I think it goes deeper than that. When technology makes unskilled labor obsolete, there will be all these things and services which we can receive without requiring another human being's efforts. The machines will do it all for us. Consequently, money will have a whole new meaning. What will you be paying for when you buy something which required no human effort in its making? The way things are going now, you will probably pay for the patents of the products and the people who first put the machines together. They will set the machines once, (by then the machines will be able to fix each other, which is not so far away) and then just sit back protected by patent laws and receiving money with no effort until some better technology comes up.

What to do when technology makes unskilled labor obsolete? Get rid of monetary economy and patent laws, these belong to a time when people did things to people.

What to replace it with? I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure. Anyways, we should better start thinking seriously about it, before people start siting back and taking our money without any effort.

About the fruits, I was thinking that if you eat an apple, you don't have to kill the apple tree, but if you eat potatoes.... =P

I guess that if plants do feel, the most moral choice would be to only eat products which wouldn't kill either animals or plants. Dairy products, fruits and so on...

Is this true for every case? Research is still being done for non-environmentally friendly products as well... What do you mean by more costly?

no one does anything for the environment is because it requires more effort.

I don't think this is how everything is today, much less how everything will be forever. Japanese people are very busy, but not to the point of not being able to separate their garbage. Assuming that doing things for the environment will always require sacrifice is a dangerous way of thinking which has unfortunately spread around. The options are not "buy a pet bottle or drink from your thermos", there are many unexplored possibilities out there. How about "always have a bottle with you and you can refill it anywhere with a variety of refreshing drinks which haven't been sitting inside your bag the whole day"? Sounds more appetizing, no? Maybe not even that would be a perfect solution in terms of environment or convenience, but I just made a nice alternative up, don't you think that if we put our efforts on the right place, we could get to a nice solution? My fear is that this "environment and convenience can't go together" mindset might slow down the coming up of nice solutions which everyone is happy with.

Producers have also made the most "convenient" choice when making the products that we love and that make our lives oh so convenient.

In this part I agree with you, but to a certain extent. Yes, producers have been making decisions which are convenient to them in economic terms. Bur personally, I don't think money is an end in and of itself. I wouldn't say big CEOs get happy simply by making heaps of money. In fact, many of them say they hate what they have to do to the environment, but the system in which they are in doesn't give them options. So I agree with you that economic convenience is bad: far from being a pleasant comfort to human lives, is a sad side effect of the sick system we live in. When I talk about convenience, I talk about making lives pleasant.

As for the rest of your argument, I agree with you that for now the best we can do is control our impulses as much as we can. I just don't think this should be considered the final objective and the one and only way to save our planet. We are smart, CEOs are smart, the system is DUMB! We just gotta do something about it....

Wikipedia it is.

When it comes to developed countries though, the story might change a bit. For example, in Japan, anyone fluent in English (not only native speakers) can easily find part-time jobs teaching, which might pay 20 to 30 dollars per hour. It's only a matter of patience to find students (the website www.findateacher.com helps a lot of people)... Also, since they love foreign faces, if you are persistent enough you can get a job as an extra on movies or TV shows, which pay relatively well... I had a friend who managed to live only with the English teaching and the TV thing, not only in Japan but also in India...

So yeah, of course it depends on where you are... If you go to a place where the locals themselves are in trouble, it's unlikely that you will manage to do much better without proper planning. I guess the best you can do is wait to be deported =P

Hope it helped =)

When someone goes against tradition, by questioning old ways of doing things or looking for new ways, progress might come from it, but also some bad changes might happen. So I'm not saying that overcoming traditions is necessarily always good. The truth is that while some traditions are harmless, others aren't. Coming up with new ways of approaching problems in which tradition had been failing can be progress. Progress can come from the end of traditions.

On the other hand, sticking to traditions which are beneficial to humanity cannot be called progress, because progress means relative improvement. If old traditions are simply carried on, this cannot be called progress, because nothing changed. (Of course that if a healthy tradition spreads to more people it means improvement, but in the way of thinking itself, there was no progress) Sticking to traditions is not progress.

Progress is, by definition, always good. The internet makes all kinds of music more accessible to the music lovers; the internet is progress. The atomic bomb killed a lot of people; the atomic bomb is not progress. So where does tradition fit in this improvement of our lives, in progress? Let's take your little study example.

You've observed that your tradition of studying has been helping you, so you stick to it faithfully. The same way, if you had a tradition of drinking 3 shots of tequila every night, you should be able to realize by yourself that this is bad and cut the tradition. Just because some form of behavior has survived over time, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good one. We still have and should decide by ourselves which behaviors to follow or not. That's progress.

So is tradition an obstacle to progress? Based on the description on my first paragraph, I'd say yes. If people are following a tradition just because they think this is safer and assume that just because it has survived over time it's beneficial, they might be retarding progress for themselves and for others.

We just don't agree about where should space technology fit in all this. =P

I'm looking forward to people's opinions on this one, as I don't know where to place myself. So if it's not much to ask, maybe you could tell us what exactly you like about tradition and why do you think it's important...

Also, I'd like to say that I'm not sure about my opinion on abortion... I do think that interrupting a pregnancy is not good, but I cannot simply ignore the problems an undesired child might bring to its family and society. At this point in my life, I wouldn't consider abortion, but I don't feel like I can make this decision for other people, so I wouldn't like it to be "banned". This matter puzzles me, so I don't usually join debates related to it. I just came into this one because I saw your comment about criminals and the undebatable, so now I'm here just looking forward to seeing you logically prove that there's absolutely no situation in which sacrificing a human embryo is the less of two evils. I'm looking forward to a debate.

It seems to me that you are just going around the issue without proving that killing a non-fully developed fetus is the same thing as killing a 3 year old child. Prove your statement without evading the debate and calling it "illogical". - Or else prove why it is illogical to debate this.

Here I didn't go as far as to point a flaw in mathematics or something that should be changed, I actually agreed that in most cases 1 is not 4, and I know how useful that is in our daily life. My point is, we can and should question and debate everything, even the foundations of something which has been working for us all along, because we can never know when old explanations might fail us. This is specially valid for the question of abortion, since our old conceptions about when life begins might be wrong.

Anyways, if my semantic discussion of 1 not being 4 was not mathematical enough for you, here I got another one...

"1 is not 4"

Wrong, this is not always the case. When dealing with binary numbers, when 1 is in the third number from the right, as in 100, 1 represents 4. In 111, 100, 10100, and so on, the third 1 is always 4 (as in the decimal system).

The only reason why traditional companies are pressuring governments to punish people is because they don't want to lose the status they used to have, once upon a time when what they did was actually special.

In absolute numbers, there might be cases of gay people who would before "marry straight" for convenience, but in a new setting can just "marry gay". Also, since I don't think all gay people were born gay, in a world where homosexual and heterosexual relationships are treated the same way, new generations might grow up with their minds open enough to choose either one. Comparing to the world we have today, where gay marriage is not exactly encouraged, maybe this would mean a minimization of straight marriages... But that's a nature-nurture issue...

Anyways, I don't think marriages as we know them will be around for much longer... ;p

Anyways... If you do want to make this into a debate about the distribution of food in the world... Man, I'm here really wondering what you are talking about... First you claim there isn't enough food to feed the whole world, and that justifies capitalism. And now you are saying that if there wasn't enough food to feed the whole world (in your head, apparently, a hypothetical situation), people would fight to death for food. You wonder if people would willingly sacrifice themselves? Well, I don't think it's very willingly, but 58% of all deaths in the world, today, are because of hunger. And as far as I know, all these people are dying without much of a fight.

Military power is what is assuring, not only food, but all the basic necessities of life for those who do have them? You know it's not like that. What military and economic power is assuring is that some people can waste a lot of crap while others simply die. Is military confrontation looming around the corner because of the basic necessities of life? Far from that. So, are military forces necessary in your scenarios? I don't care, we need proper distribution of resources now.

Anyways... If we are talking about the States, a country which lives with constant external threats, of course you guys can't just quit the military now. I wished you all understood, though, that getting more armed is not the way to get rid of the need for more military.

1 is not 4.

I agree. If both numbers refer to the same kind of thing, 1 is not 4. 1 banana is not 4 bananas. One could argue that, if it's not specified, 1 could be 4... For example, 1 family might have exactly 4 people in it. In this case, 1 (family) is 4 (people). But if the numbers are just shown without "units", it's usually implied that they are probably referring to the same thing. Therefore, 1 is not 4.

If you have your arguments in order, every issue is debatable. It's just that some are closer to a consensus than others...

Do you know the meaning of continent? ><

Do you even understand the double meaning of American?! Australian has no other meaning because Australia is a continent and a country at the same time. America, before being an abbreviation of USA, is a continent which includes other countries.

Anyways, the question here is not if the US should invest in military, but if all the world governments... The gladiator argument takes care of that...

And I don't think space technology should be priority right now... There are other real technologies more necessary to us at the moment, which definitely doesn't include military... That was basically the point of my last argument - things are being done wrong in the world, and military technology is not the way to solve it.

As a Brazilian, I must say I'm annoyed for having to specify "oh, I'm South American, oh, I'm Latin American..." But oh well, it's always a nice joke when I meet someone from the US and they say "I'm American." "Me too! which country?" =P

Anyways, to be fair to the US, they don't really have a better choice of a name... For example, the official name of Brazil used to be "United States of Brazil", and people would call it Brazil, not USB... America is just a terrible coincidence...

Anyways... I always try to say "people from the US" or refer to the country as "the States"...