In Hoboken, NJ vs. Giant Parking Robot we read where a dispute about the IP rights of the software of a major robot parking system has shut the system down, trapping the cars inside. This is a classic case of what I call PSIs, or "Price System Interferences". Here we see a dispute over "ownership" interfering with technology that is helping people, something that would not happen in a Technate (Technocratic society). Instead, the very concept of "property" is changed, so that only "personal" property would apply whereas "private" property would not. Anything having to do with the production or distribution of mass-produced goods and services can only be operated, used, performed, and/or consumed, no owned. E.g. the people in a factory would make it work, while the consumer collects the output and consumes it. Neither "own" the factory. This may seem weird, but is one of the fundamental paradigm changes necessary in order to function in a Post Scarcity society such as Technocracy. The quick example is of course, air, which no one really owns, because it is abundant. Air, while absolutely essential to human life, has no "value" in the economic sense because it is not abundant, and thus cannot be sold. Virtually everything in a Technate would be mass-produced (that could be anyway) in such a way as to be also considered "abundant" like air, and thus could not be sold. Thus an entirely new economic model is required, i.e. Technocracy.

Getting back on track, we can see how the outdated scarcity concept of "ownership" is interfering with the operation of a very Technocratic concept, robotic parking. PSIs like this are everywhere, and are constantly keeping us from realizing the very high standard of living that we could all be enjoying thanks to high-energy technology. Isn't it time we realized this and moved on?

In addition, it is interesting to note that the cars are trapped because there is no manual way to get them out. No doubt designing this in would have been expensive in both time and especially money. In the Technate, failures and shutdowns would be anticipated during the design phase, and constraints such as "budget" would not exist, thus allowing proper precautions to have been made in such a case. Money is, after all, the biggest PSI, artificially maintaining a state of scarcity where one need not exist. How many more things could be designed better were money "no object"? I'm sure there are a great many engineers out there that have devised perfect solutions to a problem, only to have them ravaged by the fiscal folks higher up. Come on, engineers, this is your time!

Ah, so finally I get around to it. :P

From http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192999&cid=15841006:

"Many of the comments above point out an "attitude" of NASA people. This may in fact be true; however, I believe that my "attitude" is one of understanding the difficulties involved. Perhpas I came across too negatively, though: I believe that we can and will go to the Moon...it's just a problem of expense driving us to a long period of time to design and build the spacecraft and develop the technologies needed.

It's important to understand the challenge that NASA is up against: During Apollo, NASA had approximately 2.5% of the national budget. Today, NASA has less than 1%, and they've been asked to do the same job while having to cover the expense of the International Space Station ($4B per year) and the Shuttle (~$2B per year, perhaps more--it depends on whose numbers you believe). That leaves (very approximately) 1/5 the spending power as what was available in Apollo."

Despite the technical problems that this author goes into later, it is here we see the essential reason for not doing better in the US space program: lack of money. The Apollo program had a huge amount of money invested in it thanks to the cold war. Today, we don't really have that, and the War On Terror is unlikely to provide benefits to it. So why not just move more money into it from the military budget? That would be nice, but not going to happen.

First of all, it has to be established that money is scarce. Regardless of whether any particular thing that money is supposed to represent the value of is actually scarce or not, money itself is scarce; it needs to be in order to have value. Given that, there is only so much of it to go around, and everyone (in this case, every hand that's out for government money) is going to want/need more of it. The reason why so much money is going into the military at the moment instead of the space program (or social programs, or whatever), has to do with the decline of the US economy, but that's another topic.

Right now I want to address the question in the subject: Can we go to the moon? I do not have an accurate answer for that, but what I can say is that there are a great many things that we have, or could have, in abundance, meaning "more than we need". This has been so since the 1920s, as Technocracy has shown, and may still be the case today, provided our current system (called the Price System) hasn't destroyed enough of our resources and infrastructure yet to change that. Given that we live in a state (or at least, potential state) of technological abundance, making a space program would be a piece of cake. Remove the constraints of scarcity that hold us back (i.e. politics and money), replace it with something that works (Technocracy), and think of the possibilities! No more "budgets" to worry about; the best and most well educated minds working on the project (and more all the time with superior education); no need to worry about whether things like social programs or defence are "doing without" because of your decisions, etc. That's abundance for you.

So just take a look at what is stopping us whenever there is some problem with society, such as lack of police, lack of teachers or doctors, lack of research in medicine, terrible space program... and ask yourself what the problem really boils down to. Almost every time it will come out to: not enough money. So then, why not get rid of the stuff?

(BTW, it should be taken as a standard disclaimer for probably every post I make here that I am not setting out to prove that Technocracy could indeed solve these problems, because that's impossible. There is simply too much to go into to put in any kind of post like this (textbooks full). All I'm doing is showing how (superficially) Technocracy can help with these things, and thus hope to spark interest in learning more. Basically I'm trying to answer the question: Why should I care? or What's so good about it? After that, actually proving it takes time, but time well spent, I assure you.)

Wow, I wonder how many thousands of people have started their /. journals like that? No, it's not clever at all, just the power of social momentum, which I suppose would make an interesting topic in itself, but that's not what I'm here to talk about right now. Instead, this message is about justifying this journal's use and existence, and maybe why in the world anyone would want to read it, but don't hold your breath.

I already have two "weblogs" on the net, already seldom used. So why another one? I mean, just like e-mail 10 years ago, now everyone and their dog is offering a "'blog" (a term I hate BTW); heck, even my own website does it! Why? Simple, because I could. It's a Postnuke site, and it was a module, easy to install, so I thought WTH. But I digress. Expect that from time to time.

Too often I find myself wanting to comment on Slashdot articles, but what I've found is that the sheer volume of users means that if you do not comment within the first hour or so, your post will not likely be read by anyone, except perhaps the person you were responding too. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but come on; if you've commented here before, you know basically what I am talking about. I have no idea how some people do it so consistently, except perhaps simply being on the site a lot, or picking articles indiscriminately. So basically, for the few times I do want to comment on something, by the time I've found it and read enough of it and the other comments, it's too late. I simply don't have that kind of time to spend here.

So thus comes the seemingly elegant solution to these two problems: I simply post my comments here in this journal. Yes, it means that few people will actually see it (I doubt with my few comments already I have many "Fans"), but at least they will be here easy to access long after the fact. I'm a little annoyed by /.'s new policy of hiding older user entries unless you pay them money. Some of my best comments (some even moderated "+5") are back there, and I can't even read them myself! Bah, I hate money, which I suppose brings me to my next point, which would be why my comments might actually be interesting to anybody.

As I said before, I don't have a lot of time for /., even though I read it every day usually. So usually my comments tend to be of the less frivolous variety, something I think is important for people to hear or know. I'm an expert on very few things, I have no PhDs or whatnot. But I what I do know a lot about is something called Technocracy, and I think it is important. And that is not simply my opinion, like many people have in related fields of politics and economics, but AFAICT, good, solid, scientific fact. Thus, I encourage people to check it out for themselves. It's a big topic, so I'd recommend starting with this Beginner's Page (it may not be pretty but it's the best organized page for first-timers I've seen concerning this topic).

So my point is that the purpose of this weblog will most often be to give a Technocratic perspective on some of the articles and other comments that appear here, something unique I can add to the community. How useful or interesting it is will of course be up to you to decide, but I think it should be. I'll of course welcome comments and questions since I know a lot of what I say will be based on stuff most people don't know about, so feel free. Hopefully I'll be posting my first one soon; I've already seen a couple that I'd really like to comment on that have already passed into the twilight "Older Stuff" column - I need to work fast. ;) But if this ends up anything like my other weblogs, then you can expect large gaps of time in between entries. I suppose if I had hoards of adoring fans clamoring for my words, it'd be a bit more often but yeah, I'm not holding my breath either.