5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S

[swgprop]

A little humor. With a fair amount of thruthiness.

Picture your ideal future. OK, not your ideal future, where you're the last man on earth fighting the zombie horde, but society's ideal future: Energy is clean and limitless, goods are plentiful and machines take care of all the dirty work. So everybody's happy, right?


But in many ways, that future is already here, and it can be described in five letters:


FARTS.


I should probably explain.


Let's talk about porn and dead babies for a moment....

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817...d-by-b.s..html

[leegs]

Re: 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S

A little humor. With a fair amount of thruthiness.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817...d-by-b.s..html

That was good, well worth the time. Thanks

[flintlock]

Re: 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S

That was humor? I found it very serious!

Good read. I've been warning about the BS society for years. Sooooo many people are in that business that don't even know it.

[Sharky]

Re: 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S

Interesting article. Fart jokes aside, I didn't think it was funny, but it did raise an interesting idea for me:

There is an aspect of the "Star Trek economy" that some people today really internalize. Imagine the fictional scenario was true, with matter duplication and no need for money. Such a society would, in fact, quickly stagnate and then implode. If you could get a copy of anything for free, that means the value of those things drops to zero, along with the motivation to create new originals.

As I mentioned in another post, this is another example of wanting something for nothing; just push a button and get the intellectual efforts of others for free. "Post scarcity" is really just a euphemism for "stealing is OK." What does it cost to copy an electronic publication? It's not zero as the author claims. Someone had to invent, build and purchase the computers, the networks, the software, the electric power stations, etc, etc. The cost of all of those things has to be amortized into the cost of copying something -- not to mention the cost of the labor and equipment required to create the original item. Sure, there could be a cost model where an author sells just one copy of a book, but the cost would be hundreds or thousands of times what books cost today. There is a huge benefit to selling multiple copies that many people seem to miss: it means that those things cost much less than they would otherwise. In addition, the possibility of large profits encourages some people to take big risks. For example, an extremely expensive-to-make movie like Avatar would be impossible in a world where intellectual property had no value.

Having said that, I do believe that disintermediation is an important, large and growing phenomenon -- but that's much different than the "post scarcity" crap.