Corruption Goes Many Places

[Tom Snyder 4,111]

I know we have a currency in place since it first started, but look where its gotten us; in a crap load of trouble and made the whole world go crazy. It astounds me to the lengths the government has gone to make our lives miserable, violating the many rights we have as citizens and in the past letting racism get out of control, even to this day.

 

Currency means nothing to me, as its only a means to our downfall; greed has been for many a handicap. Us having to pay for something the earth gives us, the water doesn't need to be payed for to be cleaned; i can see this world without the money as a good thing. You'd be rid of the one main cause of corruption, the money they could easily make on their own; where do you think the bills come from? 

 

I've seen where they come from, and its not that hard to make; yet they charge us for our living. Houses we built; and try to take away our gifts. Now they want to make living off the grid illegal in some states, its not only childish; but its a violation.

Edited May 19, 2015 by Candy Star

[The Awesome One 1,314]

I will say one thing. What if there are certain people you want to keep a track of and they decide to live 'off the grid' in order to evade authorities? Plus, why would you even want to live off the grid? To avoid paying taxes and such for the country you live in? Currency exists because it gives us a method of paying one another for work.

[Tom Snyder 4,111]

I will say one thing. What if there are certain people you want to keep a track of and they decide to live 'off the grid' in order to evade authorities? Plus, why would you even want to live off the grid? To avoid paying taxes and such for the country you live in? Currency exists because it gives us a method of paying one another for work.

This is corruptive, its not productive. If someone goes off the grid let them, its not hurting anybody. I'd rather live in isolation than live with corrupt politicians. Go after the criminals, but they can leave us alone; taxes are just an excuse, nothing more. 

 

This bill passes and look out for the angry mob. People have built their own homes with their own hands; and they want to take that away and treat you like a number. News flash, it doesn't work like that; they need to respect our rights. But so far i've not seen one hint of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Currency exists because it gives us a method of paying one another for work.

Look how well that turned out for us; people robbing banks to get by.

Edited May 19, 2015 by Candy Star

[The Awesome One 1,314]

This is corruptive, its not productive. If someone goes off the grid let them, its not hurting anybody. I'd rather live in isolation than live with corrupt politicians. Go after the criminals, but they can leave us alone; taxes are just an excuse, nothing more.

 

This bill passes and look out for the angry mob. People have built their own homes with their own hands; and they want to take that away and treat you like a number. News flash, it doesn't work like that; they need to respect our rights. But so far i've not seen one hint of that.

 

 

 

 

Look how well that turned out for us; people robbing banks to get by.

Then they better work hard to improve their lives like my grandfather once did instead of robbing banks which is a horrible thing to do anyway.

 

Ignoring the corruption, you pay taxes and the government spends them on you so what is the problem there? Those highways don't maintain themselves.

[ShoesDontWearHorses 7]

Material is power, it's something you have absolute control over. Materials are your value to the people who do not know you. Call it money, baskets, fish, wine, a poem, a machine you designed, whatever. We need materials to survive, we eat materials.

Now, lets say we have a small village where no trade happens. We have no possessions. We pick fruit from an orchard. I want to eat? I go to the orchard, grab the apple, eat the apple, done. We can only take so many apples from the orchard per day, to distribute the food evenly among all.

Little 'ol Joe makes a knife that's great for cutting fruit. It will be great for grampa since his teeth are not what they used to be. But Joe is not an old air head, oh no sir, he knows winter is comming, and he knows the food will be scarce. He also knows gramps needs the knife to eat, so he makes a deal with gramps and his loved ones: he gives them the knife in exchange for 5 of their apples. It's not that he doesn't like gramps, but he doesn't want to starve.

And 'ol Joe could've used his knife making skills in any other way. The point is, once you introduce power into a system, entities will tend to crave it. Why? Because that's how evolution works. Power is what separates the existing from the non existing or deceased. And when we consider that even the simpler thoughts are small sparks of power it is very unlikely that human society will ever be void of the concept of power.

I bet you I can come up with a similar simplification of any phenomenon you may observe in society. Things happen for a reason. People want power, and power is relative, so no, we cannot all be powerful. That is an unreasonable way of looking at things because we are human. Is it sad? Maybe.

I often say making peace with the human condition is a part of growing up, even if the reality is as dark as "we cannot all be happy", and society gives us the clearest reflection of our beings. Anything else is just built uppon that, really.
It's much like learning to accept a friend despite their shortcomings or defects.

Your picture and your post are also a pretty good symbol of this. A happy looking pony next to words discussing misery. Maybe I'm getting a little carried away...

These are my visions on the subject. Sorry if this seems a bit too detached from what you were talking about, but be sure that I was aiming for the roots. Of course some lives can be improved by giving the "right" power to the "right" people, but I was mainly focussing on your statements about currency and (at least partial) anarchy. Hope it was coherent enough.

[I used to be a stranger 7,989]

Currency while flawed, so far has become the most well-greased system for exchanging things we find desirable or useful. Without an efficient method of trading goods for services, we wouldn't have medicine, roads, electricity or telephones. I am extremely sure you have an unsaid gratitude towards the facts that somebody out there is ensuring the street you live on is repaved every 15-30 years, and the water main that provides a connection between the regional aquifer and your kitchen NEVER has ebola in it. Those things are there in the end not because some bastard out there wanted money, but because he knew a thing or two about putting stuff together, and figured that if he did it really well, he could feed himself using that skill.

 

Fundamentally there is something in the human condition that inclines us towards greed. It doesn't matter if it manifests itself in the desire for material possessions (be they trinkets, systems of currency, security items, trophies or whatever); it's just naivete to think that it's not there. It's even more naiive to think that the removal of just a single aspect of society or the modern economic infrastructure will magically make everything better. If such lynchpins existed like they do in movies, the economy would grind to a halt every few months because some genius thought he was doing the world a favor.

 

Ultimately the way to fight this inclination towards greed is not decrying the system around you, but seeing the fact that everyone has the capacity to be just as depraved as anyone else, and to own up to the most easily accessible figure of the problem: the person in the mirror. "Be the change you want to see" is trite but true. You'll be hard pressed to find if I'm wrong.

[Tom Snyder 4,111]

I'll quote a man who speaks the truth: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - And the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it". George Orwell

 

Give this a read before you judge what i say: https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/about/resource-based-economy

 

This will be better for us than the corruptive power of currency. I would rather live free than pay for something that doesn't need to be payed for in the first place.

Edited May 20, 2015 by Candy Star

[Kivil 1,721]

Currency has always been the reason everything went to the dumps, especially during the Great Depression everywhere.

[ShoesDontWearHorses 7]

Give this a read before you judge what i say: https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/about/resource-based-economy

 

But again, the point is not money. Ok, lets look at another scenario:

 

Imagine a world like that. Every resource belongs to anyone. The first apparent problem is one of personal property. A computer chip is a resource right? If it isn't, then we are back at square one, only instead of money we're juggling around sticks and stones. You probably wouldn't want anyone to get in your house or use something that's yours without permition right? But lets say you don't mind. Lets say the concept of property isn't a thing. Resources are counted globaly, and there exists some kind of global repository of "unused" resources where anyone can order anything from

 

Lil 'ol Joe is a citizen of the same city as you, and lil 'ol joe wants to carry on with a project that will take about 10% of the global copper, leaving very little to the other cities and societies around the world. Now, the materials are also his, so he can do whatever he wants with them. But turns out the people of a nearby town got a hold of his plans and need the copper, and they do not agree with his attitude. Now a third city voices itself, saying that they had a similar plan, and that theirs was much better studied and useful project than the one from your town. Let's say some kind of diplomacy is employed, and you vote for the other city, since their blueprints seem much more solid. Sure, this is a problem solved, but the people from the town who was complaining about excessive use of resources wont shut up. And there is still lil 'ol Joe, and I bet you he might not be too happy with the situation. You took away something that was for everyone from lil 'ol Joe, and gave away something that was for everyone to the other town, but that doesn't sound right, does it?

 

There are so many little factors you can add to this. You can also stretch it to any scale you want. Again, it comes down to a tip on the balance of power. And no, the world doesn't have unlimited resources. And even if it had all kinds of unlimited resources (including space), there would still be a wish of power. Consider love, for instance. People kill and die for other people. People will always want other people.

 

Money is the same as any other resource. You know why it exists? Because there are a lot of resources now-a-days, and because people need a lot of diferent resources. Imagine what would life be like, if I had to keep a stockpile of sticks, ores and other raw materials to trade into pencils, computers and staplers. We "invented" the resource we call money to facilitate trade, and of all the resources, money is perhaps the more inocent of them all. Of course, since it is money that always masks the other resources we often project the problem into it.

 

Trading doesn't balance the power balance, but it makes it possible to control how much how much each side will dip or rise face certain situations.

Edited May 20, 2015 by ShoesDontWearHorses

[Tom Snyder 4,111]

But again, the point is not money. Ok, lets look at another scenario:

 

Imagine a world like that. Every resource belongs to anyone. The first apparent problem is one of personal property. A computer chip is a resource right? If it isn't, then we are back at square one, only instead of money we're juggling around sticks and stones. You probably wouldn't want anyone to get in your house or use something that's yours without permition right? But lets say you don't mind. Lets say the concept of property isn't a thing. Resources are counted globaly, and there exists some kind of global repository of "unused" resources where anyone can order anything from

 

Lil 'ol Joe is a citizen of the same city as you, and lil 'ol joe wants to carry on with a project that will take about 10% of the global copper, leaving very little to the other cities and societies around the world. Now, the materials are also his, so he can do whatever he wants with them. But turns out the people of a nearby town got a hold of his plans and need the copper, and they do not agree with his attitude. Now a third city voices itself, saying that they had a similar plan, and that theirs was much better studied and useful project than the one from your town. Let's say some kind of diplomacy is employed, and you vote for the other city, since their blueprints seem much more solid. Sure, this is a problem solved, but the people from the town who was complaining about excessive use of resources wont shut up. And there is still lil 'ol Joe, and I bet you he might not be too happy with the situation. You took away something that was for everyone from lil 'ol Joe, and gave away something that was for everyone to the other town, but that doesn't sound right, does it?

 

There are so many little factors you can add to this. You can also stretch it to any scale you want. Again, it comes down to a tip on the balance of power. And no, the world doesn't have unlimited resources. And even if it had all kinds of unlimited resources (including space), there would still be a wish of power. Consider love, for instance. People kill and die for other people. People will always want other people.

 

Money is the same as any other resource. You know why it exists? Because there are a lot of resources now-a-days, and because people need a lot of diferent resources. Imagine what would life be like, if I had to keep a stockpile of sticks, ores and other raw materials to trade into pencils, computers and staplers. We "invented" the resource we call money to facilitate trade, and of all the resources, money is perhaps the more inocent of them all. Of course, since it is money that always masks the other resources we often project the problem into it.

 

Trading doesn't balance the power balance, but it makes it possible to control how much how much each side will dip or rise face certain situations.

Power can lead to disaster, known fact, nothing good comes out of it.

[ShoesDontWearHorses 7]

Power can lead to disaster, known fact, nothing good comes out of it.

That's not the point. Again, it's a part of growing up, comming to peace with the fact that power will never go away for the reasons I've stated before. It's the human condition, and we all have to learn to live with it, even though it can be pretty hard to swallow. We all have to learn about death when the little goldfish drops to the bottom of the bowl, or when the hamster stops running in his wheel, this is the same thing, except it is not something learned that easily.

 

We cannot all be happy.

[Tom Snyder 4,111]

That's not the point. Again, it's a part of growing up, comming to peace with the fact that power will never go away for the reasons I've stated before. It's the human condition, and we all have to learn to live with it, even though it can be pretty hard to swallow. We all have to learn about death when the little goldfish drops to the bottom of the bowl, or when the hamster stops running in his wheel, this is the same thing, except it is not something learned that easily.

 

We cannot all be happy.

There are ways around power, its not the ultimate thing in the whole world and it means nothing. They only use power to abuse it, not protect us; pointless wars, middle and lower class suffering greatly while the rich live it up and laugh at us.

Edited May 20, 2015 by Candy Star

[ShoesDontWearHorses 7]

There are ways around power, its not the ultimate thing in the whole world and it means nothing.

Ok, well, if you think so. Maybe you're right.

 

But try this: play the evolution of a society in your head. I can assure you that if you do it conssidering the human condition you'll get to power forks in the road. Or maybe I'm wrong.

[Tom Snyder 4,111]

Ok, well, if you think so. Maybe you're right.

 

But try this: play the evolution of a society in your head. I can assure you that if you do it conssidering the human condition you'll get to power forks in the road. Or maybe I'm wrong.

You can get away from it by isolating yourself, its not that hard to do. Living off the grid is a better alternative, those that oppose it see it as a threat. Government doesn't want to lose its hold on the people, but for those who live that way, i applaud them. 

 

Give equally to everyone and you get the benefits, but oppress them and you'll get overthrown; pretty well known fact.

Edited May 20, 2015 by Candy Star

[JonasDarkmane 19,777]

Although I believe in Currency, I also do believe that if someone does not want to live under it should get the choice not to do so. But instead, they would have to live without the systems support :T. 

[Tom Snyder 4,111]

Although I believe in Currency, I also do believe that if someone does not want to live under it should get the choice not to do so. But instead, they would have to live without the systems support :T. 

Unless you can make your own and maintain it; then i'd say your good; it doesn't need to be massive.

[JonasDarkmane 19,777]

Unless you can make your own and maintain it; then i'd say your good; it doesn't need to be massive.

I guess not. But if someone would want that, they would be on their own, pretty much :T. They would be pretty much excluded from luxuries (not that people need them, but there is a reason they are called luxuries  ). 

[ShoesDontWearHorses 7]

I would just like to add to what mr. Jonas said:

 

There is also the question of specific passions and the need for resources to pursue them. And again, people actually are willing to go to great extents to follow their dreams. An activity can easilly become as important as eating to anyone. Don't YOU have a passion? Don't you have something you think you could not live with? And I do know our brain handles that by not tying us emotionaly to hopes of something we apparently can not achieve, but that does not solve much because small ambition will give birth to big ambition, and then cities are born once again.

What about the space? A lot of people in the same space would tend to create rules, and paired with the above you would see how it would be essentially the same thing.

It would be like starting society over... in the dark ages. Are you suggesting each "family" live by themselves? Then what when you children grow up and want to have children of their own? What about the people who live alone?

There are also children. Would it be fair to prive them from 90% or more of the world as it is by exiling them to no man's land?

Besides, what separates an isolated person from a dead one anyway? Why would you care if they are isolated? They sure can't hear your applause. They sure can't hear your words of encouragement.

 

This whole thing just sounds about 10 times worst than what we have now, to be honest. I'm not saying the world cannot be improved, I'm saying that this is not the right thing to look at or for, when doing it.

 

But yeah, mr. Jonas said it quite well, it becomes a question of resources you will not have available to you.

 

Is neglecting 90% of what's beautiful in the world and our means of reaching those things anywhere really a solution to anything?

[kanashimi purinsesu 244]

i can agree with a lot of this thread. one of my biggest problems with money is how you need so much but there are not many ways to ever have the right amount. unless you are rich or born lucky. like even when you make it you just have a majority of it stripped away and then you have to pay bills and the like. doesn't help that if the minimum wage were increased where i live it still wouldn't be enough to live a life worth a damn. just paycheck to paycheck almost as if you are recycling money just to throw it back at the bills. the govenment is not going to raise the minimum wage though. you are probably thinking "well go to college". pfft, then you are in student debt as well and how is sitting in a classroom costing so much fricken money?

 

i dont understand. good luck getting a job worth a crap when you graduate because then you'll be thrown right back to the wolves in this garbage economy. jobs now requiring college degrees before you are even considered for some menial task that you learn everything you need to on the job anyway. it makes no fricken sense. i probably got way off topic but still how can you expect somepony to not be upset when you cant even supply them with enough money to actually help the economy while paying your dumb ass taxes and stuff.

 

then theres the whole profit prison thing. prisons aren't even about helping rehabilitate anymore now, its just about punishing and adding names to the cycle list that keeps them going in and out without oppurtunities. gotta keep those cells full to keep that wallet full. thats a topic for another day though.

 

serious wall of text. i got upset and typed.

[Tom Snyder 4,111]

The banks are even trying to draw us to get a loan, so are the car dealers, knowing you can't pay it back. Even if you gain something you can't keep it, that's just the issue in society materialism has gotten out of control and will be the end of society. The people can only take so much before the snap and turn on you. Nobody gives a care what happens to you, only that they get their money from you.

Edited May 20, 2015 by Candy Star

[JonasDarkmane 19,777]

The banks are even trying to draw us to get a loan, so are the car dealers, knowing you can't pay it back. Even if you gain something you can't keep it, that's just the issue in society materialism has gotten out of control and will be the end of society. The people can only take so much before the snap and turn on you. Nobody gives a care what happens to you, only that they get their money from you.

This pretty much explains it all for you :T.