LEES DIT !!!! Luxury in a new world order. |
959 views | ||
| door kijkdaareenaap op ma. 8 mrt. 10 om 21:01 | |||
|
Luxury in a new world order.
What I want to give is an example of how we don’t need to give up luxury items to change the world. (since most people are concerned about that, whether you admit it or not ). added: I’m thinking in terms of a society without money, please remember this when you read. To use a stupid example, consider a bag of potato chips to be the luxury product (hey, for some people it is!). I never worked in this kind of factory but I would assume that most of the process can be automated by now (and especially if we could use any technology we liked for free). Now, in your town you have this factory and also, you want some potato chips for the weekend (or every evening for that matter). Going to this factory and pressing a button could produce some bags of chips, simple as that. Now consider the fact that the factory wouldn’t consume power (electricity) when no-one is in need of chips. This stupid (hey, it IS stupid) example already has a positive effect, since all over the world factories would consume less power, use up less resources and cause less pollution (this kind of factory might be a bad example on the polluting part – or not, I have no clue – but you get the idea). Of course some people will now think of the practical problems, the one that comes to my (simple) mind would be the import of the actual potatoes. If too much gets imported they would go bad, which would be a waste. (a lot of waste goes on now in production processes, think of all the trees cut down that can’t be used afterwards, this example I have seen firsthand, a damn shame but of course, if we want to build a better tomorrow, we can’t promote that to keep going on.) I’m going off-topic, back to the point. Problems like these can easily be fixed but the stupid example from above is indeed a bad one, let me explain how it could work in real life. Instead of just going to get some bags for yourself, you could tell the people living in your street, your block, or better still, in some way let the entire town (thinking of small towns now, you can revert back to street or block if this is hard to imagine where you live) know that you are going to THAT factory on THAT particular day. People will be able to tell you how many bags are required for your town, and you can save everyone else the trip (the factory could also be in the next town, so that’s a good thing ). Since, with a little co-operation, it’s possible to figure out how many bags are needed, someone could figure out how many potatoes are needed and better still: someone else could deliver these potatoes there, the right amount, so you can press the button right away. Now I will develop the stupid example from the beginning even further. Consider that I am horribly wrong that this whole process can be automated [added: if the verb is automise instead of automate, my bad, English isn't my first language.] (big parts will still be automated though, that I’m sure of), then you could figure out how many people you’d need to make these potatoes into the yummie chips you love to eat. It should be a lot less then the amount working in the same factory in our capitalist system, because we wouldn’t make more bags then the town (or block) needs. So it’s either no work at all, or less work. (Not considering the time to get there and the time it takes the machines or people and machines to make them…yet.) Let’s go into that straight away. Since more factories would have better automatisation (okey, my english sucks) processes, less people would have to do actual work (I’m thinking in terms of a society that doesn’t use money, don’t forget it ). Before you shout at my blog: “No Fair, some people would have to do more work then others!!!”, think about all those people who, lucky for them, lost their jobs because we have access to all technology. Well, if some work (now it’s not chips anymore but any factory) would still absorb a lot more of some people’s time it would now be very easy to take shifts because all these people have “nothing (or less) to do”. Of course anyone who thinks this through could produce one flaw in my theory after another. One that comes to my mind (because people told me) is that we would still need engineers and people with the know-how to work in the factories that are left and whatnot. But be honest, these kind of problems are solveable. People can be thaught to do a certain job, otherwise everyone would be unemployed. But we have schools for that, don’t we? My point is, I think that any problem you could find in this ’system’ can also be fixed. A lot of people are way smarter then me and look what I came up with. Am I right or am I right? [added: a counter-argument I sometimes get on a money-free society is that people would simply not work because they are lazy.I believe that this would not be the case because I think that most people would more easily do something for the benefit of entire humankind (and the planet for that matter) then to fill the pockets of the select few (volunteer work kinda proves there are at least SOME people like that). And to be honest, I find the statement "people are lazy" very offensive. |
|||









