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AnotherYou

simplistic wrote: »

I am one of the villagers.
I want to work , how is it decided what job I can do?

I am absolutely stunned how often people ask this. And it is an understandable question considering you unwitting did grow up a world in which authorities decided things for you.

You decide what job you do, You may do anything you like. But, you have to understand this concept entirely to understand what you would WANT to do at that time.

Look at it this way, Money is an aspiration in society right? No doubt, SO when you remove that and we want to have people admire us, how do we go about it?

The guy driving the BMW is no longer the big shot, the guy who contributes to science or is involved at the cutting edge of technology is the guy you see in magazines and so on.

The real sociological effects of the implementation of a resource-based economy would take a long time to be realised. It would truly re-design every known incentive structure on the planet.

But, for your questions sake, and the state of mind I believe you to be in while asking it. You decide, and if you would like to do a job that we are using machines to do.

You are welcome to do it, but looking at technological developments you would be quite simply wasting your time since machines would do it faster and better than you ever could.

simplistic wrote: »

I want food, how do I get food?

Let me just say that at present The Venus Project is the best known model of a resource-based economy, it is not THE model, things will undoubtedly be changed as we learn and develop new systems.

But, at the moment, and purely hypothetically, you could order your food online, and have it delivered to your home later that day.

Or you could have a refrigerator that would order these things for you based on what you have programmed it to stock.

This is a good way to have things because ordering directly from a source would lead to less waste than a system in which markets project sales and order based on those sales, since they are often wrong and throw a lot of food away subsequently.

simplistic wrote: »

Since there is no money, if I live here how can I engage with the outside world? Say if I wanted to travel ? or even trade with a non- venus project city?

Again, a great example of a question often asked at the early stages.

Okay, so, there would be one place in the world in which everything was free, the population was educated to the highest standard possible, scientific research funding was easy to get and subsequent to all of these things said place was home to the most sophisticated society ever known to man.

How do you purpose that society would ever need to trade with anyone else?

What's more, how would you suggest this example would not be immediately followed by others?

Try to think how that would ever be possible, the world would immediately follow suit. if it came to its senses.

simplistic wrote: »

What happens if I kill someone in a fit of passion? who will arrest me?Who decides on who the police are?

This is a question best left to be decided after we hear opinions from experts on criminology and psychology, but for the moment lets just suggest the police be hired via a community website in which people volunteer and the community vote via internet to appoint police.

There would be tiny numbers required again, and what would be most important is that we develop the facilities to ask HOW you came to do what you did and how do we prevent it, we would also need to assess you to understand if you are fit to re-enter society safely and when?

There would have to be more research done, and this cannot be done in a world in which higher prison populations are profitable.

simplistic wrote: »

I want a bigger car than my neighbour who decides that?

Build it yourself. There would only be one design of car, the best one, not the biggest one.

simplistic wrote: »

I have become addicted to heroin by my own choice and I refuse to work,what happens?

You don't work, you lose your self esteem, and you either get better or you don't.

My question is, who was giving you the heroin? Without the profit-motive who the hell would be dealing drugs?

You'd have to make it yourself, which would keep you busy.

simplistic wrote: »

What happens if we are attacked?

By who? Why? Do you mean what would we do to react? As much as we could do to stop it happening again?

simplistic wrote: »

I have plenty more but if your being honest the venus project is going to have to start of small like this and I like to know how they will deal with these scenarios?

Please let me know if I didn't answer your questions.

drunken_munky52

simplistic wrote: »

I apologise I shouldnt of slapped a term on the venus project like that.

Have you seen Zeitgeist 1 or 2 yet? 3 is coming soon, this one will discuss human behavior, which Peter Joseph will show that human behavior is not necessarily human nature. When people blame something on human nature, this just says that they have not thought about the issue enough and examined what the root causes of a case are. Once we start addressing the root causes of problems, then and only then can we have a watertight solution to it forever. Society today, uses mainly laws as patchwork for social problems.

simplistic wrote: »

I am one of the villagers.
I want to work , how is it decided what job I can do?

You can be a couch potato if you like. But you will soon find that your human explorer extinct kicks in and wants you to get up and go, thus you contribute to society because this is what human nature is all about... not sweating your butt off in a crap job to fill your bank account and pay your mortgage (mortgage is Latin for "death trap" btw)

simplistic wrote: »

I want food, how do I get food?

Sharing is caring. Grow your own vegetables for one, every person in a RBE would do this. If your in short supply, dont worry... just go to your computer and tell it you need X amount of food, shortly afterwards, its conveyor to your door.

simplistic wrote: »

Since there is no money, if I live here how can I engage with the outside world? Say if I wanted to travel ? or even trade with a non- venus project city?

If the entire world economy shifted to resource based, then you would have enough time to roam the earth, exploring all the places you would never see if you were employed in a monetary system.

I think in the interim as the Venus project spreads, a barter system may be needed with other cities, but as time goes on, these cities will grow into highly advanced areas, thus unity of the human consciousness begins.

simplistic wrote: »

What happens if I kill someone in a fit of passion? who will arrest me?Who decides on who the police are?

"Criminals" as we brand them today, would obviously have treated for what in effect is a mental illness. People of the future will see that "justice" means treating the person and discovering the "whys" of what the person did, so that society can be better educated to avoid such incidents in the future. Current penal systems are as I said earlier "patchwork" for incidents caused out of social deprivation. If you change the environment in which someone was raised in, you effect how they act.

simplistic wrote: »

I want a bigger car than my neighbour who decides that?

Why do you want a bigger car? Reasons?

Is it because you feel the need to be better than your neighbour? Or is it because you actually have a practical purpose for such a desire? "Yummy Mummys" bringing their kids 500m down the road to school in a BMW X5 is the image cast when I think of such scenarios.

simplistic wrote: »

I have become addicted to heroin by my own choice and I refuse to work,what happens?

Education, education and education. Also changing the social conditions so that you don't need drugs to get your highs. This is a lame lunge at the idea.

simplistic wrote: »

What happens if we are attacked?

We will never trust each other in a monetary system, so you must be on about rogue elements or alien attack.

simplistic wrote: »

I have plenty more but if your being honest the venus project is going to have to start of small like this and I like to know how they will deal with these scenarios?

Keep them coming, or you could just wake up and smell the roses mate. There is no Utopias with the Venus project idea, its only a framework for which direction man needs to take now, before he goes down the road of self-destruction.

Realization by realization, continually advancing or genetic knowledge base with constructive mistakes, not destructive outputs like war, famine and crime.

AnotherYou

drunken_munky52 wrote: »

"Criminals" as we brand them today, would obviously have treated for what in effect is a mental illness. People of the future will see that "justice" means treating the person and discovering the "whys" of what the person did, so that society can be better educated to avoid such incidents in the future. Current penal systems are as I said earlier "patchwork" for incidents caused out of social deprivation. If you change the environment in which someone was raised in, you effect how they act.

Great answer.

bonkey

AnotherYou wrote: »

I am absolutely stunned how often people ask this. And it is an understandable question considering you unwitting did grow up a world in which authorities decided things for you.

You decide what job you do, You may do anything you like. But, you have to understand this concept entirely to understand what you would WANT to do at that time.

And the jobs that no-one wants to do? Or the jobs that are oversubscribed? Or the jobs that people want to do, but are incompetent at? Or the people who don't actually want to do anything?

The notion that a large-scale society can adequately shape itself by letting people choose what they want to do is, ironically, susceptible to the same criticism you levelled at communism - its a convenient explanation which saves a hard time thinking.

Look at it this way, Money is an aspiration in society right? No doubt, SO when you remove that and we want to have people admire us, how do we go about it?

There are numerous flaws inherent in that idea.

Lets say that I and a colleague both do the same job. Does he deserve more admiration then me if he's more talented? Does he deserve more admiration then me if he works harder? If I'm ok with that, then what's my motivation for working at al? I can slack off, and what does it cost me? I'm already in second place in the admiration-stakes, so I'm not losing anything.

The real sociological effects of the implementation of a resource-based economy would take a long time to be realised. It would truly re-design every known incentive structure on the planet.

This seems like a polite way of not saying that there would be an awful lot of problems getting from here to there. Its tacitly acknowledging that there are all sorts of difficulties, no real way of avoiding them, no plan for dealing with them, but just an insistence that if we somehow muddle through, we'll eventually get to a desirable end-point.

But, for your questions sake, and the state of mind I believe you to be in while asking it. You decide, and if you would like to do a job that we are using machines to do.

More "no hard thinking" answers....the whole "deus ex machina" thing.

I find it somehow difficult to understand. In today's capitalist world, the rich and powerful would stand to make so much more money and gain so much more power if they could replace human inefficiency with technological efficiency more widely.....and yet we're expected to believe that a move away from this society could be possible with even more technological dependancy, without any clear idea of how we're going to develop this miracle of futuristic computing.

But, at the moment, and purely hypothetically, you could order your food online, and have it delivered to your home later that day.

Or you could have a refrigerator that would order these things for you based on what you have programmed it to stock.

This is a good way to have things because ordering directly from a source would lead to less waste than a system in which markets project sales and order based on those sales, since they are often wrong and throw a lot of food away subsequently.

But my refrigerator doesn't know that I'm about to go away for two weeks of holidays, or that I've started a diet, or that I've guests coming for the weekend. It only knows that I'm running low on some perishable goods that I typically have.

Shopping online is also fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't allow me to make certain choices that I may wish to make. For mass-produced, uniform goods, its fine (if I can trust that I won't be sent dented cans, or smashed spaghetti, or broken biscuits), but for fruit and veg, it has no way of knowing how fresh I want my fruit, or how large I want my onions.

It is, in essence, a tradeoff between efficiency and freedom. As a hobby cook, I want my freedom. I want my flexibility to smell the veg, and to impulse-buy. I want to be able to be creative.

Now, of course, you've already said that I can do all of these things under your system, but you've also tried to suggest that its more efficient for me not to do them....and the point I'm making is just that. Efficiency has its own costs, and they are costs which are all too often overlooked.

Sure...you can offer both. You can offer efficiency to those who want it, and the freedom to be resource-wastingly-free to those who want that...but how does that improve things? You're allowing people to waste resources to stay happy...which isn't really that removed from the world we have today.

There would only be one design of car, the best one,

Overly simplistic. There is no "one best design".

Even if we ignore questions of subjective taste, there is the question of purpose. Even in your utopian world - particularly in your utopian world - people are not drones. Different people have different needs. Depending on differing needs, what is "best" will change.

Not only that, but lets re-address the notion of choice. What if I want the freedom to have a different design of car? Am I allowed, or will this new society forbid me my individuality?

My question is, who was giving you the heroin? Without the profit-motive who the hell would be dealing drugs?

My guess is that there would be someone out there who would discover that in a society where people were allocated according to need, they could create a "capitalism within the system", and receive allocations greater then their needs by trading goods with others.

So, if I wanted to, I could produce heroin, because no-one would deny me my freedom. I could then trade that heroin to others, and receive goods or services in return, therefore accruing more then my fair share.


Unless we assume that there are only altruistic participants, the system is wide open to such exploitation. The only way to deal with such exploitation is to create and enforce a set of laws....laws which restrict freedoms, and punish non-conformity.

drunken_munky52

bonkey wrote: »

And the jobs that no-one wants to do? Or the jobs that are oversubscribed? Or the jobs that people want to do, but are incompetent at? Or the people who don't actually want to do anything?

The notion that a large-scale society can adequately shape itself by letting people choose what they want to do is, ironically, susceptible to the same criticism you levelled at communism - its a convenient explanation which saves a hard time thinking.

Thats where the education system kicks in. You are seeing the fact that different people will want different things, again this is caused by lack of social cohesion. The mind is naturally inquisitive, therefore if people are raised in an environment where the mind fits in naturally, it will function as nature intended.

You are leap frogging the current personalities of people into the proposed idea, and naturally by doing this you will see problems. Thats like trying to run Windows 95 on a new computer... totally incompatible unless you redesign the "kernal", the basic building blocks.

bonkey wrote: »

There are numerous flaws inherent in that idea.

Lets say that I and a colleague both do the same job. Does he deserve more admiration then me if he's more talented? Does he deserve more admiration then me if he works harder? If I'm ok with that, then what's my motivation for working at al? I can slack off, and what does it cost me? I'm already in second place in the admiration-stakes, so I'm not losing anything.

Not flaws, just assumptions and just like you have assumed in these comments, you presume that all people can only function with the incentive of been admired? Thats what Hollywood is for! In the RBE, you would still have celebrities. I reckon OK magazine would be dedicated to science and innovation speakers, more than brain mushing baby gossip. Through the use of technology and educated co-operation everybody would help each other.

bonkey wrote: »

but just an insistence that if we somehow muddle through, we'll eventually get to a desirable end-point.

I will say this one more time:

THERE ARE NO UTOPIAS!

This isnt a HG Wells novel they came up with you know!

bonkey wrote: »

I find it somehow difficult to understand. In today's capitalist world, the rich and powerful would stand to make so much more money and gain so much more power if they could replace human inefficiency with technological efficiency more widely.....and yet we're expected to believe that a move away from this society could be possible with even more technological dependancy, without any clear idea of how we're going to develop this miracle of futuristic computing.

All we need is a path, an aim, a goal.... the steps we take along the way do not matter, its the direction, the drive that counts.

bonkey wrote: »

But my refrigerator doesn't know that I'm.....................................

More specifics! Jesus I could write a song about them.

bonkey wrote: »

Not only that, but lets re-address the notion of choice. What if I want the freedom to have a different design of car? Am I allowed, or will this new society forbid me my individuality?

No. Design your own car... be more cheesy than your mate if you want to be. You would have more time to be an individual in a RBE, therefore the artist would have no problem.

bonkey wrote: »

My guess is that there would be someone out there who would discover that in a society where people were allocated according to need, they could create a "capitalism within the system", and receive allocations greater then their needs by trading goods with others.

Inventory control. First you treat people's selfishness with education. Then as a fail safe, the system must not gluttonise any individual at the risk to someone else well being. Fair is fair.

bonkey wrote: »

Unless we assume that there are only altruistic participants, the system is wide open to such exploitation. The only way to deal with such exploitation is to create and enforce a set of laws....laws which restrict freedoms, and punish non-conformity.

The current system is worse, and is wide open to exploitation, as many bankers have proved, they can steal billions of euro, buy yachts and sail off into the sunset unscathed. And Joe the builder is consigned to misery and stress for a few more years... no this system would not be exploited, it would not need to be, as your needs would be limited naturally and you would learn to give more rather than receive more.