Elon Musk's Starman - Is this shit real wtf

[goDel]

thanks. will check those links

 

edit: assuming that's all true, can we just agree in that case that in order to tackle todays issues it's better to address those neoliberal policies instead of pushing towards  something (communism) which apparently is a couple of evolutionary steps into some future (we don't know how far). 

Edited December 10, 2019 by goDel

[zlemflolia]

37 minutes ago, goDel said:

I have the impression that a lot of issues in modern societies a squarely put in the lap of "capitalism". And not rightly so. 

As an example, I saw a TED talk recently where the presenter made the, imo, useful distinction between Neoliberal policies ( and its impact on society) as opposed to capitalism. My take-away was that a lot of the big issues we currently face have been a consequence of neoliberal policies. And that capitalism on itself is actually a pretty neutral framework (in theory!) which, when managed differently, is in no way a limiting factor. 

In short, capitalism as far as I'm concerned, is not a form of politics. Neoliberalism is. If you want to solve todays issues, I'd start with those neoliberal policies instead of jumping into the communism rabbit hole. And yes, I'm sorry, I really do think it's a rabbit hole. 

Capitalism and democracy are not compatible because the structures of the democracy will be undermined by capital, things will only continue getting so much worse as we enter the technological future, private property and its ability to transmit the power of some individuals over others in the form of economic and executive coercions of others into enacting that private owner's will in relation to the material world, human or non-human, over arbitrary long distances, cannot continue existing

[zlemflolia]

23 minutes ago, goDel said:

thanks. will check those links

 

edit: assuming that's all true, can we just agree in that case that in order to tackle todays issues it's better to address those neoliberal policies instead of pushing towards  something (communism) which apparently is a couple of evolutionary steps into some future (we don't know how far). 

This sounds nice and safe but it's unclear to me whether a possibility of a permanent totalitarian fascist state exists in the future which ruins the effectiveness of an incremental political revolution.  Once they enact sufficiently unequal power over everyone else and fortify themselves within AI-protected pleasure domes, coupled with the deployment of "law" enforcement drones to keep non-elites in check (or even just killing all of us since they have no use for us in a post-scarcity world anymore), these weak positions could spell our downfall.  Don't underestimate the technological power that will be unleashed from the Earth in the coming centuries, and don't underestimate the ability for one sufficiently smooth sociopath to infiltrate the aristocracy of the time and enact such a fascist state.  It's not a scenario of a default mediocre level of danger similar to the past, coupled with utopianism as the only other option - it's utopianism or Hell as far as I'm concerned but I may be wrong.

[dingformung]

14 minutes ago, Zeffolia said:

"law" enforcement drones to keep non-elites in check (or even just killing all of us since they have no use for us in a post-scarcity world anymore)

I thought about this a lot. Isn't it logical that when our whole industry and production is automated and in the hands of only a few that those few just "clean" the planet using automated genocide? Except pretty women, they can be impregnated by huge robo dicks

[goDel]

15 minutes ago, Zeffolia said:

but it's unclear to me whether...

You're on your own here. To me this is similar to demanding that people need to have all possible kinds of care readily available within 5 mins distance, at all times. Just in case something horrible might happen.

It's not a reasonable demand. Or rather, I don't think it's a reasonable risk which forces us to (re)plan an entire society to simply avoid this single scenario. You might as well demand solution for some kind of meteorite that's might be heading our way at some point in a possible future.

[zlemflolia]

25 minutes ago, darreichungsform said:

I thought about this a lot. Isn't it logical that when our whole industry and production is automated and in the hands of only a few that those few just "clean" the planet using automated genocide? Except pretty women, they can be impregnated by huge robo dicks

Well it's already entirely possible, we have the nukes to do it.  But indeed they could do it cleanly with search-and-destroyer robots.  Thus we have to stop them.

22 minutes ago, goDel said:

You're on your own here. To me this is similar to demanding that people need to have all possible kinds of care readily available within 5 mins distance, at all times. Just in case something horrible might happen.

It's not a reasonable demand. Or rather, I don't think it's a reasonable risk which forces us to (re)plan an entire society to simply avoid this single scenario. You might as well demand solution for some kind of meteorite that's might be heading our way at some point in a possible future.

It's rather that capitalism is internally inconsistent and must come to an end at some point, it's just a matter of sculpting that end to be one we want, and there seems to only be two options, anarchist communism vs totalitarian fascism.  It's about how we get to the end, then that result is crystallized forward in time.  Thus there is a global humanitarian urgency, much different from what you described which is a local and individual risk

Edited December 10, 2019 by Zeffolia

[dingformung]

 

1 minute ago, Zeffolia said:

Well it's already entirely possible, we have the nukes to do it.  But indeed they could do it cleanly with search-and-destroyer robots.  Thus we have to stop them.

How?

[zlemflolia]

Just now, darreichungsform said:

 

How?

The exploitation of capitalism to develop the means of production to the most advanced point, followed by a global socialist revolution in whatever way is most likely to lead to communism

[dingformung]

2 minutes ago, Zeffolia said:

The exploitation of capitalism to develop the means of production to the most advanced point, followed by a global socialist revolution in whatever way is most likely to lead to communism

But will it happen before we messed up the ecosystems? The ecological crisis is a good incentive to veer away from an almost solely profit based economy.

I'm opposed to Marx' idea of a steplike social evolutionism and I'm not sure how to interpet the term revolution and if it's still viable to describe broad social paradigm shifts.

[goDel]

Sorry guys, to me this is all Alice in Wonderland stuff. I'm out.

[zlemflolia]

9 minutes ago, darreichungsform said:

But will it happen before we messed up the ecosystems? The ecological crisis is a good incentive to veer away from an almost solely profit based economy.

I'm opposed to Marx' idea of a steplike social evolutionism and I'm not sure how to interpet the term revolution and if it's still viable to describe broad social paradigm shifts.

Grass roots political organizing?  Labor union organizing?  Enlightened bourgeois vanguardism?  Other things?  I wish I knew.  Clearly electoral politics don't work.

[dingformung]

4 minutes ago, Zeffolia said:

Grass roots political organizing?  Labor union organizing?  Enlightened bourgeois vanguardism?  Other things?  I wish I knew.  Clearly electoral politics don't work.

They work but too slowly and the political will of the population is diluted by corporate influence and political power games.

I think the two biggest motors of societal innovations will be:

- ecological catastrophies that cause mass migration

- mass unemployment through automatization

Serious and large-scale development aid and a universal basic income could cushion some of the problems but won't fix them.

I for example like the idea of asymmetric trade treaties that enables developing countries to sell their goods without customs but they are allowed to set as high customs as they like on foreign products. A sort of social protectionism for developing countriws

[caze]

10 hours ago, Zeffolia said:

Under communism supply chains are not optimized

fixed that for you

[chenGOD]

7 hours ago, Zeffolia said:

Supply chains do indeed need to be optimized to avoid production bottlenecks in each layer, and humans do play a role in that process and can sometimes act as bottlenecks, thus they become overworked and exploited if the primary goal is optimization of the supply chain for profit for capitalists

I'm making no pro-Soviet claims right now and won't dispute anything you said on that topic

As for your claim that the iPhone is a great technology, and indeed it is - it's a pinnacle of human achievement and a testament to man's genius, as are many other technologies - it's also an exploitative proprietary piece of hardware and software designed specifically to give profit and power to one company.  It would be better if Apple's intellectual assets were plundered and distributed globally, but this cannot happen under capitalism because capitalism requires property rights which this would violate.  But it would be a net gain for humanity, if everyone has this knowledge and anyone could compete with Apple, and in fact even under a capitalist paradigm this would increase the market competition you so praised earlier which Apple must engage in.  But it will never happen and in fact distribution of trade secrets is highly illegal under capitalism.  This contradiction leads to only one conclusion in a world where renewable energy will soon give us unlimited energy and where information can be freely copied between computers - that once post-scarcity is achieved it can only be just and optimal if it's communistic and no private property rights of this sort exist, because they are in themselves bottlenecks of production.  If we look at supply chains and their optimization from the standpoint of optimization for their private owners, this results in their private property rights over that supply chain acting as a bottleneck just as legitimate and literal as the bottleneck posed by human workers at times which you used to justify, or hopefully just explain, under capitalism.  So which exploitation is more just, that of workers or that of abstract legal entities?  To me it's very clearly the latter

In the post-scarcity economy we are approaching (whether or not it's in our lifetimes), it's not the case that humans need to be exploited and optimized for efficiency anymore, thus the remaining economic decision to make is the decision of who controls all of this vast capital and how these fruits are distributed.  The answer is according to the needs of each, not the whims.  And once a sufficient surplus is created, luxury can begin again without any ethical qualms being embedded in its existence from the very beginning of its supply chain

 A lot to unpack here.

The fraudulent accounting happened not just in the Soviet Union, but was widespread across Soviet-bloc/Communist countries. It is a major indictment of communism, and you need to address that point. Providing the correct incentives to humans is a tricky business.

 

"It would be better if Apple's intellectual assets were plundered and distributed globally,...it would be a net gain for humanity, if everyone has this knowledge and anyone could compete with Apple"

If everyone had the same knowledge, there would be no need to compete. Cooperative competition is just cooperation, companies engaged in the process of cooperation while competing are still doing it to enhance efficiencies and increase profit margins. You might be interested to learn that Apple does give back to the Open Source community. Do they give as much as they should, probably not, but they give back.

I have no issues with private property - it is the bedrock of modern western civilization. Even commons (assuming they are managed) are essentially private property, as they are private to members of the managing community. Supply chains are not the private property of a particular corporation, they can (and do) supply multiple entities concurrently.  I don't believe I referred to any bottleneck caused by human workers, rather that efficiencies can be found at all levels. Bottlenecks in production/supply chains are generally determined by supply, rather than control over private property.

Abstract legal entities are still run by people. You are exploiting people by proxy. Corporations can, and should pay more tax, there is no doubt. Is communism the best model to extract resources for the good of the entire community? No, because it doesn't allow for specialization or create efficiencies. On the other hand, neither is neo-liberal capitalism. Trickle-down economics is an insult to any thinking person.

 

Post-scarcity societies sound wonderful, but cannot exist, because, entropy is real.

[dingformung]

Name one communist country

[chenGOD]

8 hours ago, darreichungsform said:

People who dislike communism don't know what communism is. 

Just google (or ecosia) it, man, innit

Soviet socialism has not much to do with socialism in Marxist terms or in terms of the early pre-Marx socialists let alone with communism.

By da way Marx saw capitalism as the logical predecessor to socialism which he saw as the logical predecessor to communism. And he said that a functioning socialist society can only evolve in highly developed wealthy (capitalist) countries.

He wasn't so much a critic of capitalism as he was a capitalism analyst.

But why always talk Marx when we also can talk Weber

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

Ah the old "no true communism" chestnut.

I've already said that Marx provided a valuable analysis of capitalism, but his analysis was flawed because he could not foresee the adaptability of capitalism.

Weber was a good sociologist but a lousy economist. The Protestant Ethic is interesting for its sociological contributions, but not so much for its economic contribution.

[chenGOD]

1 minute ago, darreichungsform said:

Name one communist country

Post-Tsarist to Pre-Stalinist Russia.

[dingformung]

no true communism 

 

[caze]

Just now, chenGOD said:

Post-scarcity societies sound wonderful, but cannot exist, because, entropy is real.

This is nonsense, entropy only deals with a closed system. Post scarcity (of fungible resources and energy) is completely possible within the earth, and other planets, by extracting energy and resources from the rest of the solar system, including energy from the sun (which has either been locked into resources present in the planets or solar radiation). Sure, over a long enough time period the solar system in total will remain subject to the laws of thermodynamics, but we're talking about billions of years here.

This is not to say we're anywhere close to achieving such a thing, and many things will remain scarce in such a future (such as land, complex and bulky technology, certain hard to access commodities - though with land it's maybe not a big deal, there's nothing in theory preventing the earth from maintaining a population 10 or a 100 times its present size, and most estimates have the population leveling out by the end of the century).

[chenGOD]

55 minutes ago, darreichungsform said:

no true communism 

 

Right, so in the terms of communism as its been implemented (and I'm not referring even to the regimes of terror that existed in Stalinist Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea), communism has been an utter failure economically.

53 minutes ago, caze said:

This is nonsense, entropy only deals with a closed system. Post scarcity (of fungible resources and energy) is completely possible within the earth, and other planets, by extracting energy and resources from the rest of the solar system, including energy from the sun (which has either been locked into resources present in the planets or solar radiation). Sure, over a long enough time period the solar system in total will remain subject to the laws of thermodynamics, but we're talking about billions of years here.

This is not to say we're anywhere close to achieving such a thing, and many things will remain scarce in such a future (such as land, complex and bulky technology, certain hard to access commodities - though with land it's maybe not a big deal, there's nothing in theory preventing the earth from maintaining a population 10 or a 100 times its present size, and most estimates have the population leveling out by the end of the century).

Our ability to to extract resources and energy from the rest of the solar system is essentially nil. As such, the Earth is objectively a closed system.

[dingformung]

1 minute ago, chenGOD said:

Right, so in the terms of communism as its been implemented (and I'm not referring even to the regimes of terror that existed in Stalinist Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea), communism has been an utter failure economically.

Yeah agree. But the several attempts on communism didn't result in communism. It can't just be conjured out of thin air. You need a wealthy society and a functioning political system that can gradually transform into more communist or communalist forms. It's a worthwhile civilising project broad in scope, the weakest and poorest countries are those least likely to succeed

[auxien]

‘hey society that was very successful and got rich via capitalism: time to be communist now’

 

(not saying there’s no valid argument there btw, mostly taken aback by the ridiculous premise. reality is often ridiculous tho)

 

[chenGOD]

1 hour ago, darreichungsform said:

Yeah agree. But the several attempts on communism didn't result in communism. It can't just be conjured out of thin air. You need a wealthy society and a functioning political system that can gradually transform into more communist or communalist forms. It's a worthwhile civilising project broad in scope, the weakest and poorest countries are those least likely to succeed

I agree that it's a worthwhile development project - but the issue is when communism is implemented, many of the incentives that led to the success in the first place get removed. Private property, markets (including financial markets), and choice are  important components that led to the success of developing nations. Market-based socialism is probably the optimal outcome. This includes private property, but on a social scale rather than a societal scale like in communism. Markets are still involved in deciding which products succeed, and choice (or the illusion thereof if you prefer, @Zeffolia) is still an element in the consumption of goods and services. Profits are returned to the owners and investors, but also distributed more equitably (through properly enforced taxation) to social services like health care and education, as well as essential infrastructure like water/sewage/electricity/telecommunications/ etc.

This is different than communism, as the means of production is owned by a variety of models, including private ownership, social ownership, and state ownership. Maybe more similar to communalism, but with more efficient markets in place.

Wish I could dedicate more time to these responses, but busy at being a slave to my society.

[caze]

3 hours ago, chenGOD said:

Our ability to to extract resources and energy from the rest of the solar system is essentially nil. As such, the Earth is objectively a closed system.

Wut?! We've barely even begun to tap into the solar energy from the sun, our current ability to extract it is far from nil and the conversion efficiency will only improve in the coming decades (solar has gone from basically nothing to around 2% of world generation in a decade, and there's big room for growth with thermal conversion too), wind energy is basically just another form of solar power too (and that's at about 6% now of world generation, so we're talking about nearly 10% of total world energy generation coming from direct solar radiation, and we're only getting started, this is all very far from *nil*). Even fossil fuels are also largely solar power of a sort, just with another 5-6 stages added in. Also, in terms of the energy created by the sun long ago and stored on the planet in various heavy elements, we have enough to supply essentially free energy for tens or hundreds of thousands of years (so even if it was a closed Earth system energy scarcity wouldn't be a problem, we just need slightly better technology, nothing too fancy even, and I'm not even talking about fusion - which would give us millions of years worth of easily accessible fuel).

As for other non-Earth resources, our ability to extract them is not currently nil either, it's only cost prohibitive in the near term due to the current high technology cost and relative abundance of terrestrial resources, not for any technical reason. This is something which would only take a hundred years (max) to sort out in terms of the technology. We don't need to worry about the gravity well cost, because it's basically free to get things down a gravity well, compared to sending them up. Musk has already shown in principle that it's economical to launch hundreds of large-payload rockets a year (and it won't take long to see whether it can be pulled off in practice, I see no reason why not) so getting the equipment up there shouldn't be a problem either (and maybe in a few hundred years we'll have a space elevator too). Distance isn't a problem either, ion drives are highly efficient, would take a bit of time to get everything going, but once you've got a supply train moving it wouldn't matter. We're only just beginning to figure out the value of all the stuff that's out there too, it's almost certainly massively undervalued (100s of trillions $ worth estimated currently, probably at least 1000 times that figure, and that's only the nearby stuff, and I'm not even talking about the other planets and their moons).

There's no rush in tackling space resources though, we've still got massive gains to be made improving the efficiency of earth based production. Post-scarcity is possible without mining asteroids, it just won't last for very long. Eventually we'll tap our the resources and once local prices start to go back up again due to renewed scarcity, the cost of mining near earth asteroids will start to fall, it'll happen sooner with some elements than others (e.g. Platinum), but eventually it'll probably cheaper to get stuff from space even with abundant stuff left on Earth, due to the increasing environmental costs of mining for one thing.

None of this is guaranteed of course (and I'm not even willing to put a bet on the likelihood of it happening), but to say it cannot happen is simply ignorant. And to think it can't because of a basic law of physics is just flat out wrong.

[caze]

4 hours ago, darreichungsform said:

Yeah agree. But the several attempts on communism didn't result in communism. It can't just be conjured out of thin air. You need a wealthy society and a functioning political system that can gradually transform into more communist or communalist forms. It's a worthwhile civilising project broad in scope, the weakest and poorest countries are those least likely to succeed

You also need a different species of animal to implement it I'm afraid ("great idea, wrong species"), unless you remove all scarcity first, in which case you don't really need communism anyway. The inherent greed and corruptibility of people will just get in the way every time, and communism is far more easily corruptible than capitalism, with far worse results when it inevitably happens as well.