Wait. You mean war isn’t the solution to all the world’s problems?

I got one threatening letter (they are uncommon where I live in Czechia but they will write you after a while). I got a VPN and no more letters.

UK keeps forgetting that it’s just a little country now. It can’t play the big boy games like the EU and US any more.

You should totally leave then

I fully agree we need something new. And I hope we get it. I can readily imagine better ways to tackle the problems we have.

The problem with “post scarcity” is that every time I dig into the details of what “post scarcity” government proposals are, they are basically just communism rehashed with some arm waving about “technology”, so until I see some better proposals than that, I am very skeptical of anyone proposing “post scarcity” as a solution. Hence why I replied to you with my feelings about communism. To me, they are the same things in their current incarnation. Even if you take away money. There is still some central government that is doling out resources, and someone doing the production of those resources which want some compensation for their work. I don’t see that changing any time soon. But maybe someday if we get true AGI and AGI robots, we can give them all the work and let them do this…

I’m sure someone will still try to slant the playing field their way like Musk is trying with Grok, though.

Well you and I are different then, I downvote uninteresting stuff all the time. I also downvote a lot of stuff I already saw or know. This particular item meets both criteria.

This is a dormant tendency in at least half of mankind in any country you look. That’s why it’s so easy to commandeer if someone has the means by which to do so.

It doesn’t make me upset, it’s just not interesting or useful.

Dayum gurl

Me exactly. I keep a lot of the streaming services because I don’t want to host a bunch of 4k stuff myself, though I do often get the 1080p stuff for when I fly on planes or haven’t yet re upped my subscription for the show I want to watch. But many shows aren’t on any of the sub services in my country, so those are straight to the seedbox.

As it should. Ukraine is defending all of NATO

Yeah, that’s a good case for this.

I’m not sure what the difference is between this and just providing food stamps. I think food stamps would probably work out to be more efficient in the end unless for profit stores turn out to be massively inefficient.

Ask anyone who’s lived under communism and they’ll tell you otherwise. I live in a formerly communist country and have thousands of people around me who can directly compare. The only people who had it better under communism are the bottom 5-10% or people who didn’t want to work. If communism makes things cheaper, it’s because almost everyone has so much less money. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no real experience in the matter.

That’s not to say that capitalism can’t go off the rails. Without proper oversight, it will descend into monopolies and fascism, as we are seeing today. But in a well functioning system that has socialist and pro worker legislation as we see many places in Europe, the best of both capitalism and socialism can be brought out. I don’t know why everyone has to always try to go to one extreme or the other when the best system is always somewhere in the middle.

Do better next time!

I think that price gouging is mainly a result of allowing too much consolidation via buyouts and mergers, and not actively enough perusing antitrust and anti price fixing enforcement.

I suppose if it’s allowed to get too bad, the government could try to compete in the market, but governments are almost never the most efficient way to do things and can rarely effectively compete on efficiency against a functioning open market. In my eyes, regulation of the open market via labor law, protecting unions, trust busting and anti collusion enforcement is a far better way for government to solve this problem.

Unfortunately a government that’s not functioning well enough to do this kind of oversight will almost certainly fail at trying to compete against in the open market as a grocery store too. At which point you are just running subsidized food banks, which is also fine by me but I don’t think subsidizing all food for everyone will work in most government budgets.

Of course I want to live in a post-scarcity society.

Unfortunately I don’t live in a post-scarcity world. There are limits to everything. Energy, labor, minerals, fertilizer, economies, governments, etc. Due to abundant energy from fossil fuels we have started to believe that anything is possible and that’s great, and I hope we do manage to continue via AI and automation and new technologies to get closer to post scarcity. But we aren’t there today.

The other thing I don’t like about post scarcity utopias like the Venus Project (and yes, I’ve spent a lot of time researching them), is that when it comes to governance, the current plan just seems to be old fashioned communism with a ton of handwaving about how technology will solve everything else. Communist societies of the past also had access to technology, and they didn’t produce anything resembling post scarcity. As a matter of fact, if anything, they mainly produced more scarcity most of the time when compared to capitalist ones.

So for the time being I think the best we can do is to allow capitalism to do what it does best (innovation, scaling, bringing down costs), and let socialism do the things that capitalism can’t handle (economic externalities like climate change, basic human needs that profit motives greatly mess up such as health care and education, solving food and housing insecurity, etc.).

Someday maybe we will get there with enough automation and some fancy resource management software, but I do very much fear the wrong people slanting those systems in their favor. Good governance and oversight will always be paramount to making any system work, and just hand waving about technology won’t be enough.

Yeah, the hard part is deciding where the line is. This is why I’m a Social Democrat rather than a full libertarian or communist. The places that do socialism well (like Scandinavia) do it by using it where it’s most effective and using capitalism where it’s most effective. This is a never ending debate, which is absolutely needed to get this line drawn in the correct place.

While I don’t disagree with this sentiment, it can be taken too far:

• Covering every disease to the point where everyone gets unlimited exotic multimillion dollar treatments
• Giving everyone unlimited delivery of high end chef prepared food
• Giving everyone access to the best colleges to study whatever they want (no one will study to be a plumber or chimney sweep, roofer, berry picker etc.)

So within the necessities to stay alive and aligned with the means and needs of the society I can agree. Where this all falls apart is that inevitably some tribunal will decide this and inevitably someone will take control of said tribunal to funnel the best food/health care/education/jobs to their cronies, as anyone who lives in a former Soviet state like myself can attest to.

Okay I guess I could phrase that better but this is the first time they’ve used public mass transit infrastructure that I’ve heard of. I will edit my comment to include the phrase “mass transit”.