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United States41383 Posts
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 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".
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On September 16 2013 08:16 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 16 2013 08:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On September 16 2013 08:10 KwarK wrote:On September 16 2013 08:03 sam!zdat wrote: because right now the economy is on life support and we have no exit strategy. The life support isn't even actually helping the economy it's just inflating assets of people who already have wealth.
the problem is jobs. Just because people want stuff doesn't mean that they have an opportunity to work to get it, when more and more stuff can be made with fewer and fewer people (and, even more importantly, fewer and fewer AMERICANS). Technological unemployment will only accelerate (remember our 90s 'boom' was based on a sector whose raison d'etre is technological unemployment). And we ran out of ways to keep people busy 30 years ago. We've simply 'innovated' human beings out of the economy.
there will never be any job-creating economic recovery ever again. There will only ever be jobless recoveries. That is a recipe for social instability and an opportunity for left politics (also, of course, an opportunity for caesarism and fascism, that's the trouble) I don't follow. If the problem is that there is simply not enough labour involved in the creation of the stuff we want how is that a problem? If previously the total labour requirement of society/number of people in society was 40 hours per person per week and now it's 20 hours per person per week then that's a colossal success for everyone involved and we can all go home early. It's a distributional problem. For example it may not be practical / efficient / culturally accepted to break up work into two 20 hr work weeks rather than a single 40 hr workweek. If so one person wins and one person loses, unless there's a way to distribute from the winner to the loser in an acceptable way. 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. Yes, redistribution can solve the issue. How best to redistribute isn't a given though. Alphaville has a nice running series on handling that. Not saying you should use it as the bible, but it's interesting if you find the topic interesting
Edit: wage subsidies and minimum incomes have been floated as solutions.
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).
You've lost me a bit. Is capitalism producing too much (over-exploiting resources) or producing too little (artificial scarcity)?
Or is you argument that we should have an economic system that imposes what we would consider "poverty" in order to save the planet?
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United States41383 Posts
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.
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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. Me neither. Robots are sexy
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On September 16 2013 08:23 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +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 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".
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
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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
Come on Sam... you are one of them. Why are you betraying your very own kind ?
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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.
You won't get a cheap supply of everything if it's all controlled by a few hands. You'll have to deal with massive unemployment which means massive poverty until the population lowers significantly. How do you vote yourself robots when there exists private property? The means to these ends are held by the few and the rich. Your utopia necessitates some form of socialism. The current course implies the opposite.
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On September 16 2013 08:36 Boblion wrote:Show nested quote +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
Come on Sam... you are one of them. Why are you betraying your very own kind ?
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
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On September 16 2013 08:31 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On September 16 2013 08:23 KwarK wrote: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 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". 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 Yeah, don't tell me what "jonny capitalism" does. You are far too ignorant to be making those statements. I'm fucking tired of it.
What makes you think we've been in a dystopia since 1974? We've been at full employment multiple times since.
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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
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On September 16 2013 08:40 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On September 16 2013 08:36 Boblion wrote: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
Come on Sam... you are one of them. Why are you betraying your very own kind ? 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
Well, you're not beating around the bush, that's for sure.
I definitely agree with the first sentence. Second sentence is subject to interpretation IMO, but I sympathize in a certain way.
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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 Real compensation did.
Edit: you weren't trying to address me. You were trying to throw words in my mouth.
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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?
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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? It shouldn't matter that the real compensation numbers include over priced healthcare. The over pricing should be removed once you convert to real.
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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
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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
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 percentage in the world, but if we actually decreased crime, that would mean some private enterprise loses a government contract.
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you should all go read 'stand on zanizbar' by john brunner for a horrifying hilarious book about this problem
edit: 'green' products are the same thing, they are just a way to make money selling indulgences and profit from the fact that the rest of the economy is destroying the planet. We need a green economy not green marketing
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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 Some of more healthcare is developing new cures that you didn't have before. There were a lot of diseases back in 1974 that we couldn't treat but now we can.
Spending too much on healthcare isn't considered good for the economy even though, mathematically, it increases GDP. Policy makers and non-healthcare businesses are very much against rising medical costs.
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On September 16 2013 09:03 Leporello wrote:Show nested quote +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 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. Few prisons are privatized...
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I'm new to the whole collegiate finance universe.
If tomorrow the whole world decided to implement and enforce some sort-of universal minimum wage (say, US$12.00 / hr or something not completely awful), what would things look like?
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