I have a water filter pitcher also and while "a lot of areas" have "shitty" water at least the water is tested on a regular basis.  You should check out the bottle water documentary and see how many people are looking out for your bottle water safety at the FDA.  They have 1 person to review the entire bottle water industry who relies on the companies to submit their own reports with zero accountability.  I'll stop this discussion here.

Main reason why I quoted just that line is because I remember seeing a video awhile back of people in the future that would go to air stations just to be able to breathe decent air.  So if humans keep up their terrible track record we won't be too far off from your hypothesis.  It only takes a natural disaster, war, or another major event to realize how important the basic necessities for life are.  Then eventually you will have people killing each other for food and water.

What I hate about these discussions, when it comes to CEOs being paid 100* more than their workers, or athletes earning millions while nurses/firemen are on low wages (in the UK, anyway), is this implication that we actually have some sort of right to tell other people what to do with their money.

When people talk about CEOs being paid too much, and workers too little, and talk of introducing laws that limit the difference between the highest and lowest wage in a company, what they are essentially saying is that they own the business. We didn't risk any money or time investing in the company, we just reap the benefits, so why do we get a say in these issues? The employees aren't forced to work in this company, if they wanted to take the same risks that the investors and founders took, they could be making just as much money, anyway. But they didn't take that risk, and so they don't get the benefits of a high wage. If you want more money, you either work hard enough and get promoted up, or you leave, take risks, and set up your own company.

Don't force someone else to pay you more money through the law. Besides, you'll (or your kids) will be worse off for it in the long run, anyway.

No, you are wrong. Money imposes itself on true wealth. HEALTH is wealth. And HEALTH is achieved by meeting your body's needs. That's all it ever was.

You have totally bought into this illusion & I'm not surprised because this is what is taught from birth in this country. the truth is that money associates itself with true wealth. But money is not wealth. In the context of the illusion, money represents Option Power to obtain the items that facilitate wealth (health).

No civilization forms without a water source. NONE. It doesn't matter if water's in great supply or it's not. Its value is not dependent on its abundance or lack of. Its value is dependent on its function for our well-being. How it facilitates our health.

Food is not only cheap, it's FREE. It only costs differently in different regions thanks to market manipulations. The corrupt human who twists & tweaks things to his wicked desires. Manipulation is how this happens.
The only thing it cost my great-grandfather was TIME but when his efforts were done his food was free to himself. His labor benefited him & his loved ones in rural Georgia in the first half of the 1900s. Most of his children left the farm he owned to move to the big cities. Their input of labor never equalled the output of those labors' fruits. In my great-grandfather's time, he shared his bounty with his neighbors. He didn't charge them anything but maybe thankfulness. If he had too much food to store & preserve he gave it to others who didn't have as much. Not SOLD it, GAVE it.

I can live my entire life without iPods. I can't go a week without food. i don't care how many digits come after that '$' sign for Apple's product. Give me the fucking Apple to chew on.

Food is valuable no matter WHAT the "markets" say. its value is INDEPENDENT of a market. I'm talking the REAL value not that trade value game.
Markets are weak to perceptions & opinions. Truth is independent of perception & opinion. Truth is truth whether a human being speaks it or not. It needs no consensus or confirmation. Truth is Reality. And I know very well how much humankind HATES reality. They made a movie called Reality Bites if I recall.

We LOVE our fantasies. And it's all well & good when they're harmless. But this money illusion harms.

My mother gave me a gold plated watch for my birthday. I don't like wearing jewelry first of all & I have no use for gold. It still sits in the box unworn. If someone send me diamonds as a gift, it will only useful to me once I trade it someone else for something of real value. I'll play along with their fantasy that it has value & they'll give me a lot for it. But I know what diamonds are worth in the eternal sense. It's just a fancy rock.

What's the most valuable thing in my house outside of the bare necessities? My computer & its internet connection. This is my library & worldwide communication device. The computer only cost me $500 & the internet connection is only $40 added to my phone bill. But its usefulness to me is INVALUABLE. Just a bunch of silicon & magnets but it gives me great access to the human needs of learning & belonging.
Yet even it is not as valuable as that stuff in my refrigerator & freezer.

The great human flaw is in believing that Scarcity is Wealth. There was an ancient drought on Earth & humankind have not gotten over it yet. When the true necessities became rare in that drought we falsely associated Scarcity with Success. To fight over the lack & win the lion's share became our collective habit & we've enacted this idiotic behavior in every era. To our ruin.

Intelligence dictates that we take the valuable & make it so abundant that it's common. The fact that food is cheap is GOOD. The fact that water is plentiful is GOOD. The fact that air is everywhere is GOOD. Our ineptness in creating lasting things make us scared to approach our rarified items. We cannot adequately reproduce a lot of stuff so we preserve it in museums, put it behind glass cases, surround it with security guards. But if we ever get good enough to reproduce items adequately, we will make them common. We would no longer worship Rarity.

By the way there's some small society in Africa where the hunters share food with all the tribe & take no rank in the group. The tribe ribs the hunters to keep their egos in check & all members of the group partake relatively equally. Socially they are advanced even if they are technologically primitive. In our technologically advanced societies, we struggle with questions of income inequality, have a chronic homeless situation & build private prisons. I'd say we're socially primitive. Who's REALLY First World?
John Lucas

Nope, no one is forcing anyone to do anything.  But there is no guarantee that things will work out if everyone happens to merely work by self-focused motives without any regard to anyone else.  What you see in bubbles, for example, is people collectively will go into the same segment of a market and collective drive up prices far beyond what is normal, as everyone ends up being sellers in a market where they buy and believe there is another sucker to come along.  Then, the bottom falls out and impacts everyone.  Same with the said effects of income inequality and it possibly getting worse and worse, affecting everyone.  The solution to this isn't for everyone to turn a blind eye, merely compete selfishly and believe their ideological -ism will sort things out.

No amount of cheap TV and electronics will make up for people who will increasingly have problems making ends meet.

Sort of ...

The most primitive form of economy is the barter system. The problem with the barter system is that trade can only happen when both individuals produce goods or services that the other individual needs. Money is an abstraction over what people produce as a way of ensuring that individuals can trade without needing to have opposing needs. The value of the money is strictly a preceived value, and one individual agrees upon a trade based on what they believe they can purchase from others using a similar value.

I'll give you a paper ledger and I'll give an accountant a computer with state of the art accounting software and we will see who completes a company's pay roll faster. Today we have automated sales systems and online retailers which drastically reduce the staff retailers need to make sales. Technology is constantly increasing productivity, if you can't see that you're not looking ...

You're mixing multiple concepts here ...

A person's income is not based on their productivity, it is based on other people trading their productivity on a good or service that they produce. If I'm willing to exchange the equlivalent of 2 hours of my labour in wages to another individual then they have (indirectly) earned 2 hours of my productivity.

This is (just about) the most moronic and misinformed comment I have ever read ...

If you look at the poor throughout the third world they're looking to be "exploited" because it comes with dramatically higher standards of living, much better health, and much longer lives. People are flocking out of their "wonderful" undeveloped country-sides into cramped cities to take (by our standards) low paying jobs because of how much wealthier they will become.

In the absence of your "robber barrons" these people face a short life full of misery and hardship ...  but at least the raw minerals they have in the ground will remain there even though these countries have no use for them and they are (essentially) valueless to these people.

The solution to it is to not create the bubbles in the first place. How do you reduce bubbles? Sound monetary policy, no fiscal deficits, and as little government manipulation of the economy as possible. Expanding the government into essentially controlling our wages, is not the right direction to go in.

Income inequality wouldn't matter at all if the dollar was strong, people would be able to make ends-meet easily.

Again, if you were to consdier Health as the ONLY way to measure wealth.... your arguement that money is a zero sum game is demonstrably false by the fact that people live longer now then they did in the past.

The advancement of medical technology has increased health and therefore it isn't a zero sum game.

So even by your own messed up definitions... you are wrong.

Aside from which, I'd like to ask you... say everyone in the country is equally healthy, yet some of these people live in giant mansions with every luxuary available, while others live in a one room apartment that provides nothing but the basic nessessities.  Do you really view these two groups as equal?

In this thread I learned that food is free and a low rent version of Michael Pachter works harder than anyone else in human history ever has.

False equivalence. Increased knowledge on how to extend life need not be linked to money.
Medical technology advancement is because of ingenuity & insight.

You can't see a society that doesn't operate on money much like people in the Middle Ages could not see a man walking on the moon.
Medical technology extended quality of life not money. Like I said before money ASSOCIATES itself with the truly valuable. It is only valuable by proxy.

There are those & have always been those who study & observe the world for the betterment of humankind. They were not motivated by money but by their belief in their abilities to decipher the mysteries of life.

Those who studied the stars in the ancient past & mapped out constellations weren't doing it for the money. They did for the simple curiosity of how this amazing universe works. You think the man who discovered fire was worrying about cash?

Money gets in the way of a lot of progress, in fact. People are forced to worry about making a living & that cuts into time they could be spending solving our crucial problems. They get compromised & study for the profits of a corporation.

When was the last time you heard of a disease being CURED? All the technology they have today but more diseases were being solved when things were not so advanced. The medical field has become a business & businesses are first & foremost concerned with making a profit for the bottom line. Medical researchers no longer look for that which can eliminate a disease, they look for that which allows them to continue "treating" a disease. If all the diseases are cured then the doctors are out of business, right? With the money motive all the medical field is worried about is repeat business. It actually GETS IN THE WAY of progress.

Here's a famous picture of São Paolo, Brazil where some rich folks hotel's tennis court is bigger than the favelas (shantytown ghettos) right next to it.
And I bet you that's not a public use tennis court either. That's obscene & it's a wonder a Revolution hasn't happened in Brazil yet.
The rich KNOW it's obscene & that's why they live in gated communities with high security protection. Something like that should be public use for the WHOLE community. A shared resource. But massive income inequality creates this situation & only one solution will rectify it: the end of the money system.

Health is all the wealth you need. All those luxury mansions are nothing but ego. Nobody can live in that much house if they tried. Mansions were meant for whole generations of a family to live in. Almost like a private hotel. You take up that much land you had better share it with the community.

The man with the one bedroom apartment is probably more grounded & has better peace of mind. Easier to clean to boot. Once you get a certain amount of money, thanks to that middleman you have taken care of basically all of your needs & wants. Money then reverts into its true uselessness & the rich have to find some way to justify the worth of that excess money. This is when you see overgrown houses & ridiculous car collections, clothes collections. They don't know what to do with it all & just go on ego trips. Some of them only feel fulfilled when they reconnect with the non-rich working through charities and becoming activists. They would be fulfilling their need for belonging/affiliation.

Understand what true value is, Kasz216. Money is fake just like time. The reason you can't time travel is because time is only a measurement of change. You wanna travel back in time, rewind your clock. Voilá! Both of them are self-imposed human illusions.
The value I speak of comes from a source BEYOND humankind.
John Lucas

Your entire rant was completely pointless you know... largely because it was COMPLETELY irrelevent.

You suggested that

A) Wealth was a zero-sum game

B) True Wealth is related to heatlh.

A Zero sum game one where one person's gain comes at another's expense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero%E2%80%93sum_game

In otherwords, if wealth were really a zero sum game... average life expectancy would never increase.

Again, by your own goofy standards, your wrong, unless you want to completely rewrite the definition of Zero sum game as well.

Hell a REAL zerosum game of life based on health work like this movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/

As for diseases being cured... I think Chicken Pox if you count Vaccines.  That was like... 17 years ago which isn't really bad when you consider how many diseases have been cured overall and in general, the diseases to be cured first are likely going to be the easy ones.  I mean what disease do you expect to be cured by now that isn't?