Do You Know?

John Darvill

1994

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat, 4th quarter 1994, No. 337

...The unemployed, politicians preaching make-work programs, and others suggesting this method of solving social ills, should read, learn, and carefully digest the following. K Mart recently added 50,000 barcode scanners to their system, at a cost of some $300 million. This cut the time cashiers needed to record sales by 25%. Information from this scanner goes through a local area network to a computer in the back of the store that keeps track of sales and inventory. Nine times a day, the computer sends the latest data to the company's Troy, Michigan Head Office via a private satellite. The next morning, K Mart buyers from any part of the country can view national sales data from the day before.

American Airlines has a vast database of airline schedules, fares, hotel rooms, rental cars, and the expertise to use this information to its best advantage. Its Sabre reservation system is used by 26,000 subscribers in 70 countries to handle more than 500,000 passenger records every day. American Airlines' computer system also performs the crucial task of scheduling flights. When a flight is adjusted, changes ripple through the system to make sure crews, food and other related elements are synchronized. In the first quarter of this year, the company's airline operations lost money, but the Information Technologies Group posted a $103 million profit. More North Americans than ever are performing transactions without the actual use of cash -- coinless toll booths, bank machines, riding token-less subways, and paying for everything from taxi rides to mortgages, with the swipe of a card or the blip of an electronic transfer. Such transactions accounted for 18% of the $55 trillion total that U.S. consumers, corporation and governments spent last year. The number of electronic transfers has increased nearly 200% since 1986 in contrast to a 17% rise in the number of check and cash transactions. The volume of household bills paid through automated systems has doubled since 1991 to 800 million last year. 20% of utility bills, 16% of auto loans, and 17% of mortgage installments are now paid electronically. Where have all the people gone? If collectively, we had the intelligence to take this to its logical conclusion, a truly cashless society, with a distribution and inventory system based on energy accounting, we would then be a long way towards solving our many and complex social problems. Jobs are going the way of the dodo bird, and so are we if we don't soon recognize the root cause of our problem. Technocracy's design outlines a distribution system based on energy accounting.

...As you often sit in your car behind hundreds of others waiting to move a few more feet, have you ever wondered what it is you may be breathing? Each year the average car spews out: 60 kg of nitrogen oxides, 35 kg of hydrocarbons, 4,064 kg of carbon dioxides. And that's when they are well tuned.

...In October 1993 the American Public Health Association unanimously passed a resolution urging American industry to stop using the chemical chlorine. We don't understand all the mechanisms by which chlorine is harming ecosystems, wildlife, and humans. But, from what is known, it seems clear that if we wait for conclusive scientific proof, the destruction, which is already vast, may well become irreversible.

The International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes, has called toxic contamination the most critical and urgent problem facing the lakes. Despite a $5 million chemical industry campaign, a new report criticizes both U.S. and Canadian governments, calling for a phase-out of the production and use of chlorine-based compounds and many other chemicals and proposes a prohibition on waste incineration.

...Coming to a supermarket near you in the not too distant future: A store chain in Holland has installed a system whereby shoppers scan every item they put into their basket as they go along. The total bill is deducted automatically from the customers account. NO CHECKOUTS!

...Next time some politician, or some equally deranged person talks of JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Ask them how a person capable of performing at the rate of one-tenth of a horsepower in an eight hour day (if they are in the peak of physical condition) is going to compete with today's high speed technology. As more and more high speed technology is introduced, there is less need for human muscle power. Technology is faster, more efficient, with none of the labour problems associated with human labour. Machines are very efficient producers, but consume none of that which they produce nor use any of the services they supply. And there is the rub. As efficiency increases and more is produced with less and less human aid, who then consumes, pays the taxes, and how is purchasing power to be placed into enough hands to keep society operating. When that economic impasse is reached, do we close everything down, or do we realize that all we are lacking is an efficient method of distribution, a system of accounting based on the energy it took to produce the goods and services in the first place. Energy accounting is a method of distribution more in keeping with the technological, high-energy civilization in which we now live. Money is the means of exchanging a scarcity based on concepts of human labour, but such concepts as scarcity, exchange and labour are not germane and do not apply in the age we now live in, fast approaching the 21st century. Let us bring our methods of operation into line with the 21st century and discard the outmoded ideas of our forefathers -- if we expect our species to survive another century.