Presidential Debate Discussion

[Silverdream]

So, communism?

[Natalya]

Not Soviet style, I'm talking about co-ops.

[Silverdream]

Is your name Friedrich Engels? Because urbanized societies like in North America are actually the places least likely to end in revolution.

[Natalya]

I'm not even talking about having a revolution. I'm talking about making more co-ops.

[Keldoclock]

What the fuck do we do about automation?

If I'm working hourly, I have every incentive to be as lazy as possible without getting fired so that I do less work for more money. However if I work in a situation where the amount of products I help create directly correlates with how much money I make, then I'll work harder because the work becomes a little more meaningful.

This structure is very similar to late 19th century machine shops- what ended up happening is the workers did the minimum possible labor without getting fired on "sinker" days and as much labor as possible on days when they got "gravy" assignments, much to the dismay of the managers.

[Natalya]

Sinker vs Gravy?

[Keldoclock]

The machine operators were paid by the number of finished goods they created- at the beginning of the day, they would be told they would be making X for X money per piece. Some days they would have very good compensation, other days not so much. As for the terms, 19th century british slang is weird.

I think modern sweatshops work along this same principle, and I don't think they are very good places to work.

[stubby]

The story of twentieth-century economics was figuring out how to waste enough stuff that people would have to buy new stuff and keep the economy running. It's not like we don't know how to make stuff that lasts more than a year or two, it's that the economy would crash if we did.

Automation gives us the twenty-first-century version of the problem, which is similar - how can we waste enough human productivity so that there's enough work for everybody to have jobs.

We produce so much stuff, and our workers are so productive, that we need to waste everything on a massive scale just to keep the system from grinding to a halt.

[Keldoclock]

we need to waste everything on a massive scale just to keep the system from grinding to a halt.

EDIT: I never really understood why we shouldn't just use our modern techniques to set up a system where we're all self-sufficent people living in our EarthShips with our domestic manufacturing technology (C&C mills, 3D printers, highly space-efficient farms) and maybe sharing whatever systems can't be made small enough to keep in our homes (kind of like Hackerspaces, but applied to stuff like water treatment plants and so forth). As long as we could find a way to keep feeding new resources into the system, pretty much everyone could live a pretty high quality of life without things like the modern concept of labor and careers- most of our work would be in maintaining our homes and other life-support systems, as well as creating and sharing new ideas for getting more out of our limited resources ( as well as scheming up ways to get new resources) What sort of things could we do to have people stubbsidize this way of life? Would such an economy actually economize our limited resources? Would it be any better than what we have now?

[Tzan]

Shadow is having his ego stubbsidized with a new modship.
He is trying to economize his edicts against his limited membership resource.

[Ben-Jammin]

EDIT: I never really understood why we shouldn't just use our modern techniques to set up a system where we're all self-sufficent people living in our EarthShips with our domestic manufacturing technology (C&C mills, 3D printers, highly space-efficient farms) and maybe sharing whatever systems can't be made small enough to keep in our homes (kind of like Hackerspaces, but applied to stuff like water treatment plants and so forth). As long as we could find a way to keep feeding new resources into the system, pretty much everyone could live a pretty high quality of life without things like the modern concept of labor and careers- most of our work would be in maintaining our homes and other life-support systems, as well as creating and sharing new ideas for getting more out of our limited resources ( as well as scheming up ways to get new resources) What sort of things could we do to have people stubbsidize this way of life? Would such an economy actually economize our limited resources? Would it be any better than what we have now?

So lets just build a bunch of robots and become WALL-E.