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Scheduled society

Track every thing as a virtual placement
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The purpose of this idea is to end suffering. End traffic. End waiting for things.

Pretty much every job or work can be distilled into take A to B, do Y for B, assemble X with Y, combine X and Y, transfer M information into N. So, transporting people or goods. Doing services for people or assembling things like burgers or physical objects or even software (combining of information). Data entry or teaching. Care work.

Convert every human activity into a virtual placement token. If you have the placement token, you can do the activity on your token. So that could be a token to assume a place on a road in your car.

Most aspects of human life can be financialised. Do you want to drive at rush hour? Your virtual placement is more expensive. Do you want to buy some thing? How soon do you want it?

It turns out that people need little to survive: every person needs X amount of water to live, Y amount of food, to sleep in location Z.

This idea is that everyone is assigned an amount of tokens in each functional area of life. All traditional government benefits and adult social care and NHS funding is cancelled and converted into virtual placement token instead. Every thing is designed to maximise provision of what can be exchanged from virtual placement tokens.

Each person is allocated a virtual placement token which is worth a service or an amount of food, or to receive a medicine or to receive a service.

The government will work out to provide X number of people Y amount of food, it will need to employ N number of people to create a food production chain.

Placement tokens are also scheduled. Not everyone who is entitled to eating food can receive food at the same time as everyone else. So the tokens need to be scheduled. Communal kitchens can feed hundreds of people if people arriving to them are scheduled.

chronological, Mar 12 2020

QS https://quantifiedself.com
"ultra financialisation of every aspect of life" -> quantized self? [Mindey, Mar 12 2020]

[link]






       We can call the tokens "ration cards" and the whole system something about working together as a group. Communityism? Communing? Something like that.
Voice, Mar 12 2020
  

       Not so; the idea states // every person needs X amount of water to live, Y amount of food, to sleep in location Z. // and for most of the time - the famine in the 1930's was a prime example- the Soviet system didn't even provide that minimum.
8th of 7, Mar 12 2020
  

       Tokenomics 101 -- society doesn't need money to function properly. Ticketing systen can do it. But once you start seeing sub-optimialities, the token exchanges will rise, and the money is anything used as a liquid asset for exchange. So, even a small sub-optimality leads to money formatiom, and capitalism formation... which is an expression of the presence of sub-optimalities in the system, and people trying to fix them themselves through trade. Now, if we are the borg, we could resolve the sub- optimalities before they arise, and in case our society becomes the borg, we would actually run the system something like that. Howevever, even in that world, you won't have perfect optimalities all the time. So, you'd have to create markets (call them agents-based stochastic AIs) in some places for some sub-optimalities to figure themselves out without the scheduler anyway.
Mindey, Mar 12 2020
  

       This could be read in the opposite direction, as a kind of ultra financialisation of every aspect of life. Want to be first into the bathroom in the morning? You need to bid against your spouse and children. Each cup of coffee you pour from the pot costs you. Your fridge is networked and has to bid for electricity against your microwave oven, etc.
pocmloc, Mar 12 2020
  

       > ultra financialisation of every aspect of life   

       This is how this idea should be read.
chronological, Mar 12 2020
  

       Unfortunately, some people NEED more (sleep, food, medication, help, whatever...) than other people, so "everyone gets the same" fails.
Also, some people WANT more than other people, and they will beg, borrow, trick, lie, steal or kill to get it.
neutrinos_shadow, Mar 12 2020
  

       Numbers! Evereywhere!
pocmloc, Mar 12 2020
  

       The core behind this idea was to replace the welfare state with one that provides only what's necessary for survival.   

       So benefits is changed from provision of money to provision of food.   

       English is my first language. I just hate wordy sentences.
chronological, Mar 13 2020
  

       Right, but anyone who wants to do more than just survive will start trading in their tokens. Some people will try to trade and lose out and end up worse off, having lost their tokens gambling or swapping for drugs. Others will ruthlessly exploit other people, gathering tokens, allowing them to game the system, buy out entire queues at the depots, or to bribe the depot organisers. Tokens can be loaned to those in need at swingeing rates of interest, leading to an underclass of debt peons and a 1% who have so much wealth and power they don't know what to do with it. The token issuing authorities will be lobbied to adjust the system in favour of individuals and organisations with wealth and power.
pocmloc, Mar 13 2020
  

       I suspect virtual placements would be tracked by a virtual market place.   

       You couldn't trade your places without going through the online digital system.   

       On benefits? You could trade your food placements for the bear minimum to buy better clothes or vice versa.
chronological, Mar 13 2020
  

       Do you think the digital system would be 100% reliable, with no bugs or loopholes to allow it to be exploited?
pocmloc, Mar 13 2020
  

       //The government will work out to provide X number of people Y amount of food, it will need to employ N number of people to create a food production chain.//   

       Outside actual communist countries, I think India was run a bit like this in the 1970s. It turns out, the relationship between inputs and outputs is too complicated and unstable for a government to manage.
pertinax, Mar 14 2020
  

       ^Because the neural networking algorithms and hardware wasn't to hand. If there was a country now, India would be one of the few.
wjt, Mar 14 2020
  

       ... but neural networks are still reactive (to training data). I suspect they would still fail every time a new invention or innovative business practice emerged
pertinax, Mar 14 2020
  

       > Sorry [chron], there's no way to read your idea as QS or "financialisation." Is English your first language?   

       It says so in the idea itself. Kind of rude too   

       > Most aspects of human life can be financialised.
chronological, Mar 14 2020
  

       Who pays for this? For the soup kitchen, who grows the food and how are they paid? For the roads, who builds them and how are they paid?   

       I don't doubt that implementing this system would successfully // end suffering. End traffic. End waiting for things//...albeit not quite in the way the author imagines.
sninctown, Mar 14 2020
  

       I think you've read too much of Ansible. Just becase you can specify basic conditions for all machines, and get them automatically satisfied by a scheduler or optimizer, doesn't mean it's a good idea:   

       - targets: all_humans
__needs:
__- name: making basic needs satisfied
____U.N.: basic_needs=version0.1 state=present
  

       There are lots of conditions that cannot be automatically satisfied yet,... and when they can, we'll do it every day.
Mindey, Mar 14 2020
  

       Agreed, technology is an exponential snow ball, barring little melts, and resource optimization is an underlying economic pillar whether the workings can be understood by the genius humans or not.
wjt, Mar 15 2020
  

       Money still exists in my idea's world.   

       Tokens are registered on a centralised digital account.   

       They can be transferred between provider and buyer via NFC like money can.   

       They're redeemed by companies for money based on market rates.   

       Homeless people are assigned, like everyone else, enough tokens for feeding every day and for medical care and for temporary accommodation.   

       The government currently sets benefits by what you can buy and sets a monetary amount. I'd like to see some abstraction in the precedent that government sets what people are allowed to have. The price of oats shouldn't matter if someone is entitled to food for that day.
chronological, Mar 15 2020
  

       Each token is a marketplace.   

       The receive X amount of food token is some thing everyone has, a bit like universal basic income.   

       You can redeem your token in any shop or restaurant. I'm thinking credit cards should be loadable with tokens, so from your perspective, you're buying but the government is paying for you.   

       The business redeems the token from the government because that's who is paying for everyone's needs.
chronological, Mar 15 2020
  

       The governments abolishes all benefit programmes and replaces it with a token based allocation of benefits and entitlements.   

       If the government can print money to keep markets from collapsing, it could inject money into providing everyone with what they need.   

       Clothes, water, food, shelter. Unconditional token access.
chronological, Mar 15 2020
  

       // but though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
and the gods of the copybook headings said, "If you don't work, you die" //
sninctown, Mar 15 2020
  

       This seems like just "replace all social services with universal basic income and rationing".
notexactly, Mar 15 2020
  

       Yeah I'm confused as to how this system would handle economic intensifiers like population growth. Systems of production need to become more efficient to sustain larger populations, yet without any sort of reward this system results in technological and productive stagnation, just like communism did. I'm not boning it because I like thought experiments, but this one seems like it'll end in failure.
RayfordSteele, Mar 16 2020
  

       This is not a system of production.   

       It's a way of giving universal basic income but not as money, but as tokens.   

       Every thing is a market to be scheduled in.   

       If I want food now, today, next week, the price is different depending on how the market moves.
chronological, Mar 16 2020
  

       What's the difference between tokens and money?
pocmloc, Mar 16 2020
  

       Money is involved in systems of production. This is inflexible to supply and demand, and therefore fails to respond to market needs. That was the point.
RayfordSteele, Mar 16 2020
  

       This idea decouples the buyer from the seller.   

       People on the street are entitled for food and clothing and shelter but not necessarily the ones picking the price of the goods but are the people picking the supplier.   

       The tokens are used to decouple payer and buyer. But not price.   

       People with tokens for buying food go to the cheapest place that takes the minimum tokens. The government does the actual financial transaction and the person buying the food does the exchange of food for tokens.   

       The business exchanges the tokens for money. Knowing modern payment technology, the exchange of tokens for food can include the financial transaction by the government to the business for food. But the person never sees that. It's abstracted by tokens.
chronological, Mar 17 2020
  

       So, tokens basically ARE money, but with a non-fixed (or easily/rapidly changeable) value set by the government (as opposed to however-the-hell the value of money is set...).
neutrinos_shadow, Mar 17 2020
  

       //People with tokens for buying food go to the cheapest place that takes the minimum tokens. //   

       Wait, wouldn't the token be for food from a particular place at a particular time, scheduled in advance? And if they want to eat at a different time and place, they trade with an owner of a food token for the other place (who would otherwise eat there).   

       Also why do people go to the cheapest food place instead of also caring about quality?
caspian, Mar 17 2020
  

       I'm not sure I understand this right, but I see it as an extension of futures markets.
caspian, Mar 17 2020
  

       > Wait, wouldn't the token be for food from a particular place at a particular time, scheduled in advance? And if they want to eat at a different time and place, they trade with an owner of a food token for the other place (who would otherwise eat there).   

       Correct
chronological, Mar 17 2020
  

       Then how does a restaurant attract more customers overall, if every customer they gain must also cause the loss of another customer?
notexactly, Mar 20 2020
  
      
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