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[ChairmanPoo]

In almost every group of people, negative things are attributed to the one in charge, whereas good things are attributed to the individual compenents in the group. For example, if your favourite sports team has a bad season, people are quick to blame the manager, but when a team does good, people heap praise on the players.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeN9HvCot6g

[Eugenitor]

In almost every group of people, negative things are attributed to the one in charge, whereas good things are attributed to the individual compenents in the group. For example, if your favourite sports team has a bad season, people are quick to blame the manager, but when a team does good, people heap praise on the players.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeN9HvCot6g

Put it better than I could.

If CEOs were doctors, we'd have a lot of malpractice suits.

[ed boy]

In almost every group of people, negative things are attributed to the one in charge, whereas good things are attributed to the individual compenents in the group. For example, if your favourite sports team has a bad season, people are quick to blame the manager, but when a team does good, people heap praise on the players.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeN9HvCot6g

That's going off my personal experience - Although I'm not a sports fan, I know quite a few people that are, and I'm going off the things they say ("X is amazing, he keeps scoring goals", "What's the manager doing, putting X there/subbing X off?").

[IronyOwl]

God dammit Irony, you just threw gasoline on the embers.

I know. I should have let it die, but instead I did this.

Well, at least you have something to troll now. Or more things to troll, I guess.

For starters, if there's enough food to support a population, they'll increase until there isn't enough food. Even if we had enough food to feed everyone now, there's no particular reason to think that would be the case for very long. We thought the ocean was an endless and bountiful source of food, so we fished it out.

Secondly, we can produce a massive quantity of food in part because we have so much space to do it in- space that used to be wild. If you've got no problem genociding squirrels to make sure all the humans have food, I'm not sure why you'd expect everyone else to take issue with fellow humans starving, especially if they're of a different ethnicity. Aren't you just advocating the system we've got now, but with a larger base of bourgeois fatcats?

Yes, population growth is a problem, but it's one we're capable of reversing.  The problem of providing for as many people as there may be in the future is secondary to providing for as many people as there definitely are today, unless you're also of the mindset that encouraging wrongful death is justifiable in the interests of population control.  In this case we might as well drop this and have a discussion about eugenics.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Don't worry so much about the future, we've got problems now" is often one of the major reasons we have so many problems now- our forefathers said that earlier, partially because their forefathers said that earlier, and so on.

You also haven't addressed why everyone should care in the precise way you want them to. Why not ensure this utopia for all living things or just Europeans?

Third, there's a massive difference between pointing out that things are wasted, and actually finding a way to fix the problem. Everyone hates traffic lights, at least a little. It's hideously inefficient to have to slow down and stop, then wait a while, then start up again every so often when you're trying to drive. If you got back all the time traffic lights wasted, roads would gain an impressive amount of efficiency. Trouble is, how exactly does one do that? It's not as simple as saying "there's a light making me stop, so make it not stop me," just like it's not as simple as saying "this food is wasted, so let's move it to where it's not wasted." It could be done better, of course, but there's always going to be an element of waste.

I am at least taking the first step in identifying the obstacles which we must first overcome in order to ever have any hope of solving the problem.

Funny thing about stoplights.  I read an article a while back about at least one small city somewhere in europe which experimented with removing all traffic lights and signs, and actually experienced a decrease in accidents.  This is very deeply connected to a common anarchist argument -- that every situation is unique and people are best equipped to deal with them responsibly when left to approach it as such.  The existence of traffic controls create a mental dependency that actually removes a driver from being actively engaged in observing and communicating with the traffic around them.  All they're paying attention to is the lights and the signs, resigning themselves to the straight & narrow of absolutes that we're expected to live by.  No reason to pay attention to anything around us when we're being told exactly what to do.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

But you're doing so in a very narrow and short-sighted fashion. You're not looking at the whole picture, you're just saying "People are hungry, and we waste food, ergo we can fix this."

There's also the issue of dicks. Sooner or later, someone's going to realize they can ignore crossings completely because everyone else will move for them. Yes, they'll eventually get into a car wreck, but they'll take someone else with them and be disruptive until then (Incidentally, this problem gets considerably worse when new cars and medical attention are relevant to his wellbeing, and therefore guaranteed).

Fourth, food is mostly produced on large-scale farms and other sophisticated, centralized production centers. Running such a place, let alone running it at peak efficiency, requires a centralized command of some sort, which you've spent much of the thread declaring innately violent and slavery-inducing. Similar issues exist for transporting and distributing it.

This is where I would have conceded 20 years ago, but not with mass communications as they are today.  Organization doesn't require coercive authority.  The only centralization required is the availability of information and collections of input from those with a stake in the operation, which can be carried out on just about any scale today.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You are grossly mistaken about a number of things.

For one, many things are far, far too complex to be managed simply by being able to talk to someone on a cell phone. You seem to be under the impression that mass communications will solve everything, but the fact remains that most people are not qualified to do most things, and putting them in touch with each other does little to solve this. Even assuming everyone in charge is qualified (which there is zero guarantee of without some sort of central coercive authority), there's no guarantee they'll agree, remember/care enough to communicate, or otherwise organize themselves in any semblance of an efficient manner. In the worst case, two people could simply run around reversing each others' decisions.

And in case you thought having access to information would make everyone qualified and in agreement, I ask you to look at Wikipedia. Tons of information available to inform the ignorant masses. While many use it as such, it's also rife with edit wars and arguments and general complaints about information being added or removed or bias or wrong. People don't agree with it just because it's up there, and if they don't agree with it, they're not likely to follow it.

But really, books would have proven this point. Written explanations for how mathematics or engineering or medicine work have been available for millenia. Shouldn't libraries have made it so people could just up and become an engineer at any point? Shouldn't mail or telephone have made it so everyone can keep in touch and organize? If average citizens couldn't just go to the library, chat on the phone, and then go off and build a hydroelectric dam because it was the best thing to do at the time, I don't see why it would be the case now.

Fifth, you've been using the example of food based on some statistics you read, then trying to apply it to everything "related to your well-being." Some of the things directly related to someone's well-being are extremely difficult to make- there's just never going to be as many of them as there are people who want them, at least in the near future. Organ transplants come to mind, but the kind of surgeon necessary for one is a good example also.

This is true, and I totally understand that trade will always exist for things which are unique or rare.  The list of things which can be considered of genuine importance to a person which we do not have the capability to make abundant is constantly dwindling, though.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No, they're not. Well, they might be if we stop inventing things, but if you're over 30 and have multiple surviving offspring, you're doing quite well as far as animals go. If you've never really had to go hungry, thirsty, or cold, you're doing ridiculously well. If you're guaranteed to live to 60, have various electronic entertainments available, are carried where you want to go by a car, and can visit a trained specialist for most things that go wrong with anything, you're doing well even by human standards, which are ridiculously above any semblance of natural order. To imply that you then won't find yet more things vital to your wellbeing, like treatment for cancer or replacement eyes, is simply ridiculous. If there was any such thing as "enough" we'd have hit it with agriculture.

I think the only economic model humanity needs is as follows

1.  If you have more than you need, share.
2.  If you don't have what you need, find some one who can share.
3.  If no one is able to share, set about producing it.
4.  If you can't do it alone, get help.

Furthermore, this seems to confirm that the system you're advocating is "Capitalism, but everyone's nice to each other and there's no central government."

Not only does this run full-force into the eternally-stated Communism problem of "But why would they bother to work?", it runs into the issue of who's going to be enforcing this system with no central authority. Earlier you admitted that if we started fresh, and everyone was trading goods and services, the most ambitious would snowball into control of everything. This seems to imply that you know Capitalism is natural. But, in spite of this, you want to let people manage themselves, but on the notion that they follow the above plan. Well, why? Who's going to make them do it? Supposing a group of people doesn't mind if the king gets a slightly nicer hut, and it snowballs from there? Supposing one self-governing group decides it'd be awesome if they started manipulating prices to gain control of other self-governing groups, who lack the organization and knowledge to realize what's happening and put a stop to it?

What you are advocating, literally, is Utopia- a place where everyone lives in peace and harmony and freedom, simply because that's how things work. Unfortunately, that's not how things work. It would be great if birth defects didn't exist, but they do. It would be great if people weren't often greedy and stupid, but they are. It would be great if we could all just stop being dicks to each other for no benefit, but we can't. If you can find a specific solution to those problems, great- but even then, there's likely to be unpleasant side effects. If you figure once everything's nice because everyone is nice, everyone will be nice... well, aside from the difficulty of getting it to that point, it's just not going to hold on its own.

Incidentally, Realmfighter is not a complete troll. "People are dicks" is a very real, very ancient, very well-known problem, and it goes far, far deeper than living amongst dicks.

Sixth, you're trying to superimpose a new system on the old one, on the assumption that the new system would change some things but not others. Capitalism is well-known as a motivator, if nothing else, and much of the brutal oppression you speak of is used to achieve the numbers you're speaking of. As an example, under-minimum wage migrant workers are often used to pick fruit efficiently, so you'd have to either turn everyone into a migrant worker, or lose some food production.

Need is the motivator, and this is what capitalism is good at generating... need where there should be none.  We certainly don't need impoverished migrant workers. It seems like very little work that's actually worth a damn to anyone pays enough to reasonably support a family.  I'm doing work that's completely finance-based and completely worthless as I see it.  My first job was scanning & stacking packages for shipping.  I worked much harder than I do now and made less than half what I do, but I loved it.  I was healthy, felt alive, and had some sense of worth in what I did.  Now I feel like I'm in a coma 8-10 hours a day for nothing.  It seems like all the work that's out there either pays shit, is insanely high competition, or is completely worthless crap like insurance, banking, telemarketing, brokerage, bloated beaurocracy etc.  If everyone like me could afford to go and pick fruit with the migrants, we could all have more while doing less work.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

See, here's the problem- picking fruit produces fruit. Fruit isn't worth a whole lot, so you don't get paid a lot for it. This is not negotiable- it's a fact of reality. You can either have cheap fruit, and fruit-pickers get terrible pay, or you can have expensive fruit, and fruit-pickers get better pay. Either way, the fact remains that fruit-pickers don't make much money relative to how much money is "a lot," because they're not doing much- even if they're getting a fair share, they're still splitting the benefits with those who plant, tend, process, ship, and distribute the crops, and only working for a short period of time at that.

It's also easy to look at something and say "this does not produce an item I can hold, therefore it produces nothing, therefore it's useless." It's even easier to say it's boring. Neither of those have any actual bearing on its worth, however. Firefighters produce nothing. They don't even do anything most of the time. Yet, they're fairly essential. Going to a bank and saying HMMMM YOU GUYS DON'T HAVE A PRODUCT YET MAKE MONEY I GUESS YOU'RE JUST LEECHES isn't any more valid than going to a firefighter's station and doing the same. Reality is far too complex to take one glance at something and declare it meaningless.

Of course this isn't going to happen as long as we operate the way we do.  Technology gets better and allows us to produce more efficiently, requiring less labor.  Instead of this amounting to greater abundance and less work for everyone, it amounts to the wealthy elite going "Wow!  I can hire less people and get more out of them!  Less sharing!  More for me!"  And so we're forced to struggle harder than ever before to find worthless shit to waste our time on.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And yet, you seem to be claiming this wouldn't happen with everyone, as though there's some degenerate class of Rich Guys controlling everything, and ousting them from power would solve everything.

Also, we've once again run into the issue that most of those efficiency improvements came about through competition- it was profitable for someone to do so, so they did so. If we shifted down to everyone getting everything, that improvement disappears- sure, a handful of people could still try to make it more efficient because they want to, but where would they get the funding? They're certainly not going to top our current surgical techniques off a bloated fruit-picker's salary, that's for sure.


Overall, you seem to:

1. Be blaming everything on the rich. Somewhat understandable, but you have this odd notion that once they're gone, nobody else will act like that.
2. Have an extraordinarily sunny view of human psychology. You claim to not be advocating Communism, but either most of the same problems are applicable, or you're just advocating Capitalism again, in which case most of those same problems are applicable. If you don't need to work to eat, why work? If you need to work to eat, what's to stop food from becoming too expensive for some people?

Combined, your ideas are more anti-bourgeois pig than Mutualistic or whatever. Incidentally, Communism was also essentially a backlash to the excesses of Capitalism, but as we've seen it didn't really work out, for a number of reasons. Ultimately, ideas thought up in retaliation to other ideas almost invariably result in a different set of problems, because they're no better thought out than the original plan- "avoid that stuff" is a great way to run into different stuff.

Oh god, it's long even with everything in spoilers. What have I done?

[Leafsnail]

One problem is that all too often wage workers lack the initiative and drive to actually take a risk and become self-employed. My father offered a couple of workers he had aid to become self-employed (the idea  was that he would be hiring them afterwards as freelance workers). They refused, preferring to stay on wages.

Or they judge that it's a risk not worth taking?

The main flaw here could be that he is the one deciding on his own self worth. And that's pretty much where the whole economic weakness lies. In a communist system, you have an entity deciding on how much everyone is worth (and deciding that they're all worth the same). In a capitalist system, every group tries to trick everyone else into thinking that they're worth more than all the others. In a socialist system, it works the same way, but there's an authoritative entity putting hard limits on what something is worth.

Well, yeah.  When you get to the point when you decide your own pay, your worth to the company is pretty much irrelevant.  Think bank bosses who wrecked their companies and still got large bonuses to the bitter end.

[ChairmanPoo]

One problem is that all too often wage workers lack the initiative and drive to actually take a risk and become self-employed. My father offered a couple of workers he had aid to become self-employed (the idea  was that he would be hiring them afterwards as freelance workers). They refused, preferring to stay on wages.

Or they judge that it's a risk not worth taking?

I think you just won the prize for the most tautological reply in the whole thread

[Leafsnail]

Well, no.  Your post seems to imply they're too lazy or stupid to see how awesome it is to be self employed.

[Leafsnail]

Hey, something actually vaguely relevant to the topic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/nov/18/nhs-best-free-access-healthcare

The NHS was also extremely cost-effective, with spending on health per person almost the lowest in the survey. A person in the UK paid $1,500 less than one in Switzerland and less than half the $7,538 paid by every American for healthcare. Only New Zealand, where one in seven said they skipped hospital visits because of cost, spent less per head.

[Sheb]

Well, for one, they only surveyed 11 countries, and we don't know which ones. For another things, the NHS is incredibly costly to the state and quite wasteful too. The french or belgian system are way better, but they too are based on the idea that the rich should pay for the poor.

[ChairmanPoo]

Well, no.  Your post seems to imply they're too lazy or stupid to see how awesome it is to be self employed.

My post seems to imply and in fact states clearly that they were unwilling to take the risk of self-employment, despite being in a favorable position to do so. It also implies (following from the former) that, at least in some cases, the "wage worker vs capitalist" conundrum is more complex than "the wage workers simply don't have any choice", as there are people who do have a choice yet prefer to stay as wage workers, for whatever reason.

Anything else is a production of your horny imagination.

[ChairmanPoo]

Well, for one, they only surveyed 11 countries, and we don't know which ones. For another things, the NHS is incredibly costly to the state and quite wasteful too. The french or belgian system are way better, but they too are based on the idea that the rich should pay for the poor.

We do know which ones:

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/In-the-Literature/2010/Nov/~/media/Images/Publications/In%20the%20Literature/2010/Nov/IHP%20Survey/IHP%20ITLl.gif

They do leave out several important industrialized countries that should be counted in, methinks, though

[Leafsnail]

Well, for one, they only surveyed 11 countries, and we don't know which ones. For another things, the NHS is incredibly costly to the state and quite wasteful too. The french or belgian system are way better, but they too are based on the idea that the rich should pay for the poor.

...Really?  You didn't take the ten seconds to click the link and find out that the eleven countries are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US?

And sure, it costs the state a lot, but apparently not as much as other systems do.

My post seems to imply and in fact states clearly that they were unwilling to take the risk of self-employment, despite being in a favorable position to do so. It also implies (following from the former) that, at least in some cases, the "wage worker vs capitalist" conundrum is more complex than "the wage workers simply don't have any choice", as there are people who do have a choice yet prefer to stay as wage workers, for whatever reason.

Anything else is a production of your horny imagination.

Ok, that makes more sense.

They do leave out several important industrialized countries that should be counted in, methinks, though

Well, yeah, I guess you could include a few more, but that doesn't change the overall outcome of the survey.

[ChairmanPoo]

Well, yeah, I guess you could include a few more, but that doesn't change the overall outcome of the survey.

Not in the "public services provide better avaiability than the US system", but maybe it would on the supposed superiority of the NHS against other socialized care systems.

There's also the issue of patient outcomes, which doesnt seem to be addressed in that survey (and is obviously important).

[Sheb]

This study seems to show that the UK's health system is below average, but not that much. The most marking point is the lack of physicians.

[Leafsnail]

Well, yeah, I guess you could include a few more, but that doesn't change the overall outcome of the survey.

Not in the "public services provide better avaiability than the US system", but maybe it would on the supposed superiority of the NHS against other socialized care systems.

Yeah, sure.  But this is a thread about socialism, rather than a thread about the NHS.

There's also the issue of patient outcomes, which doesnt seem to be addressed in that survey (and is obviously important).

Yeah, this was just a survey on accessibility and cost.

This study seems to show that the UK's health system is below average, but not that much. The most marking point is the lack of physicians.

I'm... not sure I see it?  Why use a study that's 12 years out of date, anyway?  That was nearly back to when we had an anti-NHS government.