Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
....
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy materials
to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect. Pretty soon you
are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is founded on growth. Even
with planned obsolescence, an infinite amount of widgets requires an
infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:

two more books for the reading list:

Sepp Holzer, _The Rebel Farmer_ and _Sepp Holzer's
Permaculture_ i'm reading them in reverse order, almost
done with the second. he's got many years of actual
experience with many things, so i appreciate his
writings. some things he's almost mystical about so
that isn't as much a science as a ritualized practice
but it seems to be working for him.

This here represents a problem. The local library doesn't have "The
Rebel Farmer", and even used it is way too expensive for me from Amazon.
In any event, I need to clear out my backlog of reading books. The stack
on the headboard could do some serious damage to me, if we had a
trembler.

perhaps a fault of an ex-librarian is to keep
recommending books as i come across them.

i'm adding them to my notes too so they can
be found later or used by others to add to their
own reading lists.

things are working ok here, most libraries are
interconnected in Michigan now (even without much
funding from the state these days) using several
catalog systems (and a mass delivery system so
they don't have to pay postage per item) and then
there is the national OCLC system we can also use
if we're not too crazy with the number of requests.

Same here.


i haven't gotten into mushroom farming, but i did
enjoy the part of the book that gives that overview.
if i do get into it sometime i'll be sure to read up
on it.

It is something I should check out. We're on the side of a hill, and
there is a lot of dark enclosed space under the house.

for most of what he's doing he's using either
logs (he says fresh cut are best because they are
already moist) or straw bales, left outside, the
logs partially sunk in the ground (providing more
even moisture and trace nutrients). takes a while
(1-2 years before fruiting bodies appear) to get
going but productive for years depending upon the
type of wood used.


also how he talks about fruit trees and his
methods. very low input, but you need a varied
environment to pull it off. in a modern suburban
landscape with grasses, etc and few understory
plants that support beneficials it's a challenge.
then you may also have to deal with neighborhood
politics or town ordinances for weeds/lawn care.

his main property is upland enough that he can
work with microclimates and extending seasons of
harvest by using the warmer downhill areas and
cooler areas uphill along with using rocks, sun
catchers and ponds.

also the film mentioned: _The Agricultural Rebel_.

Film? What film? You didn't say anything about no stinkin' film. You
using Cliff Notes too? ;O)

i should have written that "also a film was mentioned".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yScINihX_z8



...
Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization
by Richard Manning
...
i enjoyed parts of it. i have to conceed the
poorer health and starvation of some peoples under
the version of agriculture much practiced in the
past.

Famines every 10 years don't auger well for agriculturalists. It's
way
past time to start humanities return to sustainable environmental
practices. It's probably an impossible dream with greed intrenched in
government.

wait until you get to the part where he talks about
China and famines (p. 71).

??????? It's the same deal, famines every 10 years.

no, he writes they have evidence of 1800+ famines in
about 3,000 years. that's a famine almost every year
to every other year.

OK, it's agreed, every other year, and we won't mention the cannibalism.

as someone noted, "it's hard to get a good night's
sleep." in that type of company.
Hungry is a hard companion.


...
The term is borrowed from the
militaryindustrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in
his famous 1961 farewell address.

he was a smart guy.

And he seemed to be human.

I wonder what the U.S. would have been like if Major General Smedley
Butler, USMC had been President.

Ike was a politician,
Certainly not in a contemporary context. Just look at his quotes. These
days politicians just keep their heads down, and continue taking the
money. Not a squeek about the Military-Industrial-Complex.

i think Butler rubbed too many
the wrong way.
He wasn't good at playing games.

"War is a Racket", by Smedley D. Butler.

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil
intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping
of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall
Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua
for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I
brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in
1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way
unmolested."




Such groups include corporations that
contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology
vendors, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activists have
argued that the Prison-Industrial Complex as perpetuating a belief that
imprisonment is a quick yet ultimately flawed solution to social
problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental
illness, and illiteracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_complex

More specifically see "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age
of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West.
http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-I...dness/dp/15955
86431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369114986&sr=1-1&keywords=The+New+J
im+Crow

gah! no, i'm not going there. it's all around me
already, i don't need to read more about it.

We have that option, for the time being, but people of color don't. It
gets shoved into their faces, like it or not.

unfortunate and worth fighting against.
I find it despicable and worth fighting against.
There are no more countries to colonize, so we are colonizing America.
The outrageous treatment of people of color in America, will boon be
visited on our paler citizen. The chickens will come home to roost.


...
Who would know, it has never been tried.

the first few years of Christianity were
supposedly communist in organisation and
sharing of resources, but that devolves like
any other system as soon as you put money
in any large amounts into the hands of a
few "leaders" or "organizers".

Ah, communist with a lower case "c", not an uppercase "C". In the middle
ages, at least in England, you would live in a village, and behind your
house you would have your garden, but beyond the garden was the
"Commons". There would be fields that were worked in common by the
inhabitants of the town for the good of everyone. There were also
forests where a person could hunt for game. Then came the closure laws,
and everyone was forced into the factories (more or less). Capitalism
seems like an extension of feudalism. Both require infinite resources.
Socialism (We the People) can be corrupted, as all can see, but it is
doable. First we have to get campaign financing out of private hands,
and everything else should flow from that, not that vigilance won't
still be required.


capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

As I noted in a different post, it is intrinsic to capitalism. The
difference is now we are running up against the finite limit of
resources in the physical world (cyberspace is something different).
As with agriculture, we ran out of arable land, and now we are reaching
the yield limits of our new cultivars. The only resource that we have
plenty of is people. That said, keep one eye open when you take that nap.

socialism is fine in some parts. i still believe
that freedom should be primary in that many systems
should be allowed under a broader form of government
and those that wish to form socialist organizations
and societies within should be allowed as long as
their members are allowed freedom to leave if they
wish. an age of consent. some written bylaws and
a coming of age ceremony would be good. i still
haven't had much of a chance to see how the Amish
have managed to become the society they have in the
USoA and how they are treated in terms of taxes and
such, but an interesting side topic for the future...

The thing is that it's not the institutions. The most efficient, and
beneficial government would be a benevolent dictator. The results of the
institutions of government depend on the love in the hearts of those who
direct them. If citizens are simply a crop to be harvested for their tax
dollars, like wheat, the results will be different than if there was
real concern for the welfare of the people.


however, i don't see any solution because any
system set up still has to interface with others
and that means some form of currency or government
to make sure the groups don't trample each other
or use false means of gain or counterfeit
currencies.

Regulation is needed to combat cheating.

which means enforcement and that means
enforcers, taxes, jails, or something meaningful
as a deterrent... which pretty much doesn't seem
to exist now.


...huge snip, too many tangents...
The world is full of Asymptotes. Don't let them wear you down.

as to how to regulate banking, i don't see any good
coming from the government being directly involved.
i already am having severe dislikes to the feds
current practices of transferring wealth from the
responsible to the irresponsible, but put the fed in
the government's direct control and it would be even
worse as then they'd have no check on their abuse of
the money supply. not that there seems to be one
right now anyways. if i had a better place to put my
money i'd be doing it, but the rest of the world is
not looking much better either.

Credit Unions keep the money local.

i have a fair amount of my savings in a few
credit unions. unfortunately, they can bloat
just like any other organization.

Yeah, but they bloat locally, not in Charlotte, New York, or San
Francisco.


...
When the "free market" reigns, corporations will own the seeds for
our
food, the rights to the our water, and charge us rent for the clothes
on
our backs. Of course the problem may be moot if Global Warming gets
away
from us, or we meet another Chicxulub asteroid.

they don't own my seeds and i'll gladly share.

The natural, free seeds are becoming fewer, and fewer. As much as I like
open pollinated seeds, I know that hybridized squash has less of a
problem with mildew. Hybridized means that it is owned by somebody.
Usually that somebody is Monsanto.

i don't think you are right. perhaps you can find
an organic source for a similar hybrid and not have
to buy from Monsanto. as there are so many squash
varieties you might even find something better.

i keep finding seed sources way beyond what i can
ever possibly use here. i don't think seed-savers are
going out of business any time soon, and the expansion
of farmer markets and people putting in their own
gardens is also a good trend in the opposite direction.

As luck would have it, I misspoke again. I was thinking that Black
Beauty Zucchini was a hybrid, it isn't. Compared to Costata Romanesco
and Zucchino Rampicante it has little taste, but it sure does withstand
mildew. I'll have to find another example of skullduggery in high places.

no shortage there.


putting on some fertilizer, and then some potting soil, and lastly
the
plant, with what ever potting soil is necessary to make the ground
flush.
Today is sunflowers, lettuce, and potting some herbs.

i've been digging and burying more shredded bark
and wood pieces and then after filling it back in
and then topping it off with soil that is actually
topsoil (and not clay). into that went about 220
onions of three types and a small patch of turnips.

Ah, to be young again.

today is a day of r-n-r. very humid and in the
80s.

Mid 70s to mid 80s here for te last few weeks and the seedlings are
jumpin'

i'm glad they are coming along.

It's the earliest start I've had in 15 years. Usually I don't get into
the ground until the first of June.

we're having another rainy day here, which is good as
we've been a little too dry, but i'm not getting more
gardens planted. we went looking for raincoats yesterday
and the stores have already moved their stocks into summer
and fall items.

We had early warmth, and dry weather (fire season started a month ago),
and even with the days still short here on the north side of the hill,
the plants were jumping. Now weather has returned to seasonal (70F),
and the tomatoes, and the peppers have stalled. The end of the month is
supposed to return warm weather, and I'll be gardening again.


today looks pretty good for getting something
done outside.

Carp that Dium, baby.

finished planting the areas i got raised up last
week. peas, beets, a few onions, snap peas, soup
peas. no beans in yet. i think i can get some of
those planted tomorrow if the ground isn't too soggy.

Onions and beets here today, and some landscaping for my Lovey.


...
I hope you make it to 60 without any chronic illnesses, otherwise it can
be a real pile of shit. Good luck.

heh, allergies have always been fun, motorcycle
accident broke and twisted things so i have to be
careful about some angles and bends and then i've
had chronic back problems since i was 15. for me
to say that it is doing better is a huge improvement
in how things are going.

The thought of getting killed on a motorcycle never bothered me. Then I
discovered getting mangled. They sure are fun on a hot day in the trees.

dirt-biking was fun as a kid, but my downfall is
that i like to go too fast. also why i refused to take
up downhill skiing. i just knew that would be a bad
idea. snowshoes are about the right speed for me.

my brother hit a deer at 60mph on his motorcycle.
he came out of it with some bad spots of road rash,
but the gal on the back had quite a bit more damage.
i should have learned from that but many years later
i wanted to try one of my own. learned the hard way
that they weren't for me.

Amen, brother, amen.


every day on the right side of the daisy roots is
a day i never expected. for some reason as a kid i
never expected to live past 30. having relatives
with chronic lung or back troubles or diabetes i
can see the way it can be. i've been through my own
piles so it's just a matter of keeping on, finding
what is important and working on that and not getting
hung up on what i can't do. being a systems analyst
means being able to break down a problem and work
the parts until it comes back together again. keep
the big picture in mind.

My plan is trying to squeeze the last drop of pleasure out of this life.

grab each day by the balls... gently...

I'd settle for an afternoon lunchmeat and cheese plater, a fresh
baguette, and a $10 bottle of French wine from TJ's.

It's good for my spirit, but anathema to my body. Classic double bind.


I'm down to the hard part now, which only makes it tougher.

hang in there and try to ignore the BS. sometimes
happiness comes in small victories and unexpected
places. like seeing a sundog or a pea plant sprouting
and flowering.

And sometimes it comes from being in on the joke ;O)

In any event,

Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
- Plato


...
Peppers (28) are in. Now it's on to the squash, sunflowers, and more
lettuce. Then it will be beets, onions, and the misc. The seeds for the
green beans must have been too old. I'll have to try again.

luckily they can be planted in series.
i keep planting peas and beans as much as i
can, i like the flowers and foliage as much
as the edibles.

Onwards, and downwards. Have a good'un.

you too! happy dibbling...


songbird

Dibble on!

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy materials
to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect. Pretty soon you
are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is founded on growth. Even
with planned obsolescence, an infinite amount of widgets requires an
infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.


songbird

In that case, it is a mass hallucination ;O)

http://endofcapitalism.com/about/1-is-this-the-end-of-capitalism/
Capitalism requires growth. A system that requires growth cannot last
forever on a planet that is defined by ecological and social limits.
Capitalism is therefore fundamentally unsustainable sooner or later it
will run up against those limits and the system will stop functioning.

The current economic crisis which began in 2007 is unlike any previous
crisis faced by global capitalism. In earlier downturns there remained a
way to grow out of it by expanding production there were new resources
and energy supplies, new markets, and new pools of labor to exploit. The
system just needed to expand its reach, because there was plenty of
money to make outside its existing grasp.


http://www.greens.org/s-r/47/47-03.html
From an ecological point of view there is something crazy about
capitalism. An ecological worldview emphasizes harmony, sustainability,
moderation - rather like that of the ancient Greeks, for whom a constant
striving for more was regarded as a mark of an unbalanced, deranged
soul. Yet every capitalist enterprise is motivated to grow, and to grow
without limit.

The root problem with capitalism is not that individual firms are
incentivized to grow, but that the economy as a whole must grow, not to
survive, but to remain healthy. Why should it be the case that a
capitalist economy must grow to be healthy? The answer to this question
is rather peculiar - and very important. A capitalist economy must grow
to be healthy because capitalism relies on private investors for its
investment funds. These investors are free to invest or not as they see
fit. (It is, after all, their money.)

But this makes economic health dependent on "investor confidence," on,
as John Maynard Keynes put it, "the animal spirits" of the investors. If
investors do not foresee a healthy return on their investments,
commensurate with the risks they are taking, then they won't invest - at
least not domestically. But if they don't invest, their pessimism
becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. The lack of investment translates
into layoffs - first in the construction industry and those industries
dependent on orders for capital goods, and then, since layoffs lead to a
decline in consumer-goods consumption, in other sectors as well.
Aggregate demand drops further; the economy slides toward recession.

As we all know, a slumping economy is not just bad for capitalist
investors. It is bad for almost everyone. Unemployment rises. Government
revenues fall. Indeed, public funds for environmental programs are
jeopardized - as mainstream economists are quick to point out, impatient
as they are with "anti-growth" ecologists.

So we see: a healthy capitalism requires a steady expansion of
consumption. If sales decline, investors lose confidence - as well they
should. So, sales must be kept up. Which means that a healthy capitalism
requires what would doubtless strike a visitor from another planet (or
from a pre-capitalist society) as exceedingly strange - a massive,
privately-financed effort to persuade people to consume what they might
otherwise find unnecessary.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/igorgree...pitalism-dying
/2/
Capitalism assumes an infinite supply of resources, which is absolutely
absurd. Infinite growth within a finite system is impossible. Real
scientists understand this. However, many economists would have us
believe that it¹s alright if we run out of something because there will
always be a substitute. And when we run out of that, another substitute.
Unfortunately, the planet we live on doesn¹t work like that.

There are natural constraints at play that are completely missing from
our economic models. We are all living with our heads in the sand. It
will be impossible for future generations to experience the growth and
material wealth that we have now because we are using up our natural
capital as quickly as we can with no regard for what will be left in the
future.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/feb/02/energy.comment
It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both

Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only
response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on
infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production
in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central
organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so
it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green
initiative anybody cares to come up with.
=======

In any event, it's not idiopathic behavior.


The only way to stay healthy is to eat what you don't like, drink what
you loathed, and to do what you would rather not do.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy
materials to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect.
Pretty soon you are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is
founded on growth. Even with planned obsolescence, an infinite
amount of widgets requires an infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.


songbird

No he isn't. The way capitalism works in Western economies requires
constant growth in the economy, not only that but it has to be at the
correct rate. Our (Oz) federal bank manipulates money with the stated
intent of maintaining growth within a narrow range - about 3% PA IIRC. I
think yours does too. Politicians of most colours cannot keep from crowing
when growth is 'good' and trying to blame somebody else when it is 'bad'.
They have accepted that the people want higher standards of living (or at
least as high as they have now) and that living standards are inextricably
linked to growth. There are plenty of examples to support this where very
fast growth or economic shrinking has produced horrid outcomes for the wider
population. Very few publicly question the system that requires this but
question it we must.

Capitalism is the product of the era of unrestricted human expansion across
the globe. To maintain economic growth one simply increased population and
found new resources and markets in foreign lands. Of course technology
fuelled this expansion by enabling faster extraction, transport and
utilisation of resources.

Economic growth requires goods, production of goods require materials. Thus
as it currently works the system must continue to extract fuel, metals,
fibre, timber etc from the earth at an ever increasing rate. Many of these
resources are limited and will be consumed sooner or later. Thus, the
present system embodies the seeds of its own destruction. The issue even
has a name "decoupling". The aim is to find a system where maintaining a
standard of living does not require constant growth, ie the two are
decoupled. So far nobody has done it. What is worse very few seem to be
concerned. We are generally restricted to peripheral arguments that climate
change isn't real or that science and technology will save us. The fact
that the core system was developed and succeeded in an environment that no
longer exists, and can only continue to succeed when those conditions exist
is widely ignored.

David

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy materials
to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect. Pretty soon you
are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is founded on growth. Even
with planned obsolescence, an infinite amount of widgets requires an
infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.

In that case, it is a mass hallucination ;O)

it sure is, because proving some point in an
argument using really shoddy research sources is
not going to convince anyone who's paying attention...


http://endofcapitalism.com/about/1-is-this-the-end-of-capitalism/
Capitalism requires growth.

wrong. the production of goods/services requires
nothing other than having the means of production,
which in the modern case means materials and labor.
there is nothing in the system which required
profitability (but it is included in the definition
i have in the dictionary, but i think that is a
minor quibble compared to the greater flaw in assuming
there must be growth).

A system that requires growth cannot last
forever on a planet that is defined by ecological and social limits.
Capitalism is therefore fundamentally unsustainable sooner or later it
will run up against those limits and the system will stop functioning.

capitalism won't cease functioning. that's like
saying people will stop breathing of their own
free will. not many can do it for long...


The current economic crisis which began in 2007 is unlike any previous
crisis faced by global capitalism. In earlier downturns there remained a
way to grow out of it by expanding production there were new resources
and energy supplies, new markets, and new pools of labor to exploit. The
system just needed to expand its reach, because there was plenty of
money to make outside its existing grasp.

gah! utter crap. the crud just works as it does.
if we want it to work differently then we need to
convince a large enough number of participants to
change their values. because values are what wealth
measures and what people consider wealth will change.
by definition in an enclosed system the rare resources
will cost more as they become harder to attain. in
a closed system where food becomes scarce then the
costs of food increases enough to where more people
will find it well worth their time to turn lawns into
gardens (this is already happening) and to put some
previously damaged lands back into production via
cleaning them up and restoring the soil. this too
is happening. rooftops in cities are well worth
redoing if the structure is sound enough to carry
the load. this too is happening.


http://www.greens.org/s-r/47/47-03.html
From an ecological point of view there is something crazy about
capitalism. An ecological worldview emphasizes harmony, sustainability,
moderation - rather like that of the ancient Greeks,

ROFL! holy crap, that is so blazingly funny and
not at all close to what history shows. the Greeks
destroyed their topsoil and killed/plundered about as
much as any civilization before them.


for whom a constant
striving for more was regarded as a mark of an unbalanced, deranged
soul. Yet every capitalist enterprise is motivated to grow, and to grow
without limit.

The root problem with capitalism is not that individual firms are
incentivized to grow, but that the economy as a whole must grow, not to

how can you quote a source that uses a word like
"incentivized" without grimacing?


survive, but to remain healthy. Why should it be the case that a
capitalist economy must grow to be healthy? The answer to this question
is rather peculiar - and very important. A capitalist economy must grow
to be healthy because capitalism relies on private investors for its
investment funds. These investors are free to invest or not as they see
fit. (It is, after all, their money.)

right. as values change (and they will and must in
the face of more limited resources) they will find
investments in sustainable and recycling materials to
be more and more valuable. the shift will happen.


But this makes economic health dependent on "investor confidence," on,
as John Maynard Keynes put it, "the animal spirits" of the investors. If
investors do not foresee a healthy return on their investments,
commensurate with the risks they are taking, then they won't invest - at
least not domestically. But if they don't invest, their pessimism
becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. The lack of investment translates
into layoffs - first in the construction industry and those industries
dependent on orders for capital goods, and then, since layoffs lead to a
decline in consumer-goods consumption, in other sectors as well.
Aggregate demand drops further; the economy slides toward recession.

As we all know, a slumping economy is not just bad for capitalist
investors. It is bad for almost everyone. Unemployment rises. Government
revenues fall. Indeed, public funds for environmental programs are
jeopardized - as mainstream economists are quick to point out, impatient
as they are with "anti-growth" ecologists.

So we see: a healthy capitalism requires a steady expansion of
consumption. If sales decline, investors lose confidence - as well they
should. So, sales must be kept up. Which means that a healthy capitalism
requires what would doubtless strike a visitor from another planet (or
from a pre-capitalist society) as exceedingly strange - a massive,
privately-financed effort to persuade people to consume what they might
otherwise find unnecessary.

there are many companies which get along just fine
on a steady product line. growth in some areas is
offset by declines in other areas. in a closed system
that is how it goes. we cannot escape physics or
limited resources no matter how much money we print,
but we can let the market function which will reflect
a shift from consumption and destruction without
proper compensation to one that does. that shift is
going on and will continue to go on for many years.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/igorgree...pitalism-dying
/2/
Capitalism assumes an infinite supply of resources, which is absolutely
absurd. Infinite growth within a finite system is impossible. Real
scientists understand this. However, many economists would have us
believe that it¹s alright if we run out of something because there will
always be a substitute. And when we run out of that, another substitute.
Unfortunately, the planet we live on doesn¹t work like that.

There are natural constraints at play that are completely missing from
our economic models. We are all living with our heads in the sand. It
will be impossible for future generations to experience the growth and
material wealth that we have now because we are using up our natural
capital as quickly as we can with no regard for what will be left in the
future.

quite false. what we are throwing away now in
landfills will in the future become a source of
valueable materials. as the concentrated metals/ores
are depleted then it becomes high enough priced to
make concentrating it from recycling and reclaiming
it from existing marginal structures more valuable.
when the price point gets right the market then works
to shift the focus and it does happen. it isn't a
question of anything other than energy and the will
to do it.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/feb/02/energy.comment
It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both

Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only
response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on
infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production
in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central
organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so
it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green
initiative anybody cares to come up with.

our economic system is influenced by each of us
making choices about where to spend our time and
money. when the prices for food get high enough,
when land and water destruction start feeding
back into much higher prices for clear air and
decent food then people will make choices to find
different ways of treating the water and land.
when it gets hard to breath and people start
kicking off from poor air quality in large
numbers then the system will self-regulate that
ways too.

in a closed system there isn't a free lunch any
more than in an active ecology there isn't much room
for an unused energy source. dead bodies are
decomposed, and from that life goes on. in our
system, the abuse of the soil, water and air will
eventually be corrected. all the other materials can
be concentrated with the use of energy (paying the
dues through entropy according to some physicists).

i'm not quite sure what i believe about that,
because there is stuff going on in physics we
don't understand yet. black-holes, plasma physics,
dark matter, etc. still a lot to be learned...
maybe we'll find a genie in a bottle...


=======

In any event, it's not idiopathic behavior.

capitalism as defined in the dictionary has the
element of profit built in. an on-going business
can get by without profit above enough to cover
the overhead (call it the entropy tax because
that is really what it is). most companies in
business for very long of a big enough size have
understand that they can increase their chances
of going forwards are based upon making operations
more efficient. i.e. reducing their overhead (or
how much energy they use or how much materials or
water or air or ...).

nowadays companies also reflect the values of
their patrons and the people who run them. some
make changes to use clean energy sources and reduce
waste or improve the water quality. those are the
ones any person would want to invest in because
they understand that it is important to value
these things. already, capitalism apart from
governmental regulations will shift faster than
the government itself will, because the government
is weighed down by PACS and political contributions
and embedded infrastructure costs. a new company
can do a complete endrun around all that embedded
overhead. existing companies can make that same
rapid shift (how else could you explain a company
buying hundreds of millions of watts of clean
energy within a few years time?). there's no
law requiring them to do it. there's no one
investor of a large enough chunk to force it or
even any large block combined. they just decided
it was the right thing to do and they are doing it.

if more people elected to purchase clean energy
through their utility it would force the utility to
put more production into clean energy sources.
already this has shifted things somewhat, but more
people making the change would send a clearer signal
and the companies will respond.


songbird

David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy
materials to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect.
Pretty soon you are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is
founded on growth. Even with planned obsolescence, an infinite
amount of widgets requires an infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.

No he isn't. The way capitalism works in Western economies requires
constant growth in the economy, not only that but it has to be at the
correct rate. Our (Oz) federal bank manipulates money with the stated
intent of maintaining growth within a narrow range - about 3% PA IIRC. I
think yours does too.

oh, i know, it's an attempt to moderate the so called
business cycle because there isn't a sufficient amount
of a safety net for people. the larger problem is that
the safety net is really people wishing that they didn't
have any responsibility for taking care of themselves.
which to me is a wider sign of how rotten the current
system is, but that's a whole different topic.

as you have seen over a lifetime that even such
attempts at moderating the business cycle are largely
driven by entrenched interests in keeping the status-
quo. when there are large events that gets thrown
out the window (wars, natural catastrophes). so it
is largely an artificial mechanism that breaks given
the right lever.


Politicians of most colours cannot keep from crowing
when growth is 'good' and trying to blame somebody else when it is 'bad'.
They have accepted that the people want higher standards of living (or at
least as high as they have now) and that living standards are inextricably
linked to growth. There are plenty of examples to support this where very
fast growth or economic shrinking has produced horrid outcomes for the wider
population.

surely, however, there's also a fair bit of evidence
that efforts to limit the destruction only makes it
last longer. so instead of taking the hit up front
and getting on with things after shaking out the weak
businesses we drag all these weak business along.
eventually they do go under.


Very few publicly question the system that requires this but
question it we must.

Capitalism is the product of the era of unrestricted human expansion across
the globe. To maintain economic growth one simply increased population and
found new resources and markets in foreign lands. Of course technology
fuelled this expansion by enabling faster extraction, transport and
utilisation of resources.

it will change as values change. values will
change as resources become more limited. that's
the nature of the beast. prices rise as supply
becomes limited. people either produce their
own (food, water, etc.) or conserve or find other
sources. what drives the whole system is the
many individual choices made, how they add up.
when we start bumping up against hard limits
like fresh water and food supply then people
will start valuing water conservation and not
wasting so much food. this type of gradual shift
is already happening and will continue to happen.


Economic growth requires goods, production of goods require materials. Thus
as it currently works the system must continue to extract fuel, metals,
fibre, timber etc from the earth at an ever increasing rate. Many of these
resources are limited and will be consumed sooner or later. Thus, the
present system embodies the seeds of its own destruction.

the system also has seeds of its own transformation.
we are the determiners of value, not the system, the
system works because of the choices that people make.
when prices rise then choices get made differently.


The issue even
has a name "decoupling". The aim is to find a system where maintaining a
standard of living does not require constant growth, ie the two are
decoupled. So far nobody has done it.

the profit requirement is only limited to
being able to cover overhead of running any
business. the more efficient a business is
the more likely it keeps going. the smarter
any extractive business is, means it knows
it has to shift into renewables and recycling
or becoming a service provider. many companies
have research arms geared towards finding
better ways of doing things and finding other
uses for waste materials.


What is worse very few seem to be
concerned. We are generally restricted to peripheral arguments that climate
change isn't real or that science and technology will save us. The fact
that the core system was developed and succeeded in an environment that no
longer exists, and can only continue to succeed when those conditions exist
is widely ignored.

it comes down to energy and not much else.
all resources consumed can be recycled given
enough energy. the only tax is entropy.

the limitation on the overall system is if
the sun gives us enough energy to do everything
we want to do given the materials at hand. when
cheap oil and other fossil fuels run out then
the shift gets made to recycling and renewables.
there is a good chance by then we'll have viable
space colonies.

widely ignoring how things change won't make
any company likely to last long. companies,
like the people that run them, have an interest
in keeping going, in continuing, so they'll pay
attention to changes. many can even drive the
pace of change faster than a government or an
individual can. like, in my lifetime i'll never
buy several hundred million watts of clean energy
or be a force to recycle huge amounts of materials
that used to be aimed at landfills or incineration,
but a large company can do that and many are.

the system can correct itself. it is gradually
doing so. if embedded subsidies for destructive
practices were removed and shifted towards supporting
cleaner alternatives then the change would be even
faster.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

really shoddy research sources is
not going to convince anyone who's paying attention...

capitalism won't cease functioning. that's like
saying people will stop breathing of their own
free will. not many can do it for long...

gah! utter crap.

http://www.greens.org/s-r/47/47-03.html
From an ecological point of view there is something crazy about
capitalism. An ecological worldview emphasizes harmony, sustainability,
moderation - rather like that of the ancient Greeks,

ROFL! holy crap, that is so blazingly funny and
not at all close to what history shows. the Greeks
destroyed their topsoil and killed/plundered about as
much as any civilization before them.

how can you quote a source that uses a word like
"incentivized" without grimacing?

=======

All that and not a single citation, hmmmm.
======

I'm reminded of the choir leader who happened to glimpse the pastors
sermon notes for the day. What caught his eye was, "argument weak here,
pound pulpit".


McArthur , and I will be back shortly.

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy
materials to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect.
Pretty soon you are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is
founded on growth. Even with planned obsolescence, an infinite
amount of widgets requires an infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.

No he isn't. The way capitalism works in Western economies requires
constant growth in the economy, not only that but it has to be at the
correct rate. Our (Oz) federal bank manipulates money with the
stated intent of maintaining growth within a narrow range - about 3%
PA IIRC. I think yours does too.

oh, i know, it's an attempt to moderate the so called
business cycle because there isn't a sufficient amount
of a safety net for people. the larger problem is that
the safety net is really people wishing that they didn't
have any responsibility for taking care of themselves.
which to me is a wider sign of how rotten the current
system is, but that's a whole different topic.


But get back to the main point. Governments and financial institutions
acknowledge the system produces crap outcomes if growth is not in the 'good'
range and they do all in their power to keep it there. Do you acknowledge
that capitalism produces unacceptible outcomes if growth is not maintained?

as you have seen over a lifetime that even such
attempts at moderating the business cycle are largely
driven by entrenched interests in keeping the status-
quo. when there are large events that gets thrown
out the window (wars, natural catastrophes). so it
is largely an artificial mechanism that breaks given
the right lever.


If by entrenched interests you mean governments that don't want to see
rioting in the streets as either goods are not available due to depression
or money has no value due to hyperinflation then I agree. I also agree that
these economic and fiscal levers are of limited value.



Politicians of most colours cannot keep from crowing
when growth is 'good' and trying to blame somebody else when it is
'bad'. They have accepted that the people want higher standards of
living (or at least as high as they have now) and that living
standards are inextricably linked to growth. There are plenty of
examples to support this where very fast growth or economic
shrinking has produced horrid outcomes for the wider population.

surely, however, there's also a fair bit of evidence
that efforts to limit the destruction only makes it
last longer.

Let's not get too sidetracked here.

so instead of taking the hit up front
and getting on with things after shaking out the weak
businesses we drag all these weak business along.
eventually they do go under.


There is much more to it than weak businesses going under in bad times. But
let's stick to the point.



Very few publicly question the system that requires this but
question it we must.

Capitalism is the product of the era of unrestricted human expansion
across the globe. To maintain economic growth one simply increased
population and found new resources and markets in foreign lands. Of
course technology fuelled this expansion by enabling faster
extraction, transport and utilisation of resources.

it will change as values change. values will
change as resources become more limited. that's
the nature of the beast. prices rise as supply
becomes limited. people either produce their
own (food, water, etc.) or conserve or find other
sources. what drives the whole system is the
many individual choices made, how they add up.
when we start bumping up against hard limits
like fresh water and food supply then people
will start valuing water conservation and not
wasting so much food. this type of gradual shift
is already happening and will continue to happen.

There are three things wrong with this:

1) The assumption that market forces will eventually result in a
satisfactory new equilibrium

This is a blue-sky imagination product. Either you have to show that
capitalism with zero growth will continue without ultrahigh unemployment or
that a new system that doesn't produce unemployment with zero growth will
evolve. You have done neither.

2) The assumption that the transition will be gradual and orderly

The booms and busts of the last 200 years give the lie to this. If anything
the global economy is less stable than individual economies. Shocks
propagate through the system at light speed now. Once real limits to
resources become apparent prices will rise very quickly, whole sectors that
work on thin margins will go belly-up very quickly. The adjustment is not
going to be pretty.

3) The assumption that it will happen soon enough to allow orderly
transition away from dependence on diminishing resources.

We see as plain as day with the climate change issue people will stick to
the old ways until the bitter end. They will not prepare in time for a new
future. They will waste time, deny, continue to exploit limited resources
until the last. The concept of finite resources that limit growth and
require a whole new way of thinking is not one that people want to believe -
therefore they don't - therefore they will not prepare for it.



Economic growth requires goods, production of goods require
materials. Thus as it currently works the system must continue to
extract fuel, metals, fibre, timber etc from the earth at an ever
increasing rate. Many of these resources are limited and will be
consumed sooner or later. Thus, the present system embodies the
seeds of its own destruction.

the system also has seeds of its own transformation.
we are the determiners of value, not the system, the
system works because of the choices that people make.
when prices rise then choices get made differently.


Hopeless optimism based on nothing but faith in economics which have
repeatedly been shown to be no better than voodoo. It isn't a matter of
deciding what brand of conflakes to buy, it's take everything you know and
rely on and turn it upside down. We are talking about changes that are way
outside the scope of anything in the past happening much more quickly all
over the world.



The issue even
has a name "decoupling". The aim is to find a system where
maintaining a standard of living does not require constant growth,
ie the two are decoupled. So far nobody has done it.

the profit requirement is only limited to
being able to cover overhead of running any
business. the more efficient a business is
the more likely it keeps going. the smarter
any extractive business is, means it knows
it has to shift into renewables and recycling
or becoming a service provider. many companies
have research arms geared towards finding
better ways of doing things and finding other
uses for waste materials.


Profit shmoffit. We are not talking about keeping the investors happy at
the AGM. Back to the main point. How do you maintain constant economic
growth without matching growth in resources? You are just hand-waving the
issue away.


What is worse very few seem to be
concerned. We are generally restricted to peripheral arguments that
climate change isn't real or that science and technology will save
us. The fact that the core system was developed and succeeded in an
environment that no longer exists, and can only continue to succeed
when those conditions exist is widely ignored.

it comes down to energy and not much else.
all resources consumed can be recycled given
enough energy. the only tax is entropy.


In the long term possibly so. But saying that there is no scientific or
technical constraint on growth but energy does not tell us how to organise
humanity and its commerce to achieve this condition.


the limitation on the overall system is if
the sun gives us enough energy to do everything
we want to do given the materials at hand. when
cheap oil and other fossil fuels run out then
the shift gets made to recycling and renewables.
there is a good chance by then we'll have viable
space colonies.

widely ignoring how things change won't make
any company likely to last long. companies,
like the people that run them, have an interest
in keeping going, in continuing, so they'll pay
attention to changes. many can even drive the
pace of change faster than a government or an
individual can. like, in my lifetime i'll never
buy several hundred million watts of clean energy
or be a force to recycle huge amounts of materials
that used to be aimed at landfills or incineration,
but a large company can do that and many are.

the system can correct itself. it is gradually
doing so. if embedded subsidies for destructive
practices were removed and shifted towards supporting
cleaner alternatives then the change would be even
faster.


songbird

You have done nothing to show me that system will repair itself and that it
will happen in good time. The system is facing the biggest changes in
history and you just assume that the way it works in economics 101 text book
will be just dandy. This is no better than those who say there is no
problem because God put the world here for mankind to exploit and He
wouldn't lie so all is right.

How do you decouple economic growth from resource growth? So far you
haven't given any indication that you know how or that you can show that it
isn't necessary.

David

Billy wrote:
....
All that and not a single citation, hmmmm.

since when in a conversation do you need
citations?

arguments can be made quite soundly from
reason and experience aside from quoting
some dusty economics books or digging
around on-line. if i'm not on-line i'm
not citing anything. this is OT in a
gardening edibles group and only tangentially
related to sustainable agriculture so ...
i guess i can't quite approach it as a
scholarly research paper...

if my reasoning is unsound then pick it
apart. David seems to be hacking at that
angle tho, so perhaps you can be safe on
the other approaches.


======

I'm reminded of the choir leader who happened to glimpse the pastors
sermon notes for the day. What caught his eye was, "argument weak here,
pound pulpit".

argument, we don't need no stinkin
argument.


McArthur , and I will be back shortly.

"You're fired!" Donald Trump.

is that quote enough?

ok, just kidding, you are not fired.
have a good night.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
...
All that and not a single citation, hmmmm.

since when in a conversation do you need
citations?

arguments can be made quite soundly from
reason and experience aside from quoting
some dusty economics books or digging
around on-line. if i'm not on-line i'm
not citing anything. this is OT in a
gardening edibles group and only tangentially
related to sustainable agriculture so ...
i guess i can't quite approach it as a
scholarly research paper...

if my reasoning is unsound then pick it
apart. David seems to be hacking at that
angle tho, so perhaps you can be safe on
the other approaches.


======

I'm reminded of the choir leader who happened to glimpse the pastors
sermon notes for the day. What caught his eye was, "argument weak here,
pound pulpit".

argument, we don't need no stinkin
argument.


McArthur , and I will be back shortly.

"You're fired!" Donald Trump.

is that quote enough?

ok, just kidding, you are not fired.
have a good night.


songbird

We don't need to show supporting authority? Great! I claim vindication,
and suggest that we move on to more important things, like why is the
Earth flat, and resting on the back of a turtle?

Did a little landscaping today, as well as planting some sunflowers and
cucumbers. I also had to replace a Stupice tomato that got ran over by
something. Three of 26 peppers also need to be replaced. It's supposed
to rain tomorrow, but be back in the 80s by the weekend.
=====

Capitalism

The socio-economic system where social relations are based on
commodities for exchange, in particular private ownership of the means
of production and on the exploitation of wage labour.

Capital is in the first place an accumulation of money and cannot make
its appearance in history until the circulation of commodities has given
rise to the money relation. As we like to say, "it takes money to make
money".

Secondly, the distinction between money which is capital, and money
which is money only, arises from the difference in their form of
circulation. Money which is acquired in order to buy something is just
money, facilitating the exchange of commodities. [Commodity - Money -
Commodity.] On the other hand, capital is money which is used to buy
something only in order to sell it again. [M - C - M.] This means that
capital exists only within the process of buying and selling, as money
advanced only in order to get it back again.

Thirdly, money is only capital if it buys a good whose consumption
brings about an increase in the value of the commodity, realised in
selling it for a Profit [or M - C - M'].
========

If Capitalism follows the above pattern, it will soon be dead, if it
isn't already.

http://www.greens.org/s-r/47/47-03.html
From an ecological point of view there is something crazy about
capitalism. An ecological worldview emphasizes harmony, sustainability,
moderation - rather like that of the ancient Greeks,

ROFL! holy crap, that is so blazingly funny and
not at all close to what history shows. the Greeks
destroyed their topsoil and killed/plundered about as
much as any civilization before them.

And we have done better? The game is lost when the plow hits the soil.
However, the Greeks did realize that letting a field go fallow for a
year was a good practice. So, yes, the Greeks lost their topsoil, but it
was in a more enlightened system than used by others.
======

Prominent interpretation, as well as criticism, of Smith's views on the
societal merits of unregulated labor management by the ruling class is
expressed by Noam Chomsky as follows: "He's pre-capitalist, a figure of
the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People
read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school.
Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he
talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people
get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of
labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid
and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in
any civilized society the government is going to have to take some
measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits."
=====

Time is up for me. I'll return as soon as possible. Don't be a stranger
;O)

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy
materials to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect.
Pretty soon you are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is
founded on growth. Even with planned obsolescence, an infinite
amount of widgets requires an infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.

No he isn't. The way capitalism works in Western economies requires
constant growth in the economy, not only that but it has to be at the
correct rate. Our (Oz) federal bank manipulates money with the
stated intent of maintaining growth within a narrow range - about 3%
PA IIRC. I think yours does too.

oh, i know, it's an attempt to moderate the so called
business cycle because there isn't a sufficient amount
of a safety net for people. the larger problem is that
the safety net is really people wishing that they didn't
have any responsibility for taking care of themselves.
which to me is a wider sign of how rotten the current
system is, but that's a whole different topic.


But get back to the main point. Governments and financial institutions
acknowledge the system produces crap outcomes if growth is not in the 'good'
range and they do all in their power to keep it there. Do you acknowledge
that capitalism produces unacceptible outcomes if growth is not maintained?

no. i think deflation or steady state on prices
is as preferable to some people as inflation is to
others. i think the policy of pushing the system
to have some inflation is actually destructive in
the long term, but the governments/social tinkerers
at present like to hide all sorts of inefficiencies
by using this. also it is a transfer of wealth
indirectly (not very efficiently either) from savers
to debtors (usually this means from the elderly to
the young).

the crap results are crap because the system is crap
front loaded from the start. garbage in, garbage out.

as for sticking to any one point, heh...
i'm in a rambly mood tonight.


as you have seen over a lifetime that even such
attempts at moderating the business cycle are largely
driven by entrenched interests in keeping the status-
quo. when there are large events that gets thrown
out the window (wars, natural catastrophes). so it
is largely an artificial mechanism that breaks given
the right lever.


If by entrenched interests you mean governments that don't want to see
rioting in the streets as either goods are not available due to depression
or money has no value due to hyperinflation then I agree. I also agree that
these economic and fiscal levers are of limited value.

but it isn't the capitalist system that makes hyperinflation,
it is the governments and the managers of the money supply
that abuse their powers and then the reaction of sane people
to that abuse.

riots are a whole different matter, a response to injustice
in some cases is the desire to correct the injustice.

i couldn't give you any system other than complete behavior
and emotional control which eliminates riots or unsatisfactory
outcomes to some people.


Politicians of most colours cannot keep from crowing
when growth is 'good' and trying to blame somebody else when it is
'bad'. They have accepted that the people want higher standards of
living (or at least as high as they have now) and that living
standards are inextricably linked to growth. There are plenty of
examples to support this where very fast growth or economic
shrinking has produced horrid outcomes for the wider population.

surely, however, there's also a fair bit of evidence
that efforts to limit the destruction only makes it
last longer.

Let's not get too sidetracked here.

i don't know if it really is a side track to point out
that one of the possible crappy outcomes of tinkering is
prolonged pain and poor economic performance. it isn't
a hard science any more than medicine is. the Japanese
real-estate bubble, when it finally burst, is pretty much
still on-going in being corrected. they've dragged their
fixes out for close to 15 years and they've pretty much
had the poor economy, market and close to a depression as
a result.

i think in the future many economists will call that
the Japanese Great Depression.


so instead of taking the hit up front
and getting on with things after shaking out the weak
businesses we drag all these weak business along.
eventually they do go under.


There is much more to it than weak businesses going under in bad times. But
let's stick to the point.

that capitalism requires profit? well how many
times can i disagree with that as it's pretty clear
to me that the system doesn't magically stop when
companies go non-profit or have a bad year. even in
the worst parts of the Great Depression there were
still companies in business, there were still people
buying and selling things. it really wasn't a problem
of capitalism, but many failed policies and the lack
of banking regulations. then about 80 years later we
ignored the lesson and made banking regulations too
lax and once again the economy took a severe hit,
but in that mess there were a lot of opportunities
for the smart person willing to take risks.


Very few publicly question the system that requires this but
question it we must.

Capitalism is the product of the era of unrestricted human expansion
across the globe. To maintain economic growth one simply increased
population and found new resources and markets in foreign lands. Of
course technology fuelled this expansion by enabling faster
extraction, transport and utilisation of resources.

it will change as values change. values will
change as resources become more limited. that's
the nature of the beast. prices rise as supply
becomes limited. people either produce their
own (food, water, etc.) or conserve or find other
sources. what drives the whole system is the
many individual choices made, how they add up.
when we start bumping up against hard limits
like fresh water and food supply then people
will start valuing water conservation and not
wasting so much food. this type of gradual shift
is already happening and will continue to happen.

There are three things wrong with this:

1) The assumption that market forces will eventually result in a
satisfactory new equilibrium

no, i only claim the system keeps working. it is a
dynamic system that also has many conflicting forces
just like there are many different actors with varying
degrees of influence.

i suspect the future is going to be full of many
unsatisfied people. we're not a species geared towards
contentment. it's not a skill that is taught, valued
or explored by many. i think i've done fairly well on
that count though, perhaps others can learn from what
i'm doing...


This is a blue-sky imagination product. Either you have to show that
capitalism with zero growth will continue without ultrahigh unemployment or
that a new system that doesn't produce unemployment with zero growth will
evolve. You have done neither.

i think you ignore the fact that for the most part
actual production of real things is a very minor part
of capitalism these days. i.e. the values have already
shifted. most people could be considered unemployed or
under-employed because most of what they do is shuffle
information, provide entertainment to others, they
really aren't producing tangible things. there are
millions of workers who simply have given up looking
for work. anyone over 50 has a very difficult time.
these people aren't included in the unemployment
statistics in the USoA unless you happen to find someone
who's really looking at the whole trend. that is just
one example of how the system shifts as the values
shift. this has happened several times in my life-time.
i don't expect this process to disappear.

(for a good example of how the current numbers are
being jiggered take a listen to a program from
This American Life called Trends that was on about a
month ago)


2) The assumption that the transition will be gradual and orderly

i don't make that claim either. i've been a student of
the markets and history to know better. the only argument
i'm making is that the system continues to function without
growth. we've had many periods of deflation or stagnation
and in those cases the markets worked, people bought and
sold things and the world did not end. yes, it hurt some
people and was painful, but that doesn't show that the
system didn't function. what it did show is that people
don't normally have any long-term thinking for retirement
or very much discipline when it comes to savings and
investing.


The booms and busts of the last 200 years give the lie to this. If anything
the global economy is less stable than individual economies. Shocks
propagate through the system at light speed now. Once real limits to
resources become apparent prices will rise very quickly, whole sectors that
work on thin margins will go belly-up very quickly. The adjustment is not
going to be pretty.

we have a government that has been running on debt
for eons, and it's still chugging along. we have
quite a few companies (public and private, non-profit
or not) and organizations that will continue along
quite fine even if they continue to lose money for
a period of years.

i do agree that the speed of things has greatly
increased, but that negative also has a positive in
that the whole system can react to new values much
more quickly. we are building a world-wide system
because the kinds of problems we are now having to
solve are world-wide. not that i'm saying it is
perfect by far. there's a lot to be said for needing
better regulations and some stops in place for when
it oscillates too far out of kilter. people who
put in automatic trading are simply nuts as far as
i'm concerned.


3) The assumption that it will happen soon enough to allow orderly
transition away from dependence on diminishing resources.

We see as plain as day with the climate change issue people will stick to
the old ways until the bitter end. They will not prepare in time for a new
future. They will waste time, deny, continue to exploit limited resources
until the last. The concept of finite resources that limit growth and
require a whole new way of thinking is not one that people want to believe -
therefore they don't - therefore they will not prepare for it.

no, there is no assumption of orderly because you
are talking about people here. people panic and
freak out over all sorts of things. all i assume is
that the system continues to function.

i agree with you about the lack of many people to
plan for the future. i don't know how this is going
to play out. it may not be very pretty, that i do
agree with. yet, through it all there will be
economic activity that continues. it won't be based
upon resources which no longer exist. it will be
reflecting possibilities of exploration for new
resources and also likely increasing values of
recycling technologies and work in that area.

the longer term, simply put, is very similar to
what happens if you read about the history of
science and some of the really long-fought dragged
out disagreements. the scientists died out and the
rest of the scientific community went on with what
actually appeared to be working. they still don't
have the full answer in many areas of science so
in effect there are many avenues still open for
arguing about physics and cosmology and ...
this is what will be happening with respect to
climate change deniers. eventually they die out
and are replaced by more aware people.

in the USoA a great number of farmers are quite
old and will be retiring. some of that land will
be put to use by younger people who have a better
idea of how to do things to preserve the topsoil and
produce food in ways that don't rely upon so much
inputs. it may take 100-200 years, but it will
happen. it's just how it goes. farmers who destroy
the land will eventually be forced out of business.
then there will be a chance for remediation.
techniques exist for pretty much any circumstance if
you have the time and patience.


Economic growth requires goods, production of goods require
materials. Thus as it currently works the system must continue to
extract fuel, metals, fibre, timber etc from the earth at an ever
increasing rate. Many of these resources are limited and will be
consumed sooner or later. Thus, the present system embodies the
seeds of its own destruction.

the system also has seeds of its own transformation.
we are the determiners of value, not the system, the
system works because of the choices that people make.
when prices rise then choices get made differently.


Hopeless optimism based on nothing but faith in economics which have
repeatedly been shown to be no better than voodoo. It isn't a matter of
deciding what brand of conflakes to buy, it's take everything you know and
rely on and turn it upside down. We are talking about changes that are way
outside the scope of anything in the past happening much more quickly all
over the world.

i'd say that you didn't live through the Crusades in
the Middle East or many other times of rapid change.
we're in for it. no doubt. i still say that the
capitalist system will continue on in some form or
another and it won't require growth. it just requires
people buying and selling. that's not faith. that's
facts. people trade things for other things. as long
as people exist they're not going to stop trading. i
don't understand where you come up with the idea that
entire economic system disappears. we have plenty of
examples from history that show that empires rise and
fall, but trading/commerce/markets/money/exchanges/etc.
all continue. for many years after the effective end
of the Roman Empire in Europe they still used the Roman
coins and tables of values for many purposes. it
worked well enough and so it went on.


The issue even
has a name "decoupling". The aim is to find a system where
maintaining a standard of living does not require constant growth,
ie the two are decoupled. So far nobody has done it.

the profit requirement is only limited to
being able to cover overhead of running any
business. the more efficient a business is
the more likely it keeps going. the smarter
any extractive business is, means it knows
it has to shift into renewables and recycling
or becoming a service provider. many companies
have research arms geared towards finding
better ways of doing things and finding other
uses for waste materials.


Profit shmoffit. We are not talking about keeping the investors happy at
the AGM. Back to the main point. How do you maintain constant economic
growth without matching growth in resources? You are just hand-waving the
issue away.

no, i'm simply stating that it's pretty clear that
economies continue to function even when they are not
growing. we've had recessions and depressions yet the
economy still worked. yes, it wasn't what everyone
desired, but it didn't vanish either. what did happen
is that new values were created and then the market
follows those forces as people act on the new
information and make different decisions. it's not
hand-waving away when we have plenty of historical
examples.

if you want to see the most recent example look at
how the shift in the world economy has gone from
manufacturing goods to the information and services.
what it took was people putting enough value on
information and entertainment. the change happened.

a great deal can be said that this is a temporary
change and at some point in the future there will be
some return to a more reality driven system. i sure
hope so. in the meantime we have the system that
reflects the values of the people in a large part
if they continue to stick their heads in the sand
and consume more than the planet can support then
there will be a backlash, a collapse and a great
deal of pain and likely some wars, death, diseases,
starvation, etc. all through that there will still
be a market, there will still be trading and there
will still be losses.

constant economic growth reported right now is often
false if you actually figured in costs of the pollution,
destruction of the environment, diseases, wars, debt,
etc.

if you really want to get critical, go there and
do the analysis. it's all manipulated by governments
bent on ignoring the known costs.


What is worse very few seem to be
concerned. We are generally restricted to peripheral arguments that
climate change isn't real or that science and technology will save
us. The fact that the core system was developed and succeeded in an
environment that no longer exists, and can only continue to succeed
when those conditions exist is widely ignored.

it comes down to energy and not much else.
all resources consumed can be recycled given
enough energy. the only tax is entropy.


In the long term possibly so. But saying that there is no scientific or
technical constraint on growth but energy does not tell us how to organise
humanity and its commerce to achieve this condition.

that is where values come in, and those values
drive the choices and those choices drive the market
(all to some extent, it's not perfect, there's
conflicts and false information).

right now the values needed for a sustainable future
are not widespread enough that all the people carry
them and act on them. but as time continues the older
population dies out and the newer population carries on
with better information. it may not be fast enough in
many cases and there's going to be a big mess in terms
of wrecked infrastructure and changed coastlines and
losses in land/topsoil, but eventually the system does
correct itself, as a closed system, if we're going to
survive, it's a certainty that is how it goes. how
many lives lost, how much damage is done to the other
species on the planet and how that may cause further
collapses is hard to say with certainty, but it's not
looking pretty. still the market will continue, people
were trading long before modern industrial capitalism
came along, it will continue long after. as long as
people are interacting it's almost guaranteed.


the limitation on the overall system is if
the sun gives us enough energy to do everything
we want to do given the materials at hand. when
cheap oil and other fossil fuels run out then
the shift gets made to recycling and renewables.
there is a good chance by then we'll have viable
space colonies.

widely ignoring how things change won't make
any company likely to last long. companies,
like the people that run them, have an interest
in keeping going, in continuing, so they'll pay
attention to changes. many can even drive the
pace of change faster than a government or an
individual can. like, in my lifetime i'll never
buy several hundred million watts of clean energy
or be a force to recycle huge amounts of materials
that used to be aimed at landfills or incineration,
but a large company can do that and many are.

the system can correct itself. it is gradually
doing so. if embedded subsidies for destructive
practices were removed and shifted towards supporting
cleaner alternatives then the change would be even
faster.

You have done nothing to show me that system will repair itself and that it
will happen in good time.

i don't know. i can't prove anything about the
future. get a few nutjobs and nuclear weapons running
around and suddenly we have a whole different set of
values (clean air, filtered water, perhaps living
underground in some form or another, dunno).

good time, the planet has been going on for
millions of years. it's not going to disappear.
if we have an entire collapse it's pretty likely
there will still be some people left to keep on
going. hopefully they'll be smarter.


The system is facing the biggest changes in
history and you just assume that the way it works in economics 101 text book
will be just dandy. This is no better than those who say there is no
problem because God put the world here for mankind to exploit and He
wouldn't lie so all is right.

i'm not saying that at all. if you've read what
i've written here you know i have a lot of concern
for the environment, for how people will figure out
how to feed themselves, etc. i don't have any claims
for how the transformation comes about. i do know
that markets will be a part of that. i don't see
them disappearing as long as people are around.


How do you decouple economic growth from resource growth? So far you
haven't given any indication that you know how or that you can show that it
isn't necessary.

it's been done to some extent as an example already
(the shift to information technologies and entertainment)
as values and desires shifted to these intangibles.
i'm not sure to what extent that kind of intangible
creation of value is possible, how far it can be pushed
from actual reality and what it will be like as forces
to drive the market or how that will all play out in the
longer term. i suspect reality will be the stronger
force in the end and that more people will have to grow
their own food and find ways to conserve energy and
other resources. an accurate accounting of pollution
(in all forms) will be critical in getting the market to
reflect what reality is showing us. as we have more
observations and scientists (and regular people involved
too) involved we get a better chance of making progress.

what the absolute closed system population of the
earth can sustain, i don't know. i also don't know
what size economy is needed to make sure that everyone
gets most of their actual needs met (ignoring the
argument about desires vs. actual needs).

there will also be very hard fights to be had over
expending resources for space flight, colonies on
other planets, doing research on pretty much all sorts
of hard to immediately justify science. these will
be fights for the future of humanity. then there will
also be fights over wild spaces, species diversity and
conservation vs. human needs, etc. i don't know how
these will work out. i hope they work out that we have
a planet still full of wild areas and a more limited
population that knows how to live in a responsible
manner. one that also has enough resources to get into
space and pressing on with getting to other planets and
solar systems (perhaps we'll never actually have to
live on a planet again if we learn what it takes to
live in a closed system smaller than a planet). it's
too early to know. i'll be long dead before the answers
to these questions are in, but i'll put my values behind
the choices i can influence now (treating the land
well, conservation, etc.) that can reduce the pressure
on the rest of the planet. as best i can. with what
i learn. like anyone else who's paying attention.

i do have both hope and faith that humans will be
around, where there are people there will be trading of
one kind or another. not all trades are profitable to
all. not all economies will do well. some people will
be unhappy and others will be just fine. the assumption
that an economy must grow is false. in a closed system
an accurate market will eventually be fairly fixed.
what is lost as friction is made up for by advances in
knowledge or efficiency. at least until the sun runs
out we have at least a large source of energy to draw
upon and a lot of recyclable materials to work with.

i've written elsewhere that i support taxes inversely
and exponentionally related to how much a produced item
is renewable/recycled/recyclable. that adjustment to any
of the large economies already (even if phased in over a
period of years) would do a lot to offset damage done.
that money could be spent on reclaiming and restoring
areas for environmental needs. we have a lot of space
that is currently being wasted that can be reclaimed and
put back into soaking up CO2 again and providing more
habitat for wild species.

if it comes to a great collapse then the wild areas
return and the topsoil regenerates at some rate. any
bare spots that can support life will get used in one
form or another. life is pretty tenacious.

i don't consider what i have as faith, i have both
science and history that show what happens after collapses.
it's not pleasant, sure, but some survive and carry on.
short of complete nuclear blasting of every weapon and
short of large comet strikes and super-volcanoes and
the sun burning out, i'm pretty sure some form of
humanity continues. it may be the case though that we
find other forms (if genetic tinkering gets to be
widespread we may take on all sorts of strange forms
-- i dunno the future exactly) and that gives us more
chances to continue too.

c'est la vie,


songbird

Billy wrote:
....
We don't need to show supporting authority? Great! I claim vindication,
and suggest that we move on to more important things, like why is the
Earth flat, and resting on the back of a turtle?

ummm..., okey...


Did a little landscaping today, as well as planting some sunflowers and
cucumbers. I also had to replace a Stupice tomato that got ran over by
something. Three of 26 peppers also need to be replaced. It's supposed
to rain tomorrow, but be back in the 80s by the weekend.

we also are due for rain tomorrow. good,
it's much better than well water.


=====

Capitalism

The socio-economic system where social relations are based on
commodities for exchange, in particular private ownership of the means
of production and on the exploitation of wage labour.

Capital is in the first place an accumulation of money and cannot make
its appearance in history until the circulation of commodities has given
rise to the money relation. As we like to say, "it takes money to make
money".

Secondly, the distinction between money which is capital, and money
which is money only, arises from the difference in their form of
circulation. Money which is acquired in order to buy something is just
money, facilitating the exchange of commodities. [Commodity - Money -
Commodity.] On the other hand, capital is money which is used to buy
something only in order to sell it again. [M - C - M.] This means that
capital exists only within the process of buying and selling, as money
advanced only in order to get it back again.

Thirdly, money is only capital if it buys a good whose consumption
brings about an increase in the value of the commodity, realised in
selling it for a Profit [or M - C - M'].
========

If Capitalism follows the above pattern, it will soon be dead, if it
isn't already.

i guess i must be using some archaic meaning of
capitalism because it doesn't say anything about these
kinds of distinctions. capital can be all sorts of
things. it varies as much as the meaning of wealth
or money can vary (social conventions, whims, fads)
apart from the actual supply and demand curve.

i don't see commodities or wealth disappearing
any more than i see a lack of new fads. the
recent one to gain steam is gluten free. on top
of the Greek yogurt. whey silly.


http://www.greens.org/s-r/47/47-03.html
From an ecological point of view there is something crazy about
capitalism. An ecological worldview emphasizes harmony, sustainability,
moderation - rather like that of the ancient Greeks,

ROFL! holy crap, that is so blazingly funny and
not at all close to what history shows. the Greeks
destroyed their topsoil and killed/plundered about as
much as any civilization before them.

And we have done better?

not in the whole, but in parts yes. at
least we know things are made of more complex
bits than air, water earth and fire.


The game is lost when the plow hits the soil.

just depends upon how it's done. like
many things, it varies. forms of no till
use of an area can deplete it just as much
as tilling. overgraze a pasture and it will
fail in time. return to more appropriate
grazing and it will recover (faster using
some methods than others).


However, the Greeks did realize that letting a field go fallow for a
year was a good practice. So, yes, the Greeks lost their topsoil, but it
was in a more enlightened system than used by others.

the Hebrews also had their fallow seasons.
it didn't prevent the wide scale destruction of
their topsoils either.

in other parts of Europe there have been
farms and gardens for hundreds or thousands
of years. those are what we should be paying
attention to... likely they are organic as
much as possible and also likely to be
manured in some manner. crop rotations, etc.
all likely.


======

Prominent interpretation, as well as criticism, of Smith's views on the
societal merits of unregulated labor management by the ruling class is
expressed by Noam Chomsky as follows: "He's pre-capitalist, a figure of
the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People
read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school.
Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he
talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people
get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of
labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid
and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in
any civilized society the government is going to have to take some
measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits."

heehee, ain't that the truth. thank goodness very
few people actually work those kinds of jobs. some
people actually do quite well with a limited task.
they pretty much go on auto-pilot for hours at a time
and they can think about other things or just play
songs in their heads. sometimes when i'm weeding
i can go on quite a while without noticing what i'm
doing in specific because i'm listening to the birds
or thinking about some philosophical point or what
i've recently read or been arguing about on usenet.


=====

Time is up for me. I'll return as soon as possible. Don't be a stranger
;O)

dude! i got a few more peas and onions planted.
increasing the variety of plants in the auxiliary
strawberry patch. we'll see what happens. got
plenty more to do. needed to take a break before
round 2. that is going to be weeding and sitting
and listening to the birdies and windchimes out in
the green manure patch. i've not spent much time
there this season and some grasses could use a
bit of trimming back or digging up. probably pick
a few bugs off the rhubarb. those are some wild
looking critters. plugs with a sharp snout and
not much else.


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:

I was taking the day off, and thought I'd embroider on your conversation
with David. Below is my abbreviated response.

David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
...
capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

You sell one, and buy materials to make 2. You sell 2, and buy
materials to make 4. You sell 4, and buy materials to make 8, ect.
Pretty soon you are looking at very big numbers. Capitalism is
founded on growth. Even with planned obsolescence, an infinite
amount of widgets requires an infinite amount of resources.

you're confusing capitalism with some imaginary
construct.

No he isn't. The way capitalism works in Western economies requires
constant growth in the economy, not only that but it has to be at the
correct rate. Our (Oz) federal bank manipulates money with the
stated intent of maintaining growth within a narrow range - about 3%
PA IIRC. I think yours does too.

oh, i know, it's an attempt to moderate the so called
business cycle because there isn't a sufficient amount
of a safety net for people. the larger problem is that
the safety net is really people wishing that they didn't
have any responsibility for taking care of themselves.
which to me is a wider sign of how rotten the current
system is, but that's a whole different topic.


But get back to the main point. Governments and financial institutions
acknowledge the system produces crap outcomes if growth is not in the
'good'
range and they do all in their power to keep it there. Do you acknowledge
that capitalism produces unacceptible outcomes if growth is not maintained?


no. i think deflation or steady state on prices
is as preferable to some people as inflation is to
others. i think the policy of pushing the system
to have some inflation is actually destructive in
the long term, but the governments/social tinkerers
at present like to hide all sorts of inefficiencies
by using this.

also it is a transfer of wealth
indirectly (not very efficiently either) from savers
to debtors (usually this means from the elderly to
the young).

More accurately, from Main Street to Wall Street. The impoverishment of
the elderly, and the young, moves ahead in tandem. What geezers lose in
Social Security isn't going to education. It's going for more weapon
systems to use against the enemies of business, foreign and domestic,
and oil depletion allowances, rebates to G.E., and weaponized,
agricultural subsidies.

the crap results are crap because the system is crap
front loaded from the start. garbage in, garbage out.

By George, I think you got it.

as for sticking to any one point, heh...
i'm in a rambly mood tonight.


as you have seen over a lifetime that even such
attempts at moderating the business cycle are largely
driven by entrenched interests in keeping the status-
quo. when there are large events that gets thrown
out the window (wars, natural catastrophes). so it
is largely an artificial mechanism that breaks given
the right lever.
The right lever seems always be handy. Since its birth 200-300 years ago
as the dominant economic system, Capitalism has always been an unstable
system; unstable in the precise sense that it suffers from a business
cycle. A constantly recurring cycle of sudden breakdown distinguished by
rising unemployment, mass bankruptcies of enterprises, idling of
productive capacity [such as] tools, equipment, and raw materials,
followed by an upswing. These cycles have never been controlled or
overcome. They vary in length and severity. Some are short and shallow,
while others such as the one we're in now are deep and long lasting.


If by entrenched interests you mean governments that don't want to see
rioting in the streets as either goods are not available due to depression
or money has no value due to hyperinflation then I agree. I also agree
that
these economic and fiscal levers are of limited value.
but it isn't the capitalist system that makes hyperinflation,
it is the governments and the managers of the money supply
that abuse their powers and then the reaction of sane people
to that abuse.
And prey tell, who controls government? Lobbyists? Who controls
lobbyists?


riots are a whole different matter, a response to injustice
in some cases is the desire to correct the injustice.

i couldn't give you any system other than complete behavior
and emotional control which eliminates riots or unsatisfactory
outcomes to some people.


Politicians of most colours cannot keep from crowing
when growth is 'good' and trying to blame somebody else when it is
'bad'. They have accepted that the people want higher standards of
living (or at least as high as they have now) and that living
standards are inextricably linked to growth. There are plenty of
examples to support this where very fast growth or economic
shrinking has produced horrid outcomes for the wider population.

surely, however, there's also a fair bit of evidence
that efforts to limit the destruction only makes it
last longer.

Let's not get too sidetracked here.

i don't know if it really is a side track to point out
that one of the possible crappy outcomes of tinkering is
prolonged pain and poor economic performance. it isn't
a hard science any more than medicine is. the Japanese
real-estate bubble, when it finally burst, is pretty much
still on-going in being corrected. they've dragged their
fixes out for close to 15 years and they've pretty much
had the poor economy, market and close to a depression as
a result.

i think in the future many economists will call that
the Japanese Great Depression.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/op...e-model.html?r
ef=paulkrugman&_r=0


so instead of taking the hit up front
and getting on with things after shaking out the weak
businesses we drag all these weak business along.
eventually they do go under.

By weak you must mean all those that lack well heeled lobbyists.



There is much more to it than weak businesses going under in bad times.
But
let's stick to the point.

that capitalism requires profit? well how many
times can i disagree with that as it's pretty clear
to me that the system doesn't magically stop when
companies go non-profit or have a bad year.
Never the less companies must consistently grow, and have profits for
their investors. This means reducing costs, and "increasing" market
share.


even in
the worst parts of the Great Depression there were
still companies in business, there were still people
buying and selling things. it really wasn't a problem
of capitalism, but many failed policies and the lack
of banking regulations. then about 80 years later we
ignored the lesson and made banking regulations too
lax and once again the economy took a severe hit,
but in that mess there were a lot of opportunities
for the smart person willing to take risks.
When the markets are manipulated?


Very few publicly question the system that requires this but
question it we must.

Capitalism is the product of the era of unrestricted human expansion
across the globe. To maintain economic growth one simply increased
population and found new resources and markets in foreign lands. Of
course technology fuelled this expansion by enabling faster
extraction, transport and utilisation of resources.

it will change as values change. values will
change as resources become more limited. that's
the nature of the beast. prices rise as supply
becomes limited. people either produce their
own (food, water, etc.) or conserve or find other
sources. what drives the whole system is the
many individual choices made, how they add up.
when we start bumping up against hard limits
like fresh water and food supply then people
will start valuing water conservation and not
wasting so much food. this type of gradual shift
is already happening and will continue to happen.

There are three things wrong with this:

1) The assumption that market forces will eventually result in a
satisfactory new equilibrium

no, i only claim the system keeps working.
Manipulating the rules isn't a system.

it is a
dynamic system that also has many conflicting forces
just like there are many different actors with varying
degrees of influence.
It must be wonderful to be that naive.

Until we have price fixing between corporations, and lobbyists that
promote loopholes for large corporations at the expense of small
business. Lower taxes, means cheaper borrowing, which is an advantage to
the large corporations over smaller ones.

i suspect the future is going to be full of many
unsatisfied people. we're not a species geared towards
contentment. it's not a skill that is taught, valued
or explored by many. i think i've done fairly well on
that count though, perhaps others can learn from what
i'm doing...


This is a blue-sky imagination product. Either you have to show that
capitalism with zero growth will continue without ultrahigh unemployment or
that a new system that doesn't produce unemployment with zero growth will
evolve. You have done neither.

i think you ignore the fact that for the most part
actual production of real things is a very minor part
of capitalism these days. i.e. the values have already
shifted. most people could be considered unemployed or
under-employed because most of what they do is shuffle
information, provide entertainment to others, they
really aren't producing tangible things. there are
millions of workers who simply have given up looking
for work. anyone over 50 has a very difficult time.
these people aren't included in the unemployment
statistics in the USoA unless you happen to find someone
who's really looking at the whole trend. that is just
one example of how the system shifts as the values
shift. this has happened several times in my life-time.
i don't expect this process to disappear.

(for a good example of how the current numbers are
being jiggered take a listen to a program from
This American Life called Trends that was on about a
month ago)

Are you suggesting that victims of hurricane Sandy, or the tornadoes in
Moore, Oklahoma, or the explosion in West, Texas, or midwest droughts,
or developmental disabilities, or disabling accidents, or lose work due
to cancer don't deserve support from the rest of us? Really?!!

In listening to the program, I didn't hear that there was any fraud
involved.

(I've noticed in the past that you seem to think that there are many
common citizens who are free-loading.)
http://thinkbynumbers.org/government...lfare/corporat
e-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/

[It isn't an equal market for all when one party can exert influence the
transaction surreptitiously]


2) The assumption that the transition will be gradual and orderly

i don't make that claim either. i've been a student of
the markets and history to know better. the only argument
i'm making is that the system continues to function without
growth. we've had many periods of deflation or stagnation
and in those cases the markets worked, people bought and
sold things and the world did not end. yes, it hurt some
people and was painful, but that doesn't show that the
system didn't function. what it did show is that people
don't normally have any long-term thinking for retirement
or very much discipline when it comes to savings and
investing.

And then there were all those commercials from banks about tapping the
equity of your home for renovations, a new car, vacations.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...my-idUSL5E8M46
3M20121105
Americans' suicide rates up since economic crisis began
=====
yes, it hurt some people and was painful, but that doesn't show that the
system didn't function.

No it seems to have functioned just fine.

We are now in the 6th year of this global recession/crisis. Unemployment
is at an all-time high in many European countries, while here in North
America youth unemployment continues to steadily rise. All the while
corporate profits have exponentially increased with little if any
trickle-down to the masses. Uh-huh.


The booms and busts of the last 200 years give the lie to this. If
anything
the global economy is less stable than individual economies. Shocks
propagate through the system at light speed now. Once real limits to
resources become apparent prices will rise very quickly, whole sectors that
work on thin margins will go belly-up very quickly. The adjustment is not
going to be pretty.

we have a government that has been running on debt
for eons, and it's still chugging along. we have
quite a few companies (public and private, non-profit
or not) and organizations that will continue along
quite fine even if they continue to lose money for
a period of years.

It sure would be illuminating if you could give a source for that
pronouncement. What we have seen for an awfully long time is government
running at a loss because of it's giveaways to large corporations.
Whether it is the contract basis for weapons from our
military-industrial-complex, or putting in new locks on the Mississippi,
that will allow larger barges to supply Cargill, and ADM with their
government subsidized grains a few cents/pound cheaper.

As for business failure, I an loth to offer a citation as this is not an
academic paper, but merely a couple of cloth heads yacking at each
other, BUT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_business_failures#1990
Scroll down from 1990 to 2010. You will see that in 2008, and 2009 a
number of businesses didn't continue along quite fine. Those capitalist
enterprises that did continue along quite fine got government welfare.

i do agree that the speed of things has greatly
increased, but that negative also has a positive in
that the whole system can react to new values much
more quickly. we are building a world-wide system
because the kinds of problems we are now having to
solve are world-wide. not that i'm saying it is
perfect by far. there's a lot to be said for needing
better regulations and some stops in place for when
it oscillates too far out of kilter. people who
put in automatic trading are simply nuts as far as
i'm concerned.

You mean like the stock exchanges?


3) The assumption that it will happen soon enough to allow orderly
transition away from dependence on diminishing resources.

We see as plain as day with the climate change issue people will stick to
the old ways until the bitter end. They will not prepare in time for a new
future. They will waste time, deny, continue to exploit limited resources
until the last. The concept of finite resources that limit growth and
require a whole new way of thinking is not one that people want to believe
-
therefore they don't - therefore they will not prepare for it.

no, there is no assumption of orderly because you
are talking about people here. people panic and
freak out over all sorts of things. all i assume is
that the system continues to function.

I guess we need a definition of function.

i agree with you about the lack of many people to
plan for the future. i don't know how this is going
to play out. it may not be very pretty, that i do
agree with. yet, through it all there will be
economic activity that continues. it won't be based
upon resources which no longer exist. it will be
reflecting possibilities of exploration for new
resources and also likely increasing values of
recycling technologies and work in that area.

the longer term, simply put, is very similar to
what happens if you read about the history of
science and some of the really long-fought dragged
out disagreements. the scientists died out and the
rest of the scientific community went on with what
actually appeared to be working.
Sorry, what are you talking about? Science is always open to amendment,
based on the accepted "facts" to the most inclusive answer. The more
questions your model can answer the better the model.
they still don't
have the full answer in many areas of science so
in effect there are many avenues still open for
arguing about physics and cosmology and ...
this is what will be happening with respect to
climate change deniers. eventually they die out
and are replaced by more aware people.
And many more who believe, may die as well, as fossil fuel extractors
spend huge amounts of money to obfuscate the impact of "green house
gases", as did the manufacturers of PCBs whose products destroyed the
Earth's protective layer of ozone, operators of "acid rain" generating
smokestacks, and the purveyors of cancer sticks. They, all, just wanted
to squeeze out a few more billion dollars.


in the USoA a great number of farmers are quite
old and will be retiring. some of that land will
be put to use by younger people who have a better
idea of how to do things to preserve the topsoil and
produce food in ways that don't rely upon so much
inputs. it may take 100-200 years,
Out of time! The high water demands of agriculture in both India (where
it accounts for 90 per cent of water usage) and China (where it accounts
for 65 per cent of water) will lead to a drop in wheat and rice yields
of between 30-50 per cent by 2050, according to the report. It said both
countries would be forced to import 200-300 million tonnes of crops.
Thailand, and Vietnam rely on river delta for growing rice. You know
what's going to happen to those river deltas, don't you? We don't have
no stinkin' 100 years to wait. A sane person would be running around
like their hair was on fire trying to get someone, anyone in power to do
something, because many are not going to go into that dark night softly.

but it will
happen. it's just how it goes. farmers who destroy
the land will eventually be forced out of business.
then there will be a chance for remediation.
techniques exist for pretty much any circumstance if
you have the time and patience.


Economic growth requires goods, production of goods require
materials. Thus as it currently works the system must continue to
extract fuel, metals, fibre, timber etc from the earth at an ever
increasing rate. Many of these resources are limited and will be
consumed sooner or later. Thus, the present system embodies the
seeds of its own destruction.

the system also has seeds of its own transformation.
we are the determiners of value, not the system, the
system works because of the choices that people make.
when prices rise then choices get made differently.


Hopeless optimism based on nothing but faith in economics which have
repeatedly been shown to be no better than voodoo. It isn't a matter of
deciding what brand of conflakes to buy, it's take everything you know and
rely on and turn it upside down. We are talking about changes that are way
outside the scope of anything in the past happening much more quickly all
over the world.

i'd say that you didn't live through the Crusades in
the Middle East or many other times of rapid change.
we're in for it. no doubt. i still say that the
capitalist system
Time out! Any system of economics isn't Capitalism.

will continue on in some form or
another and it won't require growth. it just requires
people buying and selling. that's not faith. that's
facts. people trade things for other things. as long
as people exist they're not going to stop trading.
Bartering isn't Capitalism. Food rots, animals die, art goes out of
style. The experience of wars tells us that people will exchange a
Picasso for a hamburger, because the participants aren't on a level
playing field. This is called "Predatory Capitalism". Is gambling
Capitalism? The commodities futures exchange will allow you to bet of
the value of wheat or corn, or any other commodity. This is where we got
into trouble with derivatives based on mortgages. This is also called
"Casino Capitalism".
Again, Capitalism is using capital to create more capital.

i
don't understand where you come up with the idea that
entire economic system disappears. we have plenty of
examples from history that show that empires rise and
fall, but trading/commerce/markets/money/exchanges/etc.
all continue. for many years after the effective end
of the Roman Empire in Europe they still used the Roman
coins and tables of values for many purposes. it
worked well enough and so it went on.


The issue even
has a name "decoupling". The aim is to find a system where
maintaining a standard of living does not require constant growth,
ie the two are decoupled. So far nobody has done it.

the profit requirement is only limited to
being able to cover overhead of running any
business. the more efficient a business is
the more likely it keeps going. the smarter
any extractive business is, means it knows
it has to shift into renewables and recycling
or becoming a service provider. many companies
have research arms geared towards finding
better ways of doing things and finding other
uses for waste materials.


Profit shmoffit. We are not talking about keeping the investors happy at
the AGM. Back to the main point. How do you maintain constant economic
growth without matching growth in resources? You are just hand-waving the
issue away.

no, i'm simply stating that it's pretty clear that
economies continue to function even when they are not
growing.
Thing is, Capitalism is only about 300 years old. What you are talking
about is barter.

we've had recessions and depressions yet the
economy still worked. yes, it wasn't what everyone
desired, but it didn't vanish either. what did happen
is that new values were created and then the market
follows those forces as people act on the new
information and make different decisions. it's not
hand-waving away when we have plenty of historical
examples.

if you want to see the most recent example look at
how the shift in the world economy has gone from
manufacturing goods to the information and services.
what it took was people putting enough value on
information and entertainment. the change happened.
Because of labor laws in the industrialized countries. Try to talk an
American, or an Australian into working for $3/day in a Bangladesh sweat
shop.

a great deal can be said that this is a temporary
change and at some point in the future there will be
some return to a more reality driven system. i sure
hope so.

in the meantime we have the system that
reflects the values of the people in a large part
if they continue to stick their heads in the sand
and consume more than the planet can support
That's because it is marketed to us in slick advertising as being
desirable. Processed foods made from refined ingredients aren't "time
savers", if you include your hospital visits. Or the latest electronic
toy made from rare earths, that cause wars from Afghanistan to the
Congo. Feed your ego, the environment will take care of itself.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) argued that his belief that global warming is a
hoax is biblically inspired. "Genesis 8:22 says "as long as the earth
remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and
summer, day and night." My point (Inhofe's) is, God's still up there.
The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to
change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

And this is what passes for a leader in the U.S. today.


then
there will be a backlash, a collapse and a great
deal of pain and likely some wars, death, diseases,
starvation, etc. all through that there will still
be a market, there will still be trading and there
will still be losses.

You say that like you don't have any descendants, no kids, or grandkids.

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
children.
~ Native American Proverb

constant economic growth reported right now is often
false if you actually figured in costs of the pollution,
destruction of the environment, diseases, wars, debt,
etc.

if you really want to get critical, go there and
do the analysis. it's all manipulated by governments
bent on ignoring the known costs.

Because it is advantageous to their benefactors.


What is worse very few seem to be
concerned. We are generally restricted to peripheral arguments that
climate change isn't real or that science and technology will save
us. The fact that the core system was developed and succeeded in an
environment that no longer exists, and can only continue to succeed
when those conditions exist is widely ignored.

it comes down to energy and not much else.
all resources consumed can be recycled given
enough energy. the only tax is entropy.
Entropy? Friction maybe.


In the long term possibly so. But saying that there is no scientific or
technical constraint on growth but energy does not tell us how to organise
humanity and its commerce to achieve this condition.

that is where values come in, and those values
drive the choices and those choices drive the market
(all to some extent, it's not perfect, there's
conflicts and false information).

right now the values needed for a sustainable future
are not widespread enough that all the people carry
them and act on them. but as time continues the older
population dies out and the newer population carries on
with better information. it may not be fast enough in
many cases and there's going to be a big mess in terms
of wrecked infrastructure and changed coastlines and
losses in land/topsoil, but eventually the system does
correct itself, as a closed system, if we're going to
survive,
Aw, the BIG "if". Have Pakistan, or North Korea lob a couple of nukes
into that mix, and it will be tough, even on the cockroaches.

One hundred thousand years from now all the plastic beer can holders
will have broken down, and life will get a chance to start anew, without
us.

it's a certainty that is how it goes. how
many lives lost, how much damage is done to the other
species on the planet and how that may cause further
collapses is hard to say with certainty, but it's not
looking pretty. still the market will continue, people
were trading long before modern industrial capitalism
came along, it will continue long after. as long as
people are interacting it's almost guaranteed.
Again, bartering isn't Capitalism.


the limitation on the overall system is if
the sun gives us enough energy to do everything
we want to do given the materials at hand. when
cheap oil and other fossil fuels run out then
the shift gets made to recycling and renewables.
there is a good chance by then we'll have viable
space colonies.

Your solutions seem to need a couple hundred years to realize
themselves, but the problems will be very noticeable by 2020 as we run
out of clean water. Did you happen to hear that news clip about
"Fracking". Five years ago, "Fracking" was exempted by law from water
pollution.

widely ignoring how things change won't make
any company likely to last long. companies,
like the people that run them, have an interest
in keeping going, in continuing, so they'll pay
attention to changes. many can even drive the
pace of change faster than a government or an
individual can. like, in my lifetime i'll never
buy several hundred million watts of clean energy
or be a force to recycle huge amounts of materials
that used to be aimed at landfills or incineration,
but a large company can do that and many are.

the system can correct itself. it is gradually
doing so. if embedded subsidies for destructive
practices were removed and shifted towards supporting
cleaner alternatives then the change would be even
faster.

You have done nothing to show me that system will repair itself and that it
will happen in good time.

i don't know. i can't prove anything about the
future. get a few nutjobs and nuclear weapons running
around and suddenly we have a whole different set of
values (clean air, filtered water, perhaps living
underground in some form or another, dunno).

good time, the planet has been going on for
millions of years. it's not going to disappear.
if we have an entire collapse it's pretty likely
there will still be some people left to keep on
going. hopefully they'll be smarter.


The system is facing the biggest changes in
history and you just assume that the way it works in economics 101 text
book
will be just dandy. This is no better than those who say there is no
problem because God put the world here for mankind to exploit and He
wouldn't lie so all is right.
Amen, Brother, Amen!

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
~ Epicurus

i'm not saying that at all. if you've read what
i've written here you know i have a lot of concern
for the environment, for how people will figure out
how to feed themselves, etc.
You don't seem concerned.

i don't have any claims
for how the transformation comes about. i do know
that markets will be a part of that. i don't see
them disappearing as long as people are around.
It's like your talking about the "Free Market". You don't have to know
anything about the "Free Market", because it corrects itself.
History shows that the so called "Free Market" is a rigged market.


How do you decouple economic growth from resource growth? So far you
haven't given any indication that you know how or that you can show that it
isn't necessary.

it's been done to some extent as an example already
(the shift to information technologies and entertainment)
as values and desires shifted to these intangibles.
i'm not sure to what extent that kind of intangible
creation of value is possible, how far it can be pushed
from actual reality and what it will be like as forces
to drive the market or how that will all play out in the
longer term. i suspect reality will be the stronger
force in the end and that more people will have to grow
their own food and find ways to conserve energy and
other resources. an accurate accounting of pollution
(in all forms) will be critical in getting the market to
reflect what reality is showing us. as we have more
observations and scientists (and regular people involved
too) involved we get a better chance of making progress.

How many people and observations do you need? Ninty-eight percent (98%)
of climate scientists say we are in for a fall, yet we are told,"some
say yes, and others say no". It's not like that. Ninty-eight percent
(98%) say watch out! Yet, Inhofe, says "God is with US", and the fossil
fuel extractor's shills tell us it's a hoax. It doesn't seem that
observations and scientists influence us much at all.

what the absolute closed system population of the
earth can sustain, i don't know. i also don't know
what size economy is needed to make sure that everyone
gets most of their actual needs met (ignoring the
argument about desires vs. actual needs).

there will also be very hard fights to be had over
expending resources for space flight, colonies on
other planets, doing research on pretty much all sorts
of hard to immediately justify science. these will
be fights for the future of humanity. then there will
also be fights over wild spaces, species diversity and
conservation vs. human needs, etc. i don't know how
these will work out. i hope they work out that we have
a planet still full of wild areas and a more limited
population that knows how to live in a responsible
manner. one that also has enough resources to get into
space and pressing on with getting to other planets and
solar systems (perhaps we'll never actually have to
live on a planet again if we learn what it takes to
live in a closed system smaller than a planet). it's
too early to know. i'll be long dead before the answers
to these questions are in, but i'll put my values behind
the choices i can influence now (treating the land
well, conservation, etc.) that can reduce the pressure
on the rest of the planet. as best i can. with what
i learn. like anyone else who's paying attention.

i do have both hope and faith that humans will be
around, where there are people there will be trading of
one kind or another. not all trades are profitable to
all. not all economies will do well. some people will
be unhappy

The homeless, hungry, and the sick and the dead, who are of no concern
to others.

and others will be just fine. the assumption
that an economy must grow is false.
It seems as if it is a closed, finite system with no room to grow,
except to devour our own. As the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Have an answer for that?

in a closed system
an accurate market will eventually be fairly fixed.
what is lost as friction is made up for by advances in
knowledge or efficiency. at least until the sun runs
out we have at least a large source of energy to draw
upon and a lot of recyclable materials to work with.

Pollyanna strikes again!
A recitation of your beliefs doesn't encourage my hope. Maybe I'm just
old school in that I like to prepare for the worst, and hope for the
best.

i've written elsewhere that i support taxes inversely
and exponentionally related to how much a produced item
is renewable/recycled/recyclable. that adjustment to any
of the large economies already (even if phased in over a
period of years) would do a lot to offset damage done.
that money could be spent on reclaiming and restoring
areas for environmental needs.
Yet the business paradigm is privatize the profits, and socialize the
cost, like with air pollution.

we have a lot of space
that is currently being wasted that can be reclaimed and
put back into soaking up CO2 again and providing more
habitat for wild species.
And it will happen just as soon as you can make it a source of corporate
wealth.

if it comes to a great collapse then the wild areas
return and the topsoil regenerates at some rate. any
bare spots that can support life will get used in one
form or another. life is pretty tenacious.
At least on the single cell level, it is.

i don't consider what i have as faith, i have both
science and history that show what happens after collapses.
it's not pleasant, sure, but some survive and carry on.
short of complete nuclear blasting of every weapon and
short of large comet strikes and super-volcanoes and
the sun burning out, i'm pretty sure some form of
humanity continues.
Other species have come and gone. Things like us, in one form or another
have been around for about 2.5 million years. Homo sapiens have only
been around 300,000 years. Don't let hubris cloud your Weltanschauung.
The dinosaurs had it down pretty good, but then things went to hell very
quickly. Yes birds survived that one. I wonder which mammal will survive
the next?
it may be the case though that we
find other forms (if genetic tinkering gets to be
widespread we may take on all sorts of strange forms
-- i dunno the future exactly) and that gives us more
chances to continue too.

c'est la vie,


songbird

That's all Folks.

It's the Best of All Possible Worlds.

--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

In article ,
songbird wrote:

Billy wrote:
...
All that and not a single citation, hmmmm.

since when in a conversation do you need
citations?

arguments can be made quite soundly from
reason and experience aside from quoting
some dusty economics books or digging
around on-line. if i'm not on-line i'm
not citing anything. this is OT in a
gardening edibles group and only tangentially
related to sustainable agriculture so ...
i guess i can't quite approach it as a
scholarly research paper...

if my reasoning is unsound then pick it
apart. David seems to be hacking at that
angle tho, so perhaps you can be safe on
the other approaches.


======

I'm reminded of the choir leader who happened to glimpse the pastors
sermon notes for the day. What caught his eye was, "argument weak here,
pound pulpit".

argument, we don't need no stinkin
argument.


McArthur , and I will be back shortly.

"You're fired!" Donald Trump.

is that quote enough?

ok, just kidding, you are not fired.
have a good night.


songbird

Rain yesterday, kept me out of the garden. The peas seem to be enjoying
the 70F weather, as do the tomatoes (surprise, surprise). The peppers
not so much.
I've lost some plants to varmints, snail or cats, I don't know which. I
had a back up plant for the tomato, but I'm down 4/26 on my peppers, and
3/16 on my corn. I'll probably have to buy starters for the peppers, as
it seems too late to germinate fresh replacements. The corn was replaced
by sunflowers. When the corn goes to tassel, I'll just have to get
involved to make sure that the cobs will be full. Every thing is pretty
much in except for the squash, and melons. That should be finished by
today.
To my taste making pesto from fresh store bought basil is a futile
endevor. It just doesn't have enough flavor. Bought a couple of live
basil plants from Trader Joe's a month or so ago. We had our second
pesto from them last night. There were only 5 flowering tops in it, and
it still lacks taste. I suppose it could be me. I've read that as you
get older, your taste buds become less sensitive, and you need stronger
flavors to get their attention. In any event, I'll be happier when the
pesto is mostly flowering tops.

I'll be starting a new germination tray today with green beans, as well
as mid-season replacement squash, and more lettuce. Can't ever have
enough lettuce. So I;m down to trying to squeeze in whatever is left
over.
Whew.
--
Remember Rachel Corrie
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

Welcome to the New America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA736oK9FPg

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
....
Sepp Holzer...

his main property is upland enough that he can
work with microclimates and extending seasons of
harvest by using the warmer downhill areas and
cooler areas uphill along with using rocks, sun
catchers and ponds.

also the film mentioned: _The Agricultural Rebel_.

Film? What film? You didn't say anything about no stinkin' film. You
using Cliff Notes too? ;O)

i should have written that "also a film was mentioned".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yScINihX_z8

??? i'm banned for the evening offline so i
can't look this up.


...
The term is borrowed from the
militaryindustrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in
his famous 1961 farewell address.

he was a smart guy.

And he seemed to be human.

I wonder what the U.S. would have been like if Major General Smedley
Butler, USMC had been President.

Ike was a politician,
Certainly not in a contemporary context. Just look at his quotes. These
days politicians just keep their heads down, and continue taking the
money. Not a squeek about the Military-Industrial-Complex.

of course not, it is unpatriotic.


i think Butler rubbed too many
the wrong way.

He wasn't good at playing games.

"War is a Racket", by Smedley D. Butler.

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil
intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping
of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall
Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua
for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I
brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in
1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way
unmolested."

lovely...


Such groups include corporations that
contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology
vendors, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activists have
argued that the Prison-Industrial Complex as perpetuating a belief that
imprisonment is a quick yet ultimately flawed solution to social
problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental
illness, and illiteracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_complex

More specifically see "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age
of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West.
http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-I...dness/dp/15955
86431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369114986&sr=1-1&keywords=The+New+J
im+Crow

gah! no, i'm not going there. it's all around me
already, i don't need to read more about it.

We have that option, for the time being, but people of color don't. It
gets shoved into their faces, like it or not.

unfortunate and worth fighting against.

I find it despicable and worth fighting against.
There are no more countries to colonize, so we are colonizing America.
The outrageous treatment of people of color in America, will boon be
visited on our paler citizen. The chickens will come home to roost.

at the moment around here most are more
interested in killing each other. when i was
a kid i learned hard lessons about racism.
it may matter what people say, but i also
pay attention to how they act. in my own
family it breaks my heart often enough.
i see a lot of "Christians" but not enough
Christians, so it goes.


...
Who would know, it has never been tried.

the first few years of Christianity were
supposedly communist in organisation and
sharing of resources, but that devolves like
any other system as soon as you put money
in any large amounts into the hands of a
few "leaders" or "organizers".

Ah, communist with a lower case "c", not an uppercase "C". In the middle
ages, at least in England, you would live in a village, and behind your
house you would have your garden, but beyond the garden was the
"Commons". There would be fields that were worked in common by the
inhabitants of the town for the good of everyone. There were also
forests where a person could hunt for game. Then came the closure laws,
and everyone was forced into the factories (more or less). Capitalism
seems like an extension of feudalism. Both require infinite resources.
Socialism (We the People) can be corrupted, as all can see, but it is
doable. First we have to get campaign financing out of private hands,
and everything else should flow from that, not that vigilance won't
still be required.


capitalism does not require infinite resources,
i dunno where you get that idea from.

As I noted in a different post, it is intrinsic to capitalism.

yeah, well i'll just say i disagree, but it
doesn't matter if i disagree or not, because
it's highly unlikely capitalism disappears.


The
difference is now we are running up against the finite limit of
resources in the physical world (cyberspace is something different).
As with agriculture, we ran out of arable land, and now we are reaching
the yield limits of our new cultivars. The only resource that we have
plenty of is people. That said, keep one eye open when you take that nap.

i'm a light sleeper.


socialism is fine in some parts. i still believe
that freedom should be primary in that many systems
should be allowed under a broader form of government
and those that wish to form socialist organizations
and societies within should be allowed as long as
their members are allowed freedom to leave if they
wish. an age of consent. some written bylaws and
a coming of age ceremony would be good. i still
haven't had much of a chance to see how the Amish
have managed to become the society they have in the
USoA and how they are treated in terms of taxes and
such, but an interesting side topic for the future...

The thing is that it's not the institutions. The most efficient, and
beneficial government would be a benevolent dictator. The results of the
institutions of government depend on the love in the hearts of those who
direct them. If citizens are simply a crop to be harvested for their tax
dollars, like wheat, the results will be different than if there was
real concern for the welfare of the people.

some people in government do actually care.
i don't see the current system set up to
select caring people though.


....
...huge snip, too many tangents...
The world is full of Asymptotes. Don't let them wear you down.

what are Asymps and why does they need
a tote? anyways, my basket is full, time
to hit the space bar and answer the next
post.


as to how to regulate banking, i don't see any good
coming from the government being directly involved.
i already am having severe dislikes to the feds
current practices of transferring wealth from the
responsible to the irresponsible, but put the fed in
the government's direct control and it would be even
worse as then they'd have no check on their abuse of
the money supply. not that there seems to be one
right now anyways. if i had a better place to put my
money i'd be doing it, but the rest of the world is
not looking much better either.

Credit Unions keep the money local.

i have a fair amount of my savings in a few
credit unions. unfortunately, they can bloat
just like any other organization.

Yeah, but they bloat locally, not in Charlotte, New York, or San
Francisco.

so you're biased against the big cities?


....
My plan is trying to squeeze the last drop of pleasure out of this life.

grab each day by the balls... gently...

I'd settle for an afternoon lunchmeat and cheese plater, a fresh
baguette, and a $10 bottle of French wine from TJ's.

It's good for my spirit, but anathema to my body. Classic double bind.

some things are comfort foods even if they
are bad for us. as a child of the tv-dinner
generation about anything smoked, nitrated,
salted or sugared used to be danger food to
me. i've gotten away from most of it except
a few weaknesses, but they are no longer regular
or staple foods. luxuries a few times a year.
funny how times change. in the old days hotdogs
sausages were what was made from scraps (all but
the squeal) and leftovers and sold for little.
now a lot of these sell for as much as a steak...


I'm down to the hard part now, which only makes it tougher.

hang in there and try to ignore the BS. sometimes
happiness comes in small victories and unexpected
places. like seeing a sundog or a pea plant sprouting
and flowering.

And sometimes it comes from being in on the joke ;O)

heheh, much humor around here is rather
raw/earthy -- about anything is fair game.


In any event,

Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
- Plato

and God needs a vacation...


songbird