Enslavement, Debtors Prisons, Deportation, Extermination...ALL have been done before. You don't learn a LESSON from this? Neither a Borrower or a Lender BE! Its farking BIG TROUBLE, ALWAYS.

The Banking class ENCOURAGES borrowing and lending, this is how they make their money. In the end, some borrowers always will not be able to pay back, that is statistics. In fact in a shrinking economy, most if not ALL borrowers cannot pay back. So what here? You enslave them ALL? You send them ALL to debtors prison? You exterminate them all? What?

The mistake here is to accept the idea of borrowing and lending to begin with. If you want to help someone succeed, don't LEND them money, GIVE it to them with no expectation of return. You will be a wealthy man if you do this. For wealth is in the spirit, in your generosity towards others, not in your selfishness for personal gain.

So is the truth obvious, and I will preach it here. I will back it up with my gun. So preaches the Pale Rider.

Reverse Engineer

Eh, naive, naive.
Of course, on rare occasions wealthy peoples are doing exactly that indeed.
But these are very rare occasions...

So do you really think that economy could still be working, if all the peoples are getting money for free?


Yep, I am American and I have gun.

Don't you think that SWAT teams would have heavier guns?
And they are better trained how to use them...

Man, with your attitude you will end up dead before some real troubles even begun.


So did any evil banker forced you to uptake debt?

Of course. Sometimes peoples have good reasons not to pay back debt.
Say serious disease, accidents etc.
Society could easily cater for these and indeed they should be allowed to get out of debt without nasty consequences.

Unfortunately we are dealing with millions of morons who were frivolously accepting ever increasing debt and now they want their homes, cars, plasma TV-s and holiday on Maldives for free.
Sorry man, these peoples should be made paying back every single outstanding cent back.
Just to ensure faith in any sort of economy, regardless how much scaled down it would be.

Once you disregarded basic contract rules, societal collapse will proceed to the very possible end with final cultural collapse as per Orlov scale.

The sharing economy seems to work fine for those who engage in it.

I've not had any problems with it so far.

But I'm the most naive person around.

Even in tribal economies debts were to be paid and indeed there was risk of enslavement in case of default.
You will find that in the Bible.


So how your "sharing economy" would look like?
What would be shared in particular?
Any precedence known to you?

Preach it man, preach it! Gotta hand it to you, I do love your style.

In a growing economy, lending works, at least most of the time. In a perpetually shrinking economy, such as the one we're about to enter for a generation or more, lending money DOES NOT WORK...as it's impossible to create new wealth to pay back the principal + interest. This is why our financial system is doomed 7 days to Sunday. In case you haven't heard, the Nikkei index is at its lowest level since *1982*

There just isn't going to a "50% heroically paying off their debt" as just a 20% default rate will crush the global financial system into dust, and the current rout will go nuclear.

Do any of you have any idea what that means? Everything will stop - no trade, no commerce, no planes flying, no cars moving, no gas flowing in pipelines, no economic activity whatsoever.

It's at this point when we all just hit the big "reset" button and start again from scratch - which means no debt, and no credit for anybody, probably for a very, very long time, if not forever. Which suits me just fine - I kinda like the simple lifestyle.

Many non-civilized groups "owned" things in common, and gave support to get support. So there's quite a lot of precedence there. The sharing economy to me would look like how I treat my friends and family. Stuff we share is food, labor, tools, materials, ideas.

Links relating to the sharing or gift economy:

http://www.gift-economy.com/

http://www.opensource.org/

http://makerfaire.com/

To: everybody

Did you guys hear that?
ReverseEngineer is giving out free money!

Perhaps after s u b s t a n t i a l collapse of population such ideas will possibly work in isolated communities.

What meantime?

PS. I will make an effort to read those online books to have better understanding of ideas of those, who I consider to be Utopians.

I read the intro and I'm totally confused.
It talks about things like feminism, gender, and nurturing.

What if I need a nuclear power plant or 500 miles of railroad tracks built how does that work?
Is somebody going to give that to me as a gift?

Ask Reverse Engineer and Byron 100.
If they don't give you npp, they may at least hand you down some money to build it.

Perhaps Ludi's permaculturist ideas are not as silly as they look at first glance.
However she is constantly refusing to accept that there is too much peoples on the Earth for these to work.

Really? Where have I done that?

You'll have to work that out yourself. I don't need those things, personally, so it's not a big concern of mine. I can see it might be for a lot of other people though. But I don't pretend to be suggesting solutions for everyone's problems, just alternatives for those who might be interested in these Utopian ideas.

Well, the implication of primitivism, which has been interpreted by many as misanthropy, is that the only way the tribalist ideal can be reclaimed is if a massive die off takes place in order to bring the population down to preindustrial levels. Hence the emphasis is not on preventing die-off at all but to look on the brighter side of life for the chosen few who make it through the bottleneck.

Die-off seems inevitable to me.

I'm not a primitivist, personally.

You are offering solutions which would work in some selected and quite isolated communities immersed in healthy environment, but you cannot accept that with 6.7 billions of peoples on the Earth it is next to impossible to develop these on any meaningful scale.

That is my overall impression after conversations with you.