Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I’d love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Post capitalism.
We have automation for so much manufacturing. We have solar energy which is basically free after manufacture. We could spend a fairly small amount of time really working towards automating most resource extraction and processing.
We could have a really good standard of living not just in the west but globally and we could in the process resolve the threats of climate change but instead we have billionaires.
I think if we had the tech to make replicators (Trek), we would easily be able to go full on post-cap, as that would essentially end hunger, our over extraction of earth’s resources, landfills, recycling, people not being able to afford basics like groceries, etc. I think we have the capability to do that now without that tech, but as a species, lack the will and compassion.
From what I have read there is no physical reason that we could not all have a reasonable standard of living right now with no extra technology. The reason for poverty is not a scarcity if resources, it is a distribution problem. Some people take too much and use systems like law and governance to enforce their relative position. Ditching individual wealth would solve most of the issues which prevent a good life for everyone. Being as most wars are ultimately about wealth and the same for borders it would be revolutionary.
Post scarcity society
As long as shareholder value is the number one thing it just cant happen.
Hemp as a replacement for plastics and synthetic materials. Food packaging shouldn’t have a longer shelf life than it’s contents.
Sunchips was using PLA, which is a step in the right direction.
Ah yes … The Thunderbags™… You were not sneaking any snacks around those things.
I think a moon colony was possible at minimum the mid 90’s. I only think bureaucracy got in the way along with a very stunted space shuttle.
There is also the cost.
The American program to go to the Moon cost several percentage points of American GDP over several years to get there. The USA could have physically had a moon base up there, but it would have been wildly expensive.
I will agree there. But the mining and manufacturing potential is rather insane. We could make money back rather quickly.
Agreed, a lot of sci-fi infastructure is technically feasable its just the logistics and our lack of organisation as a species that gets in the way. We could also technically start on a dyson swarm and a lunar space elevator (not an earth one though) with modern technology and materials.
I’m glad to see that we are moving forward with it, I just would rather it not be by Elon. But he has the tools to get it done.
We could be solarpunk. Like, right now. With everything using clean energy and plants everywhere.
Public transportation.
Oh look, another 'Murican “only the US exists” type comment.
Public transportation is common worldwide.
Wow this hits the feels so hard… Like it’s impressive how hard we have worked against this goal…
Slow down there. Keep it reasonable
Telemetry free consumer products would be nice
I’m on board with ethical and opt-in telemetry. Knowing how your users interact with your app is very useful, but not many companies can show restraint when money is involved.
If my data was used to refine and improve the products and services I interact with I’d be fine with it but as it stands it’s just used to help make my life hell and exploit my existence for cash.
100% this. Telemetry and market research are fine. Hell Some opt in, totally 100% disableable targeted ads are fine as long as they’re not excessive and in the way. Flagrant selling of info however, does not spark joy.
Fair point. Ethical opt-in seems alright
UBI. Not only is it viable but it works in improving everyone’s lives, not just the people receiving it.
Sure, but have you considered that this would loosen the hold capitalism has on the wage slaves? Won’t someone think of the shareholders‽
At best it would prop up capitalism until we can replace it with something better.
It’s literally just giving people more money to shove into the capitalist system. You don’t change a system by feeding it.
I won’t say it’s a bad thing… but it’s not a solution. It’s a stop gap.
UBI will be necessary when the combination of AI and robotics creates a permanent 35+% unemployment rate. We will have to institute UBI, or reduce the population by that much. Which objective will each party choose to support, and how will they accomplish it?
Which objective will each party choose to support, and how will they accomplish it?
One leading party often seems willing to accept war as a means to ends they care about.
In a total lack of contrast, the other leading party seems roughly equally willing to accept war as a means to ends they care about.
The bigger question that bothers me is how much war exactly will they feel is needed for any population reduction they feel is necessary?
And will it be more war than the amount of war I would have otherwise participated in, in my lifetime?
War is a useful tool to reduce populations, but fairly inefficient until they start throwing bombs around. It can’t be the only strategy.
Another good strategy is to restrict access to medical care. Make it incredibly expensive, so costly that many people will choose to die, rather then burden their families with the cost.
Another good one is to end childhood vaccines. A good pandemic can wipe out millions. Of course, this is only happening in America, so the wealthy will be able to afford vaccines from foreign countries, and survive any strategic pandemics. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen “PeeWee Himmler” Miller released a deadly virus on purpose, something like Ebola, just to speed the process along.
Then there is Climate Change, which is wreaking havoc on our environment, and causing far worst storms and floods. Restrict or even end FEMA, and our annual natural disasters can claim victims with much more efficiency.
Criminalize EVERYTHING, and throw more people in prison, where the mortality rate is much higher. Allow the military/ law enforcement to fire on protesters. Allow police to kill without consequences.
Prohibit Birthright Citizenship, allowing the deportation of millions of American citizens. Don Jr, Ivanka, and Eric are all Birthright Citizens, so they should be deported as well, but we all know that Aristocrats won’t be included.
And if doing all this, and more, doesn’t reduce the population fast enough, we can always go down the proven path of Death Camps.
Exactly, what are those useless sociopaths supposed to be doing now? Actual labor? Come on…!
UBI would be amazing for the economy. It’s basically Trickle UP economics. The money will still eventually end up in the pocket of some rich guy, but at least it will grease the gears of the economy on the way up.
UBI would be amazing for the economy.
Citation needed
Challenge accepted, but I’m not going to cite some media story. Instead, I’ll use a real-life example that we ALL lived through:
During the Covid quarantine, Americans were issued checks to help offset financial issues caused by not working, essentially UBI. While everyone thought the quarantine would cause an economic slump, the government-issued checks had the opposite effect - the economy boomed.
When all those Americans got extra money, they didn’t do what wealthy people do, and hoard it, they spent it. They caught up on bills, they bought new vehicles, appliances, furniture, etc. All that government money poured into the economy, and it boomed. Delivery services like Uber Eats and Door Dash finally got their feet under them, and became viable businesses for the first time. Huge online retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, etc. all reported record sales, and record profits, and record stock prices.
It was thought that if everyone stayed home from work, the economy would crash, but as long as they had money to spend, the economy actually increased significantly. Economically, it was the best part of Trump’s first term.
That wasn’t a theory, or a study, or even a small test case in a city or even a state. That was a nationwide experiment, using multiple payments over a fairly long time period, and it proved that giving money to the lower economic strata produces huge economic gains, far more than giving tax incentives to the wealthy.
And it didn’t hurt the wealthy at all. They still got even richer, but everyone else got to benefit too. Trickle UP Economics works, and the only reason not to do it is if the Ruling Class simply doesn’t want us to have it, for their own selfish reasons, which is primarily because it is easier to maintain control of poor people who rely on you for what little money they are allowed to have.
If the Sociopathic Oligarchs and Corporations won’t come to their senses, and cooperate with a new economic paradigm that works for all citizens, then sooner or later we will spontaneously switch to Robin Hood Economics, and that usually comes accompanied with things like guillotines, nooses, and firing squads. They won’t like that at all. It will be far better for them if we shift to Trickle UP Economics before we get to that point.
Why not just distribute the resources themselves, rather than tokens to exchange for resources? If we have post scarcity, we won’t need money
Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You’re giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.
Yes, but if you do it in the form of currency without changing the system in which the currency is used, it’s just feeding that system. Are capitalists suddenly going to be less greedy, and more likely to care about their compatriots instead of eager to exploit them because we give them more power and more money?
No. They won’t. They’ll just find better ways to exploit this sudden surge of basically free money.
Sure, other stuff needs to change as well, but using currency for an UBI is the easiest and fastest way to implement it.
I mean… yeah… that’s what UBI is.
I was criticizing UBI as a concept, not how it’s implemented.
I find it funny who ubi proponents say we need UBI because capitalism failed to have wages match cost of living and simultaneously say UBI will fix it with capitalism.
Housing is expensive because there isn’t enough. If capitalism could fix it, then housing would have at a minimum matched inflation and should have decreased in price because of technology improvements. So giving people more money absolutely cannot fix the housing crisis. UBI would be a handout for landlords.
When demand is the problem in a supply/demand economy, you can’t fix it with more demand (cash).
Capitalism means that they stop building before the price dips below wildly profitable, because capital is risk adverse. Capitalism won’t, not can’t, fix these problems.
A large institution may be risk averse. But a smaller firm trying to gain ground in the market would likely be more than happy to take on the risk and slimmer margins. After all, if capitalism wasn’t okay with slim margins, then restaurants and grocery stores wouldn’t exist.
Yes, and then that smaller firm fails because they take too many risks that have little chance of success. They end up being bought up by the larger firms, and all their assets put towards those higher value investments.
Given that capitalism is a system, not an individual with intention, “won’t” is the wrong word.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning, setbacks, parking minimums, or minimum floor areas; and because the perverse incentives of current taxation schemes regarding the inelastic supply of land don’t incentivize land owners to put their land to its highest and best use.
Housing is a bad example of capitalism failing because the problems developers face are extremely well known and understood. Remove the frivolous regulations, adopt a georgist tax policy, and build good public infrastructure, and you’ll get far more housing than you currently have far faster than you are currently building it. Could government do better? Maybe… but I have yet to see that evidence.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning,
That’s not true because when given an opportunity to build housing, developers always choose to build higher margin premium housing. Capitalism incentivizes profit and there’s no profit in cheap housing.
There is plenty of profit to be made in cheap housing, just like there is plenty of profit to be made in cheap food. You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money, and the store that sold it, and trucker who transported it, and the farmer that grew it will all make money - despite food’s famously slim margins.
The situation with housing is more like this: the government has dictated that only 5 acres of land in the country can be used to grow tomatos. And each tomato plant can only grow a maximum of 10 tomatos. If you are a tomato farmer, what do you do? Well, since you can’t grow as many tomatos as you want, you start looking for ways to increase your margin on each tomato you sell - selling the most appealing, perfect, organic tomatos you can.
So it is with housing. When the government finally approves the development of some denser housing in a desireable part of town, the developer wants to build the highest margin housing that they can, since they won’t be able to build 50 more apartment buildings. So they build luxury apartments. However, if the government said “you can build as much and as densly as you like on any plot of land here”, then developers would probably start with more luxury housing, but would likely run out of luxury renters quite quickly. But then they would simply seek out more profit with the slimmer margins available in affordable housing development.
You don’t need currency for that. You just need a request system. And ideally some form of moral rejection mechanism that refuses to distribute sentient beings as resources. I didn’t say it had to be distributed equally just because there’s no money.
Chicken and vegetarian was just an example, also the chicken was implicitly dead in my example so it was no longer sentient, also also there might be non moral reasons, which paint color do we give people for their walls? How often? Etc etc etc.
In the request system you propose there needs to be some sort of pointing or valuation, requesting a car should not be equivalent to requesting an apple. Whatever form of valuation you use for that, there’s your currency. Not to mention that for the requesting system to be able to work the government would need to own all products so it can redistribute them according to requests, and what would it do if 100 people requested something that only 50 were made? It’s a nice idea but it becomes very complicated very fast, whereas using currency takes away all of that complication and gives you something tangible that could be implemented tomorrow instead of in 20 years being very generous.
Just because something is easier to implement doesn’t mean it will work better.
Honestly, that’s the biggest hurdle our current economic systems are facing. People go for the easy option that seems like it should work instead of the longer term plan that has more flexibility and chance for success.
The problem with your suggestion is that it still hinges on the capitalist system to provide for people. And thus is far easier to exploit.
Yeah sure, but you have got to be realistic, you’re talking about a 20/50 year plan even if you get everyone to agree with it. Yes, Capitalism is bad, yes there are problems with UBI, but the thing you’re proposing is impossible, whereas UBI is something that could be implemented tomorrow, and would set a good foundation to move things in the right direction. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.
Oh, is that all
There’s a few reasons. Firstly greed is a motivator, and people work hard if they believe they’ll receive more for more effort. This gets people to go out and generate the resources that need to be distributed. Second, fungible tokens allow people to trade on the open market instead of having to find a particular person who is willing to trade say, a worm gear for a bale or two of cotton. The token is the middle man that allows someone trying to sell something sell to someone who doesn’t have what the seller plans to finally trade for. That’s why money started to exist in the first place.
Even in a communist system, there needs to be a way to transfer the results of labor into the things a person needs. Money is that way. Even if it means everyone gets the same amount of money to buy what they need. Everyone’s resource needs are different. You can’t just say everyone gets the exact same everything.
Finally, we’re not post-scarcity. Not really. Until resource manufacture is so automated that it doesn’t require people to do labor to acquire it, we either pay people to do the labor or we force them to via slavery. For that reason alone, we need money.
As I said to the other person, there can be a donation and request system to make sure everyone gets what they need, without tying money into it and having this weird limit of the amount of stuff people can get, and tying the idea of value to it all.
What if you make a request and no one wants to donate what you need? Would you not then want a way to incentivize someone to make the donation, or incentivize someone else to make more of what you need?
Only the things scifi wanted to warn us about.
We already live in dystopia timelie.
A moonbase.
Socialized healthcare. A living minimum wage. UBI.
A permanent base on the moon. We should have had that 40 years ago, minimum.
The moon base (and/or moon orbit base) isn’t just cool, it would facilitate building ships in space that don’t have to escape the gravity well. That and asteroid mining (to get materials for ship building) would be such a huge step to having a real presence off-planet.
Mine materials on asteroids, send them to the moon refinery and manufacturing facility, send parts up to lunar orbital ship building facility, send ships to Europa, Ganymede, etc.
Madness!!
THAT’S COMMUNISM
Socialism technically, but I get your sarcasm. I hope it is sarcasm.
Well they did say Sci-Fi and we all know how likely that stuff is. So I think we’re “safe” with Late Stage Capitalism.
The technology has never been what is holding us back.
we’re commies on the moon, we carry a…
I don’t forking understand why in 2025, taking pills is still the only way for me to get better for some illness. As someone who gets pretty bad anxiety about taking pills and who sometimes almost chokes on them, I seriously can’t understand how we have pocket PCs but we don’t have a way to just treat things without pills. Hell, I’ll drink something that tastes horrible if it means I don’t gotta test my gag reflex.
Abolishing the concept of money. Probably won’t happen but it would be pretty cool.
Money is a useful idea, and useful ideas are notoriously hard to kill.
I can see replacing cash with transfers but not removing currency entirely, but that’s my POV. What would you replace it with instead?
What would you replace it with instead?
Nothing. Humanity as a whole would have to evolve past the carrot and stick mentality for this to work. That’s why I said it probably won’t happen 😅
Roof-top gardens everywhere! Like the launch arcologies in SimCity 2000. They looked cool as fuck.
Plants on buildings bring some architectural and safety challenges, depending on how large they are. You need to somehow get dirt and water up, and the dirt can be pretty heavy. If something falls down into the ground it could hit someone and injured them. And also, with time, roots could lessen the structural integrity of a building.
No doubt, but I love the aesthetic
If you love underground, the world is your rooftop garden!
Socialism
