alanwatts

The difference between your comparison is that automation of finance/insurance would be achieved purely by mathematical calculations performed by software, while the automation of many/most other jobs would require much more complex robotics.

When workers' wages are lowered/replaced by a typical welfare program as a result of automation, the workers no longer have the purchasing power to purchase the goods produced by the automation, thus rendering such automation useless.

If prices for the end user do not decrease proportionately with the savings created by automation, the whole point of automation is nullified.

"Enhanced interrogation"

Pretty accurate description for the last 100 years. But this fighting has been going on for thousands of years between the 3 Abrahamic religions, perpetually fighting over the Holy Land and between their own respective sects.

What's not the same thing?

Plenty of such tribes exist and have existed without centralized industrial infrastructure.

>piggybacking on a technological society that did make those investments.

Indeed, every technological advancement has piggy backed on those before it.

>How do those systems manage capital-intensive projects?

The use of the word "capital" here indicates a misunderstanding of the social dynamics of tribal economies.

They produce and consume that which they need together because of shared benefit.

Large scale centralized constructions like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, or power grids are built to serve the stationary needs of the big city not the small, distributed, mobile tribe.

>I'd like to see your anthropology cites for "tribal organisations"

Look at any hunter gatherer tribe.

The key word here is "distributed". Distributed tribes are light weight and mobile by design. So they are rarely ever grouped into concentrations of 100,000+ members except for the occasional festival-like gatherings.

>What's the alternative that doesn't rely on philosopher-kings or omniscient omnibenevolent central planners?

Distributed sharing economies, like that of most tribal organizations.

All that's left is for us to ban roads, that way no one can drive their get away cars.

It's simply luditism. Their business model depends upon the constraints of obsolete technology, so they will resist every new innovation as an evil killer until their artificial monopoly finally bleeds out.

>Writing in the near-east was essentially developed as a more sophisticated accounting tool.

The ancient Greeks also developed their alphabet and coinage systems around roughly the same time.

>The term "piracy" doesn't help the problems any---it's a smear term that tries to put downloading and sharing on the same level as murder and kidnapping.

Precisely:

>I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

-Jack Valenti (former president of MPAA for 38 years), 1982 congressional hearing

https://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm

What word/phrase would be more apt, in your opinion? Marshall McLuhan wrote about this phenomenon back in the 60's

>Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before - but also involved in the total social process as never before, since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly, interrelating every human experience.

-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

Who do you think are among the top financiers of elections who are also pushing for deregulation? You don't think those congressmen actually wrote those technical laws themselves, do you?

Add student loans to the list

>Is there any way for your statement (which has many bold assertions) to lead anywhere but "We're all just victims of our genes"?

Maybe that we are influenced far more by uncontrollable environmental factors than by our "freely* willed" decisions.

>Free will: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate;

When you are hungry, you need to eat. But if you don't have any money and take an apple from the market you will be punished. So technically in this situation, the person acted out of necessity and therefore did not act out of free will.

Careful with that train of thought, teaching unconditional love and forgiveness is what has led many mystics to be punished to the max: i.e. crucified, burned at the stake, etc.

Intentions aside, the 67% recidivism rate in the US shows that it is more focused on recurring punishment than rehabilitation.

Computing and renewable energy methods are becoming exponentially more powerful and less expensive to produce, a process called ephemeralization.

>I keep trying to come up with a reason for how recent advances are improving our lives without increasing GDP. Does anyone have a compelling one?

GDP/GNP is not a measurement of happiness or standard of living.

>Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

-RFK, Speech at the University of Kansas at Lawrence (18 March 1968)

>Of course, no one thinks of themselves or their in-group as horrible. You could substitute horrible for flawed if it makes you feel better.

If everyone is flawed, then whats the point of having an arbitrarily selected group of flawed people censor all the other flawed people? That logic seems flawed, unless it is purely from a monetary interest.

Moreover, deeming people "horrible" is completely subjective. All of the great pioneers of human rights were considered "horrible people" by the majority.

>Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

-Dr. King, Letter From a Birmingham Jail

No tools have ever gone extinct in human history

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/02/04/133188723/to...

>The past few decades of globalization have resulted in the greatest destruction of poverty in history.

At the same time there are still more poor people than ever before in history, ~3 billion, so what is the net? 50 years ago there was only ~3 billion people on the planet.

Interesting. So there are no 24/7 news channels?

I.E. the Sony hack was attributed to North Korea simply because the attack had a NK IP address.

Where did you migrate from? And what was the news like there?

How do we know Duterte isn't working with the Cartels like so many others in his position? If true, this would be a great plan to consolidate the supply chain by efficiently/extrajudicially killing off the competition while increasing profits.

Economics 101: increased risk = increased reward

Reminiscent of the 1986 drug laws[1] in the US increasing punishments by 100 fold while at the same time US officials were helping import billions of dollars of cocaine[2] to help fund Nicaraguan death squads[3].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Freeway"_Rick_Ross

[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North

>You have made tremendous strides in the area of scientific and technological development. But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about "improved means to an unimproved end." How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture. Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but through your moral and spiritual genius you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. So America, I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast with your scientific advances

-Dr. King, 1956

http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...

>but the thrown away food is hardly the reason people are hungry.

What is the reason?