Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@bambamramfan

I believe a fair chunk of the alienation that concerns you isn’t just a result of competitive economic systems, but also urban planning.

When in a city, you have significantly less personal connection to, and knowledge of, the people around you.  This makes it harder not only to judge their intentions, but also to punish them.  Thus, you are at increased risk when interacting with them (as I think slavojzyzzek mentioned).

Part of the way to combat this may be to turn cities into collections of ten thousand villages.  Build each block of the city as a mixed-use unit, with internal green space and, critically, controlled access beyond the shops at the perimeter.  That could be as simple as just making people check in when they enter and refusing anyone not approved by a specific resident.  Have the block owned or managed by a sort of cooperative responsible for creating cultural festivals and whatnot to encourage social interaction and a sense of community.  Specific police officers could be assigned to each block (as the population is high enough) and get to know the residents.

With increased trust and more limited populations, the residents can get to know their neighbors more on the scale of a small town than a big city, reducing the social distance by one or two orders of magnitude.  If you’re Communitarian enough, you can also have police/healthcare/etc units focus on specific high-risk people within the block to prevent situations from spiraling out of control.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[memecucker]

“if Trump won then that means anyone more to the left of the Democratic establishment is unelectable” is the stupidest argument ever bc if you pull your head out of your ass you’d notice that if you wanted to be consistent with that logic then it shouldve been impossible for Trump to win considering that he’s further to the right than McCain and Romney

[ranma-official]

“democrats lost because they are too far left and therefore need to swing right on stuff like lgbt rights and environment” is a sentiment that’s hilariously false but also convincing enough for certain bubbles that it can do a lot of damage

[mitigatedchaos]

In case one of those bubbles happens to be reading this:

It’s worth noting that Trump didn’t do much complaining about LGBT rights himself, even if he’s let the Republican party adopt a harder stance than he has.  He wasn’t elected to Crush the Gays.  And the Environment does need its protection.

The real questions are things like Nationalism vs Globalism, concerns about terrorism, immigration, culture war speech-policing, and the people left behind by Globalization.

If the Left didn’t shift an inch on LGBT rights, but started saying “you know, maybe we should impose tariffs proportional to our trade deficits with other countries so we don’t have net capital outflow” or “you know, maybe keeping high-risk refugees from active war zones outside of our country and just sending them heaps of supplies instead isn’t diabolical racism” and stopped saying “lol dey tuk er jerbs” when someone complained about it… then they could grab some of these people that the Democrats lost.

Of course, that won’t actually happen.  Instead they’ll keep stubbornly exposing people to the same stimulus that has shocked the far right back from the dead in Europe.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[leftist-daily-reminders]

If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”

This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.

For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.

Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.

[thescalexwrites]

TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.

[mysticalmoonstone]

Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.

[leftist-daily-reminders]

Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.

[saltymantears]

So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:

Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.

The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.

[whitemarbleblock]

Always reblog.

[mitigatedchaos]

“Tensions within Capitalism” is mostly overly-academic hogwash, the same way one might talk about “tensions in the human body” or indeed any successful animal. On the other hand, the threat from automation is quite real, and it’s different this time. The “Luddite Fallacy” label is itself fallacious. Better to cut a check based on %GDP and ride it into space, or pursue some similar program. I also don’t trust anyone who hasn’t said the words “prediction market” entirely unironically to have a solid plan for what comes after The Revolution, violent revolution or peaceful.

[bambamramfan]

“Tensions within capitalism” refer to things like the unemployed person who is denied any job to do, but also told she is lazy and a leech for not having steady work. It’s a contradiction our entire society believes, but the weight of the contradiction lies on one person.

Eventually it snaps. Possibly by these unemployed people voting for unethical leaders spouting nonsense, just for any hope of making sense of their senseless situation.

“What to do after the revolution” is a very important question, but pondering how to answer it does not change the fact that the resolution of snapping tensions is coming towards you at a pretty fast clip. Even I thought Trump wouldn’t get elected till 2020. The people may pick someone else’s revolution while you’re waiting to perfect your own.

The human body also contains tensions. After enough years it dies.

[mitigatedchaos]

Had the world waited to perfect their revolutions a bit longer, several dozen million people who died might have lived.  Overthrowing a government is far easier than developing a fully workable alternative for real (not just hoping a half-finished untested alternative works out) and far more exciting than actually testing things before implementing them on a wide scale.  It’s more dangerous, of course, but that’s a different matter.

Given how straight-up murderous revolutions have tended to be in the past, it is right to distrust revolutionaries.

Doing something like cutting a % of the GDP and handing it out is less likely to crash the economy or kill millions of people.

[bambamramfan]

No argument about the disasters of bad revolutions, but my point is that shit is coming anyway. Did you not see the latest US election?

[mitigatedchaos]

A change is needed, but it shouldn’t be something irreversible that might crash the economy, and with that, extinguish the desperately-needed fires of technological progress.  There appears to be this idea, now, that with robots, the economy has become less fragile, and radical experimentation on the entire country with systems that either haven’t been adequately tested or have failed catastrophically in the past is called for.  

The economy is just not that robust.  

Direct wage subsidies and basic income/basic share are both types of programs that can be implemented gradually, don’t require armed military action, don’t threaten to derail the whole economy by seizing the means of production, don’t introduce terrible incentive structures that tend to result in violent purges, and can be rolled back if they turn out not to work as well as expected.

Direct wage subsidies can even be sold to conservative types, with the right language, then transition to basic share later.

A revolution, if it could even gather enough mass to start (and not result in a terrible civil war that divides the country into new ones) will do nothing except kill a lot of people and trash the economy, with little to no net improvement in government.

Basic income is picking up steam.  Wage subsidies haven’t quite yet, but they might as the so-called “right-wing alternative”.  Millenials in the US have lower hostile reaction to “Socialism” (in part because Republicans called every single government program they don’t like “Socialism”).  Once the truck drivers start getting laid off en masse, the political will for these programs will emerge.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[marcusseldon]

I feel like the Marxist left points out a lot of real problems in society relating to alienation, dehumanization, the lack of meaning, etc. But they get the cause of these things all wrong. The cause is not capitalism and private property, but living in a mass society where you coexist with thousands of people living and working together in one town or city neighborhood, and hundreds of thousands to millions in a single midsized metro area. We are built to coexist with a few dozen to a few hundred friends and relatives for life, and mass modern societies cannot provide that. This is why real world attempts to abolish private property and capitalism arguably worsened, rather than improved, the problems Marxists worry about in those societies.

Interestingly, I think certain kinds of social conservatives see the same problems, but also misread the cause.

For both Marxists and social conservatives, the cure is worse than the disease.

The only hope,  in my view, is some kind of liberal communitarianism, but I’m not sure such a thing is possible.

[wirehead-wannabe]

Endorsed

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

If large corporations had to carry insurance which paid out in the event of a security breach exposing users’ data, they might take it more seriously.  It converts the small annual risk of such a breach, which managers can gamble on, into a measurable monthly or annual cost which can be lowered through preventative measures.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that your mind is in Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president. You are guaranteed that it is impossible to undo this change. As president, what do you do with the powers available to you? How do Congress, the media, and the public respond? How do you respond back?

theunitofcaring answered:

Oh wow.

I want to be clear that I think I’d be a pretty bad president. I wouldn’t be worse than Donald Trump, admittedly, but I think being president is legitimately a really hard job which you can kill billions of people by screwing up badly enough and kill millions of people just by not thinking to ask the right questions or appoint the right people. And I don’t know the right questions or the right people. I don’t even necessarily know how to find them, it’s not like ‘interviewing people and determining whether they are competent at federal policy’ is a skillset I have.

I think like @ozymandias271 I probably call Obama and explain what has happened and ask him for suggestions and take them unless they involve bombing people, which I am not going to do even though becoming president seems to mysteriously make people conclude it’s a good idea. And instead of spending our foreign aid bribing people we should probably spend it stamping out malaria and neglected tropical diseases. And maybe I could try to wiggle Trump’s position on immigration around to the stance that we should have an arrangement like Canada’s where communities can raise money to sponsor a refugee and help their integration.

And of course throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture and developing carbon sequestration and so on and so forth (how much power does the President actually have to do this?) and bringing in people to have debates over things like the minimum wage and healthcare where the end result of the debates will not be ‘I know what to do’ but just ‘I remain horribly uncertain what to do, and I feel terrible about myself for not being smart enough to have it figured out’. Meanwhile I desperately try to replace the VP with someone who will be a good president. As soon as this person is secured I step down.

- to, uh, be a seventy year old man? The rest of my life sounds super unpleasant tbh. I will feel uncomfortable around all of my friends who have made cracks about how ugly Donald Trump is (moral: you shouldn’t body-shame people because what if a random blogger is bodyswapped with the sitting president and feels bad about themself as a result?), and most people I interact with will think I have a long history of sexual assault and this will be, like, incredibly unpleasant and terrifying and make me feel constantly disgusting. And I’ll have a ten year old who thinks I’m his dad, though maybe improving on Trump’s parenting would be as easy as improving on his presidency. 

[mitigatedchaos]

>  throwing a whole lot more resources at ending animal agriculture

Moonshot making an artificially-grown human heart.  It’s doable, it’ll go over better than vegetarianism, pave the way for better tissue engineering, and help push us to the far side of the medical care cost curve where costs start coming back down again.  So far we’ve been hurting from costs coming down from infinity.

The tissue engineering technology can then be used to develop and mass produce in-vitro meat, which will almost entirely replace animal agriculture within a few generations, to the point at which our descendants will wonder why we didn’t do it sooner.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[leftist-daily-reminders]

If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”

This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.

For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.

Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.

[thescalexwrites]

TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.

[mysticalmoonstone]

Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.

[leftist-daily-reminders]

Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.

[saltymantears]

So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:

Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.

The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.

[whitemarbleblock]

Always reblog.

[mitigatedchaos]

“Tensions within Capitalism” is mostly overly-academic hogwash, the same way one might talk about “tensions in the human body” or indeed any successful animal. On the other hand, the threat from automation is quite real, and it’s different this time. The “Luddite Fallacy” label is itself fallacious. Better to cut a check based on %GDP and ride it into space, or pursue some similar program. I also don’t trust anyone who hasn’t said the words “prediction market” entirely unironically to have a solid plan for what comes after The Revolution, violent revolution or peaceful.

[bambamramfan]

“Tensions within capitalism” refer to things like the unemployed person who is denied any job to do, but also told she is lazy and a leech for not having steady work. It’s a contradiction our entire society believes, but the weight of the contradiction lies on one person.

Eventually it snaps. Possibly by these unemployed people voting for unethical leaders spouting nonsense, just for any hope of making sense of their senseless situation.

“What to do after the revolution” is a very important question, but pondering how to answer it does not change the fact that the resolution of snapping tensions is coming towards you at a pretty fast clip. Even I thought Trump wouldn’t get elected till 2020. The people may pick someone else’s revolution while you’re waiting to perfect your own.

The human body also contains tensions. After enough years it dies.

[mitigatedchaos]

Had the world waited to perfect their revolutions a bit longer, several dozen million people who died might have lived.  Overthrowing a government is far easier than developing a fully workable alternative for real (not just hoping a half-finished untested alternative works out) and far more exciting than actually testing things before implementing them on a wide scale.  It’s more dangerous, of course, but that’s a different matter.

Given how straight-up murderous revolutions have tended to be in the past, it is right to distrust revolutionaries.

Doing something like cutting a % of the GDP and handing it out is less likely to crash the economy or kill millions of people.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[leftist-daily-reminders]

If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”

This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.

For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.

Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.

[thescalexwrites]

TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.

[mysticalmoonstone]

Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.

[leftist-daily-reminders]

Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.

[saltymantears]

So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:

Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.

The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.

[whitemarbleblock]

Always reblog.

[mitigatedchaos]

“Tensions within Capitalism” is mostly overly-academic hogwash, the same way one might talk about “tensions in the human body” or indeed any successful animal. On the other hand, the threat from automation is quite real, and it’s different this time. The “Luddite Fallacy” label is itself fallacious. Better to cut a check based on %GDP and ride it into space, or pursue some similar program. I also don’t trust anyone who hasn’t said the words “prediction market” entirely unironically to have a solid plan for what comes after The Revolution, violent revolution or peaceful.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[bambamramfan]

a reminder that the reason nuclear power has not grown in the US is not overzealous safety fears, but because building a plant is an extremely capital-intensive investment with a large tail risk of extremely high costs. (quotes you see about the cheapness of nuclear power are about the *marginal* cost of the power, not including the fixed costs like the plant.)

no one wants to insure that. so, the government has to subsidize nuclear power with below-rate insurance. which is akin to the government insuring major investment firms - usually they won’t have to pay out, but the one time they do, it will be ugly.

the states with a flourishing nuclear power industry (such as France) are characterized by more government involvement because that’s what it takes to subsidize such risks. nuclear power does not flourish in a free market.

[mitigatedchaos]

It isn’t the insurance. The US government would cover it if the price of the power were right. The issue is very cheap natural gas combined with uncertainty about the future price of renewables. A carbon price could make a big difference in the first. As for the second, there currently seems to be a saturation point on renewables before it starts needing too much backup power generation, and the real question is battery technology. That will remain uncertain.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[sinesalvatorem]

Francois and David are what you could loosely characterize as “libertarian” in their world view, and we often argue about the role of government in society. One particular “clash” stands out in my mind, because it helped me crystalize my thinking on this matter. So we were talking while eating lunch at the Taco Bell in downtown Monterey of all places. Suddenly David, a man in his sixties, excused himself, got up, and ran outside. What had happened was that he had seen several young men bullying and roughing up another young man, and David had gone to intervene.

In thinking about what David had done, I finally understood how he and other libertarians could see their vision of limited government as a viable means of running a society. Such a society would be entirely workable if most people behaved like David!

- Jonathan Lipow

It’s always a pleasant surprise when, instead of saying “libertarians are libertarian because they don’t care if other people suffer”, an opponent of libertarianism says “libertarians are libertarian because they think other people care about helping others as much as they do”.

[mitigatedchaos]

Isn’t this true of nearly all ideologies? That if they were practiced by good people in good faith, they’d work an awful lot better?