Zeitgeist and Venus Project debunked!

[Armitage]

To anyone who knows the answers to the following

 

Can you please post some links to the actual technical solutions proposed by the Zeitgeist Movement RBE? I'm asking for technical details not general paragraph length descriptions. If you can't do that, i.e. provide links, it's likely you're just following an empty cult-like movement. Sorry if you're offended by the "cult-like" reference; didn't mean it as an actual cult but a movement that subsists on spreading false hope to it's followers kind of like the "hopey changey" Obama cult.

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 It may have some ingenious solutions that nobody ever did before, but most of the designs will be technically outdated - there were many new materials, so today we can build TVP even better.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)

[anarcho-science-dude]

Disappointment is an understatement. So basically TZM advocates for the Venus Project. I saw TVP website, many animation, few details. So you're saying Fresco had bad experiences with the patent industry and made his inventions secret? Not that I blame him for his bad experience with the state.

 

So what are we left with? TZM says we should have a RBE but the details of the RBE are a secret and therefore they can't be examined or peer reviewed. So we are expected to accept that the solution to the world's problems is a RBE on faith??

 

 

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.

[Armitage]

Disappointment is an understatement. So basically TZM advocates for the Venus Project. I saw TVP website, many animation, few details. So you're saying Fresco had bad experiences with the patent industry and made his inventions secret? Not that I blame him for his bad experience with the state.

 

So what are we left with? TZM says we should have a RBE but the details of the RBE are a secret and therefore they can't be examined or peer reviewed. So we are expected to accept that the solution to the world's problems is a RBE on faith??

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.

[Lowe D]

Why this specific species of monkey cares so much about property, and makes that a fundamental basis of survival, when the other animals have done very well so far without inventing money?

 

How have other animals "done very well"? 

 

Good question.  The lives of other animals are terrible.  They live in a state of perpetual starvation and danger from predators and disease, and are almost always ridden with parasites, like lice, ticks, fleas, flukes, and intestinal worms.

 

Being a modern human is to live in bliss, compared to being any other animal, anywhere.  This is because other animals lack the intelligence to turn nature to their advantage, consigning them to lives of misery.  They are hardly an example for anyone.

[anarcho-science-dude]

I understand but the basic principle of the RBE is, as I heard Fresco say in interviews, to declare the earth's resources as a commons and use computers to allocate them.  The algorithm to allocate them is critical to the RBE and must be presented for review and study otherwise the RBE, as they say in software development, is "vaporware".

 

If the algorithm is not presented for peer review and study then TZM followers are just following an illusion which might never work. You can't ask people to give up resources to some centralized system, i.e. the computerized sharing of resources, if the resources will be misused. That's not to say that some of the other things TZM advocates are not good ideas.

 

EDIT: You may be interested in this interview of Fresco on Singularity 1 on 1 http://www.singularityweblog.com/jacque-fresco-the-venus-project

 

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.

 

Some brilliant scientists may work at NASA but I think NASA as an organization is inefficient and wasteful and unaccountable to those who pay it's bills. And regarding Detroit city I understand what you're trying to imply but you may be very wrong about Detroit, There's a woman who's been blogging about Detroit and she says now that their government has basically collapsed, the people are free (or more free than before) to actually trade in a free market type situation and are beginning to prosper. Only read someof her blog so don't know everything she's saying. See detroitrusttoriches.http://detroitrusttoriches.blogspot.com

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.

Edited November 17, 2013 by anarcho-science-dude

[Armitage]

I understand but the basic principle of the RBE is, as I heard Fresco say in interviews, to declare the earth's resources as a commons and use computers to allocate them.  The algorithm to allocate them is critical to the RBE and must be presented for review and study otherwise the RBE, as they say in software development, is "vaporware". If the algorithm is not presented for peer review and study then TZM followers are just following an illusion which might never work. You can't ask people to give up resources to some centralized system, i.e. the computerized sharing of resources, if the resources will be misused. That's not to say that some of the other things TZM advocates are not good ideas. EDIT: You may be interested in this interview of Fresco on Singularity 1 on 1 http://www.singularityweblog.com/jacque-fresco-the-venus-project

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. 

Some brilliant scientists may work at NASA but I think NASA as an organization is inefficient and wasteful and unaccountable to those who pay it's bills. And regarding Detroit city I understand what you're trying to imply but you may be very wrong about Detroit, There's a woman who's been blogging about Detroit and she says now that their government has basically collapsed, the people are free (or more free than before) to actually trade in a free market type situation and are beginning to prosper. Only read someof her blog so don't know everything she's saying. See detroitrusttoriches.http://detroitrusttoriches.blogspot.com

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.