CommunityforTomorrow.org

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Part 6:  Necessary Components for Community Sustainability

Maintaining of Standards

One of the least recognized, but most critical industries of modern civilization is the standards industry. Every community that participates in the fourth industrial revolution will need to produce a local organization whose primary purpose is two fold. First it is to provide the standard weights and measures that the community uses to produce its products with.

The second function it will need to carry out is to correlate its standards with other communities that it plans to cooperate with. This is essential because the only way that a machine built by two or more communities will be assured of working is if their standard measures, weights and times are either equivalent or corrected for variation between communities.

This latter function of this particular industry will be the single most important function a community will do in its efforts to rebuild modern civilization. For, ultimately, industrial civilization will reemerge through cooperation and division of labor. And this in turn will only be possible if we are all building on the same standard.

But what must be pointed out, and it is essential, is that it will be the local community's responsibility to maintain this system rather than an overbearing central system. And, in fact, the financial crisis that we presently face is the result of the misguided belief that a central government should be responsible for establishing the standards of measure and value. It is upon this misguided concept that the founding fathers were led to believe that government had a role in the process of money. To avoid similar crisis in the future, it must be emphasized that the establishment of standards and values starts at the local level and expands out from there on a voluntary, cooperative basis not upon enforced standards derived from a central governance system.

Clean Water Production and Delivery
Food
Shelter and Transportation
Lighting
Heating
Clothing
Medicine
Sanitation and Waste Disposal
Generation of Raw Materials
Chemical Processing
Processing of Raw Materials - Tool and Die
Communication
Computing Technology
Education
Maintaining of Standards
Justice
Defense

Part 7: Our Future Under the Fourth Industrial Revolution

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