Armitage

I grew up definitely bilingual, maybe trilingual, actually sort of quatrilingual. I grew up on the borders with multi-national family and a local distinct dialect. Sometimes I felt it drives me crazy, to talk in a different language or dialect to my mother, father, brothers, grandmother... It just didn't feel right to talk to them in a language that is not their own. Each to their own! The crazy thing was when they got together. It made arguing impossible. It didn't feel right to address one and have another barge in with a different language or dialect. And it felt even more wrong to use the official national language, which is my favorite, actually. It just didn't feel right. I don't know if it was a nationalistic sentiment or something, but I lived in a place that used to be stolen by my homeland, so the locals speak a little differently. Holy crap, that is messed up. I think I got over this a little when I moved out of the house to study, even more when my family broke up, let's say I don't care about my dad's language any more, that makes things simplier. Does anyone else think that multi-lingual upbringing is confusing and bad for the child? No, not the languages, they don't get confusing or too difficult, not at all. Switching between them is confusing. Keeping track of family members is confusing. Feeling the disapproval, hesitation or ironical remarks of a family member addressed in a wrong language is not a nice experience. Well, I wouldn't take it to the extreme - actually, English is my hobby and if I had children, I'd want to raise them bilingual, the national language and English. Learning English was the best thing i did in my life, it is as if I learned to read, write and speak for the second (fifth?) time, this time the right language, that has all the information, fun, science and money in it. A global language. I only wish there were computers and internet earlier, so that I'd save many years of learning in vain, inefficiently at school. You don't learn by studying, you learn by doing what you love in that language. So how does one raise a multi-lingual child? Should I be the English parent? Ah, silly me. Why didn't I ask Google first? I'm going on it. Of course I'll ask in English. I wish my potential future children were able to use Google properly, in English. I don't want them to be forced to speak in some kind of archaic local dialect that only stifles the mind, that is impossible to use when speaking about science, politics, or anything intelligent. I was never much into linguistics like some philosophers, but now that I think of that, it might explain why I met so few educated people in my region. Before you think I am some sort of linguistic genius, just think the languages are all from neighboring countries of the western Slavonic group and so they are extremely similar, probably just about as French, Spanish, Italian and Portugese. English is the only truly foreign language I know and I know it anyway second best besides the national one. The others I'm not good at anymore, it's mostly a passive knowledge.

I suppose that makes us both bitten by the leftist bug. I believe that there should be an economic bottom line and it should be above zero. Freedom without economic security is not a freedom at all, it's a burden. No wonder people keep selling it to politicians for promises. There is a way to have a bottom line that will rise with us, not without us. Today companies automate everything, but they do it without us. We need more automation, but we need access to the machine productivity. We need to let people directly dial up and click on what products they want. Voting with your wallet is not a fair vote, it presumes we had our hand in the work, which is increasingly not the case today. Today the most productive thing we can do, is to step away and let the machines work. Laissez les machines faire! Division of labor is overrated, person of the future is a scientist-generalist, with an experimental attitude towards everything. As R. A. Henlein said, specialization is for insects. So is work, I say. Bees of cubicles and ants of conveyor belts must become the past.

What about starting an anonymous web discussion about the jerk? Spread around the office some links, start with people you trust...

Do you have a Human Resources department at your work which would be interested in such an information?

If that is directed towards the Original Poster, I agree whole-heartedly. Many of the arguments are just lazy thinking. OK, I can write you off as an idiot troll. I don't know what a "model" is when some people use it in a context of their own, in a forum far far away. I know what a "model" is objectively and I said so. I've got enough capacity to know both TVP and punctuation. You don't know either of these. And your use of the word "wrong" tells me, how desperate you are to be right.You never understood TVP or RBE to begin with, if you call it ideology. Science is not an ideology, it is a universally applicable method.Yes, I am lazy to work manually. Nothing wrong with that. People who aren't lazy tend to be lazy intellectually and they never push forward the development of technology or society.Now, where is that blacklist feature, I hope it works this time.

As I said, I am not from any forum or a group. I speak on behalf of RBE, because I understand it and consider it a solution to most of today's problems. I studied RBE from Fresco's talks, Fresco's books, TVP channel discussions, to which I added my layman's understanding of biology, ecology, automation (graduated from that), and systems theory or regulation of systems in general. Plus of course, sociology which I study. What Fresco says still makes perfect sense. I don't know what TZM says and I am not interested in hair splitting. Ultimately it does not matter what any group or individual says, TVP is merely an application of science to social problems, nothing more, nothing less. Doesn't matter what Fresco says, what Fresco knows of science will be superseded and he is fully aware of that. In fact, he counts on that. Of course I made it up. Till this moment I had no idea what is RBEM and I said so, in case you're counting wrong and right score with all these wrongs. And I still have no idea. And I'm still not sure I should care. I care about application of science and technology on the problems still occupied by the obsolete practices of market and politics. Yeah, I suppose so. TVP does not want other people meddling with their model, because other people may not be self-educated geniuses or they may not understand Fresco's intention behind all the design.But I'd say my understanding of TVP is pretty canonical and standardized. My impression is, I have understood the concept itself and I can generalize from that, without mixing in any cultural notions. I don't know what are you trying to prove here. I probably need the difference between RBE and RBEM spelled out explicitly. But just in case, my preliminary agreement is with TVP, because that's what I studied. Nothing is clear to you. I do not believe in ideologies, I believe in application of science to social problems. Groups and their ideologies or opinions are irrelevant to me. I have found many parallels in nature that inspired Fresco to make his designs and ultimately it's the nature and science that has the final word, not Fresco. Furthermore, I consider myself well-versed in the usual macro and micro-economy (can't vouch for precise English terms though) and also in Austrian school economy, both were in my final exams. Plus of course the study of RBE through TVP and general observation of systems and organisms. Economics works, but it is merely a special case of a principle, a case which extended beyond its circumstances of usefulness, just as any ideology ever does, sooner or later. We need to understand a general principle of how systems work, in order to design a new economy for new circumstances. The most perfect case of a system is an organism-like system. This is the very archetype of RBE and I constantly marvel how close in design is the TVP to an organism, as if Fresco based it directly on biology. Only of course TVP is even more flexible in design than organism. You have asked me about some forum politics and term-definition conflicts, which has nothing to do with RBE itself. You have not shown you understand anything at all, not even the Libertarian non-violent communication principle, judging from your frequent calling me wrong.

I don't understand, what do you mean by "RBEM? You know what a model is and what is it for. Eh, I see on the first link that there has been some development in terminology. I am not in contact at all with TVP or TZM forums or authorities. So my take on this is pretty basic: RBE is an idea. A RBEM as you say is a model. It's not for living in, it's a specific manifestation of the idea through science into a model, the purpose of which is testing, debugging, troubleshooting. Not living in. So we can not judge that a model is better or worse than an idea, they're not the same category, they're a subset (model) and a set (idea). The thing that transforms an idea into a model and beyond is science. (or other selective process such as mother nature)An example of the idea of RBE is a project which will go through the stage of a model, and specifically called TVP. A project is something that goes purposefully and scientifically through all the stages / sets. As I said that's pretty basic. I've got no idea what do other people mean by RBEM. Do you think I should read it all through and catch up on what do they mean by RBEM? Isn't it better to keep things simple? As for your other question, I must warn you, I digress somewhat from the official Fresco's terminology, but for important reasons. When he speaks of "RBE", he means a future society with scientifically designed environment that makes life easier and happier - which results in what Stef wants to accomplish with peaceful parenting (which obviously can't extend beyond his family, so he has to keep his girl out of state school etc). Well, think of it as a peaceful environment. You can read a story from that environment in his free e-book Looking Forward. However, I go a little deeper and I say that every integrated economic system that I know of that does not use money, market and price system is a RBE, albeit not necessarily scientifically designed. As for the second link, it doesn't say much, but I agree with PJ, RBE is a natural phenomenon. I'd call it a natural law of integrated systems. Your body is a RBE. When you burn your finger, the centralized computer of the brain registers it as pain and sends a muscle order to pull the hand back. Your body is an integrated system. It works and it works to minimize suffering.Let's say there is a forest behind your back yard. In that forest, when a fox catches a hare, the hare feels pain, but the fox doesn't feel the hare's pain and happily eats it. The natural competition in ecosystem is not a very integrated system, loosely connected at best, population explosions, extinctions and so on. It works, but it does not work to minimize suffering.Let's say there's a market in front of your front yard. People compete there, basically trying to get the better deal than other people. Let's say you have a shop there and someone has more savings, can afford to lower prices for a time, he undercuts you puts you out of business and you he gets to buy your goods at cheaper price, leaving you free to go to the forest to get some hare. The market is also not an integrated system. It works, but it does not work to minimize suffering. An integrated system that minimizes suffering means there are no built-in antagonistic actors in the system, such as buyers and sellers, peasants and kings, or hares and foxes. I see that this doesn't follow the official terminology whatever it is, but I aspire to be clear and simple enough so that I don't need it. One can always dream...

My favorite kind of freedom is having food, housing, healthcare and information provided permanently and unconditionally, in modest but sufficient amounts. This kind of freedom is known to make people impervious to "employment" and other forms of indentured servitude. Any other definitions of freedom, such as the "freedom to wander around and get hungry or freeze over night" or the "freedom to get material possessions as long as we are willing to part with wasted-hours-certificates (a.k.a. money)" are highly suspect of Libertarian propaganda. That being said, I don't envy Americans. The American situation is not so different from British colonial occupation, only this time they are occupied by GS bank, Federal reserve private bank, the military-industrial complex, the Wall Street financial lobby and their 30 % richest white men representation (a.k.a. The Congress). Soldiers are returning from Iraq, some more conscientious ones safely disabled by PTSD, some hardened by battle and prepared to encounter any home resistance with extreme prejudice. And yes, there is one more difference, the central government probably has half the domestic support that the British had. These are some rumors that go around my Europe-based Facebook page. This is the impression I get from the OP, this is what I think the OP hints at.

The talk was about a computer model if that's what you mean. Fresco on his ranch has a plenty of plastic models of everything, including cities. Also blueprints. Fresco was much of the time busy designing the social and technical side of future global society. One has to think of school curricula, linguistics, city organization and such, so that the society is not prone to stupidity and opinion. It's not all just technology or models. I think the 100k are for the professional screenplay writer working on it right now. They hired some famous dude in retirement or something. However, as major motion pictures go, that will probably take tenths of million at least and some sponsor. Having a screenplay is the first thing when begging sponsors for money. Also, a simulation is basically a game. You know how much game development costs today? It's one of major industries. But nevermind me, my relationship with money is...difficult. I can admire pretty much anyone who is not bankrupt doing what they love, considering how little I can support them.

RBE can not have a model, because it is just an abstract concept. We see specific examples of RBE everywhere around in nature and in society. The Venus Project is a specific example of RBE that should be able to be tested and simulated digitally. Once the team develops a realistic city model, it can hook it up to other virtual cities like that, even simulate Corcen, the computer with global information on resources and so on. I suppose then it will be an example of a resource-based economic model. Then people will basically play Sim City - probably sending all kinds of trouble and catastrophes at the model, to see how it behaves under conditions like too much people, energy surge, energy blackouts, etc - how fast other cities respond, how soon can supplies arrive or be sent, stuff like that. Then they'll turn it over to the internetz as a MMORPG. Probably a Second Life mod In any case, TVP is not anarcho-primitivism, if anything, it's anarcho-scientifism, only science is no ism.

Yeah, these accounts sound bad - they sound very human. Peter Joseph sounds almost like a capitalist, doesn't he? Well, I'm not in contact with TZM or anyone. I just understand the organism-like economy of TVP and I think it's important that other people understand it as well. TVP seems very common sense to me, but our current system and all cultural values go against common sense, and so TVP is extremely difficult to understand right. I don't think it's a sect, i think it's a new school of thought - an "intellectual sect", so it's academically and socially legitimate Well, not less legitimate than Keynesianism or monetarism or any other school of thought. I am glad that science and economy thus become matters of public discussion, they ought to, compared to the crap we face in media all the time! All schools of thought until today were either intellectually bankrupt or corrupt to preserve the current system at all costs. Fresco experienced the 1929 crisis on his own skin and the WW2 as well - and so far we've done nothing, absolutely nothing to solve the root causes of these disasters. I am seriously concerned that the war may be a method of "venting the steam" or destroying the surplus economic prosperity that get produced due to automation, which however can not be sold, because people don't have money, because machines don't return money back into the economy. So war is a way to burn the wheat or sugar as they used to do in 19th century and it's a way for young men to find employment. USA has been since WW2 almost constantly in war, only Clinton era was perhaps a brief respite, but he was taken down quickly. If that is how the current economy works, then we're still eyeballs-deep in shit, we are still one foot in war all the time. I mean, you, Americans. I'm from Europe and we've got the same problems here, only we don't invade other countries. Not militarily, only economically. So I think the objections of TVP to the current system are extremely serious and can not be easily dismissed. Every time a businessinvests into automation and does not create as many jobs, he breaks the system, he takes away purchasing power from people who are supposed to buy the product, so he is less likely to sell it. Yet he has to do it, or someone else will and lose in market competition. Job creation rate stagnates, unemployment goes up, production goes up as well. No matter what we do, there will be masses of people with little or no access to money and they will bring down the system, even if the business somehow figures out how to sell the products, which I doubt. It is very important that you understand that RBE is not a magical cornucopia, nor a competitive system. It is determined by what resources, science and energy we have, only arranged and used differently than in capitalism or market. With resources and energy accessible to an average citizen, the RBE we can have is simply a family household. So there is no such thing as "your RBE" or "my RBE", it must include all four sectors of economy, so it's best done at the very least on national scale, better on multi-national, continental or global. You don't need to stop me, the fact that I am not a continental industry stops me by itself. I won't stop you from building your own small scale home RBE (family household) either. If you want to look at how a RBE might look today at a municipality scale, read B.F. Skinner's Walden Two. If you want to know how could it have been like at the end of 19th century, read Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. If you'd like to see the future RBE, aimed at elimination of human labor, read Kenneth S. Keyes' Looking Forward. This article, debunking TVP has some flaws. I'll try to explain. The first serious one I've noticed is the fallacy that TVP equals or depends on any particular technology or piece of science. This is not so. It's simply a method of using any resources, technologies, etc, directly and scientifically to solve problems. Again, it's important. Another bad attempt at debunking is Jevon's paradox. Yes, more efficient technology increases consumption. But why is that so? Is it in the conditions of capitalism, of scarcity, competition, poverty ever looming around? Economy, where people have little security, little freedom and no goal in life, except accumulate more and more money, so that perhaps one day they might buy some of these? No wonder then that consumption increases any time. If Jevon's paradox says anything, it says that capitalism and consumerism can waste any newly gained capacity. TVP does not waste. Anything produced in TVP is built to last, to be updated, shared and eventually recycled. The all-recyclable world is merely a storage of resources, something that capitalism claims to have in economic growth, but which was never actually true. Resources used without a specific purpose are not growth, they are waste. Arranging the economy around human preference is a bad idea. Preference is not a purpose, it's opinion. And you know what they say about opinions. Opinions are like assholes, we all have them and they are all full of shit. You should be afraid of opinions, they abuse people who hold them and everyone around. What are the needs? The author says TVP does not use Maslow's pyramid, but a current standard of living. That is a flat out untruth. TVP uses the Capability approach. As for the energy sources, we can use any, but only under TVP we can transit to renewables without being slowed down by vested interests of energy business or by lack of monetary capital. Fresco for example describes geothermal energy from the sea vents. Of course all mass-produced dwellings would come out of factory covered in photovoltaic panels. TVP means the end of waste of resources in form of consumerism, war, and eventually heat loss from badly isolated buildings... However, TVP can not and will not suggest any specific solution - this is not what TVP is about, Fresco is not here to do the scientists' job, anything he says has to be verified by scientists. The point is, there is no evidence capitalism can do any better energy-wise, on the contrary, capitalism is the cause of Jevon's paradox and global waste. Rare earth elements or other scarce materials would be distributed according to a statistical survey of where can they make the most impact, according to a statistical study, empirical knowledge... Imagine if all interested parties could at most pay exactly the same amount of money - or had no money at all. How do you then decide? Statistical survey... I find this kind of hypocrisy unbelievable, market does not care for people who have no money, they are dependent on charity. A good system would not need any charity! Who has less money, has to bite the bullet and shut up. As for things like healthcare, the method I remember from Walden Two, they just train more doctors and give them shorter hours, so they're not overworked. Also, the doctors are more motivated to invent preventive measures and preventive social programs, so their workload goes down. In the current system, if workload goes down, people get fired or get less money. TVP is literally the most ambitious socio-industrial project on the planet, it is society 2.0, economy 2.0, industry 2.0. Which means a self-taught engineer can not pull it off by himself and two people can not raise money on it. Public relations and propagation counts more than anything else. Public awareness - Matrix-like notoriety is a must. Fresco and Roxanne are convinced that they need a major motion picture and professional propagation materials, online game, web magazine and so on - and so they have a team to work on these and other projects. I think the major expense is now - besides the digitalization of Fresco's blueprints, is the screenplay for the major film, prepared by a professional screenplay writer. I think they even considered Roland Emmerich as a director for the film itself, if a sponsor shows up. This is of course all a preparation. The actual testing city will be more similar to a NASA facility for Earth, or a part of Silicon Valley. Nothing more, nothing less. If you think tens or hundreds of thousand dollars play any role here... In country, where almost half of budget goes on war and only a small fraction to NASA... Please be serious. Fresco has relatively little to do with technology, it goes forward too fast for him to keep the models up with current materials. His main contribution is things like life style and environment design, education methods, school curricula... however, someone brought up in the style of TVP would not have a good life today. People today are unsane, all the ideologies and conventions make them behave in a way that a strictly rational person could not fit in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiYOL7cg8i8

I have no idea what is anarcho-primitivism or why is that exclusive or contradictory. Seems to me you just want to disagree with TVP no matter what. TVP is much more sophisticated than you say - it's simply that state of the art technologies are used, doesn't matter which ones. If anyone has a problem, all he needs is to present empirical evidence for it. There is no necessity to make gigantic geoengineering projects, any technical solution with a given power output will do. There is no commercial interest or interest groups to force our hand into a particular solution. The problem is not technology, the problem is people misusing technology for profit. Money are universal wild card that can get people anything they want, so they just grab natural resources, slap a brand on them, throw them on the market and get some sweet sweet profit, not caring what happens with the resources or nature. It also seems to me, that you idealize nature. Natural processes are slow and probabilistic. Animals do not lead happy and stress-free lives in the wild, they usually lead short, difficult lives, in the end eaten by something, usually alive. Nature equals suffering. Fresco basically proposes to turn Earth into one big wild park, save for very compact and carefully limited network of relatively small cities, connected by quiet maglev trains. He even speaks of carefully displacing the top soil before building a city. He speaks of rebuilding coral reefs. TVP and TZM and RBE are the best thing that can happen to nature. Nobody in TVP would cut down a tree to make newspaper or blow up a mountain because there's gold or diamonds underneath. Technology is the friend of nature. No, no person will be forced out - we talk, we use our head, we negotiate, we find reasons of why and what. There are no good people or bad people, as Fresco says himself. Nobody ever does anything for no reason - and if yes, they don't do it very determinedly, and if yes, they're usually low functioning autist and can be negotiated with by experts on autism who are usually high functioning autists. The point is, the cities are not going to be much good anyway, if people move out to a different cities and most of the goods and services will be gone and capitalism will go even sooner, due to technological unemployment, credit crunch and whatnot. But a rooftop gardener would be very valued in TVP, someone who would voluntarily look after gardens or hydroponics or do a personal research, can be a gardener for a whole city, along with other volunteers. As for birds... Do you know how many birds lives in a city? Pigeons, owls, kestrels, crows, whatnot... Not counting the birds in nature... In RBE we don't build underwater wires. Fresco speaks about reconstructing coral reefs and building facilities for marine biology research... He says each research branch should have a trouble-shooting task force, in case of marine biologists these will probably be folks who push whales off the beach or mercilessly brutally slaughter crown of thorns starfish and the recent voracious lionfish infestation. (good riddance) If you think we are short on rare earth elements and silicon for solar panels... Just think how much resources we had, if we did not produce a new edition of Play Station, XBox, Wii, GameCube, iPhone, Mac, a few hundred cell phone brands and whatnot every year, none of which can be updated and none of which is easy to recycle as a resource. This is in direct violation of TVP design rules. You're proverbially crying on a wrong grave, man.

If TVP proves its usefulness as a better allocation mechanism (yes, peer-review, no doubt!), private ownership of resources will lose meaning. We do not actually use resources directly, today they are just market fetishes to move money around. The software to keep track of resources is being developed by about five companies, including Google, so I heard. TVP team keeps track of the progress and works on many other projects, mainly about educating the public. The software or technology itself is NOT a problem, it is well-within our technical possibilities. Public awareness and understanding is the problem. The basis of the algorithm is very simple indeed and it's known as supply and demand. Only it's a direct digital demand and specific material supply. From what I see, the allocation structure is pretty flat, it's a decentralized network of cities. But there is subsidiarity - things are allocated at the lowest possible level or nearest place (energy-wise) on which they are in demand. Let's take an example. Let's say the city has a network of automated restaurants serving free food 24 hours a day. To make that possible, we must make a statistical survey of how much and which resource can a given area produce and build there a city with accordingly fixed population capacity. Then we must make a survey of people's eating habits and schedule. Not everyone will eat at once, TVP is not capitalism and people do not have to work or have a 9-to-5 work day and use the facilities all at once. So we can downsize the facilities somewhat, save for safety margins.All the automated restaurants are connected to a computer, which keeps track of local (and global) resources. The moment (or before) some restaurants start to run low on supplies, the computer will order more supplies from production lines, can even speed them up (or slow them down) within limits. This will happen automatically in real time and may even include some fancy future projection algorithms and daily, monthly, yearly and weekly statistics on resource consumption to predict seasonal fluctuations of demand... Of course, the input resources will mainly originate from what is grown/produced in the area or will be enriched by food enthusiasts of all kinds - the new non-profit businessmen.Any aspect of the system must be constantly open to people's initiative and experimentation, in the spirit of Walden Two. NASA is known to be basically a protected workplace for slightly autistic and because of that brilliant and creative people. NASA registers every year about 1600 new technologies or inventions, many of which became necessary articles of our daily life - or their offshoots. It is impossible to track the exact NASA inventions and their profit precisely, inventions get adapted for commercial use. But one thing is clear, NASA is paying for itself many times over, even though we can hardly track it and even though they do one of the most useless jobs on Earth (joke intended). How is that possible? Because science deals with reality and extends our possibilities. Most of people's preferences do not deal with reality and are not helpful. No matter how indirectly, the scientists of NASA still deal with problems building housing structures, providing food, water and healthcare and long distance communication. These are essential on any planet. But we need to develop them for this planet specifically in form of mass-produced integrated solutions, yet easy to modify and recycle. So you're right, they're not working efficiently. But they're using physical science and that counts for much more than any free market enterprise system can muster. Market system does not change the rules of game with new technologies. It may actually slow down technological progress.

I have no direct experience with reincarnation, but my mom used to do regression therapy for years. The most peculiar thing about it... People may make up stories about their deaths - nobody really does that, but in principle, they can. What they can't make up is the sensations and the emotions associated with it. A seemingly simple phobia or other problem may lead in relaxed regression into a waking nightmare of past life traumatic experience and grown men and women were crying and sobbing for hours in my mom's office. In extreme cases up to 10 hours. Her office was at home, so I heard. I went through regression therapy myself a few times, but it didn't work on me much. I never felt much. The stories I saw took a long time to appear and were not really vivid. Also, after one hour there was nothing to do.

I think any potential sponsor or government representative can go personally and meet Fresco and Roxanne in Florida to see the plans or take along some engineer to tell these plans are real. There was just no big sponsor yet. Fresco had a bad experience with Technocracy, he joined them, but they did not show any plans to him except of irrigation network plans, and they had some racist issues, that was back in 80's, so he left them. So I am pretty sure he will gladly show the plans to someone who is serious and competent. But he will not publish them in a way that the current capitalist industry might patent them and use for its benefit. We, the non-engineer public are expected to see the movie that TVP prepares and then demand from our government to send representatives to inquire about RBE and its real status. Then a testing city will be built, which will provide all the empirical evidence we need to see if it's more beneficial to transit to TVP. RBE is NOT secret. It is a principle we use everywhere where is not a market with price and money. This is how families, internal company economies and army economies are organized. This is how our bodies work, how NASA builds the space stations and how Amazon or Barnes & Noble replenishes their market stock. We use computer databases (or our memories) to keep track of things and allocate them directly. There is no market system and ownership barrier inside a single factory, or it would not work. One production line does not negotiate a price of semi-products with another production line. That would be silly. TVP is simply a 501C3 nonprofit organization, that did lots of preliminary research into the global industrial RBE design, including social behavioral design (designing the places according to our needs). If we want to save 75 years worth of man-hours of research and experiments, we need to invest the money into TVP, but they will go to thousands of independent, hired engineers and other professionals (most of them already signed up). Fresco will be soon dead and Roxanne is not an engineer. TVP is like an attempt at NASA. NASA researches the best ways to live in the orbit, Moon, or Mars. TVP wants to research test the best ways of living on Earth. But eventually we can use every single piece of technology we have, TVP can use Mitsubishi automation, Google computer networks and software, IBM processors, Detroit city for raw material... (sorry, dark humor) I mean, nothing will go waste, TVP is not different or separate from what we already do to get things done, build housing, grow food, provide education, prevent disease and so on, it's just a more scientific, organized minimum-hassle way to go at it. In the current system, these basic needs are more of a byproduct and extra-systemic solutions.

So you still think I'm some American guy? The pen-stealing former president Václav Klaus and the alcoholic current president Miloš Zeman rings no bells to you? (and the alcoholic minister of finance, calling citizen activists dickheads) OK, today I there is a scheduled march around some major vistas in the Prague center, do you want any photographs? And what is this Trollville, is it some kind of account status punishment?

What? I guess I should check out this STer guy, he seemed reasonable to me, yet his posts were hidden because of some negative reputation thing... And a bit TLDR, truth be told. I mean, I'm not him. He's from America. I'm from Czech Republic. Koukni, šřžíéášěéťď, tohle na tvojí klávesnici nenajdeš, co? Jestli mi nevěříš, tak jdi do prdele, vole. Tady máš moji adresu a nechtěj mě nasrat. Co bys ještě chtěl za důkazy? Měl bych se vyfotit na Karlově mostě? Vždyť jsem Čech jako poleno. No možná ze Slezska, to je jedno. Kolik lidí jste si takhle spletli s tím chlapem? Možná byl každý z těch účtů někdo jiný, to nemůžeš vědět. Clear enough? Consider me not STer for now, later you can find some Czech guy and he'll confirm you the grammar and idioms. Now, would you please give me a briefing on who is STer and why is he so similar? Yes, I'm sincere in my efforts. And, STer is self-proclaimed INTJ. I am an INTP, borderline INFP. (which means a basically honest and nice guy, haven't had a single sock puppet account in my life and haven't ever killed anyone in a MMORPG)

This may disappoint you a little, but Fresco worked many years as an engineer and what technical solutions he prepared, are not magical solutions that make lots of stuff out of nothing. He designed a concept of global economy, that will provide us the benefits of mass-produced jigsaw infrastructure, instead of the present mess of slowly rusting sprawl. He had to design everything, so that it fits into everything else. Some of his more exciting inventions include self-erecting buildings based on thermal memory alloys, which erect the building when heated. Another disappointment, Fresco had a very bad experiences with the patent industry and decided to make all designs a secret property of his nonprofit organization. You can see a lot of them when you book a tour around the Venus, Florida center, but nothing that could be patented. Fresco's design is simple, because it's a concept, a blank basic design meant for further upgrading. It's also white, because it's for the tropical climate of Florida. It may have some ingenious solutions that nobody ever did before, but most of the designs will be technically outdated - there were many new materials, so today we can build TVP even better. Fortunately, TVP designs are very easy to update, that's what they are meant for. If you want some technical details how does Fresco actually accomplish things, you must buy the TVP DVD collection, it contains old Fresco's talks from the 80's, I heard the technical stuff is there. Although he will probably also talk about the social technology - how he worked and cured alcoholics or how did the save the problem youth of slums from criminal life and made them honest working citizens. I mean, Fresco is not as funny and likable as Stef, but he could fix people and he did earn my deepest respect. So if you want some technology to blow your mind, go to the http://www.thevenusproject.com/ website and click on the Technology tab. You'll see the TVP concepts, but there's a choice The Current State of Technology and this is what we can really do today. Nobody can say Fresco proposes anything unrealistic. TVP is basically not about any particular technology, we already have that. What we don't have, is using that technology in a synergistic way, so that trains load themselves and fit into freighters and people don't have to mow their lawns and lay bricks on their houses and fuel their cars and spend 8-10 days at work. I must quote B. F. Skinner's Walden Two: "We industrialized the housewifery!" (sorry I mostly missed the whole social know-how / semantic magic / philosophical phramework, which is actually a true form of TVP, but this is not what the question was about)

Well, there were many more of shattering, terrible and beautiful experiences in my life. This was just bit of steering. If a car changes direction, it may be the right direction, but it doesn't change the car. Maybe this was the direction I was searching all along, so there was not much to change, only a lot of information to learn. I mean, Peter Joseph may have some personality similarity, he's a very intuitive man just like me, his style of seeing the world probably matches mine, so there's nothing to disagree about. (that's what drives me away, see further) The second movie Zeitgeist Addendum, I agreed and resonated with it so strongly, that I could only watch it by pieces, having pauses once in a while. Very few things strike my heart with such an emotion. Both parts of the film, the banking stuff and the TVP stuff. I don't avoid things, I understand and move on. The things I understand, they drive me away. Away to connect them to other areas, teach them, discuss them, even manifest them if possible. I am seeing double, everything I understand, I see the thing itself and I see what might be or what should be. I am a fundamentally restless misfit, professional fence sitter and running train jumper. I never follow, I always bring in the missing element, even if I fundamentally agree, so it looks like I disagree. I agree, but supplying what is missing is more important than agreement (and I don't think I can help it, it sort of happens). Agreement is boring. (and usually means it's the time to get some workin' done. Screw that. Discussion and learning is my work.) Well, I'm just a young, old, outworn soul, under a personal dictatorship of a voracious and militant brain, who I have to feed constantly, or neither of us is happy. We travel the world together, looking to play the biggest game in town, which seems to be for now a large-scale social engineering of the future. Really, nothing else is satisfyingly ethically meaningful for me and challenging enough for Colonel Brain. Well, maybe parenting would be, we'll see about that some day.

In my experience, when people tell me I'm not getting it, I'm getting it from so many points of view simultaneously, that they don't recognize it. Do you still mean solving our own inner problems as the key to fixing the world? I thought I answered you. Peter Joseph taught me two important things: - Economy is not boring. It's exciting, terrifying and much more simple than it sounds by all the financial stock market mumbo jumbo. - He pointed me towards The Venus Project, the beginning of another journey.

I listened to many, many podcasts with Stef. Do you say there are other podcasts where people are allowed to disagree with him and they are not instantly marginalized as someone who went through childhood abuse and doesn't want to admit it? Oh, I hope so! Because all the guys here seem to think so. (by the way, I am now officially scheduled on the 12th December show, I mistook the date for January) You can not know how I work on myself. I do, in a great, systematic, many year-spanning effort. I learn so much these days and I find things on my own. I meditate for hours and contemplate. I integrate all good advice, including Stef's. But that's my business. You can not possibly find out how much work I've done on myself, even I am not quite sure. However, part of this learning is learning about you and other people on this forum and how to communicate with you. Please keep calm and carry on with feeding me more information. So what do you think basically is, we are damaged people. As long as we are damaged and dysfunctional, we should not trust ourselves with any kind of social engineering. We should do what, try to fix ourselves while fighting unemployment, trying to make ends meet, watching the world institutions collapse, empires causing wars? I would say a service to the world, even in groups, is the most powerful instrument of personal development available today. Yes, we should do our best to win our deep inner game against ourselves, but we gain power to do it by outside action - and our inner victories give us in return a strength for this action. There is a striking similarity between the world inside and the world outside. And we will not win by focusing only on the inside, because the world outside creates dysfunctional people every day in all areas of poverty. Poverty is the war without gunpowder, it is economic violence. I am good at systems, all kinds of them. I am also educated to understand systems. No matter of my deep inner game, I can do a good job with systems of all kind. Systems aren't people after all. And I know a good or bad system when I see it. Don't tell me some kind of personality dysfunction can affect this, because the greatest thinkers and philosophers were in social aspects very dysfunctional people. (founding fathers of America, founders of Sociology, etc.) If the society is sick, then I can be dysfunctional, a bit hurt, yet at the core fundamentally healthy and sane, and that entitles me to social engineering. If you want something new, you don't want someone who's good at fitting in today, you want someone fitting in the future. I will tell you a secret. Most people are not individuals. They are bodies with meat computers in their head and these meat computers all run viruses and nothing else. There are great social epidemies of memetic viruses and people divide themselves according to which meme are they infected with. They are friendly or hostile, depending on what memetic viruses do you carry. They will defend the integrity of their meme and behave as a mindless group. The only difference is in labels. The labels always vary, but the behavior is always the same, tribalistic. Tribalist groups can kill, even if their label says "thou shalt not kill" or "pro-life". So we are not really dealing with individuals. You can recognize a true individual very easily. It is someone who installed a firewall, at some point in his life. Once he can critically think and filter the incoming information, he is usually cast out of his tribe... But he can still have a lot of crap in his head - and a lot of pain in heart. Such an individual then painfully revises everything he ever believed about reality - or only as much as he has to. There is sort of a fellowship of criticism between such people. We can help each other straighten out the bullshit we keep having. Behind our firewalls we can finally conquer our inner world and become true individuals. It is as much an act of personal revolution as Marx envisioned with the class revolution. It is a birth of sentience. But you can never know how much crap someone still has in his head. And you can not tell what happens when someone clear this crap out sufficiently. Then something happens that we are reminded of by Nietzsche's philosophy, something not yet well-described by modern psychology, perhaps except Jungianism. Such individuals are out there as well. On the more civilian note, do you have any more information about Peter Joseph? What self-hatred? I am not his follower, or anyone's. His materials changed the direction of my life, but it was a one-time steering, I'm not attached to him or what he did ever since. I'd say he's a Stef-grade thinker, far from stupid, far from perfect, and what is most important, he takes action and has production skills. As for taking action, what the hell does that mean? I am surrounded by people who do not habitually take in information. They ingest more beer than information and have a great social life. I am bored out of my mind when hanging out with them. Realization or not, the progressive ideas make me feel alive. But how do we communicate with people who use their mind just for work assigned by someone else? How do we bring up deep topics, when they just want to have fun and drink? Even masters degree students, mind you.

I don't know what do you mean by falsification. By definition, all social phenomena are statistical. There always are exceptions, or there's something wrong with the survey. Can you imagine a statistical causal link? Structural violence matters, because it impacts people. Impacted people are more likely to go and coerce other people. Coerced people are more likely to initiate violence. But you see only the manifested violence and it is a tip of the iceberg and does not directly reflect the real roots. The statistical causal link starts at the deep end, of social and economical insecurity, lack of surely, unconditionally provided food, housing, education, healthcare. If there are conditions about these basic needs, then there is some degree of coercion. Institutions that provide food, housing, education and healthcare are operated by people and by mutual coercion of people to receive these needs in return for some form of servitude. This is not an argument, this is a description, an observation of what society does. This is not a judgement if that's right or wrong. This is only a different way to say "people provide goods and services in return for money and they use money to buy goods and services". I merely describe what happens with their feelings and relationships during that process. You confirm it by the way you choose on which of your preferences do you spend money. The very fact you have to choose because of limited money causes you stress, that's why you try to maximalize your benefit - otherwise you'd choose randomly. Most people here tend to idealize that process. Why? Because it is an economic model that does not include these feelings. Economists do not consider it necessary to write into economic textbooks how do people feel about this or that market process. So readers imagine that in reality the feelings are not there, or at least in the future reality of free market. Of course, that's nonsense. But proponents of various economic theories seem to neglect the emotional impact of economic processes on people, as if the economic theory would be competent to study the society. OTOH, to sociologists this kind of observation comes naturally.

You want to help me, but so do many others - and in exactly the same way. I see we've got some strong stereotypes here. For example, everyone's thinking that TVP is a centrally directed system and thus everyone who likes TVP, likes to have things and people under control. And that's because of what parents did in early childhood, not because of anything else. This is something we can hardly deny, nobody has a perfect life and thus explanations that explain everything, explain nothing. Firstly, TVP is not a centralistic system. The only thing that is central in there is a design guidelines (so pipelines fit into each other and computer language standards are used) and central display of global resources index, so that they're available to anyone. Standardization is there only to promote freedom. If we each used our own personal language instead of English, we'd be trapped by it, that's hardly a freedom. Secondly, each person is different. For example, I am a veteran of the inner battlefield, of introspection and mindfulness practices. Trying this kind of well-meant but simplistic psychologism on me is like asking Buddha if he ever tried meditation. Thirdly, I have one strong vice and that is an intellectual pride. I have an intellect, I am proud of it and because of that, I hold it to the highest standard. Intellect is a gentleman's game like golf, you keep your own score and it is up to your pride as a gentleman to keep the score straight. I have this pride as well and I know if someone else proves me wrong or doesn't. You could defeat my intellectual pride very easily, if you told me something new. You didn't, so what my intellectual pride does, is getting greatly offended, by how you underestimate TVP, me, or my ability to find any traps or whatever that might lead to totalitarian regimes and so on. Now that I think of it, it's kind of annoying and unnecessary to get offended by well-meaning people like you, who do their best and can't really know how I keep my score. Of course we can set a system, where everything is free and where present reasons for unhappiness do not apply. Of course we can design an environment, where being good will be the most obvious and most comfortable course of action. Nobody has to force people to be good, if people are so eager to react blindly en masse to something as small as a change of price of one article in supermarket, then being good in a good environment and good social know-how will be easy indeed. We have the knowledge, resources, technology and a moral duty to use them. And I desire to control others? I wish people controlled themselves. And I know what environment and education should be prepared, so that becomes a reality quickly and naturally. Yes, even Stef contributed to this knowledge. Don't think that Stef knows everything or that he is the only one who deals with this topic, or that Jacque Fresco says something different. Jacque Fresco just progressed from this stage, "what is the moral thing to do?" into the stage "what are the instruments to that the moral thing becomes a universal standard and not a laborious process of lone, isolated Libertarian parents scattered around the world?" People like Fresco can do this step in a flash. From ends to means, from present means to their roots. Stefan is taking hell of a time. See the duality of means and ends. Ecology is the end, the final arbiter and the thing that keeps us alive. But the means to affect ecology the most, are not in ecology itself. We will not fix the world by letting it slowly grow over with moss. We will fix the world by technological application and by using social science in design of the environment and offering a preferable life style on top of our technological abilities and resources. The greatest polluters are the greatest industries, hence the importance of economy and technology for ecology. Sociology is a great eye-opener. Ecology tells you nothing about the human society. Sociology tells you about the impact of technology and science on society, about impact of pretty much anything on society. People here consider just very few things and their effect on society or individuals. They need to stop to see the society as a black box that only responds to childhood abuse and war trauma.

If coercion includes only state or criminal violence and not structural (such as economic) violence, then the definition of coercion is incomplete and thus partially wrong. You don't want to have a wrong definition. Why would you want to have a definition that includes violence only from some institutions and not others? One reason can I think of is, that you might be attached to the institution. Why would anyone want to be attached to capitalism and market? I can hardly imagine why. Perhaps because all other imaginable alternatives are much worse. However, I can see working resource-based economies, I don't feel attachment to capitalism, I see an alternative. So I don't feel the need to protect it by making incomplete definitions of coercion. I don't need to sweeten up the market. It's sweeter than government regulations, I can see that much, but it's best replaced ASAP.