From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Fri Jul 25 2003 - 21:01:27 MDT
Date sent: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 20:25:26 -0600
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: Re:Jobs and Human History
From: "athe nonrex" <athenonrex@godisdead.com>
Send reply to: virus@lucifer.com
>
> [athe nonrex 1]
> [Hermit 2]
> [Joe Dees 3] [Hermit: Still screwing up on formatting such that it
> looks as if his posts are made by others} [Hermit 4] [hr] [Joe Dees 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 th! e 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.
>
> [Joe Dees 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?
>
> [Joe Dees 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.
>
> [athe nonrex 5]
> who said anything about communism in the first place? i spoke not of
> such, did you hermit? i have no problem debating communism with
> someone, as it was a good system, and had it been carried out the way
> that karl marx imagined it (with first having the mass of surplus in
> capitol generated by a capitolistic economy), it may have actually
> worked, but the (soon to be) soviets were more caught up in the
> political implications of the class struggle than they were with the
> social and economical implications of a healthy wealthy nation that
> possessed the capitol to be reditributed in the first place.
>
Communism is the system where talent and time-costly learned skills
were decoupled from compensation, and as such, it furnishes a
historical object lesson of my point. Not providing fair compensation for
labor in a field destroys the incentive to enter it. This could also
happen in the music industry, if artists are not fairly compensated for
their creativity because their creations are taken without compensation
(it's called stealing). Communism, it has been said, is the perfect
system for perfect people; however, since people in the real world are
not perfect (if by perfect one means absolutely altruistic rather than
wanting to be fairly paid for their labor), it was destined to fail - and so it
did.
>
> [Hermit 4] The facts are in contradiction to this commonly held
> position.
>
> [athe nonrex 5]
> and what's more, i might add...there are people who genuinely enjoy
> their profession of being a doctor, or an expert programmer, or a
> learned and skilled musician, that would inevitably follow their
> interests to what would be a joyous calling for them, not just a
> profession or a career or a job. it would be something that they do
> because of their love and enjoyment of said activity. and their
> contribution would enrich their own lives, as well as the lives that
> they touch, as they would not be "forced" to do this to survive. there
> is a difference between working and doing your job.
>
There are indeed people such as this, but they are not in the majority,
much less the totality, as such a system would require. Under
communism, or any system where people are not fairly compensated for
their labor, people would only indulge in such professions as hobbies,
not employment, and if they cost a lot of time and/or money to indulge
it, only the otherwise idle rich (a theoretically nonexistent class in a
communist system) would possess the wherewithal to so self-indulge.
>
> [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.
>
> [athe nonrex 5]
> the collapse of capitolism? you mean, i may actually get to say "i
> told you so!" soon? interesting...
>
Only because of an excess of shortsighted greed motivating the voters.
This is why I support a balanced budget amentment to the US
constitution; a constitutional (as opposed to an absolute) democracy
can indeed forbid destructive yet popular (for bigots) behaviors, such as
racial, age, gender and sexual orientation discrimination, and
destructive yet lucrative (for greedheads) behaviors, such as pollution
or the uncompensated appropriation of the fruits of others' creativity, by
virtue of the judiciary declaring any laws passed to permit them to be
unconstitutional. Of course, this is all still a work in process, as the US
is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, system; when conditions
progress so that new rights, responsibilities and obligations are
necessary (such as intellectual property rights and informational privacy
rights), there is a mechanism called the legislature that can augment
the system to address them by passing appropriate laws.
>
> [Joe Dees 3] Why become a capable brain surgeon, a meticulous diamond
> [athenonrex: that would be, "diamond"...the grammar nazi strikes
> again!] 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?
>
> [athe nonrex notes hermit's proper spelling of the word
> "diamonds"...the grammar nazi is pleased.]
>
A typo corrected before your reply, but held up by David until my post
passes his PC muster, as all of mine (but only all of mine) are.
>
> [Joe Dees 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?
>
>
> [athe nonrex 5]
> joe, no matter what i post...regardless of subject matter, content,
> manner of presentation, manner of perspective, or how calm or vehement
> i am about the said subject matter, you seem to post opposite of me
> and/or my view/comments/ideas/etc...
>
> just curious, are you "contra pro contra?" [contrary for the sake of
> being contrary?]
>
No, I am disagreeing for the sake of being correct (besides which, I
must note, my original post was not in response to yours; rather it
seems that you have contrarily responded to me). It is not my fault that
you so often adopt flawed positions on issues.
>
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