Date sent:      Fri, 25 Jul 2003 13:25:31 -0600
To:            virus@lucifer.com
Subject:        Re:virus: Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 13:17:39 -0400
From:          "Hermit" <hidden@lucifer.com>
Send reply to:  virus@lucifer.com

>
> [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 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.
>
But in the meantime, while waiting for such a system to become
practicable and feasible, energy is still needed from other sources. 
Alternative sources have so far not proven to be cost-effective or
sufficiently productive in practice.
>
> [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 compensated for.
>
> [Hermit 4] Unless produced by an expert system?
>
And who produces, programs and maintains the expert systems for next
to no compensation?  That just pushes the basic problem back a single
layer.
>
> [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.
>
Actually, the per capita income in the 1990's Soviet Union proper was
around $4000/year,  and their housing and product shortages were
legendary.  The Soviet standard of living never came close to
approaching that of citizens of the US.  The running joke there was,
"We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us".  They had to pay off
the Eastern European satellite countries in order to ameliorate popular
unrest and maintain their docile subservience (which is why the per
capita income of citizens of these satellites was double that of the
citizens of the Soviet Union); this strategy eventually failed them. 
When a labor union formed in Poland, it demonstrated that, contrary to
Marxist dogma, the proletarian workers did not feel that they were the
same as the government, and thus needed an organization with which
to negotiate with them.  The US did much the same thing by assuming
the economic burden of the defence of western Europe, allowing them
to spend monies on social programs that otherwise would have had to
be alloted to defence spending.
>
> [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.
>
The problem with democracy is that, once people find that they can vote
themselves largesse from the public treasury by voting for fiscally
irresponsible politicians, they tend to do so, which is why the two major
parties are the tax-and-spend Democrats and the borrow-and-spend
Republicans.  Eventually, this short-sighted greed tends to bankrupt the
system.
>
> [Lucifer 3] Why become a capable brain surgeon, a meticulous diamond
> 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?
>
If people cannot get fairly paid for inventing such things, we will never
get there.
>
> [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?
>
I'm concerned about the cultural and informational stagnation and
impoverishment we will suffer in the meantime, if the people who are
capable of producing culturally and informationally innovative and
enriching products discover that fair compensation for their talents there
is not forthcoming and decide to follow more lucrative careers instead.
> ----
> This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2003 board on Church of
> Virus BBS.
> <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54;action=display;thread
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