Cyprus woes

[AllPurposeAtheist]

The world went right along fine for thousands of years without the internet. I lived the first 30 years of my life without it and remember life as bearable.
That said it is a handy tool for some of us while for many others it's nothing but a distracting toy to gossip and post jesus slogans on facebook.
That and 'social engineering' has little to do with Cyprus. The simple fact is it's a political power game. Cyprus attracted filthy rich to stash vast sums of money TAX FREE which took billions of dollars, rubles and so on OUT of circulation leaving nations tax starved and on the hook for worthless paper.
It's not unique to cyprus.. Plenty of places are defacto money launderers for the oligarchy who are now legally robbing governments blind, the US included.

[Sal1981]

Social engineering was already tried in some places. Look up Soviet Union. It failed.

You really don't want to see the basic problem, do you? All these experiments you mention ("credit" system, social engineering, genetic engineering, etc.) must be imposed by someone on the rest of the population. Now, who controls those who are in power?

The people of course.

Have you met the people? I have. They are not fit to control themselves, much less the government.

We seem to manage in democracies, and the most of the people elected also seem to be educated on it (at least here) in management and political theory. And this is with the fact that democracy is basically majority rule.

[Sal1981]

I was being facetious.

Greed isn't the only game in town. Education is, in my mind, the cornerstone of our civilization. Without education and the spread & search for knowledge, we'd be impulse driven greedy, short and malnutritioned cavemen. Somewhere along the line we figured shit out and improved our lives, by just figuring out stuff, like, it was a bad idea to shit where we eat.

Yes, and in Soviet Union and similar societies people were "educated" to think that their system was the best. Look how it turned out.

I don't consider ideology worship (in this case Communism) being educated in anything. I mean specifically in the sciences, even social 'science'.

[Sal1981]

Social engineering was already tried in some places. Look up Soviet Union. It failed.

You really don't want to see the basic problem, do you? All these experiments you mention ("credit" system, social engineering, genetic engineering, etc.) must be imposed by someone on the rest of the population. Now, who controls those who are in power?

The people of course.

Yeah, just like people in Soviet Union had full control over those in power. Don't make me laugh.

That was a Communist state, the "people" there were very much just connections from nepotism, and anyone that wasn't friend or family was ignored - clearly not a check for power.

Besides, I think government should not be elected, but by proving that you're competent enough to rule mixed with some sort of element of disparaging power, such as democratic councils, so it doesn't get centralized.

Who should decide who rules? Well initially it would be a democratic council, engineering a competency test or whatever and the people would vote on if the test was valid or not. I guess some quasi-democratic technocratic republic, you could call it.

[Sal1981]

It's an engineering calculation, and quite a complex one. Do you want me to account for all the energy that is produced and used by a nation? I can do that, just would take some time. IOW; it's an engineering issue, technological.

Wrong, it's a social issue. Calculating energy is easy, defining people's needs isn't. You didn't answer my question.

My mistake. I forgot about 'needs'. The people in their daily routine would have a say what they need or not, exercised  by their expenditure.

As for needs, it would be the surplus energy, divided evenly to the nations population.

No, that's what you'd give them, not necessarily what they need. Again, you didn't answer my question.

'Needs' seems hard to pin down for me, because the way I see it, it would be what they'd want, and what of those wants could be achievable from what's available. It would depend on what people spend their credits on.

If the energy to sustain yourself is covered by your "credits" you run into a major problem: given that those credits are issued based on the "net energy" left, you have to make sure that this "net energy" is at least as much as the energy spent to produce it, otherwise people would not be able to sustain themselves. Good luck with that.

Why, thank you.

I see that your "ideal system" isn't well thought out. No, schratch that, it isn' thought out at all.

I've just played with the idea of how a nation would look like that wasn't entirely democratic, but based on competency instead of votes. Also, there's always surplus energy, the Sun gives plenty (and what we can dig out of the ground).

And here you run into another major problem: state-owned economies have been shown time and again to not work. You may put it as you want, but this would still be a strictly state-controlled system.

The conditions aren't the same. Besides, only the energy calculation of how much everyone gets to use, is calculated. How people spend those goods and what they wish to produce is entirely up to them.

"Besides, only the value in dollars of how much everyone gets to use, is calculated. How people spend those dollars and what they wish to produce is entirely up to them". Yup, sounds exactly the same!

Except it's based on something real. Money, currently, is just paper and whatever value we think stuff has, but not the value stuff itself really is. Using the energy needed to produce something is a start, to approach what value something has, instead of some arbitrary value.

Irrelevant. Someone, be it an individual, a group thereof or the state, will still have to provide those services. Therefore, your credits will still be used exactly as money is used now.

The producers would be in large part be a workforce necessary to surpass sustainable energy. Basically production-side. They would not get anything for their work (because there's no money) except for an energy certificate, that is evenly distributed from surplus energy from the overhead energy calculation.

Yup, sounds like Soviet Union. Ask those people how it worked out.

It had systematic flaw(s) in theory itself. Human nature for one. But Communism is another discussion.

No, greed is a basic human feature.

Then we change it.

How? With genetic engineering? "Social engineering" (aka indoctrination)? "Education" (which can again turn into indoctrination)? It was tried, it failed. And it failed because those in power of "engineering" the society had full control on it. Your "Technocracy" bears exactly the same risks.

It does bear the same risks, which is why there should be stop-gaps from centralization of anything, not just power, but also who decides what's correct in a knowledge sense. What exactly these stopping mechanisms would be is debatable.

Wrong. Money, in its various forms throughout history, it's what has allowed our economy to shift from a highly localised, barter-based one to a more global one.

And it has time and again resulted in economic disparities, boom & bust, and what have you, in a global economy. It doesn't work currently.

Each and every economic system mankind has tried has resulted in disparities, impoverishment of many and enrichment of a few, etc. It's human nature, unfortunately.

I'm just playing with the idea for an alternative to current economic system of money. Also, I'm not quite sure how trade would work in Technocracy.

TL;DR: You can put it as you want, but goods, services and resources have a value which is highly dependant on both their availability and our personal needs/wants. Your "credit" system is just another way of quantifying that value, just like money. It doesn't solve at all our current, and very real, problems.

You're half-right. It's re-quantifying value itself on what it really is based on; Joules.

I may be half-right, but you're completely wrong. You can't objectively quantify the value of goods, services and resources, be it in dollars, joules or chickens. Each of us places different values on the same thing, and you cannot excape that unless you turn the whole world population into mindless robots. No thanks.

People may disagree on value of things from a monetary perspective, but how much Joules went into a goods or anything for that matter is something we can calculate. People just have to accept maths and physics, despite what they think.

What people value, when there's not enough information on what it constitutes, becomes arbitrary.

[Plu]

And that's exactly my point: we all define our needs differently, therefore there's no way to univocally say what's "better" for the community as a whole. We may all agree on some very "basic" concepts which are anyway given for granted nowadays, but from that point on opinons will diverge.

You could start with a definition of "making sure everyone has access to the basic needs". Food, shelter, access to information and the ability to socialize.

Hell, if we could give everyone that, we're already at like 90% of fixing shit by then. Many problems arise from people having even less than the most basic needs and nobody willing to give them an option to get out of it.