Tranquil Claw

Secretly grinning over here because I know an explanation that no one from the debate section would believe. This adds more evidence to Michael Newton's discovery ya know!

Personally I see Scootertrix the Abridged to be the best because of it's clever animating, humor, story plot, characters, and a whole running dialogue between Celestia and Luna that drives humor through the roof. Rainbow Dash is now known as "The Bird" and has some very unique social traits that you'll spot straight away. Fluttershy is... weird. Twilight is a control freak who gets frustrated easily. Pinkie can break the fourth and Rarity has a very limited vocabulary as well as the overwhelming desire to "sell a dress". Applejack is pretty much the same except less trusting. All in all it makes for some very interesting moments between the characters. There are some masterfully placed plot twists and sublime foreshadowing put in all over the place. Scootertrix the Abridged truly is a must see.

Another thing I can add is that teachers are underpaid most of the time, driving away many of the good ones who go off to better jobs. Teachers are the core of any society, they are the ones who's opinions matter the most because they affect the next generation's knowledge considerably. I personally had a teacher that was the definition of free speech. She used to be the one in class who always didn't care and became popular at the expense of her education. She was the best teacher I've ever had just because she taught everything expressively and believed in student led education. One problem stemming from the world's education system is that students are taught to believe in whatever the speaker tells them to, eventually growing into a habbit of listening without question to all authorities. This destroy's the populace's ability to make their own educated opinions later in life. This is why I support student led classes as they are just as effective most of the time and also teach social interaction and cooperation with peers to achieve common goals. You can learn more about this by looking up the Independent Project.

Then again what makes a society good is also the people that live in it.

Here are my questions regarding the topic of creating a society in this world that is better than the system it replaces. Can this be done? If so then how would you do it? Are there any flaws with how you would do it? If so then are there answers that solve these flaws without creating more flaws in the process? If not then can you change your core idea to exclude or alter that flaw so that it has minimal impact on the society? If your design passes these tests, how would you make it happen? My goal with this thread is to bring out the ideas of potentially brilliant people to fulfill the goal of finding fixes to world problems and hopefully inspiring real world innovation. Now before any of this even happens, we need to know what this theoretical society attempts to improve or solve in the real world. This can be anything from world hunger to preventing the next dictator from rising up and terrorizing the populace. The specific criteria I want to fulfill in this case are the following: Create an equal start for all citizens guaranteeing basic needs without stressing the economy beyond operational capacity. Eliminate or neutralize corruption in both companies and government. Encourage the implementation of scientific breakthroughs to the country's infrastructure. Eliminate suppression of individuals and their ideas or discoveries should they potentially improve the world. Guarantee basic rights unless in conflict with the rights of others. Support preservation of the world and all its inhabitants. Be capable of changing to fit circumstance while remaining intact and beneficial to all mentioned criteria. This is the criteria for the theoretical society I hope to find. Try thinking outside the box. This is theoretical and anything can work with enough time and improvement. To start off I've been tossing around the idea of needs supplying needs. In return for giving the government what it needs to function,the government gives the people what they need, in this case food, water, and shelter. Going into further details, the government is able to impose a labor tax on the people for a certain time period like once a week or every three days and is then required to supply basic utilities like running water, electricity, food, and shelter to those people. This time period is flexible and depends on the minimum quality of living as determined by the people. Should any individual question the government's timeframe, the government must then show/communicate the process used to provide for that individual using their work. A key principle In this system is that both government and individual remain in communication, which stresses the need for a localized government that doesn't appear too high up for an individual to contact. This goes on to my next idea, which is that government is tiered yet equal, which is my form of checks and balances. As government exercises power over a larger population, that power becomes limited. On top of this system lies a variation of Capitalism designed to appeal to what an individual wants and how they can get it. Once the community is cared for and given an equal start, the focus becomes on relieving pressure on the average individual. The less things that are enforced the better. Material desire will be the motive for doing more than is required. Caring for your local community will only give and maintain a living. Anything added on to this living will be up to the individual. This is the most dangerous portion because things like greed come into play. In getting a job the individual must first find the group involved with it such as the environmental, industrial, scientific, or miscellaneous groups. These groups are given a total fund (I have not yet determined how it is set) which will be redistributable as needed to members of that group. These groups will have direct power over the politics in the local government but can only use consensus to enforce such power. Say if the governor was purely an industrialist minded person, the environmental group could throw a hissy fit and either shorten his term or put forth agreed upon limitations to it. If this was a decision by vote, the environmentalists would get no say if their group was smaller. Coming to consensus in difficult situations can also drag in other views that otherwise would never have appeared, resulting in more solutions available. The governor on the other hand, would have control over major projects and regulations regarding the usage of government power and supply. State wide government will deal more with things that do not relate to the people than the city/community/town government.

Human nature is very fickle in that we are both self centered and cooperative. In other words either nature and liberty take hold and people make some world changing mistakes or cooperation becomes encouraged and evolved letting us fix, deter, and improve on individual decisions so that they have less or no consequences. Right now we have a sort of balance between the two, which leads me to believe that the world could lean either way slightly or not at all. As long as this balance is in place, no major things will change for either good or bad, but as soon as either of these two traits become the larger major events start happening. Of course, one couldn't use this argument effectively because there are so many other influencing factors and details to take into account concerning human nature. It truly is nearly impossible to tell what the future holds, so instead we take both extremes and try to find a median of the two. Extremes representing possible good changes vs possible bad changes.

Here is more or less a rundown of the situation in warp drives. If power becomes a problem you might want to look at what people have been doing recently with magnets and magnetic fields. Plenty of not well known impossibilities going on in the world.

4. A way to see the afterlife. (check) 5. A cheap source of power that harnesses the earth's magnetic field and generates free electricity. (check) 6. Having at least tested a "humanitopia". (dang that means I'll have to stop procrastinating) 7. Made contact with an alien species publicly. (NASA your attempts at concealment are pathetic) 8. Lack of suppression from government. (that stands for everyone, not just communism) 9. Less crappy presidents in the USA or at least a new type of government. 10. Better education methods adopted world wide. (more support for dedicated student led classes) Feel free to add on to the wishlist.

When I look at this I can really tell who's been watching excessive amounts of news compared to who hasn't. Anyways my view of the future is that humanity will continually better itself over the course of time, only the methods seem to change. No matter how many challenges come by, eventually we overcome them. That is a trend that has happened and will continue to happen. With that in mind, it isn't a question of whether or not we will be here, it's rather a question of how well we will have used our time here. People are thinking too much about extremes as those are things that stand out the most to us when we refer back to history in order to find clues, not to mention the fact that modern news programs are inclined to think about extremely bad things as they stand out more than the collective good that happens every day in huge amounts. This is an example of our current fear-based society in which events are singled out and judged by the collective audience. A fear-based society only progresses by learning from mistakes, and in order to learn from them you have to focus on them. So life starts to seem worse as time goes by, whether or not it actually is. A curiosity-based society, on the other hand, is harmonious in nature. The best example of this is the ancient city state of Athens. Their religion was in complete support of the pursuit of knowledge, unifying the people in cause as much as belief. It could be considered the median between socialism and capitalism ideals in that the local community as a whole, strove to be better than the competition. When Rome adopted part of this, they went straight to a Golden age, and when Italy copied it, they entered a Renaissance. The point I'm trying to make here is that we are going to advance no matter what, it's just how we advance that matters most.

I suppose it's just a factor of lost meaning over time. Something I notice very often, is that things get taken for granted as they age, thus making them seem as if they need something new to make them worth keeping around. That explains why human nature is so good at innovation. Anyways, what it represents is the exact same thing as what it means to humans. When what it means to us changes, what it represents changes. I can agree that my use of "fear" is a bit extreme, but when I said that, I was referring to the occasion where one loses something or is taught to think of using something as dangerous to themselves. I think you kind of dodged my original question by redefining money's purpose. What I was asking for was, are the added innovations to money like banks and credit a benefit or a deficit to it's original use.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the dollar never existed and a different system of exchange was adopted? Could you imagine the average dollar or credit being replaced by something else entirely? Do you think that the age old system used to this day is still the best possible system one could have come up with? To answer questions like these I like to return to the foundation our currency is built on, representation. More specifically, a representation of what you are in possession of. After a while money started branching off and taking on new meanings like promises to fund this to get back more of that. Banks sprung up and so did debt. Money had evolved from something useful to something potentially dangerous. Cautions had to be taken to warn others of this danger and fear finds yet another material thing to inhabit. Money turned from a use to a trade off over the course of time. Representation was the initial goal of money, what it represents though, is what matters. Say money instead directly represented the accomplishments of an individual. How would it change and for good or bad? Say money instead directly represented the respect an individual received. How would it change and for good or bad? These are just some examples that I can think of off the top of my head. What do you think?

I will be giving thanks to three days off school for this Thanksgiving. Other than that I don't have any plans.