In SA we have the Blue Bulls, they are already a power in rugby.

Getting them to generate power , the SPCA and Bull Union will be onto you if you try something like that.

With 300 000 000 cattle you should invent steak's and biltong and fight famine.

As far as sustainability is concerned, the load the bullocks in the photograph are pulling is of more sustainability value than the bullocks themselves. Animal production costs a lot of kWh per kg. Plant production rather less so. Maybe the vegetarians are on to something?

"As far as sustainability is concerned, the load the bullocks in the photograph are pulling is of more sustainability value than the bullocks themselves. Animal production costs a lot of kWh per kg. Plant production rather less so. Maybe the vegetarians are on to something?"

Ah, but are we talking about environmental sustainability, or sustainable technology? Draft animals don't require the industrial base that tractors do. And no farmer ever woke up in the morning to discover that his tractor had given birth to a tractorette. Draft animals run on raw biomass, and the exhaust is good fertilizer.

The downside, as I have mentioned, is labor. A farmer with even a light tractor can produce much more food per hour of his labor than he can with animal power. And none of his arable land has to be used to grow food for the draft animals. So now there is more food available, and jobs building the tractor, and producing the fuel, the tires, the paint, etc. etc. For all its faults, I maintain that the Industrial Revolution caused the greatest prosperity in human history. Global surpluses of food!

It needs to start small. So, everybody in the village has to grind their grain by hand? Somebody needs to build a grist mill- water, wind or animal power is fine. The miller grinds the grain for everybody, for a share of the grain. This frees up hundreds of hours of labor for his neighbors. So they spend those extra hours on productive tasks like weaving, carving, whatever. Now the miller is wealthy- he has more grain than he can eat. So he trades his surplus for the productivity of his neighbors. Now they all have extra, and want to trade it for things they need and want. The miller's next-door neighbor bakes the best bread in the village. The wannabe baker uses their extra hours to build a big oven. But, the baker has no grain! The miller loans the new baker the flour to get started. Now the baker, with that big oven going all day, can bake a lot of the village's bread. Some folks will trade their wealth for the time they spend baking bread. The baker pays the miller back- with interest! Hey, the miller just got richer, but the baker is very happy, and so are all the people who don't have to bake their own bread unless they want to. Now grain is in short supply, so the miller and the baker pool their wealth and buy some land, and hire laborers to farm it. More grain= more wealth. But it's costing them money to pay their crews. Now that they have wealth- a mill, a bakery, and some land- they can get a bank loan in the city to buy a tractor! They use it, and rent it out to other farmers so they get the maximum productive hours out of it to reduce the capital cost per hour. Boom! The whole village just got more productive. Now the farmers can pool their wealth and build a biogas plant to take their manure, so they can sell lighting and cooking gas to the villagers. The glassblower and the tinsmith (who learned their skills in their newfound free time) start a lamp factory together.

I could go on for pages. Do you see what I'm getting at?

That process has a natural outcome which is expressed today in this greatest of all depressions.

The bank which loaned the money for a tractor also loans money for the development of factories that make the owners rich and who take their money, as part of a new and bigger plant and who also borrow from the bank some of that commodified money.

But now the bank wants a seat on the board of the manufacturer and uses that to further enrich the bank and also to gain control of another source of the banks main product, money.

To cut things short their comes a point at which the banks money supply has grown so large that he simply cannot any longer find qualified buyers for the money so in order to keep expanding and growing his money capital he, on the percentages, starts reducing the standard for borrowers and starts as well to falsify the data on the loan papers. Mix that with the equivalent process in industry, too many cars, too many air conditioners, etc. and....I am sure you see what I am getting at.

There is no answer to that accept an end to production for profit and a return to the production for use economy of our distant stone age forbears but on a high technical level.

j.

"There is no answer to that accept an end to production for profit and a return to the production for use economy of our distant stone age forbears but on a high technical level."

That, sir, is what Ayn Rand referred to as "The Anti-Industrial Revolution."

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_topic_environmentalism_and_animal_rights

I am perfectly capable of living the "Mother Earth News" lifestlye, off the grid, self-sufficient, producing everything I need. But that is all I would have time for- I would be working twelve and sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, just to obtain the basics of survival. One bad year for crops, plus some bad luck hunting, and I starve to death. That was the state of mankind before the discovery of concepts like the Economy of Scale and Specialization.

As the settlers of the Massachusets Bay Colony discovered during their brief and unsuccessful experiment with socialism, humans work harder for their personal profit than they do for their neighbor's welfare. When the settlers were allowed to work for their own profit, the productive output of the entire colony increased, and its prosperity along with it:

"The Puritans implemented a form of Platonic Christian Socialism, which was based upon an ideological synthesis of such influences as 1) Plato's Republic, 2) a utopian interpretation of the New Testament (especially Acts 2:44-46), 3) a joint-stock agreement between colonial shareholders and the London-based John Peirce & Associates company, 4) a Continental European cultural attitude toward education (acquired during Pilgrim settlement in Holland), and 5) especially close economic and cultural bonds between Boston's elite and the ruling class of England. During their first three years in the New World, the Puritans abolished private property and declared all land and produce to be owned in common (a commonwealth).

In Plymouth over half the colonists promptly died from starvation. Governor William Bradford observed that the collectivist approach "was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort." He lamented the "vanity of that conceit of Plato's . . . that the taking away of property and bringing community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God." Governor Bradford implemented private ownership of property, but Platonic Christianity continued to dominate other aspects of regional social policy.
http://www.quaqua.org/pilgrim.htm

Experimental evidence, published for review, with reproducible results. The conclusion: socialism is a noble theory which is unworkable in practice.

I agree, market capitalism is a lousy system. It does not provide a fair and equitable distribution of wealth. BUT- it provides a more fair and more equitable distribution of wealth, and generates more wealth to distribute, than any other social system yet devised.

I don't see why in place of private ownership and production for profit, which has led to the banking system and money as a commodity and the contradictions inherent in that as evidenced by this latest and greatest depression, common ownership by those who work industry, and hence are best suited to managing it and collectively determining the needs of production for the well being and development of all is excluded by your citations to earlier primitive systems.

These ideas are not Luddite. The Luddites opposed manufacture because it reduced them to appendages of a machine and alienated them from the product of their hands and brains.

Common ownership of industry and the economic system to use that industry to provide for the welfare and development of all, instead of leading to the present closing and destruction of industry, i.e., just what you were attributing to my concept instead of those who as the present owners of the industrial system are doing just what you accuse others of, would lead to elimination of the tremendous waste now caused and to the development of effective production methods, since profit would no longer be the purpose, with out the negatives of what we have now, i.e., the rape of the planet and of the vast bulk of the planets population.

Your reaction suggests it was pre-programmed and that you are not even aware of that programming.

j.

Mr. Jersawitz is absolutely correct. It is not Luddite to suggest public ownership of the means of production. Luddites oppose technology because it is perceived as a threat to their ability to make a living, regardless of who owns the technology.

Public ownership of the means of production has another name - communism. It is generally conceded amongst those who have tried it (and survived), to not work very well.

One might assume that the tens of millions who did not survive the grand experiments in the Soviet Union and Red China and Cambodia, and... would not speak highly of it either. But of course, that can only be an assumption.

Those millions of deaths are not even a speed bump in the road to those who eagerly want to impose their enlightened and noble visions on the hapless masses who have yet to have the slave yoke of communism dropped across their backs.

As Thomas Jefferson spoke so presciently some two centuries ago, "The tree of Liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

It seems that even in what was once the freest and richest and most powerful nation that ever existed, there are no end to the would-be tyrants.

"Programmed?" Not hardly.

First, "fiat money" as opposed to hard currency is not part of market capitalism; it's a part of our current flawed political system.

Second, I absolutely endorse employee ownership of companies. There's no reason the employees who do the work shouldn't share in the profits. I'd love to see some of our closed factories bought at auction by the employees and reopened.

To me, private property is one of the most basic human rights. In a just society, anything I have, I have from the fruit of my own labor. If I dig iron ore and coal and use them to forge a tool, it is mine. My neighbor's need for that tool has no bearing on my ownership. He can either offer me something of value in return, or make his own tool. Let's say all my neighbors want to use my tool, and don't think it's "fair" that I won't let them use it without a free exchange of value. So they form a committee, take a vote, and determine that their need outweighs my property rights. That may be democracy, but is it justice? Or are they just a gang of looters?

Let's say that tool took me twenty hours of labor to build. I have provided twenty hours of productive labor to society, but received no compensation. My neighbors have provided zero hours of productive labor, but they now own twenty hours of value. They have just consumed more value than they produced. This is a critical point- that is why every collectivist system eventually collapses. Why should anyone break their back sixteen hours a day, when all their needs will be met by the labor of their neighbors? Without the motive of profit, how do you motivate a person to produce? Only one way- by force. People will be "assigned" to jobs by the Government, and forced to meet production quotas based on the limitless needs of their neighbors. They will receive only what the Government determines is their need. That is slavery, and I want no part of it.

Look at North Korea and South Korea, North Vietnam and South Vietnam, East Germany and West Germany, China and Taiwan. Which countries were the real "worker's paradise?" It always comes down to coercion and rationing in collectivist societies, and the Government is forced to suspend democracy in order to prevent the workers from voting in a different form of government.

I am trying to remember who it was that said "Property is theft."

Just looked it up, the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in What is Property?

Truth be to tell rather than "..private property is one of the most basic human rights.." for the bulk of humankind's existence there was no such thing as private property, society being essentially communal insofar as cooperation was essential to survival, and hence the planet was worked as communal property.

This will no doubt offend you but in some societies, even right up to recent times, women were free to circulate, were not property as they are with the advent of the "marriage contract."

Indeed, even today in places like Nigeria, there are two sets of familial terms. In the cities the terms are those of the nuclear family. In the countryside there still hangs on the terms of a society of free women where the fathers of the children are unknown thus every male is an uncle.

As to the recent history of communism, any reading of the works of the principals in that stead, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, definitely not Stalin, made clear that "Communism" as a fully working system, had, for economic and resource reasons, to be a worldwide system.

It was indeed the industrial backwardness of the Soviet Union and imperialism's wars of intervention, that lead to the usurpation by Stalin of the state apparatus and the difficulties that ensued.

Nonetheless, I think that anybody would be hard put to show that the acts of such as Stalin and company were anywhere as bad, and they were no doubt bad, as those of capitalism's world imperialistic deprivations seeking to accrue to its own interests, the interests of a very few, the property in minerals and other raw materials, let alone the labor power, of the rest of the world.

How many millions died in the two world wars? How many kidnapped in Africa to serve as slaves, not just in the colonies that became the U.S., but in the colonies of all the imperialist nations?

Indeed, how many are now being killed and/or tortured in the interest of acquiring access to oil, in Afghanistan, and Iraq. How many are threatened as in Iran? In whose interests, except those of U.S. imperialism, is the Zionist state of Israel carrying out a pogrom against the Palestinian peoples whilst expropriating their lands.

How many of the very few stone age peoples left in remote areas are being driven off their lands and murdered in the interest of stealing their communal properties.

I set my response out in what I hoped would be non-political terms because I sought to point to the inherent faults in capitalist economy, for instance this greatest of all historical depressions that has just begun to bite and in the attempt to resolve will likely lead to a world war of unheard encompass.

I thought such technical examination might be more appropriate for an engineering web site.

Nonetheless, whatever turns you on.

j.

Hmm. . . Will have to give Mr. Proudhon a read:

http://books.google.com/books?id=K_8wAAAAMAAJ&dq=What%20is%20Property%3F&pg=PR5

I respectfully disagree that private prperty is a modern innovation. Our oldest codes of laws all seem to include the crime of theft. Of course humans cooperate when it is to their advantage to do so. But even when food is considered a community resource, once the division was made, the individual shares became private property. Clothing, weapons, jewelry, etc. have always been private property.

Agreed that "It takes a village to raise a child." In the small town were I grew up, every adult was an authority figure, to be given the same respect and obedience that a parent received. My Lady Wife (who loves cultural anthropology the way I love engineering) maintains that collectivism only works on a village/small tribal level, and breaks down on a larger scale.

Individual freedom would have prevented a lot of the deaths that you describe in your email. Think of the prosperity we would have if every slave in history had been free to exchange their labor for value.

To get back onto sustainability, free exchange for value is the best way to manage the world's resources. Let's say Iran has a free and democratic society, and is sitting on huge reserves of oil. Under your system, that oil belongs not to the people of Iran, but to the whole world. Rather than having to exchange value with the people of Iran, who are free to accept or reject any offer, you would give "society" - whose power would be expressed by one world government- the right to take all of Iran's oil, whether they like it or not, for the common good. And if the Iranians refuse to acknowledge the need of their fellow men, and insist on their property rights, what recourse would there be other than to use force to sieze it? That, sir, is the fly in the ointment. Individual freedom and global collectivism cannot coexist.

Obviously your outlook is Libertarian and hence a real mixed bag of fish not really to be dealt with here.

Nonetheless, you are dead wrong on private property.

How long has humankind had a written record system?

Have you any idea how many hundreds of thousands of years humankind and human societies have existed?

Have you any idea, in that timespan, how recently humans first were able to produce a surplus and hence able to begin to develop the idea, let alone the practice, of private property?

No offense meant but I think you are out of your depth and too accepting of Libertarian nonsense and illogic which statement will no doubt get me, from others if not you, a healthy dose of vituperation.

I don't think it appropriate to take this any further on an engineering site but there is always my e-mail address if you must.

j.

Hey don't give up now...

please outline the real world path to your vision, same for the libertarians [no, saying we should strictly follow the constitution, isn't a path, it's a goal]..

Like a good Libertarian who is not objective (Objectivism is a different beast) you have, it seems, focused on one class of those who consume more than they produce and are those who unfortunately, for one reason or another, most systemic, unable to engage in productive labor for their own good or that of society.

But there is easily demonstrated a class that does produce less than they consume who do not suffer from those disabilities. Consider the standard axiom for labor in this economic system.

"A fair day's pay for a fair day's work."

It has been shown, and I am not going to reproduce it here, that a "fair day's pay" turns out to be barely enough for the worker to reproduce himself and come back and do it again on the morrow.

It has also been shown that in that "fair day's work" the worker produces far more value than that of the "fair day's pay."

That surplus value (Value surplus to the daily needs of the worker) goes into the pocket of the employer to do with as he wishes. That is the source of his profit, insofar as the employer who does no labor employs the only creature on the face of this planet that can produce more in a day's labor than is required to exist, other human beings.

You seem to attribute to me a belief in the equal distribution of wealth. I have not said any such thing nor even talked about equal distribution. In fact equal distribution of the wealth produced by society would deny society the special abilities, talents, skills, arts, of many individuals who if they were aided by society in acquiring their ability to contribute, could, other conditions being in place, benefit all of society.

Equal distribution is a foolish, simplistic idea generated by idealists, not materialists.

As far as the development of human societies able to produce surplus and keep records you have it about right; maybe fifteen thousand years.

How many hundreds of thousands of years of humankind's existence does that leave where there is not even a material basis for the development of the concept of private property.

Obviously the concept of private property is a very, very, recent development and not, in terms of humankind's longevity, very basic.

Because you are obviously very mixed up, as isn't everybody who starts with ideas not based in material reality (Ideology as opposed to materialism) you need to retract what you said about private property as fundamental.

If we can't agree on private property we cannot, for very fundamental conceptual reasons, carry on any meaningful conversation. That would be like trying to discuss quantum mechanics with one of us disagreeing that there is in physics anything beyond Newtonian mechanics.

Your wife, who seems to be the source of your knowledge about the San and other hunter-gatherer societies (i.e., pre-private property), ought, perhaps, to be the one contributing to this discussion.

j.

The OP has a valid point about the industrialized West's perception of the developing nations, though I'm not sure I concur. But, we in the West see things through our cultural filters and that doesn't always work in other places.

For example, we argue endlessly whether a 1.6 gallon toilet flush is adequate, or should we return to the old 3-4 gallon units. Yet, In parts of Asia and Africa, there is not even 3 gallons per person available for any use, and our use of potable water to flush a toilet must seem incredible.

It is not clear to me that we can have any useful discussion of global energy use while we in the US use more energy on hedge clippers than some Asian poor use for their whole house. It's easy to say that we have the energy available and that we worked for it and that we're entitled to use it as we see fit, but we are in danger of not having the moral authority to tell everybody else what to do.

I don't even know how to think about this situation.

You start by thinking of the tremendous rip-off of capital in the form of value produced by individuals in the developed industrial countries every day that is surplus to their own daily needs of subsistence and which their employers stuff in their own pockets.

j.

Hi pvhramani - You make some really good points. It's difficult for folks in the West to preach to China and India to "grow clean", when we're the ones who've benefited from dirty growth all these years, contributing to the accumulated mess we're globally in at the moment. I heard a letter read this week on BBC World Service, by someone in your part of the world, commenting that Germany gets 46% of its power from renewable sources, reminding me of the bumper-stickers saying "Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!" (band & some history) I saw while traveling there in the 80's. Maybe there's something all of us can learn from how folks in the Heart of Europe have weaned themselves off fossil fuels and nuclear? - Larry

PS - For folks interested in Germany's efforts with renewables, check out my earlier CR4 Alt-Power blog, Is Old Thinking Killing Green Jobs?.