Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Notes for the Economic Calculation in a Natural Law/RBE lecture video



Peter Joseph, founder of the Zeitgeist Movement Global,  gave a lecture in Berlin,
Germany on November 12th, 2013 about the economoic calculation in an NL/RBE.
The lecture was streamed live on the internet but wasn't released as a video until
December 3, 2013. 

While watching the video I have been making notes included with time stamps to
serve as a table of contents for the video lecture. This can be used by anyone who
wants to skim the notes in order to find out where in the video that specific topic
was discussed, rather than needing to rewatch the whole video or remember
where certain things were covered. 

Here is the video followed by the notes. 


2:00      Part 1:     Why Change?
            Part 2:     Post-Scarcity
            Part 4:     Economic Organization and Calculation

9:09      "[The] excess use of the earth's resources or 'overshoot' is possible
            because resources can be harvested faster than they can be
            replaced...the cumulative overshoot from the mid-1980's to 2002
            restulted in an 'ecologocal debt' that  would require 2.5 earths to pay.
            In a business-as-usual scenario, our demands on planet earth could
            mount to the productivity of 27 planets by 2050"
            (Fig. 4)
             -Marine Ecology Progress Series, Vol. 434:p261, 2011

9:30       And there's no shortage of other corroborating studies. To one degree
             or another we are indeed greatly overshooting the annual production
             capacity of the earth.  Coupled with pollution & collateral distraction
             caused by industrial and consumer patterns. Again this kind of research
             has been published for many decades, now, & why is it, that with all
             this mounting data, we can't seem to curb life support depletion &
             our overshooting consumption trends?
           
10:10     Is it because there are too many people on the planet? Is it because
             we're just utterly incompetent and have no conscious control over
             our actions? NO...

15:00     Morality as opposed to what works or doesn't.

17:30     Class Warfare

18:30     Inequality is a mathematical result of market competition.

19:10     Stuctural Classism

21:00     "The market generates desperation as its method of coersion"

21:30     'Free' market contradiction.
             Only the rich perhpas the super rich who have no need to worry about
             basic survival due to their wealth could possibly be said to engage of
             'voluntary free trade'.

22:30     Socio-economic inequality is a form of poison that effects peoples'
             psychological health in profound ways.

22:50     Structural violence.

24:00     Health related to inequality.

26:45     More examples of Structural Violence
             1.5 million children die yearly from diarrheal diseases  that are utterly
             preventable

27:50     Physical violence linked to poverty

28:37     Aristotle quote, "poverty is the parent of revoluion and crime."

28:40     Gandhi "poverty is the worst form of violence."

29:00     Preventable (poverty)

29:12     Solving social inequality is not just a nice thing to do; it is a public health
             imperative just like making sure our water isn't polluted so we don't get
             diseases.

29:25     It's a form of blowback.

29:55     People feel that society doesn't care about them.

30:20     The New Civil Rights Movement


31:01     PART II: POST SCARCITY
                            An Abundance focused Worldview

31:15     A Natural Law/Resource Based Economy is not a Utopia.

31:20     The Zeitgeist Movement seeks a high-relative-sustainable abundance,
             relieving the most relevant forms of scarcity.

31:45     –Relative/Sustainable abundance.
             –focus on most relevant forms of scarcity.

32:10     The market cannot differentiate between needs and wants and this gets to
             the roots of our value system disorder which continues to distort our
             culture.

33:35     Matt Berkowitz interview with famous Austrian economist.

34:29     A 'Post-Scarcity' or "abundance" worldview, with an active recognition
             of the natural limits of consumption on the planet. Seeking equilibrium.

34:50     technology makes it currently possible to have abundance for all the
             worlds people without need to compete.

35:15     "Ephemeralization" term from Buckminster Fuller. More with less.
             Energy/Resource Use inverse to efficiency/Power.

35:45     Moore's Law.

36:30     High Standard of living? What is meant?

36:45     If we as a society wish to keep the value of constant materialism, growth
             and consumption promoting the virtue of having infinite wants then we
             might as well just kill ourselves right now...As that is going to be the end
             result if we continue to push past the limits of the physical world with
             respect to our resource exploitation and the loss of bio-diversity.

37:35     4 categories to cover in post-scarcity.
             •food abundance–
             •water abundance–    
             •Energy A–
             •Material A–
                        ⬊ very conservative assesment for: using statistics that have been
                           put into industrial use, not theoretical.

38:00     Food  According to UN, one out of every 8 on earth suffer from chronic
             under nourishment.

38:20     Current world agriculture production of calories info (2,720 kilo calories
             per person)

38:45     According to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers:
             30 - 50% (or 1.2 - 2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reach a
             human stomach. Figure does not reflect that large amounts of land, energy,
             fertilizers and water have also been lost in the production of food stuffs
             which simply end up as waste.
           

39:30     Vertical Farming

40:05     Vertical Farm in Singapore-example.  $3 per month electric

40:35     Students at Columbia University determined that to feed 50,000 people,
             a 30 story farm...
               ⬋
40:53     30 Story farm on 6.4 acres = feed 50,000 people
             78 farms, using 0.1% Los Angeles
             land Area = feed 3.9 million

41:15     Apply this to earth population of 7.2 billion.  Need about 144, 000 verti-
             cal farms to feed the whole world.  921,000 acres of land – given that
             about 38% of earth's land is currently being used for traditional agri-
             culture, we find that we only need about .006% of the earth's existing
             agricultural requirements. If the current agricultural acreage was used to
             put 30 story vertical farms side by side, then the food production would
             be enough to feed 34,440,000,000,000 (34 trillion people).

42:25     We only need to harness about 0.02% of this theoretical capacity to feed
              9 billion (2050 population)

42:40      Makes any argument moot.

42:45      Water: According to World Health Organization, about 2.6 billion people
              half of the developing world- lack proper santitation and about 1.1 billion
              have no access to any clean drinking water.

43:05      2025 predictions of water scarcity
              Cause? Waste and pollution.

43:30      Purification: Water Purification stats for World.

46:55      Water Purification for Africa example.

48:35      Energy:

49:22      Geothermal Abundance Comparison.

49:25      2006 MIT report on Geothermal

49:40      Total energy consumption of all countries on planet is about 0.55 ZJ per
              year.

51:10      2013 Ethiopian geothermal plant used for statistical extrapolations. Facts
              and figures.

52:25      Wind Farms
              Breaking it down...

54:30      Solar Fields

55:40      4.1% of the world's deserts would suffice to power the world with solar.

55:45      Water based power. 5 dominant types.

56:00      Stats – Global potential using existing methods.

57:00      Energy Recap   –Systems thinking.

57:56      Localization/Reuse schemes

59:20      Peizo-electric

59:45      using Piezo-electric for highways.

1:00:20   Material Abundance

1:00:50   Inefficiency is the driver of profit

1:02:09   Access not Property

1:03:05   'Property' is not empirical, it is a protecionist contrivance.

1:03:45   Designed In Recycling – zero waste

1:04:20   Nanotech Recycling

1:05:20   Conformation of good design to the most (a) conducive & (b) abundant
              materials known.

1:05:35   Efficiency = Conducive, abundant.

1:06:00   Home construction, current inefficiency. 40% wasted materials.

1:07:00   Design Conduciveness for Labor Automation
              3 distinctions. Human Assembly = handmade
              Mechanization = Humans assist the machine.
              Automation = No human action.

1:09:00  "Everything (products) is the same? No.

1:09:45  Section conclusion with quote by Buckminster Fuller.

1:11:00  Part 3- Economic Organization and Calculation.

1:12:05  Definition of an economic model.

1:12:30  "Rarely if ever, is anything said about public or ecological health (in traditional
               or market based economic modeling). Why? Because the market is 'life blind'
               and decoupled from the science of life support and sustainability- It is simply
               a proxy system."

1:12:45  Sustainability and efficiency protocols.
              Arriving at decisions via Natural Sciences.

1:13:35  Structural system goals.
              What are the structural system goals of capitalism?
              Capitalism's structural goal is growth and maintaining  rates of consumption
              high enough to keep people employed at a given time; employment requires
              a culture of of real or perceived inefficiency and that essentially means the                       preservation of scarcity in one form or another.

1:14:15  An NL/RBE's goal.

1:14:28  System Overview.  The myth that the system is 'centrally planned'. No.

1:14:50  This model is a collaborative design system (CDS), Not centrally planned.
              It is based entirely upon public interaction facilitated by programmed,
              Open Sourced systems that enable a constant, dynamic feedback flow that
              can literally allow the input of the public on any given industrial matter,
              whether personal or social.

1:15:15  Common Question, "Well, who programs this system?"
              Sustainability and efficiency factors are not a factor of opinion.

1:16:00  Open Source.

1:16:20  What about private ownership of the means of production?

1:17:00  Means of production in capitalism must be owned by the capitalist...
              The need for price. The Price Mechanism.

1:18:20  Is there another way? Without price system?

1:18:45  Completely eliminate exchange and create a direct link between the consumer
              and the means of production itself. The consumer becomes part of the means
              of production and the industrial complex, if you will becomes nothing more
              than a tool that is accessed by the public to generate goods.

1:22:15  Structure and process.
              (1) Collaborative Design Interface and Industrial Schematic.
              (2) Resource Management, feedback and value.
              (3) General principals and the Macro-Calculation.

1:22:33  The Collaborative Design Interface is basically the new market. Open-source
              and open-access comes in the form of a website.

1:24:25  Computer aided design/engineering.

1:24:40  Learning curve will decrease over time.

1:25:45  Digital Physics for virtual testing.

1:27:00  Designs are put through efficiency filters (5).

1:28:45  Military efficiency and standardization.

1:29:45  Strategic design conducive for Labor Automation.

1:30:30  Industrial Complex Layout.

1:30:55  Production, actual manufacturing would evolve as automated factories which
              are able to produce increasingly more with less materials, inputs and less machines-
              ephemeralization.

1:31:50  Distribution- distribution libraries.

1:32:30  On demand production becomes more efficient.

1:32:50  Distribution Library is a direct feedback link between production, distribution
              and demand.

1:33:30  All goods have been pre-optimized for recycling.
              Zero waste economy.

1:35:08  Value measures. Scarcity and Labor Complexity.

1:35:35  Scarcity assessment scale (1 to 100).
              Example given with wood.
              Example given with metal.

1:37:10  Value calculations are done by machine due to complexity.

1:37:25  Labor complexity means estimating the complexity of a given production.

1:38:50  Macro-Calculation
              4 functions relating to stages of design, production, distribution and recycling.

1:39:35  Linear block schematic.

1:39:45  Process 1: Design schematic.

1:40:55  Process 2: Production Efficiency.

1:42:35  Process 3: Distribution Efficiency.

1:43:15  Process 4: Recycling Efficiency.

1:44:00  Concluding statement.

1:45:05  End Lecture
              Questions and Answers.


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