axib @ axib @beehaw.org

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The technology already exists to create food or other things at scale though without much manual labour so I disagree with that assertion.

It exists now, but it is complicated to produce and maintain, let alone develop from scratch. I don't think it can be done by a village of 300 people, even if they have access to all the information they could need and education and all that. Even if they had all the knowledge needed, the infrastructure required to produce it is large and expensive. Maybe a village could specialize in producing tractors, but I don't think they could also make their own cell phones. And they only need so many tractors for themselves, so what would they do next? Either sell the additional tractors they build to another village, or change their production lines to make something else-- though they may need more tractors suddenly in the future.

A lot of what you're saying relies on efficient recycling and automation. Once we have this, then sure maybe a sharing utopia would be possible. But I'm not convinced that we're close to that. A lot of companies are trying to develop self driving cars, a lot of money stands to be made from that over paying truck drivers/taxis/etc. But it's hard. Japan is investing a lot in automation because of their aging population causing future labour shortages. We're making progress but it takes a lot of time, and it's not clear if it will ever be completely possible. So currently it is basically "dream technology".

You assume capitalism always offers more, it doesn’t necessarily and even if it does at the beginning over time it would merely exploit more and more people until they got fed up enough to leave, more people would do that currently if there was any place to go where they didn’t have to be exploited and could live a happy life with all they needed but there isn’t really anywhere like that currently.

Have you read about the history of the Soviet Union? The number of people fleeing from East to West was significant enough to build a wall to keep them in. Fleeing in the other direction was almost unheard of. I don't think simply "giving up capitalism" is all that we need to create a better life, I think there still needs to be some way of deciding how to allocate resources that are used for different things. Historically it seems like the answer to that is either having a centralized government make the decisions, or having a capitalist free market do it. Both can be corrupted, make bad decisions, and result in shortages of food and other essentials. Both can cause some polarization of wealth. I don't think there's a third option of "everyone just be better", since once you reach a certain point, it only takes a few people taking advantage of a system to ruin it. I would happily just "be better", but I don't have enough faith in others to do the same. I'd only have to observe a few people taking advantage before deciding that the system is doomed and I'd be better off in a different economic system.

I think smaller communities would be great for many reasons. But I think scale is a key to our current level of productivity. And I think it's required for building certain complicated technologies, like industrial farm equipment or computer chips. And without industrial farm equipment, farmers are less productive, so your village of 300 people might need to be mostly farmers. I think this is what was required in the past, but with the industrial revolution it opened up so people could specialize in other things.

There wouldn't need to be capitalist villages, I think that some would inevitably form. Maybe many people are okay to just do a job and get rewarded the same as everyone else, but others might prefer something closer to the current system. And assuming no one is preventing them from existing, how do you prevent someone from deciding that they would be better off in a capitalist village where they might get paid more than in the sharing village?

Maybe you're right that nuclear power is a red herring. Say we rely on solar panels or windmills. I think these are also complicated to build and require some rare materials. Who would volunteer to go to a remote copper mine if they could instead stay at home and work on something else for the same reward?

And maybe people are passionate about that sort of thing, so it'd be okay. But surely there are some jobs that are important but not as appealing. Who would clean the sewers or do something a bit dangerous like fix power lines or maybe washing windows? And I'd bet that many people might still go to 8+ years of medical school to become a doctor, but would people still do that for some less appealing careers?

So I feel like you need to offer some extra reward to incentivize people to do jobs that they wouldn't want to do. Part of why I say this is because I'm counting down the days until I can have a vacation, and eventually retire. My job is "okay" but I'd rather work on fun hobby projects, but I don't think anyone would ever pay me for them. One viable option is for me to work my normal job to make money to buy food, but then take time off to work on fun stuff that I enjoy, but no one wants to pay me for (or trade me for food).

So assuming you offer some reward to people for the less fun jobs, how do you prevent them leaving for capitalist villages which would presumably always reward them more? This is the key issue IMO. Unless getting rid of capitalism results in huge savings by not needing to advertise, compete, etc.

I mention dream technology because I feel like that can help with some of the scale issues. Maybe with unlimited power and 3D printers, a small village could produce everything they need, so you don't need to worry about struggling just to produce everything you need for survival.

I'm trying to politely explain that if you want people to care more about your software, then you should go to more effort to explain it. If you just dump your source code online with minimal explanation, not as many people will care as if you explain what you're trying to solve, how your thing works, and maybe alternatives that you considered, future features you'd like to address. Going through the source is the hardest part that many people might not want to bother doing. But most people might read a brief description and watch a short video, even if they aren't all that interested in your idea at first. Even if they are skeptical of the need for a barter system, they can still appreciate the work you put in, and offer advice on the technical side, to help you with this and future projects.

I did skim your source and it looks like it's mostly wrappers around a database. Some ideas, if you wanted to write about it:

• what are the different options that I user has? It looks like they can say "I want X" or "I have Y", then what happens next? I shouldn't need to read your source code to understand what your software does.
• I saw something about connecting to your database over TOR, I don't quite understand that. If there's an exchange of real good, what is the benefit of TOR? Don't you have to break anonymity to trade real goods?
• how is your database hosted? If this is for a "currencies have collapsed" type of scenario, instead of relying on TOR, it might make sense to rely on a decentralized database that exists on everyone's phones.
• security concerns: it looks like people can write to the database. Does that mean someone could also erase all the entries? How can you prevent abuse like that?

I think that can work well on the scale of a small village or something, where everyone knows each other. But I think it falls apart once you get above a certain number of people, maybe around 300.

After that I feel like inevitably enough people just stop caring if they are taking more than they should, or not contributing more than they should. And there are too many people for everyone to keep track of. Plus, it's easier for leadership to be corrupted at this stage.

And it's even more complicated if say like... you can go work in the capitalist village and make a ton of money and get treated lavishly, then retire to your home sharing commune where you can benefit from the system without having had to contribute to it. (for example, working in the US and then retiring in any country with public healthcare). I think part of the justification for the Berlin Wall was to prevent "brain drain". So it seems plausible that "sharing societies" also kind of tend to be "you are not allowed to leave" societies, and that is often not good.

That being said, if we ever get unlimited cheap power (fusion? fission seems like it is "close" but falls short for other reasons), and some sort of Star Trek food replicator technology, or at least fully automated farms that only need the nearly free power, then maybe we'll have such abundance that we will be able to give away essential supplies like food for free. Water is already somewhat free (public drinking fountains). If we can ever get some cheap and effective mass transit, then maybe we'll have abundant housing too?

Thanks, I get how barter would help in that case, but without running your software or seeing a demo of what it does, it's not clear to me how it works, or why it's better than alternatives. You said this elsewhere:

what about the software determining the value of the products, can you answer that.

Now that sounds interesting, how does it determine the value of products? And in the absence of money, how does it even represent value?

I'm asking this because I'm curious, but I'm also trying to give you tips on how to make a more engaging post. I'm not super interested in actually switching to bartering instead of using money right now, but I'd read about how your project works for a few minutes if you want to write about it. I suspect others might feel the same way. I looked at your github repo README and it's all just technical instructions on how to run it.

After reading an explanation for how it works and why it's more useful than other alternatives, then I might consider actually downloading the source and trying to use it.

Especially if you make bold claims like "is this the future of commerce" ... you have to at least explain what you did if you're going to say something like that.

ah, interesting! I might have heard that this was misquoted before (and forgot), but I didn't know it was from the bible.

"... of all kinds of evil" is interesting too. To me this implies that loving money isn't necessarily always a problem, if it means say being frugal to save money/food to survive the winter or something, or saving for your children's future.

Do you have a demo video or something to watch? Or could you provide a bit more detail about the problem you're trying to solve, what a typical use case might be? I rarely clone a github repo and try running it. Not just because it takes time and I'm often browsing on my phone, but because I don't want to let potentially malicious code run on my computer.

I agree that money can seem like the cause of a lot of problems, but ultimately isn't it a pretty good intermediary for trade? Maybe skipping money entirely would be great in the event of some sort of global currency collapse, but even then, maybe we would just use bottle caps or something?

And even if someone can prove that money is indeed a bad thing, even if we abolished it and resorted to barter... wouldn't some people just hoard some other in-demand commodity and become powerful through that?

I feel like money isn't the root of all evil, it's just a representation of wealth and people hoarding wealth is probably the real issue.

It is fairly difficult, but there are a few reasons why I found the difficulty more pleasant:

• pacing: the most difficult parts you'll first encounter are optional bonus objectives (strawberries) that you can skip and come back to later. So you can take your time and get them as you go when you feel like it, and if you get frustrated you can continue with the main storyline for a bit (this happened to me a few times when I was playing, so it was basically continuous enjoyment)
• very forgiving: in Hollow Knight, it's like Dark Souls where if you die, you lose your in-game currency and need to make your way back to your corpse to recover it, and if you die again then you lose it completely. But in Celeste, you get a checkpoint at every "screen", so it's very forgiving to experiment new techniques and just keep trying over and over again. There are some longer patches so that it doesn't feel too easy, but overall I really liked it
• most of the storyline is accessible without having to do much extra. There are some more challenging levels at the end that require finding some hidden unlocks earlier in the game, and beating some tougher challenges that I'm going through now.

But fair point, even the base storyline is quite challenging, especially if you don't love this genre. I'll edit my comment to be more clear. They do add some "assist mode" to make it easier if you want to enjoy the story, but I'm not sure if it's still fun to play it that way.

I recently discovered Celeste and love it so far. It's a skilled platformer that doesn't seem as punishing (edit) compared to other platformers that I've played, but still challenging enough to be satisfying. (edit: And the base story difficulty is not as bad as some other platformer games). The story is also really nice (overcoming depression and mental health stuff), not something I usually play but I was really engaged with it, and communicated in a nice simple way (not a ton of cutscenes like story-heavy games). edit: Celeste is similar to Hollow Knight, though I got stuck at a part of Hollow Knight and haven't picked it back up in a while. Celeste is much easier than N++ and Super Meat Boy, IMO.

(I had intended to play it on my 4k TV, but I found that it has a significant delay that makes it hard, and I somehow didn't notice it in other games. It's much easier to play on my PC).

Also RE the OP's mention of simple phone games, I really like "Simon Tatham's Puzzles": iOS, Android on Google Play and F-Droid. It's a collection of simple puzzle games that I enjoy idly playing for a few minutes at a time.

I've been interested in that! How do you like it compare to games like OpenTTD, Cities: Skylines, and Factorio (sort of)?

I love the trains in Factorio, and I enjoyed trying out OpenTTD for a bit, but I eventually got bored with it because airlines were easy money, and it was too easy to lose money when building a train network, and it took too long to expand. In Cities: Skylines I could never really figure out how to fix traffic, I felt like silly little things were causing it to back up. I don't think I ever really got seriously into rail traffic in it, though.