“Theres nothing wrong w/ not wanting to associate with a certain group.”
It is, however, quite irrational and pointless.
I do think that you might want to answer John Jame’s question, he seems to REALLY want you to answer it, and trust me I daresay that a lot of people here are wondering the same thing…
Kaczynski’s religion is anti-tech. Mine is not. Bear Grylls is fake propaganda made to make survialists look stupid. And I don’t want to associate with blacks. Theres nothing wrong w/ not wanting to associate with a certain group.
This actually made me lol. Also, how is Bear Grylls fake propaganda (also, how is propaganda fake)? Just some phony reality show made to be educational when your camping trip goes haywire. The guy’s no Les Stroud, but I don’t see how it’s “propaganda.”
You know as well as I do that there’s a huge amount of propaganda against self-sufficiency. The government controls the media, the schools and everything else. Living off the grid is being made ILLEGAL for God’s sake.
Thing is…you’re completely full of yourself and have not done a single thing to make any of us think otherwise. You go on and on about this stuff while you “prepare” and go on that the government is not letting people do it, but guess what? I have friends that travel “off the grid” frequently. I’ve had friends that train hopped and traveled for months (some still doing it and have been for years). There used to be a tent city here in the woods, people living “off the grid.” Thing is, that’s not enough for you, you want to go “primitive” (or whatever the hell you plan on doing). Not sure what you have in mind, but whatever it is you’re never going to do it. You can’t pull yourself away from the “grid” or anything else you claim to be against. You read Prison Planet and Infowars and talk about survival like Dale Gribble, and sadly you are just as big as a joke as the fictional character of Dale Gribble is (for those who are “in” on the series, Dale claims to be a soldier of fortune, but when given a fake mission to raise his spirits completely screws it up). People live off the grid everyday, and they generally don’t talk about doing it on econ forums. Maybe it’s because you’re some white, middle-class, “privileged,” sheltered and conspiracy scared [enter age here] year old, and never actually been out on your own on the road or in the wild. I don’t know what your case is, but it’s clear you’re never going to go “off the grid.” Hell, you probably can’t even last one night in Vegas.
So what’s the deal? Are you going to fess up and answer John James’ questions and stop posting about survival and “off the grid” nonsense, or continue to be some Mises forum jester?
a) because you claim to prefer living off in the woods
b) because you reject technology and claim to be “anti-tech” and Internet, computers, and this forum = tech
c) because you reject “civ” and Internet, computers, this forum and virtually everything about it = “civ”
Why are you here?
Why do you think I’m here? I should ask you the same thing. Why do you believe in civ and then claim to support anarcho-capitalism and non-aggression when civ as always been statist and violent.
Tell me, what is wisdom to you? I’m on the belief that the wiser you are the more you will come to the logical conclusion that civ is a bane on the human existence. People on the right and the left become anti-civ once they take their philosophies to their logical conclusions. Every time you have civ you run the risk of having a state. There has never been a stateless civilization and never will be since it’s too easy for people to take power over others and create the state.
Why do you think I’m here?
To unintentionally troll yourself.
I should ask you the same thing. Why do you believe in civ and then claim to support anarcho-capitalism and non-aggression when civ as always been statist and violent.
Even though it’s directed towards JJ, I can’t pass this up. What do you think civilization is? Well, from what I see theories put forth by those who support anarcho-capitalism and NAP are only putting forth a framework of how people would or could interact peacefully and productively in society, or civilization. Thing is, civilization is the outcome, it’s what is this growing product, everyone adds to it in it’s forms from the arts to science and technology, it’s a manifestion of the mind and spirit of it’s people. All through it’s culture of customs, art, music, film, literature, food, language to it’s innovations through the division of labor. Acting individuals creating something that will be known well long after they have passed. Civilization is a level or way of “coming into being” at it’s most productive state. The theories you find on this website are only how to produce and make civilization become even more fruitful. What’s this mean? It means everyone of those theorists was not against civilization, on the contrary they wanted to see it blossom and grow even more rich and bountiful. They wanted progress. Civilization is not statist or violent, but the means on how to create a more bountiful civilization have never fully been figured out; it’s been a history of trial, error, and repeating the same trials and errors. Thus, from people like Bastiat, Mises, and Hoppe they’ve “created” an alternative way, a more productive and efficient way of reaching a more rich civilization.
Tell me, what is wisdom to you? I’m on the belief that the wiser you are the more you will come to the logical conclusion that civ is a bane on the human existence. People on the right and the left become anti-civ once they take their philosophies to their logical conclusions. Every time you have civ you run the risk of having a state. There has never been a stateless civilization and never will be since it’s too easy for people to take power over others and create the state.
Thus, all the advancements in science, technology, medicine and the arts will no longer exist to aid you in anyway possible. Is it wise to take theorists and philosphers out of context to support your asinine theory of anti-civ? Don’t forget, they were the bourgeoisie. When you have civilization you run risks, risks are a part of life. If you are afraid to take risks you are afraid to live. For your theory to work we’d have to abandon the division of labor, and all the progress in our many forms through voluntary cooperation and innovation, because we run the risk of something bad happening. Instead, let’s collectively live in reclusion, we will all be there, with all the tools to grow and advance, but never pick up the tools out of fear of someone telling us how to use them. No, we don’t have the bravery to think for ourselves, and we are scared of running the risks of doing something crazy…like living.
Again, why are YOU here?
Honestly I don’t know. I can only guess because you have a need to spread this primitivist nonsense and project an image that you are superior to others because you see yourself as some kind of Tarzan who can live off nothing more than his own cunning, and doesn’t need or even want anything that resembles ease, fun, or comfort, to a point of claiming to reject civilization entirely…because it helps your self esteem.
That’s why you haven’t left “civ”, because (a) you couldn’t survive in the woods and (b) for you it’s not even about living in the woods, it’s about projecting yourself as better than others. That’s why you continue to use the technology you explicitly reject just so you can come back here and make a fool of yourself constantly by talking about all this crap you’re “going” to do and spouting your “beliefs” about being against everything you actually choose to participate in every day (civilization and all its aspects), because if you actually did go off into the woods and reject all the technology and civilization you claim to be against and want to get away from, you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone how much smarter you are and better prepared you are anymore.
You wouldn’t be able to continue spreading your idiotic propaganda and your useless predictions about how much better off you’re going to be, and how everyone should do what you keep claiming you’re “going” to do. And that would just kill you, because then you wouldn’t have a way to maintain any semblance of a reason to live. Without anyone around for you to remind how much smarter and cool Tarzan-y-er you are, there’d really be nothing keeping you from falling into a deep depression, and then, quite ironically, all this mental energy put into survival would be for naught, as you wouldn’t have anything to survive for.
But, that’s just my guess. You could easily just be a sadist who comes here to troll yourself like Bert said. I honestly don’t know.
So…
Why are you here?
I am keeping an open mind here. Let me say from the beginning that I think its farfetched, and here is why: We used to make 15-25 items a day by hand. Then we got a robot welder. Suddenly my job was to feed it parts, and I was making 100 items a day easily. But my job didnt disappear, it actually doubled. Because this robot requires 4x to 6x the inputs per hour that I did (production inputs, not labor inputs like wages). Someone has to cut all that steel into squares and drill and tap holes, etc. And the robot itself requires someone to program it. So, 1 man making 25 per day translated into 2 men and a robot who can alternate (covering each other breaks) and support the robot and make 125 pieces in the same time period.
so the tasks require complex motor skill and learning skills (a programmable robot has extremely primitive learning skills). The idea is that if you replace all the tasks with robots, and all the robot support with other robots (that supported each other) then you would be free to come up with a robot that would identify problems and return the system to homeostasis. And support robots would grease its fittings, so you basically have a robot ecosystem, with robots drilling oil that they load onto robot trucks, who drive to robot refineries and make robot fuel from.
aside from practical problems with this system, can someone explain to me how it is theoretically impossible?
The critique bears some similarities to Marx. I recommend reading chapter 15 of Capital (and maybe the previous chapter on manufacture as well):
The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. [116] The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery. The whole system of capitalist production is based on the fact that the workman sells his labour-power as a commodity. Division of labour specialises this labour-power, by reducing it to skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value. It is impressed upon the workpeople, as a great consolation, first, that their sufferings are only temporary (“a temporary inconvenience"), secondly, that machinery acquires the mastery over the whole of a given field of production, only by degrees, so that the extent and intensity of its destructive effect is diminished. The first consolation neutralises the second. When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it. Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and felt by great masses. History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers, an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally sealed in 1838. Many of them died of starvation, many with families vegetated for a long time on 2½ d. a day. [117] On the other hand, the English cotton machinery produced an acute effect in India. The Governor General reported 1834-35:
“The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.”
No doubt, in turning them out of this “temporal” world, the machinery caused them no more than “a temporary inconvenience.” For the rest, since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields of production, its temporary effect is really permanent. Hence, the character of independence and estrangement which the capitalist mode of production as a whole gives to the instruments of labour and to the product, as against the workman, is developed by means of machinery into a thorough antagonism. [118] Therefore, it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour.
In the previous chapter, Marx explains how capitalist manufacture seeks to specialize workers as much as possible. A worker’s labor is cheaper the less education he has. So when machines displace the workers, the workers lack the skills required to work in new industries. The individual capitalist has no incentive to provide his employees with education and skills that will help them get new jobs after he lays them off. This is why capitalism must resort to mandatory publicly-funded education. It is the means by which the individual capitalists escape the prisoner’s dilemma.
its funny how actual capitalists do the exact opposite, as in try to hire people who have no skills but willngness to learn, and then teach them the skills necessary for them to operate tools (where exactly do you draw the disntinction between a tool and a machine?) like someone whose labor costs more. it seems like you are setting up to equivocate on the meaning of “specialize.”
You foresee a future where machines eliminate all entry-level employment, and even though we have all this material bounty (how else could we afford to have robots sweeping the floors, taking out the trash, and polishing the gold bars?) we capitalists are too unkind to provide free education! Mwaahaaahahaaaa! Seriously? What happened to the internet in your universe?
What excellent agitprop! He even subverts the metallist paradigm by suggesting that they would have to make a law to stop people from accepting paper fiats! Hahahahaha
So capitalists want to hire unskilled workers, so when they replace the skilled workers with robots, the workers become nskilled and cant get jobs? If marx and engels had, you know, participated in markets instead of being the phlegmatic beneficiaries of the products of markets, i.e. The leisure class, they wouldnt have advocated this drivel. Besides, the only reason the owners of the capital goods had monopoly status was because of the intellectual property status of the means of production themselves. Capital goods require multivarious labor inputs that are exponentially harder to automate. This is an empirical fact. Attempt to explain a meaningful difference between “machine” and “tool” in this context and you will see what I mean. They are called “machine tools” in industry parlance btw.
I want to at least thank FotH for getting the convo back on topic. Any other thoughts you guys have on my response? Makes sense/doesn’t?
its funny how actual capitalists do the exact opposite, as in try to hire people who have no skills but willngness to learn, and then teach them the skills necessary for them to operate tools (where exactly do you draw the disntinction between a tool and a machine?) like someone whose labor costs more. it seems like you are setting up to equivocate on the meaning of “specialize.”
That’s not true. Many jobs require college degrees, for example.
You foresee a future where machines eliminate all entry-level employment, and even though we have all this material bounty (how else could we afford to have robots sweeping the floors, taking out the trash, and polishing the gold bars?) we capitalists are too unkind to provide free education! Mwaahaaahahaaaa! Seriously? What happened to the internet in your universe?
No, I don’t think “free education” is going anywhere.
So capitalists want to hire unskilled workers, so when they replace the skilled workers with robots, the workers become nskilled and cant get jobs?
No, they want to hire unskilled workers (provided the industrial process has evolved to a point to function with unskilled workers) in order to cheapen their labor expenses and thereby increase their profits. The “robots” later replace the unskilled workers. The trend is this: skilled workers > unskilled workers > “robots.” I’m sure they would skip directly from skilled workers to “robots” if they could. The demand for labor in the economy shifts from consumer goods to productive goods. The people who the robots have replaced are now somehow supposed to build the robots.
Besides, the only reason the owners of the capital goods had monopoly status was because of the intellectual property status of the means of production themselves.
This would certainly be consistent with Marx’s contention that capitalism is predicated on “primitive accumulation.”
Wheylous, when it comes to arguing with Internet Luddites, the only winning move is not to play.
O rly? Tell that to the market where there are openings for unskilled laborers.
I want you to sit down and think until you realize that this is not a counterexample to my point.
please describe an industrial process that hasnt evolved to use unskilled labor
Here in the real world, they operate and maintain the robots because they havent invented anything close to robots that can replace human workers. But in marxist fantasy-land where calculation is unnecessary, the evil capitalists have better robots, apparently.
I typed out a response to this, and the site messed up when I tried to post, now I only feel like paraphrasing my original message.
On robots, it’s not as dystopian as it’s opponents make it to be. They have a rather narrow minded view of technological advancements, and look at the tech industry, it appears to be the most productive. They assume ever robot replaces a person in the short and long run, but it takes people to innovate and create this technology, and everyone’s competing for the best. As far as an imaginary construct of robots doing all the work, well who cares. More robots, less people, greater out put of goods, higher standard of living, less work, more leisure, we all win (if you want to go that route). (I’m half assing what I originally posted)
On unskilled labor, when unskilled workers enter a skilled producution process, they become skilled laborers through experience. A friend of mine got hired for this satellite installation company called MasTech and knew nothing about how to do the work. He went through paid training (1-2 weeks) and after that was certified. Thus at the company’s expense unskilled becomes skilled. Another friend of mine joined the shipyard after the college he got accepted into lost his transcript and didn’t get in, for the hell of it joins the welding program (again, on the job training and paid) and in a years time of working full time at the shipyard made enough to get married and buy a house. These are your “unskilled laborers.”
What do you think of the Law of Life and how it relates to austrian economics and open competition?
I think you missed my point. Which is, that I think you’re a wuss for not wanting to associate with certain racial groups.
Are you going to force me to associate with others I don’t want to associate with? Cultural marxism says race doesn’t exist. Are you a cultural marxist?
I think you need to familiarize yourself with non-human counterexamples to this “law of life” like birds of prey.
I never said I wanted to force you to associate with anyone. I’m just telling you what I think of you as a person. I think you have no backbone, that yer yella, chicken, a scaredy cat.
What does race existing or not existing have to do with it? Race exists- you’re still a wuss for not wanting to associate with blacks and I won’t respect your opinion on it. That’s all, no big deal.
Law of Life
Oh, idk, viruses have been quite able to survive. I hear rodents have been around for a while as well.
Plus, humans don’t even hunt any more.
Cultural marxism
I am not sure that all things “collectivist” are marxist. I thought marxism was limited to public ownership of the means of production…
Plus, it is easily arguable that “racialism” (if you wanna call it that as a politically correct word) is indeed very much a collectivist notion.
Some primitivists believe that in order to function in an ecosystem, a species must compete for nutrition to the best of its ability yet refrain from waging war against its competition. Things like intraspecies territorial battles are permitted. Interspecies territorial battles are prohibited. The form of agriculture that most of the human race subsists from is a form of intraspecies war because it involves displacing competitors from territory and/or poisoning them. This is the “law of life” as I recall it from Daniel Quinn’s books. I know there are factual counterexamples to this law, birds of prey (who wage interspecies war against competitors) and others and so I mentioned it.
bear in mind I didnt watch the video that Freedom4Me posted (at least this time he posted it), but I think I replied accurately anyway.
I think you need to familiarize yourself with non-human counterexamples to this “law of life” like birds of prey.
Birds of prey dont have civilization. they can’t artificially recreate their food supply.