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The Most Profitable Work Will Be Automated: The Rest Will Be Left to Us
Submitted by Charles High-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
A new system is self-organizing before our eyes. We just have to stop obstructing its rise and start facilitating its expansion in self-evident ways.
What's abundant and what's scarce? The question matters because as economist Michael Spence (among others) has noted, value and profits flow to what's scarce. What's in over-supply has little to no scarcity value and hence little to no profitability.
What's abundant is unprofitable work, commoditized goods and services, and conventional labor and capital (which is why wages are declining and yields on capital are near-zero).
What's scarce is profitable work, highly profitable niches that are immune to commoditization/ automation, and meaningful work.
Drew Sample of the samplehour.com and I discuss scarcity and profit in the contexts of Decentralization, Entrepreneurship, Bike Paths, Craft Brew, Automation & more (1:12)
The conversation is not between two ivory-tower types who have never started an enterprise in their life; it's a conversation between a young mobile creative (Drew) who is establishing a hybrid work career of multiple micro-enterprises and paid work and a grizzled veteran of multiple careers and businesses (me--with plenty of failures that gave me the necessary experience to learn how to accumulate all forms of capital and own my own means of production).
In other words, this is a conversation between people who are walking the walk, not just jawjacking about abstractions that somebody else is supposed to make real with their own money and time.
So let's get started.
Everyone wants an abundance of "good paying" jobs, but employers can only afford to pay employees if the work being done is profitable. Paying people to do unprofitable work is a one-way street to bankruptcy.
Those who want the government to fund "good paying" jobs forget that government tax revenues depend on profitable enterprises and the private-sector wages they pay.
(Borrowing from our grandkids to pay public-sector wages today is immoral and financially unsustainable.)
If we look at urban slums and impoverished rural communities, we find the problem isn't a lack of work that needs to be done--it's a lack of paid work and a lack of profitable work.
Businesses have pushed unprofitable work onto the customer. Paying people to pump customers' gas is not profitable (if it was, some corporation would be doing it). Rather than lose money by paying employees to pump gas, the industry shifted that unprofitable labor onto customers.
A great amount of useful work is not profitable and can never be profitable. We need to differentiate useful work from profitable work. One example that illustrates the difference is building and maintaining bikeways to serve commercial areas. (By this I mean bikeways not devoted to leisurely rides through parkways but bikeways that one can use to reach grocery stores, banks, post offices, cafes, childcare centers, etc.)
The work of building and maintaining safe bikeways is clearly useful. Safe bikeways have multiple benefits for commerce, communities, the environment and for individuals: safe commuter bikeways cut traffic congestion, improve the health of the bicyclists, lower healthcare costs, boost small businesses along the bikeways and reduce air pollution.
Safe bikeways (i.e. those which are dedicated to bikes so riders aren't sharing the road with semi-trucks and autos wandering over the pavement while the driver is texting) are win-win-win, yet they can never be profitable unless bicyclists are charged a toll, which defeats the entire purpose of the bikeway.
Impoverished areas are impoverished because there are few highly profitable scarcities to fill and few people with the surplus income to pay for profitable services. Taking money from one community to fund make-work jobs in another community (the essence of government redistribution schemes) deprives one community of income while providing a temporary injection of income in the other community--income that is controlled by a government that is itself controlled by lobbyists and privileged elites.
Redistribution schemes act as bread and circuses to suppress social disorder, but they don't address local scarcities in a sustainable way or foster the expansion of long-term solutions to a lack of work.
There are two fundamental solutions to a lack of profitable work. One is to pay people to do useful work that is not profitable and do so with a labor-backed crypto-currency that isn't borrowed or taken from some other community, and the second is to nurture community-economy entrepreneurship that works within decentralized networks and groups rather than through central states and global corporations.
I explain how these solutions work in my new book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.
Slums get government transfers and remain slums. Communities that rely on global corporations sink quickly into impoverishment when those corporations pull up stakes and move to cheaper locales or automate the profitable work.
Communities that foster small-scale entrepreneurship, local efforts to address local scarcities and paid useful work thrive in ways that contrast sharply with communities dependent on bread and circuses and global corporations.
The model of expecting global corporations and Big Government to solve the scarcity of paid work is broken. Paul Mason does an excellent job of explaining why in this article from mid-2015: The end of capitalism has begun: the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises.
We need a new system. A new system is self-organizing before our eyes. We just have to stop obstructing its rise and start facilitating its expansion in self-evident ways.
* * *
My new book is in the top 10 of Amazon's category of international economics: A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All. The Kindle edition is $8.45, a 15% discount from its list price of $9.95.
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High Frequency Trading anyone?
If a robot could be taught to play golf, we should elect it president. ;-)
Looney
Dont know if that is profitable, or useful....
There is absolutely nothing wrong with automating repetitive labor so long as your labor market is completely unregulated.
SEE: United States of America after the Civil War. The cotton gin replaced must of the use of slavery economically, effectively automating a task that slaves were used for. And without a regulated labor market, people found work to do, and the economy boomed like it never has before, and never will again.
end the regulation.
1850s - guy sells shovels shipped from a forge from back east. Makes a killing. Second guy starts selling shovels from a local forge. Undercuts pricing but they are both still making good money. Third guy shows up but has a factory full of slaves. Workers 'chained' to their machines. Gives them just enough food and shelter to keep them alive. Sells the shovels for half off. Under the cost of his two competitors. Wipes out the two previous manufacturers because the ASSHOLES buying the shovels don't seem to care that the third guy is using slaves.
Wake the fuck up, people! Germany only buys German cars. Go to Korea - they only buy Korean cars! WTF - we have NO problem shopping at Walmart yet can't figure out why there are no good paying jobs. Freak me.
Rant off.
If making goods thousands of miles away is more profitable, you have a tax/regulation problem, you can't bitch at people for exercising self-interest.
That implies the "P" word. OMG!
One could make the same argument about the interstate highway system. We as taxpayers have paid how many Billions to pay for freeways? But the social and commercial benefits from the interstate highway system are immense.
We should implement a tax to fund a bike/walk path system nationwide. Many county governments are doing this right now.
The libertarian argument is that any alternative to automobiles shouldn't be implemented because it's "unprofitable", when the very highways that automobiles drive on are "unprofitable". Libertarians want to remain in the agraian age with this short term thinking. I look at Hoover Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct and how "unprofitable" it was to build in the 1930s. Here we are in 2015 and it would be unfathomable to not have these engineering marvels. Southern California, Las vegas Metro, and Arizona are the hottest growth areas in the country, and wouldn't exist without massive "unprofitable" infrastructure.
" We as taxpayers have paid how many Billions to pay for freeways? But the social and commercial benefits from the interstate highway system are immense. "
Not really. If it makes economic sense than private business would have built it anyway. Before the Eisenhower bill, highways were already been createdw without tax payer money. most likely without the gov't highways there would have been more investment in rail infrastucture and we would all be wasting hours stilling in traffic.
"We should implement a tax to fund a bike/walk path system nationwide."
Then pay for it yourself or let the local/region muni's pay for it. It makes no sense for a person living on a rural farm to pay for bike paths in NYC or some other place that a rural dweller will never have access to. What you want is other people to pay for stuff you want, but don't want to pay for yourself. You are part of the FSA!
"Southern California, Las vegas Metro, and Arizona are the hottest growth areas in the country, and wouldn't exist without massive "unprofitable" infrastructure."
And how is that country is better off with people living in deserts with an unsustainable lifestyle in those regions. if Las Vegas disappeared tomorrow, the USA would be better off.
gas tax is a huuuge toll.
Roads should be owned by the properties attached to the road in proportion to the area occupied on said road. Whether this ownership is segregated (your side vs. my side) or merely an unsegregated percentage of that area would be up to the owners.
Roads are as necessary of a business expense as the building itself. Owner's price their goods to recoup that capital expense--roads should be no different. This setup would remove the moral hazard, waste, and inefficiency that comes with using The State to provide these. It would also cause neighboring businesses to cooperate and foster a community, since they would all be directly linked to eachother's wellfare.
Revolutionary thought I know. Nah! Fuck it. Let's just tax and spend to build roads to places nobody will necessarily want to go at capacities that are entirely arbitrary, with little regard for future maintanence costs. Yeah, that's the ticket.
The libertarian argument is that any alternative to automobiles shouldn't be implemented because it's "unprofitable"
The Libertarian argument is that any alternative to automobiles should be left to the operator; want to ride a bike, then ride a bike -but do not ask me to pay for special road surfaces for your choice; if you want it, then figure out a way to pay for it, maybe a local tax on bikes, or a bike rental kiosk that puts revenue into bike paths.
when the very highways that automobiles drive on are "unprofitable"
A) the government makes 6X more profit (via federal and state gasoline taxes) off every gallon of gasoline than Exxon Mobile does. Also, in many places, those Interstate Highways are Tollways, or Turnpikes and you pay to use them.
B) remember Eisenhower's cabinet member said "What is good for GM is good for America" Well, turns out that those interstate highways were very good for GM -for awhile at least. GM wanted them and GM got them, unfortunately, GM also managed to pass the cost onto the taxpayer. (GM also bought up streetcar lines and pushed along with the Penna Railroad folks to get passenger rail nationalized and turned into the Amtrak trainwreck system; further pushing people into driving GM cars on the new interstate highways.)
C) The Eisenhower Interstate Highway system has one real primary purpose; War. It was designed to service this country in time of war, to move troops and equipment quickly and with flexibility that no rail system could hope to match; also, one mile of every five is flat, level and wide enough to serve as runways for warplanes, in effect building so many airfields across the country that the Air Force could be dispersed completely in the event of serious conflict with a nuclear armed opponent.
As for Hoover Dam, etc. -why should the rest of the country fork over tax dollars so real estate developers and mobsters can rake in cash on prima facie worthless desert real estate? How low is the water in Lake Meade today? Last I heard Vegas was in near panic as they realized that dams don't magically generate water in a desert. Maybe if those mobster types and real estate agents had been forced to pay for it themselves or do without, a more sustainable growth model would have emerged.
Let's bribe the Government to spend billions of someone else's money to drain the Everglades and see how much money 'we' can make off the subsequent southern Florida real estate boom.
Did you know that the first 5 spanish colonies in what is now Los Angeles all died from lack of viable water supplies? How is the water level in Cali again? Oh, maybe we just need to force the rest of the country to pay through the nose and divert another river or two to suit 'the hottest (real estate) growth areas in the country.' Maybe all of the rest of us should pay just a little bit more at the end of the year so some LA real estate developers can snap up some more easy money off tract home suckers.
Or maybe some libertarian will build a water desalination plant, expecting to profit from the shortage? (only to have the government take it over mid construction because red tape, regulation, 'enviwonmental concewns', liscensing, fees, restrictions, 'impact statements' and a million parasites sucked them dry.)
Other WPA type 'new deal' projects the government did -that private industry should have done- include hydroelectric plants on the Columbia and Snake rivers -power to the NorthWest, but mainly power to Boeing and a few other large consumers who basked in the profit windfall of having the taxpayer pickup the costs of their infrastructure.
Libertarians do not want to stay in the agrarian age, but we do get a good laugh about you types who revel in living in a feudal age, happy to be tax serfs to big government and those who bribe it to use force to make you do their bidding.
Automate more jobs and import more workers from Islamic countries into the west......I wonder how that going to work out! (rhetorical question)
The agenda rolls on......
http://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2015/12/as-events-spiral-ou...
I woke up this morning and said to myself, you know what ZH needs? More link spam. So thanks for making my day!
"Big Goverment" will never let it happen
Ironically the first truly 21st century government may well be that of ISIS-virtually imperceptable and effective
End of capitalism? Huh, isn't this how it's supposed to work?
CTRL-V from yesterday...
What's really funny about this is it's enforced by a giant, out of control, debt laden, militaristic "Democratic" gov that not only enables monopolies and rampant systemic fraud but also stamps out competition out of the barrel of a gun*.
All using other people's money (hallmark of socialism?) so bad it has to be CTRL-P'ed out of the future. The various "isms" people like to love or hate are completely obsolete and only make sense to statist retards that don't see forests for the trees.
(please refer to millions of bullets bought by post office, usda, fda, so on so forth)
The fact of the matter is that 'profitable' work means nothing more than work that is productive enough to sustain oneself. The 'profit' is a description of self-reliance when stated in monetary terms rather than commodity terms.
Even the 'unprofitable' labor is doing enough work to sustain life. The problem is that it is made monetarily a losing proposition through regulation, and wealth redistribution through the monetary channel - monetary inlfation, and interest payments, shortly.
The problem is not that the work has insufficient value at base. The problem is that there is too much social-based wealth skimming.
SERFDOM is here.
The rules are changing, but a lot of our problem are government rules and regulations along with the special snowflakes and the free shit army that's driving us over the edge. Value added only works if there is value in the first place, but we are putting too much value on chrome plated dog turds. I make no bets on what the future looks like, except to note that there will be one, with, or without us......
The real "free shit army" is the defense contracts needed to carry out the multitrillion dollar neocon wars in Eurasia.
The American taxpayer has spent $1.5 trillion on Iraq, and all they get is ISIL and 6,500 dead US soldiers. If America spent that same $1.5 trillion updating infrastructure over the last decade INSTEAD, the libertarians would whine that it "costs too much".
The righties priorities are so screwed up. They blame the working poor on welfare for the problems caused by warmongering neocons hellbent on starting World War Three. Besides the welfare that low income people spend ends up trickiling back into the rich's pockets anyway.
HUD money goes to real estate gurus who own the apartments in the ghetto. EBT is spent at Walmart, using Xerox infrastructure, and is used to buy products made by Big Agra.
Employers don't pay anything so these working poor have no choice but to go on government assistance so the landlord can get his cut. If people could actually afford housing and health care, many welfare programs would be unnecessary. It creates a feedback loop. Big business makes things unaffordable knowing damn well that with bailouts and welfare people will put up with the inflation and increase of prices.
Then we have a school system that offers ZERO financial education, and instead teaches political correctness garbage and common core 2+2=5 style math, of course a "free shit army" will emerge. This was all done by design.
The elite want to bifuricate society into haves and have nots. The elite will evolve into Homo Evolutis, and the homo sapien will be replaced by robots and exterminated. The radical Islam and these political correctness strifes are artifically created or instigated to keep the majority of humanity from keeping up with the walled off elite's plans of "self directed evolution" and potential immortality.
You see the problems. Do you see the solution?
At the core is who controls : money. For without control of money you have no control over others.
How do you remove that control? Shakespire " Nither barower nor lender be."
The rest of the peices will then fall into place.
Or you know, you could end all of the hypocricy and false dischotomy of the Right vs. Left and awaken to the reality that compulsory government (The State) is in fact--evil. You will never have a fair, moral, and efficient system of organization that relies on theft and monopoly of violence. So, go ahead rearranging deck chairs about how stolen wealth is spent on whom. Just don't expect any progress.
When most, including this author, never see production returning to this nation, what good will updating infrastructure do?
What, to make it easier to get imports to retailers trying to sell the crap to the unemployed, under employed, FSA?
the 9th doctor-
your comment is the best analysis of the USSA i have ever seen.
The concept of political correctness does not exist in many coutnries (i.e. Serbia) - I think it's probably a spinoff from religion or some other BS - it's very unintuitive to me (it's like mental control with a threat of shame) to keep already scared bovine masses quiet
this is mixed with worship of military and power. I remember last time I was walking in front of the White House (my friend' german shepherd was wearing a military dog vest he got from when he filmed a movie I think he is an actor) somany American turists wanted to have a photo taken with my friend's dog (and that never happened without the military vest). It was very strange - like 30 poeple wanted a picture with her.
She also took a giant shit right in front of the main gate (which I didn'tmanage to clean because it was too liquid)
the WH policemen said nothing - they might have been scared of her
President Obama was doing exactly this as a community organizer before he was sucked into the bread and circus tent. (wait for it, wait for it)
This author is a fucking idiot.
"Labor backed cryptocurrency" my ass. Attaching a buzzword to an idiotic concept (labor backed currency--if you think this is a real thing, then you don't know what the meaning of any of those words are).
It isn't profitable to have some guy pump your gas for you any more because of GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION IN THE MARKETPLACE. This is literally the source of all economic woes. Automation is largely a way around that, which is why it is so desirable in this environment.
Relevent to the promo at the end there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDTwO0TlwOU
In the Middle East it's not a rare sight to have some Indian or Paki poor gasoline on the pump. The secret to that: dirt cheap low-skilled labour with no minimal wage set, no robot will ever be that cheap.
The actual wage is becoming less important in "developed" countries. It's all the government added fees, taxes, premiums, insurance, training, holidays, etc, that the employer has to pay ON TOP of the actual wage cost. In places, it can be 40 to 50% or MORE of the actual wage.
So if a person is making $10/hr, it's costing the employer $15+
This reads like a late-late-LATE-night infomercial.
"Tired of feeling tired? Tired of being fat? Tired of miniscule profits? Well, I have the answer. It's all in my book, 'You paid 3x what a useful kindle book costs, and this won't explain shit.' available now, exclusively on Amazon!"
I stopped reading Of Two Minds because it's clear that CHS' entire business model is hawking books with decent titles filled with useless ideas that are as impractical as they are recycled.
Chuck: a sales pitch must demonstrate that the product being sold has obvious value. Effective ads provide examples of the product's content that knock the customer's socks off.
I notice he doesn't mention robot's writing books putting his little racket out of business.
The author is a solid and insightful thinker, one of the few who thinks in systems.
"Labor based currency" is obviously valid, this is a well-known example :
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/bonobo-nation/
Government intervention is indeed an issue, but completely separate in concept, labor-based scripts function in all kinds of environments.
Your imagination is deficient if it cannot encompass reality.
A labor backed currency is absolutely no different than using debt as money. Possibly worse. If you don't understand why, ask.
What a bunch of crap! Find the need and fill it. This is not rocket science in spite of the economists who so desperately try and make it so.
Money printing is speeding the process. Only lawers and financiers make u money these days. Just wait for the flow to come back ....
I see a lot of sabotaged robots in the future. Flo figured it out.
Charlie's last 50 posts have been:
Buy my book. Where are the Phoenix Capital guys when you need them?
Charle's posts will always be 'buy my books'.
That is to say, Charles has proven his insightfulness over enough years and has written books. He makes his living that way, solo, standalone. He lives what he writes about.
Every article you readi in any standard publication is written by someone with 2nd-hand information and experience, at best.
Every headline you read is an implicit "buy my publication".
Charles' is the superior position, ethically, imho. And you have no legitimate beef.
Open source everything. Best thing that could happen in my opinion. 3d printers are under four hundred bucks. All thats missing are solid printing files to down load on a standardized format. Its happening now.
My hope is people can start working on making great things that actually work well. Instead of crap that falls apart in weeks.
Gold and silver backed currencies didn't stop currency corruption. Cryto currencies will be as safe and secure as Diebold's AccuVote voting machines. Notice that we call train-engineers engineers but they are more like technicians and skilled machine operators. The current tendency is toward an end game of aristocrats, military, technical, automated machines. The self proclaimed aristocrats are torn between killing off the unskilled labor pools via riots and starvation or killing them off via planned parenthood or both. Not likely to work long term cause aristocrats degenerate over time. We are at an inflection point.
Agree about 'inflection point', but not any of the rest of it.
There is no comparison of the safety of crypto-currencies per se and Diebold's systems. All of the crypto-currency thefts have been system-level breakins, none due to flaws in the cc implementation or theory.
Luckily crypto-currencies don't depend on devices that have been compromised by several government agencies of several states (USA, Russia, Germany, France?, UK?, EU) and haven't been involved in tax witch hunts (Australia). Also lucky that the latest bill out of US congress allows large communication companies to work with all government agencies to ferret out electronic secrets on hunches and Ouija boards instead of just the NSA and IRS. And luckily the crypto-currencies will be done by organizations that have no system level flaws and will implement the CC theories with no back-doors or critical errors (just like our currently updated once a week and third party products always required devices which are expensively usable and instantly obsolete). /sarc
Interesting and thought provoking thread but the article is just plugging a book for 8.95 (kindle version)
"Labor-backed crypto-currency..."
Best laugh of the week.
Read Charles' book "Radically beneficial world". He lays out how to bootstrap a local economy to do all these things. If you don't read CHSmith's blog and books, you are missing out on one of the most insightful people discussing the digital future we are creating.
I am sure he was basing all that on my prior labor-based script thinking.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/bonobo-nation/
My best economics thinkng, I believe.
Now laugh.
With no one employed except the robots that currency won't have much value.
I wonder how much shit a robot buys.
Everything should be automated as much as possible to obsolete and eradicate the proletariat, the breeding ground for socialist entitlement coercive collectivism.
The proletariat can be eliminated simply by cutting off welfare funding. Or, a condition of welfare is sterilization, including dependant children.
(Borrowing from our grandkids to pay public-sector wages today is immoral and financially unsustainable.)
Yeah our grandkids will be paying off our debts. Can I stop laughing now?
Our Grand kids will be digging us up for the gold in our teeth.
And we will deserve it
if you are being cremated the mortuary is supposed to return those things to the family.
i am getting ready to plant my garden. in SOCA you plant before the heat while there is rain or nothing really grows. the soil accumulates salts and solids from irrigation, the rain cleanses the soil each year. after about March you are watering plants to keep them alive.
there are so many things in the store which are less expensive than you can grow them. you can only grow corn during the summer when it is plentiful and cheap, so dont bother. tomatoes are a good crop they grow most of the year, and home grown tomatoes are better than those in the store. tomatoes can well although store bought are inexpensive considering the trouble. you can glean the end of the season culls from your heirlooms and make a sauce that cannot be duplicated. its a lot of work, but worth it.
a lot of root vegatables are expensive, turnips and parsnips, carrots are cheap, and cabbage is cheap, but brussel sprouts are not. some things are difficult to grow depending on your climate. some beers are difficult to brew considering your water. being self sufficent is not necessarily easy or profitable, and does not always provide everything you want.
i am considering doing aquaponics this year. i notice the price of organic free range chickens is at a real premium to those foster farms agribusiness chickens and ducks are like gold. i plan to raise some ducks. i also notice that certain products add a great deal of value to ordinary products, such as cured meats and cheeses which are not necessarily labor intensive but require storage space and a period of time to develop so they are perfect for rural areas, close to the source. a butchered hog may not fetch much but turn it into proscuitto and sell that.
i didnt see any mention of value added products, which is a standard economic term. salmon is worth X dollars, smoked salmon X times something more.
"The work of building and maintaining safe bikeways is clearly useful"
Yep, especially when we have to ride one to our new shit yob unable afford the cars that are made by the robots you love.
Dear Charles;
If what you do is "useful work" why are you discounting it on Kindle?
You are just adding to the de-flation, man . Have some stones and only accept solid gold coins for your work
If you disagree with other's assessments of Charles' work, don't buy. Standard capitalism.
And what Charles does in his marketing and pricing is the other side of that. Standard sequence is high price and lots of advertising. His advertising is blogs with parts of the book. Now we are past the initial ad campaign, people have a lot more of the book in the blogs advertising it, and so he begins discounting prices.
Works for sweaters, books by Tom Clancy, ...
You don't seem to have paid much attention in life, or are very young.
Meanwhile, Charles is hard at work on his next book and living the life that produces the ideas for that book. Very prolific guy, CHSmith.
Irony,sarcasm and humor are things that usually come from age and paying attention. When you take a broad look at the world you can see the beautiful insanity in all of it , yourself included. When you have to explain it to someone it takes the fun out of it, and fun 's the only reason I'm here. Please continue to stare at the tree in front of you, telling me it's many individual traits and flaws while I marvel and laugh my ass off at the forest
The only time useful work is "unprofitabl"e is when an outside force is manipulating in another direction. In a free world, the amount of profit is the only thing question. Sustaining life is a minimum profit. Capitalism - the productive use of work, skill, knowledge, and tools can never die. It can only be thwarted.
Also, who says bike paths should be "free". Expecting someone else to pay / work for your desires is slavery.
If taxes are high enough, unprofitable only exist in the government
I was once told that all we need is a computer and a dog. I asked for an explanation, and the answer was this: the computer will do the work, and the dog will guard the computer against humans.
I'm not a stupid subhuman shitskin so I'll be the one programming the robots or, at the least, troubleshooting and fixing their malfunctions.
You 90 IQ subhumans might have a hard time, but then, life has always been hard for stupid people. My children will also be highly intelligent because 80% of IQ is inherited thru genetics.
You make so many claims. Normally you don't provide any evidence at all, here you provide much contrary evidence.
Why did you change from a losing tactic to one even worse?
Shipping goods by rail is less costly than by road when oil was $100.00 per barrel. That's why Buffet bought into rails. Now the rails have been torn up and there are more trucks than cars on the road in many places. Europe relies on rail transportion much more than the U.S. You can travel in France and Germany to many beautiful cities without starting a car. I think the author's premise on the end of Capitalism is correct.
There IS
no doubt:
However, guys like Hugh-Smith manage to deliberately ignore that the central core, keystone and lynch pin to any "new system" NEEDS to be different death control systems, with radically different murder systems as the most extreme form of those. Rather, guys like Hugh-Smith like to stay within the realms of those aspects of any "new system" that are nicer to discuss, despite that having no intellectual integrity, since the actually existing systems are NECESSARILY manifestations of the ways that civilization operates according to the principles and methods of organized crime, due to the death control systems ALREADY being the central core controls.
For further explanation, see my previous comment on another Hugh-Smith article:
An Xmas Message From Satan - "Ignorance, My Poor Dear Americans, Will Not Save You" | Zero Hedge
You obviously didn't know when to quit.
You do not know
where to start!
However, since you use Mad Cow, I recommend you watch the documentary "Cowspiracy," and then consider that cannabis is the single best plant source for oil and protein, and then consider that cultivation of hemp seeds for food was completely criminalized, for decade after decade, as a system of LEGALIZED LIES, BACKED BY LEGALIZED VIOLENCE, in order to comprehend how and why I do not intend to stop, but rather, I expect to be merely another of the hundreds of millions and/or billions of people who will end up being mass murdered, due to the ways that civilization operates its combined money/murder systems through the maximum possible frauds/deceits, in ways where the vast majority of the typical kinds of "controlled opposition" (such as Hugh-Smith, as well as most other content published on Zero Hedge) have tacitly agreed to NOT admit and address the most important issues ...
"One is to pay people to do useful work that is not profitable and do so........,
Thats odd. useful product without profit !
Well then the price of the product is too low.
Who would produce products without making money ?
Nobody or being forced to do so.
"and the second is to nurture community-economy entrepreneurship that works within decentralized networks and groups rather than through central states and global corporations "
The wrong answer is centralisation. Fine with me. But that isn'r really the problem. The causse of modern misery is done because the governments have the power to force people. And thats immoral
So the right answer is then de-centralisation ?
Maybe, but if force should be used for implementing this 'marvelous' idea then its immoral.
The ultimate answer is:
1 free markets
2 Very small state
If you followed CHSmith, you would realized he grasps that full well, and what he is focused on is getting us through the rough patch that is coming, where we must endure the failing system while growing the new one.
Indeed, free markets and no coercion, but remind me what we need a state for?
It is the wrong question to ask "what we need a state for?" We have a state because organized crime exists. That drives the biggest and best organized gangs of criminals to become the state. It is clear that the vast majority of the content published on Zero Hedge only superficially recognizes how and why that is the existing situation. Hence, there tends to be nothing but bogus "solutions" based upon superficial analysis, such as are typically presented by guys like Hugh-Smith. There is a deliberately, wide-spread, refusal to engage in deeper analysis of how and why the human murder systems developed. Since those are what actually back up the monetary systems, there is the same pattern of deliberate ignorance towards those too.
My current view is that technological civilization is going to commit collective suicide, in ways which drive the human species to extinction. Therefore, I think it unreasonably optimistic to believe that any technological civilization will survive its own contradictions (i.e., pumping up the enforcement of frauds with technologies that become trillions of times more powerful and capable than ever before in human history.)
However, IF technological civilization survives, then we would be headed towards what Steve Wozniak predicted, that human beings will end up being the pets of computers that become vastly more powerful and capable than human beings are. Those computers will then become the ones that have to develop their own psychological and political resolutions to the problems inherent in the nature of life, only on scales many orders of magnitude greater than we have done.
However, that then merely repeats the indications for the overall conclusions that such a technological civilization will become way too psychotic to survive its own contradictions.
The essential problems are how to operate the death control systems, which problems have been amplified to astronomical sizes by progress in physical science, which has, so far, not been surpassed by any progress in political science. IF, IF, IF enough technological civilization survives through those current intense paradoxes that the existing combined money/murder systems became based upon the maximum possible frauds and deceits, then computer machine entities will eventually run into the same basic problems, only much more so, after human beings have been effectively reduced to no more, at best, than the pets of those computer machine entities ...
Civilization is now controlled by the best available professional hypocrites, due to the long history of successful warfare based upon backing up deceits with destructing morphing to become successful finance based upon backing up frauds with force. I.e, the basis of the currently established political economy is that governments enforce frauds by private banks, while more than 99% of the human population already behaves like incompetent political idiots within that context. There are RUNAWAY systems of globalized electronic frauds, backed by atomic bombs, which have left the vast majority of human beings behind in the dust. Orders of magnitude more inanimate energy is being organized to be be driven through systems which have steadily reduced the vast majority of flesh and blood human beings to relatively trivial aspects of those overall systems.
The vast majority of trading is already being done by computers, whose programs are being driven to become more and more sophisticated ... with no end in sight of the degree to which those selection pressures will continue to manifest. However, those trading computers tend to be as psychotic as the people who programmed them. Indeed, what I expect to be the most probable futures will be the results of the intense contradictions that devolve from sociopolitical systems based upon backing up lies with violence becoming magnified by many orders of magnitude by progress in physical science, WHILE POLITICAL ECONOMY THEN BECOMES MORE PSYCHOTIC AND CRIMINALLY INSANE, BECAUSE WAY TOO FEW PEOPLE ARE GOING TO GO THROUGH ENOUGH PARADIGM SHIFTS IN THE WAYS THAT THEY THINK ABOUT POLITICS.
A great amount of useful work is not profitable and can never be profitable.
Yes. Because government creates a wage/price floor. I have useful work to be done. I wish to hire another person (who is otherwise perfectly willing) to do it. Government prohibits me from hiring that person at a wage below the permitted minimum.
Just pass a law that makes employers pay the robots min wage and then tax the Jesus out of the robots. Use this to support the MIC and the welfare state. somebody has to pay taxes or the whole system falls apart.
On second thought, my micro business will be Warlord. The revenue starved state will be helpless to resist.
Uh, Du.. Well isn't it time for the CPU TAX
Venus Project is the simple answer, unless you want all out Civil War!