if humans were really an intelligent species...

GoTheSwannies

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Thread starter #26
That is kind of what I was getting at earlier when I said people need to be empowered emotionally. Humans are very hard to satisfy long term and I believe a psychological paradigm shift is needed. I'm sure most people if given a choice between lifetime satisfaction and a small salary versus lifetime angst and a large salary would choose the former. I just don't know if taxation and redistribution is the way to go about it.
a paradigm shift is absolutely necessary. the human mind (randall animals) are adaptable to the environment. we've been programmed to accept our current situation as normal, but there's so much wrong with it. its just that as a collective there's not enough of a resistance. it's just easier to accept the status quo.

it just feels like the gears of the machine have moved so far in one direction that we can't go.back. but there's a way. but considering our current situation we'll only act when its too late. and even then the capitalists Willbe jumping into the fiery lakes with their bags of money
 

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Hot Pocket

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#27
In theory yes from all the resources. But does that money trickle all the way down? (There is a thread on the S,R & P board about it). Ergo a lot of Australians are struggling to make ends meat, have to deal with the inflated costs of a boom which doesn't benefit them and are then lectured how great they have it.
Of course it doesn't. We have a high standard of living, but if you go back to the 60's or 70's the scenario was a lot better for a lot more people (we had few, if any, billionaires during that time too).

Better social safety net
Free higher education
Only one parent had to work
An average wage could get you two cars, a house and a holiday house
Could raise a family of 5+ kids on a normal wage
Working hours were much less, people could spend more time with the important people in their life and not at work

The working class is all but dead in Australia (though I take great pride in the fact our tradies are the highest paid in the world, and our minimum wage is the highest - two of the primary reasons for our low unemployment figures). The middle class is being attacked right now.
 

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#28
One thing we could improve that would benefit Australia.

Consumer information on food and other goods tends to focus on ingredients and where the product was made.

I'd like to see a percentage index, that shows what portion of each dollar that company earns actually stays in Australia. And an additional index displaying environmental impact.

Most humans are great at knowing what is right and wrong when they have the information. So getting information out to people in an easy way should be a priority (Of course Abbott is trying to do the exact opposite of this at present though).
 

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#30
It's the consumers fault, they are creating the demand. People are always looking for someone else to blame, if you really care that much stop buying things you don't need.
Correct. But there is an environmental problem where both parents tend to work and people are raised by advertising. There's a reason companies spend so much on ads, they work really really well.
 

Caesar

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#31
Of course it doesn't. We have a high standard of living, but if you go back to the 60's or 70's the scenario was a lot better for a lot more people (we had few, if any, billionaires during that time too).

Better social safety net
Free higher education
Only one parent had to work
An average wage could get you two cars, a house and a holiday house
Could raise a family of 5+ kids on a normal wage
Working hours were much less, people could spend more time with the important people in their life and not at work
Well of course it was. In 1960 the population was 10 million and there was no manufacturing industry to speak of in most Asian countries. Stuff had to be built locally and with a tiny isolated population, the working class were in high demand and could name their terms. Housing was cheap because cities were small and there was plenty of land.

People are struggling these days because of an entitlement mentality that doesn't mesh with the reality of a globalised economy. Everyone complains about being wage slaves paying astronomical mortgages on expensive property, yet we have the biggest homes on the planet. Everybody wants the 1960s lifestyle in a 21st century world.
 

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#32
Well of course it was. In 1960 the population was 10 million and there was no manufacturing industry to speak of in most Asian countries. Stuff had to be built locally and with a tiny isolated population, the working class were in high demand and could name their terms. Housing was cheap because cities were small and there was plenty of land.

People are struggling these days because of an entitlement mentality. We have the biggest homes in the world, yet we complain about property prices. Everybody wants the 1960s lifestyle in a 21st century world.
Ok but why do we allow our industry to be undercut by the third world?

There are better ways to go about it. We should have tried to build the third world up, with the same living standards, democracy etc. that we had. Instead we allowed big business to exploit the third world, entrench corrupt politicians/parties who brutalised the third world (we actively assisted in this), and sell the same goods we used to make back to us at a discount, while robbing us of countless jobs in the process. It has given a fake "cost" to most goods, because they're made using slave labour.

I'm not entitled to anything outside of basic human rights, I don't need much. Food, shelter, family, friends, planet. Everything else is secondary, acquiring useless shit is not a good goal to have when you consider the moral cost our species pays for it.
 

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#36
You can't run the planet as a command economy.
Its a much better alternative than racing to the bottom on evnironmental, economic, moral and health standards. Corporatism is nihilism for the vast bulk of human beings.

I feel government has already gone too far down the road of compliance to multinationals.

It will just end up in another violent revolution, with even more deaths than last time. This is the way of greed.
 

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ep2018

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#37
Mobile network technologies are humanities greatest invention IMO. I agree with the camera part, but your argument with smart phones in general is flawed.

And I'm assuming inventing medicine is much more difficult than it is to invent smartphone technologies, so theres that, too.
 

Caesar

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#39
Its a much better alternative than racing to the bottom on evnironmental, economic, moral and health standards.
I don't mean you shouldn't. I mean you physically can't. We live in a globalised world. There will always be somewhere out there with cheap labour, and people out there who will take advantage of it. Protectionist economies that try to create artificial conditions can't compete with that.

As I said, water finds its own level.
 

Hot Pocket

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#40
I don't mean you shouldn't. I mean you physically can't. We live in a globalised world. There will always be somewhere out there with cheap labour, and people out there who will take advantage of it. Protectionist economies that try to create artificial conditions can't compete with that.

As I said, water finds its own level.
Anything is possible with political will. Anything. I'm an optimist and a humanist for sure.

I don't want to compete with that, I want to reject it and do something differently altogether even if it means we have less "stuff". Humans don't need to compete, we're a community.
 

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#42
we'd be investing our resources into technology too improve health instead of putting better cameras in smartphones. we'd be putting money into.curing diseases instead of just masking their symptoms. we'd be focused on making products that last instead of polluting the earth by creating things that constantly need to be replaced.

humanity is inherently flawed in that respect, everything about our society is driven by the dollar instead of actually benefiting society. we need to turn the corner sooner rather than later but i don't know what the answer is.

btw, touch screens on smartphones, is that not a technological oxymoron?
I believe that there are countless apps for smartphones to help improve/monitor your health.

We're getting there, however don't expect everything to happen in your own lifetime, that would be unreasonable.
 

shurg123

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#45
Big screen plasma TVs can't really be used as the go-to trope for the evils of capitalism any more, considering how cheap they are these days.
 

GoTheSwannies

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Thread starter #46
Big screen plasma TVs can't really be used as the go-to trope for the evils of capitalism any more, considering how cheap they are these days.
I have two questions for you. Why are they so cheap to produce? and what are the consequences of cheap plasma tvs?

They're cheap because slave labour is utilised to produce the materials/components. Cheap tvs = disposable tvs which means that we need to find places to dump the waste products.
 

GoTheSwannies

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Thread starter #47
I was just using smart phones and health as examples to illustrate my point, but they could be substituted for any number of things.

If we were working as a collective to better humanity, our pursuits would be different. It's the equivalent of having a super power but only using it for selfish pursuits.

Take pharmaceutical companies for instance. Pharmaceutical companies make their money off the misery of the world, if there were no sick people in the world pharmaceutical companies would go broke.

There are people out there with terminal illnesses hanging in there praying for a breakthrough to come.

Now, if a pharmaceutical company discovered the cure for cancer tomorrow, they would probably burn it. Pharmaceutical companies are in the business of prolonging people's lives and masking their symptoms rather than curing diseases altogether, because the moment you cure a disease you lose your ability to make money off it.
 

nicky

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#50
Most major innovations (Penicillin is a good example) in medicine have come via public funding.

More public funding for science and research, higher salaries. Nobody grows up wanting to be an investment banker because its morally rewarding or feels good. Its money.
Very true.... Also alot innovation in technology comes via public funding (mainly in america but still). However when there's a break through it's immediately privatised which means that the public wear the risk and the private sector take all the profits. :(

Off topic a little but you might like this article that someone on this board posted a couple of months ago from a british magazine (the strike) ...

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/nat...nsense-jobs-20130831-2sy3j.html#ixzz2dovjazQj
 
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