Quote from: bobos15 on June 19, 2014, 08:34:05 AM

The solution to poverty is technology. If you have free energy you don't need money or economic systems . But technology is suppressed.

This is such a simplistic and misguided view. Firstly, technology isn't widely suppressed, there is more vested interest in those that can gain advantage from technology, than interest from those that seek to suppress it. At best you can suppress for a short while before someone independently discovers, steals, or supercedes it. I laugh when people say technology X is suppressed by the big bad company, because there are many nations with no interest in maintaining the status quo who would use it if it worked. Typically, technology X is a great idea that doesn't scale in cost or application to be useful.

Secondly there's more to technology and advancement than energy. Certainly it is significant and can impact some industries greatly. But others it might be a tiny fraction. There are massive capital costs in research, whose use mainly mental exertion and experimentation. There are capital investments in land, equipment and resources, the materials needed to be extracted, processed, the plant to do that process, all have to be constructed. Then there's supply chain, the movement of the resources and product. And infrastructure move or utilise products. Then there's the meatware, the sustenance, protection and education of the people that make it all happen. The energy bill, while significant as a proportion for some items at the start, fades to a tiny fraction of the value of the end product.

Consider this: energy is literally dirt cheap, we mostly dig up carbon and burn it. Its that worthless. What we do with it is far, far more valuable.