Competition

Let's not kid ourselves. What humanity is competing with is powerful forces of nature. Why are we wasting effort and despoiing the planet by creating nation states to compete with each other, when what we so clearly need to do is to defend ourselves as a species from natural events such as earthquakes, severe weather, global warming (a natural reaction to our activities, at least in part), diseases affecting us directly and affecting the food we need to survive, and possibly other things.

Is this not enough or us to be going on with? Why are we competing with each other, and not collaborating to face these very real threats?

Communism

I suppose TVP/TZM advocates might find themselves saying that we shouldn't squander our natural resources in pursuit of [financial] profit. (In Natural Capitalism terms, liquidate our natural capital and call it income). Thinking about it, I'm quite happy with "we shouldn't squander our natural resources".  That's it, full stop. Profit? Maybe, maybe not, competition? Maybe maybe not. But if competition and financial profit are not being harnessed to the end of environmental sustainabilty, or at least not against it, then they have to be sacrificed. This is nothing to do with social justice - even that is contingent on sustainability.

Nature is a dictatorship; cooperation

I hope you won't think it glib or distasteful for me to comment that the devastating earthquake in Japan and the resultant terrifying tsunamis in the region show us above all else how powerless we are in the face of nature. Politics is useless in that you can't vote against an earthquake and so is money insofar as you can't buy or sell an earthquake.

Money will be needed to clear up the mess, and paradoxically this counts as economic growth, but the other thing that the aftermath of disasters (natural or man made) shows up is how we tend to co-operate at such times. The question is why do we revert to competing during more settled times?

Plane ticket price madness

"Code sharing" is the selling of one airline company's flights by another airline. The price for the same seat on the same flight can vary drastically. I read about this in Metro (London, 8/12/10). In the article one airline's spokesman said "We always advise customers to shop around for the best fares to suit their needs". Setting aside the odd concept of "needing" to spend more money to get exactly the same thing, this point is also odd as we have an airline effectively marketing other airlines' tickets. Let's not forget in all this oddness that there are of course companies that exist to find the cheapest fares for you. Yes, special websites that uncover information that is already known, but that has been covered, or not shared. Thus a market and competition and jobs are created to achieve nothing.