US Politics Mega-thread - Page 439

On September 16 2013 08:21 sam!zdat wrote:
they don't want servants they want robots.

this is your english fantasy about the old country house system :p

On September 16 2013 08:16 KwarK wrote:

At which point redistribution, both by government and by the invisible hand, come into play. If some of the guys are rolling in money from their twice normal hours and other dudes have no money from not working at all then the dudes with the money are gonna want some servants and suddenly their take home income is nearer 30 hours and the guys who were unemployed are up at 10.

Prosperity changes the basis of the economy but the rules remain unchanged.

On September 16 2013 08:15 sam!zdat wrote:
capitalism artificially manufactures scarcity. This is why you have to believe that all use-value is a sacrosanct subjective thing about which nobody may judge.

i've lived at right about the poverty line for the last two years. At this same time, I was one of the richest human beings who ever lived.

this is all separate from the issue of technological unemployment, which is about the fact that as the organic composition of capital increases due to technological 'innovation' you have to open up new industries in order to employ people (or just give them sustenance but that threatens the social order). But the problem is that we have everything that we need already (and more).

post scarcity is kind of a stupid concept however because we are stealing our abundance from the future (through exploitation of nonrenewable resources construed broadly).

On September 16 2013 08:26 KwarK wrote:
I think I'm just not getting this dystopian future we're on the verge of when all labour is done by robots and there is an overabundance of cheap supply of everything.

On September 16 2013 08:23 KwarK wrote:

Then someone has to build the robots. And if the robots start building the robots and repairing the robots and doing all the work then the people just vote themselves some robots and spend all day masturbating because "fuckit robots".

On September 16 2013 08:31 sam!zdat wrote:
But you will have to find yrself some THEY LIVE glasses and shatter that ideological cage you are trapped in first

On September 16 2013 08:26 KwarK wrote:
I think I'm just not getting this dystopian future we're on the verge of when all labour is done by robots and there is an overabundance of cheap supply of everything.

On September 16 2013 08:36 Boblion wrote:

Come on Sam... you are one of them. Why are you betraying your very own kind ?

On September 16 2013 08:31 sam!zdat wrote:


yes well that's what we call socialism, more or less I think everyone should have a basic minimum income (which requires less bureaucratic overhead than welfare)

jonny capitalism has to simulatenously produce too-much and not-enoughness. This is a neverending spiral. If we don't balance it consciously, reality will do it for us and it won't be pretty.

we need to smash an economic system which produces endless squandering of resources and planned obsolescence. Don't you realize that if you produce something that just works and never breaks then you are a terrible capitalist? Yes it will be difficult, and yes we will need people like you to help build it. But you will have to find yrself some THEY LIVE glasses and shatter that ideological cage you are trapped in first

edit: we are already in that dystopian future and have been since 1974. But hey, if all of the sudden the jobs start coming back I'll be overjoyed to be proved wrong. But I think that's delusional, the jobs will never come back and the only jobs that WILL exist will be horrible suicide-inducing corporate service industry druges

On September 16 2013 08:40 sam!zdat wrote:


because 'my kind' are a bunch of wasteful banal shallow morons and I hate them. Rich people suck and are useless parasites who piss on everything that is good and beautiful, so fuck them all

On September 16 2013 08:43 sam!zdat wrote:
I was just trying to address you. Jonny was not a kind of capitalism. Sorry.

1974 was the year after which real wages never rose again in the US

On September 16 2013 08:46 sam!zdat wrote:
no I mean 'jonny' meant '@jonny'. It was just indicating that I was talking to you because my computer is broken and I'm on my phone and quoting is hard

edit: by real compensation you are including our bloated healthcare program which has become a health-industrial complex, should be provided by the government anyway, and largely serves to mitigate to whatever degree it can the health issues which are a product of our capitalist created lifestyle of automobiles and high fructose corn syrup right?

On September 16 2013 09:01 sam!zdat wrote:
yes but the point is that getting more healthcare means you are getting sicker. Getting more healthcare is a bad thing not a good thing, it would be better not to get sick at all. But getting sick and getting healthcare increases gdp so therefore it is a good thing, so therefore giving people diabetes and then treating them for it is good for the economy. Go capitalism

On September 16 2013 09:01 sam!zdat wrote:
yes but the point is that getting more healthcare means you are getting sicker. Getting more healthcare is a bad thing not a good thing, it would be better not to get sick at all. But getting sick and getting healthcare increases gdp so therefore it is a good thing, so therefore giving people diabetes and then treating them for it is good for the economy. Go capitalism

On September 16 2013 09:03 Leporello wrote:


Same thing with prisons. "Privatizing is good because it creates incentive", so we create incentive for "crime" to exist. Everything in our prisons is privatized and outsourced. We have the largest incarceration percantage in the world, but if we actually decreased crime, that would mean someone loses a government contract.