Yes, and I’m happy to take the hammer and sickle away from them. They don’t get to have it.
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While everyone’s throwing out their favorite quotes about doing away with the current notions of “jobs”.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
– Buckminster Fuller
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If they can’t (or aren’t allowed to) participate in the system, you can DEFINITELY count on those people starting their own businesses to survive - outside the system. The establishment then calls that “illegal” and uses every tool at its disposal to prevent it. This includes identifying vulnerable groups with the outsiders and criminalizing their existence (directly or indirectly). This are reasonable actions within the system, and considered unreasonable from the outside.
The military / government get the best ships. Replicators are not easily obtained. Energy is a commodity. We see little of life outside government (federation or other), but it looks much harder. They also use money.
And I’m someone who desperately wants Trek to be a part of our future.
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Great idea for the most part, but I think taxing robots isn’t a good way to go. It’s like taxing hammers, computers, or any other tool for that matter. It stifles innovation and when the costs are passed on it sends the wrong price-signal. Instead, get to the root of the problem of capitalism, and tax the land-owners, slum-lords, and rent-seekers: the more land you own, the more tax you should pay for it.
In practice, modern society didn’t happen until people started optimizing tasks and leaving others to do things that didn’t involve making sure there was food on the table (and that said table was clean).
If you want a new renaissance of art, innovation and critical thought, then you have to give folks time and opportunities to do those very things.
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https://twitter.com/afrociclismo/status/1102733966350659584?s=21
https://twitter.com/afrociclismo/status/1102733967801937920?s=21
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I’m waiting for self-driving cars. God that would save me so much time. As a commuter student, I drive 100 miles a day for a total of 180 mins of driving. It’s so monotonous. I’ve bought and listened to so many albums in the car, audiobooks, etc. The sound of the interstate too, I hate how it drowns out the music so I have to turn it increasingly louder. You hear literally everything, the friction on the road, the trucks going buy with their brakes clicking because of the grade of the hill, and when it rains, the rain + the sound of the friction on the road, so annoying. I guess I should invest in some noise cancelling headphones but, even then, I guess I’d have to check that I’m not violating some obscure law like in NY State. I had a relative that got a ticket for literally having a pair of headphones in, in NY. The officer said something to the effect of you can only have one ear muff on while driving by law.
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AOC’s version of the future is the one I remember reading about as a kid. ~Sigh~ It really points out the tragedy of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama all being from the same party - There is an entire generation of Americans that have known nothing but every increasing authoritarianism, and think the ability to accrue unlimited wealth is the only model of capitalism.
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If only someone hadn’t just posted that…
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So, she’s pro utopia?
I was only kidding (I’m thrilled to have a toilet). I understand that specialization is important for a productive society. I’d add to your summary of the development of society/division of labor the factor of coercion. It’s not like joe the pesant said “gee I’d like some western civilization, I think I’ll just toil in the fields so the guys in velvet can make some paintings.” He didn’t have a choice, and that’s kinda a problem.
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We’ve seen scientists in Star Trek who have become persona non grata within the scientific community because of rule breaking (like Dr. Manheim in “We’ll Always Have Paris”), so I think this is handled from the top, like some sort of grant system, and not through some sort of number of up thumbs on the far future version of Facebook. We also don’t see cultural icons get preferential resources on Federation (Jake Sisko as a reporter and writer doesn’t seem get any, and Lwaxana Troi, as Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, only seems to be tolerated when not acting as a diplomat because she’s Deanna’s mother ). There are also different groups (Federation Science Institute, Daystrom Institute, the Federation itself, Starfleet itself), so more opportunity for top-down decision making. Seven-of-Nine’s parents were pretty young, so I don’t think they’ve had time to built a reputation, and yet they got the big enchilada in terms of material resources and importance of mission.
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Well, there’s “I’m honestly baffled - and perhaps angry - that you think this comment is racist, when I’m just telling the ‘truth’!” and “Gosh, I just don’t see how this comment is racist (wink wink).” I’m seeing a lot more politicians doing the latter these days than they used to. But there’s also degrees of racism - i.e. sure, they’re racist, but they’re using racism beyond what they actually believe in, as a tool. There’s also that the oligarchs are the ones cynically using racism to advance their agendas - the Republican party and its politicians are the tools as much as the racism. The politicians are not-smart people who are often being manipulated by the racism themselves as much as they’re manipulating with it.
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You are joking, right? You mean you have not noticed that most people want to keep up with the Joneses and have been for as long as we have recorded history?
they aren’t.
while true that the democrats are republicans; the republicans are fully neocon. while both parties support big corporate interests, the republican party has done so by trying to burn the government down.
the point is we can do better than all of them, not that there aren’t large and important differences between the choices we’ve had.
[ edit: once upon a time there was the phrase “billionaires for bush-gore.” worked like a charm to reduce democratic turn out. and look what it got us: 9/11, no progress on climate change, the afghanistan and iraq wars, and that was just the first term. ]
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The upper classes have lived like that for centuries and they were just fine. Well, relatively. Is it portrayed as somehow different when all of society does it? I suppose the social structures would be radically different…
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The Federation in Star Trek is a colonial imperial army-and-corporation. Its like the East India company. It does what it wants due to its military power, and any internal economy is corporate accounting. When Crusher buys something and charges it to the Enterprise, the ship (the Federation) accounts it somehow vs. the local government (whatever that might be and whatever faction the Federation chooses it to be), or maybe the vendor can go to some local Federation office, stand in line for four hours, bribe some people, and either get some sham Federation scrip or credits at the Federation run store or some devalued local currency. (The local vendor doesn’t have access to a replicator of course!) And within Starfleet or the Federation, there is only a power structure and power economy, your position and lifestyle is determined by your role in the military organization, not by any skill, production or trade based activity. You get to be on the Enterprise because of your ability and loyalty in the military, and possibly your personal, family or social influence. All work is done at the pleasure and for the organization. If most concrete labor is automated or externalized to various colonized planets (got to extract that dilithium somewhere), then the primary activity of people is working in the colonial military to maintain control over those planets. But we digress… (Always wanted to see this side of ST actually explored more…)
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