A different economy

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/what-if-anyone-could-build-a-sustainable-civilization-from-scratch?trk_source=recommended

Not everyone runs Linux. It may be a far superior OS to Windows, but it takes maintenance and time. Some people aren’t willing to spend that time.
Same with other software. You can find open source software to replace anything commercial, but it tends to take a little bit more maintenance and a little bit more time.

This becomes exaggerated in the hardware-space. While I have many of the required skills to build that sort of open-source hardware, and while I have the skills to administer an open-source-software system, many people do not. Either because they don’t want to, they can’t dedicate their time, or, well, perhaps they simply can’t. Not everyone is an engineer.

Here’s a challenge. Go out to your garage and build something. Build, heck, I don’t know. Build a desk. What skills did you use?

  • Sawing
  • Sanding
  • Painting
  • Planing
  • Doweling/screwing/glueing

Do you have those skills? Maybe. I do. But does your neighbor? And their neighbor. Probably not. Not everyone has the ability to build a desk. They can learn though.


I fully support this. I would love it if instead of going to the shop to buy a desk I could chat to the guy down the road and ask him to build me one, and in return I’ll sew him a pair of trousers. But to be honest, in today’s money driven world, I don’t see it happening. People simply don’t have the practical skills required to sustain their own standard of living.
And lets admit it, there’s no way I could be typing this on a computer I built myself. No-one within the city has the nano-fabrication technology to build the hundreds of chips used in this laptop.


Finally, let me share some Fiction. I recently read Saga of Seven Suns by Kevin J Anderson (the whole series). In it there are a group of people called ‘Roamers.’ They are treated like the scum of humanity. They exist in the harshest places, they mine metal on lava planets, they harvest hydrogen from the skies of gas giants. They do not have all the technology in the world. They build it all themselves. They also have a very high mortality rate.
But my favorite thing is the way they build their technology. They don’t build it modular. Because if it’s modular you have to have spare modules if a module breaks. They build things hackable. Everything they build they can tear down and build into something else.

We don’t have the technology for that yet. Or maybe we don’t have the skills. Perhaps it is something that can never be done, as without a certain level of technology, you stall. You can’t build the hydraulic actuators for a digger in your garage (Ok, actually, my neighbor can, he has a full-on-machine shop in his garage).

Well you’ve set me a challenge BPR. I’m going to dedicate the next couple of months of free time to designing. Designing the tools a person would need to turn what they have from one thing into another. Because that’s what we need before this sort of thing becomes technically feasible.

Meh, ppl are lazy… they can read but they don’t contemplate on.
They have lunch but they only eat it. First one must take into account the meaning of a process/action as a whole. Same is in industry, do study PLM (project lifetime management) to understand a little bit more of what i imply.
Why do you think there’s exploitation?

Really this whole thing explodes, when you can build a robot capable of building robots,
that then harvests materials, to be used to build more robots.

A 3d printer, that can print a 3d printer is also a fine start.

What I concern myself with personally, is energy.

I believe that waste water purification and solar energy collection can produce liquid diesel
carbon neutrally,

This could eliminate vast quantity of infrastructure.

Another Idea I like a lot is the Filter shower systems.

Australian engineering firm CINTEP has developed a product that cuts that number by more than half. The Water Recycling Shower looks and feels like an ordinary shower, but is able to slash water consumption by 70 percent. It does this by automatically cleaning, filtering and pasteurizing used water. The shower then recirculates and reuses 70 percent of that clean water. -

After open source “Life” arises, then open source medicine, and open source medical assistance can take off.

Symbiosis

The main downside with Linux is also still there, and that is the fact that the user is expected to learn how to use the console for a number of things that is completely GUI-driven in Windows. Another fact is that downloading apps. in Linux can be a hassle if the package is not neatly packed with everything it needs like what we see with Blender. Windows is a lot more used in part because using it is a lot easier, these days you don’t even need an instruction manual to get around it for the first time, not so much for Linux.

Also, as much as some hate the idea of corporations, keep in mind that the ethics exhibited by various FOSS organizations can be just as bad as the shadier ones, if not worse (see the GIMP foundation). You can still get hosed, maybe not monetarily, but in the way that software ideology takes precedence over the needs of the users and you get outright flamed by the devs. for daring to give a critical statement about functionality.

Making everything open source is not going to create a utopia, people will still be people, they will still have their own ideologies and ideas of what is or what is not ethical. They will still be vulnerable to succumbing to the darker side of the human condition.

What’s nice here is that something like this solves more than just distribution and wasteful ‘reinventing the wheel’ scenarios.

Consider, if you will, the rage factor. We’ve all heard of things like road rage, domestic violence and people who simply seem to snap and go on a rampage. Just the other day there was something in the news about a guy shooting and killing three other individuals over a parking space.

While I don’t think this is the whole of the problem, I believe a major contributing factor comes from stressful situations. For example, if you’ve ever worked in customer service or been to a department store I’m sure you’ve seen more than a few irate customers throwing a huge temper tantrum hoping to get some type of special treatment.

Little does the customer know that this type of behavior doesn’t stop there. This generally stresses out the recipient of this very poor behavior, probably even angers them a bit, especially since, being on the job, they can’t reciprocate and are otherwise forced to cater to the demands of these rather unlikeable people. This stress builds up and gets passed around, having been angered to the nth degree on the job someone might encounter a minor annoyance on the road and blow it into a major road rage incident or in harsher cases go home and take their anger out on their children or spouse. In extreme cases a person might get entirely fed up pick up a gun and show society what they really think of them.

In a world where rather than paying a corporation who is then obligated to fulfill the order one instead simply asks available talent to fulfill a particular need the ‘customer’ must keep in mind that the ‘provider’ is under no obligation whatsoever to fulfill any request and therefore must, heaven forbid, actually ask nicely and treat the provider with respect rather than disdain thus delivering what I believe would be a massive reduction in the overall stress levels of society. Fewer people walking around near the breaking point ready to blow up over the tiniest inconvenience.

In addition to that stress reducer you also have the time factor. If you’re not required to be at work at a specific time under the threat of punishment then you’re not going to have any of those stressful days running late, speeding down the road at unsafe speeds trying to avoid getting reprimanded. I believe quite a few traffic accidents occur during the morning rush, everyone racing to get to work on time, driving at unsafe speeds paying more attention to the clock than the road.

Plus, not needing to be in your desk at your designated time affords one the opportunity to dictate their own sleep schedule which is, by nature, not always exactly the same. This means people will be getting better sleep, they’ll be more rested, more alert and less irritable.

So even if people ‘work’ fewer days out of the week the days they do ‘work’ are more productive because they’re less stressed, well rested, actually enjoy what they do and like the people they’re doing it for.

P.S. I don’t see the less user friendly interface of Linux to be much of an issue. Say, for instance, OSX or Windows were made open source and the employees of Apple and Microsoft were freed to work on those operating systems, or anything else, as they so choose. Just because knowledge and skill becomes open source doesn’t mean all of a sudden anything not currently open source simply vanishes, it just becomes open source.

So people would still have a choice between Windows, OSX, Linux and possibly a number of new entries into the OS field. Moreover the safety of Windows would become less of an issue, people would have less of an incentive to write malicious software. Because they don’t hate those companies for withholding their intellectual property, they don’t have any reason to harbor animosity towards others.

Plus ad-ware/spy-ware becomes less of a problem. For what reason would anyone have to throw advertisements all over the place? For what reason would anyone need to spy on their ‘customers’ for market research?

All things considered, it’s just another demonstration of how easy it is these days to construct and publish a video . . .

http://opensourceecology.org/

it’s much more then just a video,

many groups, and people are refining it from all around the world,

they could just use a little help, making things less complicated, and cheaper, and stronger.