SignyM's answer to the world's problems by SIGNYM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

SignyM

I don't see a voluntary transition from our current condition to a more sustainable and equitable one. At present the thousand or so of 'haves' have more than all the rest of the vast, vast majority of the 'have nots' put together. That gives them the power of economic life and death over everyone who is influenced by the system.

When I remember Collapse by Diamond, I recall that the few societies that stepped away from the abyss did so b/c one in power changed the course of the entire society at cost of their PERSONAL demotion. I don’t see that happening here ... not among our economic elite who do for the most part run the government as well as the economy.

But that attitude is common not just among the rich. In fact, using Geezer as an example - he will go over the cliff hanging onto his stuff rather than let go of his stuff and grab a handhold for survival.

So how did the rest of us get so buffaloed into being so inert about our survival in the face of the powerful few?

Well, there are the system beneficiaries, the ultra-rich. They have the system rigged to benefit them with no care for the future, and will not (I predict) give it up. There are the deluded system promoters like Geezer and little rappy et al, who seem to be extremely focused on things - specifically, the things they think they'll be able to acquire if only the rest of us would get out of the way and let them grab with their greedy hands as much as they want. People be damned. There are the comfortable who don't want to risk what they have now even if it means survival later. There are the desperate who are clinging to life with every minute of every day and don't have time to do much else except ... keep hanging on.

But mostly there are people sort of like us. Driven by design to focus on latest consumer geegaw, the heating bill, or the price of gas. ie - our immediate circumstances in our individual lives. I don't think our survival is going to come from below, either.

If you're looking for a theoretical answer as to how this could be prevented from happening again, based on the nuanced understanding of human social systems and technology, I haven't come up with one. But as I've heard argued - and it makes sense to me - our circumstances will be so reduced as a species (assuming we survive) that the chances of vast social networks shuttling the crystallization of vast amount of work into ever smaller channels scattered around the globe - will be an impossibility. If we don't decide our future, circumstances will decide it for us.

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Sunday, August 4, 2013 1:59 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Any concerns that I may have had of Sig being a bat guano crazy commie nut case are now cemented and are fully verified.

Climate "shift " ? Is that what we're calling it now ? It's gone from global warming, climate change, to now climate SHIFT, in little more than a decade. Loverly. Why not just call it for what is the REAL problem - pollution. That's all folks really care about, having clean air to breath and clean water to drink. Screw that, it's too complicated an issue now. Just call it 'climate shift' and tax the mutha out of anyone or anything, right ?

After all, think of the children!

Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen

Resident USA Freedom Fundie

" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall

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Sunday, August 4, 2013 2:34 AM

NEWOLDBROWNCOAT

Uh, Sig-- don't spend the prize money just yet. Wait 'till you see the check.

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Sunday, August 4, 2013 6:27 AM

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

separate the top 1000 richest people from their money, and distribute

nationalize banks

cooperative or individual-owner (no employees) businesses only

eliminate money

So are these seperate, or a package? If you eliminate money, for example, what's the point of nationalizing banks, and how do you distribute the wealth of the top 1000? If I'm an individual-owner of a welding business and I do work for a cooperative making plows, how do they pay me? I don't need a plow.

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Sunday, August 4, 2013 7:08 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Any concerns that I may have had of Sig being a bat guano crazy commie nut case are now cemented and are fully verified.

Climate "shift " ? Is that what we're calling it now ? It's gone from global warming, climate change, to now climate SHIFT, in little more than a decade. Loverly. Why not just call it for what is the REAL problem - pollution. That's all folks really care about, having clean air to breath and clean water to drink. Screw that, it's too complicated an issue now. Just call it 'climate shift' and tax the mutha out of anyone or anything, right ?

After all, think of the children!

I'm surprised that of all the things, it was global warming/ climate change/ climate shift that you singled out.

I just want to go into space. ._.

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Sunday, August 4, 2013 8:04 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:

I'm surprised that of all the things, it was global warming/ climate change/ climate shift that you singled out.

I just want to go into space. ._.

It was at the top of the list, so I just went w/ it.

The rest were just too absurd to bother with at all.

Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen

Resident USA Freedom Fundie

" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall

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Sunday, August 4, 2013 10:08 AM

Quote:

It was at the top of the list, so I just went w/ it.

The rest were just too absurd to bother with at all.

Ah.

I've always thought that we should have multiple socioeconomic systems going on in a region as big as the US. You could have communist enclaves or whatever and capitalist enclaves at the same time. All that matters is that the people living in a particular system agree to it.

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Sunday, August 4, 2013 6:05 PM

OONJERAH

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Ah.

I've always thought that we should have multiple socioeconomic systems going on in a region as big as the US. You could have communist enclaves or whatever and capitalist enclaves at the same time. All that matters is that the people living in a particular system agree to it.

Hmmm. I never thought of that. I've considered
society segregating itself in other ways, but not that.

Sounds pretty awesome. Could it work?

===========================:~>

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Sunday, August 4, 2013 6:41 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
So are these seperate, or a package?

Do you need to ask?

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Monday, August 5, 2013 2:45 AM

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
So are these seperate, or a package?
Do you need to ask?

Apparently.

Can you answer?

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Monday, August 5, 2013 5:53 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Ah.

I've always thought that we should have multiple socioeconomic systems going on in a region as big as the US. You could have communist enclaves or whatever and capitalist enclaves at the same time. All that matters is that the people living in a particular system agree to it.

Hmmm. I never thought of that. I've considered
society segregating itself in other ways, but not that.

Sounds pretty awesome. Could it work?

Maybe. We already have various forms of small scale trade for items that are easily bartered, as well as cooperative ideas like credit unions that exist alongside the predominant capitalism.

Complete segregation could become tricky because then a system of trade between two different kinds of economies would have to be established. There also exists a kind of mistrust between different economic systems.

On the other hand, America trades with China. Who ever would've thought that would work out?

So... Where there's a will, there's a way. In the very least I think that multiple regional economic systems operating at different levels would provide it's own kind of a safety net for people and it would be more humane than existing clashes over welfare versus taxation, give people more of a choice. Segregating systems entirely by local organization based on which system people want to live under would have similar results, and I don't think trade would inherently be damaged by the change. There's lots of ways it could be done.

I don't really have a strong commitment to any economic system, so it's always just made sense to me to let people choose what they want. Plus if one system fails, there are the others already developed and stable for backup.

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Tuesday, August 6, 2013 2:41 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Quote:

It was at the top of the list, so I just went w/ it.

The rest were just too absurd to bother with at all.

Ah.

I've always thought that we should have multiple socioeconomic systems going on in a region as big as the US. You could have communist enclaves or whatever and capitalist enclaves at the same time. All that matters is that the people living in a particular system agree to it.

Articles of Confederation were tried here already.

Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen

Resident USA Freedom Fundie

" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall

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Friday, August 9, 2013 3:36 AM

Keep the Shiny side up

Bump for SignyM to respond to my question, since she seems to be back.

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Friday, August 9, 2013 4:49 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Quote:

It was at the top of the list, so I just went w/ it.

The rest were just too absurd to bother with at all.

Ah.

I've always thought that we should have multiple socioeconomic systems going on in a region as big as the US. You could have communist enclaves or whatever and capitalist enclaves at the same time. All that matters is that the people living in a particular system agree to it.

Articles of Confederation were tried here already.

Yeah, but that only failed because none of the other nations were willing to back the US currency then. We were a new nation and considered a bad investment, no one was sure if we could stabilize. The economic doubts became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think we could totally pull it off now.

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Friday, August 9, 2013 8:25 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The answer is: separate.

Each is addressing the main problem that I see today: extreme imbalances in wealth and agency (call it "power", or "the ability to determine one's future").

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Friday, August 9, 2013 8:41 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Any concerns that I may have had of Sig being a bat guano crazy commie nut case are now cemented and are fully verified.

Well, I've been thinking for quite a while now that you're a greedy, delusional sociopath. Personally, I'd rather be called a bat guano crazy commie nut case.

Quote:
Climate "shift " ? Is that what we're calling it now ? It's gone from global warming, climate change, to now climate SHIFT, in little more than a decade. Loverly. Why not just call it for what is the REAL problem is

Yeah- a metastable state. Nobody is calling it climate "shift" except me and a few modelers. And I think they understand "metastable' a lot better than I do.

Quote:
pollution.

I see your thinking has progressed to the 1960's. Keep on going! You can do it!

Quote:
That's all folks really care about, having clean air to breath and clean water to drink. Screw that, it's too complicated an issue now. Just call it 'climate shift' and tax the mutha out of anyone or anything, right ? After all, think of the children!

Is this an attempt at sarcasm? You need to delineate where you're being serious and where you're being sarcastic much better than this, because as I read this statement it makes no sense.

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Friday, August 9, 2013 5:54 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

So, I have a glimmer of an answer. It's the 'just enough' ethic.

But I want to digress a little bit. We all come to this question with our own deep-seated responses to the world. I come from an insecure background and so my answer focuses on security. Geezer comes from a privileged background and so his answer focuses on amassing things - let you inner greed out, Geezer! SignyM focuses on maintaining harmony. Frem on a world where driven defenders like him don't have to come into being. And so on. We each come to answers that fit US specifically. (Little rappy has no angst and so he has no answers - he's just a mindless munching machine looking to gobble.)

But looking at the data from baboons, chimps, and people, some things stand out to me:

the mere accumulation of stuff, by individuals or small groups, above the norm fosters pathological social behavior

hierarchical behavior is self-reinforcing in a group - and if you get rid of the hierarchy you can get rid of the behavior

With that in mind, I propose the 'just enough' ethic. That ethic means that you are alert to when you are using resources for survival and security, and when you are using them as an object of greed. Just enough resources, just enough work, just enough children.

I freely admit I have no idea what economic and social structures would be allowed or forbidden under this ethic (though it's fair to say capitalism - which involves taking more than you need or have personally worked for - would not be allowed).

But this I can say about the just enough ethic: it doesn't need a leap of faith to see the benefits. If people follow the ethic, there will never be too many people. There will never be too few resources. There will never be people denied survival. It would be a society of security of opportunity.

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Friday, August 9, 2013 6:09 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"You could have communist enclaves or whatever and capitalist enclaves at the same time."

They would have to be allowed to create their own currency, banking systems etc. And there would need to be a common means of communication and trade between groups - I imagine the groups being geographically limited, and no one group would have access to all the resources it might need. There would have to be a means for groups to redress grievances between themselves - the water, fishing, watershed examples of the other threads. There would need to be either methods of defense by each group, or a common means of making sure one group or groups wouldn't aggress against another or others. That's off the top of my head.

A lot of slaughter has taken place when an overarching identity and structure has fractured: the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda come to mind.

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Friday, August 9, 2013 8:02 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The problem is that this is the same approach as Geezer: if people only change their minds, the society will follow. However, I think that the external environment (ie the economy) does drive a lot of behavior. So you have to change the economy in order to change behavior, but you have to change expectations in order to change the economy. Where to start?

The other thing is that humans are not good at "vigilance", and by this, I mean not good at maintaining an outlook unless there is some sort of rewarding feedback for that behavior. So I'm looking at changes which are automatic.

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Friday, August 9, 2013 8:27 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"The problem is that this is the same approach as Geezer: if people only change their minds, the society will follow."

Well, I don't have a clue how to get from here to there. But my idea is one-up on Grampy's in this regard: it doesn't take an act of faith to see how the benefits of the system will come about. They directly follow as natural outcomes.

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Saturday, August 10, 2013 7:26 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

BTW SignyM - there's an interesting fact about the passably peaceful baboons:

Baboons in general are noted for the aggressiveness of the males and the extremely low ranking of infants and females. But when the top males of the group died from TB tainted meat at the dump, * the nearby lodge that dumped its trash there changed its practices and incinerated it instead *. The dump, which had been a prize spoil of the hierarchical system, ceased to be one. I wonder if the dump had continued to exist as a treasure that was easily dominated, would the relatively flat hierarchy and peaceable society have continued to exist as well.

Given the studies on humans and chimps that indicate mere concentration of goods in few hands causes pathological social behavior in the entire group, I think the first step is to remove the people with the goods from society, or the goods from those people, or both, in order to create a better society.

The second is to teach people to stop responding like bacteria in a petri dish. The primary response of living things to more resources is to reproduce to the limit of the resource. But given that we have technology, we are no longer at the edge of survival as a species or as individuals. We don't depend on amassing numbers and spreading to the edges of our habitat as insurance against extinction. (Not that this is a conscious thing, but things which exist in large numbers tend to carry forward in time. It's just a system characteristic.)

We've escaped that. As long as we don't have too many children and take too much resources, our individual and species survival is secure into the future. We no longer NEED to respond as if we were under threat of extinction, like bacteria.

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Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:20 AM

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The answer is: separate.

Each is addressing the main problem that I see today: extreme imbalances in wealth and agency (call it "power", or "the ability to determine one's future").

Okay.

"separate the top 1000 richest people from their money, and distribute"

Per Forbes, there are about 1500 billionares in the world, and they have a combined wealth of around $5.4 trillion.

If we redistributed that money evenly to everyone on earth, it'd be a one-time distribution of about $750 per person. This'd really be a boon to someone in Sudan or DR Congo, assuming the "government" there didn't find some way to funnel it their way, but to folks in Europe, North America, and much of Asia, it wouldn't be much.

Also, you'd have a good bit of that $5.4 trillion taken out of the money available for investment. Not sure if that would be good.

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Sunday, August 11, 2013 5:39 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Per Forbes, there are about 1500 billionares in the world, and they have a combined wealth of around $5.4 trillion.

If we redistributed that money evenly to everyone on earth, it'd be a one-time distribution of about $750 per person. This'd really be a boon to someone in Sudan or DR Congo, assuming the "government" there didn't find some way to funnel it their way, but to folks in Europe, North America, and much of Asia, it wouldn't be much.

The biggest obstacle to wealth is ... poverty. I know it sounds like a truism, but NGO's are looking at the idea of rather than determining from a distance how $ should be spent (on wells, stoves, schools, roads, vaccinations, or whatever) perhaps $ should just be given directly to "the people" who are producing (mainly women) to decide HOW it should be spent. Sounds much more libertarian to me that way: imposing on the privileges of a few and respecting the privileges of a few billion.

Quote:
Also, you'd have a good bit of that $5.4 trillion taken out of the money available for investment. Not sure if that would be good.

Right now, that "investment" money is chasing its tail: buying up paintings and diamonds and gold, or buying up land in Africa. Either way, those "investments" are not doing much good for "the many".

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Sunday, August 11, 2013 6:24 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Here's a first-person account of what happens to people when they get more (or think they get more) compared to others:

http://open.salon.com/blog/steven_axelrod/2009/09/13/the_trouble_with_
rich_people

The Trouble with Rich People

What's wrong with them?

The question keeps coming up.

I’m surrounded by rich people; I work for them on a daily basis; I have wealthy family members and friends, as well as various in-laws and acquaintances who would be considered rich by any normal standard, though they deny it stridently, and act insulted if you mention … not the elephant – more like the 1955 Bentley S1 Continental touring car in the room. Or the Matisse cut-outs on the wall. Almost without exception they follow rigid protocols of behavior that I find baffling, mean-spirited, stingy and awful.

Years ago, I overheard a friend of mine, beseeching a wealthy patron for another cash transfusion to his struggling literary magazine. I listened, stunned by the tone of the exchange. At the time I thought it was a perverse anomaly. I know better now.

“ --perhaps the magazine ought to fail,” David, the benefactor was telling my friend Toby, when I happened on their conversation. I paused in the shadowed hallway to listen.

“Maybe,” Toby said. “But I can’t really deal with that idea right now. I have a staff of ten and a growing subscription base and I can’t let a two week cash flow problem ruin that. You have to see that I can’t just -- ”

“Toby.”

“I can’t just let everything – what?”

“You talk too much. You don’t listen. That may very well be one of the reasons your business ventures fail so consistently. You can’t always count on this kind of free ride. It’s making you lazy and careless.”

I almost laughed out loud at this comment: David had in the time I had known him, never let anyone slip more than a word or two between the cracks of his self-important monologues; he had never shown a speck of interest in anyone else’s life, their problems or their ideas. As to the notion of a free ride, David Barandes had been bequeathed a free ride unparalleled in the history of the human species. He had never worked a day in his life, never done a scrap of laundry, cooked a meal, or even paid a bill: the Barandes family domestic staff and accountants had always handled such petty details. I remembered the lovely Jaguar XKE that he totaled at Hampshire, skidding on some black ice, driving too fast one February night. The car had barely been towed away when an equally stunning 1964 Shelby Mustang appeared in the Merrill House parking lot.

After this life of anesthetizing privilege, he had the casual temerity to lecture Toby (who held down two jobs to support himself and the crazy dream of his little magazine) about a ‘free ride.’

...

I’ve seen similar moments since, an experienced many of them myself. For example: the wealthy dowager (I’m talking about a personal fortune of close to fifty millions dollars, barely scathed by the recent financial crisis), blithely showing off some new extravagance to the niece who, with her sisters, was providing hospice care for their mother with no help from anyone. The work was exhausting, even traumatic, and the aunt could have provided round the clock nursing care just by dipping her gold-plated ladle into the limitless sea of money at her disposal. She wouldn’t even have noticed the expense. With literally no effort (her accounts could have handled the transaction), she could have made life bearable for her nieces and eased her sister’s dying immeasurably. But it never occurred to her. Instead she spent hundreds of thousand of dollars on some vain frivolity … and carelessly boasted about it to the sleepless, harrowed young woman who was working around the clock less than a mile away. This seemed impossibly cruel to me, but I was accustomed to this kind of behavior by then.

...

... perhaps there’s nothing inherent in us that drives this harsh and barbaric materialism. I was beginning to think so – and imagining new schools that would train the children of wealth to a new, open-hearted humanity – until I came into some money myself.

Actually, it’s better than that. I just thought I was coming into the money. I never actually saw a dime. The big deal fell through (Most Hollywood deals fall through –except the drug deals). But for a few weeks there, I had a vision--I finally saw the prospect of a windfall, a period of true a shining glimpse of authentic prosperity opening up on the horizon. No more debt! No more overdraft fees. No more punishing 60 hour work-weeks.

Instead: travel, freedom, peace of mind.

And what was the first thing I thought of? How to to hide my new fortune from my friends. How to protect it from my greedy ex-wife. How to use it without giving myself away, what story I could concoct to explain a new car or a flat screen TV (Small inheritance? customer cast off?).

I was acting exactly like all the rich people I hated – and I was still broke! Just the THOUGHT of money had poisoned my mind and kick-started all the same pathologies I’d been denouncing for years. Maybe those responses are actually instinctive.

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Sunday, August 11, 2013 9:08 AM

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
[The biggest obstacle to wealth is ... poverty. I know it sounds like a truism, but NGO's are looking at the idea of rather than determining from a distance how $ should be spent (on wells, stoves, schools, roads, vaccinations, or whatever) perhaps $ should just be given directly to "the people" who are producing (mainly women) to decide HOW it should be spent. Sounds much more libertarian to me that way: imposing on the privileges of a few and respecting the privileges of a few billion.

It'd work better if the kleptocratic governments in a lot of countries wouldn't be skimming off most of the distribution for themselves. Then again, allowing folks to decide how to spend the money themselves doesn't sound very communal, unless they decide to voluntarily form associations to do so, sort'a like Libertarian socialists.

Quote:
Right now, that "investment" money is chasing its tail: buying up paintings and diamonds and gold, or buying up land in Africa. Either way, those "investments" are not doing much good for "the many".

If much of those folks money is in stocks, it's invested somewhere. Think Bill Gates doesn't have a bunch of Microsoft stock? Or that Carlos Sim Helu isn't invested pretty well in his telecom empire? I'd expect Warren Buffet or the Koch brothers have most of their money working for them, rather than just sitting around. Most people who have big money do so because they keep their money working for them.

Consider folks like Eike Batista, who, at #100 on the billionaires list and $10.6 billion seems pretty well off, until you realize last year he was #7 with $35 billion. His stocks in companies he owned dropped quite a bit. His holdings in one company dropped from a value of $19.9 billion to $3.7 billion in one year. I don't cry for him, but his money obviously wasn't all in paintings and gold. http://www.forbes.com/profile/eike-batista/

Anyway, folks who have billions of dollars can buy paintings and jewelery like you'd buy a pizza, and with about as much impact on their total assets.

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Sunday, August 11, 2013 10:40 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Investment in stocks doesn't mean investment in production. If it did, stock prices wouldn't drop from "$19.9 billion to $3.7 billion in one year", or rise by 50% in two years, because production doesn't change that quickly. In fact, a lot of the time stock prices rise and fall in ways that are counterintuitive to the health of a productive economy overall- instead of rising when employment rises (for example) they sometimes fall because of concernt that interest rates might rise (due to inflation concerns). If there's one thing I've learned about the stock market, it's just as susceptible to speculation as gold or anything else.

So much for "investment"!

(Geezer, for someone who boosts the "free market" as much as you do, you really should learn more about it.)

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Sunday, August 11, 2013 8:10 PM

MAGONSDAUGHTER

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

WORLD PROBLEMS

climate shift

overpopulation (beyond sustainable resources)

extreme inequity in resources, money and power behave in non-entropic ways

lack of agency in individual and collective futures

other long-term environmental contamination, species loss etc.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

separate the top 1000 richest people from their money, and distribute

nationalize banks

cooperative or individual-owner (no employees) businesses only

eliminate money

ANALYSIS
Problems in all concepts... ideas welcome!

I'd personally be frightened of anyone suggesting such dramatic changes, given how much conflict it would cause. I'm not interested in living through a reign of terror, no matter how much I consider some people might deserve to be stripped of their wealth.

My solutions are less drastic.

I don't think you need to nationalise all banks, just have at least one. We used to have a highly regulated bank industry, with banks being government run. It was a rather rigid system. However, I can see how you might benefit society by having at least one bank that would not be intent on making profit, and which could offer reasonably priced or no cost services and low interest fixed housing and business loans - no frills of course.

Big investors and high risk takers could go to private banks which would offer higher interest on savings, but there would be at least one bank that would offer services that didn't rip you off to lower income earners who end up paying a load of bank fees that they can't afford.

Businesses/especially larger ones should be accountable cost wise for the impact of their business. Too often business reaps the benefits and the government has to either clean up messes or build extra infrastructure at tax payers expense.

Eg when a new housing development is built on the city fringe, the government is expected to build everything from roads, schools, public transport, parks ammentities and so on. More of this cost should be met by the developer, and that includes environmental costs.

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Monday, August 12, 2013 2:59 AM

Keep the Shiny side up

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Investment in stocks doesn't mean investment in production.

Not always. However, if you're invested in a company you control, seems the money invested would go to production by your company. Think Gates' money invested in Microsoft stock doesn't help Microsoft?

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If it did, stock prices wouldn't drop from "$19.9 billion to $3.7 billion in one year", or rise by 50% in two years, because production doesn't change that quickly.

Such changes are a result, generally, of folks losing faith that the company's ability to make money. That's why the price of stock in a particular company tends to rise and fall based on earnings statements, new product rollouts, changes in management, etc.

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In fact, a lot of the time stock prices rise and fall in ways that are counterintuitive to the health of a productive economy overall- instead of rising when employment rises (for example) they sometimes fall because of concernt that interest rates might rise (due to inflation concerns). If there's one thing I've learned about the stock market, it's just as susceptible to speculation as gold or anything else.

If you're playing with mutual funds, maybe. For folks buying and selling individual stocks, performance of the particular business is key.

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So much for "investment"!

So you don't think folks with lots of money use it to make more money? No "unobtainium barons"? No gradient of wealth getting steeper? I though that was your argument against capitalism - the inevitable concentration of wealth into the hands of a few. If they're out spending all their money on paintings and jewels, instead of putting it to work making more money, how does that inevitable concentration occur?

"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Saturday, August 17, 2013 8:18 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

separate the top 1000 richest people from their money, and distribute

nationalize banks

cooperative or individual-owner (no employees) businesses only

eliminate money

I'd personally be frightened of anyone suggesting such dramatic changes, given how much conflict it would cause.

Here's a less radical idea then - the taxing of large amounts of wealth and profit out of existence. These taxes would apply to people (remove the wealth from the people) and organizations like businesses, which are another center of resource control.

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Saturday, August 17, 2013 8:27 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

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Think Gates' money invested in Microsoft stock doesn't help Microsoft?

No, not really. There are only so many programmers that you need, and the "production" cost of a loadable disc is pennies. What the $ goes to is buying up competing companies, prosecuting pirated software users, defending (or extending) it's end user license agreements (EULAs) and business practices in court, making deals with the NSA to build in back doors, and bending or creating laws like the DMCA that extend copyright protections far past what the framers of the Constitution intended.

Besides, Bill is beyond all that now. His massive wealth is in heritage seeds and human vaccines... where the real money is.

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Saturday, August 17, 2013 8:36 AM