Maybe next time the reporter rides along and Tesla does the driving
According to the CNN reporter who also drove the car, "Tesla has a load of instructions to maximize battery power, and I think I followed them pretty well."
So this doesn't sound like a car you can hand over to just anyone and get optimum results. Maybe until the car becomes truly consumer friendly under all conditions, reporters should be taken along as passengers for media test drives.
The problem is obvious - too much waste of everything because too many resources are being poured into making a handful of people monstrously prosperous at other people's expense.
That is what I have been saying. Unless we approach world economics differently, we'll not make a lot of progress dealing with the world's issues.
I think folks need to get used to this idea and start working on it as part of the mainstream of economic endeavor rather than constantly talking about it as if it were some sort of waste of time and effort.
Considering we can hardly get our shit together to deal with easier problems, I don't think we'll be putting a lot of resources into leaving the planet anytime soon.
The issue is the wastefulness of the upper echelons of our population.
You're saying what I am saying. Given a lifestyle we live or aspire to, there's a limit to how many people the planet can support. Yes, technology/innovation has allowed more people to survive than in previous centuries, but the number of people who can live on the planet is not infinite.
How many more people Earth can support will depend on a lot of things. However, whether the necessary steps will happen in a timely fashion is a guess right now. HIV, for example, greatly impacted Africa. It's impact could have been more limited, but that would have required cultural changes, government and medical changes, etc.
China has had some awful air pollution. That can be prevented, but will require significant changes there. How fast will those happen? Radiation in Japan. That could have been prevented, but wasn't.
The global issue now appears to be climate change, but some people say it isn't happening or it's natural and people have nothing to do with it. Others can't agree on what should be done or whether they will do it even if they know they should.
I'll toss this article into the mix for further discussion.
Fortunately health care in the US is (presently) not an all or nothing proposition.
I was thinking about the global situation, not just in the US. There are people in the world who don't have access to safe drinking water, basic hygiene, etc. Money is fine as an indication of what people want, but they must have money for that to happen.
It will never be as meaningful as measuring what they will actually pay for it.
I'm concerned when we reach a point where lots of people can't pay for anything because they don't have the money to do so. Health care could fall into that. People want it but can't afford it.
I believe humans are capable of finding solutions, but I'm not sure we have enough time to find solutions without some massive disruptions headed our way.
In the past those disruptions have been in the form of wars, natural disasters, disease, and so on. Those are always looming on the horizon and the questions facing the world now are how successfully we might continue to head them off. For most people in the US, we have hit an income plateau. Improvements have been funded by increased consumer debt rather than increased income. If we reduce debt, the economy faces an extended period of slow growth or even contraction, which is probably better for the environment, but will make a lot of people unhappy about those numbers.
It's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out. I definitely see the disruptions coming, in many industries, which is a common theme of mine in Techdirt. But I like to point out that it won't just be Hollywood that is disrupted. I think all industries will be disrupted and at an accelerating rate. But I think the new crop of disruptors don't realize that it will happen to them, too. I've seen a lot of Internet-related companies come and go and expect the current crop to be replaced by others. The notion of long-term investing makes less sense when fewer companies are likely to exist long term. Disrupting the financial system is a big change likely to happen, and not likely to happen smoothly.
Another big issue is the interconnectedness of the world. Economic dominoes are likely to fall in one place and take down other economies, too. People are also now trying to figure out how to protect data and access when everything is stored in networked, hackable clouds.
That would be a disaster. Economic growth shouldn't be about using up resources but about improving what we have and what we can do.
We know that productivity is increasing, but if the financial benefits of productivity accrue to just the top 1% of people, then society as a whole hasn't benefited. So it would be useful to reflect that in the numbers.
And as some people have pointed out, if a company pollutes and then people are hired to clean up that pollution, that is "growth" but not in a good way.
Therefore, whether we have a gauge of "happiness" or something else, we need to factor in negative results that produce "growth" but not improved quality of life across society.
It occurred to me that health statistics might be one way to measure quality of life in a way least likely to be manipulated. If you generate numbers based on life span, accident rate, disease rate, suicides, murder, wars, and so on, you can use that as a form of life quality. If, for example, rates of obesity and starvation go down, that suggests you've reached an appropriate balance of food that extends to exercise, quality calories, and so on.
I am to the extent that I believe you can't expand population until every space on the planet is full of people. There is a limit to how many people Earth can support. We may have been wrong about predicting when that limit will hit, but it will hit.
We can't grow ourselves out of debt, no matter what the Federal Reserve does | Charles Eisenstein | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "Obviously, it isn't true that the more we buy, the happier we are. Endless growth means endlessly increasing production and endlessly increasing consumption. Social critics have for a long time pointed out the resulting hollowness carried by that thesis. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly apparent that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. Why, then, are liberals and conservatives alike so fervent in their pursuit of growth?"
I was going to say something similar. Use a quality of life measurement, not a happiness measurement. Quality of life involves health, creativity, basic needs met, family and/or relationship time, etc. When people have money, that's what they buy: quality of life. They might use money to save time, for example. An alternative to increasing wages would be to allow people to continue to receive their current incomes, but put in fewer work hours in the process.
One of my concerns is economic models based on growth. But growth uses up resources. A better model might be one based on sustainability, where we are no longer looking for growth, but stabilization.
At some point we will reach a population limit. The environment can't support an ever increasing population. We either stop the growth, or something happens (e.g., wars, plagues, starvation) and people begin to die off. No matter how many technological innovations we develop, eventually we run out of the necessary resources to adequately support the population.
Therefore, setting different goals, which don't involve economic growth, may be an alternative to what we have now.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Where's The Research? These Guys Are A Foreign Business
When agencies are abolished you also remove the complexity. That makes things like self representation and understanding the law things the common man can do.
I can certainly get behind that.
But let me toss out an example that I wonder about. I am very concerned about environmental protection. Fracking, for example, is moving into suburban neighborhoods which will impact the people living in those neighborhoods. So the homeowners could possibly assert damages in many ways: damage to the environment, to their property values, to the water, to the air, and so on.
But to win those cases, presumably they would have to gather the evidence to prove damages. Gathering that evidence can be expensive and not everyone who is damaged will have that kind of money. But even with evidence, we have people who won't accept it (e.g., climate change debates). So what will it take to prove damages and collect?
Still, I suppose, if you throw out agencies and let everyone sue to settle stuff, then perhaps more environmental issues will actually get a hearing. I think environmentalists have some pretty strong cases concerning damages and if that's the way to make progress against polluters (both local and global) so be it. Speaking of which, how do you sue a company polluting in another country but the pollution migrates into your air space or into your ocean water?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Where's The Research? These Guys Are A Foreign Business
In a free society, manufacturers would be held liable for any and all damages caused by their product; this, combined with the desire to earn repeat business by maintaining a positive reputation with consumers, would provide them with an incentive to ensure their products are safe.
This is the part of libertarianism that intrigues me. If the system is based on damages, that brings in lots of lawyers. So it becomes a litigation system and all that entails. And then you need a system to hear the lawyers, collect money, and perhaps punish violators. So over time you may end up with a very complicated governing system in some form.
There's actually quite a bit of info on how gift economies differ from market economies. So much, in fact, that it would overwhelm this discussion. That's why I usually just point people to places like the P2P Foundation because it has collected a ton of resources.
So why do I keep bringing this up? To get people thinking about what a post-IP culture could look like. Once everything is freely shared with everyone else, you can facilitate a radical transformation of world economics if allowed to do so. But that transformation is going to upend many of the current power/wealth holders and I am not sure they plan to give up without a fight. As Techdirt points out, companies are trying to protect their territories by strengthening IP laws. But I anticipate that once new power players benefit from the lack of IP laws, they will look to protect THEIR territories and the cycle begins again. In order to break the cycle, the whole concept of property and ownership needs to be re-examined. And people are doing that for several reasons: (1) the shared/networked culture of the Internet, (2) environmental protection, and (3) world recession and growing income inequality.
Here's just one more thing to toss out about gift economies.
Economic Systems: Non-market Economies: "As a result, standard economic analysis is inadequate in explaining how and why these non-market economies functioned."
Because gift economies are a part of a free market economy. Not sure your point.
Although you may assume all economies are free market economies, not everyone holds that view. So I try to point that out because we can determine who owns what, who governs what, how resources will be distributed, etc.
If the Internet allows for full democratization of everyone in the world, I expect a lot will change. I like to get people thinking about that because what we do now will likely shape the future of the world economy. If we want to give every person in the world a middle class life, we have to figure out how to share resources. How do we do that? Are we going to charge for clean water and those who can't pay don't get it? How are will going to deal with air pollution? And so on.
P2P Foundation -- David Graeber on Giving It Away, an introduction to the gift economy:
"Mauss’ conclusions were startling. First of all, almost everything that 'economic science' had to say on the subject of economic history turned out to be entirely untrue. The universal assumption of free market enthusiasts, then as now, was that what essentially drives human beings is a desire to maximize their pleasures, comforts and material possessions (their 'utility'), and that all significant human interactions can thus be analyzed in market terms. In the beginning, goes the official version, there was barter. People were forced to get what they wanted by directly trading one thing for another. Since this was inconvenient, they eventually invented money as a universal medium of exchange. The invention of further technologies of exchange (credit, banking, stock exchanges) was simply a logical extension.
"The problem was, as Mauss was quick to note, there is no reason to believe a society based on barter has ever existed. Instead, what anthropologists were discovering were societies where economic life was based on utterly different principles, and most objects moved back and forth as gifts – and almost everything we would call 'economic' behavior was based on a pretense of pure generosity and a refusal to calculate exactly who had given what to whom. Such 'gift economies' could on occasion become highly competitive, but when they did it was in exactly the opposite way from our own: Instead of vying to see who could accumulate the most, the winners were the ones who managed to give the most away. In some notorious cases, such as the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, this could lead to dramatic contests of liberality, where ambitious chiefs would try to outdo one another by distributing thousands of silver bracelets, Hudson Bay blankets or Singer sewing machines, and even by destroying wealth – sinking famous heirlooms in the ocean, or setting huge piles of wealth on fire and daring their rivals to do the same."
There aren't "alternative economies." There is just a single economy, and lots of different ways in which economic transactions take place. Thinking of them as different is a weird and incorrect way of looking at things.
Not everyone agrees on property concepts. Economies can be set up any way people want to set them up. Gift economies are as legitimate as free market economies. There isn't a set of economic principles that everyone agrees upon. I think that's where you and I differ. You think there are universal economic principles, and I think they are constructs. Economics isn't a hard science where inputs always result in the same outcomes.
And others have called me a socialist. Others have called me a hater of big companies, while some (including you) regularly accuse me of being a shill for big companies.
Okay. So you're not a libertarian. But I like to envision what happens next -- beyond the copyright days. I've already assumed copyright will become less relevant as the old power goes away and the new power takes over. I have said that I think everything is going to get shared online and trying to sort out who gets credit for what is going to be harder and, if economics change, less of a concern.
I have been suggesting a post-IP world based on concepts in the shareable/P2P/commons/alternative economics discussions.
Since Techdirt is a forum to discuss IP issues, I have intentionally been bringing a different, non-libertarian, perspective into the mix.
On the post: What The Tesla / NY Times Fight Teaches Us About The Media
Maybe next time the reporter rides along and Tesla does the driving
So this doesn't sound like a car you can hand over to just anyone and get optimum results. Maybe until the car becomes truly consumer friendly under all conditions, reporters should be taken along as passengers for media test drives.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Quality of life
Even if it were true (and I don't think it is), it is beside the point if the goal is to change policy.
I haven't said that. But I don't think we're having a conversation. You can make your points and I'll leave it at that.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Quality of life
That is what I have been saying. Unless we approach world economics differently, we'll not make a lot of progress dealing with the world's issues.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Quality of life
Considering we can hardly get our shit together to deal with easier problems, I don't think we'll be putting a lot of resources into leaving the planet anytime soon.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Quality of life
You're saying what I am saying. Given a lifestyle we live or aspire to, there's a limit to how many people the planet can support. Yes, technology/innovation has allowed more people to survive than in previous centuries, but the number of people who can live on the planet is not infinite.
How many more people Earth can support will depend on a lot of things. However, whether the necessary steps will happen in a timely fashion is a guess right now. HIV, for example, greatly impacted Africa. It's impact could have been more limited, but that would have required cultural changes, government and medical changes, etc.
China has had some awful air pollution. That can be prevented, but will require significant changes there. How fast will those happen? Radiation in Japan. That could have been prevented, but wasn't.
The global issue now appears to be climate change, but some people say it isn't happening or it's natural and people have nothing to do with it. Others can't agree on what should be done or whether they will do it even if they know they should.
I'll toss this article into the mix for further discussion.
Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Re:
I was thinking about the global situation, not just in the US. There are people in the world who don't have access to safe drinking water, basic hygiene, etc. Money is fine as an indication of what people want, but they must have money for that to happen.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re:
I'm concerned when we reach a point where lots of people can't pay for anything because they don't have the money to do so. Health care could fall into that. People want it but can't afford it.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Quality of life
In the past those disruptions have been in the form of wars, natural disasters, disease, and so on. Those are always looming on the horizon and the questions facing the world now are how successfully we might continue to head them off. For most people in the US, we have hit an income plateau. Improvements have been funded by increased consumer debt rather than increased income. If we reduce debt, the economy faces an extended period of slow growth or even contraction, which is probably better for the environment, but will make a lot of people unhappy about those numbers.
It's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out. I definitely see the disruptions coming, in many industries, which is a common theme of mine in Techdirt. But I like to point out that it won't just be Hollywood that is disrupted. I think all industries will be disrupted and at an accelerating rate. But I think the new crop of disruptors don't realize that it will happen to them, too. I've seen a lot of Internet-related companies come and go and expect the current crop to be replaced by others. The notion of long-term investing makes less sense when fewer companies are likely to exist long term. Disrupting the financial system is a big change likely to happen, and not likely to happen smoothly.
Another big issue is the interconnectedness of the world. Economic dominoes are likely to fall in one place and take down other economies, too. People are also now trying to figure out how to protect data and access when everything is stored in networked, hackable clouds.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Re: Quality of life
We know that productivity is increasing, but if the financial benefits of productivity accrue to just the top 1% of people, then society as a whole hasn't benefited. So it would be useful to reflect that in the numbers.
And as some people have pointed out, if a company pollutes and then people are hired to clean up that pollution, that is "growth" but not in a good way.
Therefore, whether we have a gauge of "happiness" or something else, we need to factor in negative results that produce "growth" but not improved quality of life across society.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Quality of life
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Re: Quality of life
I am to the extent that I believe you can't expand population until every space on the planet is full of people. There is a limit to how many people Earth can support. We may have been wrong about predicting when that limit will hit, but it will hit.
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Re: Quality of life
On the post: Should We Be Measuring Happiness As An Economic Measure?
Re: Quality of life
One of my concerns is economic models based on growth. But growth uses up resources. A better model might be one based on sustainability, where we are no longer looking for growth, but stabilization.
At some point we will reach a population limit. The environment can't support an ever increasing population. We either stop the growth, or something happens (e.g., wars, plagues, starvation) and people begin to die off. No matter how many technological innovations we develop, eventually we run out of the necessary resources to adequately support the population.
Therefore, setting different goals, which don't involve economic growth, may be an alternative to what we have now.
On the post: Ron Paul, UN Hater, Asks UN To Take RonPaul.com Forcefully From Ron Paul's Biggest Supporters
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Where's The Research? These Guys Are A Foreign Business
I can certainly get behind that.
But let me toss out an example that I wonder about. I am very concerned about environmental protection. Fracking, for example, is moving into suburban neighborhoods which will impact the people living in those neighborhoods. So the homeowners could possibly assert damages in many ways: damage to the environment, to their property values, to the water, to the air, and so on.
But to win those cases, presumably they would have to gather the evidence to prove damages. Gathering that evidence can be expensive and not everyone who is damaged will have that kind of money. But even with evidence, we have people who won't accept it (e.g., climate change debates). So what will it take to prove damages and collect?
Still, I suppose, if you throw out agencies and let everyone sue to settle stuff, then perhaps more environmental issues will actually get a hearing. I think environmentalists have some pretty strong cases concerning damages and if that's the way to make progress against polluters (both local and global) so be it. Speaking of which, how do you sue a company polluting in another country but the pollution migrates into your air space or into your ocean water?
On the post: Ron Paul, UN Hater, Asks UN To Take RonPaul.com Forcefully From Ron Paul's Biggest Supporters
Re: Re: Re: Re: Where's The Research? These Guys Are A Foreign Business
This is the part of libertarianism that intrigues me. If the system is based on damages, that brings in lots of lawyers. So it becomes a litigation system and all that entails. And then you need a system to hear the lawyers, collect money, and perhaps punish violators. So over time you may end up with a very complicated governing system in some form.
On the post: Ron Paul, UN Hater, Asks UN To Take RonPaul.com Forcefully From Ron Paul's Biggest Supporters
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Libertarianism
So why do I keep bringing this up? To get people thinking about what a post-IP culture could look like. Once everything is freely shared with everyone else, you can facilitate a radical transformation of world economics if allowed to do so. But that transformation is going to upend many of the current power/wealth holders and I am not sure they plan to give up without a fight. As Techdirt points out, companies are trying to protect their territories by strengthening IP laws. But I anticipate that once new power players benefit from the lack of IP laws, they will look to protect THEIR territories and the cycle begins again. In order to break the cycle, the whole concept of property and ownership needs to be re-examined. And people are doing that for several reasons: (1) the shared/networked culture of the Internet, (2) environmental protection, and (3) world recession and growing income inequality.
Here's just one more thing to toss out about gift economies.
Economic Systems: Non-market Economies: "As a result, standard economic analysis is inadequate in explaining how and why these non-market economies functioned."
On the post: Ron Paul, UN Hater, Asks UN To Take RonPaul.com Forcefully From Ron Paul's Biggest Supporters
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Libertarianism
Although you may assume all economies are free market economies, not everyone holds that view. So I try to point that out because we can determine who owns what, who governs what, how resources will be distributed, etc.
If the Internet allows for full democratization of everyone in the world, I expect a lot will change. I like to get people thinking about that because what we do now will likely shape the future of the world economy. If we want to give every person in the world a middle class life, we have to figure out how to share resources. How do we do that? Are we going to charge for clean water and those who can't pay don't get it? How are will going to deal with air pollution? And so on.
On the post: Ron Paul, UN Hater, Asks UN To Take RonPaul.com Forcefully From Ron Paul's Biggest Supporters
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Libertarianism
P2P Foundation -- David Graeber on Giving It Away, an introduction to the gift economy:
"Mauss’ conclusions were startling. First of all, almost everything that 'economic science' had to say on the subject of economic history turned out to be entirely untrue. The universal assumption of free market enthusiasts, then as now, was that what essentially drives human beings is a desire to maximize their pleasures, comforts and material possessions (their 'utility'), and that all significant human interactions can thus be analyzed in market terms. In the beginning, goes the official version, there was barter. People were forced to get what they wanted by directly trading one thing for another. Since this was inconvenient, they eventually invented money as a universal medium of exchange. The invention of further technologies of exchange (credit, banking, stock exchanges) was simply a logical extension.
"The problem was, as Mauss was quick to note, there is no reason to believe a society based on barter has ever existed. Instead, what anthropologists were discovering were societies where economic life was based on utterly different principles, and most objects moved back and forth as gifts – and almost everything we would call 'economic' behavior was based on a pretense of pure generosity and a refusal to calculate exactly who had given what to whom. Such 'gift economies' could on occasion become highly competitive, but when they did it was in exactly the opposite way from our own: Instead of vying to see who could accumulate the most, the winners were the ones who managed to give the most away. In some notorious cases, such as the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, this could lead to dramatic contests of liberality, where ambitious chiefs would try to outdo one another by distributing thousands of silver bracelets, Hudson Bay blankets or Singer sewing machines, and even by destroying wealth – sinking famous heirlooms in the ocean, or setting huge piles of wealth on fire and daring their rivals to do the same."
On the post: Ron Paul, UN Hater, Asks UN To Take RonPaul.com Forcefully From Ron Paul's Biggest Supporters
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Libertarianism
Not everyone agrees on property concepts. Economies can be set up any way people want to set them up. Gift economies are as legitimate as free market economies. There isn't a set of economic principles that everyone agrees upon. I think that's where you and I differ. You think there are universal economic principles, and I think they are constructs. Economics isn't a hard science where inputs always result in the same outcomes.
On the post: Ron Paul, UN Hater, Asks UN To Take RonPaul.com Forcefully From Ron Paul's Biggest Supporters
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Libertarianism
Okay. So you're not a libertarian. But I like to envision what happens next -- beyond the copyright days. I've already assumed copyright will become less relevant as the old power goes away and the new power takes over. I have said that I think everything is going to get shared online and trying to sort out who gets credit for what is going to be harder and, if economics change, less of a concern.
I have been suggesting a post-IP world based on concepts in the shareable/P2P/commons/alternative economics discussions.
Since Techdirt is a forum to discuss IP issues, I have intentionally been bringing a different, non-libertarian, perspective into the mix.
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