Your thoughts plz
- Thread starter fmonroy
- Start date
I don't have time to watch that entire thing, but I have problems with what I've seen already. For one thing, the video suggests that all products should be built to last 100 years, made of the best materials, etc. Well, some things simply don't need to last that long. Look at my computer. I doubt it will last more than a few years. How terrible and wasteful according to the video. Yet, every time I buy a new computer it's ten times better than the one it replaces! If my first computer had been built to last one hundred years, I'd be working with a 50 megahtz microprocessor! It's wasteful to build things to last longer than the amount of time it takes for them to become obsolete.
Imagine how expensive everything would be if everything was built to last 100 years! And what about progress? How the hell could you improve anything if no one would be in the market for anything new for their entire lifetime. Sounds like the road to economic stagnation to me. No progress. No innovation. Everything staying the same, or more likely, everything constantly getting worse.
Its something which should have been here instead of capitalism.
Now the fun part is that the money needed for any research is funded by organizations motivated by greed. And no one would want the existing system to be replaced. Why because the poor are always worried and not even going to spend time thinking or watching such stuff. The best they want is religion. That solves most of their problems. The rich can never give up the luxury of what money can buy. If we don't learn ways to tackle the basic psychological factors in human beings and understand it more accurately, any man made system will fail after a certain amount of time.
Now the fun part is that the money needed for any research is funded by organizations motivated by greed. And no one would want the existing system to be replaced. Why because the poor are always worried and not even going to spend time thinking or watching such stuff. The best they want is religion. That solves most of their problems. The rich can never give up the luxury of what money can buy. If we don't learn ways to tackle the basic psychological factors in human beings and understand it more accurately, any man made system will fail after a certain amount of time.
Exactly, those organizations / individuals don't want that change, and most people, as part of the system, is afraid of the change.
I got tired of listening to the presentation and never found out what system is being proposed to solve the problem.
Did anyone listen long enough to get to a description of the proposed system? I am guessing that it is some variation on a world government which either owns or controls everything & is perhaps the only employer (or at least controls how much each person is paid). I wonder if it is some variant of Fabian Socialism.
It makes me think that my crackpot analysis is applicable to this movement. When Einstein, Bohr, Newton, et cetera presented their ideas, they did not spend a lot of effort describing what was wrong with existing science. They presented their concepts and reasons supporting their notions.
One quick method of recognizing a crackpot is to compare the amount of effort spent knocking the current establishment compared to the amount of effort spent presenting new ideas.
BTW: The post relating to planned obsolescence was very good. My first computer had two diskettes, no hard disk, 640K of usable memory, & a less than 5KHz CPU. My next system had a 20MB hard disk and I think a 12KHz (Kilo Hertz, not Mega Hertz) CPU. I am glad I no longer have either of those systems. I remember a comment by some Auto executive about a car which would run maintenance free for 20 plus years.
I have applications (WordPerfect, MathCad, & others) which would have cost me 100,000 or more each in the era when there were only mainframes (those mainframe programs were not close to as good as my current applications). How many copies of Windows XP do you think Microsoft would be able to sell at say $2500 each? How many systems would Dell be able to sell at $50,000 each? I would bet that those companies would make far less total profit at those prices.
Did anyone listen long enough to get to a description of the proposed system? I am guessing that it is some variation on a world government which either owns or controls everything & is perhaps the only employer (or at least controls how much each person is paid). I wonder if it is some variant of Fabian Socialism.
It makes me think that my crackpot analysis is applicable to this movement. When Einstein, Bohr, Newton, et cetera presented their ideas, they did not spend a lot of effort describing what was wrong with existing science. They presented their concepts and reasons supporting their notions.
One quick method of recognizing a crackpot is to compare the amount of effort spent knocking the current establishment compared to the amount of effort spent presenting new ideas.
BTW: The post relating to planned obsolescence was very good. My first computer had two diskettes, no hard disk, 640K of usable memory, & a less than 5KHz CPU. My next system had a 20MB hard disk and I think a 12KHz (Kilo Hertz, not Mega Hertz) CPU. I am glad I no longer have either of those systems. I remember a comment by some Auto executive about a car which would run maintenance free for 20 plus years.
The bit about scarcity increasing price & profits failed to mention that increasing price increases profit per unit sold, not necessarily total profit which is the real name of the game.
I have applications (WordPerfect, MathCad, & others) which would have cost me 100,000 or more each in the era when there were only mainframes (those mainframe programs were not close to as good as my current applications). How many copies of Windows XP do you think Microsoft would be able to sell at say $2500 each? How many systems would Dell be able to sell at $50,000 each? I would bet that those companies would make far less total profit at those prices.