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These advancements are unlikely to reduce the cost of medical care. Just make the lives of people who can afford it too long and make the earth too crowded.

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One of the reasons that mortality rates for cancer has declined dramatically is that many more cancers are diagnosed today that wouldn’t have been diagnosed 40 years ago. Many of those cancers would have gone away on their own.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1206809
The best way to improve health and reduce health care expenses is to eat right and exercise.
In the not too distant future, stem cells will be used to replace anything that breaks and genomics may be used to better target diseases with the right treatment.

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[quote=SD Realtor]Rich the article you wrote regarding the impending domestic debt crisis is very well written. Depressing but well written.[/quote]

What article are you talking about? I don’t see this one.

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I recently ported my landline (AT&T) to a new cellphone (Virgin Mobile). This took a week or 2. Then I ported my old cellphone number to GV. It cost $20. Finally, I forwarded my old cellphone number from GV to my new cellphone number (old landline). It works great!

You are correct that you can’t port your landline directly to GV. Transferring through a prepaid mobile number would be the best way to do that.

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[quote=pri_dk]You are arguing that the computer and electronics industries are counter examples of economic growth?[/quote]

Yes, almost everyone in this country now has a tv, a cell phone, and a computer. These new product categories add to economic growth. The electronic parts of the computer get cheaper. The resource based parts remain expensive. The industry is growing as large parts of the world move out of poverty.

[quote=pri_dk]Yeah, available energy could be a limiting factor, and ultimately has limits. But we haven’t even scratched the surface on some of the most potent energy sources, and economic growth doesn’t have to correlate with energy usage.[/quote]
Within a couple of hundred years, we will be reaching the limits of energy production no matter which sources you use. With current technologies, it will be much sooner than that.

[quote=pri_dk]Metals and everything else can be recycled. Food is just energy. Population can be managed.

I’m using LED Christmas lights this year.[/quote]

I did not say that innovation would stop, or that your well being would not continue to increase. Only that economic growth would eventually reach a limit.

In the near future, we will probably all be wearing glasses that will display virtual reality or any other information that we desire. They will start off very expensive, then the cost will fall until they are not much more expensive than a cheap pair of glasses. Sales of most other electronics will be obsolete.
The cost of entertainment is going up now. As the cost of electronics drops, more and more people are creating their own content and distributing it for free on YouTube or Facebook. It will become increasingly difficult for movie makers and tv studios to charge large premiums for their productions.
I am pessimistic in suggesting that this might occur in our lifetimes. Many of us here including me thought that housing prices would hit a peak in the early 2000s. But it is inevitable that the economy will reach a peak within a couple of hundred years.

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[quote=pri_dk]Exponential growth simply requires that every year we find ways to do and have the things we want cheaper/better/faster/whatever.

0.001% growth every year is still “exponential.”

Most people don’t know understand what the word means.

Do you really think that we will ever run out of ways to do things better?

Is human ambition and resourcefulness just going to halt one day?

Why do so many present the question as a (false) choice: exponential growth or collapse?

Exponential growth isn’t that hard, and it isn’t that outrageous.

In fact, it’s all we have ever known.[/quote]

Growth requires that the total amount of money that we spend increases.
Yes, we will continue to do things cheaper/better/faster. But when things get cheaper, growth goes down. Better and faster do not necessarily translate into economic growth. Most electronics have become cheaper over the last 30 years. Also, information will continue to be cheaper. Especially when the copyright/patent expires. The goods that become more expensive are primarily resources that are not unlimited. Land, oil, metals, food.
A more complete proof is explained in this link:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

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[quote=pri_dk]The Ponzi scheme analogy is worthless.

All long-term economic plans assume perpetual growth.

All of them.

Ok…there are some that don’t. You’ll find them in the bookstore under “apocalyptic fiction.”[/quote]

Do you really think the economy can grow exponentially forever? Exponential growth is pretty scary. Eventually, the growth will end. I hope it is not in my lifetime. If we transition to a steady state economy, it will be much easier than if it collapses like a bubble.
We seem to be having more and more bubbles in the economy. It is possible that we might be very close to the peak.

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[quote=flu][quote=swave]
You think this sounds silly, but Charles Eisenstein has proposed that currency decay. But at a significantly longer half life than you laughed at. Currency that decays with a half life of about 20 years really fixes a lot of problems. It is described very clearly in chapter 12 of his book.

http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_chapter_12%5B/quote%5D

I never said it was a silly idea…. It’s a lunatic idea….But we had discussed something similar to this awhile ago…[/quote]

Do you have anything more specific. We have several bad ideas to choose from. Is this worse than the others? Have you read this page? Can you tell me where it was discussed before? I must have missed that.

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[quote=SK in CV][quote=markmax33]
You don’t understand that once it goes, it goes. Everyone’s savings are wiped out. This same freaking cycle has happened EVERY TIME and you are turning a blind eye to it.[/quote]

Every time? Every single time? Not a single exception? (Those are trick questions, be careful.) (And please note, never once have I claimed that inflation isn’t coming. I’m only pointing out that your arguments supporting that prediction are rediculous.)[/quote]

I have seen at least 2 explanations of why this happens. Charles Eisenstein explains it in Chapter 6 of his book http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_ch_6_usury

and Michael Maloney: “We Pay Tax for the Privilege to Have Currency”

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[quote=flu][quote=afx114]
By golly, you’re a genius… What the U.S. government needs to do is invent a time based currency… It starts to exponentially decay the moment it leaves the banks and ends up in the hands of people. If you don’t use it, it starts to decay…Don’t use it for a few days…it turns into ashes…..That’s how our government can stimulate growth here in the U.S.A….Forcing people to spend their dollars the moment they get them…[/quote]
You think this sounds silly, but Charles Eisenstein has proposed that currency decay. But at a significantly longer half life than you laughed at. Currency that decays with a half life of about 20 years really fixes a lot of problems. It is described very clearly in chapter 12 of his book.

Sacred Economics: Chapter 12, Negative-Interest Economics (Pt. 13)

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[quote=markmax33]
Most likely there would be a market of currencies and there would be somewhere between 5-10 of them that would dominate the market. Remember the currencies would be competing for you business. They would likely have ads on tv and some currencies would be handled more efficiently than others. The currency orginators would find ways to profit from the transactions similar to the American Express, Mastercard, Visa. Those companies operate just like currencies currently and ensure customers from fraud.
[/quote]

I agree with you on this. But, I don’t think that the currencies need to be based on gold. Let the market decide what they are backed with. The money could be based on clean water or fertile farmland.

Sacred Economics: Chapter 11, Currencies of the Commons (Pt. 12)

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Yes, I know that Madoff was very connected and that the SEC was very incompetent. I know someone who worked for SEC enforcement through the 90s and quit in 2003 because he couldn’t do his job. But eventually Madoff did stop because of the SEC and government prosecutors. The SEC should have stopped him 10 years earlier. But, if it weren’t for the SEC and government prosecutors, he would probably still be in business. We need to try to minimize corruption, but that is not the same as getting rid of everyone.

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Too Big To Fail is the obvious problem. But the government should not decide who to make the banks smaller.
The larger banks should be required to either have a higher capital ratio, or pay more for FDIC insurance or both. It should be enough higher that they will decide on their own to become smaller.

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[quote=aldante]
When you get a small group of regulators who control virtually unlimited resources the corruption is much greater and much more harmful. Look at Madoff. $60 billion ripped off – all the while a citizen was pointing his finger but the SEC turned their head.
[/quote]
The SEC should have stopped it much sooner. But, do you really think Madoff would have stopped sooner without the SEC?

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[quote=flu]Oh my…. talk about big brother watching….
I never knew…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography

Printer steganography is a type of steganography produced by color printers, including Brother, Canon, Dell, Epson, HP, IBM, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Lanier, Lexmark, Ricoh, Toshiba and Xerox[1] brand color laser printers, where tiny yellow dots are added to each page. The dots are barely visible and contain encoded printer serial numbers, as well as date and time stamps.

Color laser printers appear to be the type mostly involved, the measure being brought in during the 1990s by companies such as Xerox seeking to reassure governments that their printers would not be used for the purposes of forgery. The identification is by means of a watermark, often using yellow-on-white, embedded in the printout of each page, and in conjunction with other information can be used to identify the printer which was used to print any document originally produced on a wide range of popular printers. It may be actual text, or a repeated pattern of dots throughout the page, more easily visible under blue light or with a magnifying glass, and is intended to be very difficult to notice with the naked eye.

In 2005, the Electronic Frontier Foundation cracked the codes for DocuColor printers and published an online guide to their detection.[2] Most printers’ codes have not been decoded, although the coding system framework and printer serial number encoding is the same on both DocuColor and the Epson Aculaser C1100/C1100N/A.
[/quote]

This was done initially to help to identify counterfeiters. It is probably used for more than that now.

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