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Cake day: Jun 09, 2023

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But we’re not in the correct-information-only age. There’s a lot of noise to filter out, and most people aren’t trained well enough to do that (i.e. critical thinking). I think that we may need to address that issue before things improve significantly at the political level.







The Energy Accounting page is under Technocracy Fundamentals on the beginner’s page. The Energy Certificate one is much longer and older (for example paper certificates would no longer be used today). I checked and the links work for both.

The other two more comprehensive docs I mentioned should be available now under Technocracy In Print (links are towards the end of their respective descriptions). Let me know if you need any more help or have questions.


No such thing as strong enough regulations. They’ll alway find a way as long as there is motivation to do so.


Nope. All you’d be doing is slowing down the damage in the short term while breeding more clever and less moral actors. The only way to get rid of that behaviour is to change the rules of the game.


I guarantee there’s more people who might like to travel than planes and fuel to move them. Expanding the sector requires a variety of inputs, which themselves are in shortage.

There will always be some things that will be scarce, yes, like say space travel, that will have to be dealt with by other means. The point is that there are more than enough other things that can be provided in abundance to give everyone a high standard of living. And once the inefficiencies of the current system are removed, even many scarce things (like air travel) will be far more available than they are now.

Please do. I did read through that page and a few other places on the website. It explains that it’s a new economic system, but not how it works.

There are a couple pages that go over the basics (e.g. The Energy Certificate), but if you want more details I just need a way to get a couple of pdfs to you.


Maybe they should make a reality tv show about it, entertainment is way more lucrative than saving lives. I mean, if they can make crab fishing a show… 😞


Well, if you’re talking about just food, shelter, and some very basic kind of transportation (no planes!), sure, there’s no scarcity. That’s a very low bar, though, and most people don’t want to live at the subsistence level.

No, I mean a high standard of living, according to what is possible at the time. Good homes, plenty of good food, easy transportation wherever you want to go in the country, etc.

Can you link to the original proposal, so I know what we’re talking about?

I can get you the older stuff sure, but it was written for a different audience. You’ll most likely do better with a starting point like this.


How does that work? There almost wasn’t enough food to go around in the great depression,

Oh there was plenty of food to go around, the problem was that the system couldn’t make it “go around”. Either people were too poor to be able to afford it (all the unemployment back then) or companies couldn’t sell it for enough to stay in business. That was the problem: we were suddenly able to produce so much that the prices fell too low (in conjunction with decreased demand due to lower purchasing power) to sell it. This was precisely the problem Technocracy was developed to address. An economic system based on scarcity cannot distribute an abundance of goods and services, so either you use a system designed to actually do that (Technocracy), or you get rid of the abundance and keep the old system. Guess which we did. So crops were burned, livestock slaughtered, even weird stuff like pouring oil on oranges so no one could eat them. Get rid of the abundance, and prices go back up. Then we pumped money into the system so that people could afford to buy that scarcity again with the New Deal, subsidies to farmers, and good ol’ WWII helped a lot too.

and plastic was an advanced new material hard to come by from the 40’s through the 60’s. Electronics took a long time to be produced in any significant quantity too. And what about land?

I’m not talking about an abundance of every little thing, but rather what essentially gives a high standard of living: food, shelter, transportation, etc. We could have given everyone on the continent a much better life than was typical for the day. We have enough natural resources and technology to do that (although that won’t remain true forever).

Plato said everything would be great if we had the smartest people in charge. He called it the philosopher king, others call it technocracy.

Ah I see. Yeah, the term “technocracy” does get used to describe different things. What I’m talking about is a very specific proposal developed in the 1920s to address the problems of high production in a scarcity economy.


Actually in North America we could have had a working post-scarcity since the 1930s. It is why we had the Great Depression and what Technocracy was designed to be able to handle. It’s only been our continued use of a scarcity-based economic system that has been holding back our productive capacity with extreme inefficiencies.

Not sure where you are getting the philosopher king thing from?


I was going to make a funny fake headline about this, but I’m worried that someone out there would take it seriously and there’s already enough of that crap out there.


Actually Canada is the closest it has ever come to getting UBI, as there are two bills (C-223 and S-233) being reviewed for it right now. It still is going to need a lot of support though, so head over to https://www.ubiworks.ca/guaranteed-livable-basic-income to sign the petition, learn more about these bills, and otherwise tell everyone you can, and we might have a chance!


True, if a person has been shot, you have to go after the person with the gun to prevent them from doing it again. But I’d also like the person who got shot to get immediate medical aid.


Lowering prices is only one possible outcome of competition though. So is lower product quality, and laying off workers. In general, cutting costs.


Have you ever heard of Technocracy? It was designed specifically to do this, to provide every citizen with the highest possible standard of living without the gross inefficiencies of money based economies, to take advantage of technological automation to increase production and reduce work needed without reducing the standard of living by breaking the tie between income and labor. And it’s a pretty detailed idea too.



The problem is how widely is this one article going to be seen compared to the “dozens of op-eds”? Will it be picked up anywhere else?



That was more interesting than I thought it was going to be, thanks.


Or regulate at all…

Associate Prof. Ma’n Zawati, research director for McGill University’s Centre of Genomics and Policy in Montreal, says private commercial DNA laboratories don’t need licences to operate and sell services.

😲 That’s some pretty serious caveat emptor there! I’m not giving my dna so any random weasel in a suit.


I’d add health care and education too. Imagine free post-sec…



This is the first I’ve heard of the pilot project, and it pisses me off. Someone finally said ‘screw opinions, let’t find out empirically whether ubi works or not’, and conservatives reply with ‘we don’t need no facts. We already know!’





My peeve is “pussy” as a pejorative. A lot of people really like it, so I would think it should be a compliment. But yeah, sexism.


Damn, I keep forgetting to set that up. Now I have to go to the bank in 30 below weather. 😠🥶


I’m not worried. I’m sure Captain Kirk will come back in time and save them.


Deus Ex, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, and Cyberpunk 2077. Like you said, they are games I like to get lost in, just walk/drive around in, soak in the ambience. I like to pretend I’m there; it’s a great escape, like you said, comforting.