The Zeitgeist Movement - Give me your best shot.

Post Reply New Topic

Just thought I'd say not only have I seen all the documentaries by the movement but I have watched several of their campus lecture videos based in the UK and US. Many times Jacques Fresco the brainchild behind the RBE has himself said that a global catastrophe or something big like a global war would probably have to commence before the RBE is itself accepted by society or able to be indoctrinated as a norm to others (though not in those exact words). He didn't pray those things happen either, he was just being real about it. And that's all Awesomelyglorious is doing as well, looking at the situation realistically.

I figure that depopulations, while tragic and grievous, are just a part of life. The Great Famine & Black Death happened, as did the Holodomor & Holocaust, Great Leap Forward, World War I & II, Thirty Years War, Cree & Blackfoot War and so forth. It's something to expect. The benefit of these events is that it allows us to have exuberant highs and booms.

Nope, an RBE assumes nothing in terms of human decisions. Please refer to my latest podcast entitled "Misc. Q&A 7 + Rant" where I answer about the economic calculation problem.

I would consider it unwise to take anything that anyone says about an RBE to be the hard-line as it were of how an RBE functions. Even what I say. It is best to use the information as inspiration to do your own research.



I have a few questions:

How exactly do you define a "software planned economy"?
How do you define an RBE as a "software planned economy" by this definition?
What other "software planned economies" are there in existance?

As I have said to Janissy, please refer to my latest podcast.



No.



Is it me, or do people expect to understand this objectively by debating it on here without viewing the material whatsoever?



Yea, that's cool. However Jacque isn't necessarily the "brainchild" of this. He's as much an originator of this train of thought as any current scientist is to their current theories on things. Information and findings are filtered through previous minds that have studied these things.

The thing about Jacques and TZM's perspective on this, is that the catastrophe doesn't have to occur. Its just a matter of where each respective person's tipping point is. There isn't one singular tipping point for all humanity just like there isn't one singular moment when all the balls fall out of a container at once if you pour it out.



They don't have to be. One thing I know from personal experience is that a cancer patient doesn't have to die first to realise they need treatment. Same thing here. The value system and socio-economic model that we currently have is a cancer. And its just a shame that some of us have to hit the final stages before they realise they need to change.

I expect they have plans for machines and automation to handle that but I sincerely doubt they know how to make the machines they are dreaming up.

I don't often tote out common cliches, but here I feel its applicable:

"Necessity is the mother of all invention"

I don't doubt they will be made in the next 5-20 years, just that ZG don't have anything to offer in this department unless more scientific brains hop onboard their movement.

Of course, however I dare say you've heard of my good friend Doug Mallette, yea? He used to be a systems engineer for the space shuttle programme and also one of TZM's most vocal advocates. There's also Federico Pistono (another vocal advocate) who has credentials in robotics and has written a book called "Robots will steal your job, but its ok" I can ask them if you like.

Only heard of the first one. I'm glad they have gotten these folks to their cause, I was not aware of that. What do you think it will cost in R&D for their starting projects? I'm guessing they would have to start with agriculture, to facilitate for their first members of the RBE.

I personally have no idea how much something like that would cost. But on the subject of agriculture, Doug is on point with that. He's created a company called CFS (Cybernated Farm Systems) which is gonna design, construct and distribute fully automated verticle hydroponic/aquaponic farming facilities, or as Doug jokingly calls them "salad factories" to countries that need them.

However the idea of the test city is to not have it as a residential thing. You gotta have it as a demonstration orientation to guell all the naysayers and demonstrate to the world how it works, otherwise there's gonna be a big hoo-har about who gets to live there and who doesn't. People will be able to go to the test city like a museum/exhibit thing and after going round, people may ask themselves and each other:

"Why don't we have this in our country/region?"

And support will grow exponentially because the train of thought has a physical reality in demonstration. No-one would be able to dispute it anymore and the pressure upon governments to either stand down, or to allow for these cities to be built will be incredible.

I haven't conflated anything at all. You said "infinite economic growth". The inflation of the currency is NOT economic growth AT ALL. We can inflate it infinitely, but there is no desire to do so.

Additionally, YOU'VE conflated between unlimited economic growth and unlimited increase in the consumption of resources. One can believe in the former without believing in the latter, and I don't think anybody is explicitly assuming infinite resources. It's YOUR argument, so if the system is really predicated on infinite resources, then prove it. However, most economists explicitly accept that we have finite resources and nearly infinite options, thus needing a system to economize on uses.


Well, yes.


You do realize that this proves nothing, right? I mean, so long as there is cancer, then yes, there will be people dedicated to helping deal with cancer. That's a sign of a system that works, not a one that does not, so give me the argument.


You do realize that those terms basically only exist within the Zeitgeist crowd, and that "diametically opposed" really really has to be proven, rather than assumed when talking to somebody else. The videos I've seen:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4M0eQ3qKII[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ES45Chp750[/youtube]

Don't show even the most basic awareness of economics. So, McMurty somehow thinks that economic doctrine requires every agent is a money-maximizer, except nobody in economics even believes that or pretends to hold to that. Economists believe that people are preference maximizers, and these preferences include the family and everything else. He criticizes economics for having no category of need, but this is him conflating normative and positive economics. "Preferences" are simply a way of figuring out how an agent will act, so in the game-theoretic definition, many needs will be preferences. "Need" only comes into normative evaluations, and many of those do talk about needs, like hunger. A lot of poverty analysis is going to talk about hunger, sickness, and those other things. McMurty not understanding that is a failure on his part, not that of economists. McMurty talking about GDP being used mindlessly as a proxy is also foolish. Economists KNOW the gap. They talk about the gap. Most textbooks mention the gap. GDP is used as a proxy because of the degree to which it fits, as GDP growth and unemployment rates are usually considered related variables. And the other video acting like all of finance is just a game is also silly. While I admit that the sector is bloated, likely due to cognitive biases and people being resistant to certain notions of an efficient market hypothesis, moving money around is simply moving resources around, and EVERY society is going to need people who move resources around. Every society needs coordination, and the financial sector is trying to coordinate our resources. Also, talking about the invisible hand as religious is also a bit of silliness, as the same idea is covered in the fundamental theorums of welfare economics, which have been proven under certain circumstances as holding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamenta ... _economics So, saying a forerunner of this idea is just religious is silly. One might argue it is wrong, but it's propaganda to pretend it is outright silly.


This proves nothing. Any activity involving the allocation of resources makes money, because money represents the resources moved. Inefficiency is the least likely to be true though, as a lot of effort is made to make things more efficient. Some of the leading productive techniques are driven by promoting efficiency, and these are promoted because they are considered to make money.

Disease, wars, prisoners, and pollutants ultimately have economic costs though, and can certainly hurt economic activity.

Do you have an argument, or am I supposed to be impressed by the assertion? I need you to make a motherf***ing argument, not ramble on.


Umm..... yeah. Any and every economist could tell you the same goddamned thing. The issue is that the overall structure of the system is centered around a focus on certain inputs and certain outputs. Banks and other companies cannot actually quantify "the people", and they cannot allocate their incentive structures very easily around "the people", so they work around a profit-based model.


I've actually studied this s**t, unlike you. So, you masquerading that you're competent and I am not is a joke.

If you look into an economics textbook, here are the GDP equations:

MV=PY

Y = C + I + G + NX

Y stands for GDP
M stands for money supply
P stands for price level
V stands for velocity of the dollar(how fast money changes hands) (So the money * the amount of time it changes hands= the sum of exchanges made in the economy)
C stands for consumption
I stands for investment
G stands for government
NX stands for Net Exports

Neither of these demand infinite growth. GDP being the sum of production within the economy doesn't demand economic growth. And frankly, we can imagine an economy with markets and without economic growth. Investment trickles into merely the cost of depletion. Consumption fills the gaps. And potentially, every market stays in equilibrium, without demand or supply shifting. No contradictions. Maybe a bit of a shift given that return on investments will die down, but.... nothing really impressive. If anything, most economic models actually pretend growth NEVER occurs, and that's because our models for markets developed a LOT sooner than our models for growth and markets are easier to study than growth.


Sum it up really quick. You can do that right? I mean, it would only take you what, a minute, and then we could start moving past it?


Sum them up. If they're from the past, then it must have been forgotten, or regarded as insufficient.


Evidence that you are not aware of your self-proclaimed enemies? Contrast your statements with those of economics. You don't even seem aware of basic economic theory and the two videos I watched on clarifying one of your pieces of ideological terminology showed a complete lack of knowledge of basic economic ideas.

Also, I don't really need to prove an absence. If you knew of some major scientific body endorsing the RBEM, you could have slapped me down in an instant, but you didn't. Additionally, much of the attention gotten about these groups in the media are negative, I mean, the Zeitgeist films have scores of criticisms from informed people as being wrong on basic facts. The criticisms of economic doctrine are basically erroneous. If you just look on the Venus Project web-page, this kind of support, one that would be very highly touted if it existed, is not found. Finally, if there were actual scientific bodies who really took this seriously, and who represented actual science, we wouldn't see this debate on the fringes of the internet, but rather it would be much much more prominent.


I didn't use the scientific method to realize that putting one foot in front of the other enabled me to walk. I wasn't even fully developed when I started walking. And if I had to prove I walked, my proof would not be a scientific study, or any hypothesis generation or anything like that.

Do you know anything the scientific method? Do you know anything about walking?


Except we haven't. Some deficits may be resolved, but scarcity has not fundamentally changed. Not every place on earth is going to have a master chef for our dining pleasure for every type of cuisine. We can't physically fit everybody into a baseball stadium, and certainly not into the best seats. We cannot just burn all of the fossil fuels just for the hell of it, but rather we need to abstain and economize. And so on and so forth. It makes no sense to talk about Earth's finite resources, and then claim that no scarcity exists in the same breath. If resources are finite, then they are scarce, and they are not scarce, then they are practically infinite and we can waste without concern.


Except that doesn't work as an argument. At all. The earth DOESN'T cooperate. Foxes do NOT cooperate with rabbits, they try to eat rabbits. Foxes do not cooperate with other predators either. I mean, "survival of the fittest" is really not the same as cooperating and involves a lot of non-cooperative strategies for a lot of animals, including humans.


And ineffectually. The argument is intrinsic motivators, but most people don't have intrinsic motivators more powerful than their motivations to do things that only provide them benefit. So, do you have any evidence that you can construct intrinsic motivation strong enough to achieve your objectives?


Except this is entirely reasonable. No movement has ever converted the entire world by rhetoric alone, so predicting this is foolish.

Additionally, few revolutions have avoided institutional problems. In fact, arguably, every single one of them has had to deal with massive institutional problems. Even the American revolution involved overturning the Articles of Confederation, and the Russians and French had truly brutal revolutions that led to corrupt institutional frameworks that failed to attain objectives.


Then provide us the answer. I mean, obviously it was missed somewhere along the line, so why not just post it really quick here, so that way we can understand where everything stood. Even if it has been answered, I doubt it was answered in a very satisfying manner.


You do realize I wouldn't have stumbled across any of that without significant research right? You also realize that your answers are probably things I'd consider inadequate if you actually gave an answer instead of saying "Well, it's answered already" and then I'd ask another probing question based upon your inadequate answers.


You expect me to sort through 7 hours of Q and As? And you say "cannot be bothered to listen"? I've seen the responses you've given on this forum, and they are dramatically inadequate to these questions. In fact, all you have ever done is blustered, evaded, and spread misinformation while on this forum. In fact, given the kind of response you gave to me earlier, you don't actually know what the hell you're talking about at all, you can't even make a basic argument(so...... why would I hunt through 7 hours of you not actually arguing anything, but rather just blustering with rhetoric), and .... so yeah, this is pretty much foolish. Also, I've clicked your link, and I couldn't find any of your podcasts, instead I see this a loading screen that never loads.


I expect you not to give misinformation and to have informed opinions. Nothing about my opinion suggests that I am utterly ill-informed. I'm simply not going to bother fine-graining a response when what I've seen is clearly inadequate for the job. So, going on about intrinsic incentives, is there any research supporting the conclusion that this is sufficient to get human cooperation on these projects?


Honestly, I don't actually consider you a teacher.

You do realize that this still puts you behind Creation scientists, right?

You see, you could call me a fence sitter. I love the concept of this city. I've watched countless hours of video on this whole thing. But there are all these obstacles they must overcome and they rarely address them in the lectures or documentaries such as government opposition, funding, years of R&D, who will take over the project should key members disappear (as in how freely available is the information and management of it for its legacy to pass on) etc.

Look at what the history of 19th to 20th Century patents and inventions has taught us about the US government. Anything that would damage the need to purchase from the corporate machine that ties to the top tier of lobbyists and bankers has seen the inventors be bought out, threatened, silenced, killed. Even if they won't be providing the first city to consumers as a test it is dangerous to the elite. As it stands if any of them were to be wiped out today they would be forgotten by the public even if awareness was raised.

On a positive note - futuretimeline has dubbed those farms in buildings vertical farms. it's definitely the way to go to ensure crops are untainted, uncontaminated or gm'ed. It also eliminates any problems to do with space.

I couldn't find the podcasts. I don't have any high hopes, as you don't have any awareness of economic ideas, so.... how could you even begin to tolerably criticize a notion you don't show any signs of understanding?

You seem to understand the economy as much as a creationist understands evolution, and given that, and given that you spout out criticisms as intelligent as "Well, if humans evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys", it seems that your movement is still on the fringes for a reason. I mean, even the Singularity has a larger number of higher quality proponents, and it's still considered a fringe concept and likely of questionable scientific support.

Wow, I can see AG is back on form with his noodling, making huge leaps of faith and logical fallacies, ignorant assumptions and not making any effort whatsoever to consider anything outside his closed world view. And swearing on top. Strange that he "couldn't find" my podcasts when I provided a link for them. Maybe he chose to ignore it.

"Also if you wanted to find out what questions I have already answered in my podcasts here is the link:

AAUTZM Podcasts"

Did you get it that time? Tell you what when you have moved that pointer over to that link, clicked on it, and listened, (which would be a MIRACLE) then we can talk. And I don't wanna hear your whinging "I can't be bothered to waste my time with that" That's no excuse. Like I said, you are not immune from the burden of research. Know what you are trying to refute. Then you won't waste my time and yours asking redundant questions that I've already answered.

That's a good point, however there are references to numerous things that you've addressed here. Solving all these problems is gonna be a very arduous and complicated task. Once we think we have a handle on it, a whole new problem presents itself. Its gonna be a very bumpy road.



Aain, very good point. That is why we need to bring together as many able-minded and able-bodied people to help make this a reality.



Absolutely.

Forgot to mention one other problem which is why I brought up patenting and inventors:

Free. Renewable. Energy.

This is something consumers want, should have, and the Venus Project want to make use of. So many patents have been bought up by government and the oil industry that will not invest in or create these alternative energies that are free, renewable and proven to work (they have to work else the patents aren't allowed to be approved by law). It would at first cripple, then very shortly after destroy the oil industry. That in turn would shatter the illusions the military industrial complex presents to us. Then there's all the other companies that lobby whom it would affect like the motoring companies, shipping firms, travel firms etc. There's simply too much at stake. It wouldn't be allowed to happen.

I am not making any huge leap of faith.


I did not engage in any logical fallacy.


I don't speak from a place of ignorance on these issues.


There is no strangeness. I made the statement twice, here's the other time: "Also, I've clicked your link, and I couldn't find any of your podcasts, instead I see a loading screen that never loads. "

A loading screen that never loads when I click on your link counts as not finding your podcasts. It isn't strange. It says "Please be patient.... The Community Call is Loading" but it doesn't load.


I already saw your link. Your link doesn't work.

In any case, given everything I've seen on these forums, there is nothing to refute. You don't even KNOW logic. You don't actually KNOW how to construct a logical argument. You don't even KNOW economics. You can complain about how I "avoiding the burden of research" but frankly, we're talking about an issue comparing Creation Science to evolution. Pointing out weak spots where the theory doesn't seem to be plausible by existing knowledge, and pointing out how it fails to even properly consider the opposing and dominant intellectual paradigm is not unfair.

Pretending that I am some fool when on even the times where you try, you fail to even construct the most basic logical framework, and instead rely on bluster instead of thinking to solve the problem, that seems like the real issue, not any deficiency on my end. I know my competence, it is available to anybody who reads any exchange I engage in, and so your lies don't actually stick.