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Why not make everyone a Citizen?

Some critics of a Celebration Society believe that everyone should be a Citizen. In my view, that diminishes the importance of the title and office. In modern democracies, citizenship is a birthright. As such, its powers and responsibilities often remain little known or taken for granted. While a society can force people to learn these–and, […]

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The Techno-utopianism of Peter Diamandis

I am an admirer of Peter Diamandis. He and Steven Kotler have been largely responsible for shifting the planetary conversation from endless doom and gloom within a context of scarcity to the possibility of sustainable abundance. For the book Abundance and his related work, I believe we all owe him a large debt. Peter is […]

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Meat in a Celebration Society

Meat consumption is a problem is many ways. A substitute for industrial “farming” of animals is needed. This could take the form of vegetable “meats” (more on this below) or a 21st century alternative to industrialized animal “husbandry”. We will, in future, grow meat in vats in a factory-type environment without the involvement of any […]

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Service can Organize Society

While some believe that money is necessary to motivate behavior, this is false. Significant organizations exist that operate on the basis of voluntary, mutually supportive service. That service is unpaid, and can be highly effective. One prominent example is Toastmasters. Toastmasters was founded in 1924 —almost a century ago. It has grown from nothing to […]

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A Better Political System

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” ~Winston Churchill With all due respect to Churchill, that’s not quite correct. Democracy may be better than other present day systems, but a system once existed that led its people to world naval dominance, a culture that remains greatly […]

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Ominous Cascading Effects of Accelerating Automation

When one paid worker appears or disappears in a community, it causes what economists call a “multiplier effect”. This has historically been estimated at 5 times the salary of the worker. Here’s how it works: if a person earning an income enters a community, that worker will then demand various goods and services. The providers […]

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An AI epiphany

In movies such as The Terminator, The Matrix and so forth, self-aware AIs come into existence and soon threaten humanity. This thinking is reflected in the arguments by Musk, Hawking and others against creating strong AIs. Due to a recent insight, I believe that self-aware AIs are not much of a threat to humanity, and […]

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What’s wrong with a Celebration Society?

In this world, however much we might wish it otherwise, there is no perfection to be found. Every beautiful thing has its limitations or deficiencies. Even mathematics has Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems. So, too, must a Celebration Society be imperfect. This is not to say that I regard it as falling short of being utopian, for […]

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Continuous process improvement

Those of us who are old enough will remember the 1950s, when “Japanese import” meant balsa wood trinkets. Several decades later, the first Japanese cars started appearing in the US. They were widely derided as cheap looking, rust-prone tin cans, at first. No longer. In recent years, Japanese cars have led the world in reliability […]