Skeptic Project

As a starting point explain the following [more questions will come if you manage to satisfy the people here]:::::

How you plan to combat the fact that resources are finite and often difficult to access in the real world, yet ideologically an RBE plans on having resources available for everyone, which implies they are infinite and can be distributed equally to all people around the world with ease at any time they demand more.

yeah that kind of statement is sidestepping the arguments that a RBE is not a viable option.

Camping is fun until you actually need to do some fucking work to survive.

Yeah its not like the rest of the world is going to take a drop in quality of service and material substance, so for a RBE to work it has to not only appeal to the lowest common denominators needs, it has to also appeal to the elitists needs. In other words it has to have a framework that can maintain the current highest possible output of material existance for the richest people on earth, and this needs to be maintained for every human on Earth .

This is a big question. So what are the ground rules?  You mentioned that the rest of the world doesn't want to take a hit to their standard of living so the other 3/4 can be raised up.  So let's start there. It is not a requirement that the upper 25% sacrifice any cut to their current standard of living.  It does require the redistribution of productivity gains as they happen in the form of higher wages and lower prices.  The core of any capitalist system,  free market or otherwise is to produce better products for the lowest cost.  Now whether this is done through competition or collaboration the goal is the same.  Produce the best you can at the lowest cost you can bear. At a profit of course.

I spoke earlier of the deflationay power of technology on prices. Think  of communications. Sending letters centuries ago was a perilous process. And costly. Today it is cheap and reliable. Even better we now have e-mail, twitter, Facebook, FaceTime. Instantaneous, reliable, cheap communication.  In travel we see the same trend. Travel across the ocean centuries ago was long, perilous and hugely expensive as only the rich could fund such expeditions (kind of the equivalent of commercial spaceflights today). Today transoceanic flights are routine and well within the grasp of the middle class in terms of affordability. 

I am writing this reply on my iPhone which I also used as a GPS to get to the house I am staying at for a family reunion.  In 1975 there was no such thing as wireless access, texting was not even part of the popular vocabulary, maps were solely physical things that were produced and sold in brick and mortar stores. The point; such services that such a mutli-functional device can provide for mere pennies would have cost hundreds of dollars for equivalent services, indeed if these services existed it an equivalent form at all back then. 

On the horizon in my particular industry is automated warehouse picking and using smartphone scanning technology to phase out the need for a cashier or stock boy.  You walk in and either scan the goods with your phone or pick what you want from a touch screen and the order is assembled for pick up. Either way you pay with your phone. And you can order from home if you wish for later pick up. 

This current move in that direction impacts all retail establishments. 

This is why it is necessary to share out these gains in productivity back to the workers by either dropping prices on necessities or raising wages overall. 

TL;DR version

The poorest among us in North America today live better than kings of yesteryear precisely because of technological innovation.  This trend will continue. 

Of course. Allow me to continue.  Let's be clear although Fresco coined the term even he doesn't know how it is going to pan out.  He makes a case for circular cities most likely based on the assumption that herding populations closer together is the height of efficiency. And it is true to an extent, using distrubution models of today cities are more energy efficient when trying to sustain large numbers of people.  Shrink down food production so you can grow 10K pounds of food on a tenth of an acre, coupled with ubiquitous network communications, and decentralized power generation and you could make the case that you can live and work anywhere. 

So in my previous post I was laying the groundwork for the resource argument.  I acknowledge upfront that we live on a finite planet with finite resources. This is not up for argument.  The answer comes down to how can we effectively and efficiently pull the resources we require and stretch them further.  In any society you have a material requirement, an energy requirement, and lastly a labour (productivity) requirement.  In my previous post I illustrated how grotesquely expensive some of the most common everyday acts were back in the medieval day.   Both in materials, labour, and energy.  This is why I was talking about standards of living, people were abysmally poor only very few people proportionately could even afford something that approximated middle class life and usually at the expense of the labour and production of the peasant class. 

As long as a society has access to ample energy, be it food calories or petrol/nuclear or renewables, labour/productivity can be manipulated to refine resource use either by finding more, finding substitutes, or getting by with less. 

So if you did a direct comparison of how much time and energy was spent on equivalent goods and services you will see that costs decline. 

My iPhone (I love it can you tell?) for the service it provides (not the technology it contains) would be worth a fortune in say the 1800's (for the sake of argument it comes with necessary infrastructure to support it's full operation).   This piece works so well  it might as well be magic to the uninitiated. 

Also in my iPhone comparison I sidestepped the actual worth of the technology (incalculable or worthless depending on the understanding of who has it)and the supporting infrastructure that it requires because this investment in infrastructure and knowledge represents a cumulative progression where one advancement or combination of advancements could not come until the advent of another. 

TL;DR

Fresco although a "pioneer" cannot realistically say how emergent society will look. Technology and it's use will determine the shape of future society. 

The finite resource problem is not solved by making resources infinite (impossible) but by shifting the other parts of the equation; mostly labour/productivity efficiency and energy production. 

The trend is we've gotten better at utilizing our resources and increasing productivity. The energy question is still up in the air.  This will continue as long as we have energy. 

^You're a meaningless term.

DOES EATING YOUR OWN POOP FALL IN LINE WITH A RBE?

So you're not talking about TVP's RBE per se, but comparable technological progress?
Sounds rather passive and deterministic.

The critical stopping point for Fresco's vision is HUMANS. I think we really could have what he calls a RBE and it would work except for the fact that humans would fuck it all up.

Fresco recognises this that is why they go on and on about education. They think that you can condition abhorent behaviours out of people. While I personally think its true to an extent what the Venus Project requires is complete and total success in this regard in every single way. There will be no police, no laws, no one with more power over another, so the society cannot allow a single person to act out of order.

I remember Fresco even saying that if we suddenly found ourselves in a RBE we probably wouldn't like it because we haven't been conditioned into it! The point being that humans would have to take a cut in how they live and they would have to see life differently in order for the society to function and while I feel it is conceivable to do this with a certain number of people, even a majority of people isn't enough, even if every single person could be conditioned to think this way it still only requires a single person to go against the grain.

I think we talked ages ago about how bartering would just come naturally in a RBE that Fresco describes, bartering that just cannot happen if the society will function as intended. He'll say that people will make art and want to hang it in a gallery so everyone can see it, but what about hand made furniture? What if your neighbour is a great carpenter and you want him to make you some furniture that he has in his house. What if you have nothing to trade? In this instance the only real responce can be that people won't desire hand made furniture and therefore they will not want to make it either. What about film making? How will you get people to work on a film if they don't all believe in it? You can get people to do things today by providing an insentive, money, what insentive will there be in a RBE society? Again the only responce is people won't want to make films. There will defenders of Fresco's society that will try and find ways to make it work, but after all the arguments it will come back to that one simple point. In a RBE humans will all uniformly have to think very, very differently to how we think now with no exceptions for it to work and that's why it won't.

All their talk of nano machines and star trek style replicators annd all these fictional technologies that if they can exist is so far off into the future its not work thinking about is based only on trying to solve this fundamental problem.