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Mentioned by the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism This notion of freedom resonates wit

Mentioned by the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism This notion of freedom resonates with me the most. I want to live in a society where basic needs are met through automation, so that people can spend the majority of their time following their calling and finding meaning. Less than 2 hours per day should be spent working towards survival, or else our tech offers little benefit over living in a hunter-gatherer society. Concretely, that would look like: * Robots pay taxes - not people, to be used for UBI * No taxes on necessary commodities like food, high taxes on luxuries * Taxes on unearned income would always be higher than on earned income * Labor performed on process not application, so maintaining the things that make the things * Profit on another's labor would either be considered inappropriate or taxed highly: at or near 100% * Unsustainability would be suspect, as it runs counter to the cultural goal of providing for all people forever * Injustices which impose burdens on people doing the most spiritually significant work would be targeted first: no penalty for being a parent, teacher, nurse or other caregiver There's probably a lot more to be said about this. I feel that the powers that be seem to be doing everything they can to prevent progress in this direction. Specifically, the wealthy and powerful seem to be doing nothing to help makers and inventors, they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego. So we all work longer and longer hours to build bigger houses and buy more expensive vehicles to create profit for billionaires. We don't invest in trusts that would pay the living expenses of self-sufficient communities of tiny homes with hydroponic gardens and solar panels and such.

Cyberdog 4y ago
Not sure what this has to do with the article. Did you post this comment on the wrong page or something?
- dmacedo 4y ago
  The article mentions "Transcendentalism", the above comment's author seems to have researched, and offered their opinion on the matter. Seems like an appropriate comment, and a worthwhile discussion of what the transcendental ethos imply, coupled with what drives the behaviours that are antithetical to those goals, which leads to the historical moments the article refers to.
- donclark 4y ago
  Maybe he is additionally commenting on where our government is lacking today, and what he envisions us to be experiencing currently - if our GOV really were trying to improve things. I am glad that he did comment - and have copied it to dive further into those thoughts.
asdff 4y ago
I think an issue with this expectation is the assumption that our current set of technology was made for its utility alone. The reality is that most of the innovations of the 20th and 21st century only came about if they had a strong profit angle or lopsided military advantage to go along with them. As such, it's hard to actually do what you propose when everything we have is only stuff that was good enough to make a profit at one time. It's not like a bow and arrow or the wheel, fundamental tools that were built for their own merit, not because the bowstring company had a patent and legally set the standard for what sort of arrow is to be sold in stores or anything like that. So then we have to take a step back and ask what is actually innovative about our global culture's technology today? Is the 4k TV really that innovative? IMO not really, you are using more energy now to watch the same movies and TV you might have been watching a decade ago. It's not like the bow and arrow, imparting a novel function that didn't exist before. Its just an iteration on existing ideas, just slightly different enough to market on that difference and convince people to sell thing x that does y for thing z that does y. Even when we do work hard to further the capabilities of these innovations, e.g. computers being so much more powerful than they were 15 years ago, are we really reaping that fruit? Or is everyone still using microsoft word, email, and light web browsing like they were doing 25 years ago with hardware that's at least an order of magnitude less powerful? Real innovation is scarce imo, since we don't invest in innovation, we invest in profit and innovation comes as a side effect, if it comes at all.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  LED TVs use far, far less power than the old CRT TVs. The old TVs would warm up a room, LEDs, not.
  - datagram 4y ago
    > you are using more energy now to watch the same movies and TV you might have been watching a decade ago I think they're comparing 4K TVs to earlier HD TVs rather than CRTs, though I don't even know if that would be true given various improvements to power efficiency (LED vs CCFL, for example).
- Dalewyn 4y ago
WalterBright 4y ago
Nobody makes you live in a bigger house or buy an expensive vehicle. I bought my truck used 30 years ago, and used it daily up until last year when it finally expired. It cost me very little money. > they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego. Your sentence contradicts itself. BTW, some years ago a luxury tax was placed on yacht building, based on the notion that millionaires were jerks for spending their money on yachts. Then the local economy of one of the yacht building companies collapsed, because the millionaires went elsewhere to spend money building their yachts. So the tax was rescinded.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  I don't gel with all of GP's views. Human-to-human competition is the driver of woe. But when it comes to: > they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego. Not a contradiction. Billionaires have wealth that easily makes both sides of this statement true.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Only if you replace "and" with "or". Besides, nobody hoards wealth. It's all invested.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  Your just-so story is fine when thinking on a local and small-scale level. On a holistic level, "but the millionaires will move if we offend them by asking for taxes" is a race to the bottom; a tragedy of the commoners. It's long term utterly and unfathomably destructive. Also, yacht building is one of the least morally defensible industries on the planet. If the industry crashed to 1% of its current level it would be a net boon to the Earth and humanity. Your insistence that hoarding money and spending egotistically are mutually exclusive is kinda weird. Can you explain why it's not possible to do both? Are you just being unreasonably pedantic? ...
  - nickpp 4y ago
    > is a race to the bottom; a tragedy of the commoners And here I was thinking it was kind of a free market of governments helping keep politicians honest and competitive. You know, less like the two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for dinner. > yacht building is one of the least morally defensible industries Please enlighten us: in what “moral” way do you think people should be allowed to spend their own money? There is a wonderful little story in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in which an highly productive essential worker kept receiving the smallest salary in the factory because his expenses (music records were his guilty pleasure) were deemed unimportant compared to the other workers' issues - until he just quit and the factory ran out of business.
ericmcer 4y ago
"If" we were able to pull this off, which right now is a total pipe-dream, what do you picture the average person doing in this world? Would you implement harsh restrictions around what you can do if you are dependent on the system? Can someone have 20 kids and not raise them because it isn't part of their calling? Would people from other societies be allowed to immigrate in or would it be closed to all migrants? I don't think it is some orchestrated scam from a power mad global elite that is fighting against your utopian worldview. I don't think it is feasible, barring some kind of sci-fi AI that manages everything for us.
- coldacid 4y ago
  >barring some kind of sci-fi AI that manages everything for us At which point we'd need a Butlerian Jihad.
  - tkanarsky 4y ago
    Recommend reading Daemon and Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez. It describes a reasonably plausible transition to a society managed by an impartial AI.
    - coldacid 4y ago
      I'm less concerned about the social and political aspects of governance and labour by AI, and more the big gaping spiritual hole it'd leave us with.
- bergenty 4y ago
  If we have robots raise the kids it’s possible. I don’t see why we can’t have migrants if it’s basically a utopia of excess.
- zackmorris 4y ago
  The other comments are good too and have been mostly answered by others, but I think that yours is the most core reaction to the points I touched on. No: no restrictions or anything like that. I read somewhere that socialism typically requires roughly a daily 6 hour commitment from workers to keep things running. Communism might be spiritually closer to my points, but also suffers from gamification of work where bosses are still produced which maintain authority but don't actually participate in the making of things, so the result is yet another class system dividing rich and poor. Those heavy-handed systems result in the same rat race we have under capitalism. What I'm suggesting is more like a trust for all citizens. So how wealthy people in the US get mailbox money and enjoy the benefits of large corporations generating steady dividends. The bottom 50-90% of the US is denied that since it wasn't born with generational wealth to invest. We have to work entire lifetimes to barely afford a home. Short of coming up with $10,000-100,000 of investment capital per person (although that money already exists in the hands of the very wealthy), I'm saying that we could automate basic needs to make them free or nearly free. For example, there's no reason why we couldn't have made something like the Aptera solar electric car 20 years ago, just after lithium iron phosphate batteries were invented (or 40 years ago when solar panels became viable). We could all be driving for free for life right now, but the market prefers to build giant $60,000 trucks that get replaced every 10 years. We could be building $10,000 tiny homes and using 3D printing methods to grow produce robotically in our own neighborhoods. My experience the last 20 years has been only work. It takes so much effort to make rent that I never got to invest in basic tools that would have made my life a lot easier and more pleasant. The opportunity cost of work is so high that it eclipses all else. Had it not been for work, I would have done what my ancestors did: build a house in about 2 months from materials on the land, and work the land seasonally for food. My time beyond that would be mine to use for inventing and building things. I actually got to experience a time like that, it was called the 1980s and 90s, but now leisure time is a distant memory. I'm kind of joking, but what we have today is anathema to what I thought the future would bring. More like a libertarian's paradise than a futurist's utopia. And I live in one of the more rural places in the country. I can't imagine being locked into a big city where every second of every day goes towards mere survival. As far as 20 kids and immigration and all that: the way of this trust system is to provide for basic needs. Meaning that it's self-sufficient and scalable. It would strike at the basic causes of immigration like hunger and wealth inequality so that people could stay where they live. Having 20 kids would certainly put a burden on the system, but I think that people are driven to do that either due to the scarcity mindset of not being able to afford birth control, or from religious indoctrination that tells them to go forth and procreate in the face of environmental devastation, or both. There's also the patriarchy which overrides whatever the mother has to say about all that. To answer your original question: with basic needs met and a 10 hour workweek, the other 6 days would go towards "real work" that pays dividends beyond survival. For example, I made a shareware game before 9/11 that took me a whole year (about 200-365 days) while living with my dad. Today with Saturdays free only, that would take me 7 years (it ain't gonna happen). I have at least 100 ideas that would generate residual income that ain't gonna happen either. My life is a daily withering of expectation, suppressing the callings I feel in my heart to instead go satisfy whatever obligations are demanded of me. I have no children, so there's a futility to it of sacrificing to a next generation that isn't mine. And even if I had kids, by induction I would question the sacrifice of every generation to the one that follows. Surely we can do better than that. Since I've never seen any real movement on these things, I think they might require a cultural revolution and grassroots effort to implement an opt-in trust system with UBI in a distributed fashion. I think maybe software co-ops like the Humble Indie Bundle that distribute a win to the losers and funds open source could do it. 3D printing and home automation will help. Better tax policy (keeping capital gains taxes higher than self-employment taxes) could do it. Rather than complaining to the critics like I've been doing, it would be better to create viable alternatives that are compelling enough that the arguments against them become moot.
thweroui239423 4y ago
Meta-note: you're assuming that all this 'survival' is meaningless, that it teaches you nothing, and that is better to be rid of, that this 'meaning' jazz is outside this. I doubt, deep down, if anyone outside the occident really thinks this way.
solidsnack9000 4y ago
What about profit off another person's capital? What rate should that be taxed at?

Cyberdog 4y ago

Not sure what this has to do with the article. Did you post this comment on the wrong page or something?

dmacedo 4y ago
The article mentions "Transcendentalism", the above comment's author seems to have researched, and offered their opinion on the matter. Seems like an appropriate comment, and a worthwhile discussion of what the transcendental ethos imply, coupled with what drives the behaviours that are antithetical to those goals, which leads to the historical moments the article refers to.
donclark 4y ago
Maybe he is additionally commenting on where our government is lacking today, and what he envisions us to be experiencing currently - if our GOV really were trying to improve things. I am glad that he did comment - and have copied it to dive further into those thoughts.

asdff 4y ago

I think an issue with this expectation is the assumption that our current set of technology was made for its utility alone. The reality is that most of the innovations of the 20th and 21st century only came about if they had a strong profit angle or lopsided military advantage to go along with them. As such, it's hard to actually do what you propose when everything we have is only stuff that was good enough to make a profit at one time. It's not like a bow and arrow or the wheel, fundamental tools that were built for their own merit, not because the bowstring company had a patent and legally set the standard for what sort of arrow is to be sold in stores or anything like that. So then we have to take a step back and ask what is actually innovative about our global culture's technology today? Is the 4k TV really that innovative? IMO not really, you are using more energy now to watch the same movies and TV you might have been watching a decade ago. It's not like the bow and arrow, imparting a novel function that didn't exist before. Its just an iteration on existing ideas, just slightly different enough to market on that difference and convince people to sell thing x that does y for thing z that does y. Even when we do work hard to further the capabilities of these innovations, e.g. computers being so much more powerful than they were 15 years ago, are we really reaping that fruit? Or is everyone still using microsoft word, email, and light web browsing like they were doing 25 years ago with hardware that's at least an order of magnitude less powerful? Real innovation is scarce imo, since we don't invest in innovation, we invest in profit and innovation comes as a side effect, if it comes at all.

WalterBright 4y ago
LED TVs use far, far less power than the old CRT TVs. The old TVs would warm up a room, LEDs, not.
- datagram 4y ago
  > you are using more energy now to watch the same movies and TV you might have been watching a decade ago I think they're comparing 4K TVs to earlier HD TVs rather than CRTs, though I don't even know if that would be true given various improvements to power efficiency (LED vs CCFL, for example).
Dalewyn 4y ago

WalterBright 4y ago

Nobody makes you live in a bigger house or buy an expensive vehicle. I bought my truck used 30 years ago, and used it daily up until last year when it finally expired. It cost me very little money. > they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego. Your sentence contradicts itself. BTW, some years ago a luxury tax was placed on yacht building, based on the notion that millionaires were jerks for spending their money on yachts. Then the local economy of one of the yacht building companies collapsed, because the millionaires went elsewhere to spend money building their yachts. So the tax was rescinded.

_carbyau_ 4y ago
I don't gel with all of GP's views. Human-to-human competition is the driver of woe. But when it comes to: > they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego. Not a contradiction. Billionaires have wealth that easily makes both sides of this statement true.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Only if you replace "and" with "or". Besides, nobody hoards wealth. It's all invested.
mandmandam 4y ago
Your just-so story is fine when thinking on a local and small-scale level. On a holistic level, "but the millionaires will move if we offend them by asking for taxes" is a race to the bottom; a tragedy of the commoners. It's long term utterly and unfathomably destructive. Also, yacht building is one of the least morally defensible industries on the planet. If the industry crashed to 1% of its current level it would be a net boon to the Earth and humanity. Your insistence that hoarding money and spending egotistically are mutually exclusive is kinda weird. Can you explain why it's not possible to do both? Are you just being unreasonably pedantic? ...
- nickpp 4y ago
  > is a race to the bottom; a tragedy of the commoners And here I was thinking it was kind of a free market of governments helping keep politicians honest and competitive. You know, less like the two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for dinner. > yacht building is one of the least morally defensible industries Please enlighten us: in what “moral” way do you think people should be allowed to spend their own money? There is a wonderful little story in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in which an highly productive essential worker kept receiving the smallest salary in the factory because his expenses (music records were his guilty pleasure) were deemed unimportant compared to the other workers' issues - until he just quit and the factory ran out of business.

ericmcer 4y ago

"If" we were able to pull this off, which right now is a total pipe-dream, what do you picture the average person doing in this world? Would you implement harsh restrictions around what you can do if you are dependent on the system? Can someone have 20 kids and not raise them because it isn't part of their calling? Would people from other societies be allowed to immigrate in or would it be closed to all migrants? I don't think it is some orchestrated scam from a power mad global elite that is fighting against your utopian worldview. I don't think it is feasible, barring some kind of sci-fi AI that manages everything for us.

coldacid 4y ago
>barring some kind of sci-fi AI that manages everything for us At which point we'd need a Butlerian Jihad.
- tkanarsky 4y ago
  Recommend reading Daemon and Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez. It describes a reasonably plausible transition to a society managed by an impartial AI.
  - coldacid 4y ago
    I'm less concerned about the social and political aspects of governance and labour by AI, and more the big gaping spiritual hole it'd leave us with.
bergenty 4y ago
If we have robots raise the kids it’s possible. I don’t see why we can’t have migrants if it’s basically a utopia of excess.
zackmorris 4y ago
The other comments are good too and have been mostly answered by others, but I think that yours is the most core reaction to the points I touched on. No: no restrictions or anything like that. I read somewhere that socialism typically requires roughly a daily 6 hour commitment from workers to keep things running. Communism might be spiritually closer to my points, but also suffers from gamification of work where bosses are still produced which maintain authority but don't actually participate in the making of things, so the result is yet another class system dividing rich and poor. Those heavy-handed systems result in the same rat race we have under capitalism. What I'm suggesting is more like a trust for all citizens. So how wealthy people in the US get mailbox money and enjoy the benefits of large corporations generating steady dividends. The bottom 50-90% of the US is denied that since it wasn't born with generational wealth to invest. We have to work entire lifetimes to barely afford a home. Short of coming up with $10,000-100,000 of investment capital per person (although that money already exists in the hands of the very wealthy), I'm saying that we could automate basic needs to make them free or nearly free. For example, there's no reason why we couldn't have made something like the Aptera solar electric car 20 years ago, just after lithium iron phosphate batteries were invented (or 40 years ago when solar panels became viable). We could all be driving for free for life right now, but the market prefers to build giant $60,000 trucks that get replaced every 10 years. We could be building $10,000 tiny homes and using 3D printing methods to grow produce robotically in our own neighborhoods. My experience the last 20 years has been only work. It takes so much effort to make rent that I never got to invest in basic tools that would have made my life a lot easier and more pleasant. The opportunity cost of work is so high that it eclipses all else. Had it not been for work, I would have done what my ancestors did: build a house in about 2 months from materials on the land, and work the land seasonally for food. My time beyond that would be mine to use for inventing and building things. I actually got to experience a time like that, it was called the 1980s and 90s, but now leisure time is a distant memory. I'm kind of joking, but what we have today is anathema to what I thought the future would bring. More like a libertarian's paradise than a futurist's utopia. And I live in one of the more rural places in the country. I can't imagine being locked into a big city where every second of every day goes towards mere survival. As far as 20 kids and immigration and all that: the way of this trust system is to provide for basic needs. Meaning that it's self-sufficient and scalable. It would strike at the basic causes of immigration like hunger and wealth inequality so that people could stay where they live. Having 20 kids would certainly put a burden on the system, but I think that people are driven to do that either due to the scarcity mindset of not being able to afford birth control, or from religious indoctrination that tells them to go forth and procreate in the face of environmental devastation, or both. There's also the patriarchy which overrides whatever the mother has to say about all that. To answer your original question: with basic needs met and a 10 hour workweek, the other 6 days would go towards "real work" that pays dividends beyond survival. For example, I made a shareware game before 9/11 that took me a whole year (about 200-365 days) while living with my dad. Today with Saturdays free only, that would take me 7 years (it ain't gonna happen). I have at least 100 ideas that would generate residual income that ain't gonna happen either. My life is a daily withering of expectation, suppressing the callings I feel in my heart to instead go satisfy whatever obligations are demanded of me. I have no children, so there's a futility to it of sacrificing to a next generation that isn't mine. And even if I had kids, by induction I would question the sacrifice of every generation to the one that follows. Surely we can do better than that. Since I've never seen any real movement on these things, I think they might require a cultural revolution and grassroots effort to implement an opt-in trust system with UBI in a distributed fashion. I think maybe software co-ops like the Humble Indie Bundle that distribute a win to the losers and funds open source could do it. 3D printing and home automation will help. Better tax policy (keeping capital gains taxes higher than self-employment taxes) could do it. Rather than complaining to the critics like I've been doing, it would be better to create viable alternatives that are compelling enough that the arguments against them become moot.

thweroui239423 4y ago

Meta-note: you're assuming that all this 'survival' is meaningless, that it teaches you nothing, and that is better to be rid of, that this 'meaning' jazz is outside this. I doubt, deep down, if anyone outside the occident really thinks this way.

solidsnack9000 4y ago

What about profit off another person's capital? What rate should that be taxed at?