Uriel238 [all pronouns]

When I was creating a Star Trek expy, this was how the Federation worked: there were a lot of universal basic services, and one of the governmental departments looked to expanding what services qualified as UBS and looking maintain and improve state offerings so they are competitive to commercial offerings.

UBS would still be prone to corruption and exploitation, but its absolutely a viable bridge towards post-scarcity communism.

As a note, clothes, laundry and hygiene would need to be included in a starter set of UBS. I suppose if UBS and UBI came together, and the program would seek to add common UBI purchases into th3 UBS category.

Slrpnik is our satellite.

You know it is curious that the common folk bear the tax burden while getting no representation and thr ownership class gets allnthe representation but evades taxes.

This echoes something I learned in history way back when we were occupied and had to contend with monarchs. Funny Numbers Or Fight!, Better Dead Than Red! Fuck Off With Your Stompy Jackboots! and such.

So during the Great Depression (about a century ago) the industrialists were totally happy, and Hoover was on board with them. The people were seriously thinking about doing that thing Lenin was trying over in the Soviet Union, because really anything was better than eating flour paste and living in cardboard and stacked paint cans.

According to Behind the Bastards in their two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity, FDR’s New Deal was in order to give capitalism another chance since it really was doing the people wrong, and Hoover and his industrialist pals really hated it.

(Christianity at the time was also on team-pinko, except they believed it was the responsibility of wealth and industry to just be relentlessly charitable, so at the time the industrialists had no allies in the Church. The current right wing guns-and-money Christian Nationalism is the product of a decades long propaganda campaign to turn the faith into a pro-wealth, pro-capitalism ideology. And the Catholic Church and Protestant ministries alike bought into it.)

Yeah the art community hated desktop publishing too. People who spent decades working with moveable type were made obsolete.

The problem is not that creativity is easier, the problem is our industrialist masters are all too eager to replace us from the artist to the driver to the lawyer to the task laborer to the engineer.

This isn’t a new problem. The reason Disney only does CGI and live action movies now is because the cell animators unionized.

It’s not the technology. It’s the system that lets you die for the grace of profit-minded industrialists.

With the US on the brink of autocratic rule, it’s really time to take seriously the notion of communist revolution.

This is part of that austerity plan isn’t it?

Not good optics for EU as a sane government when they decide to force march the Greek public for the failures of odious policy.

Sounds like EU Oligarchs are endlessly greedy and cruel as well.

When I hear free energy I think of perpetual motion machines and other notions that conflict with basic laws of entropy.

However, we’re absolutely interested in clean energy (that is, energy that doesn’t muck up our environment) and cheap energy (that is, energy that burns low or sustainable fuel). This is why we’re looking to mimic the sun and develop fusion. But fusion is super tricky. It’s so tricky we’ve been about 30 years away from fusion for over half a century. Meanwhile, the movie Chain Reaction didn’t feature a literally free energy source, just one so drastically cheaper than what we’re using now that it’s practically free. It’s the way that humans have been in existence for such a short time (in contrast to the cosmos, the earth, life or even some dinosaur species) that we practically don’t exist.

Another interesting thing to me, is our capitalist system has always half-assed solutions. For the longest time we used simple fission reactors that are not particularly efficient, elegant or clean, and right now we have a waste mess that is, in some places, a waste crisis. (I remember a LWT segment on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, why we haven’t finished building it, and what the consequences are having failed to do so.)

As I see it, the end game of capitalism is not to have a sustainable society of billions of people, but to have a sustainable society of one person that uses all the resources, and has replaced everyone else with automation (even to the point of curing his own loneliness with drugs or sexbots or whatever). So making production of stuff better, cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable, whatever, is not a priority. Heck, the dude may be happy with training an AI to mimic his own headspace and leaving that as his heir.

There are some really awesome paths towards better power, and while it’ll never be free, we can make it really cheap, so that households can afford gigawatts or yottawatts of energy use. But Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman) is right that established industrialists will put all their resources toward stopping any disrupting technology or movement that might unseat them, even if it would benefit all of humanity, including them. Social power is just that sweet.

The problem is not the what we want, but the how we get there.

Right now a few old men who don’t care about future are making bank on fossil fuels and personal cars. It’s how we circumvent their armies of lawyers.