We are the consumer class now, but we are still somewhat in the game, and we can manipulate the game, which allows us a relative level of freedom. Once removed from that, we become pure dependents, and the tit is the corporate oligarch. Covid has proven this. Amazon shares increased 3x while small businesses shrank and were regulated out of existence. Where did the stimulus checks ultimately end up?

Ignoring the fact that I'm working on 5 distribution warehouse projects in direct competition to Amazon (who happens to be right across the road from my client's site)... What are you suggesting? Obviously, small shops can't reasonably compete with shipping and overhead against giants, so should we subsidise them so they have a fighting chance? Limit the size of giants? Give everyone free puppy cuddles twice weekly to alleviate the stress of their empty consumer lives?

I’m not suggesting anything. I’m predicting the weather

Me: It looks like rain tomorrow. Everyone: are you suggesting we shoot giant maxi pads into the clouds?

Can't use proprietary brands if it's gov project... so better just stick to a vague description and hope it's not a giant soggy mess by the end of the day...

There is an impossibly thin line between socialism and oligarchy.

That’s what most people like you don’t understand.

Let’s keep this thread productive

There's an impossibly thin line between any system of civilization and oligarchy.

classic

Fair enough, but socialism is an especially effective way to feed an oligarchy.

I don’t think we can have a productive conversation about this topic until we open minds up and go beyond 20th century failed solutions

Have you seen Wall-E. The Pixar movie? Even more accurate than Brave New World to explain where we are heading…

Robot love is the future.

How is socialism an effective way to feed an oligarchy? I'm guessing this is some kind of horseshoe theory thing but they're essentially opposite ends of the spectrum.

If the workers own the means of production how are they feeding an oligarchy?

But that’s a big part of how corporate America is priming things. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The term “woke capitalism” has been used to describe how corporations use culture to maintain control.

Do you support the government breaking up these massive corps?

No. I view the government as the biggest corporation of all.

And we ought to break them up first by reducing their power, not increasing it.

So you want to break up the only group large enough to wield power against the corps, then ... pray? hope? trust? the corps will ... break themselves up?

I don’t claim to know the solution. I’m just pretty sure that giving more power to the government (that is largely beholden to the corporation) is not the solution.

Seems to me like the "beholden to the corporation" part is the problem, not the government itself.

Chicks and eggs

These corporations are not operating in a vacuum. Their power is because of the US government and global network of governments, not in spite of it.

...which is why that needs to change. Disbanding the only group large enough to affect that change is foolish. Change that group and use it to do the right thing. Do you throw away an expensive knife that you cut yourself with because you let it get dull?

Good analogy Pete

I think we can all agree that government should not be giving any special advantages and support to corporations, as they have. If we remove those advantages, we may see a slight leveling of the playing field. Second,

globalization comes with a cost. The corporations who want to do business with foreign nations should be paying that cost, not the tax payer. The US security and military apparatus that clears the way for this type of foreign business dealings (oil, manufacturing,

etc) should not be funded by the average tax payer. Let them pay for it. So, we don’t need to enlarge govt, we need to remove it in the right places, and use those resources elsewhere. This could be a bipartisan thing, but the state is deeply corrupted by corporations, so it’s a chicken egg senario.

etc) should not be funded by the average tax payer. Let them pay for it. So, we don’t need to enlarge govt, we need to remove it in the right places, and use those resources elsewhere. This could be a bipartisan thing, but the state is deeply corrupted by corporations, so it’s a chicken egg senario.

This is really one of the main libertarian arguments. The idea that we want to come after grandmas welfare is a scare tactic. There are many low hanging fruits, like agriculture subsidies, that are the main focus of people talking about shrinking govt. The neocons have taken this spirit and flipped it towards things like ss and welfare. In a perfect world we would eliminate everything, but that’s not something on most libertarians priority list.

Ok, but my point is eventually that will be zero days. Lol

I think Greek society offers a pretty good example of what might be an outcome. The upper class was involved in politics, art and philosophy. Work was not considered a important piece to make people feel fulfilled in life. A good book is "A world without work" It doesnt take a stance but looks at the studies where universal income was implemented and alcoholism shot up but countered with examples such as the one above. It also mentions how socialism might actually have to be the only answer but how do you keep a meritocracy in that scenario and does class mobility completely stop? All good questions but according to Tduds you need to stop thinking. It might lead you into discovering things against the narrative for the sheep.

Don't put words in my mouth to make yourself appear smart. If you have more than three brain cells you should be able to make your point just fine using things people actually said.

Reverting to a personal attack. Another debate won!

You cited something I didn't say. Pointing out that you did that is not a personal attack. 

This idea that you need proof or a complete dissertation to discuss ideas is problematic, especially for design professionals.

Probably why some of us would have won the bet on whether the Wuhan novel coronavirus came from the Wuhan novel coronavirus lab (see Jon Stuart).

archi-dude, absolutely. Work is much more than just bread. Humans, especially men, need work to fulfill their sense of purpose. Without that, we will degenerate.

Imagine the beautiful things we could create if, untethered from the need to get money to survive, we had true freedom to choose the labors that give us that sense of purpose.

I don't need "proof" or "a dissertation", I suppose I just have a higher bar for what I consider a fruitful discussion. Happy to continue in honest discussion if anyone wants to expand on my questions below.

tduds, get rich, lulz.

Yes Tduds, that’s true. But it’s tricky to do enable that in a way that also doesn’t also lead to tyrannical restrictions on what you can create
.

tyrannical restrictions on what you can create? the National Endowment for the Arts is holding on Line 2 to speak with you...

Yeah, you probably wouldn’t have a problem apologizjng in mandarin like John Cena…but that’s where this goes. Creative liberty is absolutely connected to economic liberty.

So, you can have something like a UBI, and some cottage industries would emerge possibly among those who’ve been displaced by automation I suppose. But only so many people would be capable of doing this. Many would probably degenerate.

[nevermind]

Nothing wrong with any of that. It’s called thinking

How many “conspiracy theories” have to be proven true to jerk your neck from the mainstream narrative?

The thing about theories is that the veracity of any one theory has little bearing on the veracity of theories in general. That's not how thinking works at all.

My point is you're presenting things as self-evident that very much are not, and then extrapolating some theories from those. My challenge is that you need to do a bit more work to convincingly demonstrate the existence of your initial conditions before you propose actions to address them.

As usual I'm not so much countering your arguments as I am suggesting they're not yet coherent enough to be worth considering.

Ah like critical race theory.

Like you know what CRT is.

"Lotta hypotheses presented as axioms & conclusions in this thread" gets confronted by their own hypotheses getting presented as law not theory. Reverts to personal attacks. Lost the debate.

What?

Plot = “the main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.“.

The industrial rev is not same as robotics and AI

Socialism and oligarchy goes hand in hand. The Chinese style cultural revolution happening in this country is maybe intentional, and 99.999% guaranteed to not benefit the masses, otherwise it wouldn’t be echoed by the political and corporate elite.

Woke capitalism is capitalism that benefits from, or kneels to the strong arm of government. See Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Taking away many jobs and not replacing them.

That’s like your opinion man.

Answered in order^ From phone

Apocryphal stories have some neat applicability... https://www.etymonline.com/word/sabotage

Not better, not faster: just cheaper, because that is the only thing that matters. Robots don't get sick, don't take days off, don't get health insurance and retirement benefits, can be replaced at will (ok, this one applies to pretty much all labor as well), etc.

Every tech is a double-edged sword, and both edges are used for profit first (and often last and only). Triple-edged when you count displaced labor.

The internet went from a magical information superhighway to a virtually gridlocked cesspool of advertising, datamining, and propaganda where ecommerce did to small business what interstate highways did to small towns. 

What I see would be a shift. While during the period of transitions, there will be displacement but that is often addressed by various programs for retraining which is and has been used to address the issue. Yes, some will be ultimately retired and kind of kicked to the curb which is how our society deals with those who can't 'adapt' and/or simply won't. There will always be new supply of people that will get the training (unless we kill ourselves off and then no one would have to worry about the future anymore... anyway).

One can accurately define a problem, suggest a narrow simplistic causation, and then go on to propose a solution that is far more catastrophic than the problem itself, like Marx did.

yes i actually think that's the most common outcome - every era's major problems were the solution to the previous ones.

The rich do whatever the fuck they want. Which is basically try to increase their wealth. Which is not work in any sense.

i think once they achieve wealth they look to develop power. that's the real danger for societies

Money and power are one and the same, and always have been.

Not really. Money is a form of power but power isn't always in the form of money. You can take the analogy of all squares are quadrilaterals but not all quadrilaterals are squares. That analogy would apply in the abstract of the point. Money may be a power but not all power is money. There was a time before money and yet there was power. Money is the fiat currency of properties, assets, and resources tradeable and through trade is the art to have the leverage in negotiation. It's all the art of negotiation (avoiding using the phrase that happens to be a title of a book associated with a douchebag). That's where power is... the leverage to compel another to your will and desire. Inferring on the meaning of power in this context.

Someone should find a way to turn ricky’s long-ass posts into some sort of blockchain. They’d make some much coin overnight to make Bezos will look like a dirty pesant.

No alternative power structures will be tolerated by the powers that be unless they control them absolutely. Governments and corporations already control the internet. If anything, the future will just be a continuation of the ongoing war for control among various political and corporate factions.

This is most likely because the company is greedy, and they use half-assed automation to replace the workers so they can shove that minimum wage pay (times number of workers not staffed) into the coffers of the C Suite.

Same here with the self checkout machines...they’re everywhere now, almost every supermarket has them

This isn't new though. I remember experiencing self-checkouts about 10-12 years ago. It started out as a prototype (maybe 2-4 self checkouts) and it grew to replace about half the traditional checkouts. A couple years later they, for whatever reason, started scaling back and some stores got rid of them entirely. Maybe customers weren't ready?

The pandemic brought them back, and I see a about a 1:4 automated to traditional checkout ratio.

Personally, I love Home Depot's self-checkout. 

I think they may have been removed because of shrinkage.

SneakyPete, is that nominally a joke, or actually funny?

I meant shrinkage as in retail theft. If I made a joke it was purely accidental.

lol, I thought you were making a joke out of the nominal dimension vs. actual dimension lawsuit filed against Home Depot years ago where the guy claimed they were deceiving customers because a 4x4 didn't actually measure 4 inches by 4 inches. The suit was dismissed but they changed the way they labeled wood to solve for ignorant customers who don't understand nominal dimensions represent the size before dressing/surfacing and shrinkage.

I’m not necessarily anti-automation. I just think we need to replace those jobs…and it goes beyond just giving money out. What if something like a National reforestation effort or some modern version of the city beautiful movement was created to replace such lost jobs. A sale tax on automation produced products could fund it.

You can assume automated products would be cheaper to out compete…and the sale tax would level that a little

Because they can never have enough money. The more they have the more they are afraid of losing it.

At a certain point it’s only about power

The human race has some seriously sick limbs that need to be trimmed.

History encourages wealthy people to keep the masses happy. No one wants to end up in a guillotine circa the French Revolution.

When automation takes over, the revolution will follow shortly...the masses will have all this time on their hands to educate themselves to finally realise they’ve been had. Nothing more scary for the powers that be than people with nothing to do and nowhere to go...

That’s what Soma is for. (Brave new world)

@random, which is why the police have been militarized, citizens are under constant monitoring, and a few billionaires have started talking about a basic income guarantee.

Stankest robot on the block