A big ah hah moment for me was realizing that money is a representation of inefficiency. So for example, if everyone had a means of growing their own food, generating their own electricity, taking care of their own health, and had unlimited access to information, we wouldn't need to buy things or pay for services. A Mr. Fusion and a replicator would be all we needed.
That’s probably the real reason they don’t use money on Star Trek. Not so much because they eliminated scarcity (which they obviously did, with numerous planets to choose from) but because giving everyone the basic means to sustain themselves was such a small fraction of the economy that it became dehumanizing to force people to work so much when society could provide for all within the percentage of a rounding error.
This concept’s relevance for coffee makers: what’s a coffee maker without coffee? Anyone can brew coffee by pouring hot water through a sock (as it’s done in much of the developing world) and I can say from experience that it’s both more convenient and can even make a better cup. So the key is the coffee, not the machine. It’s not really surprising that Keurig wants to cement itself as a middleman, and since coffee is everywhere, it was probably inevitable that they’d turn to a DRM solution.
Hydroponics, fabless photovoltaics and big data medicine are going to be what take us into the future, not some kitchen gismo. In fact, the more I witness “progress” in my lifetime, the more I see that the really revolutionary stuff like the internet is generally free and shared by all. Otherwise it just makes some guy rich. I want to be rich too, but I’ve spent half my life chasing a goal that wouldn’t even be necessary if I was off the grid and could just get left the heck alone.
> A big ah hah moment for me was realizing that money is a representation of inefficiency.
Ehhh. I guess that's basically true, but people would probably read the wrong idea into it if you phrase it this way.
An economist would rather phrase it as "a dollar spent on something is a vote for there to be one dollar more of something." But it can be flipped around to your line of thinking as "a dollar spent is a representation of one dollar's worth of dissatisfaction or unmet need that someone has." If everyone has exactly what they want, then market velocity goes to zero. Money doesn't cease to exist; it just ceases to be moved around. (Inflation is, partly, a disincentive for ever letting this happen.)
Either way, even in a post-scarce utopia, capitalism would still survive; it has useful emergent information-redistribution properties beyond its use in plain survival. For example, an "everyone gets a basic income and spends it in a market" system thoroughly beats a central-allocation system when it comes to figuring out what crops need to be grown, what factories need to be built, etc.
Money is just a tool humans use to represent value. It is up to us to decide what is valuable.
It's not about efficiency or inefficiency. You can't alone create everything. Food, water, power, maybe. But what about designing something great and complex?
You could argue people would do this for free, but that's not right. A designer isn't an emoting artist seeking to express some particular vision. A designer solves humanity's problems. There's usually lots of things we want to express, but we don't have time to express them all. The way we select the problem to solve is by evaluating the economic potential of it.
In other words, money makes people solve problems other people care about. It's the fitness function of technological evolution.
The internet is far from generally free and it is in danger of being shared by all (which of course this community is well aware of) by "fast lanes" and other detrimental laws motivated by middlemen who want money.
That’s probably the real reason they don’t use money on Star Trek. Not so much because they eliminated scarcity (which they obviously did, with numerous planets to choose from) but because giving everyone the basic means to sustain themselves was such a small fraction of the economy that it became dehumanizing to force people to work so much when society could provide for all within the percentage of a rounding error.
This concept’s relevance for coffee makers: what’s a coffee maker without coffee? Anyone can brew coffee by pouring hot water through a sock (as it’s done in much of the developing world) and I can say from experience that it’s both more convenient and can even make a better cup. So the key is the coffee, not the machine. It’s not really surprising that Keurig wants to cement itself as a middleman, and since coffee is everywhere, it was probably inevitable that they’d turn to a DRM solution.
Hydroponics, fabless photovoltaics and big data medicine are going to be what take us into the future, not some kitchen gismo. In fact, the more I witness “progress” in my lifetime, the more I see that the really revolutionary stuff like the internet is generally free and shared by all. Otherwise it just makes some guy rich. I want to be rich too, but I’ve spent half my life chasing a goal that wouldn’t even be necessary if I was off the grid and could just get left the heck alone.