Vilageidiotx

Loners bar.

i'll have a coke on the rocks pls

Borgies pls go

<Snipped quote by Keyguyperson>
Have you tried hydrogen oxide spaceplanes, solar sails, aluminium oxide rockets, orbital tethers, and gravity slingshots?

@catchamber

dude

you sound like you are really really high, like, all the time

Borgies pls go

I can't tell what's a meme and what's serious anymore. I'm just here for the ride.

@Witch Cat

Nobody knows what happened in this thread.

Borgies pls go

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Although I must say that wouldn't be relevant to the alleged prophecy of Karl Marx. While matter and energy cannot be destroyed in the universe, they could be enforced to act accordingly the laws of communism, redistributing themselves evenly across all space within the universe. The destruction of all celestial objects and life through pulverization or conversion to energy would be a consequence of the act of redistribution.

All they've got to do is find the script where the physical laws of the universe are written and add communism.

@Arkaquiavel

Wait, did you just describe the second law of thermodynamics?

Physics is a communism confirmed.

...

Borgies pls go

wtf happened here

this thread became very weird very quick

Borgies pls go

Politics is not inherently violent, and you don't need a violent revolution to repair the violence of the status quo. There is a high probability that a violent revolution can undermine its own noble goals, and establish a more violent system than what you started with.

@catchamber

It's a possibility. But there is a high probability that a non-violent revolution wasn't a revolution at all, but simply a matter of the powers that be allowing a few changes to protect from the possibility of real large scale change.

Just because total automation can replace conventional farming doesn't mean the latter will cease to exist. Some people will prefer traditional methods, simply because it appeals to their personal aesthetics.

Yes, but those people will be in a comfortable position where they can make their preferences happen, even if it requires them to take a loss. I'm talking about the changes that happen at the bottom of the food chain to the people who don't have much of a choice in the matter.

I don't see automation rapidly outcompeting every traditional model in every market. Even if it did, people will suddenly be able to get many high quality goods at very low prices, allowing them to pursue economic activity unrelated to survival. Algorithms may be able to make art, but some people will simply choose to compensate human artists. On top of this, a vast amount of educational resources will be accessible to the majority of humanity, allowing them to focus their efforts on continuous improvement of existing technologies.

I agree with the first sentence, but that's the problem. If automation killed employment in a decade, we would be forced to figure it out. Instead, automation has came about like the boiling water to the frog. We don't notice it because it happens gradually, and when we see the causes we start looking for other problems. I'm afraid people will spend their lives being impoverished before the slow-burn of automation finally reaches the point where post scarcity makes some sort of socialistic society inevitable.

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They still retain the right to refuse them service, and can exclude them from their economic choices that provide mutual prosperity to those with compatible worldviews.

But they don't have the property to make that happen.

One little pertinent fact about Marxist economics is that Marx thought early American was not a capitalist society for exactly this reason. Because most people were small-time farmers and therefore owned their own means of production, they approached the market as individuals capable of bargaining. Capitalism happened when the farmers gave way to industrial workers who did not have the ability to negotiate because, lacking the means of production, they didn't have a way to live without the approval of the business men. To go back to the tractor guy making his neighbors unemployed, what do those neighbors do? Sure, they could refuse to purchase from tractor guy, but tractor guy doesn't care because he sells his goods on a national market. Your unemployed neighbors boycotting you? Fuck'em, sell your goods in the city. Neighbors won't talk to you in church? Fuck'em, go make new friends in the town next door. Those unemployed neighbors have no recourse because they have no power to bargain. And at the end of the day they have to buy food from somebody (if they can afford it), and chances are that person will be another dude with a tractor.

First, organizations that seek to end hunger can pool together resources to provide the systems and its byproducts to those in need. Second, if you create a greenhouse or vertical farm with reflective and hydrophobic surfaces, accelerate crop growth with carbon dioxide collected through ionic smog vacuums, internally recycle water and purify inputted seawater through solar thermal, gather solar thermal steam and molten salt power, acquire condensation based hydroelectricity that connects to subsurface drip irrigation, and stack FarmBots on shelves, you can maximize the amount of food for a given volume. If you live in an apartment, you've voluntarily sacrificed living space for proximity to an urbanized community, which makes it your problem.

That's nice, but it is utopian. We already have the resources necessary to end world hunger, that we don't is evidence that it won't happen in this current system.

I haven't done research regarding such movements, so I'm assuming none of them exist. Maybe we could work together to draft legislation for this?

Income caps get talked about. In the United States this is presented as a 100% tax on the top-most tax bracket. When people hear that, they think we are taking all the money from the rich people, because people don't understand our tax system. Currently the top most bracket is people who make $419,000 a year. A 100% tax on the top most bracket would mean that a person who makes $819,000 a year would pay taxes on the first $419,000 as they typically do, but the entirety of the next $400,000 would automatically go to the government since all money above that $419,000 is taxed at 100%. At present, the tax on this income is theoretically 40%, though there are a shit load of tax breaks available to people at that level of income. This, incidentally, is why Trump won't release his tax forms. I have no doubt he has kept that shit legal, but if people actually saw how many breaks he gets, there would be even more anger in the streets.

The internet has expanded the amount of information available to consumers, as well as their economic options. If you look hard enough, I'm sure you can find out who is and isn't worth compensating.

I know some of this. The thing is that wages are at least partially based on the cost of living, and I'm an average working dude, so my ability to afford ethical shopping is limited. Like I said though, I do what I can. I buy what I can from the farmers market, try to avoid big box stores, etc. But there are limitations here. Between the cost of living and the fact that finding many items that are not produced in sweat shop conditions is a fucking nightmare.

Such is the case for some political progress, but that doesn't mean those wanting a better world should stoop to the level of mutually assured conflict. It's very counterproductive, and should only be reserved as a completely last resort.

At what point does this mean that an afflicted party cannot fight back?

In that case, I'll bring up your reference to the Glorious Revolution allegedly being a bloodless revolution, as evidence to the contrary of your claim.

Because the definition of violence has moved around a few times during this conversation. I don't believe anybody died over it, but property was definitely confiscated. Remember we were talking about workers reclaiming property from the wealthy, not guillotines.

Would you like me to provide a detailed analysis as to how an individual can be completely self-sufficient with modern technology?

I can see how that's an amusing thought, but I'd gladly pay a one-time fee to suddenly acquire the means to be completely independent from the rest of society.

Still need the land. Also, I feel like we are really talking about how people who are already in a comfortable positions can retire from society. I'm more worried about the disenfranchised masses. If we were all middle class and capable of buying shit loads of machines that made every one of us self sufficient, I wouldn't be too concerned about the state of things.

However, the society you described would be well within their rights to forcibly redistribute the entirety of one's private property, even if it resulted in their death. One could be the most charitable person on the planet, and such a society could doom them to death simply by overriding their right to personal property with a majority vote. Not only do I find this horrifying, it's also a dangerous tool that can be used by manipulative people and groups to oppress society.

But is it less horrifying that a guy can freeze to death homeless just a block from an empty house because of the way we handle private property? I recognize that there are no utopias under the sun, but I think the democratic system is comparatively less horrifying than the aristocratic one.

Why I never check the "Bump in the Night"

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Won't do much good if they shoot you before you get close enough to swing it.

@Burning Kitty

I don't live in that big of a place.

Why I never check the "Bump in the Night"

I have a sword on the wall. I guess if someone starting bumping my night, I could use that.

Borgies pls go

If that's true, count me out. I'm deeply opposed to violent political change, for various reasons.

@catchamber

Politics is a violent business. I agree that vengeful or unnecessary violence should be avoided. But sometimes the most violent thing is to do nothing. To decide whether or not violence in a revolution is worth it, you have to compare it to the violence of the status quo. If you see the current system as theft from the working class, than you see a crazy amount of violence built into the current system, and the violence necessary to break out of that system is justified.

FarmBot Incorporated isn't providing handouts, but open sourced technology that can feed the world. You still have to create or purchase the machines.

We don't have to automate all food production, as that's a dangerous form of industrial centralization and overspecialization. Either way, what's wrong with mass producing food for everyone? If food is cheaper, people can reinvest in themselves and other industries.

FarmBot Incorporated is basically giving workers collective ownership and the fruits of their labor, because anyone that builds or buys the units doesn't have to pay royalties.

Because that's not how capitalism approaches automation. It won't stop and say thats enough. Once it becomes cost effective, food production will be completely automated. The reason for this is that farms that aren't automated won't be able to compete. If automation allows you to sell a box of food for $1 a pound, and the pre-automation mode at $3 a pound, than any food produced using pre-automation methods will cost three times as much as the automated food. If there is a difference in quality then you will be able to sell the pre-automated stuff as a luxury good, but as the quality becomes equal, the pre-automated food increasingly becomes a cottage industry. If there are no health, quality, or ethical concerns of the automation process, then pre-automated food will become such a small industry as to be irrelevant when talking about employment.

Also, reinvestment in a post-automation world becomes tricky if things get automated too quickly. Shit, the United States is insanely unready for this problem, since here we still require an arm and a leg just to get the necessary education to reinvest, making it very difficult for working folk to move from one industry to another.

From the looks of it, Joe Davis’s boy is putting the needs of themselves and their family above their own people, and is ignoring the future possibility of being replaced by a machine that can guide the tractor without human input. So, he's a mentally incompetent tribalist, and the rest of the community would be well within their rights to ostracize him and boycott the company he works for.

Now you are thinking like a Marxist. Of course, they can't ostracize him very well because he is the propertied individual in this scenario.

That's not true, because FarmBot Incorporated provides an open sourced technology that can feed the world. Plenty of technical data is publicly available online, and the resources needed to create new technologies are widely available at relatively low prices.

About FarmBot specifically, there are a few problems regarding it's effectiveness. First, most people who have problems accessing food do not have either the money or the property to manage it. Second, a single person needs at least an acre to produce enough food to feed themselves (I googled this, the numbers vary, but an acre seems to be the most common average). Four working class people living in an apartment do not have the resources to use a farmbot, even if they can spring for the $3000 upfront cost of the equipment itself.

We both agree that many managers and CEOs are overpaid. My advice would be to draft legislation that forces them and their subordinates to be paid more fairly, or to limit your economic support to companies that already do this voluntarily.

Income caps are talked about enough, especially now that there is a group of modern economists who are worried about the twin-problems of wage stagnation and the wealth gap between the aristocracy and the working people. If a political movement got going to push this issue, I would support it.

And for the record I do limit my economic support to especially heinous businesses as much as I can afford to. The problem is that we are talking about problems that are almost universal. Sometimes you cannot shop with your dollar because there isn't a good choice.

Had I lived in such times, I would've argued that slavery, let alone "partus sequitur ventrem", is a despicable legal doctrine that has no place in American society. Frederick Douglas did violate the law, but I wouldn't just sit back and accept the status quo. I'd be protesting, networking, and building economic systems that negate the need for human slavery.

That all happened, but it ended in violence anyway. When abolitionists figured out they could move to Kansas Territory and use their vote there to make it a free state rather than a slave state, they did that. When it was clear they heavily outnumbered the Pro-Slavery people, Pro-Slavery politicians in neighboring Missouri responded by crossing the border and straight up murdering Free-Staters. "Si vis pacem, para bellum." If you want peace, you gotta be ready for war. This is as true with social causes as it is with geopolitical ones.

Just because something has always happened a certain way, doesn't mean it'll always happen that way. I believe your argument is an appeal to tradition.

It's an appeal to evidence. It would be an appeal to tradition of there was no tangible connection between violence and revolution. Needless to say, the connection between violence and revolution is so tangible that the two are practically synonymous.

I don't believe they exist, because I find the idea to be a horrendously vague, double-edged sword that can be used to justify oppression. The "upper class" will use it to scare the "middle class" into obedience, and lure the "lower class" into providing them political support. Meanwhile, the violent revolutionaries will use it to mobilize the "lower class" for their purposes, then turn around and take their property after the revolution is over. We can sit here all day and argue about definitions, but I'd rather spend my time providing everyone with the means to survive and prosper without relying on the rest of society.

The problem is that none of the things you mentions would be efficacious if the classes didn't exist in some tangible form. They are vague in the same sense that race is vague, but none the less they exist. Like I said before, if you can draw a circle around a group of people and say they have more or less access to their society than another group of people, you have a class.

No person is an island at present, but modern technology is advanced enough to make people self-sufficient. It's relevant, because many political struggles are based on the majority of society lacking what they need to survive and prosper.

I don't actually think this is true. Even with your robots, the idea that you have to purchase self sufficiency from another person is kinda funny tbh.

However, it's possible that allowing modern capitalism to function without hindrance can lower productivity growth. Some employees recognizing their expendability will become lax, due to a morale loss. Some investors becoming very wealthy will refrain from supplying the market with ever-increasing capital, due to bubble risks. As for the impracticality of requiring Wall Street to research ethical codes, I'd rather such a task be done by those that are actually concerned about their malpractices.

I actually agree, yeh, you do have to intervene, because capitalism has all the intelligence of hungry dogs jumping at a carcass. You just have to be insanely tactical about it because, just like intervening with the dogs, it's very easy to screw up.

Regarding the Marxist revolutionary scenario, how does one impartially prevent capital from reaccumulating into the hands of a few? Also, without the forces of supply and demand to gauge value through evolutionary means, how does one impartially ensure everyone receives exactly what they put into the system?

By not recognizing the legal status of capital. Most forms of property require the law to recognize them, elsewise everything is by right of conquest. The Syrian Kurds have this system right now where the community is allowed to vote on the allocation of property. The effect being that you can build up capital if you wish, but if your community decides that your private pool of capital is bad for the community, they can vote to redistribute it. In the west, property is held up as a sacred right in all forms, so we tend to think of even the redistribution of something as abstract as capital as being theft equal to burglary. If we could vote on the allocation of capital though, perhaps we wouldn't have the problems we currently have.

For the most part, I agree with you. However, I believe it's in the best interest of all people that every person and mutualist system has the means to survive and prosper without reliance on the rest of society. That way, should one portion of the gestalt falter, the remainder can simultaneously repair the damage and operate with little-to-no loss in productivity.

It sounds nice, and maybe automation will do this, I just really doubt it. Just taking the farmbot alone, someone will figure out that it's more practical to specialize in one form of produce and trade with their neighbor. This process will move up and down the line because this form of sharing surplus is the way all human societies, from tribalist to capitalist to socialist, create the abundance that makes our species so much more impressive than the animal kingdom. We are inevitably a social species, and we will create social constructs that, if taken away, would make our lives poorer. If society fell right now, people would still live. It would just be a harder life than we are used to. Likewise, if that automation society collapsed, the farmbots would eventually wear down for some people, and we would be back down to square one.