From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Fri Jul 25 2003 - 13:25:31 MDT
[athe nonrex 1]
[Hermit 2]
[Lucifer 3]
[Hermit 4]
[Lucifer 3] Energy should be not free, but reasonable.
[Hermit 4] Energy should tend towards free because the Sun provides a "free" 1.2kW per square meter at the Earth/Space interface and collecting sufficient of it to provide the projected population of Earth in 2020 a US level of energy (after allowing for all system losses) will cost us far less than the US currently spends on oil for a year - but has an effectively infinite lifespan (no moving parts) unless terminally damaged by a meteorite or other space debris large enough not to be vaporisable. At which point, for the space segment of the system, only distribution and maintainance costs (mirror cleaning and repair, hydrogen provision to make up for leakage losses) are noticeable. The Earth station costs will be slightly higher as it is intended for now to use very simple, well understood steam technology to fire boilers and to produce Hydrogen for gas fuel use. Even so the cost per kW is so low that the cost of tracking and accounting would be significantly higher than the production cost. So the cost of
the accounting would outstrip the cost of investment and maintainance. At which point it makes sense to "give away" the power in return for other non-monetary advantages.
[Lucifer 3] Information, on the other hand, such as computer programs, video, and music, requires, training and expertise to properly produce, and should be fairly compensate for.
[Hermit 4] Unless produced by an expert system?
[Lucifer 3] This is exactly why communism failed; because they did not recognize the necessity of compensating to a greater degree for rarer and more difficult-and-time-consuming-to-cultivate skills. Thus, people gravitated to the least skill-and-training-intensive lowest common denominator for which they would nevertheless be equivalently compensated with those who possessed rarer skills and abilities for which they had to necessarily sacrifice greater chunks of their life to master.
[Hermit 4] The facts are in contradiction to this commonly held position.
[Hermit 4] We need to recall that the communist states (USSR) originated a century ago as agrarian economies with ignorant peasant populations. Nevertheless, by the end of the last century, they had a better trained, higher qualified general population, largely enjoying a significantly higher standard of living than the US. Their failure was caused by a combination of running out of cheap raw materials; attempting to play catch up with the US's self-destructive military spending and being drawn into long term minor conflicts which posed a lasting drain on the population and morale. Eventually this resulted in the loan holders losing confidence in the USSR's ability to repay the mounting structural deficit and their withdrawal of term facilities.
[Hermit 4] Notice that the problems which lead to the collapse of the communist system are endemic in the US today, and I suspect that the eventual outcome may be similar too. At which point it might be interesting to read how the world explains the failure of capitalism.
[Lucifer 3] Why become a capable brain surgeon, a meticulous diamind cutter,an elite program writer or a musical genius, when slinging hash or garbage cans will win you the same pottage of filthy lucre? As long as communism is not a universal system, communist societies have to compete capitalistically with other more competitive societies which pay better for such skills as long as they are actually possessed; this inequity entails a defection brain drain.
[Hermit 4] Agreed in principle, except that people with capability tend to wish to use it - and those with too great a capacity tend to mess up. Thomas Edison made a very bad train conductor and Einstein a very poor patent inspector - because they spent too much time daydreaming. An intelligent security guard is a mistake as he can be persuaded to bend the rules. In the military, we used a rule of thumb that officers and men in any unit should not have a spread of more than 30 IQ points in order to prevent misunderstanding and trouble. I could go on, but you can figure it out as well as I.
[Hermit 4] But what happens when the brain surgeon is made redundant by bloodstream resident medical mainainance nanobots. When Diamonds are assembled Carbon molecule by Carbon molecule, when programs and music are produced by AI running on cheap silicon?
[Lucifer 3] I noticed the same thing in the military; the better doctors and dentists migrated to private practice, while the least competent denominator continued to embrace the safety and security of the less competitive environment. If people of talent cannot be commensurately (with their talents and time-consuming-to-master abilities) compensated for in their chosen field, they will migrate to another one, or never embrace the economically crippled one in the first place.
[Hermit 4] When the jobs are done by machines, what do people do?
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