On 10/28/2015 08:08 AM, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote: 2015-10-27 21:47 GMT+01:00 Shelley <shelley@xxxxxxxx>:
- Learn how to fix and repurpose things. Take good care of your things so they last longer.
I know how to fix/repurpose most things. Actually fixing things often doesn't compare favorably with just buying a new one - time spent at 10 euro's per hour makes most repairs very borderline effective.
Truecost one or two dead 24 year old foxconn/Bangladeshi sweatshop worker's body into that equation when you do that cost comparison. Even if it doesn't affect you directly now, it will in the future in the form of terrorism, because terrorist come from societies and cultures being destroyed, typically in this day and age for someone else's profit.
Razer mentioned a TV, I don't own one. I have a sizeable monitor. Much prettier than most TVs. I might get a projector someday, it's fun to watch movies together like that.
Razer also fuzzes about collectivism vs individualism. They used to have collectivism in many nations. They all lost. I think a society design that involves individual incentives (the best of capitalism; advanced finance, legal persons, markets, competition), global optimization (the best of communism; managed competition, fine tuned production, >designed markets<), and collective ambition (the best of government/academia; being able to strife together and make deep, long term investments) would be ideal.
The Zapatistas are a collectivist society and they've far from 'lost'. Other example must exist but they're not coming to mind, and certainly 'scalability' IS a problem. The homeless in the US spontaneously form self-supporting collectives that are also highly individualistic. The only real social structures are 'fuzzy'. The quest for purity, of thought, political structure, culture, drug, whatever, is a disease. But my basic stand is, by it's very design, Capitalism is murderous, and predatory. There is no such thing as 'kinder and gentler' capitalism and there never will be. RR