Ephemeralization

When one person can accomplish the work of fifty men, ideally the quality of life of all fifty-and-one persons increases. Buckminster Fuller echoed this sentiment and suggested that through innovation we would one day be beyond the need to have jobs and daily labors.

Capitalization on efforts, however, resumes unabated.

Capital-ism seems to not care so much about how much is accomplished, but looks for how much can be exchanged for concentration of resources.

While I enjoy Fuller's notion, wealth is already difficult enough to amass in a single locus, and I wonder how we can achieve both meaningful livelihood and ease of living without sacrificing one or the other.

Yes, everything approaches the push-button rapidity, but that is both things unhelpful and helpful. Exaggerative motions in human intent that slide towards infinity in either direction. Perhaps with the power of the collective come to be, we can protect ourselves from ourselves. Perhaps only our best selves will flourish.

With innovation and with invention, it stands to reason that the lives of the collective lot ought improve, yet we still find disparity and disparity growing [at that].

So what on earth to do, what on earth to do. When gains are concentrated in the few and the ease of the many appears to be squandered. What on earth to do, what on earth to do, when there's so much accomplished, and so much left to do.

"They seemingly can't run stuff like medicine manufacturing, heavy machinery engineering etc. "

Well, I now have a image of soviet russias state factories spitting out tank after tank ...

Governments can handle this. Also "government" can mean very different things, but I agree that on a general base, they are not able to handle a complex chain of supply. Or at least not as good as a distributed market of private entities.

A very common example of this is people suggesting to remove private profits from the modern economy. It seems like a really good way to cut down waste and save costs in theory, but it never worked in practice if you do it for the whole economy. It does work really well for some problems, but for many others those private profits seems to be a necessary evil for the system to work well.

What those people are missing is that private profits is a really good instrument for allocating resources and performing quality control efficiently in many sectors. Removing those means you now need to manage all those resource allocations and quality controls via other means, and so far we haven't found anything better for most business to business supply chains.

Governments often do well in the business to consumer space though, as in many cases cutting costs there means consumers gets worse service. But in the business to business step both sides wants to push costs to each other, so they negotiate on who should do what to make both earn money, or they will go and do business with someone else.

ITER? 2007? I heard about that in the mid 90s. I can still hear the voice of Prof. Miri [1] in my head: "toroidal,... poloidal,... explain it to me"

Had to look it up [0] and found that it started in the late 70s even!

Interesting aspect you are bringing up there, lots of truth in it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

[1] one of the nicest persons I met at the University https://iranglobal-info.translate.goog/node/57691?_x_tr_sl=a...

> A very common example of this is people suggesting to remove private profits from the modern economy. It seems like a really good way to cut down waste and save costs in theory, but it never worked in practice if you do it for the whole economy. It does work really well for some problems, but for many others those private profits seems to be a necessary evil for the system to work well.

> What those people are missing is that private profits is a really good instrument for allocating resources and performing quality control efficiently in many sectors.

Such a ‘whole economy’ system was being built by Allende’s socialist government in Chile in the form of project Cybersyn (with the help of a well known British cyberneticist). This was before the Chilean bourgeoisie, backed by US imperialist forces, coup-ed Chile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0

An exciting project called http://valueflo.ws is being developed by http://mikorizal.org and others that reminds me a lot of Cybersyn.