who know each other.  You don't know someone halfway across the world, or even many of the people in the same city.  Therefore, you do not care about them.  Or most people won't, anyway.  People need an emotional connection to others in order to care about them.  Sometimes, that emotional connection is brought about through successful marketing campaigns (i.e., showing hungry children on a commercial so you'll donate), but in general, people only have that connection with others that they know.

The reality is all humans are equal, if we weren't caught up by our differences, we could display empathy equally.

I disagree with you regarding technology.  I do not believe what we have today could have happened without the incentive of profit.  If you want to prove your case, show me the BEST technology that has come of people living in communal settings such as the one you describe.

I agree, what we have today could not have happened without greed, because that was our fate, there's no changing that.

We can, however, work without incentive of profit and become extremely more efficient.  If you're paying somebody to do a job they don't like, they aren't going to put their heart into it.  If everyone followed their heart and did something they love, we would all be doing our best in the most free way possible.

Angel, did not see the link.

Rep, the earth is becoming (re)awakened, as we once were.  The hippy revolution was a push of love from society, followed by a correcting shove from ego.  Now that we have global communication, our consciousness is realizing we only need love to be happy.

You're still completely ignoring that we would have a horrible mismatch of supply and demand.  A huge oversupply of music/arts/stuff people want to do, and a huge undersupply of electricians/carpenters/farmers/etc.

I would also argue with the point that people would be "extremely more efficient" if they were doing what they love.  Even though I love to write music, I wouldn't want to do it 8 hours a day.  I'd rather do it 1 hour a day, then have the rest of the day as free time to entertain myself with non-productive activities.  And even though I love writing music, it doesn't mean I am particularly good at it, and that I am more efficient at creating music than I am at being an accountant (because I am not - I am truly a better accountant than musician).

And I like how you ignored my request for facts on 6% of the US covered in hemp supplying all of our energy needs.

[dank]

Everything is art when done from the heart.

http://relegalize.info/hemp/08-organic-biofuel.shtml

[SgtSpike]

Everything is art when done from the heart.

http://relegalize.info/hemp/08-organic-biofuel.shtml

Doesn't change the fact that very few people want to do manual labor when they can draw or write music instead.

Ok, you linked to a biased source that contains no facts or calculations to back up the claim regarding 6% of land turned into hemp would supply all of our energy needs.  I skimmed the page, because it is quite long, so maybe I missed it.  I still call BS on it though - the percentage required would be much higher than 6%.

[repentance]

So where did they go wrong? At what point did they stop dropping out? How can we learn from their experience to make it really work this time?

I'm not sure that they did start dropping out.  Ageing Baby Boomers are seen as a real problem in many First World nations precisely because such a small proportion of us are going to be self-sufficient in our old age.  We're seen as the self-indulgent generation which spent our young adulthood travelling and studying esoteric subjects at university when education was low cost and which has always tended to live in the moment and let tomorrow take care of itself (given that many of us grew up expecting a nuclear holocaust in our lifetime, providing for our retirement wasn't exactly a high priority for us as young adults and by the time that threat had passed the rules had changed).

As far as "making it work this time" goes, I guess you need to look at the whole picture.  Money is simply a more efficient way of getting some things done than donating produce or labour.  Fuck knows how many years it's going to take to make an impact on malaria, but it's going to happen a lot faster with funds from the Gates Foundation behind the quest than it would if the project relied solely on people donating their expertise.

dank sees isolated problems which have seemingly simple solutions.  The reality is a bit more like a very large jig-saw puzzle.  You have huge sections of humanity living in regions where producing enough food for the population is an uphill battle.  Those same regions often lack the kind of infrastructure which helps reduce disease (bear in mind that lack of proper sanitation meant that disease was rampant in the major urban centres of many First World nations in the early twentieth century).  Getting clean water to people in developing nations isn't nearly as simple as it might sound - doing so would greatly reduce the death toll in those nations but reduction in the death toll would stress the food supply even more.

It's ironic that dank is talking about carbon footprints when Bitcoin is inherently so wasteful from an energy point of view.  It's ironic that he's a Bitcoiner when the Bitcoin economy as it stands right now is driven largely by greed and the desire for people to increase their own wealth without producing anything which benefits others.  

I don't think that we're going to solve the world's problems in my lifetime.  If we couldn't do it during a time of great prosperity in First World nations then we're not going to be able to persuade people in developed nations to "live simply so that others may simply live" when huge segments of the populations of those nations perceive themselves as barely getting by.  There may have been huge technological advances in my lifetime, but they haven't driven the kind of change which was envisaged - which was nations producing so much that people worked far less hours without any drop in standards of living.  When large segments of a population are hugely discontent with their own lot in life, they tend to be more focused on getting their own problems solved than on the plight of strangers thousands of miles away.  dank mistakes that for lack of empathy, when in reality he's just as self-indulgent as the most rampant consumer.

At the end of the day, change requires people asking themselves what trade-offs and sacrifices they're prepared to make to bring about change.  Not the trade-offs and sacrifices they're willing to make when they win the lottery or someone gives them $5 million, but the ones they're willing to make right this moment - regardless of their current circumstances - to make this world a better place.  I don't know what answers the current generations of young adults have to that question.

[Richy_T]

At the end of the day, change requires people asking themselves what trade-offs and sacrifices they're prepared to make to bring about change.  Not the trade-offs and sacrifices they're willing to make when they win the lottery or someone gives them $5 million, but the ones they're willing to make right this moment - regardless of their current circumstances - to make this world a better place.  I don't know what answers the current generations of young adults have to that question.

The answer the current generation is likely to be to tell seniors that it's their own damn fault they bought into the social security ponzi scheme and they aren't going to be able to help themselves to the earnings of the younger generation any more. It's going to get messy.

WRT solving the problems of the world, it's not possible. Humanity will expand (metaphorically as well as literally) to over-fill any non-problem space you can define the same way a liquid fills a container. Any attempts to fix things from the outside will just lead to problems elsewhere. Aid to many places has had the disastrous effect of enabling cruel, evil regimes to stay in place well past their sell-by date.

[kokojie]

People should do it because they want to do it, not because they're made to do it.

They you would not have any, for example, garbage sorters. I can't think of anyone that would "want" to sort garbage all day long. Same goes for a lot of manual labor jobs.

[dank]

At the end of the day, change requires people asking themselves what trade-offs and sacrifices they're prepared to make to bring about change.  Not the trade-offs and sacrifices they're willing to make when they win the lottery or someone gives them $5 million, but the ones they're willing to make right this moment - regardless of their current circumstances - to make this world a better place.  I don't know what answers the current generations of young adults have to that question.

The answer the current generation is likely to be to tell seniors that it's their own damn fault they bought into the social security ponzi scheme and they aren't going to be able to help themselves to the earnings of the younger generation any more. It's going to get messy.

WRT solving the problems of the world, it's not possible. Humanity will expand (metaphorically as well as literally) to over-fill any non-problem space you can define the same way a liquid fills a container. Any attempts to fix things from the outside will just lead to problems elsewhere. Aid to many places has had the disastrous effect of enabling cruel, evil regimes to stay in place well past their sell-by date.

Aid isn't a solution to a problem, it only prolongs the problems.  Humans must accept death as a part of life and not make decisions based off fear of death.  When you don't fear death, you can really love to live life, if we spread the knowledge that love is the only solution we need, nothing can stop it.  You can't stop an idea, or energy even, especially one as divine, simple, yet powerful as love.

Solving humanities problems is about raising our awareness, forming a higher collective understanding.  People don't understand helping yourself doesn't help you become happy.  You either need to live with your ego, all the time, and find happiness through that (while creating negtivity, greed, war, etc.) OR, you can live with your heart, all you need is more and more love to be happy, and what's wrong with that?