Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jacque Fresco has died

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 113 posts

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#71

Post by jokoon »

Once you realize politicians do an actual hard job running things by using deception, and when you realize money is just a tool we use to measure what goes where with accounting, then you realize we use money because even the best ideas don't work because humans are natural competitors. Money is not about corruption or running numbers, it's about counting sheeps in a complex human society. That's it. Currency is not bad in itself, it's just that the world is so large, and since it's not possible to organize such a large place, we use currency so that things self-regulate. People are already trying to not use money, and have more simple lives, but everyone realizes that we all are feet deep into our sweet comforts and we can't let it go.

It's great to have ideas, it's another to execute them. I felt a little more interested by what kind of city Fresco was proposing, and all the architectural details, than the leap of faith into less poverty and less war. By all means, if you have ideas to reduce poverty in any place in the world, and reduce conflict in Syria, I'm sure the UN and most western governments want to hear about what you want to say.

It's time to let the ideology go, and work on more fine-detailed, feasible objectives. Local politics or organizing a neighborhood seems much more realistic to me, than building new cities from scratch.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#72

Post by JackFr »

lawless123 wrote: post #59
JackFr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just "on average", people are materially better off today than at any other period in history, at all levels . The poorest people today are better off than the poorest people at any previous era.

The poorest today and the poorest in this era are often slaves and often starving. That hasn't changed. If you're referring to the poorest in your particular nation state, consider they're probably not the poorest in the world, which we're all using in some way.

No - I am explicitly considering the world. There are fewer people (as a percentage) starving and in bondage than in any prior era.

I don't think I have an overly rosy picture of the present. Rather I think your picture of the past is too romantic.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#73

Post by david927 »

erik14th wrote: post #54
rodolphoarruda wrote: post #3

I remember when I watched the Zeitgeist documentaries and had my first contact with this 'resource based" society. Weeks later I had dinner with a friend who was a director in a Spanish consulting firm specialized in the banking sector. I tried to impress him with what I had seen in the documentary. In the end, it was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.

As much as I like Fresco's vision, it sounds to me like saying: "hey, you know all that code we wrote for Society 1.0 in the last couple thousand years? let's throw all that out and write Society 2.0 from scratch" and he acknowledge that when he says the actual system would have to collapse for his ideas to take place. His spec is beautiful but without backwards compat and no smooth transition route, I can't see it h…

Ideas often don't neatly, slowly segue into other ideas. The Ptolemaic model didn't migrate a step at a time to the Newtonian model.

If progress has taught us anything is that we often spend too much time arguing at the leaf level when what is needed is to back a branch or two toward the trunk and make a change there.

Moving out of Monarchy and Feudalism to Democracy was a sea change that overthrew everything before it. We managed it and are much happier because of it. While I don't agree with Fresco's vision entirely, it's not because fundamental changes aren't feasible or even, possibly, necessary.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#74

Post by ElijahLynn »

Jacque will be missed. Fantastic communication, patience and ideas. I actually wrote Jacque in once as my vote for president as well as donated to the Venus Project.

This should be front page news, good to hear it at least is on HN and NYT.

He has said in the past he didn't think our current society would make it to his ideas in his lifetime and that it may take a 100 years or so. He knew he was playing the long game and was laying the ground work for society many years out. A true visionary unbound by the scars of modern civilization.

Jacque (and Roxanne) have deeply affected my life and direction. I will continue to strive towards the ideas brought forth by them.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#75

Post by dredmorbius »

kovek wrote: post #36
wawka13 wrote: post #34

The truly big loss for the whole world. RIP, Fresco. Also, if someone needs an essay or paper about him - fill free to visit it at https://handmadewritings.com

What does this handmadewritings website have to do with Jacque Fresco his Venus Project?

Hint: It doesn't, it's spam.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#76

Post by boona »

ue_ wrote: post #64
boona wrote: post #39

You mean someone who understands the complexities of the markets and the financial system wasn't convinced by Marxism with robots? I can't imagine why.

It's worth noting that Fresco wasn't a Marxist, and the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists. It's also worth noting that a Communist society as Marx envisioned it takes great advantage of automation anyway, but rather than being used to cut costs in the short term, it's used so that people have to work less on the whole, leaving more time for intellectual fulfillment. And please let's not pre…

> the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists

It has sure tried, but it can't, because it's Marxist at it's core, and it therefore shares it's same inherent problems. It can't calculate properly properly for one, and whether the heads of those systems are politicians or programmers, the failure points are the same.

> please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate

Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate. Soviet economists had a joke that went "We'll take over the entire world, but not New Zealand so we can know how much things cost". To that point, remember that when China was communistic, they had brought in thousands of Sears catalogs so they could allocate their resources correctly. These are things we take for granted today, but it's an attribute of economic freedom.

From an empirical perspective, Marxist economic systems have failed catastrophically in all of the 20th century. The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to starvation. Soviet Russia, China, and even North Korea had to allow at least pockets of free markets for people to survive.

So while I'm not saying that Marxists economists are economically illiterate, they have a lot to account for. And from what I've read from Mr. Fresco and the Venus Projects, including debates I've listen to, they don't seem to have an answer to these questions.

Edit: For more on the calculation problem you may want to look up "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by economist Friedrich Hayek. Incidentally, Jimmy Wales has stated that that paper was central to how the wikipedia project is managed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#77

Post by erikpukinskis »

jhbadger wrote: post #25

He always reminded me of fellow utopian Paolo Soleri (who died in 2013) -- even though their ideas were impractical (at least in the short term), we really need dreamers like them to make people question whether current society is really as good as we can hope for.

Paulo Soleri was indeed a gem. I visited Arcosanti years ago... A group of friends rented some rooms in the complex and took the tour. Interesting bunch of older artsy types in a typical intentional community: compelling, but seemingly dying.

Then we realized there was a whole other "city" of young people living in the "temporary" construction housing down the hill. These were young people eager to move the vision forward, but were generally stifled because Soleri himself (or his supporters who were older and "full citizens" of Arcosanti) didn't want to deviate from The Plan.

I think this is what kills most of these intentional communities... They create a class structure where the in group has privileges the out group doesn't, which leads to inevitable ideological calcification, which leads to inevitable decline.

The solution, in my mind, is to build on the idea that every person is a potential contributor, but for health issues, and that we live in a time of plenty.

This changes "no that won't work young one" and "no get out of here bad man" to "how can we marshal the resources to do that too?" and "let's get you some health care services".

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#78

Post by boona »

cryodesign wrote: post #58
boona wrote: post #40

I think society values good intention way too much. This man fought his entire life for what amounts to Marxism with robots. His intentions may have been good, his heart in the right place, but his ideas were bad, and if implemented, they would be disastrous. If we judge him by his intentions, he was a good man. If we judge him by what he wished upon the world, he was a horrible human being. Though we should keep goo…

Can you explain how his ideas would be disastrous?

I'm having that discussion elsewhere in the comments. Here is my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#79

Post by id122015 »

the fire consumes all the fuel that it receives.

Although his concepts look nice on paper I dont understand what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially. And then we are back to the same problem we have now.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#80

Post by worldsayshi »

rukittenme wrote: post #48
worldsayshi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't make money you can't build a better world?

Yes. Please rate the better world: World A (has food) or World B (does not have food). Money isn't magic. Its an abstraction. Remove it and possessions become currency. So if your better world does not make "money" (read: food, water, shelter, doctors, raw materials, etc.) then your "better" world will kill all of its inhabitants.

It's obvious that money is not a sufficient abstraction for resources and/or the usage of money eventually leads to world b. The "money system" is killing whatever resources it's supposed to represent.
Post reply on HN