I have been following your work since you appeared on a panel with Steve Keen for a group called Wise Response New Zealand. Thank you for making your work available!!!
Unbelievably impressed Simon. If you build it they will come, I might come too! Or maybe help to build a sister community here in rural upstate NY based upon those same principles.
Interesting solutions. Some of them are a bit out there for this old metallurgist, but I agree that most are desperately needed. Designing a tech center/ village of the future from a blank slate in the middle of nowhere sounds very intriguing and should develop good data for future designs. However, few people will be interested in living that way until they have no choice. We also need to be envisioning a way to convert cities as they inevitably depopulate and rural small towns that are not blank slates but are presently sliding into oblivion. Mining needs to get in gear to produce the materials needed which means governments need to enable responsible mining not delay and outlaw it. The next 30 years will be very interesting and uncertain for most people. Resiliency will be a persons most important personality trait.
Simon is repeating things he and I have talked about, which is interesting. Regenerative Governance is a much better approach than Venus, though they share a lot of similarities.
Dear Simon, on one of the nice slides you had: So, what do we do? - We must collectively decide... I thought about it before as well. we miss a platform where we could interact collectively.(i missed during lecture) more details on it - have any ideas? Some global voting software or? (In back of head I aslo have what JF - mentioned that people usually are not trained in what they out to want. In your Tier 2 economic slide - do you really see a place for this in future? (About tier2) While keeping this rate of resource depletion vs. what TVP calls for an access to all inhabitants..seems to me a value update or (paradigm change) as you called seem inevitable. Thanks for all the extensional work!
I am concerned that the decision trees you lay out seem to require centralized control of many decisions in societies. If this is true, how do they respond to shifts in demand? Imaging your city planners determine that on average people want x amount of wine and y amount of beer. The planners determine how to integrate this into the plan. Consumer preferences change and now people want a different amount of wines vs beer. Or to take something more a basic need like clothing, demand shift to more wool and less cotton. How does the system detect and respond to these changes in basic needs without prices?
The things you own end up owning you. The average house has 4 tonnes of stuff in it, I wonder how much of that is actually a net positive for us. I'm sure we could pare down our stuff per capita till each person could carry it in a backpack.
It is guaranteed that the Sun will have a ‘BIG’ say in all our future plans, and sooner than many can’t even imagine. All bets are going g to be ‘off’ unless the ‘powers’ that like to think they are powers recognise this, and begin to prepare for ‘events’, and right soon. The clock is ticking.
I appreciate much of what Simon has to say about raw materials and the restructuring of the industrial landscape, especially regarding the new technologies converging toward a good material future (LFTRs and microwave low density minerals processing). I do have an issue with the framing around population however (although I don't think this is a core portion of the arguments). The core of the issue is that population control is immoral, no matter how it is introduced and no matter which side it is implemented for (the increase or decrease of it). Intelligent management of ressources is a good thing, however, I fear that any person considering any measure of population control completely misses the mark around the fact that population is a fundamentally self-regulating system anyway. The biggest issue with any proposed decrease is that it has to account for the massive aging of the population required for it to happen, which just isn't sustainable economically or morally. You cannot count on forging a new population level on the backs of the younger population who will have to be the slaves of the old ones who will depend on them to survive in old age and you cannot expect the old to die faster to solve that problem. We are already in a population time bomb through the unsustainable levels of low birth rates in most countries around the world and we have yet to see the effect of the unprecedented level of dependency ratios we are creating. It is very likely that the next 20 years will be full of miserable old people who can't afford decent living conditions and young people unable to afford the economic and societal costs of caring for the elderly. Higher dependecy ratios are likely to be extremely corrosive to the social contract since it will likely break the pension system in the short to medium term and the young people who paid in to see no benefits will have legitimate grievances towards the old who broke it by not having children... Long story short, anyone who thinks population decreases are desirable have yet to consider that the next 20 years will already be extremely corrosive to the social fabric of societies as a result of it and some countries are likely to fall into chaos because of it. We are already in a population crunch environment and it will not be pretty.
Agreed on the demographic collapse. Other real challenges I see are localized production of semiconductors, and increasing state control, regulation and centralized planning. If you want televisions, you'll probably have to go analog, because I don't see high resolution OLED displays being built locally in each settlement.
@@EnvironmentalCoffeehouse Looks to me like the philosophical equivalent of defining your ideology as ''the one where only good things happen''. You might want to define what you mean by ''empower females''. Women today in most countries are legitimately and objectively the most ''empowered'' they have been in human history and yet we are still seeing this population bomb in the countries where they precisely are the most empowered, sometimes even legally above men. If anything, it looks like fertility is inversely proportional to how ''empowered'' women are, considering the most fertile countries on Earth are also the most unequal (think much of Africa and the Middle East). I am not suggesting we reverse the course of history of legitimate social progress (it is absolutely a moral good on many fronts), but I think your argument shows a lack of perspective on what is happening. The amount of power you give to women is at best unrelated to births and at worst, inversely proportional to fertility. Rainbows and peace signs won't solve the population bomb here.
Simon, we have been over this. Unsustainable is unsustainable. The Venus concept completely contradicts your own analysis. While there is the claim of designing to meet the needs of those living in the city, this is irrelevant if it is not aligned with the needs of the bio-region. And, Venus' emphasis on hi-tech solutions simply at smaller scale ignores that those technologies are inherently unsustainable and depend on future discoveries to make them make sense - just like all the tech you claim can't be done because of resource constraints. I do not understand why you are so in love with the Venus Project when it is the opposite of what your own research says we should do. Regenerative Governance is the key, not technology and fancy tech. It is the **decision-making** that makes or breaks whether a society is sustainable. You still do not seem understand this.
What is planned for Venus Evolution is a merging of all ideas. Degrowth, permaculture, regen ag, circular economy, steady state economy and will use Venus Architecture. All merging with my work of resource constraints.
@@simonp.michaux1638 That's all naturally included in anything called "regenerative", Simon. Despite our direct conversations, you do not appear to have a clear sense of what Regenerative is, and the Venus project absolutely does not. Regenerative Governance is a system already fully aligned with what is and is not regenerative and goes far beyond Venus or the Doughnut economy by providing a governmental structure. No other system or model does. Why would you embrace something that is sub-regenerative rather than something that aligns in every way with regenerativity and provides the structure at EVERY scale, not just cities, to accomplish it? You are hitching your wagon to the wrong horse.
@@simonp.michaux1638 Your work is the math. The limits have been understood for a very long time. I identified the need to reduce consumption 80% well over ten years ago with simple logic and simple math. There is nothing special in this, Simon, so I am not sure what "merging your work" means. If you mean providing the math, great. We need people running the actual numbers. But conceptually and logically, it's all been covered for a long time. This is from the Venus website: "Comprehensive technology (CT), assumes double the natural resources of BAU but also an advanced technological infrastructure, rapidly adopted, that increases the efficiency with which we extract and use resources while abating pollution. Stabilized World (SW), assumes double the natural resources of BAU, a comprehensive technology, and a change in societal values and priorities." As I told you when you first told me you were interested in the Venus model, their focus on tech is a non-starter. 2x the resources of BAU????? You have already acknowledged we do not have the resources for ONE time of BAU. What the hell are you thinking now? I understand you are a tech-oriented person, I mean, look at your field, but I had hoped you had gained some understanding of regenerative systems via our conversations. You do not seem to have done so.
@@simonp.michaux1638 Simon, that you even describe "merging" all these things says it all. Regenerative = systemic. There is nothing to merge as nothing is separate. What needs to be merged is people's brains with regenerative knowledge so they can understand. We should talk. You're still not understanding what regenerative means. Venus never has, either. Close, but close only counts with bombs and horseshoes. Regenerative is a threshold, not a continuum. Close will lead to collapse just as surely as totally unsustainable will, but perhaps a little more slowly.
Based on what I know from The Venus Project, the buildings and high tech designs you see are just a manifestation of a train of thought under certain conditions , they by themselves are not ALL the project is about. The most important part of it is the basic way of thinking that it involves. As it's originator has always said, the most important aspect of the venus project is the social design, the value system that it involves. Have you looked at it in depth? If you've done only cursory examination of The Venus Project then I understand why you might think it's about the high-tech stuff. But in essence, it is not.
Well at least I am doing something. I see very little attempts to go after the real issues. For the record I go after energy first then sourcing of commodities. Perhaps I could leave the money systems to you?
@@simonp.michaux1638 The Chinese plan for 1000 years. The Russians plan for 100 years. The Germans plan for 50 years. The Americans ride in on a horse with their cowboy hats and blow up everyone's plan. How on God's green Earth do you think that you will forecast out 500 years? It's capitalism, man. Look backwards 500 years. All the central plans crumbled to nothing. The true value of society was all created with open markets. Maybe you could argue that there is some kind of net benefit from state control in China. But I am not even confident that this is truly the case. Now cast your eyes 500 years in the future. I think that the best thing that you could is advocate and be involved in liquid metal reactors. I would way rather see you throw your efforts in chasing down the feasibility of this technology. Technology is upstream of politics. I am done with "smart" people telling me how to organize things. Build something and I will buy it. Good day sir.
I'm from the Russian-speaking community. People in the Russian-speaking community, as you can see on RU-vid, have 1.5 million subscribers. Zluzko, who works with the channel, moved to Florida months ago to meet with Roxanne. What he saw there surprised him. What surprised him was that the project had started to change its direction, namely towards what Simon was talking about. The scary thing is that everyone who worked on it in Florida kept quiet. Sluzko started to reveal this topic recently, before he couldn't because his mouth was closed with a non-disclosure pact. Now sluzko can only talk about something because this Simon started his movement. If Simon is not stopped it will damage the reputation of Jacques Fresco's legacy, it will undermine the work of Jacques who has worked for this all his life. it's a document that was made by the Russian-speaking team. A sort of synopsis of the current situation. docs.google.com/document/d/1-BXq9oXBC9e8eQsbLxdh0T0FdiJEzN1phX3c9Og0baU/edit?pli=1#heading=h.hhfqa5nwv5dm and this is a podcast that Sluzko did. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-mS91MrXKb5E.html These links are in Russian, I hope you can translate them into English if you are interested.
