utopian daydreams for an armageddon afternoon

by **sceneshifter** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 1:31 am

DE: I haven't followed this thread too closely. I like paragraphs and the colors give me a headache. SS: Sorry about that.. I wonder how many like the colours and how many don't? I put paragraphs in on wordpad and they get taken out in the transfer. I have added paragraphs more carefully this time. But why are short paragraphs important when books dont have them? DE: Also, quantity and quality are not really interchangeable. SS: Ouch. Quantity doesnt necessarily mean low quality. Communication is very hard, expecially on this topic. But the potential value of it is so ginormous, I would think YOU would give it a go. After all, that is why people are spending enormous amounts of time of this forum, to get results. This plan offers superginormous results. Worth checking out, surely. It is the root of all the problems mentioned on this board. DE: Having read a post or two of sceneshifter, they were too vague for my taste. SS: Too vague? I am trying to establish the value and truth of the idea, so people will spread the idea, so we will have a grassroots majority to empower the idea. If all the people who it will benefit enormously see the idea, we will have the idea implemented. So explaining the idea is essential. This is consensual. I have a proof that everyone already agrees with this plan. The plan has to be explained in outline and in detail. It is available in long form [500 pages] at www.globalhappiness.org [not an org] and various short forms [2 pages, 20 pages]. How much can I put in one post? Give it a chance, dont ask the impossible. DE: That said, one doesn't go around simply limiting income. There's all kinds of other issues here. For example, I'm perfectly happy to have a limited income if my needs can be met with that income and the needs of others can be as well. For example, I pay too much for health insurance, and mine is cheap compared to most. At 15 bucks an hour, I pay about 15 hours a month for insurance. SS: One goes around limiting income to an approximation to that earned, because that is justice and nontheft, and nontheft is what we have to have for nonviolence. Pay from $1 to $1 billion a fortnight is not just, is not nonviolent. And violence is escalative to extinction soon. We have to solve the problems at the root, because of shortness of time before extinction [99% chance of extinction within 50 years], and because it is much more efficient and easy to solve our millions of problems at the root. Like killing the tree by chopping instead of picking off leaves. We can solve nothing if we ignore the biggest, most glaring, most disturbing wrong. And this greatest cause of unhappiness is easy to solve because 100% of people will benefit enormously from solving it. Ie, the will to do it is unanimous, if people will think unfallaciously, rationally, dispassionately. And it works without compassion, which has failed. DE: I also pay to maintain a car as our mass transit here completely sucks. And I can't afford a cab! In general, the gap between highest and lowest paid workers in the US is obscene and getting more so. Here, you can absolutely wreck a company as CEO and get tens of millions in bonuses while the guy whose pension fund you just raided gets jack. If he lives here in Tennessee, in fact, he probably just had his Tenncare health insurance terminated or his medications limited to 5 per month. THIS is the American capitalist story. Especially these days...cough...FORD MOTOR COMPANY...cough cough....SUPERBOWL...cough....30,000. SS: 'in the US': the US is a conceptual category, not a real one. We chop up reality into these arbitrary and artificial bits as a first stage in trying to understand, but the next step is showing all the connections which make things unseparate. The economy is global. We have global communications, global finance, global transport, but no global thinking. Global is a trendy word but in practice it means only international. Global hourly payrate range is beyond obscene, it is unimaginably enormous. And more than obscene, it is theft. And theft produces violence. Because money is a joker good, good for millions of things, for most things, for almost all things, for all necessities. And violence is escalative. Because violence is vendetta back and forth. You don't want vague. The devil's in the details. Details are at www.globalhappiness.org [not an org]. But I don't know how much you have picked up so far. DE: Anyway, no time to post much today. I just can't ever pass up a chance to dig at Gates and the "secret software" crowd. SS: You sound wonderfully relaxed in such a hellish situation. You say: This is the American capitalist story. But the American dream of a land of the free was based on limited reward for limited contribution. Jefferson and Lincoln warned against the corporation, but were not heeded. Not unlimited reward for contribution by work that is necessarily limited, finite. First thing they did after signing Declaration was try to prevent overpay. This plan is the same in essence as the Marshall Plan, the Macarthur plan in Japan after surrender, Henry Ford high wages economics. Which all did a lot of good. All empires thrived on this plan/understanding/practice. All empires collapsed without it. It is very very simple in essence, though it ramifies through every facet of human life: Everyone knows that if a government imposed very wide hourly payrate range, that that would produce enormous violence and endless offshoot problems. THEREFORE EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THAT REDUCTION OF THE VERY WIDE HOURLY PAYRATE RANGE WILL KILL ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF VIOLENCE AND OFFSHOOT PROBLEMS like extinction, corruption, tyranny, slavery, unfreedom, torture, sadism, genocide, hiroshimas, etc, etc. We just have to show people that they already know it. To reach 3 billion adults may seem a big job, but it is done in just 32 times the time to show one person. [ 2 to the power 32 = 4 billion] Which, if a person had an awake sense of their danger, would only take a few days. And each person's share is only one 3 billionth of that task. Overpay is overpower. Overpower is tyranny and corruption. Tyranny means slavery, oppression, unfreedoms. Tyrannous slavery means war. War escalates. Extinction draws closer. We can't keep getting closer without hitting it. We already have 60 times enough bombs to plunge the world into 3 times an iceage. The enemies of survival and happiness are denial of the problems, not seeing the easy way by cutting the root, blind faith in the customary ways, despite the customary ways being so far from happiness. I don't know of any questions about this I dont have answers to. Good answers.

by **smithtalk** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 4:49 am

right at the beginning you ask, what cause most problems? wealth and poverty so why do two well fed domestic cats fight?

by **Floyd Smoots** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 1:31 pm

....They're CATS, and cats are crazy!!! I should know, I currently reside with Three, feed four or five ferals at work, and have lost 3 others from home in the last decade! Why catz do fight & battle??? Because They CAN!!!!!!!! <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol"> Cathead Floyd

by **blanc** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 1:40 pm

you left out criminal earnings from this discussion I think.

by **Floyd Smoots** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 2:24 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>you left out criminal earnings from this discussion I think.<hr></blockquote> I don't think any of my cats have any criminal earnings, at least none that they've offered to share with me! <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/happy.gif ALT=":D">

by **sceneshifter** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 10:31 pm

Bill Gates: At his peak, he has pulled US$10 million an hour, while the world average was US$10 an hour [paying housewives and students too]. That means he has given one hour of his life to the world, and got in return a million hours of others' lives. It means that he does one hours' work and is rewarded with a US$10 million house or factory. Is there anyone in the world who has the desire to give anyone a $10 million house in reward for an hours' work? Why are we doing it? There is something of the order of a million hours' work in such a house. Which is 400 years of 50 hour weeks. Is this madness harmless? As one person takes the produce of a million people, so 3000 such people would take the produce of 3 billion workers. That is, of all the world workers, including housewives and students. We don't have 3000 Bill Gates's. But 6000 people, taking between the average and a million times the average, will take as much as 3000 people, all taking a million times, will take. And we are very close to that. We are within 10% of that. We have 1% taking 90% of world earnings. With a fraction of that 1% taking the bulk. We basically have a very very few owning and controlling the rest of us. A very very few taking most earnings of the rest of us. A ginormous theft. A very few taking most of everyone's money. Is this madness harmless? 90% are on between a 10th and a 1000th of what they earn, of the wealth they create by their work. The world is a southern plantation. This theft is very very apparent. No one who is a victim of it is unaware of it. It is just plain theft. You are reduced to a 100th of your present income. You are not happy. You are aware you have been ripped off. Every second of your life reminds you of it. Every hour at work. Every hour of rest in poverty amid wealth. And there are 5 billion of you. It means war. War of robbed against robbed, robbed against robbers, robbers against robbed, robbers against robbers. Everyone against everyone. Is this quality of life? Or is this an artificial construction of pain? Everybody works. More or less the same. Noone can work more than 100 hours a week. The average person works 50 hours a week. The range of quantity of work is not great. From zero to double the average. The range of hourly pay is from a million times to 1000th of the average. Is something wrong here? War and weaponry have escalated for 1000s of years, racing towards extinction. Where is the sense? Where is the control of our destiny? With equal hourly payrate, every family in the world working average hard would be on US$75,000. That is, every family working average hard is creating US$75,000 of wealth, and 99% are being robbed of some of it, 90% are being robbed of between 90% and 99.9% of it. Would every family on US$75,000 be paradise compared to this we have? What is stopping us? What can stop us? Everyone will gain. Enormously. From being in paradise compared to this. What benefit of the present situation can compare to the benefits of such a paradise? We go: Our champion thief is bigger than anyone else's! And then dash off to fight the wars induced by the theft, protecting the thief with our lives.

by **BajaSur** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 11:21 pm

From IWW.org: <a href="http://www.iww.org/en/node/1280">Work Until You Drop</a> <img src="http://www.iww.org/graphics/agitators/classic/4-HourAgit.jpg" style="border:0;"/> Work Until You Drop: How the Long-Hours Culture is Killing Us In Japan they call it karoshi and in China it is guolaosi. As yet there is no word in English for working yourself to death, but as more and more people put in longer hours and suffer more stress there may soon be. This week, an American survey concluded that long working hours increased an individual's chances of illness and injury. It noted that for those doing 12 hours a day, there was a 37% increase in risk compared to those working fewer hours. Ronald Reagan was wrong, it seems, when he said: "Hard work never killed anyone." Death from overwork is not a new phenomenon in Britain but it is largely unremarked upon. In 2003, Sid Watkins, a paediatrician who was exhausted after working up to 100 hours a week, died after injecting himself with anaesthetic in an attempt to cope with his workload. The coroner at Dr Watkins' inquest described the hours he had to work as "crazy". In 1994, the parents of Alan Massie, a junior doctor who collapsed and died after working an 86-hour week at a Cheshire hospital, claimed that their 27-year-old son was worked to death. He had worked seven days and three nights, including two unbroken periods of 27 hours and one of 24 hours. In the same year, British Airways pilot David Robertson, 52, died while flying. Work stress and long working hours were implicated. The American study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, points out that overtime and extended work schedules are associated with an increased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, fatigue, stress, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, chronic infections, diabetes and other general health complaints. In Japan, most karoshi victims succumb to brain aneurisms, strokes and heart attack. Professor Cary Cooper, a stress expert at Lancaster University Management School, says the risk is not just confined to those who work more than 60 hours but hits those that put in more than 45. "If you work consistently long hours, over 45 a week every week, it will damage your health, physically and psychologically. In the UK we have the second-longest working hours in the developed world, just behind the States and we now have longer hours than Japan," he says. Prof Cooper advocates "working smarter", not longer, and introducing flexibility into the workplace. He acknowledges that the Department of Trade and Industry is trying to encourage business to adopt such practices, but it is a slow process. Derek Simpson, the general secretary of Amicus, the manufacturing, technical and skilled persons' union, agrees with Prof Cooper. "UK employees work the longest hours in Europe, yet all the evidence shows that long working hours are bad for our health, equality, our families and for society. People's jobs are by far the biggest single cause of stress, and stress-related illness is the silent killer in our workplaces, impacting on workers' physical and mental health. "As well as being bad for individuals, our long-hours culture is also bad for business because lower working hours relate directly to higher productivity. It is no coincidence that the UK has the least-regulated economy in Europe and is the least productive in the industrialised world. "Yet while other European governments are aiming to reduce weekly working hours below the working-time directive limit of 48 hours, our government is still desperately trying to keep the opt-out." In a survey, Amicus found that almost one in five workers was put off sex because of long hours. The union found a third of people said they didn't have enough time to spend with partners or children. Community work, socialising, personal fitness and hobbies all lost out to excessive working hours. Earlier this month, the law firm Peninsula published a survey of 1,800 employers. It found that four out of five of them worked more than 60 hours a week and revealed that seven out of 10 got only four hours' sleep a night. In her recent book Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, the Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting points out that Britain's full-time workers put in the longest hours in Europe at 43.6 a week compared with the EU average of 40.3. The number of people working over 48 hours has more than doubled since 1998, from 10% to 26%. And one in six of all workers is doing more than 60 hours. Roger Vincent, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, says that overwork inevitably leads to lapses in concentration and therefore accidents. "Between a third and a quarter of all road accidents are in some way work-related. That means that somewhere between 800 and 1,000 deaths each year on Britain's roads are to do with somebody driving or being on the road as a result of their jobs." In 1987, the Japanese ministry of labour acknowledged that it had a problem with death from overwork and began to publish statistics on karoshi. In 2001, the numbers reached a record level with 143 workers dying. Now, death-by-overwork lawsuits are common, with the victims' families demanding compensation payments. In 2002-03, 160 out of 819 claimants received compensation. The health and safety magazine Hazards has continually warned that karoshi does exist in the UK. It said: "In July 2003 the government proposed abolishing the mandatory retirement of 65 years. The old notion that "we work to live, not live to work" could soon be superseded by "we work until we drop". Nose to the grindstone in Europe's sweatshop · The UK's long-hours culture means that on average many of us are now working a 43.6-hour week. Our counterparts in the rest of Europe do 40.3 hours · The last seven years have seen a significant rise in the number of employees working in excess of 48 hours a week, rising from 10% in the late 90s to 26% now · Women in the workforce have also experienced changes to their work pattern. Since 1992 there has been a leap of 52% in the number of women expected to do 48 hours a week · The number of people working a long week has also jumped. Estimates from 2000 -2002 suggest that those clocking up 60 hours a week have increased by a third, which equates to one sixth of the UK labour force. · We may be working more hours but many of us waste the opportunity to take time off. Recent surveys estimate that only 44% of workers use up their full entitlement to annual leave. Reasons cited for not taking paid holiday often include a heavy workload or fear of upsetting the boss · The right to take a full hour for lunch seems at odds with our modern workplaces, with 65% of UK workers not using the full 60 minutes.The average time for a break is now 27 minutes, and more of us remain at our workstation · Source: Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, by Madeleine Bunting --------------------------------------------------------------------- I have no comment on this I just thought sceneshifter might like this article.He might have a comment (or two).

by **sceneshifter** » Fri Feb 24, 2006 5:31 am

smithtalk: why do cats fight? Thank you, smithtalk, for the point. I gather you are suggesting that violence is caused by human nature. But here is a proof it is not so. If a govt re-arranged hourly payrates to range very widely, from say a million times to a 1000th of the average, we all know already that that would cause a dramatic incrrease in violence. Therefore we know that removal of the very wide range of hourly payrates we have in the world today, from a million times to 1000th of the average, will cause a dramatic reduction in violence. Cats will still fight. But you dont need me to point out that cats fight for reasons, territory, sex, and that injury is minimal. The busy tom may get torn ears, but this is rare. And does not compare to the damage humans do. Humans do 1000 times the damage. We also know that pay theft is a cause of violence from the fact that money is a joker good, good for millions of things, including all necessities. Therefore money is a matter of first importance to people. It is life, comfort, freedom, power, dignity, etc. Again, imagine yourself reduced permanently to 100th of your present hourly payrate: multiply that 'annoyance' by 5 billion: that is how much violence will disappear with equal hourly payrate for all. 90% of people are paid between a 10th and a 1000th of the wealth they create by their work. That is, they are from full slavery to the superextreme bitter and deadly slavery. This is a major cause of violence. Is the cause of 99% of violence. With equal hourly payrates, people will still fight over sex a la Carmen. Territory wars can be contained most easily when power is spread widely, in proportion to work. With superoverpower and underpower, a few can control many to fight for their ends. The people in the middle and at the bottom are slaves to the purposes of the superoverpowerful. We are very very foolish to allow individuals to accumulate up to a million times their contribution to society by their work, and thus control us. With removal of overunderpay, power to control others will be very much more evenly spread. blanc: criminal earnings Thank you, blanc, for your point. A universal maximum fortune set at the utmost one person can contribute to society by their work [minus a lifetime's minimum living costs] will give the police a weapon to attack and defeat any criminal fortunes dangerously large. Unlimited fortunes [for limited contribution to society by work] is an enormous stimulus to criminal acts. So is the enormous underpay that enormous overpay causes. There are people so desperate and hungry, they will kill for 50c. And there are superoverpaid who can buy the services of millions of these super-robbed, super-desperate. Our first concern is to reduce the hourly pay range to a survivable violence level. At the moment the range is a billion. Ie, two people working equally, one getting a billion times the pay. With violence proportional. Under a maximum fortune, criminals will still be able to have one maximum fortune more than they have earned. About US$4 million. But this will be minute compared to what they are free to have now. The Mafia bigger than the 5 biggest coroporations together. Overpay makes underpay makes violence makes extinction soon. Overpay is tyranny, unfreedom, undemocracy, uncapitalism. As well as being plain theft. Calculations for the maximum fortune given elsewhere. Briefly, maximum fortune = 100 hours x 50 weeks x 50 years x world av. hourly payrate [US$15 in 2006, doubling every 12 years with 6% global inflation. [Minus a lifetime's minimum living costs, say, $1 million - US$20,000 a year.] With the assumption that no one working 100 hours a week for 50 years is working harder per hour than the world av. hardness of working per hour. If we make the further assumption that it is bad and unnecessary for anyone to work more than 50 hours a week [see below], we can halve this max fortune level and thus further reduce overpay, underpay, violence, danger and likelihood of extinction by nuclear winter. We can also limit yearly pay to 100 x 50 x US$15. The first step is getting people to see very clearly that justice would be enormously beneficial to ALL. [Proofs for this in previous posts by sceneshifter in various threads.] Absence of overpay and underpay will mean every family in the world, working average hard, will have around US$75,000 a year [doubling every 12 years]. bajasur: workdeath Thank you, BajaSur, for the posting of that very interesting useful information on workdeath. It reinforces my position, that we can set maximum paid weekly work hours to 50, and thus reduce overpay/underpay/violence further. I will add that I have read that housewives do an average of 70 hours a week. The highest worklevel I have heard of is 120 hours, Winston Churchill during the war. But he was a very good catnapper. Another point is that people should be paid for travel to and from work. Because this is also time that a person cannot provide for himherself in other ways. But it is a minor point, because if everyone had US$15 an hour, this would be somewhat in proportion to worktravel time anyway, and no one would be being seriously robbed without specific worktravel pay. We want to keep the bureaucracy very simple. We can worry about minor points when we are free from near certainty of extinction in the next 50 years. The remark about fear of upsetting the boss is interesting. We ought to understand this means slavery. The ruling classes manufacture and preserve unemployment so they can cower employees. We underestimate our slavery. 99% are paid less than they create by their work. 90% are paid between a 10th and a 1000th of their just pay. And we think slavery is a thing of the past! Anyone on less than US$15 an hour, including housewives and tertiary students, is being robbed, is contributing the difference in order to strengthen the tyranny of overpaid! It is only our asleepness that prevents us knowing this. We allow pay up to a million times the average. What this means, what we would realise if we were awake, is that this means we allow 1,000,000 people to work, entirely to pay another. For Bill Gates to get paid a million times the average, a million people have to work average hard and be paid nothing. A legal robbery of 1,000,000 people so that one person can have a million times his earnings! The purpose of govt is justice! And the permanent robbery of 1,000,000 paychecks obviously creates an enormous bed of violence, which all of us have to pay for in lives, taxes, sufferings, destruction and danger! How mad are we! And BG can get little benefit from this overpay, because most desires and needs are satisfied by fairpay of US$15 an hour, US$75,000 a year per family! And the superoverpay isolates and greatly endangers BG! So, to satisfy a few very marginal desires of one person arbitrarily chosen, we all suffer enormously, including BG! And it takes only 6000 people being paid between the average and a million times the average hourly pay to take all the earned money off all 3 billion world workers! And we are within 10% of this! With 90% of people having between 90% and 99.9% of earnings stolen! And another 9% having between nothing and 90% stolen! Imagine the anger that causes! Imagine your anger at having you TV stolen! Imagine having 90% of your paypacket stolen every week of your life! And the net benefit of overpay is negative! Is the satisfaction of the few, marginal desires of 1% of people that US$75,000 can't satisfy, minus the enormous danger and endless selfprotection trouble of being superoverpaid among superunderpaid! With everyone, rich and poor, wanting to get their hands on the money you have! [The rich have more power to get the money you have, the poor have more drive to get the money.]

utopian daydreams for an armageddon afternoon

Reply dreamsend

begin

Because....

relative wealth

Wealthy Relatives???

Eg Bill Gates

4 hour work day

Replies smithtalk, blanc, bajasur

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