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    Author Topic: Economic Devastation  (Read 504859 times)
    aminorex
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    January 06, 2015, 07:23:05 AM
     #481

    Aminorex, if someone handed me a $billion but I found I couldn't buy what I wanted with it, what would be the value of those $billion digits? In fact, the $billionaires can't buy what they really want. There are only so many possessions you can buy, before you've bought duplicates of everything. This is why they look for overpriced symbols of wealth to purchase so they can feel they haven't run out things to buy.

    That's why you should stop thinking about money as a commodity.  It's a symbol used to program society.

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    But if their capital is knowledge, and it can't be created with money (because creativity doesn't respond to money, it responds only to the heart and desire and serendipity), then how can I induce them with money?

    That's a conceivable end-state to a lengthy process.  Several forks in the path are possible, and that particular end-state may be very long indeed in coming.  Please remember that we are not there yet.  

    A symbol is not knowledge, but the transition from commodity to knowledge must necessarily involve a transition from material to symbolic, if it is to be incremental.

    However, knowledge is not fungible.  Knowledge cannot be money per se.  It can conceivably supplant money, but that requires vast degrees of social reorganization and at least one generational change.  (Think Arthur C. Clarke.)  You want to immanentize that eschaton, and I can respect that.  Given a notion of inevitability (pace Marx) I can't fault you for trying to advance that clock.

    Meanwhile, there is work to be done, and God willing I am going about doing it.

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    I understand human nature will try to create artificial scarcity to try to have power, e.g. wars can create physical scarcity. But they never succeed long-term.

    Having power is good.  Without it, no work is done (in time).  There is a lot of work to be done (and precious little time).  Yes, power is the means by which evil is accomplished.  Conversion to a non-scarcity knowledge economy will not stop power, desire, evil or good.  It won't even stop war, in and of itself.  It can bring the species to a more expansive and sustainable homeostasis, for a while, but it is not the apocalypse.

    Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.  Give a man a Poisson distribution and he eats at random times independent of one another, at a constant known rate.
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