ITT we talk about "perfect" societies

[zarus tathra]

A 100 sq foot plot takes 10 hours of labor to prepare and can provide all the food one person needs, assuming there are 4 harvests, like down south. After that, it only takes 30 minutes of upkeep per day to hold off the weeds. So with 2 hours of labor per day, anyone could grow enough to easily feed themselves, and then some.

 :-s

you'll need to provide some back up for that. A ten by ten bedroom plot can provide all the food? How? Can it be stored without refrigeration? Salted? I need some more for this. Don't wanna come out and say BS, but it is very close.

edit;  as a gardener, I can take care of a 10 x 10 plot in about 5 minutes.

In the book I have, that's exactly the claim they make.

edit: nvm, it's around 1000 sq feet. Not exactly tiny, but still quite small. It's estimated to cost like 5 hours a week.

The system is as follows:

Dig up the first 12 inches and put it in the row that was just displaced. For the first row, put the soil in buckets and fill in the last row. Then, using a spading fork or U-bar, disturb the 12 inches below. This will loosen up and aerate the soil to a depth and degree that normally is not possible.

A lot of care is taken to use companion planting, nitrogen fixing plants, and compost-producing plants, coupled with plants that produce a lot of calories per square foot.

There are some fine details to fill in, but this is the gist.

And the Khmer Rouge did a LOT more than make people flee to the countryside. According to Wikipedia,

The Khmer Rouge systematically destroyed food sources that could not be easily subjected to centralized storage and control, cut down fruit trees, forbade fishing, outlawed the planting or harvest of mountain leap rice, abolished medicine and hospitals, forced people to march long distances without access to water, exported food, embarked on foolish economic projects, and refused offers of humanitarian aid, which caused a humanitarian catastrophe: hundreds of thousands died of starvation and brutal government-inflicted overwork in the countryside. To the Khmer Rouge, outside aid went against their principle of national self-reliance.

I don't think anybody alive is crazy enough to do something that drastic and arbitrary.

[zarus tathra]

What happens to university professors?

The scientists will be in charge of the government, I'm thinking something like Foundation, where everything's controlled by a massive computer and a cabal of computer scientists and mathematicians.

I'm not quite certain what'll happen to the Women's Studies and African American Studies professors, their ideas only really have relevance in the context of modern corporate society. "Affirmative action" doesn't really have much meaning if there aren't any corporations. A lot of them already grow their own vegetables, anyway. :D

[Plu]

edit: nvm, it's around 1000 sq feet. Not exactly tiny, but still quite small. It's estimated to cost like 5 hours a week.

So 5 hours a week per person? That means you can support about 8 people on a 40 hour work week. Assuming that many people are too young or too old to till the fields, or living in the city, that means you're going to have a pretty low farmers to food ratio compared to what we have now.

Considering that we'll still need as many people as we have now to build machinery, store, distribute and prepare food, build new houses, do research, run basic government services, educate new people, provide entertainment and do all the other things that are required to operate a high people density country, that might become problematic. We're probably going to have to shut down a lot of features that we're currently used to because we need more people who currently have jobs to perform to become farmers.

And this is even assuming that farmers only have to tend to crops, they have much more stuff to do around the farm that will add to their 40 hour workload, so it's probably more reasonable to say that each farmer can support about 6 people. That's most likely just a little bit more than their own family (assuming 2 plots per farm, they could support about 12 people, which probably includes themselves, three kids, and at least one grandparent; basically you can support 1 city family per farm family. That means to support a city like New York (with 10 million inhabitants) you'll need about 1.5 to 2 million farms built around it.

[zarus tathra]

If the system had zero redundancy the way you suppose, there wouldn't be any unemployment. Then factor in the very real possibility that most people produce at most 1/2 the optimal rate, which is a hilariously generous estimate, then factor in all the redundant "job creation" done by the government and unions and Wall Street, and then planned obsolescence and industrial sabotage and inefficiencies from shoddy engineering.

China's going through a labor shortage, but the thing is, their machines and management are so inefficient they need 10 times as many people to do half as much work as we do. Face it, the price system is finished, or it would be, if it didn't cripple itself so artfully.

[Plu]

Cute how you think that your system would not have the same redundancy that the current one does.

[zarus tathra]

If you get rid of planned obsolescence, then you'd probably have to make 1/2 as much product, AT MOST. Decentralized quality control, like Yelp but peer-to-peer, would solve this. So that's one 2x multiplier of efficiency.

Then you add in statistical process control and advanced inventory management like Kanban, which time and time again has been shown to dramatically increase quality and productivity and decrease costs with minimal rework of design. This is at least 1.5x, but that's very conservative.

Using software inspections and competitive engineering in the style of Tom Gilb would allow the vast majority of the failed software and engineering projects to actually succeed, which is at least another 2x multiplier of efficiency.

Then add in some kind of AI control system like Cybersyn to detect irregularities like high absenteeism and fiscal corruption. This thing allowed 200 strikebreakers to do the work of 40,000 striking truckers, delivering food where it was needed. Let's call this a 4x multiplier of efficiency.

So you have 2x1.5x2x4=24. I know that this looks like magic, but keep in mind that Cybersyn was built in the 70's, and that statistical process control was what allowed Japan to make the best products in the world less than 5 years after World War 2 wiped out their industrial base. And this is without Taylorist shop management and projected improvements due to automation and artifical intelligence demand prediction.

[stromboli]

Right. 100 square feet for one person. Sounds good, assuming a vegetarian diet. A cow, one, requires from 2-5 acres, depending on the forage. Add three people, a typical family. Want pork? Add more acreage. Want to produce food for someone other than the 4? Acreage. Try to harvest hay off of 5-10 acres with a scythe. You need machinery. You need barns for animals, sheds for equipment, feeders, extra feed in case your crop yield is poor, and so on. Farming is all about covering the contingencies, because they are endless.

If you live on a biointensive source for your people on a strictly vegetarian diet, well and good. Assuming a consistent water supply, good planning and not relying on nature to provide rain and not having to worry about any adverse weather, fine. But once you scale up past the initial subsistence farming, is where the problems lie. You can't have a society devoted entirely to individual subsistence farming, unless you are talking a very small scale, limited population society. Which is what aitm and I both stipulated. Utopia only works with a small group that is completely on the same page philosophically and every other way. Like I keep saying, Utopia has been tried many times in history, and I know of no case where it worked. I'd be happy to see an example if you have one.

[La Dolce Vita]

The perfect society is a mixture of the worst of fascism and communism, and is built around oppression and discrimination? I have a hard time believing this thread is serious.

[aitm]

I think in order to even begin such an endeavor the population would have to be addressed. I don't think a system is capable without drastic reduction in, shall we call it, the "useless factor"....oh, interesting side thought, but what do we do with the severely disabled and mentally unstable? Soylent green???  :/

[zarus tathra]

I think in order to even begin such an endeavor the population would have to be addressed. I don't think a system is capable without drastic reduction in, shall we call it, the "useless factor"....oh, interesting side thought, but what do we do with the severely disabled and mentally unstable? Soylent green??? :/

They go on the farms. They farm/fish, or they die. They can wander all they want, they might even make it back to "civilization." It doesn't matter. The default response to any kind of bullshit will be sending people to a farm. The prison population would be a fraction of what it is now.

And we don't even have to violently destroy corporate society, our recent experience is that it can not survive without support from the central bank. If we refuse to support the central bank, then it will fall all on its own.

[Plu]

The perfect society is a mixture of the worst of fascism and communism, and is built around oppression and discrimination? I have a hard time believing this thread is serious.

This.

[zarus tathra]

The perfect society is a mixture of the worst of fascism and communism, and is built around oppression and discrimination? I have a hard time believing this thread is serious.

I've posted paragraph after paragraph, link after link. I'd like to think you can do better than this.

If we keep the current system, either we'll have mass unemployment, or we'll have full employment and constant, repeated crises of overproduction and underproduction. Our ecosystem and especially our financial system can not sustain too much of this.

I know this sounds like Marx, but Marx didn't have the computer technology we do today. This by itself would be enough to guarantee success, IMO.

And Pol Pot didn't allow people to own land, or anything. The farmers, on the other hand, would be living the survivalist dream if they play their cards right.

[Plu]

It actually sums it up quite well. You have a communist economic system, where everyone who you deem "useless" is opressed by being dumped on a farm where they will either grow food or die, regardless of what they wanted to do with their life.

The least you could do, if you're serious, is admit that it's what your personaly perfect society is built around.

[zarus tathra]

In our current system, you get a job, or you die, or you go on government assistance and help destabilize the system. In my system, you get a job or you get your own plot of land in the countryside and the opportunity to eat better than 90% of corporate citizens do now. We'll even give you guns to hunt with/defend yourself.

There will always be a working class, unless we get some super-computer that controls a robot army to do everything for us. And even a transhumanist like me would not trust that.

[Plu]

In our current system, you get a job, or you die, or you go on government assistance and help destabilize the system. In my system, you get a job or you get your own plot of land in the countryside and the opportunity to eat better than 90% of corporate citizens do now.

In our current system, you get a job. In your system, the system sends you to a farm. That's where the "opressive communist" part is coming from.