Talk:Energy accounting/Archive 1

A heavy bias exists for pro-technocratic beliefs, but that's because they invented the system.

C. Nelson 21:03, Dec 24, 2004 (UTC)

It seems a little pointless to talk about avoiding monetary corruption in a system where there is no money. More important are the effects that removal is believed to have on the social systems they influence.

Yeah, this page is very heavy on the technocratic beliefs. Why must energy credits be evenly divided? You have people making energy. They trade their energy to people who provide goods or services, or energy from somewhere else. The goods and service providers trade their surplus energy for goods and services. All that sounds like your typical economy.

In a system where it's evenly divided, all energy production is controlled by a single entity, typically the government. That's completely unrealistic.

There's also the abundance/scarcity issue. Scarcity typically implies that there's a finite quantity of some good. With energy there is a definite limit to what can be produced. The same with matter. Unlike matter though there could be differing amounts energy being made usable each day. So if everyone decides to cash in on their credits, the whole system would break. Realistically though, this would probably not happen. I'm sure that's a fear every partial reserve banker ever had back in the days of gold. I could have my 1000 Kw/H energy credit in my pocket for years and finally decide I want to use the computer for a couple of hours.

It might be better to have energy credits represent something other than Kw/H though. I'm not entirely sure. One thing that I'm sure of is that energy is not abundant. X amount comes from the sun each day that we can harvest into electricity through wind, solar, burning, etc.

In sum, this page needs a complete rewrite. Energy as the monetary standard. (It's more in demand than gold will ever be, and beats fiat.) This page does not need to be energy as basis for techie communist wet-dream.

- NolanEakins

The way the technocrats view the world, is that scarcity can be eliminated through technologic progress. In their world, a technologic capacity exists where 99% of material goods could be made abundant. To think more like them, imagine an economy where all goods and services are digital and traded on the internet. In such a case, appling a price system leads to artificial scarcity; some people would be poor (not because the technology does not exists to give everyone ample) because there is so little labor by which to attain money. Perhaps the article is not clear enough; but energy credits would not be traded nor are they a store of value. They merely represent a percentage of productive capacity, and expire after a given period if not spent. If our cyber digital technology can provide everyone with 400GB data a day, the system would distribute and allow each person 400GB of data, if they choose to use it. When the energy-credit is spent, it disappears until the next time period. The system is used to give everyone an equal share of 'abundance'. In the real world, relative abundances seems to come along with companion scarcities.

C. Nelson 01:58, 12 January 2006 (UTC)