Calories, Joules, Watts vs. Dollar, Euro, Yen

"We have to begin regarding Calories, Joules and Watts as the key currencies rather than the Dollar, Euro and Yen."

"At present, economics is the study of how people transform nature to meet their needs and it treats the exploitation of finite natural resources including energy, water, air, forests, arable land and oceans as externalities, which they are not.  For example, we cannot pollute and damage natural ecosystems and their local communities ad infinitum without severe repercussions to their underlying sustainability."

"The current model of the disposable economy operates as a system for transforming low-entropy raw materials and energy into high-entropy toxic waste and unavailable energy, while providing society with interim goods and services and the temporary satisfaction that most deliver.  Any such transformations in the economy mean that there will be less low-entropy materials and energy available for natural ecosystems. Mounting evidence of this conflict demonstrates the limits to our national, regional and global growth!"

50% U.S. Unemployment? Not in 20 years. Right Now.

Note: You say we exaggerated? Your 2014 BLS Update is below.

#IncomprehensibleTruth is still truth. This is only the very beginning of the kinds of breathtaking wake up calls and cataclysmic shifts we'll discover amidst accelerating #BigData in the coming decade.

The first tenant of economics is, "compared to what?" What do we mean by #Unemployment? How many ways has that word been laundered, spun, and compared to false and misleading metrics, to date? This chart begins to pull back the curtain; but you should get the data for yourself and press #OpenData into service of both illuminating our current predicament and forging new ways forward.

Fig 1. -- Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate.

LEGEND
totnonpart (top purple line) =  Total U.S. Labor Non-Participant Rate. Number of Americans displaced, discarded, disabled, dropped out of the count and completely off the Workforce Map.
civnonpart (orange/yellow line) = Civilian Labor Force Non-Participation Rate (100-civpart).
u6rate (green line) = True Total #Unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons.
unrate (bottom blue line) = MSM Consensus Crowd-Control #Unemployment Story

Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED mobile)

Don't like that slice on The Data? Try the direct BLS view on for size:

2014 BLS Update

Still don't like The Data? Think it's out of context? Try this compared to what view, vs. GDP & Profits:


What will really bake your post-scarcity noodle is that right now, in 2013, we've created the first 3D printed food, straight from the Star Trek replicator. Got change for a paradigm?

Wall Street Psycho Inmates Still Running the Asylum

Oh, you thought the worst was over? They're already trying to bury the bodies again. "Now, citing competitive concerns, bankers are pressing the Fed to limit its release of information—expected as early as next week—to what was published after the first test of big banks in 2009" (Lenders Stress Over Test Results, WSJ). So much for sunlight, transparency, and truth.

"Capitalism has shortfalls," says Richest Man in the World, Bill Gates.

“Capitalism has worked phenomenally. Look at North Korea versus South Korea, or China before and after 1979. Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t ... take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that. We don’t have to [ask] whether capitalism is wrong.” - Bill Gates: 'I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’ - Telegraph

This is precisely the premise of our work in these pages. It's not about whether an abstract system is right or wrong, but whether or not it's accomplishing all of our human objectives. Industrial capitalism worked for the stage of civilization that the so-called advanced west traversed over the past 150 years; it's simply not adequate for the next leg of the journey. We can and should immediately offset poverty and homelessness with Basic Income and continue to evolve toward maximum human flourishing.

Core issue that killed #MLK was #EconomicInequality #ItsNotAboutRace It's about #BasicIncome Sustainable #Postscarcity #EndPoverty

It's so not about race. The core issue that killed #MLK was moving beyond superficial distinctions of color and creed, taking on the core malignancy of the human condition: escalating and unsustainable economic inequality. 

King's evolving political advocacy in his later years ... paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with whom King was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Towards the time of his murder, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."

Of course, the word distribution has long since become an emotionally hijacked firestarter keyword of the fundamentalist tinfoil hat lexicon; and actually, it's perhaps not the most accurate word to describe the challenges of a sustainable postscarcity circulatory system. Notwithstanding, a preponderance of economic scholarship over the most recent half dozen decades or so has gradually converged on the most logical first step, variously described as Basic Income, Universal Basic Income (UBI), Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), and similar language-specific nomenclature that crosses virtually all ephemeral cultural and language boundaries.

Follow, learn, and join the rapidly rising global #BasicIncome trend on twitter:

• @BasicIncome
• Facebook: Basic Income Rights
• @RentaBasica
• @RevenuDevie
• @BasicIncome_J
• @Grundeinkommen
• @BINews

And if all that is still not enough to bring you up to warp speed, here's Captain Picard: Make it So.

Quants: "If people don't complain now, then it serves them right when the next financial crisis happens."

Captain Picard on the Fate of Capitalism

Maybe all the data on this site is too mind numbing. Let's try something different.

Explore more about how "the economics of the are future somewhat different."

5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions

When the tinfoil hat brigade says that our economy is a Ponzi pyramid, they're essentially right. After U.S. President Lincoln was assassinated (perhaps in part because he printed the Greenback; the people's currency), the banksters hijacked the system. "So it was a large fraud that was backstopped by a sort of over-fraud." - Ellen Brown. Cue the 20:25 mark to get the 30 seconds prior that provides context for that quotation. Where thinking people of conscience can legitimately differ is considering the matter of which form of social capitalism, or free market socialism, which mashup of an adaptive mixed economy to implement in order to address the resulting unsustainable resource skews, to provide sustainable currency circulation -- not distribution -- via a Basic Income, or similar program that ensures consistent, healthy, transpiration at the capillary level of the economic body.

Regardless of what you might have been told by an abusive parent or others, you're smart. Probably very smart, or you likely wouldn't be reading these words. So, instead of spoon feeding you yet another forgettable Top 10, the subject of this post is your assignment: watch the full video. Do the homework. Write your list of the the top 5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions that you discover in the comments here. We can do this. We can increment the system, raise it to a more sustainable, adaptive level without throwing out the baby with the bath water. That's the '++' of Capitalism++.