Відео

Glad you enjoyed it!

Hi Vitoria, You can purchase my book, "The Habit of Thought." There are used copies on Amazon for $26 or email me at michaelstrong@expanseonline.co and I'll sell you a new, signed copy for the same price.

​@@SocraticMichaelStrong Hi Michael, thank you for your prompt response. I'm certainly sending you an email. Appreciate you (P.S. you are one of the feel that writes my name correctly. Thank you for that too!)

Write me at michaelstrong@expanseonline.co and let's discuss. Good luck with the learning environment, I'm passionate about expanding these environments - and there are challenges.

And she is a marvel of confidence and goodness! May the combination of martial arts and Socratic dialogue continue to empower her with respect to mind, body, and spirit!

A natural resource-based economy appeals to both left wingers and libertarians alike! Because if you really understand it you see how much sense it makes and the freedom it brings to humanity. You just Haven't done the research.

+pigeonpsycho We are not talking about you are better at sports, I'm better at chess therefor there's inequality. We are talking about 85 billionaires having more money than billions of people. The billionaires have far more influence and if you do away with government regulation you'll only grant them more power in a money-market based society. I never see you right wingers discuss this. Do you want corporate masters?

TerraRubicon Agreed. A RBE however, would result in a best case scenario for everybody!

+Michael Strong Again, you are mistaking technological problem solving and development with the cart that brought it.Yes, some kids in Africa now also have cell phones.... yet they have no running water or electricity at home. As tech costs drop due to the "zero margin cost" phenomenon, many will improve their economic condition in certain ways - but that has nothing to do with capitalism itself. It is a law of technological progress, as Ray Kurzweil points out. Value is inherent in tech efficiency as it evolves and that is irrespective of price and markets at the root. And as an aside, to what extent is this real life "prosperity" exactly? China's growth fetish has created 16 of the most polluted cities in the world. They turned in their bikes for polluting cars to help GDP. They may not be as poor but they are counter acting that by the inherently destructive nature of the market's production of negative externalities, lowering quality of life. As far as this "Entrepreneur" theory stuff, you can praise the creativity and organizational skills of people in general - but that is all it is. And this creativity can be facilitated in many different ways. The false assumption that there is an empirically relevant role to those who are "Entrepreneurs" is frustrating as it takes a temporal phenomena created by business culture and assumes it is the most optimized method possible in economic theory as a whole. There are other, better ways to allow for people to contribute and create, as discussed by TZM. Overall, you give great examples of vague outcomes, short term positives and assumptions that take no larger system data into account. Anecdotes have no value in social science. The only relevant stats are larger and long term, requiring a deep dissection of the interacting structures that comprise them. In this holistic, long term view, we find nothing but negative outcomes, with the only exception being technological progress itself - which has raised the standard of living of society for the time being, (at great external costs that will, rested assured, come back to haunt everyone). Again, this has nothing to do with capitalism and markets at its core, which is exactly why TZM promotes a model that focuses on the technical nature of existence, as that is all that matters economically. Doing so, you remove the vast, poverty/conflict creating, environment destroying negative externalities that capitalism will always create, no matter how it is arranged and no matter what the entrepreneurs think or do.

+Michael Strong It's disappointing how basic systems theory is lost in the economic community, where intersecting aspects of the socioeconomic condition are ignored, falling back on - yes - vague and superficial declarations that have much more complexity underlying than assumed when it comes to public health, social stability and ecological stability. While any reduction of poverty has been shown to correlate to increased public health, the mere argument that a reduction has occurred to whatever degree under a given economic method does not suddenly justify the practice. As I said before, the reason most countries are in poverty is because of the long term effect of colonialism, which is - by all scholarly accounts - a product of business interests and the interest in profit - capitalism in form. I know of few countries that exist in extreme poverty that have not been dominated by a foreign power working with capitalist exploitation in the past. Will more local free markets help? Yes... if they ever get them, which is slim due to the damage capitalist ideology already set in motion or reinforced, spawning militant dictators and oligarchy. 2nd, and more specifically, the account of this "extreme poverty" reduction is highly suspect and far from impressive even if true in the long run. If you research the history of the "Millennium Developmental Goal 1" of the UN, you will figure out that various bogus baseline moves and accounting tricks were used to create the figures they claim. In 1990, the World Bank realized poverty lines of the world's poorest countries clustered around $1 per day. The WB said in its 2000 annual report that "the absolute number of those living on $1 per day or less continues to increase. The worldwide total rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.5 billion today and, if recent trends persist, will reach 1.9 billion by 2015." Hmmm - Not good info for Capitalist loving folks and WB/IMF policies, eh? So - they moved the goal post from the official $1.02 (1985 PPP) to **$1.08(1993 PPP) [**given inflation was lower in real terms]. This trick allowed a technical "reduction" of poverty by 400 million between 1981 and 2001. Then, in 2008, they moved it to $1.25 (2005 PPP), accounting for millions more that are now "saved" from extreme poverty.... all because of the glorious free-market. Now- I'm not saying the market hasn't improved some things but as I said before, it is shortsighted to assume a system that literally created mass poverty to begin with by unequal distribution of wealth and war should now be credited with helping the circumstance it started by its very dynamics. Even more, the confluence of system effects with ongoing pollution, emerging resource scarcity and other externalizes that have direct link to the consumption driven/highly competitive market, are on pace to reversing this modest trend rapidly. Again, the market IS NOT A SYSTEM OF PROBLEM SOLVING. It is a just a system of organization and a terrible one at that when compared to other possible models. Only technology and design solves problems. I'll put it this way, all major anti-poverty institutions have stated that the world produces, right now, enough food for every human being. As denoted in the statistics present in the book The Zeitgeist Movement Defined, we have a new technical capacity to feed many thousand times the current population based on advanced methods in agriculture currently going unused. With almost 1 billion staving on the planet today, with a vast technical means to solve this problem available but not being put into practice, is the great indicator of the vast inefficiency of capitalism. Not to mention, capitalism is based on class division for labor exploitation and the odds of it ever creating a large reduction in social inequality is highly improbable. Again, the ONLY thing giving the illusion capitalism is working is the natural dev of applied technology. Did I mention there are more slaves in the world than anytime in human history? 27 million in debt peonage and other nearly feudal mechanisms across the world. While, as you note, there are pockets of public health improvement, there are also vast disease and mental health issues rise across the world, with structural violence killing over 18 million a year because of market byproducts. And war? The US, China and Russia are trying to figure out what to do when the very first major resource crisis hits the planet, spending no time building their arsenals. A few nuclear bombs would make these minor poverty statistics quite pointless. And by the way "GDP"? It is a false measure of social prosperity. The US plutocracy is proof of that, with enormous amounts of money moving amongst the 1% alone, creating the illusion of broad spending and growth. I could go on and on about the system confluences and market driven externalities that are converging into a perfect storm of negative outcomes. If you don't agree - fine - just wait and see. People like yourself, as well meaning as you are, are simply pushing a genocidal, elitist system that is going to damage everyone in the end... just watch. ps- recent health measures have also suggested that to achieve normal life expectancy, at least $2.50 per day is needed to live today. If that standard is sound, which has been justified by Peter Edward of the UK, then the real number in extreme poverty is actually over 3 billion.

+Michael Strong In ten years, you will see further pollution, ecological decline, increased overall poverty and social unrest due to interrelated factors all centered around the economic system and its injustice both socially and ecologically. The grace period of capitalist progress is over, as I described before, given the convergence of negative social and ecological pressures mounting. I find it interesting that you keep promoting the same weak, short-term stats, derived from GDP - many of which I have already addressed - ignoring the repeated observation that this development is not about capitalism at all - it is about the dev of technology and its dissemination - which will occur regardless of the system employed - the only role the economic system has is the degree of amplification of this capacity. While recent improvements have been made by markets, they are nothing compared to the technical possibilities that go untouched/fought/ignored due to the restrictive nature of the competitive, profit driven, self-interest oriented, scarcity focused economy that roots back to the Malthusian period. You ignore that - because if you didn't, you would be debunked from top to bottom. As far as your sense of history and the roots of market development, you clearly need to read some books. The market did not "emerge" suddenly after feudalism - it was underlying in its core structure from the moment civilization settled and specialization of labor became tradition, fostering the interest in trade/medium of exchange - and any basic historian of economics understands this foundation. You again ignore this for it ruins your isolated view of the market practice, as though it was novel to Adam Smith's time - giving false grounds to attribute things to capitalism by comparison when there is no solid, detach distinction - only mutations. Yes, there are 27 million slaves in the world right now and since I suspect you have an internet connection I suggest you research it and think about the dynamics of why. Saying things have "improved" denotes very little in this scenario. I could say 18th century American slave owners could have improved the welfare of their slaves by giving them more resources, easing their lives, improving health and even allowing literacy -- that does not correct the condition of slavery itself. Yes, during the course of "modern" capitalist reign in the last two hundred years, we have set in motion the greatest decline in biodiversity and life support systems ever. All the stupid gadgets and microwaves mean little when there is no fresh water or rare earth metals left. Not only can this be tied to the self-interest of the market focused institutions without question, the UN even stated that all large scale goals to slow this process have failed due to commercial projects which simply have no incentive to preserve or conserve. The pollution driven by industry - seeking to save money as all market interests do, have reached epic proportions in both land/ocean and air, with huge consequences pending. The recent immigrant crisis, the endless wars driven by profit seeking corporations in collusion with government are also evidence of this grand disaster the market mentality and the tribalism it embraces creates. Yet all of that macro data noted (and look it up) you still persist with these cherry picked, short-term and erroneous declarations that it has been markets that have improved the world. No. It has been technology and communication and while markets have help facilitate this, it has reached the end of its productive system capacity on the global level and needs to be updated/replaced before the byproducts of the market system further destroy and destabilize.

+TZMOfficialChannel I note that you have not made any predictions regarding the future progress of TZM, along the lines I proposed: "Are we likely to see a successful TZM community/jurisdiction/governance system for 10,000 people within the next ten years? 100,000 within the next twenty years? Regarding your predictions of environmental catastrophe, I'm reminded of Yale historian Paul Sabin's account of the second attempt between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon to be on progress (after Simon won the first bet): In 1995 Ehrlich and Julian Simon tried to agree on a second wager. Ehrlich, along with Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider, challenged Simon to bet on 15 indicators of material change: concentrations of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and ozone in the atmosphere; global temperatures; tropical forest area; and quantities of harvested fish, rice, and wheat per person. Simon refused, arguing that these proposed indicators affected human welfare only indirectly. Simon instead suggested indicators that directly measured human health and economic well-being, things like life expectancy, leisure time, purchasing power, and commodity prices. Rather than bet on change in a physical entity such as the ozone layer, Simon suggested measuring “the trend in skin cancer death.” The physical world, Simon suggested, could change around us, but progress of human society would continue, bolstered by new technologies, adaptation, and markets.www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/science/2013/09/ehrlich_and_simon_bet_what_terms_should_we_use_to_gamble_on_earth_s_future.html I would take a similar tack as Simon: Let's bet on the fundamentals of human progress, which I predict will continue to increase. I'm quite willing to believe that by some metrics the environment will be worse (e.g. the Pacific plastic garbage patch may be bigger, more species may well have gone extinct) and yet humans will, on average, be living longer lives, with lower rates of infant mortality, more leisure time, etc. The very reason such bets are important is because the fear-mongers have been wrong over and over again.

@@michaelstrong1632 Can't you just agree, I mean all that reading and writing. You went through all of that, you would still doubt good intentions? If we can amplify well being and ecological sustainability with a different economic system why not? I understand you may not think we'll realistically see it in our lifetime but if it's more rational just fight for it on the principle of preserving rational justification itself.