The Future
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We already have people without incentive, and who make everyone poorer as a result. They're called billionaires. They have no incentive to improve the world, because it's being broken is what they benefit most from. Bezos doesn't benefit from happy healthy employees, he benefits from desperate, powerless employees. They can't fight back if they're terrified of losing their job.
The combined net worth of the 2020 class of the 400 richest Americans was $3.2 trillion, up from $2.7 trillion in 2017. As of March 2023, there were 735 billionaires in the United States.
Meanwhile, poverty is the 4th leading cause of death in the United States. Killing 10 times as many people as homicide in 2019.
As far as the evils of socialism, why is the life expectancy 7 years better for men and 5 years better for women in Canada vs the United States? Could it be socialized medicine and ready access to healthcare perhaps?
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Beautiful weather in 2035? I like your optimism.
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Daemon Silversteinreplied to [email protected] last edited by
It's not about the money, it's about what money allowed them to possess. If they get to possess all the lands, all the commodities, all the technologies, all the books, everything (as explicitly said by the character's dialogue "We finally given you all of our worldly possessions", notice how the word "possessions" is used instead of "money"), they'll still have it even though money isn't circulating anymore. After all, money is actually their creation to hold what the money really meant to represent: gold and wealthy. Money was created as a "certificate of gold ownership" in a world that used to use gold as a means of exchange resources. People don't possess gold anymore, they possess what is promised to be a "certificate of gold", with gold not being monetary backing anymore because of fractional reserve banking and stock market speculation which together created money out of thin air without actual value other than "guarantee" from the banks that they'd keep accepting it and circulating it, until they don't anymore.
That's why they are investing in robots and automation. Once they have servants programmed within the constraints of their will, servants that (supposedly) won't turn against them because they're non-sentient machines, they won't need "peasants" (as they consider everyone else) anymore.
That's why they're investing in flying to the damn Mars. Once they (supposedly) have a new (supposedly livable) settlement far from "peasants", they can let everyone else die in this scorching Earth that reached this point due to their greedy actions.
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If you're 'terrified of losing your job', the problem is probably you because your ability to leech off a rich person is in jeopardy, you buried yourself in debt, you're living beyond your means, you have drug addictions, etc.
Bezos is an asshole. Not all rich people are bad (not all people are bad). -Strawman argument.
Meanwhile, poverty is the 4th leading cause of death in the United States.
Asserting something that can't be proven. -Do you have a religion you want to dispense also?
As far as the evils of socialism, why is the life expectancy 7 years better for men and 5 years better for women in Canada vs the United States?
Could be many things like distance from equator, better food ingredient standards, etc. Do you think posing a question makes a point?
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What kind of stupid question is this? No, I don't believe idiotic things like 'money is THE root of all evil'. There are obviously other incentives in life. What's your point?
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I'm trying to understand why you seem to think that socialism is a fantasy. In my experience, it's usually a rebuttal about getting paid.
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Thats a deluded take.
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I am sure you're a "genius" who thinks people are poor or living paycheck to paycheck because its only their fault. But you wouldn't know anybody.
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Poverty is about resources. Most people in the US have plenty of that. Most people living paycheck to paycheck indeed did it to themselves.
Talked to someone while returning bottles and cans the other day. They had an electric bike with a trailer. They make ~$80 a week just going around town picking up bottles and cans. -Something I used to do before e-bikes. I made 2x minimum wage doing it when redemption took longer and more effort (feeding through a machine). Almost any idiot is capable of doing this, others are capable of far more.
If you're dependent on an employer in the US; you're probably a lazy leech that simply refuses to do actual work because I could give example after example of work people could do for more money. -When you lack those resources, then complain about poverty.
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Most people isn't good enough. Homeless people exist and underpin the entire concept of inequity with capitalism. The only thing they did was not have money.
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I've been homeless, have you?
You're probably ignoring underlying problems like drug addictions, mental illness, and divorce. Also, some people simply choose the life. -
Yeah that minimum wage sure makes people go above and beyond lol
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Sounds like you were stealing scrap metal to me, right to private prison, you are now happily employed.
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Getting through all of those conditions requires huge amounts of money, as I'm sure you know. There probably are some folks that prefer homelessness, but it's a substantial minority and likely due to a situation where apartments don't work and they can't afford a house.
I don't need to be homeless to have compassion and a vision for a better world.
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Experiencing homelessness leads to a better understanding of homelesseness. Same with wealth; if you've never been wealthy; you don't know the experience. Sure, it's nice that you show you care about it, but anything you have to contribute on the topic is about as effective as donating to a scam artist and thinking you did good.
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Cleaning up other people's litter. lol
The guy does a service. I just return my own and my landlords. -
It's argued that slavery was a choice. Working minimum is far more so.
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Do you have the proper tax stamp and notorized permit from the state and your landlord? You are going straight to prisonl as well.
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Experiencing homelessness leads to a better understanding of homelessness
I 100% agree with you that lived experience is a necessity to finding an answer, but it's unrealistic to expect only people with that experience to produce solutions.
anything you have to contribute on the topic is about as effective as donating to a scam artist
What was it you were saying about lived experience? Well you've never lived my life. I can see the precarity of homelessness myself. I'm in a place that's forced to make plans in case I have nothing. I'm also building an organizing committee for my union local to address homelessness in my community. I'll make sure to tell everyone that attends our moneyless winter clothing swap that even though I'm there and planned it, I'm actually a con artist.
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[email protected]replied to Daemon Silverstein last edited by
money is a proxy for resources, is the thing, having someone "own" everything includes owning all the money, at which point you end up with the same issue. Ownership is meaningless without a system to enforce that, because one person cant prevent everyone else from using "their" stuff on their own, and systems require buy in from a large fraction of the population to function, which requires giving enough people a reason to participate. Automation doesnt really solve this, it increases the total amount that can be produced, meaning you can hold a higher fraction of the total because the smaller fraction left can be "enough" to keep the system running, but some tasks exist that require a significant degree of intelligence and thinking to do, meaning you must either have humans do them, or have machines that are smart and self aware enough that them finding ways around restrictive programming becomes an issue.
I dont think Mars has anything to do with some plan by the rich to escape tbh. Early space colonies by nature would be cramped, form-follows function places to live, and the rich tend to like a lot of comforts. It seems to me more likely that they would send other people to colonize mars as a vanity project, or for resource extraction, or just because they personally like the concept and have enough money to push for it to be done, than that very many of them would personally go there. They might suggest that it could be a way to escape climate change or such in order to try to prompt others to buy in, but that notion falls flat on its face when one considers that even if we burned every scrap of coal in the ground, every drop of oil, and then fired off every nuclear weapon, it would still be easier to build a settlement on earth than one on mars. If you have the resources and the technology to build a mars colony, "the planet burning" is no longer much of a threat to your survival anyway.
