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from the are-utilities-really-optional dept.
Broadband Internet access is a "core utility" that people need in order to participate in modern society– just like electricity, running water, and sewers, the White House said on Tuesday. A report written by the Broadband Opportunity Council, a group created earlier this year by President Obama and co-chaired by the Secretaries of Commerce and Agriculture, says that even though broadband "has steadily shifted from an optional amenity to a core utility," millions of Americans still lack high-speed Internet access.
The report cites 2013 data indicating that about 51 million Americans, or about 16 percent of the population, cannot purchase broadband access at their homes. That number may have dropped by now, but the White House says the government needs to make a bigger push to expand broadband deployment, especially in rural areas and low-income communities.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by jmorris on Thursday September 24 2015, @04:52PM
Cuba has the best track record of communist countries...
True, of all countries who went as far down the road to Communism they remain the only one without millions of mass graves, mountains of bleached skulls, etc. Probably because the US mainland being so close provided a relief valve.
You may or may not be "paid" as well as you used to be..
Wouldn't matter anyway. Research the generally accepted (now) theory that under socialism the pricing mechanism is impossible so money itself is pointless. The Soviets and others could simply copy our pricing information and limp along but as the horrible truth that they couldn't actually 'win' because they absolutely required us to exist had to be a factor in their demise.
Capitalists suck.
We don't know for sure, we don't have enough samples. Most of the people associated with the word are nothing of the sort. Corporatists, Crony Capitalists, Fascists (fully in bed with the State) are the rule, not the exception. Just having a little Capitalism lifts the poor out of poverty, creates immense wealth, etc. See China. Imagine what would happen if we actually tried full Capitalism.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Friday September 25 2015, @02:33PM
I was going to make a similar point, so I'll just add it on here...
Remove money and let people do what needs done. Would *you* rather sit there flipping burgers, or might you find it more interesting trying to build a robot to flip those burgers instead? It's not *easier* in the short term, but it's more interesting and more effective in the end and solves the problem for far more people. People *want* to work, and create, and help others. We wouldn't have volunteer and service organizations otherwise. Of course such a system would sacrifice some efficiency today (although I think it would be far more efficient in the end) but at least in the developed world I think we can afford that. The per-capita GDP of the USA is six figures. We can certainly live comfortably with less. You'd need to do a lot of redistribution, but that would happen the moment you abandon currency. Much harder to hoard billions when it must be in the form of physical goods. Eliminate the government too and doing so becomes entirely impossible.
Of course, I wouldn't actually advocate trying to do this overnight. But there's already a lot of talk of shortening the work week. Give people more free time, they'll use some of that free time productively. Which, combined with continued gains in efficiency, can create a feedback cycle to eventually eliminate the need for capitalist employment. The main problem is simply that businesses resist paying the same wage for fewer hours, even when those hours are more productive, because they're trying to hand those gains over to the executives instead. Some studies have found the average office worker is only productive for as little as 2 hours and 53 minutes out of an eight hour day. So what if instead of forcing these people to spend five hours a day wasting time stuck in a cubicle, we liberate that labor for more productive uses?
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Friday September 25 2015, @05:20PM
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday September 25 2015, @06:35PM
Just from a brief reading of that page it doesn't seem like Technocracy is really eliminating currency. Rather, it seems to propose replacing dollar accounting with "energy accounting". I would instead prefer a more decentralized approach, which is why I generally categorize myself as an anarcho-syndicalist. The problem isn't wealth; the problem isn't government; the problem is centralization of power. Technocracy eliminates wealth, but it still seems to require a powerful central government to allocate resources. And that seems rather needless if we're considering a society of abundance. Maybe I just need to read a bit more though...
Lately I've also been considering a philosophy I'm currently referring to as "Hive Humanism" (if anyone can suggest an existing name for this I'd be glad to hear it...I'm sure there's probably something.) Given that we've already got research labs wiring the brains of multiple animals together, how long can it really be before all of humanity is acting as a single organism? Can't have a government of one; can't have an economy of one. The question is merely how we best get there from here. Because right now if you consider humanity as a single entity we've got some serious problems: Frostbite, cancers, graft vs. host disease, autoimmune disorders, etc...
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Friday September 25 2015, @06:57PM
Just from a brief reading of that page it doesn't seem like Technocracy is really eliminating currency. Rather, it seems to propose replacing dollar accounting with "energy accounting".
They are very different things. Energy Accounting is not a currency or form of exchange. It is simply a way to measure how much people consume in order to know how much to produce, so that there is no waste or shortages. There would be no way to "accumulate" wealth, as you pointed out, because you could only try with physical items which would be burdensome (and noticeable). Some more on it here [technocracy.ca].
I would instead prefer a more decentralized approach, which is why I generally categorize myself as an anarcho-syndicalist.
Anarcho-syndicalism, as far as I can tell from my cursory research into it, may be the closest idea to Technocracy I've seen, but I still have more to learn about it.
The problem isn't wealth; the problem isn't government; the problem is centralization of power. Technocracy eliminates wealth, but it still seems to require a powerful central government to allocate resources. And that seems rather needless if we're considering a society of abundance.
Completely the opposite in fact. Technocracy does not even use any form of political government. Politically speaking it is anarchist. The "administration" that you see in Technocracy only involves itself in objective, technical matters, not subjective ones. People would be just as free, and probably more so, than they are today. (In depth look on that here [technocracy.ca].
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday September 25 2015, @08:05PM
OK, that's helpful and makes a bit more sense. But telling people what to produce and where to allocate it is still a form of power which could be corrupted, so I'd prefer that the administration is as decentralized as possible. Perhaps something like a global, automated search engine for labor. Instead of a government saying "We need X houses, which needs Y hours of builder time and Z feet of lumber..." the person who needs a house would find someone who knows how to build a house. And that person would know a lumberjack, or an automated tree farm and mill, or someone who enjoys experimenting with alternative composites...whatever gets the job done. The more traditional anarcho-syndicalist concept would be something like the builders union gets a request from the housing coop and they all vote if they can fulfill that request.
But a global index of labor probably wouldn't actually be much of a problem I think...that's not much more complex than Facebook. Although...let's use GNUSocial as the model, not Facebook :) The bigger problems might be organizing large-scale and potentially undesirable work. Chip fabs? Oil wells? Maybe if nobody wants to work the wells, some robotics engineer would find the challenge interesting enough, or people could find alternatives, but the challenge would be getting to that point without everything falling apart. And of course there's some societal change necessary to create that level of cooperation, although that could solve itself if we eliminate the possibility of hoarding resources. And it's also worth keeping in mind that ANY positive economic or political revolution will likely require significant societal change -- otherwise it would have already happened!
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Friday September 25 2015, @09:40PM
No one "tells" people what to produce except the people themselves through Energy Accountung. EA figures out how much people are consuming, then uses that data to determine how much of those things to make for the next cycle. Simple as that. It's giving people exactly what they want. Centralizing technical decisions like this in no way infringes on anyone's freedoms, it's the only way to achieve the kind of efficiency you nees to create abundance.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 25 2015, @05:52PM
Remove money and let people do what needs done.
You can remove the USD, many would in fact say that would be an improvement if we replaced it with something that can't be manipulated. Some would say gold, other now argue for BitCoin. But the basic point for here is simply that a monetary unit is required to enable the most basic economic function, division of labor and specialization. None of the things you discuss can happen without money to mediate the exchange. How do you barter the future delivery of a robot to a restaurant to a chip factory for the raw components to build it from? You require money, banking and the pricing mechanism of a free market. Everything else you write flows from that ignorance and is best ignored.
Please do not vote until you correct your dangerous ignorance of basic economic concepts.
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Friday September 25 2015, @05:58PM
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 25 2015, @06:09PM
There was a time I wouldn't have believed that much ignorance could be packed into a webpage so short it doesn't even scroll. I wouldn't have believed people tech oriented enough to be posting here wouldn't instantly see one or more fatal errors in such twaddle. I'm long past such childish naivete and know such things are all too common.
Again, I only pray you do not vote until you read a 101 level economics text by a non-marxist. Either Chicago School or Austrian School would suffice for this purpose of teaching the bottom line basics of economic activity. Heck, even most of the followers of Keynes aren't as ignorant of economics as what was on the linked page.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday September 25 2015, @07:05PM
You've missed my point. You don't need currency if you don't mediate an exchange. I'm starting from the assumption that we have or will soon reach a largely post-scarcity society. And in such a society there's no reason to exchange resources rather than simply providing them.
Look at open source software. Look at people who volunteer for the food bank, or meals on wheels, or amnesty international. There are plenty of examples already in society where resources are distributed or labor is performed without any exchange of currency or goods, simply because somebody saw a problem and took action to address it. So clearly such systems are possible; the question is only one of scale. Can we address all of humanity's basic needs through such systems? I'm not sure if we've reached that tipping point yet, but surely we can do better than we are today.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 25 2015, @08:08PM
So you think people will just decide to build a mine and then work it, that others will decide to just supply the resources required to dig and otherwise work that mine, that thousands of others will simply appear to help and that somebody else will just decide to build and operate a smelter and give away the finished metals and that even more absurdly, that without the pricing mechanism acting as a signal that all this will occur in exactly the right amounts to avoid massive waste. The invisible hand only works if you have a market and that includes prices, monetary units and the rest of it.
Getting some folks to volunteer time to help distribute food is wonderful, truly. But you can't build a whole economy around that sort of thing because so many tasks aren't the sort of thing you can pay people in feelz for doing. You can get people to work a food bank or soup kitchen, good luck getting them into the fields picking produce. Hard enough getting Americans to do that for money, what do you think is one the big drivers in this huge knock down drag out immigration fight? So automate that job you retort. Great, we solve a big problem, net productivity rises, etc. Great. There are still going to be a lot of jobs, at least within our lifetime, that machines aren't going to be able to do and very few people are going to just want to do for no compensation. Good luck running an emergency room on volunteers, better luck still finding the people who will keep track of the certifications of those imaginary volunteers, keep the storeroom stocked with medical supplies, etc.
Finally, lets grab the bull by the horns and deconstruct the Open Source movement. It is beginning to more and more appear it was a temporary reaction to a market inefficiency. It was more bother to monetize smaller works than the benefit of GPL brought in faster development time. So anyone developing software as a means to some other end found it of benefit to public license and the economics quickly selected against small efforts to develop and sell software as a product but still seems to permit large ones like Microsoft, Apple and Google. The Play Store seems to be bringing an end to that though. You can't download f*cking BusyBox without wading through paid apps, begs for donations, Pro versions, etc.
Again, these are 100 level economic concepts you appear to be entirely ignorant of. Please stop posting and start reading. Go get an introductory economics textbook and start on page one since you apparently know less than nothing on the subject. You know so many things that just aren't so it is going to take a major effort to simply unlearn what you have been fed by people who do not have your interests in mind.