Let's talk about this tension between making money and doing good.
First, let me point out and acknowledge that you totally can "let go" and rely on "the Universe" or higher power or whatever you want to call it, God will take care of you. He says so in the Bible and several other places.
I actually did this. I dropped out of high school and took a "leap of faith" to quit my job and move to Seattle w/o any kind of plan. (It was the Book of the Subgenius at the time.) Within days I was homeless, and remained so for about four or five years, but not like other homeless people. I was on a journey, and I was taken care of the whole time.
Now some of that care took the form of e.g. Christian (and other) charity, but a lot of it was a kind of strange luck. But I don't want to get into metaphysics (here, now, too much), which is kind of my point:
The deep spiritual answer is to "Let go and let God". However, this doesn't automatically lead to homelessness!
<... More here, this is kind of a leap>
We don't need to solve metaphysics- start a new religion -we just want to change some of the parameters of the system so it's less unpleasant. We've noticed that most of the unpleasantness is not physically intrinsic, and we want to do something constructive with that knowledge, eh?
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In a sense, our current economic system incorporates projections of personal trauma and hang-ups.
THe process of healing ourselves as individuals is also the process of healing society and the economy -- into ways that no longer require drudgery and control-freak-ism.
What would that look like?
Imagine a homestead, there's a house with passive solar design, etc., a garden (Grow Biointensive, 5000ft² per person), etc., even small-scale integrated alcohol fuel production. The idea is that the money outputs are minimized thanks to good design and ecological integration. (Property taxes et. al. would be the major expense(s).)
Imagine that the homeowner had investments such that the "passive income" met the expenditures (and kept up with future increases, and so on) such that there's no need to work to make money. (There would be some labor overhead to maintain the homestead, but I'm counting that as part of life: exercise is healthy, etc.)
As an aside, we postulate an economic system that:
This last point deserves elaboration, eh? In any event, it was brought up by someone on Mastodon:
Passive investments in these situations are either a huge amount of money sunk into the stock market, or landlording.→ https://kolektiva.social/@donkeyherder/110732503438622544
And:
Kolektiva is an anti-colonial anarchist collective...
I appreciate the prod to elucidate this point.
First, as I mention below, it seems to me that a system that requires a monetary maintenance fee (e.g. property taxes, the one totally unavoidable expenditure, eh?) also has a responsibility to provide the opportunity to own some kind of "passive income". Otherwise there is a systemic barrier to a non-work lifestyle.
Which brings me to the next point: I'm not saying that you should avoid all work, nor am I trying to cast aspersions on the fundamental dignity of work. I'm taking aim at the "bullshit jobs", at the economic system that seems to want to suck up our time and attention. I don't have to belabor the point that work can and should be fulfilling, an expression of service and worth.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_jobsThis should also be understood in context: I believe we are in a transition period right now, and the Stock Market probably won't vanish overnight (I hope things don't get so bad, eh?) so it's sort of a fight-fire-with-fire situation? Just like burning fossil fuel in the generator to power the well to get water is a necessary evil to reach the point where we don't need it anymore, so having passive investments might be a way to make the system pay for it's own tax, etc.
The objection was that money would be "sunk into the stock market", but we can imagine investing in enterprises that are making things better rather than worse, e.g. Kiva facilitates micro-loans to small farmers all over the world. There are lots of businesses and people who are trying to make a living doing things that are worth supporting, eh?
→ https://www.kiva.org/In the limit, we're talking about a world where machines can do pretty much all the work anyway, so the problem isn't really to make money (because you can't, because the machines can do anything you can do, and better than you can do it), the problem is to construct an economic regime that doesn't result in riots and starvation.
I'm attempting to bridge the gap from the current status quo to the post-AI, post-scarcity Star Trek-style future.
Anyway, we have an ecological "unit" of living, the exact granularity from individual to family to neighborhood is less important than the economic equilibrium, if you will, between the expenditures and income, such that labor for the sake of "earning a living" is minimized to effectively zero.
In this context we can expect that a certain percentage of people will become potatoes. I don't doubt it, but I find this area of discussion uninteresting. Couch potatoes are mostly harmless.
I hope and expect that people will put more time and attention into things like:
In terms of Maslow's Hierarchy, if we supply the lower levels for everyone then (hopefully) they will turn their attention to the higher levels, eh?
Now let's postulate that some of the folks living in the economic equilibrium condition decide to work to make some extra money. They invest that money into land and stocks (or whatever), and set up another homestead with the physical and economic apparatus, and then sell, rent, or give it away.
And of course, you would look for customers/neighbors who want to do the same, so that the system as a whole has exponential growth.
Make it a freakin' franchise!?
So that's the basic idea: create these "units" of ecologically harmonious and economically stable lifestyle (like soliton waves in the matter/energy/money flows?) That's first order.
Create a system (factory) that creates these "units" and replicate that. (Second order.)
Create a system (factory factory) that creates these replicator systems that create new units of eco/eco living. (Third order.)
Last but not least, come up with ways to accelerate all of the above! (Fourth order and beyond!)
This is something one desires for oneself, and indeed it would seem odd, even hypocritical, to promote this without living it, eh? We are also trying to answer the question, "How do I make a buck?" eh? On the same token, if this is a viable thing to do (and I see no reason to doubt it) then it's its own answer: Make money by eliminating the need to make money. It sounds like a paradox, maybe, but it's just logically self-referential.
For one thing, a lot of the above sounds like it could be covered by a vertically-integrated real estate development corporation. There's going to be a lot of domain knowledge of construction industry and regulations, as well as ecological design, etc. and financial, uh, stuff.
It's much easier for a large RE construction corp to build a whole neighborhood than for an individual to build a single house, especially if we're talking about non-standard methods and materials like aircrete, strawbale, adobe, or rammed-earth bricks, etc.
I keep thinking about Greenwave and starting some sort of marine variation of the above idea. (yeah yeah "Waterworld" lol) It's not really such a nutty idea? Maybe as a seed system that then comes back on land when it's acculuated the resources to buy large properties and cope effectively with regulations and such.
Some sort of technological breakthrough that lets us proceed more-or-less business-as-usual without drastic changes to our systems. Some thing like fusion powered CO2 scrubbers or whatever,
This comes in a few flavors: New Age, Techno-Singularity, Rapture, Men from Planet X, etc.
This is simpler to define in the negative: no magic solution that maintains the status quo AND no magic revolution that transcends our human condition.
We are going to have to change some big things:
I think this is possible, and even fun if we set it up that way.
Combine the streams:
The thought occurs that this doesn't have to be one "monolithic" system, we can imagine lots of hoogenous systems that share the common goal/practice of ecological harmony.
This brings me back around to some sort of Sustainable/Regenerative "Whole Earth" Catalog (by way of thinking, so how would you help a broad coalition? Give them access to the things they need, including a market place to sell thing they make?)
How to do? Consider starting conditions (let's take $ as a proxy for total available resources):
(I included that last one because that's about how much moolah I have now.)
If you have $10⁸ you can probably just go ahead and do it. You've got resources enough to hire experts and construction companies, etc., deal with gov and regulations and code, etc.
If you have $10⁶ you can probably just barely build a single homestead system in the USA or other "first world" nation.
If you have $10⁴ or $10² then it gets interesting...
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Can we have infrastructure w/o emissions?
the real challenge in decarbonizing is in the developing world, where countries will rely on burning carbon as they try to ramp up building their infrastructurethe real challenge in decarbonizing is in the developing world, where countries will rely on burning carbon as they try to ramp up building their infrastructure→ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/25/magazine/vaclav-smil-interview.html