How can the addictions that might arise in an individual be prevented from causing disruption in society? Where is this explained?
We don't prevent it. We mitigate it, minimize it and help people with such afflictions, not put them in a cage. Current disruption is the result of the profit motive reinforced by government institutions.
Government is the core problem.
Government is made up of people. Are you asserting that only a certain type of people are the problem? The reason governments have vast authority and power is due to the monetary systems that have been employed, and the distorted values they engender in the population. Eliminating the monetary system and associated profit motive will render government unnecessary.
There is a difference between fiat or paper money which is no more of a commodity than the paper and ink which represents it, and metals that are used for coin as real money; the former relies upon confidence in its exchangability whereas the latter have practical purposes when not in a form used for money.
The idea of money can be made manifest in anything. It is dependent upon people to promote the idea in the first place. Gold is not money, it is simply a natural resource. Imbuing anything with extra-physical properties is the real religious threat to our continued well being. The Zeitgeist Movement and Venus Project promote science, objectivity and ecological sustainability.
Capitalist economies approach maximal efficiency; governments interfering with business through legislation and regulation cause increasing inefficiency; gov’t is the problem, not a sound financial system. The current financial system of fractional reserve banking has been created by and for banks, legalized by gov’t, and enforced by police/military under authority of that government.
There are no capitalist economies, because they could not operate without a government or other authority to protect their operation. When everyone is out for themselves, what limits do you impose on people's actions? Choosing to work together for the benefit of everyone is less likely to generate the corrupt government that you demonize so readily and frequently.
Businesses can scale back during slow times by reducing employee hours, laying off, moving production to cheaper areas, diversifying, etc… gov’t is nearly impossible to cut back once it has spread out, mostly due to increased societal dependence on gov’t.
The well being of business is not the utmost concern in a resource based economy, but the well being of individuals. Sacrificing the individual for the business is what the monetary system does vigorously and repeatedly at an accelerating rate. Government monopolies derive their social dependence by the use of force, again supported and encouraged by the monetary system.
There is a continuum/range of product type and availability in any arena; the best/most effective balance of cost and quality, not just the ‘best’ of everything. As a point of contention, who determines what ‘best’ entails?
This is one of the reasons a monetary system is so wasteful. A wide range of products to support a stratified population is antithetical to a resource based economy. Why produce increasingly shoddier and unreliable products except to sell a newer one to the same person next year? Efficiency and efficacy are determined using the scientific method, measuring results and updating methodologies and concepts according to new found knowledge. The monetary system promotes using ancient methodologies until such time as it becomes unprofitable not to, increasing the amount of waste and inefficiency in the system.
Cost efficiency approaches limits of efficacy at which point there is a drop in profit, indicating that some aspect of the product or service is on a decline. This is a feedback mechanism in the same way that blood pressure and heart rate are indicators for circulatory system performance in the body. If I have no heart rate, it is difficult, if not impossible to determine my cardiac performance and respond or treat accordingly.
Poor metrics can be replaced with better ones. Using an inefficient and destructive monetary system as your metaphorical heart beat does not give you any information regarding true resource supply, human necessity, goods durability or efficiency of production. These are all distorted in favor of maximized profit and do not promote the well being or people or the planet that sustains us. Knowing all these things objectively will prove to make for a much better circulatory system for everyone involved.
Universal business and consumer objectives are to find a quality good or service at a reasonable price; this is not always the cheapest nor the most expensive.
You are correct. The monetary system forces people to compromise. A resource based economy does not serve an arbitrary, artificial and destructive money interest, so there is no need to compromise.
Planned obsolesence is not an objective; case in point - IBM Thinkpads: they developed a reputation for being so durable and reliable that they sold like hotcakes; I’m still using a 7 year old Thinkpad which, as anyone here can easily attest to, is generations for a computer product; meanwhile, cheap old chinese knockoffs that fell apart after a few months during the same era didn’t garner repeat sales. Without return in the form of profit, IBM would not have known the level of success generated by the series.
Yet the resources were spent on such knockoffs, and such companies continue to produce such products today. Their motive was short term profit, which is increasingly becoming the only focus prevalent in business today. In an RBE, people would collaborate and design long lasting high quality products, not compete for diminishing profits.
It is absence of competition that prevents new ideas and greater efficiency from taking hold, particularly through new legislation instituted by gov’t; until established big businesses, mostly with assistance from and pressure on gov’t for enforcement, can implement these new ideas and efficiency measures, they will not be brought to market. Thus, it is government collusion that needlessly slows progress.
The monetary system discourages competition and innovation. It is human ingenuity that produces newer models, products and ideas. It has been shown that people do better at creative tasks when they don't have a profit motive.
The lifespan of a product is the result of a balance in quality and cost; if an item outlives its usefulness for one person, but breaks before another has finished making use of it, is that planned obsolesence or waste?
Cost is an imaginary, arbitrary opinion based concept. It forces people to compete for a diminishing pool of currency by producing cheap wasteful products in mass quantities. As stated before, the monetary system discourages competition with artificial and intrinsic barriers to the market. If the item was not designed to be produced sustainably, function well over many lifetimes and be recycled easily, then yes, it is generally wasteful.
Money is a proxy for resources, particularly services and finished products. Money has many functions, including incentive and feedback. Run a business and you’ll certainly understand.
It also hides the true cost of such products and services. What cost is assessed to the people who will die from working with hazardous materials in a developing nation? What cost is reflected by the untold amounts of environmental destruction? What is the cost of an entire generation of people denied education, health services, food and water for the benefit of a few businessmen? What cost is reflected in entire countries being invaded, destroyed and ransacked for the benefit of a few multinational corporations? Monetary cost is a poor metric of anything meaningful.
Economic sustainability is synonymous with life sustainability, but this video uses subtle fear tactics to misdirect on that point. An economic system can apply to a single cell or an entire planet. A better term might be a logistics system.
Economic sustainability refers to business perpetuation, not life sustainability. Business, profit and money do not concern themselves with the well being of people, just the amount of profit can be generated, usually at the continually deplorable conditions that it subjects them to.
None of the economic points in this video cut down to the core of why things are the way they are; why businesses find incentive to waste instead of gear toward efficiency and quality. The culprit is government, but the focus is on the symptom (monetary system disruption) rather than the cause (gov’t).
No government can be sustained without a monetary system. Your blind adherence to fantastical economic theory does not let you see the natural consequences of the monetary system, which is centralization of authority.
Status symbols have been present throughout mankind’s history; does the ZM think it’s going to just stop what seems to be an inherent predisposition?
It is not an inherent predisposition, but reinforced by the culture that people develop in.
A business that kills its clients or does not provide a worthwhile and quality product or service will not remain in business. There is no debate on this in any realm of economics. Cigarette and alcohol producers neither directly, nor immediately kill users of their products. Users find an appeal to using the products and the companies obtain returns so long as their customers make use of them. There are some short-sighted businesses that do cause rapid harm, but they quickly lose a customer base and fail.
You seem to switch stances here, praising those industries that have garnered government support for their murderous products. Interesting.
This video attempts to do away with any sense of personal responsibility; history has already seen this in the catastrophes that have been government-managed economies. Even reliance on automation through robotics has its own dangers that have been debated ad infinitum for the past century. Who repairs the robots? What if the repair mechanism breaks down? Is there supervision? What if the computer system concludes that humanity has become an ‘inefficiency’? And so on.
Please define what you mean by personal responsibility. People like to use that phrase, but don't understand what it implies. The legitimate questions that you bring up pale in comparison to the questions generated by our current monetary system. What happens when we run out of potable water for people? What happens when we can no longer rely upon plentiful fossil fuels as a source of energy? What happens when nuclear war breaks out? The assertion that machines will decide to attack humanity is a popular fiction used to cause sensationalism and sell entertainment products. It is unlikely that computers will take any meaningful negative actions against people.
This is another version of creating equality where there never has been, and attempting to do so will destroy the productive capacity of society. This is the result of socialism. Providing for the base needs of human life (food, potable water, shelter) is no guarantee of either equality or success.
No one is creating equality or even promising such nonsense. When we value the individual, we allow them to reach their highest potential, so that they contribute to society to the best of their ability. Millions of people who could potentially help change the world are sacrificed to the monetary system in order to keep the few comfortable.
Money itself is any commodity used as a proxy for other forms of wealth, therefore money is not debt; credit is debt.
Money is an idea, and in our current dominant paradigm, it is debt.
Individual businesses need to compete, innovate and excel in their respective fields in order to survive and thrive. Any grand ideas may be all well and good, but the natural order of things will eventually take its course. Rather than fighting those forces, working with them provides the best results.
Why should we confine such competition and innovation to businesses? That seems contrived for the benefit of the monetary system, not people. Businesses do not adhere to natural order, they attempt to ignore it in their pursuit of profits, always with negative effects.
Figuring out the logistics requires plugging the numbers into a computer and interpreting the results? Yeah, time to catch up - that’s so 20th century. Every automobile manufacturer, steel production facility, energy generation utility and countless other businesses have been doing this for decades. Before that, it was done by hand in ledgers.
‘Proximity strategy’ already takes place. It’s a natural process of civilization. Cities don’t magically spring up near major sources of water for no reason. This has been a natural principle since before the Sumerian civilization.
Shared use? How is this a new concept? Perfect case: Zipcar. In general, any rental by whatever name for the past… millennium. This kind of service fulfills a need. Once again, forcing individuals to adhere to this is no different from government mandates.
Scaling such systems out for the benefit of everyone and not just private interest would allow for much better resource management. That is the whole point of the film. We have the technology to reach these goals, but the influence of the monetary system inhibits such actions.
What empirical evidence and testing can be pointed to with economics?
None, because it is a contrived fantasy that has successfully fooled many people into believing its tenets. It cannot be subject to scientific inquiry.
If every system than can be tested, should be tested, doesn’t it stand to reason that a free market without government interference would be a good test? It is a system that hasn’t been formally attempted on any long-term basis without external interference.
Bitcoin seems to be engaging in such a test to a limited extent. However, there is no such thing as a free market. Everyone and everything is subject to the laws of nature, and there is no freedom from that.
Profit and loss are the measurements that a business uses to determine its success and accuracy of its predictive assumptions or ‘math’. Without this feedback, endeavors with useless or destructive tendencies would last far longer than normal. Note the existence of ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions.
Basing your success on fantasy is not going to give you accurate feedback. Abusing math to your own benefit does not free you from the physical reality on which you truly rely on.
Mundane actions are not the only things compensated for by monetary reward. Nor is money in and of itself a reward, yet it is an incentive and feedback mechanism which maintains a significant level of economic and societal stability.
Stability is not the same as sustainability. We can see that with the coming unrest due to the recent severe financial instability. Trading long term problems for short term stability is a poor way to conduct human affairs.
By any other name, capitalism has been the only system to pervade throughout history.
Due to use of force.
Natural gas can replace oil. It’s mostly a matter of reconfiguring existing infrastructure. It isn’t a final solution, but it could push collapse out by about 50 years. During that time, a transition might occur to a more sustainable platform.
It certainly appeals to established interests, and its promotion and widespread production is also induced and encouraged by government collusion, which you supposedly oppose. Not to mention the environmental destruction and natural resource poisoning associated with its extraction. This is only the result of putting business concerns ahead of people and environment.
Hopefully you realize that the idea of money is obsolete and its associated power structures will no longer be necessary to provide a high quality of life for all people, both now and in the future.
