Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, one way that I know, for sure, the US is in no way a Christian nation is that all over the place in the US, everywhere money is being loaned, interest is being charged. Jesus certainly never went off on the subjects of abortion or sex before marriage, but charging interest made him flip over some tables in a temple because he was so mad.

Jesus was right to be mad, because charging interest *breaks* capitalism. Here’s the basic problem. In our system, money is a pointer to value. The little bits of green paper have no actual value but you can use them to buy various goods, so they are backed by all they can buy.

When you charge interest, you are doing something with the pieces of paper which cannot be matched in the real world. Very few real world activities generate more actual value just by holding a certain amount of value – farming being the one exception. But, because you’re making the accounting system do something that doesn’t match reality, *trouble* ensues. We’ve talked about in previous episodes how the great depression was caused by a failure in the accounting system – and that’s the kind of failure you can run into.

So, I inadvertently got into a discussion about piracy and intellectual property in a place where a number of content creators hang out, and the results drew my attention to something that I’ve thought about before, and want to speak on some.

Said content creators were insisting that piracy hurt their bottom line. One spoke about how a new book she had writen “made only $20”. Now, I’m very clear on piracy had nothing to do with this – the problems those creators are up against is that we have many, many, many more good content creators than we did – the internet has made every person with a video camera, tape recorder, or keyboard a potential filmmaker, musician, or author, and the net result is that it’s very, very difficult to stand out of the crowd and get noticed. I spent ten hours on my last song and it has, thus far, 41 downloads – I consider myself very lucky when content I am working on breaks 100 downloads, and I will be astonished if my upcoming album makes more than 100 sales.

However, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is how capitalism affects unconscious bias in ways that hurt us all. This is most dramatic to me in the case of the preacher who cannot fathom in any way that the religion they are spreading might be wrong or damaging (because if that was the case they’d have to find a new job) but I think also the content creators blaming piracy – and more to the point, *caring* about what people who can’t possibly buy their content do – also illustrates the same sort of problem. The grocer who makes sure to destroy potential food before throwing it away so homeless folks don’t eat it. I could go on for a while, but the point I want to make is that we are not always aware of the neural structures that are being built inside our minds but it is a *really* safe bet that those structures are going to tend to be pro-survival since that’s why evolution has seen fit to gift us with these big brains anyway. Now, capitalism often makes decisions which hurt all of us pro-survival for individual members of the species. I think a lot of people have implicit biases towards acts that one might call evil, or at least incredibly selfish, but are not aware of those biases because they’re wired into their neural net on a subconscious level, or at least in a way their neocortex can not enumerate and/or see.

Nowhere is this more frightening than in for-profit medicine. I’ve noticed that when it comes to things that will kill you otherwise (i.e. heart attacks) the US healhcare system is moderately competent if overpriced. But when it comes to things that won’t, they’re really, really bad. I think part of why this is is that evey doctor in the system is going to have uunconscious bias towards doing things which don’t solve the problem so you’ll keep coming back because every time you come back they make more money. Basically it’s just like the thing with SSDI and the printer cables all over again.

And this isn’t something we’re looking for or measuring, partially because one of the unconscious biases we end up with is that capitalism is good and helping us – if we have a lot of money. And of course because of some of the decisions we have made lately if we have a lot of money we also have a lot of power so we are the one who’s decisions and thoughts are leading to the end result. It’s amazing how pervasive these unconscious biases can be – I gesture you to the cash for kids scandal – these judges really thought, at least claimed to have thought, that they were still behaving reasonably.

So, I feel like some people might be forgetting that, from a big picture perspective, making money is not a goal for humanity at all. Businesses should not be in business to make money – if they are, they’re likely doing damaging and/or stupid things. They should be in business to provide a product or service. The money is a token used to indicate contributions to the group, that can then be traded for other resources the group provides – I talk about this some in resource allocation as a group, but I think people miss the point, so I will belabor it some more.

When the government takes some of “your” income (which it uses to provide services we all need), they’re actually taking the token that was given to you by the group in exchange for your contributions to the group. Money is never “yours” in the same sense that other things are, it’s always a pointer to group resources.

Beyond that, one also needs to bear in mind that corporations exist to make the world a better place by providing a need or want for the group, in return for which dollars are handed over. The whole system is *supposed* to ensure that everyone is contributing to the welfare of the group but in fact it often does the opposite, because owners and upper management feel that, even though they often contribute the *least* ongoing value, they deserve the lion’s share of the tokens (which they will then hoarde like idiots, see this).

I think part of the problem is that a lot of people have lost sight of the big picture. They don’t think about optimizing user experience or happiness for the system as a whole. However, we would all have the best user experience if we *all* were trying to optimize the happiness for everyone in the system as a whole. *Definitely* one of the things that is killing America – and that may well lead to extinction of humanity if we don’t get our heads on straight – is the making of decisions which ultimately reduce happiness as a whole, or even survivability, in order to make money. We see this in companies destroying ecosystems with toxic chemicals, we see this in America’s perpetual war machine destroying overall value in order to give military contractors yet another pile of pointers, we see this in a lot of places.

But, I still maintain, your well-optimized corporation does not make massive profits. We are *all* the richest when it plows the majority of it’s money into either R&D or employee salaries, and beyond that when the salaries are not vastly disparate, because those who get paid the million dollar salaries are likely to just hoard them.

Now, a aside here – America offers you the only safe option for changing jobs or ceasing working is to have a fairly large nest egg stashed away, and thusly I am doing a bit of money hoarding of my own. I’m not happy that this world forces me to do so or risk starving and freezing to death, I’m not at *all* happy that the homeless in my city have their tents stolen and burned and if I had my way *everyone* who participated in that would forfeit all their assets and be forced to be homeless for a year. We clearly live in a world that is far more dystopian than it needs to be, and part of the blame for that is quite rightly laid at the feet of the conservative and the religious, both of whom are provably believing wrong things and taking actions based on them that are holding us all back.

(It’s always struck me as funny that people call America a “democracy” but we’re not, at all. We’re a democratic republic where your options are generally between two folks neither of which would be as good a choice for leadership as a random individual picked by drawing straws – and while we speak of “keeping the world safe for democracy” and “spreading democracy” what we truly believe in is not democracy but capitalism. We have been known even to overhrow democratically elected governments in order to install friendly dictators but we will bomb you back to the stone age if you dare try some form of collectivism. America stands for “don’t share, don’t work together, be enslaved by the bosses until you die, own lots of guns though!”)

Anyway, to return to my original point, in a ideal world corporations are not concerned about making dollars, they are concerned about making goods and providing services. To have it elsewise means the products get steadily more poorly made and steadily less valuable – a example of how capitalism unfettered leads to a worse outcome for everyone. We must teach our children, and always remember ourselves, that dollars *are not value*, they are just a pointer to it. Decisions that make paper dollars but destroy real value (like holding a war over false pretenses) hurt us all and are to be avoided at all costs.

So, I was having a conversation with a friend who pointed out that the US was dangerously close to a birthrate at which bad things would happen. I inquired further as to what they meant, because as far as I knew we were nowhere near a low enough birthrate to risk food production, power, technology, etc. It turned out what they were referring to was “the economy”.

This really underlines to me, not that I needed it underlined, how dumb our current patchwork quilt of rules surrounding resources is. Greta Thunberg had pointed out the folly of a system that exists to perpetually try and get higher and higher GDP – there *obviously must be a point* at which this will fail if GDP is tied to physical resources because physical resources available are a bounded resource.

Now, of course, our economy is doomed to failure for other reasons as well – it is tied to the idea that everyone must have a job and that simply isn’t realistic in the world of increasing mass automation, and it fails to recognize the value that many people who don’t have a official “job” bring to the overall picture.

However, if we were to chase the idea that we perpetually must have more children in order to continue to have GDP rise off a cliff, it would inevitably lead to the extinction of the human race. We have to come to understand that we must live in balance with the system we’re living off of, and we must find ways to live on nature’s interest rather than the principal.

This doesn’t necessarily have to mean losing quality of life. I still like best the idea of shaping a neurological operating system that enables us to experience vast riches by copying access to experiences from mind to mind – think of it as video games, only without the computer hardware. We might need some computer or technological help to pull this off – and we certainly will have to learn to build really trustworthy computer systems before we can do this, which will mean completely taking money out of the development of operating systems because money corrupts, in general, everything it touches, at least from a making-it-trustworthy point of view. It drives via competition it until it reaches a peak, and then it drives it into corruption and off a cliff. At least, that’s my current perspective – I gesture you to Windows 10, not to mention the state of the US health care system, as examples.

Anyway, my point remains. We *MUST* design a better resource allocation system or we must accept that humanity will be extinct within a century. Our current system will chase ever increasing GDP off a cliff.

We almost certainly are *above* the carrying capacity of the planet – we can see this in ever dwindling supplies of all sorts of key resources. We need to be reducing our population, and our current RAS will not encourage that. When people talk about how Americans are having less children because they “cannot afford them”, that sounds like *good* news to me

I had a interesting thought the other day. One of the official purposes of inflation is to discourage money-hoarding.

Now, obviously something is a bit nuts about our resource allocation system because humanity is fantastically wealthy and yet people are having trouble affording food and a place to live. This is partially because of greed, but it’s also partially because the idea of money is fatally flawed in a bunch of ways. See other places in this blog for more about that.

Various band-aids have been suggested – obviously inflation is a band-aid which penalizes people for money-hoarding but also results in money becoming steadily more and more out of whack with reality because money is backed by all it can buy and it is backed by steadily more actual value.

I’ve talked about the desirability of having two types of money, one for finite nonrenewable resources and the other for renewable resources, and having UBE for the latter. I’ve talked also about the desirability of tracking every kilowatt-hour, man-hour, gram of copper, gram of silicon, etc, etc that goes into each transaction, so we could finally find out what we can and can’t afford.

I’ve talked about the desirability of having wallets that have a *maximum* quantity they can hold, to discourage money-hoarding (which is a stupid and counterproductive behavior – it hurts the hoarder, it hurts everyone) – with of course a quota board to approve *really* big projects like starships.

I’ve also talked about how we should ban all behaviors which do not match the real world. Charging 30% interest is not reasonable, because in the real world your resources didn’t expand by 30% over a year. Any time we make the paper tracking system do something the real world did not do, trouble is likely to ensue – and indeed, trouble has – our resource allocation system makes it look like humanity is just barely holding on by the skin of it’s teeth when in fact humanity is spectacularly wealthy.

So, I think various people have talked about how clearly we’re less wealthy than we once were insofar as once a single worker could pay for a entire family to have a house and food and the like, whereas now two workers can barely pay for a family to have a apartment.

I was musing last night that even the most wealthy among us are not winning by my standards. This is not what winning looks like. I *know* what winning looks like – as I’ve said, it’s a bunch of friends and the holodeck. It’s also knowing that everyone that everyone you know knows has food and shelter and isn’t one wrong move away way from losing these things.

Of course, this is part of why I scorn so harshly the republican ideal of “personal responsibility”. We’re not gods, and life has no undo button, so in essence what they are saying is “people with bad luck deserve to starve so people with good luck can have two yachts”. It’s not a way to build a world I want to live in, but unfortunately we’re stuck with these people because they can’t be convinced that they are wrong – they have a religious attachment to their beliefs.

(And, lately, they’re willing to lie, steal, and cheat in order to keep those beliefs controlling the world. The bit about lying about the election having been stolen – and the number of them apparently dumb enough to believe the lie – is depressing. It’s impressive I suppose that Dear Leader is self centered enough to be willing to swing a sledgehammer at the idea of us being one functioning country if it will make him a few more million.)

(I actually had a friend who was gullible enough to believe that Trump wouldn’t need to take any money from people because he already had enough. This is wrong both because for people like Trump there will never be enough and because Trump is in fact upside down and probably owes the russian mob money as well. Anyway, he’s recently collected $200 million claiming it was for preventing election fraud but if you read the fine print it’s to pay down debts)

Anyway, I’ve talked before about how I want a different world – dramatically different – than the religious right and the small government right want. (Of course, ironically, the right is the party of big government – big war machine government in particular). But I also want a different world than the left appears to be championing. It seems like everyone is thinking *way* too small. It’s got to be a sign of something dramatically wrong that someone working full time can no longer afford to rent a apartment, and we really should be demanding that the bankers fix it before they find themselves no longer in control of anything. But instead we’re all pointing fingers at some of the most laughable, most obviously *not* the problem things there are – like immigrants. It takes a special kind of stupid – which unfortunately it seems a large number of people are – to think that immigrants are the problem. It takes not noticing that taxes are not really the problem ,among other things. If we gave that full time minimum wage employee all their taxes back, they still couldn’t afford to rent a apartment. We’ve built a resource allocation system that makes real value disappear.

Ok, so leaving aside how often capitalism makes us optimize against the best interests of either the race or individuals, I wanted to talk about a way that money sucks that as far as I can tell applies to almost every single large scale resource allocation system ever built.

Even in “Comminist” and “socialist” countries, they end up using money. And the problem with this is that not all actual real goods are created equal, but every transaction involving money throws away all metadata. So you can trade your paper rubles or dollars or francs or what have you for your resources, and we have completely lost track of what went into those resources. People keep talking about how the “invisible hand of the market” will solve everything, but as far as I can tell, the invisible hand of the market is A: myopic B: slow C: wasteful and D: not really how we should be wanting to do things.

Lately COVID has given us some excessive examples of this. Ideally we would have just stopped pumping as much oil when we realized we weren’t burning as much, but because this didn’t happen, for a while barrels of oil literally had a *negative* value.

Now I get that you could not, pre computers and networks, track every single type of fixed good and inventory on hand. However, things have changed, and I really think someone should be sitting down and working on designing a resource allocation system that is properly tuned to what we can now do.

So, I know I’m repeating myself here, but the whole COVID thing really does underline how we need to be more agile in our thinking regarding resource allocation. At the end of the day we’re likely to get millions of people killed (by the end of this) and a large number of these deaths are because we can’t let go of the idea of money and we can’t just let people have the things they need for free until we’re on the other side of this pandemic.

Now, I understand that a lot of this is that a number of evil ideas are pervasive on earth.. and I know that various right wing friends of mine are horrified at the idea that anyone could get anything for free and are convinced that this would lead to us all starving because no one would work. I think this shows a lack of understanding of human nature, although it may be true that humans should go extinct and be replaced with something else because it may be true that we simply suck too much to continue existing. We certainly are one of the most destructive to other life forms species to ever live – one of the problems we have is that we don’t have any natural predators that can really take us on, and we breed like rabbits, so we’re going to overload the ability of the planet to generate resources sooner or later unless we change the way we think about the world. I’ve made the suggestion that we should start creating software (in the form of neurological interconnects) for our minds such that we can experience having anything we want while not actually placing any load on the planet for physical resources at all – once we learned to do that we could likely also become immortal by moving the software that was us from body to body, and we could do things like using hypervisor-like structures to do the necessary work to keep everyone fed while also providing the conscious experience whatever we wanted.

And we may or may not get there, however, in the meantime we still have this problem that we have a resource allocation system that is fragile as hell. Pandemic? economic crash. Volcano? Economic crash. Flood? Localized economic crash. It also encourages stupid decisions – like building stickbuilt houses in flood areas when we could build houses that could survive flooding without damage – we could also build fireproof houses, cars that need virtually no maintenance, and a number of other similar things but people are too in love with a system where everyone must work. I personally think the system where everyone must work is awful and should be torn down.. it’s one of the many many things about Earth I would criticise. But perhaps I’m just too negative in my thinking and Earth is actually perfect and providing everyone but me with what they want and need.

(Or perhaps not.)

So, I notice the government is still thinking of economic stimulus in terms of let’s keep those dollars circulating. This makes sense because if all the dollars end up in the hands of the billionares, the dollars are suddenly worth nothing at all and the rest of us will create a new currency. However, in terms of keeping us all alive and healthy during this pandemic, passing out money is not the right thing to do.

We have no idea if the USD is even going to be worth the paper it is printed on when this oil war is over, and certainly if the government keeps printing money idiot economists are going to tell us it should be worthless. (There is some level at which this is true, but we’re obviously nowhere near that level if we’re having to loan money into existence)

Anyway, the right solution is to hand out ration booklets, a la WWII. Except, no money changes hands. You’ve got coupons for N calories of food – you can choose whatever food you want, we probably would exclude luxuries like lobster which would still be paid for in USD, but for the most part anything we can cheaply and easily mass produce goes on the list of things you can buy with your coupons. You’ve got coupons for N kwh of electricity, N cubic feet of water, N gallons of gasoline. We have some sort of arrangement via which you can barter the ones you don’t need for the ones you do, and we also give out more resources to the essential workers than to the folks just staying home.

We combine this with rent and mortgage forgiveness for your primary residence, and 0% interest on all outstanding secured debt until the emergency is over.

You see what I’m doing? I’m putting us on the bucketed currency system. *This will work* much in the way that printing checks for $2000 a person per month will simply result in the price of rent becoming $2001 for each person. Essentially this recognizes that capitalism is flawed, and very poorly suited to deal with this type of situation, but we shouldn’t starve to death in the midst of plenty, so let’s temporarily use production for use instead.

Of course, the powers that be won’t do this. They’re not smart enough, or they wouldn’t want to be in charge of things. They also lack mental agility, and even if they didn’t most of our citizens lack the mental agility to consider this situation a war, and know that we need to use different approaches during wartime than we do during peacetime.

So, one of the problems I keep running into with $COMPANY is that they are making decisions which make short term profit at the cost of long term profit. They keep encouraging their employees to sell .. with increased commissions.. while not having equipped all the employees to sell online or having prohibited in person events. This is a really dumb thing to do, but it reminds me of my conversation with a carny who was setting up a ride at the Prince William County Fair.

He was being really intent, carefully checking every bolt, every cotter pin, and he told me “Kid, you never want to kill a mark. You want them to come back next year so you can fleece them. Kill one mark, and a thousand marks won’t come next year because they will be too afraid. I check my ride until I’d be willing to let my own kids ride on it.”

The logic which doesn’t escape carnies but does seem to escape $COMPANY is that encouraging selling right now if it risks in person interfacing is potentially killing both customers and employees and therefore costing long term profits. I understand that we are not mentally adaptable enough to switch to a alternate RAS just for this emergency and then switch back – that we’d literally rather die than do anything that smacks of collectivism. All I can do is sit back and watch the carnage. Lately I’m thinking the USA will be 5x the deaths of the nearest competitor.