It's just not theoretical anymore. the forecasts of the past century or so have come to pass. We're here, now. We need to be in the present when we're making public policy that shapes and guides the next steps into the future.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Friday, August 3, 2012
How Much Is Enough?
"Instead of redistribution, we offer people debt; and of course that is a very, very insecure way. Another would be an Unconditional Citizen's Income ..."
Sunday, January 15, 2012
"The economics of the future are somewhat different." - Jean Luc Picard
Perhaps too much data on this site is making some aspects of immediate and inevitable change seem overwhelming. Maybe a little make believe will help those trapped in the current make believe world.
But wait, there's more.
But wait, there's more.
Friday, August 5, 2011
The Great American Poverty Tour
Beginning Friday, Cornel West and PBS host Tavis Smiley will take to the road with a 15-city “Poverty Tour” to raise awareness about the plight of impoverished people.
They’ll visit soup kitchens, public housing projects, and farms. They’ll stay with low-income families and along the way they’ll try to assess whether Obama’s policies are working.
“This is a way to galvanize as opposed to complain,” West said. “Both parties have rendered the poor invisible. The only thing we have left is to dramatize their plight.”
It's long past time to grow up and out of emotionally hijacked redistribution rhetoric.
 |
| New American P.I.I.E. - Permanently Inadequate Intermittent Employment |
@CornelWest: I try to tell the truth.
When 40% of our children are going hungry,
I'm going to get morally outraged at that. http://ow.ly/5WsIH
Monday, May 9, 2011
The End of Poverty
A Feature Film
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, author, "24,000 people die every single day from hunger and hunger related diseases. At least 24,000. That doesn't need to happen, we have plenty of resources, so that shouldn't happen; it happens because of the system we've created. We can say, without a doubt, that this system is an absolute failure. From the most rational, objective economic standpoint it's a failure. Less than 5% of the world's population live in the United States. We are consuming over 25% of the world's resources and creating roughly 30% of it's major pollution. That's a failure."
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, author, "24,000 people die every single day from hunger and hunger related diseases. At least 24,000. That doesn't need to happen, we have plenty of resources, so that shouldn't happen; it happens because of the system we've created. We can say, without a doubt, that this system is an absolute failure. From the most rational, objective economic standpoint it's a failure. Less than 5% of the world's population live in the United States. We are consuming over 25% of the world's resources and creating roughly 30% of it's major pollution. That's a failure."
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Idiocracy vs Postscarcity
Mark Taylor in Nature News suggests that we mustReform the PhD system or close it down. Awesome. Are we so pathologically obsessed with the status quo that we'd actually institute a systemic policy that intentionally retards the advance of knowledge and the continued growth of human intelligence? Really? It's not news to readers of this space that:
We'd rather shut down universities than contemplate ways to transcend this brief blip, this historical aberration known as the industrial capitalist, and post-industrial information revolutions? Why not declare victory, and move on to the next model? On the other disheartening hand, if the best that our best and brightest "surplus PhD's" can collectively figure out is to turn back to pre-middle ages, perhaps we deserve the inevitable zombie apocalypse idiocracy, after all.
Dude, that would totally suck. Let's please not.
Higher education in the United States has long been the envy of the world, but that is changing. The technologies that have transformed financial markets and the publishing, news and entertainment industries are now disrupting the education system.
We'd rather shut down universities than contemplate ways to transcend this brief blip, this historical aberration known as the industrial capitalist, and post-industrial information revolutions? Why not declare victory, and move on to the next model? On the other disheartening hand, if the best that our best and brightest "surplus PhD's" can collectively figure out is to turn back to pre-middle ages, perhaps we deserve the inevitable zombie apocalypse idiocracy, after all.
Dude, that would totally suck. Let's please not.
Monday, April 18, 2011
A Poison Pill for the Scarcity Zeitgeist Zombie
In How to Kill a Debt Monster (The Ingenesist Project) explains:
While the scenarios above illustrate the point well, we don't have to wait for telepathy to see these forces at work, right now. Today. Present tense.
Suppose someone discovers a new form of energy that is free for all to use with no negative environmental impact. Suppose that another person creates a device that allows people to communicate telepathically. Suppose someone discovers an anti-gravity machine that can transport people and objects cheaply and rapidly. Suppose someone invents high-yield perennial food crops that don’t need to be replanted every year.This is the straightforward conundrum humanity faces at the inflection point from a scarcity to postscarcity existence. We achieve such overwhelming surpluses, in so many domains, that the Scarcity Game is literally laughed out of existence.
Each would deposit huge amounts of economic value while simultaneously wrecking havoc on the financial system. Oil companies would go out of business, telecoms would go bust, transportation industries would cease, and agribusiness would fail, etc. Millions would lose their jobs and mortgages would collapse, etc.
While the scenarios above illustrate the point well, we don't have to wait for telepathy to see these forces at work, right now. Today. Present tense.
- We have the "new form[s] of energy that is free for all to use with no negative environmental impact." They are called solar, wind, and geothermal.
- We have the devices that allow people to effectively communicate telepathically. They're called smart phones, bluetooth headsets, mobile chat, and SMS. We all have fun with this every day as we use this "digital telepathy" to talk with friends about the other people who are standing right there in front of us.
- As for perennial food crops, okay, this one maybe has a little ways to go; however, there's no debating the magnitude of the productive disruption created by improved technologies, genetically modified crops, and the bombastic Brute Forced Scarcity of various subsidies which are only in place in order to prevent the collapse of food prices described, above.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Monday, October 18, 2010
Debunking Postscarcity: 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.
Gotta include a mix of this type of content in order to keep it real.
There's truthishness here.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
What is Progressive Postscarcity?
Maybe it's as simple as Teddy Roosevelt 2.0.
"With its crowning invention of the Internet, the corporate-state apparatus has laid the seeds for its own obsolescence."
"We must usher in an era of flexible manufacturing networks, digital fabrication, and distributed production. This sort of resilient model is our only hope against the converging crises we are experiencing, from the economic to the ecological."
"With its crowning invention of the Internet, the corporate-state apparatus has laid the seeds for its own obsolescence."
"We must usher in an era of flexible manufacturing networks, digital fabrication, and distributed production. This sort of resilient model is our only hope against the converging crises we are experiencing, from the economic to the ecological."
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Zeitgeist: International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment
“Agree with me if I seem to you to speak the truth; or, if not, withstand me might and main that I may not deceive you as well as myself in my desire, and like the bee leave my sting in you before I die. And now let us proceed.” - Socrates
"In the past, throughout almost all of human history, the main threat to survival was nature. Today, it is culture. Not only does structural violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together; structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence."
SYNOPSIS: Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which will present a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society.
This is hardly a new anthem. Martin Luther King, Jr., December 18, 1963:
"Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word: maladjusted. ... I would like to say to you today, in a very honest manner, that there are some things in our society and somethings in our world of which I'm proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted to these things until the Good Society is realized."
"I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, and leave millions of God's children smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society."
"In other words, I'm about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment ..."
"In the past, throughout almost all of human history, the main threat to survival was nature. Today, it is culture. Not only does structural violence kill more people than all the behavioral violence put together; structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence."
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward | Official Trailer- [ Extended ] from ZeitgeistMovie.com on Vimeo.
SYNOPSIS: Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which will present a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society.
This is hardly a new anthem. Martin Luther King, Jr., December 18, 1963:
"Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word: maladjusted. ... I would like to say to you today, in a very honest manner, that there are some things in our society and somethings in our world of which I'm proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted to these things until the Good Society is realized."
"I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, and leave millions of God's children smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society."
"In other words, I'm about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment ..."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)