Canadian Tar Sands

[casualjoe]

Surely you can see the corelation between manufacturing costs and the final price of the product? What's the point of making a mass hand made product in Europe when frankly speaking someone in a 3rd world country making a shoe can produce the same result for a fraction of the cost? You seem to be forgetting that workers getting pennies for their job are not forced to work, they do it out of their own free will.

It's easy to reel off facts about how the economy works today, we've all grown up with it and are familiar with it. They are forced to work because they live in poverty, our system doesn't allow them anything. They'd benefit from a decent education a bit more than legal slavery. We've got it so easy, don't you feel like taking on a proper challenge?

Maximising profit = more spent on R&D. 3Dfx is a case in point here - very long design and production cycles, slightly bad management and as a result the company went bust despite having products which were well ahead of their time. They always released the best product they could, but a few months later when they were hard at work designing the next chip to be released in a year or two, Nvidia would come along with something slightly better and much cheaper than what 3Dfx was currently selling.

If 3Dfx and Nvidia (and IBM ect..) all worked together imagine the sick stuff we'd have now.

What you're saying is we should all design AI's and robots which will subsequently serve our needs so that humans don't have to do anything. I just can't see that happening. It's ambition to improve our/others' life that drives us to be who we are. Don't you think that with such an attitude to just enjoy ourselves and have machines do everything else for us, humans will become obsolete? Look at the drug addict stereotype, it's a similar story - all he wants is to get his fix, he's of no benefit to the society whatsoever. I would never give away my job for a life of pleasure and having everything for free because it's having to pay for pleasures that drives me to perform better.

You'll find that nearly all crime is a consequence of poverty, greed for money or lack of education. You have grown up subjected to the belief you have to earn money to pay for pleasure when there is a clear, (intentional) lack of emphasis on you're own mortality and moral values to drive you to work hard and do good things for others. I believe we could evolve into a great civilisation in harmony with nature again, pursuing arts, music and generally being creative with no man made economic restrictions. It's just that the problems created by our current way of life, like chav's, corporate billionaires and the grip they have over peoples minds, are getting in the way of progress.

These aren't my ideas by the way, there are about 10 million other people that share similar views who are contributing to The Venus Project.

[Fish-Finger-er]

You'll find that nearly all crime is a consequence of poverty, greed for money or lack of education. You have grown up subjected to the belief you have to earn money to pay for pleasure when there is a clear, (intentional) lack of emphasis on you're own mortality and moral values to drive you to work hard and do good things for others. I believe we could evolve into a great civilisation in harmony with nature again, pursuing arts, music and generally being creative with no man made economic restrictions. It's just that the problems created by our current way of life, like chav's, corporate billionaires and the grip they have over peoples minds, are getting in the way of progress.

not my viewpoint here either, but who is to say living pursuing arts,music and being creative, is any better or worse than driving to the golf course in your jag, so you can have 18 holes of golf and enjoy whiskey older than the hooker your renting tonight.

regarding the sweatshop slavery argument. its kinda flawed(As is my argument, but anyway)

take some figures ive got here, the average hourly wage for a sweatshop worker is $0.44, which is about 30p. which sounds like slavery.

but bear in mind in china the average wage is $2ish a day, so they are actually on above average wages.

you could then say that doesnt matter a bit, as people are living in poverty, but less than 15% of people in china are classed as living in poverty, some organisations class over 20% off the uk as living in poverty.

other arguments (less scientific) include the fact that in goa, you can buy pints of lager from touristy bars for 5p, meaning you could buy 6 pints with one hours sweatshop wage, in some places in the uk youd struggle to buy 2 pints with the wage of a checkout assistant, and even on my job, I think id probably see about 6 pints from an hours wages.

[casualjoe]

Ok, so the situation with sweatshops are improving. What's not improving is the gap between the super rich and the poor. The way things are going it's only going to get worse. Are rich people better than everybody else? I personally don't think so.

The US plan to increase the GDP of China by creating a mass consumer market of Chinese 'Americans'. This will help the US out of recession as it will generate a huge demand in which will stimulate production in America. The Chinese government are happy to do this but only in their own time, development is going well for the Chinese at the moment and they don't want to make any drastic changes where as America feel they need to do this asap.

So 3 billion more people are going to become avid consumers like the US, this greed thing is taking over and our planet is basically screwed.

I'm being a bit harsh on the US here. European governments are just as crazy too.

Edited September 18, 2011 by casualjoe

[Greetings]

It's easy to reel off facts about how the economy works today, we've all grown up with it and are familiar with it. They are forced to work because they live in poverty, our system doesn't allow them anything. They'd benefit from a decent education a bit more than legal slavery. We've got it so easy, don't you feel like taking on a proper challenge?

The ideology you are conveying is quite interesting but I can't help thinking that there are some big loopholes in it. Let's talk about cheap labour vs. education.

You're suggesting we should get rid of poverty - the nasty truth of the matter is that we need it (don't want to sound harsh). We need people who are willing to do the "crappy" jobs like taking out the trash or cleaning the streets. If we're all well educated, who's going to do that? Someone who's finished uni? Sure you can convince anyone to do that by offering him a lot of money but that money is not going to come from nowhere.

How do you want to get rid of poverty? Where is the money going to come from?

Who is going to do the crappy jobs if everybody will demand a high pay due to their good education?

Where are the well educated going to work if there's only a limited amount of jobs which require higher education?

Oh, one more statistic about China - apparently there are not enough resources on Earth to bring their standard of living up to the standard of living of Americans or Europeans.

Edited September 18, 2011 by Greetings

[casualjoe]

Standards of living in our current system is based on GDP. GDP does not take into account whether peoples basic human needs are met. When human needs are not met, all of our bad traits come to the surface. All our resources will be consumed in the name of growth, which is not resourcefully economic! Everything gets consumed, then what?

Edit. Who shall clean the streets and take out trash? We could build super efficient cities that clean themselves, where every product is designed to be fully recyclable when a better one is produced. Our capacity for innovation is huge and with people from 3rd world countries educated, innovation would increase beyond your wildest imagination.

This change would require a lot of work of course, but what a great thing to work on! I'd personally die happier knowing I had spent all my life working towards something positive than destructive.

Edited September 18, 2011 by casualjoe

[MonsieurMonkey]

Not read all of this back and forth, but I had a similar argument with a friend. Joe your idea is very Eutopian and it's better than any other as far as I'm concerned. (Although completely unachievable) If every big company gave all of their profit, to developing 3rd world countries over the next 10 years, with a focus on education and developing renewable energy sources from a blank canvas where there was no infrastructure already in place. Their returns would be phenomenal the 10 years after, not only would they own a lot of valuable patents probably, they would double their possible target audience.

Vodafone currently owe our governemnt around £6,000,000,000 (It might be another 3 zeros, it's a billion but I'm just not sure if it's an American billion or English), think how many wells that could build in Africa. By the way, it was 7 billion, but they said they couldn't afford that, so gave us 1 and we wrote off the rest.