Grrl Power #1049 – Proposing better worlds
I came up with Deus’s comment that “Evil always has the advantage of being more proactive” as I wrote this page and I think it’s probably true, because I think there’s a limit to how proactive ‘good’ can be. I don’t think ‘evil’ has a limit, really. All of the tortures Deus mentions are utterly horrific – the Blood Eagle, where someone skins your back, then cuts away all the muscles, then breaks your ribs and pulls your lungs out so you suffocate while in bowel evacuating agony is by far the kindest one on that list. (Crucifixion doesn’t sound that bad, but it takes days to die from it. I imagine the Blood Eagle could be drawn out to some degree, but… look, torture is bad, m’kay?) The Holocaust, all the shit Japan did to China during and before WWII, even just 90% of what happens during any war. There’s no limit. Actual demons have probably never invaded Earth cause there’s nothing left to teach us.
But for ‘good?’ You can lock your door at night, making it slightly harder for someone to rob you. If we assume they try your door, then immediately give up and go home, then you’ve proactively prevented 1 unit of bad. It doesn’t increase the units of good, but arguably, preventing an increase in bad is, in itself, good. Chances are the burglar doesn’t stop at the first locked door, so they go to your neighbor’s house and find an unlocked window and rob them. So you start a neighborhood watch. That’s proactive. But it’s a big neighborhood and you only have 12 volunteers and the robberies continue unabated. So you buckle down and eventually figure out who it is, but you don’t have proof and the cops can’t get a warrant to check out his house so you… confront him? Break into his house and try and steal back everything he stole? Break his hands with a hammer? Set his house on fire? Kill him?
Obviously most of those are wild overreactions, but for the sake of brevity, you can imagine an escalation that leads to a level of proactivity that crosses the line from ‘good’ to ‘not so good.’ But that’s my point, I think good has limits. Preventative medical checkups are good. The world of GATTACA? Probably not great? Especially as it was presented segregating humans into the GATTACAs and the GATTACAn’ts.
‘Good,’ in my opinion, also requires more work. If you want to walk across the hall to another apartment and beat up your neighbor, that’s pretty straightforward. If you want to prevent your neighbors from beating each other up, you’re stuck patrolling your entire apartment complex/neighborhood.
I think a lot of supervillains can be categorized as individuals who cross the line into proactive goodness. Ecoterrorists like Poison Ivy or Sam Jackson’s character from Kingsman. Humans are killing the Earth so kill a significant percentage of the humans. Problem solved. Humans have proven time and again they can’t govern themselves without descending into corruption and abuse, therefore I will govern them whether they want me to or not. Problem solved. Etc.
Of course, while some behaviors are pretty clearly good or evil, there’s a mass of complexity in between. If you really want to prevent that guy from robbing his neighbors, you could achieve that by eliminating desire. Arguably bad. You could also eliminate or at least minimize poverty. That’s almost definitely good as the majority of crime is in some ways motivated by poverty. But then what are we really talking about, communism? And how do you prevent the pigs from being more equal than everyone else, leading immediately back to haves and have nots. Maybe you eliminate scarcity. That’s… probably good? Right? But that involves an overhaul of economics entirely, as well as tech and resources we don’t have yet. Who knows what new problems could arise from such a dramatic paradigm shift?
Ultimately, Deus’s point is that super powers are likely going to magnify humanity’s… humanity. Sitting back and hoping the world won’t become a lot worse is negligent.
On a serious note, “Curse words based on female genitalia” would be the bluest of blue chip stock ever.
The May Vote Incentive is up! This month it’s Warsyl, from Tamer: Enhancer 2! I’d say “spoilers,” but the book has been available for 5 months now. Anyway, this pic doesn’t have a zillion outfit variations, partially because her armor took longer to draw than I thought it would, but mostly because she just has an armored form, and an unarmored form. The latter being available over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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I’ve always loved that phrase about giving a man power to test his character.
I’ve heard another way to test one’s character, is to see how they treat those beneath them.
Those sayings are actually really close, as you need some amount of power to have people beneath you.
H.G.Wells’ “The Man who could work Miracles”. Good Movie
A better version might be insulation from consequences. Usually, power is just used for that, be it money, political, or any other form.
wish I could remember the name for the trope where some higher being tests a world or civilization by giving them some grand artifact, if they use it wisely and to benefit everyone there is a reward (or just using this power source wisely is its self the reward), but misuse it and your world fails the test.
-lots of variations on this from what it is, what it does, what happens after the test, and why it was done in the first place ranging from magic, gods, fairies, and oddly every type of alien civilization towards most other types *even just a type 2 drooping replication tech on a planet or zero point energy batteries with easy use interface*, clear up to something like a type/tier 6 depositing “magic/eldritch” power stones or wish granting artifacts, etc..
I think Deus may be suggesting humanity as a whole is getting the test of power, only instead of it being something a select few could hide away and end up getting the world judged for the actions of a few they are tossing the proverbial chaos gems into as many hands on the planet as they can to get a real feel for what happens when humanity has the power.
*why they would do this is anyone’s guess (literally seen the reasoning vary from something grand to experiments to gamble between gods, to just felt like something to do, etc…).
We have people in power literally deciding if some people have the right to exist levels of evil right now. I don’t know where to go from there if I was a good guy. I’m a morally ambiguous guy so I would be holding a stun gun tied to a huge battery pack and asking if sauce for the goose was likewise for the ganders. Because I’m not an eye-for-an-eye guy but proposing wiping out a person’s sexual identity merits a response-in-kind.
It has always been like that, but we also live in world where nearly half the nation is expected to vote based on their skin color. Do you have any idea what it is like to be not-white and critical of something the democratic party has done? You get shanked for that.
So yeah, this is how you get a less than 50% literacy rate, and politicians literally using the same campaign promises for half a century.
So this is why my having a political opinion is worthless. There is only one I’m permitted to have by social norms and anything that happens I need to blame on a party that has not had power here for decades.
And that’s the problem with a two-party system. There’s no motivation to be any better than the lesser of two evils.
You could apply that argument to abortion where people are also “literally deciding if some people have the right to exist levels of evil right now.” By your definition, would it be “good” to go around with the stun gun?
From my perspective, it would not be “good”. From the perspectives of the majority of voters in Texas, Oklahoma, and a few other states, it would be “good”.
So define “good”
And that doesn’t even cover the probability of ectogenesis by the end of the decade which will REALLY toss a new set of factors into the question.
I should also say I’m pretty much the closest thing this world has to a super. I have been hit 3 times by pickup trucks hard enough to total out the truck and walked away from the first 2 with just scrapes and ruined clothes. The last one to hit me was going freeway speeds estimated at 45-65 MPH with best confidence of 60 based on my weight and trajectory. I didn’t walk away from that wreck, because of multiple broken bones in the leg that got hit, the truck had to be cut apart for the driver to get out, but he claimed a tree got blown on the truck during the T-storm that preceded the wreck and he somehow managed to drive with the passenger side of the cab almost flat. Somehow nobody in the local PD connected the white pickup seen hitting me with the white pickup with the severe damage to the front and cab on the passenger side, if they even considered it.
Anywho, I have been hit by motor vehicles a bunch of times and (mostly) not gotten hurt, I’m (almost) a super.
Interestingly enough? Latveria in Marvel comics has a stable population, a decent economy and its people live free from fear of invasion. Their leader is terrifying, true, but he is FAIR in his own way.
Not a NICE or GOOD person, Victor Von Doom, but a man who has always TRIED to be at least a decent leader. (Mainly because he saw so many less than decent ones!)
And the Fantastic Four have seen what can happen if he is replaced in the past.
Any replacement will get access to his technology and a lot of power.
When he was replaced it was usually Doom himself who made sure whoever replaced him made a mess of things. He cares about his people as long as they are HIS people. Otherwise, he’s perfectly alright with inflicting misery on them until they acept him back. With Doom. it’s always been about his ego.
Spoken like a Richards
never trust a man who names himself Mr Fantastic, such a man get a swelled head.
Victor Von Doom was the quintessential bad guy, but over time he grew to be so much more. He is not and has never been a nice person. He is not humble, not does he suffer fools. He sees himself as the best person to led humanity to a better age. Thing is, he may very well BE the best person to do that. Far better than someone like Hank Pym, Tony Stark or several different incarnations of Reed Richards.
I do not like many of his methods, but his ends?
*shrug*
One man’s hero is another man’s villain.
I DID love the story arc with a certain teenage girl saying “‘I asked myself ‘What would Uncle Doom do?'”
Then, the thunder of millions of comic book readers’ jaws hitting the floor! Yeah, that is EXACTLY what he would have done, Valeria! All the rest of that arc was a bit of a mess, but that scene alone sticks with me and always will!
When it absolutely, positively HAS to be done RIGHT the FIRST time to fix EVERYTHING because Reed Richards messed something else up? Call Doom. His fee will be high, but it WILL get done.
Or, more likely, he will bollox it up so bad in his attempt to take all the power and glory for himself that he makes an utter mess of things if stopped, while murdering the love of his life for power, making her into a suit of armor, and casually eliminating any Latverians who disappoint him or do not meet his expectations.
Doom is so conceited about this he used the Ultimate Nullifier to get rid of a timeline where Doom was indeed the great and celebrated hero, because he simply couldn’t stand being stared in the face with his own failures.
Doom was only a decent leader if you were far enough down the stack to never be noticed by him. He’s stated more than once that he would happily expend their lives to fulfill his ambitions.
He’s a rancher managing a compliant herd of cattle, no more.
Being ruthless and decisive is not the best solution to all problems. Reed Richards has a terminal case of Too Much Mercy and Understanding, but that doesn’t make his decisions bad.
After all, if he thought like Doom, Doom would be long dead.
True, in so far as it goes.
Of course, if Sue Richards thought like Doom, LOTS of people would be dead. ‘She’ is truly scary one of the Fantastic Four and what is more? She knows it, hence why she goes far out of her way to be as nice as possible. Because if she went bad, lots of people would drop dead. Not all at once, but silently.
Read that comic again, but replace every “Super”, “Super Power” and “Power” with “Gun”.
you can take a gun away from someone; super powers would be more like trying to take away martial arts training.
And even then, people are rarely born with martial arts training, at least as far as I know.
implanted guns
I don’t think that works too well. If Deus is right and the superion field is bespoke, then it can likely be deactivated. Who’s gonna make their own superion field in their garage? Nobody. But guns? Ooooh guns, you can print the fuckers now.
Criminals will have guns. Literally, criminals make functional guns in prison, including fully automatic ones upon occasion. No 3D printer required. A literal “police state” would not fully disarm criminals.
(For bonus points, look at historical examples of pneumatic guns, then realize all the ways everyday construction tools could be made into effective guns along those lines.)
So, criminals **will** have guns. The only question is if the law-abiding will have them, too, to defend themselves, or if they will be sheep to the slaughter.
This is not a *moral* claim about what should or should not be, it is simply fact. The only country in the world that ever successfully disarmed their populace (including the criminals) of guns was Japan, and they did so by making the samurai the equivalent of Judge Dredd, legally allowed to execute anybody they felt like at any time. Gee, that sounds great, right?
If you are arguing for a “give everyone guns, good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns” line of logic which it seems you are, know that gun laws have been effective in reducing the rates of gun violence. Like sure, even in places like Britain that have strict gun laws, there remain gun violence and deaths, but the point is that there’s a lot less of that than in places with lax gun laws.
Sure, there will always be the extreme, but gun laws increase the effort it takes to commit gun violence, and effort is a pretty effective way to stop people from doing things. In the past, the most popular suicide method was to stick your head in a gas oven. It was easy, available, and relatively painless. So they changed how ovens work and suicide rates dropped as a result, as the methods to commit it were less available and it became harder to do.
The thing to keep in mind is that it isn’t some all or nothing situation. It sucks that it is almost impossible to get rid of, but striving for the impossible doesn’t mean toiling in vain, we can’t get to perfection but we can get closer and closer.
“If you are arguing for a “give everyone guns, good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns” line of logic which it seems you are, know that gun laws have been effective in reducing the rates of gun violence.”
Irrelevant. I don’t care about rates of GUN violence. I care about rates of *violence* of all kinds. The murder victim isn’t less murdered because what was used was a hammer or a fist instead of a gun.
Gun ownership and violent crime rates in the world do not remotely correlate. The US alone has about half of all the guns in private ownership in the entire freaking world, yet by murder rate (and violent crime in general), we are not exceptional.
“Like sure, even in places like Britain that have strict gun laws, there remain gun violence and deaths, but the point is that there’s a lot less of that than in places with lax gun laws.”
Not true. Not even close to true. Strictness of gun laws and violence rates *also* do nor correlate.
Gun ownership rate and suicide rate also do not correlate, by the way – killing one’s self is simply not all that difficult.
Now, you can *cherry pick* examples any which way you like! And of course, so can I. Things that do not correlate will have examples of every combination.
One last thing:”If you are arguing for a “give everyone guns, good guys with guns can stop bad guys with guns” line of logic which it seems you are”
I did not argue for that. That is a strawman, which is a logical fallacy.
OK dude. You didn’t mention non gun crime in your post at all. Your post was entirely ‘criminals will have guns, only question is if other people will also have guns’, so no, it isn’t a strawman argument, as it seems to be literally what you are arguing for.
Also BTW there was a Harvard study that found that guns do increase the general homicide rate, kinda obviously because gun crime is a part of violent crime, and if gun crime goes down then violent crime rate goes down. Six studies actually from the looks of it, just coming from Harvard alone. hsph.harvard edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/
Blah, blah, “the way to peace is giving everyone a gun.”
This myopic idea makes a lot of assumptions about people, several of them contradictory. It also tries to completely sidestep the question of legitimacy in the use of force, which is one of the underlying motives for the existence of society in the first place.
What’s even worse is the whole, “I’m just stating facts,” bit. It’s a thoroughly disingenuous ploy, and attempt to stop conversation, by implying that the mere existence of a fact precludes any examination or discussion of that fact, or investigation into what may, or should, be done about it.
“Blah, blah, “the way to peace is giving everyone a gun.”
This myopic idea makes a lot of assumptions about people, several of them contradictory.”
You’re right, it does. Since I did not argue for that, or even something that resembles that, what is the relevance?
And yes, the existence of hard, well-documented facts should indeed stop certain kinds of conversations. When something has been posited (“let’s take away the guns, that will reduce crime”) and ***thoroughly*** tested and found not to work, there’s no reason to suggest it any more.
That’s what facts do. If you suggest jumping off a cliff and flapping your arms to fly, I’m going to point out some relevant facts about that, and then, based on those facts, I am going to actively avoid participating in your activity if you insist on going through with it.
It’s like suggesting communism again. Communist regimes directly murdered or intentionally starved to death (which is morally the same thing) 100,000,000 human beings in a century. No other ideology comes close to the murderous death toll of communism. There’s no reason to have further discussion about what “may, or should, be done” about communism – it should be avoided, full stop.
Gun control has been tested similarly, over many decades, in many countries of the world. It does not work to reduce crime.
If everyone has guns, the evil people will still be doing the majority of the killing, and good will be doing more than their share of dying. It’s fundamentally a social problem, and requires a social solution. Guns and super powers just raise the stakes, make the cost of those problems higher. They don’t necessarily affect how many disputes there are, just how deadly those disputes end up being.
“They don’t necessarily affect how many disputes there are, just how deadly those disputes end up being.”
That is the claim about guns, yes. In terms of actual data in the world, that claim is utterly unsupported. Gun ownership rate and murder rate do not correlate by country. To put it another way, reducing guns does not result in lower violent crime rate. Note that I am *NOT* claiming that increasing guns does either – that is *also* not supported by the data. (Though, if you care, it actually does have *some* support, just not enough to be “statistically relevant”, while the opposite doesn’t even have that.)
The most common murder weapon in the US is “personal weapons” – that is, fist and foot. There are many ways to murder someone, if that is what one wants to do, and since criminality selects for people who are larger and stronger than average, and criminals can select their victims (meaning that they can choose people who appear smaller and weaker than average)…
You don’t have to imagine how a world without guns works – go crack a history book and look. Still plenty, plenty of murder.
“The most common murder weapon in the US is “personal weapons” – that is, fist and foot. ”
That is incorrect – mea culpa.
It was bugging me, so I checked, and I remembered the wrong part of the statistic. In the US, personal weapons kill more people every year that all rifles and long guns (which is why the “assault weapon” bans are so silly), but they are not the most common murder weapon.
yeah, if humans could find and convince another type 4 or above to intervene on their behalf.
unless this is a case of the artificial field has a physical generator (which is more a type 2 or type 3 thing to do), and the powering up of humanity was an unintentional side effect of the generator (like the aliens were making a communication relay between realities and the field it generated granted super powers for whatever reason)…like..oops, better send a tech out to fix that.
as is it seems humans would lack the necessary skill and power to even try to turn it off, other than to maybe prevent their own genomes from decrypting it. Which is the key here. If you can tweak people to get the power, then it stands it may be possible to tweak people to no longer be able to access the field.
why smash the radio tower when its easier to turn off the radio.
(although that in of its self is a dangerous prospect and it may not actually be possible to put that lock back on once the door is broken down, the unknown hyper advanced aliens may have accounted for this possibility and prevented anyone from being able to hoard/restrict access to this power once it was opened up beyond killing those who have it.
For the record the blood eagle is a myth
The boats was VERY real and the most F**ed up exicution method ive ever heard of was called Scapism and was a persian exicution method the traped you between 2 boats covered in honey and then force fed you milk and hobey your outsides got eaten by bugs and rotted as you s**t youself to death
Gives a whole new meaning to “the land of milk and honey”
The blood eagle isn’t real. It’s one of those folk tales where the shock factor is the point of it, but the vikings never did that. It’s too cumbersome and impractical. You’d expect Deus to know that.
Are you willing to bet money on the chance that nobody ever was willing to go to that much trouble to make sure their wenemy died a horrific death? Because I’m not. It may not have been common, but I’d be very surprised if it was never done at all.
It’s possible that someone, somewhere has tried to do it, but the kind of damage you’d inflict on a person just cutting them up to perform it would be likely to kill them before you actually could.
Some still came up with it, even if it’s fictional.
So Deus isn’t THAT wrong.
Are you so sure that it’s not real? While there is no proof it was ever done, we are talking over a milennium ago, and there sure were quite a few skaldic verses about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has happened. I’d rather not bet on the inherent goodness of all people of all time.
‘Inherent goodness’ of warriors who thrived on battle. Um, no.
Blood Eagle may have been a myth or not. Does it really matter?
Even if it ‘wasn’t’ physically possible for such an act to be done in such a way that the subject lives long enough to spread fear to his/her contemporaries, it was a potent psychological weapon. Whether or not historical warriors from the Scandanavian area were capable of doing it and keeping their victims alive through it is far less important than they were WILLING and ABLE, indeed, sometimes, downright EAGER to try and do it to those who earned their wrath.
*Shudder*
Myth or no, the Blood Eagle is terrifying. Which is the whole point.
Yeah, the Brazen Bull was a myth as well. But human’s still imagined it as something that was done.
In many of these cases, it’s almost beside the point whether anyone actually went through the whole process of carrying out the torture-execution. The level of consideration implicit in even designing such a procedure, as opposed to defaulting to something swift and straightforward, tells its own story about Humanity’s tendencies.
Yeah, and the scary part is, even a person considering themselves decent can come up with really messed up torture methods.
I devised what I called (initially) “The 108 paths of pain” (I think the actual number is higher), which was designed as a systematic method to inflict as much pain as humanly possible on a person without any part being outright lethal.
(I’m not sure if it’d be okay to vividly describe it tho, but it lengthy.)
Yet I’d like to hope I’m a reasonably decent person, so if I could come up with something messed up…
Kinda like the ole ‘Death of a thousand cuts’?
One of the fun parts of being an author is stimulating the imagination, but I have to admit, my own took me to some VERY dark places on occasion. My first published story opened with a girl who was dying after being tortured. (Her uncle who was/is a dragon took EXTREME exception to that. ’nuff said)
I like to think I am a decent person too, but then I come up with that or worse, am I?
Humans have a history of cruelty and I often wonder if it is part of our DNA to be.
Technically, he never said anybody used it, just that somebody came up with it.
Huh maybe first in years of reading? Also fascinating to see once again a long term issue being addressed in universe that so many hand wave because it’s deeply complex both in morality and long term effects. Love how Deus is not just a eccentric idiot or prop villain. Eager to see his follow up on that.
Yeah, he’s an idiot villain (calm down CheerPanda, you’ll break an arm one of these days the way you wave that flag)
As usual Deus doesn’t take his reasoning far enough. There have been real world experiments proving the solution to poverty is give people money. The reason we don’t? Because they didn’t earn it. We attach a moral value to things because we don’t pay attention to reality. Everywhere Universal basic Income has been tried it’s been wildly successful. Homelessness has the same solution, give people homes. It works and it’s cheaper and more humane than any other solution you can imagine.
In the US we have the resources and technology to create a post scarcity society. A small minority is so invested in their twisted version of morality we don’t. .
Technically, it works, somewhat, in a world where basically everybody was raised expecting to have to work for what they got. So the first generation is giving money to people who have been socialized in a society where people don’t just give you money.
When you get to the second generation, where you’re giving money to people who were socialized to expect to get money for nothing, and don’t have that conditioned in feeling they need to be doing something useful?
Well, there’s a reason family fortunes rise and then fall again.
Think about why fish living in caves end up blind: Evolution doesn’t conserve unneeded traits. Social evolution does that, too. What would the world be like after a few generations of people not needing to work in order to live and have children?
Probably not a post-scarcity society anymore, because the lack of scarcity in the first place was due to a lot of people thinking they needed to be productive.
A lot of utopian thinking comes from stopping at a first order analysis, and neglecting to analyze what happens next.
And yet you do the same? You judge the second generation by the standards of the first. All i can see is a world where an enormous amount of human creativity and productivity becomes unshackled.
Unfortunately this only works in a truly post scarcity situation, the whole point of the current system is to keep such locked away behind tiredness, social mores, baby making, consumerism, religion, etc because scarcity is indeed all too real (even if induced and deliberately exaggerated in many cases). Power over others is the true coin traded in this world :(
I very much agree and very much disagree. First, we definitely have a skewed society that wastes a ton of resources on stupid crap, be it mega yachts or political in-fighting. Streamlining such things would get us to a basic level of care for everyone, easily, hands down, no question. But that is not a post-scarcity society, that is a “nobody is starving” society.
Work is called work because it is, in fact, work. There will always be some people who choose to work no matter what is going on, as they gain satisfaction from it. But most people prefer to do what they want, and the satisfaction of work is not gonna compare to other activities for a lot of people. Any society that needs no work done at all is so far beyond our current level as to be unrecognizable to us now. Until that magical day arrives, we need work to be done, and that means workers, and people aren’t gonna fix robots all day just because it’s fulfilling.
Could we make the robots fix themselves? Sure. Still need to protect ourselves from the psychos. Oh, robots do that to? Still gotta lead the country. Oh, robots do that too? Congratulations, all hail the robot overlords, humanity is now happily enslaved.
Could there be a society that exists without any oversight of any kind? At small levels, absolutely. At larger scale, no. Anarchy even in a post scarcity society would not be sustainable long term without altering humans. Could that be done? Perhaps, but would we still be human afterward?
You completely misunderstand anarchy on the conceptual level.
A lot of this reminds me of a ‘Brave New World’ mentality when it comes to post-scarcity societies.
But in Brave New World, it wasnt actually post scarcity. They just hid what slavery was by calling them Epsilons, and drugging them along with the rest of humanity to be satisfied with their place in the world. And eventually that type of world falls apart and leads to mass death and collapse of the entire system as soon as anything unexpected happens.
Or maybe when people say post-scarcity society, they mean Star Trek’s Federation. The idea that, due to technology like replicators, there’s no longer any need for physical items or money. Whcih honestly always struck me a fake for several reasons.
1) Star Trek DOES use money. They have to because not everyone does what Earth does. Remember when Jake wanted to buy an autographed baseball for his father? He couldnt. Humans don’t have money. So he had to guilt Nog, the Ferengi, into it, because human philosophy about money does not work on a wider scale if someone has something you want, and you have nothing to offer them in exchange.
Or when Riker was trying to bid on rights to the Barznian Wormhole. How the hell does he do that? The Federation does not use money! He’s going to have to trade technology. So the Federation DOES have to do something involving money – we just became more economically primitive and resort to barter, which is why a species like the Ferengi, who is technologically inferior by all academic means, somehow has technology that is on par with the Federation and has a TON of influence in the alpha quadrant despite being rather cretinous people – because they made gold-pressed latinum, an item that CANT be easily replicated, the galactic standard for trade.
And lets say for a moment that the entire galaxy DID adopt the Federation’s idea of no money. Or let’s just limit ourselves to Earth. It’s STILL not a post-scarcity society. Services and land are limited in quantity. Intelligence is limited in quantity, because not every person is an Alfred Einstein, a Stephen Hawkings, a Zephran Cochrane, a Noonian Soong, or a Richard Daystrom. These people have intelligence which is in demand because not everyone has it. Their sheer level of intelligence or creativity is a scarce resource.
Sisko’s father runs a restaurant because he loves cooking food for others. He obviously doesn’t get paid for it and does it because he’s living his passion. Great. But he also has bus boys there when Jake isnt there and people who mop the floors. Is that THEIR passion? Probably not. They have to be getting something for doing a job which is largely unfulfilling, or they are so otherwise useless in Federation Society that this was the only thing the Federation could come up with for them to do?
What about land? Ensign Kim has a really posh apartment in San Francisco with an amazing view. Can EVERYONE have that apartment with that view? Obviously not. How does he get it while others cannot? It’s a scarce resource. But you can go to another planet and have a posh apartment there. Sure. But I can’t have THAT posh apartment with THAT view of Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco.
Picard’s brother (and later Picard) has a vinyard. It’s been in his family for centuries. Why can’t I have that? Sure, I can have a vinyard, maybe, if I go to another planet where the land is right for it, but it’s not going to be the same as Picard’s vinyard. The wine will not go to the same amount of people, if I was to want to give it away (since no one uses money in the Federation). I won’t be able to have the vinyard on Earth. I won’t have the same soil. It’s a SCARCE resource.
Plus frankly, the Federation lies about no money even within federation space. Riker has bought items from others working within federation space for rare, difficult or dangerous to replicate items like biomemetic gel. Sure it’s basically just bartering again, but I’ve seen the federation use biomemetic gel as a substitute for gold pressed latinum in SEVERAL episodes. Which means they do need to use money, not only outside the federation, but within it, unless they just want to forcibly take what they want from anyone who has it, which would not seem very utopian to me. :)
Regarding Kim’s view: with the level of holo-displays, that view could be had in a bunker two miles underground, or on Uranus
Everything else is probably correct
I actually took that into account but it’s an actual view, NOT a holo-display and not a holodeck. We see the outside of the building he lives in on the episode where he gets sent home in an alternate timeline where he never became part of the Voyager crew. :)
It’s why I used Star Trek instead of, say, Total Recall where Arnold and Sharon Stone had fake view digital windows. :)
Didn’t mean his view was artificial, meant that anyone could have that view as well, so the rarity or demand would not be there
The primary distinction between work and play is choice. There are lots of things people do for fun that require a great deal of time and effort. People might voluntarily choose to do many of the things we currently call work, even without the pressure of payment, if they weren’t needing to make a living.
Imma just call you out right here.
You like to describe human beings in terms of “usefulness.”
That, Brett, exposes a very screwed up idea. “Usefulness” is a trait ascribed to things, not human beings. You are, in short, treating people like objects. You assign value based on how they benefit and/or please you, and regard those that do not as disposable. That is, in a word, objectification. It is dehumanizing, to say the least.
Brett might be referring to usefulness in terms of input vs output, not an inherent worth of a person. Usefulness can be ascribed to things AND to people, at least people within a set series of circumstances. Or more specifically, a person’s SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE, and PRODUCTIVITY can be described in terms of usefulness, even if you’re not describing that to the person’s intrinsic nature themselves.
A person working in a factory might be a brilliant musician or artist on par with Mozart or Carlos Santana, but if their work productivity is the lowest on the factory line at Widgets Production Incorporated, then they are the least useful person on that factory line for that business.
And while I agree that people are not disposable (because that WOULD be dehumanizing), they can be fired from a job if they are not worth the amount of money they are paid for their services, compared to what another person is paid for a greater or better quality of services.
If there are two basketball players, and one constantly drops the ball and trips over themselves, while the other can make a 3 pointer every shot, one is more useful to the team than the other.
If you are charged with a crime and want to hire a lawyer to prevent you from going to jail, you’re going to want the lawyer who has the most experience and most wins under their belt, not the person who just got out of law school with barely passing grades who has never had a job before. One person is a lot more useful to your needs than the other person.
“The first generation is giving money to people who have been socialized in a society where people don’t just give you money. When you get to the second generation, where you’re giving money to people who were socialized to expect to get money for nothing, and don’t have that conditioned in feeling they need to be doing something useful? […] Probably not a post-scarcity society anymore, because the lack of scarcity in the first place was due to a lot of people thinking they needed to be productive.” – Brett Bellmore
I’m afraid you’re also stopping at barely more than a first-order analysis, compounding that with an all-or-nothing approach, to reach an unjustified conclusion.
You’re inflating “the need to be productive” into “a need to be maximally productive all of the time“, and assuming no intermediate between that and complete idleness. In reality the vast majority of people would welcome the ability to reduce their working hours, while still keeping worthwhile work as one of a portfolio of paid and unpaid interests. A ‘work to live’ society rather than our current ‘live to work’ society, if you like. In such a society there will no doubt be some especially driven individuals who would work just as much as they do in ours, if not more so – but they will be the ones who are truly driven by a passionate interest, not the ones desperately scrabbling between multiple jobs to keep their head above water.
Yes, there will be wobbles as such a system stabilises. It’ll take time to learn how much of the work actually does need to be done by a Human and how much can be palmed off onto automated systems, and what that implies for individuals’ workloads. There will probably be further wobbles in the future, especially when artificial intelligence reaches the stage where it can be recognised as a Person with all the attendant rights and responsibilities.
But we are rapidly approaching such a disruption anyway, as the number of Humans ‘needing full-time employment’ goes up and the number of working hours needed to keep society running goes down. Ask yourself: how many jobs in the modern world actually need to be done, how many are not necessary but still have some overall benefit, and how many are just excuses to keep the imaginary numbers churning through bank accounts for the sake of arbitrary statistics?
Ain’t that the damn truth.
There is no reason for poverty and homelessness. Yet they exist because somehow people being rich is important
Not just “rich,” though.
Specifically, a tiny minority of people having monopolistic control over vastly more resources than they could ever possibly utilize is, somehow important enough to justify billions of others living in literal squalor, while acting as virtual slaves.
its a human need. everyone has to feel superior to someone else. pain and misery are essential parts of the human condition. someone has to cause it. its a hard job and we need to pay them well.
Can you cite your sources showing that “everywhere universal basic income has been tried it’s been wildly successful”?
Here is one article I found and had time to read – it shows the impact of “UBI” to be far from wildly successful. Small to moderate improvements in only a handful of the places it was tested at best. Some areas where it was tested showed no improvement. Others showed a decline in people’s willingness to work. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map
The other fundamental issue with UBI, is “where does the money come from”? Part of the current US inflation issue is from all of the “stimulus” money that has been given out the last few years. The money has to be backed by something. Take Alaska, which had something akin to your UBI with each person in the state getting a check regularly — because it was paid out dividends from oil mining. The checks are effectively oil right payments for any oil that might be under the land you are on which could be drained away as oil is extracted (“I drank your milkshake…”)
Entitlement would lead to the “Animal Farm” reference that Dave used in his post, and the fundamental reason why communism doesn’t work. As long as an economy exists, no country can create a post-scarcity society. There will always be someone that feels they deserve something more/better than the next person. Right now, those people either work for it, are envious of it, or steal it.
And it won’t matter about “need”, it’ll be a “want”. I don’t “need” a 3k sq/ft home. I wanted one, and I bought it. Ironically, I wish I had bought a slightly bigger house, because the bedroom I setup with my (basic) gym equipment isn’t quite big enough to make it all usable without sliding/storing/moving something else first.
Where does ‘money’ come from now? Governments print out pieces of fabric (that cost more to manufacture than their face value) every time they feel they are running short, and yet, most people are turning to electronic payments (some governments are trying to go entirely cashless already)
Money is an idea that we have agreed has physical form. its all fiat. the ‘hard’ stuff is valuable because old and or dead people say its valuable. there are materials rarer than gold in your house and you probably paid less than five dollars US to get it.
Technically speaking, gold is valuable not just because of its rarity but its properties as well. There’s a lot of things gold is good for that other materials aren’t, in that other materials might do one thing better but gold does all the things good.
But, yes, the point about its value being arbitrary is true.
gold does not do all the things good- it is very soft and that is not always a good thing. with material science TANSTAAFL applies. its a balance.
Fractional reserve banking, mostly. And other financial fictions. The economy is mostly illusory at this point, and money no longer has much relationship to the supply and demand problems on the ground.
I read through your source, where you said that “Others showed a decline in people’s willingness to work”, and in that entire list and only the 1970’s experiment by the US showed any decline in people’s hours worked. In another case, Iran for instance, people complained that it made people less willing to work but economist proved it wasn’t actually lowering the labor supply.
So yeah, in pretty much every case in that list where we have results, it lowered crime, improved happiness, didn’t decrease the labor supply, improved education and sanitation, and grew the economy. Notably in Kenya the economic multiplier was 2.6, meaning that for every 1 dollar given out, the economy grew by 2.6.
Going through the list:
Alaska, Didn’t decrease employment, wiped out extreme poverty.
South Carolina, Economists found that it doesn’t make them work less. It does lead to improved education and mental health, and decreased addiction and crime.
1970’s america, Benefited the people (unspecified), and modestly lowered hours worked (because the hours worked was self reported and was found to be under reported, disappearing in some cities and decreasing in another). In some cases it was also resulting from students staying in and completing school rather than dropping out and getting a job at 16. It increased high school completion by 11 and 25-30% between cities.
Stockton California, no major results, though they are spending it on necessities.
Canada, first run had increase in general health, higher graduation rates. Some people claimed the second run reduced workforce incentivization, but economists pointed out it didn’t run long enough to have any meaningful results
Brazil, no results yet
Finland, happier and less stressed, increase societal trust, didn’t impact the labor supply either way.
Germany, less anxious, better graduation rate, more motivated at work
Spain, higher life satisfaction and mental health, didn’t impact labor supply
Netherlands, no results yet
Iran, people complained it was disincentivizing work, but economist found it didn’t impact the labor supply, no results mentioned other than that.
Kenya, large economic growth
Namibia, Child malnutrition dropped, education enrollment went up, crime fell
India, sanitation went up, nutrition went up, school attendance went up. Also higher productivity and new businesses. “the positive results of the pilot programs were overwhelming”
China, no results posted other than complaints about government corruption
Japan, increased in interest in new business, lower divorce rates, significant increase in happiness
So your claim that it is “small to moderate improvements in a handful of places it was tested at best” is just false. Across the board, in pretty much every place it was tested, it led to improvements. Whether the improvements are small to moderate is also misleading. Many of the things are lacking exact numbers to them. While you might be dismissing the results as the improvements were largely in forms of life satisfaction, that doesn’t mean the results were small.
As to the inflation, most sources I’ve looked at are finding that it is the result of price gouging. Corporations have an excuse to, raising complaints about the supply chain or unstable conditions, and then raise prices far beyond what it needed to actually account for it, leading to companies having record profits and record high prices.
And as to what the money for UBI would come from, it’s taxes, it’s obviously taxes. Especially as productivity comes more and more from automation, it can be really easily taxed to make sure that the lowered demand for labor doesn’t cause suffering.
We could already create post-scarcity on a global scale. We have the technology and the resources.
It’s just not profitable.
As for Deus? Look at what he is doing and remember his TV appearance way back.
He has told us how he wants to take over the world and he has already build up one African country. With enough countries on board or conquered he will reach the point where he has the resources to go post-scarcity.
Though it is save to assume that his access to alien technology will have accelerated his time table. I’m pretty sure he has bought anti-gravity technology on his little shopping spree. That gives him cheap access to space and the resources of the entire solar system. Together with the replicator technology he has now he can go post-scarcity within a few years.
Even without taking other countries under his wing.
What UBI experiments are you referring to? Every country I know which implemented it cancelled it or otherwise declared it a failure. The results I usually see are people refusing to work and massive inflation. Specifically, I know of Namibia and Finland trying it.
I’m pretty sure that the general consensus is that deregulation and free markets are the usual culprits for reducing poverty as it is the easiest way to get work or start a company. If you look in the most poverty stricken areas, then tend to also have the most regulation.
Just as an example, homelessness and poverty in the US usually concentrates in the areas with the most regulation, the most free benefits for the poor, and so on, like LA, NYC, and San Francisco.
“Just as an example, homelessness and poverty in the US usually concentrates in the areas with the most regulation, the most free benefits for the poor, and so on, like LA, NYC, and San Francisco.”
You’re falling for it. Apply a little bit of logic: if you personally were made homeless, would you attempt to survive in a place where there are few or no resources to help you cling to life and where the cops regularly come around to steal your things and beat you? Or would you go to a place where there are some resources and the cops do that less often? The choice is obvious – anyone who could would relocate to a place that’s less hostile to their existence. You’ve been told that the cart is pulling the horse, and you’re falling for it.
We’re all told to believe that human kindness causes poverty, but that’s as ridiculous as saying that because there are lots of cancer patients undergoing cancer treatment, it proves that cancer treatment causes cancer.
Yeah, why would a place that kills their poor and homeless have more poor and homeless than a place that doesn’t kill them? The problem is that they’ll claim to be discouraging people from becoming poor and homeless, and it’s hard to disprove. Actual prevention is going to be better than either, however.
As a Finnish person who’s currently unemployed and lives off unemployment benefits paid by the goverment, I hope I can shed little light on this. That experiment our goverment ran for basic income about 5 years ago, was poorly executed, and since it didn’t have immediate affect on unemployement statistics it was promptly cancelled.
However, as I am currently unemployed goverment pays me enough to cover housing, electricity, food and such basic necessities, with the only major difference from basic income being that if I were to get a job the payments would be reduced accordingly, and therefore with current system I’m strongly disincentivized from finding a job that doesn’t pay well enough. I do get the idea that if I can pay for the necessities myself, goverment shouldn’t have to pay for them, but in practice it doesn’t work that well.
Replacing the current system with basic income, at least in my case, would cost goverment exactly nothing as they would still pay the same amount of money, but if I were to get a low paying job in addition, they would get some money back as income taxes.
No there are not Warder. You hear about UBI experiments, we got one about to start here in Austin. What they don’t tell you is that they are not closed economies, they assume zero inflation, unlimited resources, and even ignore multi-generational fails (kids stop learning).
Anyone who says we have unlimited resources should be willing to do the math. We don’t much less if you take “dirty energy” of oil/gas out of the equation.
Typical capitalist-boot-enjoyer.
We literally have access to unlimited energy. Between solar, tidal, geothermal, nuclear, and wind, we have more energy than we can use. The problem isn’t a lack of resources, it’s the distribution mechanism. Remove control from a handful of sociopathic hoarders, democratize it, and you can solve the problems.
We do not need billionaires, or their privatized corporations, to prosper, let alone survive. The contribute _nothing_. They are _literally_ parasites.
In most cases where UBI has been tested, they’ve actually found higher graduation rates and school attendance. I don’t believe you could find a case where UBI has been tested that led to lower education rates, as they seem to not exist.
Most people like to learn, until we beat it out of them.
Amen.
A bit less focus on treated colleges like factories that churn out technicians, and a bit more on actually educating people, would go a long way.
the way to do that is to remove the disparate impact exemption for college degrees.
Great read on the history and issues inherent in modern education devolving from the industrial age factory – https://stopstealingdreams.com.
Also a big fan of Mike Rowe’s writeup on the same topic, and his foundation work to get technical certifications and blue collar jobs the respect (and scholarships) they deserve – https://www.mikeroweworks.org/about/
Having homeless people also offers an easy target whenever someone needs an easy target group to blame for something going wrong, when the actual solution might negatively impact the bottom line of the person in question or their financial backers.
And yes, if we put our current resources and technology to use properly, we could move past scarcity.
Unfortunately it would require massive changes all over society to do so, which means as long as a significant number of people are comfortable living in the yesteryears it’s probably not going to happen.
That is patently false.
You are correct about the not earning thing part, only you spun it around.
People who are given stuff without having to work for it become entitled and don’t appreciate what they are given, expecting to always be given more.
Not to mention that handouts cause depression as people think that they are worthless, and only capable of living off of the goodwill of others.
UBI was tried in a few places in small scale, and it failed spectacularly each time.
I’m always floored when people rail against solutions like UBI because “it makes people lazy or entitled.”
The point of UBI isn’t to make people industrious, it’s to alleviate poverty, homelessness and starvation. I find it alarming how many people think extreme poverty it fine and dandy because starvation motivates people to get jobs?
The argument fully and willfully ignores that rich people are entitled AF. Everyone is entitled. Giving poor people a stipend doesn’t make them entitled, it makes them continue to be human.
The argument also ignores the fact that most people are kind of lazy already. “Lazy” being a pretty ill-defined term to begin with. I mean, anyone who doesn’t have a family with 2.5 kids and a full time job and 7 hobbies and doesn’t spend 2 hours a day in the gym and isn’t also on the PTA and the HOA is lazy, right?
So really, it seems to me that the argument boils down to “why should I have to work when that other guy doesn’t” which furthers my point that most people are lazy, and also ignores the fact that people on UBI aren’t usually living in mansions and taking helicopters to their second home in Aspen. The goal is to meet fundamental needs.
Don’t forget it’s also a crime preventative as people won’t need to steal copper to sell to recyclers for basic stuff. Plus, there are people who’s greatest accomplishment for a group project is staying out of the way, having worked with some, I can honestly say I’d rather have them paid to stay home.
And you didn’t even get to the bit about care providers.
The whole idea that someone needs to manage a household &provide care for children or other dependent family members tends to get forgotten in the “people must work for wages or starve to death” capitalist mentality.
“The point of UBI isn’t to make people industrious, it’s to alleviate poverty, homelessness and starvation.”
It only works in the very short term and/or small scale, because without industriousness, *there’s no stuff*.
Until we have robots to do everything for us, if no one works, we all die.
With UBI, only the people who want to work work. How many people is that? *Not remotely enough*.
So yes, until we don’t need anyone to make stuff, “industriousness” is something we do, in fact, need.
We as a society already have things in place to provide the necessities of life (food, shelter), and I’m not against that. In fact, I would be for several (fairly obvious) improvements to that system, as we could feed and house every single person in the US for the money we throw into those systems right now because they are so bloated and horrible.
But that’s still not the same thing as “here, have money”. That’s like giving money to beggars claiming they’re going to use it for food – stupid.
I think I’ll take a slight downturn in our already ludicrous production of commercial products in exchange for preventing thousands of people from starving and going homeless in America.
That’s just me though.
Wait, wait, wait…you mean we _don’t_ need another billion tons of superfluous plastic packaging, tchotchkes, Halloween costumes for dogs, or single-use-kitchen-novelties that ultimately never reach consumers, and instead go straight into a landfill along with the hundreds of thousands of expensive, difficult-and-toxic-to-produce laptop computers that Amazon doesn’t sell before next-year’s model comes along?
But, what on earth will people do if they aren’t absolutely scrambling to grind out every minute of the day in order to desperately meet their basic survival needs? Are they going to suddenly take up a hobby, or expand their education, or raise their children, or just enjoy a good book, or even write a book of their own, or, heavens-fucking-forefend…participate in their own government?!
…why, I shudder to imagine it.
*quickly fanning herself in antebellum fashion*
“I think I’ll take a slight downturn in our already ludicrous production of commercial products in exchange for preventing thousands of people from starving and going homeless in America.”
Absolutely!!!! Great trade!!!!
The problem is that it doesn’t stay “slight” for long. People don’t like feeling like chumps, and working when your neighbor doesn’t yet not seeing any real benefit from that screams “CHUMP!”
Of course, the other problem, if it’s homelessness and lack of food that you’re worried about, is that for most of those people, no amount of money in their hand will fix the problem in anything more than the very short term. The problems they have aren’t solved by money, and for the large portion of them with drug problems, money *exacerbates* their problems.
You really have to utterly ignore the actual problems that lead to homelessness and food insecurity (in the very large majority of cases) to think that giving them cash will help.
But them not having cash is a significant portion of the problem. And I refuse to not address it simply because some other people might feel like “chumps” because now a homeless person barely has enough resources to live.
“But them not having cash is a significant portion of the problem.”
For a small number of them, yes.
But for a large number of them, giving them cash will not help AT ALL. In fact, in a majority of cases, it is more likely to actively harm them.
For only the most painfully obvious example, I give you “drug abuse”. Yes, let’s put more cash in the junkie’s hands. That sounds like a great idea. /SARC
“And I refuse to not address it simply because some other people might feel like “chumps” because now a homeless person barely has enough resources to live.”
By all means, pay no attention to the obvious side effects on the morale and actions of other members of society your proposed course of action would have. That’s a real recipe for success.
The issue isn’t “oh no, they’ll feel bad”, it’s “their productivity will also plummet, with many of them no longer bothering to do as much, since there’s very little reward.”
Weirdly enough, most people actually do like contributing to society, and they like it even more when they aren’t being economically pressured into undertaking labor they find objectionable, or which significantly harms others. Humans are social creatures, and participation is kinda the norm.
Moreover, UBI isn’t going to cover much beyond bare subsistence, and most people aren’t content with that, and as such are willing to trade a few hours of labor a day in order to get things they like, but don’t necessarily “need.”
It’s weird, I know.
Fundamentally, what you are arguing, whether you realize it or not, is that without the metaphorical whip on their backs, people will never to anything. This shows a low opinion of others, and exposes something of yourself.
Bharda: [ Weirdly enough, most people actually do like contributing to society, and they like it even more when they aren’t being economically pressured into undertaking labor they find objectionable, or which significantly harms others. ]
Awesome — how many hours a month do you do volunteer cleaning the toilets in the local truck stop for free?
Picking lettuce?
Meat packing?
Exterminating rats?
Inseminating turkeys?
You gladly do them when you’re not economically pressured, just for that warm feeling of contributing to society, right?
This picture your painting is pretty unfounded, Ichn.
You do not need the constant threat of starvation or homelessness to get people to fill low-skill jobs.
Those types of jobs will always be filled because UBI doesn’t mean actual jobs can’t pay more.
Nor does a UBI change the fact that low skilled workers need to start somewhere with simple jobs like you just listed.
For the record, “low skilled jobs” is a classist myth created to divide the laboring classes against each other. Tell me how valuable “low skill” labor is, when the toilets are backed up, the garbage is piling up, and the food is rotting on the vine.
Everyone talked shit about truck drivers, until suddenly they need their goods delivered in a pandemic, then suddenly, we’re “heroes.”
…until all ya’ll feel like you can take us for granted again, then suddenly we’ll be “dumb truckers,” again.
Just like all those “low skill workers” were magically transformed into “essentially workers,” but now that they expect to be treated humanely, decently, respectfully, we start seeing capitalists & their boot-lickers whining about “nobody wants to wooooork.”
Actually, it’s just that nobody wants to be treated like garbage 10 hours a day in order to make someone _else_ rich.
…so tired of this crap…
get used to it. we don’t force the wealthy to learn uncomfortable history anymore. so they are going to drive us to repeat it. sadly it will destroy much.
I completely agree.
“Tell me how valuable “low skill” labor is, when the toilets are backed up, the garbage is piling up, and the food is rotting on the vine.”
Low skill labor pays poorly because of the huge pool of people who CAN do it, because it is “low skill”. Basic supply and demand. It’s not a hard concept.
That doesn’t make it not valuable, it simply makes it cheap.
“Those types of jobs will always be filled because UBI doesn’t mean actual jobs can’t pay more.”
The only way those jobs can pay enough to get people to do them with UBI is if the UBI isn’t enough to live on.
If UBI is enough to live on, people won’t do those jobs for cheap. If you try to make all of those jobs “not cheap”, you will get massive inflation, which will make the UBI no longer enough to live on.
Throwing money into the economy results in strong effects. All that money the government created out of thin air in the last 2 years? Oh, look… massive inflation.
What percentage of the population actually needs to work in order to provide the necessities? What if we distributed that labor over the population? How much work do people actually need to do, and how much are they doing now?
I’m not against UBI because it makes people lazy and entitled, although it would to an extent (giving jobs for which they get paid is always going to be more useful than giving people money for nothing, which makes them more dependent on the government). It does decrease the very incentive to even try to get work if you are automatically going to get a certain amount of money, and that assumes that prices will stay the same for goods and services, which they will not.
I’m against UBI because it doesn’t work on a large scale. It suffers from a few basic problems when trying to set it up in any pre-existing system
1) The money has to come from somewhere. The idea that it would come entirely from new taxes is simply not plausible. We already need new revenue coming in to prevent social security and medicare from becoming bankrupt, which it will be rather soon. UBI would requir tx increases that VASTLY exceed anything we have EVER experienced, and not just for the rich. For anyone ironically NOT getting UBI.
2) UBI would be, by its very definition, ‘universal’ – it means everyone would get it. Which just means dumping more money into the economy without producing more goods or services. Which leads to higher inflation. And we already have seen that happening now from just a few stimulus checks. It would be far worse if it was a permanent feature. Now lets say it was not truly universal, but was instead a means-tested program. That MIGHT work a little better, although we still have the ‘where does the money come from’ problem to solve.
The general reasoning behind UBI is to end poverty in America by giving people the ability to meet basic financial needs (despite that there are already many means-tested programs for that – SNAP, unemployment, social security, EITC on taxes, Medicaid, medicare, WIC, HEad Start, rental vouchers, etc). All that would need to go away if you want to implement UBI that actually fixes anything without bankrupting the entire nation.
In order for UBI to accomplish this, it would need to (1) be large enough to raise people to the poverty line WTIHOUT ending medicaid, child care assistance, rental voucher programs, etc, (2) include recipients who are not currently working, and lack any sort of earnings record to prevent massive fraud, and (3) be financed by massive tax increases unless you want to completely eliminate social security, medicare, and a lot of other services – which, as a side note, I doubt any politician would be willing to run on because no one will vote for someone running on that (ask Andrew Yang, who was a pretty smart person but running on something where the details were things no one in the present would be okay with).
The main problem is we are not starting from scratch, where we can set up UBI as part of our basic infrastructure like some other places have done. We already have a fully set up, incredibly complicated, massive system in place which would need to be completely torn down for hundreds of millions of people first, which would be pretty disastrous for not only our economy, but the entire world’s economy. We simply have too many people to make UBI work, which is why the main places it tends to work is in places with VERY low populations like Alaska, as basically a bribe to get people to live there in the first place.
The whole system is horrifically inefficient and exploitative, and needs to be taken down anyway. The question is how quickly it happens, and how carefully it’s done.
It’s all lies built on other lies. Eventually the whole house of cards will fall under its own weight.
“The whole system is horrifically inefficient and exploitative, and needs to be taken down anyway”
Except we have become very dependent on that system. If it is taken down, generations of people will die and we might not survive the change. The larger the system, the more difficult it is to take it down quickly.
“It’s all lies built on other lies. Eventually the whole house of cards will fall under its own weight.”
I’m not actually disagreeing with you there. But before you take down a system you need to know how the new system will work and that it won’t fall under its own weight even faster and more disastrously. Not to mention what I said earlier about ‘taking down the system causing mass destruction for everyone you’re trying to help in the first place.
Our dependency on a system shouldn’t discourage us from attempting to replace it. In fact, that very dependency should motivate us to always be trying to improve it, rather than kicking that can down the road, hoping the bill never comes due.
While I agree in theory that flawed systems should be replaced, if its not replaced with a provably better, actually workable theory, you are just asking for more death and suffering. I am not a fan of kicking the can down the road, but less so a fan of doing something new in such a panic that one does not realize the implementation of a new thing will cause far more suffering without any guarantee of success once its implemented.
Not meaning to be flippant but the idea that you are espousing (and I know this is not your intent from what I have read of your posts) sounds a lot like “what are a few hundred million lives in the name of a better world?” It’s something that has been done before, many times, usually with disastrous effects, and often by truly evil or incredibly inept people.
The idea I’m espousing is that we should be thinking about and discussing what a better system would look like, and how to get there, but the people invested in the current system very systematically try to crush and demonize any discussion of alternatives.
It’s always funny how the argument is that we need to keep the poor scared of starving to death to make them work, but the rich need to be bribed with lots of money to do… whatever it is they supposedly do that benefits society.
The people most concerned about the free rider problem tend to be the actual free riders in a system.
I’m more concerned about ‘how to pay for something’ part than the ‘keep the poor scared of starving to make them work’ part (although I do think a lack of incentive to work is a big problem that can and does spread (see what happened in Oregon with the ripple effect with minimum wage rising too high too fast). Also the idea of universal vs means-tested. Universal sounds nice, but is unworkable once a population gets too large or there is already a massive system in place. Means tested at least sometimes works, at least in the short-term. It still has similar faults to universal, but works for a longer period before collapsing under its own weight, once the ‘means’ being tested gets too large for the people outside the means can no longer afford to keep it up.
Dave, I love ya man, and you’re often very smart and insightful about a lot of topics (and it shows in your comic), but you’re just waving around a lot of Straw Man(tm) oversimplifications in this post.
Dave: [ I’m always floored when people rail against solutions like UBI because “it makes people lazy or entitled.” ]
That’s shorthand for the root of the downstream problems with UBI — being lazy or entitled is in itself not the most (or only) negative downside of UBI.
Dave: [ The point of UBI isn’t to make people industrious, it’s to alleviate poverty, homelessness and starvation. ]
Well yeah, that’s the goal, and it’s a noble one. But ultimately, if truly “U”(niversal), it ends up being counterproductive even to its own goals.
Dave: [ I find it alarming how many people think extreme poverty it fine and dandy because starvation motivates people to get jobs? ]
BIG straw man. No one serious says “extreme poverty is fine and dandy”, nor that “extreme poverty” is necessary to motivate production. Nor is UBI necessary to fight “extreme poverty”. The US doesn’t have UBI, but it has trillions of dollars of other kinds of programs to combat extreme poverty — programs which by design avoid several of the pitfalls of true UBI.
Dave: [ The argument fully and willfully ignores that rich people are entitled AF. Everyone is entitled. Giving poor people a stipend doesn’t make them entitled, it makes them continue to be human. ]
You’re only arguing against a straw man here. Try arguing against the full depth of arguments against UBI, please.
Dave: [ The argument also ignores the fact that most people are kind of lazy already. “Lazy” being a pretty ill-defined term to begin with. I mean, anyone who doesn’t have a family with 2.5 kids and a full time job and 7 hobbies and doesn’t spend 2 hours a day in the gym and isn’t also on the PTA and the HOA is lazy, right? ]
No, that’s another straw man. The real argument is that a UBI income sufficient enough to be worthy of the term (i.e. enough guaranteed strings-free income delivered to everyone’s door every month to provide for the necessities of life, even if albeit a low-frills life) will disincentivize enough people to enough of a degree that not enough people will be motivated to go out and do the kinds of jobs that keeps a society viable (e.g. food, energy, housing, roads, etc. etc.) Why? Precisely because yeah, people tend to be lazy and aren’t going to volunteer to do the hard jobs every day out of the goodness of their hearts (in sufficient numbers) if they’re getting paid a living(ish) wage simply for breathing. The problem with UBI isn’t that it *makes* people lazy, it’s that it *facilitates* and enables everyone’s natural laziness.
Dave: [ So really, it seems to me that the argument boils down to “why should I have to work when that other guy doesn’t” ]
Another straw man. To the extent that’s an issue, it’s not the way you put it, it’s “why should I have to work when a large slice of my productivity is siphoned off to support the people who sit on their butts playing video games all day rather than benefiting me, the guy who’s still busting his ass?” And therein lies another major flaw with real UBI — the high amount of taxation necessary to fund all the “free” UBI eventually drives most of the still productive members of society to either say “screw it” and kick back too, or move away to lands where they can still retain much of the fruits of their labors.
Dave: [ which furthers my point that most people are lazy, ]
Again, this is actually the key problem with UBI. Most people *are* lazy. However, we need most people to be working to keep providing food and shelter and services to everyone. If not, then “most people” are going to go hungry and homeless and so on in even far greater numbers than do so today, no matter how many digits are printed on their UBI checks (hello, Zimbabwe). You can’t print food supplies and so on. Tens of millions of people have to work lousy jobs every day to make them happen.
Dave: [ and also ignores the fact that people on UBI aren’t usually living in mansions and taking helicopters to their second home in Aspen. ]
Arguments against UBI don’t “ignore” this huge non sequitur. Nor do they rely in any way on it.
Dave: [ The goal is to meet fundamental needs. ]
Sure, but the UBI “solution” only makes fundamental needs like food, housing, and energy ultimately even more scarce and unaffordable, by disincentivizing the productivity which provide them and in enough quantities to keep their prices low enough for most people to afford.
The vast majority of the work people do is contrived and unnecessary. What percentage of the population actually does the work needed to provide food, housing, and energy? Most people are involved in bureaucracy, paperwork, and the production of luxuries.
UBI is definitely something I’d like to see test runs on. I was surprised when one of our (German) most famous rational/left politician Sahra Wagenknecht told us from her personal experience growing up in communistic East Germany back then, that when people get something for free they tend not to value it and e.g. leave the window open while heating etc. I don’t like it and I wish it weren’t true, but that woman is smart and what she says has substance. Which is why I prefer going step by step, i.e. starting with a small UBI that still requires you to work but if you have multiple jobs you’ll be able to quit one of your jobs, and then see what happens, because that way the worst of the worst jobs will be the first to no longer have employees. Then we can evaluate the results of that change and discuss if it makes sense to raise the UBI another step.
That’s basically what the Pirate Party wants, i.e. the party that started out as nerds and engineers who just wanted to find the “right” solutions as objectively as possible, regardless of ideology, but got overrun by corrupt and/or fanatic people who ended up doing nothing but shoot themselves in the feet.
In a democracy we get the government the majority deserves. All we can do is persevere and keep pushing for change.
Warder, if that were true, the US would still have old-school Welfare. But that took very few out of poverty and created a LOT more poor. If you take the money and use it to survive while you get a job or survive while you train to get a better job, you stop being AS poor.
But that, unfortunately, isn’t how Welfare was structured. It’s how many people in your family need money… So what happens is not more working people, it’s more children in a family with already not enough workers. And because bureaucracies exist to implement policy, not think about whether or not what they’re doing works, you wind up with more poor – every generation.
Sorry, but your claim doesn’t need disproving by experiment. It fails the test of history…
Huh, Reagan’s made up “welfare queen” stories are still believed in some circles? Wild. I thought at this point, everybody knew that they were lies. But, that does fit with also not knowing that the welfare state was implemented specifically to save capitalism from its inevitable structural failure. A system based on extracting wealth from workers trends toward extracting all of the wealth from workers, and such a system can’t sustain itself if all the workers are dead from poverty (the current “supply chain crisis” is serving as a wonderful reminder of those facts).
Inflation
Also, Post-Scarcity tends to be a white middle/upper-class kid argument.
I would argue that “morality” is just the tool being used. The people who actually have the material motive for preserving the current status quo are the ones who profit from it, at the expense of everyone else.
Yay capitalism…
He’s got his own solve poverty by giving poor people money experiment in the works. That we don’t hear more about his plans is probably because he’s not the main character.
If you want to see where “being too proactive” gets you, watch Moon Knight.
Ammit would kill anyone with any capacity for evil, even if they would never act on it even without an external stimuli to “remain good”
This included killing toddlers to stop any theoretical evilness
So, they would kill everyone then, because everyone has the capacity for evil
Ammit claimed to be able to see the future deeds of each person, and weigh the evil they would commit if they were to continue living with the good. That said, since she was empowering herself with the souls of those who were judged to be evil, it’s possible she wasn’t being *entirely* honest about that part.
I take it as a given to never trust an anthropomorphic crocodile.
Only when they smile :)
Also don’t trust when they cry. It’s always crocodile tears.
Ba dum bump tsssh!
(and no that was not a pun – it was a joke, a far higher form of humor)
Only higher in the medicinal sense.
I think she actually sees the future, so it’s based on actions you haven’t YET taken, instead of the capacity to commit them.
Ammit would love the world of Minority Report.
She saw the movie in an alternate world, didn’t like the casting choice so killed everyone involved in hiring Cruise before the rights were sold :P
Hm that must have been in the director’s cut of Moon Knight :)
cue up the Spaceballs quote about good and evil….
and oh boy. the high priest of the church of Dues is going to be fun when she recovers.
Good and evil are not very helpful distinctions. there is power and there is those who use that power. Carlin’s comment is pretty apt- think about average intelligence, remember that 1/2 the people are dumber than that. also realize that we can’t really measure intelligence at least not useful intelligence. thus it is scattered more or less randomly throughout the various levels and classes of human society. there are places on the internet that collect stories of people who obviously have limited intelligence in roles where one would normally assume that only people with above average intelligence would get to. even if some of the stories are fake, enough get verified to demonstrate that we don’t really select for intelligence in our society. so on top of moral ambiguity we get people who NEED to be able to understand the nuances of a situation and quite obviously can’t. Go ahead and cue up CCP greys excellent Rules for Rulers, it really won’t help.
in my experience Humans have developed the ability to ‘feed’ in some way off of hurting each other. Male to male ‘friendships’ are a fantastic example- we men seem to be only able to relate to one another by ruthlessly hurting each other physically and emotionally. from the outside in, women would seem to to better, they seem to be able to develop supportive relationships. On the other hand, it does not take long to discover that women extensively train to cut each other down emotionally to a level that men just aren’t trained for. and then we try to have relationships with each other….
If god exists, She has a really unhealthy obsession with irony and a dark sense of humor.
Yes. Just, YES. Irony and dark sense of humor is putting it gently, but it’s a great statement.
well to borrow an old song my parents would play..
‘But if I really say it
the radio won’t play it
so I’ll lay it
between the lines.’
And now we see Deus’ TRUE motivations. Not only is it very hard to regard him as a villain at this point, but he’s actually reminding me of the original Superman – the proactive rebel against the establishment, not the defender of the status quo that he is today. The ORIGINAL Superman, who targeted war profiteers and forced the government to renovate slums.
“Remember what I said about half the people being powered within ten generations? I’ll probably be around for that. You likely will be too.”
“What?”
“I know that there are certain supernatural individuals who are centuries old. Medical advancements are quickly accelerating to the point that the average person can have access to some form of significant productive life extension within a couple of decades. I know I have several people working on that. But you, Maxima, as far as I can tell, are functionally immortal. What will YOU have after five hundred years?”
“If what you are saying is true, I guess I’ll still have everyone?”
200 million years have passed,
the continents have remerged into Pangaea Ultimate, what remains of humanity are scattered species among the stars, most of whom don’t even know Earth was the world their distant ancestral species originated from.
what remained on Earth and directly descended from humanity is no longer visibly able to be described as human, more like a Chocobo that lactates,
that is except for two, sitting upon a hill far removed from the cities of bird and rabbit like sapient beings are two immortal beings, worshipped as gods a few hundred thousand years prior, but now have removed themselves from the civilizations of this world; they are too alien despite originating on this very planet.
these two sit at a tree stump over what was once a great village 30 million years prior, but they agreed to meet here once every decade or two and play a game of chess and reminiscent about the past and their descendants among the stars.
these two have spoken countless languages, seen things no living being on their planet could imagine, and once so long ago they were called by the names Achilles and Maxima.
He was also a destruktive prankster. He was a bit of a troll in the silver age too right? I’m sure Pander knows all about it.
I dare anyone to tell me that Superman doesnt deserve to get slapped for this shtick.
https://preview.redd.it/dzn1h6pzizj81.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=7f32868be010831d119d6a414f9f2a4fa15cb98f
slapping superman… I’d ask Lois as she might be able to do it. though I expect its like slapping a brick wall, hurts and barely annoys the wall.
Slap him with a kryptonite laced glove then.
Dude deserves a slap for that image. :)
I don’t blame superman for that. that was some idiot involved with the comic who did not have sufficient supervision. someone does need some discipline for that. I know where we can get some equipment, must have the right tools for the job.
Oh, I would love to just blame some idiot involved in the comic, but Superman in the silver age has far too many times where he did stuff like that.
Burning poor Jimmy Olsen’s present to him when he adopted him as a son as some sort of really weird lesson.
Telling Robin and Jimmy Olsen dig their own graves, and saying that since he has a code against killing, BATMAN will kill them instead. WTF Batman has a code against killing too! (to be fair, Jimmy would fake dying at least 3 times a year in order to try to trick Superman into telling him his secret identity, so he’s awful too).
Making poor Robin walk atightrope with Batman and himself sitting on a pole which Robin has to balance on his shoulders.
https://superdickery.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/216_4_018.jpg
Showing off his super intelligence by using mathematics to instantly tell how many beans are in a jar. And getting the number wrong because apparently super-multiplication is different than normal, human multiplication. As in it’s wrong, and no one had the guts to tell the super-jock that he doesn’t know how to do basic math. 20 x 16 x 10 = 3,200, not 32,000, super dummy….
https://superdickery.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/1007supermathematics1iw.jpg
*shakes fist* Superdickery.
Silver age Batman did not have a code against killing (not really). he wouldn’t kill his own sidekick or an innocent person, but he absolutely put a bunch of goons in their graves back then…heck the Joker’s real world origin is that he was the first villain Batman didn’t kill because the writing staff and editors were tired of coming up with a new enemy every single time and wanted some reoccurring antagonists.
even later eras Batman who said he did, it was one of the sources for the hypocrit trope of heroes sparing the big important villain “I am not like you, I won’t kill”…meanwhile the fifty henchmen he just beat up would actually be dead, and some even definitely dead.
“I am not like you Dr. Destruction I will not kill.”
“You shot fifteen of my men with a freeze gun, freezing them solid, shoved that guy out the window after pulling the grenade pins on his coat, set those three on fire, and threw a bladed object into the skull of thirteen guys…they are all dead Captain Batdude!”
I’d suspect that “Accelerating the Armament of Humanity” would force seeking solution for these problems earlier rather then later. Also by having well armed regular humans being capable to be on more equal footing with supers.
Those are not necessarily downsides. If the confrontation point only comes a century or so in the future, that’s a lot of time in which strategies for using and abusing Powers can be developed and refined before things kick off. Pull the timescale down to decades, and there isn’t that opportunity for the field to spread so much.
Eliminating poverty is not automatically communism. You know what communism and _uncontrolled_ capitalism have in common?
Both of them don’t reward hard work, and that’s the fatal flaw in both systems. In the former, finding work is a buyer’s market (which is why it needs a dictator forcing people to work), in the latter it’s a seller’s market.
Humans do things they get rewarded for. That’s why there are so many cheap clicker apps. Countries that have controlled capitalism with a welfare state have understood that. The power of employers and employees needs to be balanced.
i’m glad someone gets it …..
The entire point of socialism is that hard work *should* be rewarded. That’s why the primary maxim of socialism is “The workers should own the means of production.” Because it’s well understood that when you work for someone else, you are working hard to enrich someone else, who is paying you poor wages while skimming all the surplus value of your labor for himself. When you the worker own the means of production, you are responsible for your own income (as opposed to your boss) and you can actually control your own income through your productivity (at least up to a point – loans, suppliers, buyers, etc. also have an effect). It’s also the maxim of communism, but communism as a mode of government often quickly turns into “The state should own the means of production” and it’s all downhill from there. Stalin had some quick censoring of Marx to do when he realized that Marx’s critique of feudalism applied perfectly well to his system of government. True communism is supposed to be more like direct democracy, including democratization of the workplace.
Socialism and communism don’t assert people should get money for nothing. They just assert that people who work hard should be properly rewarded instead of having the value of their labor skimmed off the top. That if you are working hard, you probably shouldn’t be in poverty, and yet the poorest people are often the hardest-working and barely treading water because they are being exploited for cheap labor using their weak bargaining power from their lack of resources and state of desperate need against them.
Asserting that people should get rewarded just for how hard they work is very close to getting money for nothing. I work as a programmer – I could work wayy harder if I, for instance, blindfolded myself and scattered the keys of my keyboard around the building. That wouldn’t make my work have any more value, though, and in fact would drop my productivity almost to nothing.
Or, for another example, take Sisyphus. He does really hard work, but it’s meaningless (by design).
I think “hard work” here means “producing value”.
It’s the idea that if I make something, the value of that something will return, in part to me. I’m also a programmer, so let’s say I’m doing an app to automate a process. If doing this automation generate 0.5millions/year less loss to a company, but my pay stay the same (let’s say 70k), the difference goes to top, to people that didn’t produce that value.
It’s not about the quantity of work, but the value of it.
A society that reward hard work simply reward people that generate value. The real problem here is: how do you measure that for more abstract job or not production oriented work? Social worker, janitor, theoretical scientist, etc.
For me, that’s the biggest problem (I don’t think it’s impossible to resolve, a fully realized socialist society must overcome this).
You’ve got it right. As I said, you would control your own income through your productivity. So if you are producing nothing, then whoever would be paying you all for that is probably an idiot. But who knows, sometimes you end up paying people to go through the processes of work while producing nothing simply because you *need* them and the whole place to stay in working order with working skills in case there’s real work coming up and you don’t want to have to rebuild your infrastructure again to accommodate that. That happens with military purposes, I think, needing to preserve production capacity without producing anything at the moment, so you pay people enough to keep a working skeleton crew going through the motions so you can upscale and hit the ground running at a moment’s notice when needed.
Anyway, the way you’re supposed to get compensated appropriately for productivity is largely determined by how much money you make producing it. If a software company were a worker cooperative, then the workers are the shareholders, the managers get voted in (everyone has an equal vote), and the profit gets split among the workers. The full methods of preserving and running a co-op are a bit more complicated, but worker co-op tech companies do exist. In companies like that, people are generally motivated to work hard (in ways that are *actually* productive) and punt loafers.
There’s also the problem of the Pareto Principle, which seems to happen in a broad series of situations from economics to nature to universal phenomenon. It’s not actually a universal phenomenon, but it’s frighteningly close in how broad it is.
The Pareto Principle roughly specifies that about 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, so there’s always an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. 20% of the suns produce 80% of star energy. 20% of trees in a forest get 80% of the nutrients and light (ie, the tallest ones). The entire concept of evolution’s ‘Survival of the Fittest’ is an example of the Pareto Principle. 80% of the profits from a casino come from 20% of the big spending ‘whales’ (sometimes an even smaller percentage, but overall throughout all casinos, about 20%). In short, things are not, and never can be, equal in outcome, even if you try to make it equal in input. Some things will have advantages or be better than other things. Some things will take more or give more than other things. It always leads to inequality in the end.
What does this mean as far as economics is concerned? The Pareto Principle is most well observed in the relationship between wealth and population. 80% of the land tends to be owned by 20% of the population. 80% of the wealth in general tends to belong to roughly 20% of the population. 80% of the risk involved in investments tends to be from 20% of the population.
This is a problem when managing human resources as well, if you want things to be completely equal. In most corporations, 20% of a corporation’s staff wind up driving about 80% of the firm’s profits. The larger the corporation, the more apparent this becomes. It’s the same with clients/customers.
Before I worked at the ADA’s office, I was a paralegal in Ohio for this small, one person firm. On the first day, my boss sat me down in his office and showed me two stacks of folders, One was about 6 folders, and the other had a BUNCH of folders. At least 25. He pointed to the stack of 6 folders and told me, ‘These are the clients who keep the office afloat. They are my major clients. You may sometimes sit in the office when they come in but you are to NEVER do anything regarding them. This is my work. They pay for my services and expertise.
HE then pushed over the stack with 25 folders. “These are the majority of my clients. At least half of them probably won’t pay me and I’ll write them off as a loss, or have to hire a firm to chase after them to make them pay. You get to work on their briefs and I’ll look them over to make sure you did not mess up too much.”
It occurs to me years later that…. 6 is very close to 20% of 31. 20% of the clients paid for 80% of that law firm’s business profits.
This is also roughly true in the population of a nation’s wages, or the amount of food produced by farms, or the amount of writers who become famous, or the amount of free throws made by people on a basketball team, or the amount of movies that get produced vs how many are submitted. It’s probably true about the amount of webcomics that get a large following vs the amount of people who make webcomics that almost no one ever sees.
20% of a workforce, at best, is usually going to be responsible for 80% of the output, at least. So they’re going to tend to get paid the most, or at least be considered the most valuable workers.
The Pareto Principle may be the natural way the universe organizes itself, but we can decide whether that’s an ideal to aspire to or a problem to solve.
actually the Pareto Principle is an artificial creation of living entities. to understand where it comes from look at data-science and the graph-theoretical subfield of “Networks”. basically it is caused by a network growing in such a way that the oldest nodes gain most of the new connections of the network. to a rich person gets more social connection when they have been at this game for a longer time. it basically is rewarding age instead of rewarding actual work. to get rid of this principle you would need to erase history and redistribute wealth on a regular basis. not really an easy task given that every living entity has some form of memory, would work much better if we all were machines ready to get brainwashed every now and then…
In other words you are advancing a form of mass murder. if you destroy our memories, are we still ourselves? I say not. language cannot exist without memory. meaningful thought cannot exist without language to record it. If you have to take away our memories to make the world work, I think its time to go back to the drawing board or accept that morality is the tool of the weak to restrain the strong.
“actually the Pareto Principle is an artificial creation of living entities”
Well… it also happens with stars and other cosmological structures. Which arent actually living entities. It doesnt seem to be an artificial creation at all – it’s a natural aspect that happens to also be present in most aspects of human and other animal life. But to make a system without the pareto principle eventually coming into play would be, as you stated, monumentally difficult, if not impossible (or result in people attempting to do things which are morally evil to ‘force’ an equal outcome that is not occurring naturally).
Natural outcomes are not moral. In most cases, it’s defying the natural outcome that is moral.
It’s not an ‘ideal to aspire to’ – it’s just something that seems to happen more often than not as a basic aspect of the universe, both in nature and in social and evolutionary situations as well.
It’s not a problem to solve per se, but it’s something that you need to deal as a natural consequence of just… realistic events with when you’re figuring out the problem of equity vs equality in human social design systems.
“The entire point of socialism is that hard work *should* be rewarded. That’s why the primary maxim of socialism is “The workers should own the means of production.” ”
Ah, but the problem is always that “the workers” don’t actually own jack s__t. In theory, they own it all and the party “manages” it for them, but in practice, the workers are serfs and the party is medieval nobility.
In actual practice, socialism is dictatorship with a nice paint job and better PR. Every dang time.
OK, not *every* dang time. China managed to be “oligarchy with a nice paint job and better PR” for a while (though they’ve fallen back to dictatorship again now). Also, Europe is currently trying out a “dictatorship of the bureaucracy” version, which is, best I can tell, unprecedented in human history. To early to say for sure, but it looks to be falling into all the same problems, but with a bit lower body count than the others, so hey, that’s something, I guess.
you do realize that there are successful companies run on socialist models? they are called something else and the structure is discouraged by some of the players in the finance market. but they do exist and do just fine here in the US.
Tell me you don’t know what socialism is, without telling me you don’t know what socialism is…
“Tell me you don’t know what socialism is, without telling me you don’t know what socialism is…”
I don’t need to – you just filled that role.
I know exactly what socialism is. What I’m pointing out is that actual implementation of “socialism” turns into “not socialism” nigh-instantaneously every time. It’s inherent and unavoidable.
Socialism on any scale requires a powerful government. Those who run that powerful government have dictatorial (and extremely near to it) powers. Oddly enough, that attracts people who want to be dictators.
The theory of socialism is a wonderful, beautiful thing. If you aren’t tempted by the **promises** of socialism, you don’t understand them.
The problem is that, in actual implementation, it CAN NOT deliver on those promises. It turns into dictatorship, very very quickly. Every. Time.
I don’t think you know what a “worker cooperative” is. The government is not in charge of that. Quite often it does an end-run around a government that does *not* like to see such things, because they prefer for the wealthy and influential to own the means of production since that is how the politician’s own bread is buttered.
You just assume that socialism means you have to get the government taking it over. It doesn’t. When the motto is “the workers should own the means of production,” that is meant *literally*. The government owning the means of production is obviously not the same as the workers owning it. There is a reason why people argue about “true socialism” and “true communism” and it is precisely because of stuff like this.
“I don’t think you know what a “worker cooperative” is.”
I do, actually, and some of them work quite well. And some of them don’t.
They do use some socialist principles… but only a few. The more like actual, government-run socialism they are, the more likely they are to develop similar (though obviously less violent) problems.
And yes, “socialism” means that you have to have the government take over, of something so powerful that it is de facto the government. Otherwise, it’s just a normal company, with shares owned by the people who work there.
**I literally work at a company like that,** so yes, I know what I’m talking about. Anyone can set up a company like that in a free society. They aren’t incredibly rare.
But they aren’t “socialism”.
It sounds like you have defined socialism in such a way that any socialist policy or structure that works isn’t socialism. The far-right has done a fine job of poisoning the word. Socialist policies are very popular, right up until someone calls them socialist.
And that’s basically the point of right-wing-boogeyman-socialism: to obstruct discussion of actual socialism.
“It sounds like you have defined socialism in such a way that any socialist policy or structure that works isn’t socialism.”
As I said above, if you aren’t tempted by the promises of socialism, you don’t understand them. *OF COURSE* the promised benefits of socialism are popular!!!!!!!!
The problem is that socialism, in actual practice, *does not produce those benefits*.
The point of left-wing-utopianism is to deny every attempt at socialism in the real world as “not actual socialism”.
“Socialism” that is voluntary is not socialism, it’s capitalism. Anyone can form a company where the workers own the company. If they are all doing it voluntarily, well, how is that different from any other company in this country, legally and ethically speaking?
But if you still want to make the kinds of claims you are making, please define for me “actual socialism” as you see it.
That is such utter nonsense that I can’t even form a coherent rebuttal.
Capitalism requires the state. Communism requires the state. They both have more in common with each other than either do to socialism, which does not require a state, or force. There is a wide variety of socialist systems, but what they generally hold in common is that the economy should benefit the people, and that people should be rewarded for their contributions. The distinguishing trait of capitalism is that ownership should be rewarded above all else. Under Communism, as it has existed in history, the economy serves the state, none of which have a good track record of serving their people.
The distinguishing trait of capitalism is that it rewards ownership, rather than productivity. People try to justify it as the most productive using their resources to purchase and own things, and so they’re indirectly being rewarded for being productive… But why bother with the levels of indirection? It just provides the opportunity for someone to circumvent your reward structure, and construct a situation in which the least productive are rewarded for the work of the most productive, who themselves never get anywhere.
I would say you are – in broad strokes – not wrong.
I don’t think it’s worth us quibbling over details. ^_^’
…I will add, though, that I (for now) think the best alternative is market-socialist system, where any business larger than an independent single-operator is required to be an equal partnership or exclusively worker-owned co-op.
The US (and many other nations) are famous for somehow taking the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism and mixing them together somehow in the most horribly inefficient ways. Usually because of politicians (at least for the last 80 or so years) who are in league with a limited number of corporations.
Because that’s where the incentives are. It’s not that people are trying to make the best system they can, and just repeatedly failing, it’s that the people with the power to affect those outcomes actively want them.
Yes, except a significant portion of even the people who are not in power tend to vote for those systems in hopes of getting something for nothing. Which never is really going to happen – there’s very little in life that’s actually free AND will work well for a society in the long run (humans are not perfect creatures and a system needs to work based on that imperfection instead of assuming people will always make the best possible choice for an ultimate goal of an artificially structured society). There will always be people who want something for nothing and will take advantage of any scenario that allows for that possibility, there will always be people who do more work than others (which helps the civilization prosper and progress) and need an incentive for that if you want it to be a regular thing, and there will always be people who are not going to be satisfied if others are getting for free what they have to work for. In any society trying to achieve a Utopia (and usually creating a dystopia instead, sometimes without even realizing it), there needs to be some outside thing which prevents NATURAL human perceptions of reality from taking hold and ruining the illusion of the constructed society.
In Brave New World, it was Soma. And sometimes forced social conditioning if the Soma was not enough.
In We Happy Few (the video game), it’s ‘Joy.’
In 1984, it’s IngSoc – a combination of social conditioning, scapegoating (Two Minutes of Hate), authoritarian redefinition of what is truth (The Ministry of Truth), and fear of the watchful eye of Big Brother.
In Justice League Unlimited’s Earth-50, it’s the Justice Lords – which is pretty similar to IngSoc but a lot more noticeable to a larger percentage of its population.
Well sandwich me! It’s getting political…. Snot zzzZzzZZZ
Yeah I think the forum may get too political for me today. It’s not even funny to make bad puns about politics.
I wish somebody would make some puns bad, good or tear-able I don’t care. that’s more fun than letting myself think about this f’d up mockery we pretend is a society. I miss that thread on a highly specific subject from earlier. would it help If I brought something from r/dadjokes?
It really depends on what “political” means. I would say the comic has been explicitly political since at least page 145, if not earlier. Every page may not be a deep exploration of some political topic, but feminism and economics come up regularly. You could argue that it’s possible to discuss morality without getting political, but once you move from pure discussion of right and wrong into enforcement, I think you’ve heading into politics.
In the words of Dark Helmet, ‘Evil will always triumph because Good is dumb.’- or rather, in this case, limited in its range of actions. Bad people with powers will have an advantage over good people with powers, especially if the world goes on as it has, because good people with powers will be trying to do things like follow the law or be decent people. Bad people… won’t. Two people with super strength are fighting, and the one that’s trying *not* to pulp civilians with sonic overpressure is gonna lose to the guy who just doesn’t care, most of the time.
And that’s in a contest where the powers are fairly evenly matched. Fighting a super intellect aiming to manipulate the stockmarket? It doesn’t matter if your police force can fire lasers or fly if they can’t even determine that they’re in a fight in the first place.
It’s more the fact that anyone seen to be doing something must be evil and should be stopped
In the words of Dark Helmet… you mean the idiot who was soundly defeated less than a minute later? Then had his escape pod stolen by the bearded lady from the circus? Somehow I don’t think that just because someone said it, that makes it somehow true.
I have to admit so far I’ve also only come to genocide as a solution.
And yes, from the list off physical torture crucification took the longest.
I’ve always wondered how someone came up with crucifixion. Christ is supposed to have been crucified so it predates Christianity. It’s not really an obvious way to kill someone.
How or why would you work out that strapping someone up unsupported with arms outstretched would put enough stress on the muscles used for respiration that the victim would slowly asphyxiate?
Was there some ancient Mengele measuring how long his victims took to die and after trussing someone up and waiting, thought, yep this is how you do it.
It’s entirely possible it came about not as a means of killing someone. It could have originally been something knee the stockade. Hang them up for x hours or days to teach them their lesson, then cut them down. Then they realized people who were up there long enough started dying and things evolve from there. Not saying this is what happened, I want there and have done no research on the subject, just throwing around ideas.
It’s not necessarily asphyxiation they were after, there is also starvation and general exhaustion, for example.
Really, how the person dies is basically irrelevant, the important part is that it’s painful, drawn out and most of all on public display.
The original crucifix was an ‘X’ not a ‘t’, and they were just as often placed upside down
At a guess, the Roman’s didn’t initially realize that crucifixion caused asphyxiation. As far as I can tell, it was designed to basically be the Roman equivalent to have some starve to death in an elevated cage in full view of passers by. A huge part of why it was done was to send a message than anything else, like how punishments are partially to convince people that breaking a law is not worth the punishment as opposed to restitution for the victim.
From what I have found, crucifixion predates the Romans as well. The first mention I found was from the 5th century BC. So probably used before that but not recorded, or no records survive.
Οι Σίμσονς did it.
I love where Deusch is going, but I hate that it’s Deusch going there.
Well, the display in panel three is reasonably accurate.
Deus has become my favourite character with this,he know that an world were everyone has superpower is potentiality
a nightmare world and a nightmare world is really bad for profits. He actually wants to make sure that tomorrow is the same as today. He is no longer a simple arch villain, he is a man with an agenda. Whether that agenda is bad for everyone we have to wait and see.
You’re not paying attention, Nick.
The man has explicitly stated he intends to overturn the status quo, not preserve it.
Yay, time for meta discussions!
I do like when the authors point out this type of thing, and I especially like when it’s analyzed in some way. LitRPG in particular seems to forget that the badguys getting rewarded with more power allows them to do more bad stuff, although it’s most commonly remembered as a way to generate conflict since your character will never be too safe.
That said, while I can see why Deus is making this point, I would also posit that the fact that it’s easier to knock buildings down than build them and they’re still standing means humanity is at least somewhat interested in keeping the lights on. The counter to that is that the situation becomes much worse when your hypothetical badguys have little to no logistical requirements and can just chuck fireballs at people they don’t like.
Which leads us to apocalypse scenarios, to a degree. When discussing them, I generally describe three possibilities (I like the stories, sue me): 1) Fundamental Break 2) Logistical Break 3) Social Break. 1 happens the most in fantasy fiction, where magic comes knocking on the door and says electricity can go fuck itself. 2 involves a fundamental shift in the environment, where something as easy as transportation has a hard time keeping itself working, such as the spawning of giant firebreathing squirrels, or the nukes flying. 3, to continue the fantasy analogy, it’s hard to maintain the existing social order when assholes start throwing fireballs at people they don’t like.
The fact that Maxima has signed up with uncle Sam means that 3 is not likely to happen unless supers become common enough to attack where she isn’t, but isn’t a guarantee. Society will run into issues, and Strong Female Protagonist on your recommendation list does some fun stuff exploring that theme. That said, the ability to manufacture supers, particularly if a semi-fixed powerset especially if it’s defensive, would definitely be good for stability. That said, I think Uber does a great job playing with that in that it’s a Real Super Powers in the same way that Real Robot diverted giant robots away from superheroing.
Anywho, for whatever reason, I did want to discuss the stuff you mentioned about Cultivation and the scenarios you tossed out. I think a lot of cultivation fiction (well, that I’ve read) slips into the same ‘magic school’ scenario that are all over the anime scene right now. I mean, it makes sense for the ruler to try and empower their magic users for strategic reasons, but I think the writers slipped too far into wheel spinning holding patterns, and cultivation seems to fall into a lot of the same traps. I think both Aether’s Revival and Cultivating Chaos (of your preferred authors) used this, but they broke it up with various tournaments and such.
Where I think it tends to shine is apocalypse scenarios, and often the subscenario of a regressor. It seems traditional cultivation stuff has ‘levels/tiers’ built in, but the background of a stable system of schools/sects constantly competing for resources/talent with very little open warfare makes some sense, but I find it slips into that same magic school issue. With an apocalyptic scenario the MC stumbles into a monk class, or whatever, and slowly develops their skills from there rather than having to sign up for a school. Regressors, such as Trojan Nightmare, where the MC presumably did all of this off screen and then got sent back in time to redo things are also fun since the MC can just skip the bowing and scraping for information and just do a rush build. That does of course leave off ‘Dao’ systems where understanding a concept lets you warp reality.
Recommendations!
Defiance of the Fall (one I’ve recommend before) vaguely touches on cultivation systems, usually the Dao system, but is much more oriented on an RPG apocalypse subgenre https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09168R29M
Cradle (by Will Wight) is probably my favorite cultivation series, and while they touch on the cultivation schools, they generally lead toward fighting and the MC and a small group wandering about rather than staying home. Does have a bit of bowing and scraping though, mostly because powerful people who can vaporize people tend to get some respect. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076G8DVN6
Apocalypse Reborn – A vaguely similar setup to Trojan Nightmare since as the name implies, apocalypses! Regressors! LitRPG mechanics! but it has a very different… game scenario? Hard to describe, but it seems more like humanity is in a much larger game for somebodies amusement since there’s a ‘shop’. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RNNJB8K
Threads of Fate – again, a regressor, but the MC is actively avoiding being recruited by the existing powers that be, frequently traveling between treasure hordes and manipulating any schools he finds to let him into their treasure room so he can hopefully rob them. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08TTK29LT
Now! A request for you! Do you know of any LitRPG superhero book series? The closest I can think of is Ludus, the Hazard portion anyway, but I’m curious if there’s anything else similar. Normally, LitRPG leans either classical western fantasy or eastern fantasy/cultivation where everyone is focused on kungfu but can shoot lasers.
There is a webnovel I am really enjoying that is applying a heavily modified set of D&D rules to a marvel type universe.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/49030/the-power-of-ten-book-four-dynamo
If you like his writing style I thoroughly recommend reading all of his books on royalroad. I’m currently re-reading the book set in a 40k (ish) grimdark universe except the lead character has the grand quest of making it a non-grimdark universe.
thanks for the plug! :)
Hmm, I actually can’t think of any superhero LitRPG, which is weird. It seems like an obvious combinations. That said, I think Level Up! by Simon Archer might fit the bill, based on the blurb on Amazon. https://amzn.to/3wzlJUI I haven’t read it myself, as I think Archer falls into the category of “The only thing worse than a bad book is a mediocre book.” There’s just nothing about his writing that ever seems to really hook me.
I can think of a very few, mostly through amazon recs, but not many of them were to my taste.
At it’s core, I suspect that it’s just preferred for fantasy/cultivation magic/power systems, whereas for super heroes it’s a bit more… urban fantasy-ish?
Like, setting it up, you’ve got a few options (up for grabs if any writers think they’d be fun).
1) Secret Powers – follows standard urban fantasy protocols of hiding it from the normies to provide a backdrop world that is like ours, but there’s secret super powers. I personally don’t like these, as it creates too much pressure (for the writer) to create a status quo and stick to it, preventing the supers from changing any major aspect of the world.
2) Individual Power – probably the easiest(?) version to write, the MC just has a power that operates on RPG logic, likely with quests that grant power growth. It seems like it would slot into a super hero world pretty easily.
3) Partial Empowerment – similar to something like the Wearing the Cape ‘verse where powers are unlocked by a moderate portion of the population, maybe the unlocking event determines the starter build? Would probably share a lot of features with class based LitRPG systems (as opposed to free point or Souls Like style).
4) Full Empowerment – would probably share a lot of features with RPG Apocalypse subgenre, just with a more super hero powerset than a fantasy/cultivation oriented one? Honestly, it again straddles the line with the common fantasy ones, just going for a much wider variety of powersets compared to tossing fireballs around.
For the record: one of the reasons I’d say that in spite of it being easier to knock buildings down than build them, that buildings still stand, is basically:
One evil person might want to destroy something, but other evil people will want to preserve that thing.
Those other evil people will want to destroy something else, but other evil people will want to preserve the thing that that evil person wants to destroy.
And so on and so forth.
In other words, we tend to see things in a “good vs evil” sort of way where there’s ONLY a unified good vs a unified evil, but the thing is, there’s neither a unified good nor a unified evil and the lack-of-union in evil is a stronger factor in keeping society function than the lack of unified good is in destroying society.
Good not working together still does good, just not as much as they could.
Evil not working together means that there is less effectiveness in the evil being done, with evil versus evil and evil working with good to stop evil all contributing.
Granted, this is just a huge generalization thing and more of a “why society hasn’t collapsed into a total cesspool”. Society still has plenty of room for evil to thrive, and it has done so, but the evil thriving is not as bad as it arguably should be given the lack of unity in good.
Sadly I must agree with your points. Just look at our stories, especially the ones about super heroes.
Most heroes only become active after something bad has happened.
I’m impressed. I played a bit with the numbers and it’s good to see that Deus still takes time to enjoy himself. Living with numbers like these I probably couldn’t sleep anymore.
The problem isn’t those 50% of humanity with superpowers in 10 generations.
The problem already reaches critical levels by 0.5%.
By the current population that would mean we would have 40 million people with super powers in the world. Let’s say only 0.5% of those are half of Maxima’s power level, that would amount to 200,000 that can shrug of any ordnance you would usually use in an urban setting. 200,000 that could take out
Yes, the world of Grrl Power is on a deadline and I see now why he shares this information. The sooner the rest of the world gets on his program, the better.
As for his ‘accelerating the armament of humanity’ goes, it’s meaningless compared to this. It is doubtful that most of the industrial nations are going to change their ways. His goal is making Africa and any other country that wants to go on board. If he has to sell weapons to do that, he will. As I said, it will be meaningless anyway. Of course they won’t be there for this ‘building a better world’ goal. They just want what it looks like ‘his countries’ get. A better economy and through that more money.
If the world doesn’t want to get better because it’s the right thing to do, he baits it with greed.
there is an anime (haven’t watched it) but the concept is something I have imagined before as a thought experiment and there are things to be done with it; where a group of girls are transformed into Magical Girls, but there are no villains, no giant monsters, no alien invasions, nothing for them to actually fight; so they end up causing their own internal conflict as a result.
on the superhero angle I think this could be summed up if we had one of those movies where there has never been a superhero before and we only just now get the first and only superhero. Like most pre combined universe superhero movies. But in those movies there is usually already a gang, crime family, aliens, or even a super villain who just hasn’t put on a costume yet but is clearly a super villain; to push the hero to act.
Having done some leg work on the *what if someone wanted to be a superhero in the real world*, you find so many restrictions, limitations, and such on the fighting crime (police scanners tend to be AFTER the crime has taken place) and the majority in any given city will be something that unless you are already a detective your ability to shoot lighting from your eyes and summon fire wasps out your ears or whatever isn’t going to add anything to helping solve the case.
without a suitable opponent, super villain, giant robots, alien invasion, etc…the super hero is either a cop or soldier in fancy duds, a civil servant, or just sit back…I mean get dark realistic and add the fear of government trying to force you to be a weapon or dissect you and the potential superheros who aren’t S-class (thus fully capable of telling the US military to bugger off if they try and force you to go blow up another country), will decide to sit out using their powers to aid mankind.
of course get more people with powers and some will be tempted to use them for crime, enough at the C-class and higher and then you NEED superheros/super law enforcement.
But accelerate the number of people with powers and you may actually be able to skip past the superhero/supervillain era where being super is now the norm to some My Hero Academia world treating it as general stuff, or Kiddy Grade, and other series…get closer to that 100% and you end up with some interesting choices, heroes and villains, or the world ends up looking more agrarian and its skills and magic…all depending on the nature of the powers in question of course.
Humanity ending up like Omniman’s people is a potential as well *value strength and believe they have the right to force their way of life on everyone else as a result*. and would probably be one other aliens would fear. Although one supposes advance fast enough and varied enough along side some cooperation mindset could avoid such a scenario.
a world of Apocalypse *only the strong are worthy* is definitely a scenario to avoid. But focus on keeping a luxury life style without the conflict and you just might get things like geokinetics and florakineics being farmers and cultivators and not trying to sink cities and bring about the rise of the green.
Gluten Free is the ultimate evil.
Low carb pasta is utterly unbelievable.
its also expensive.
you can make ‘pasta’ from veggies, veggies are low carb, therefore, low-carb pasta
you steam that pasta. the low carb pasta I’ve seen you boil just like regular pasta.
Regarding good being more reactive and evil being more proactive: I think good by its very nature is required to be reactive. Its why there is a standard for ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and ‘probably cause’ instead of the alternatives.
The alternative is to also go after people who ‘might’ do something wrong, aka everyone.
Put another way, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Good can only maintain itself by waiting for evil to show itself.
Deus does have a point as the super power lottery could be extremely dangerous if you do not have the proper safe guards. Yes handing out the ability to make super powered people sounds insane… Until you think about the odds of some random person getting the power to make heads explode or turn half of New York into walking parasitic monsters that devour all flesh.
Yes the odds are low, but people feel better knowing that bombs will suddenly not be dropped on them, and governments feel better knowing that some random smuck can’t overthrow them and do whatever they want.
The idea of making a super power network by getting people you can trust with powers to act as the safety net does sound appealing. Even more so when you have a good established group ready to beat up the bad eggs that would abuse their power if they had them.
Just look at the restaurant when the first super hero team was established… All of those ‘normal’ people granted super powers decided to try taking out the only super power protection the USA had… And these were people from the USA for the most part. Just look at what happened when aliens made their first unofficial, official tourist ride appearance.
‘normal’ aliens tried kidnapping super heroes and then we had criminals trying to abduct the heroes and the aliens.
Deus may be causing a lot of problems, twisting things to benefit himself, and is a super villain… But as a villain once said “I want to rule the world! Not a ball of ash!”
Deus trying to help and lay out the ground work is to help ensure that if he does conquer the world it will stay his and not suddenly go up in flames because some idiot with more powers than sense decided that if they can’t be in charge then they would burn everything down around them…
Which we have seen with some businesses as a very painful thing. Deus wants to keep ‘his business running’ and that is the bottom line.
He may be a villain, but he has a point. He may step back and let someone else lay out a better plan… But until then he is going with his plan because he views it as doing something instead of waiting for the problem to sort itself out.
More people are always hurt by overreacting to the dangers of potential changes in society than by changes in society. Somewhere between 2-3% of people are doing the evil things Deus mentions. Everything he says sounds just like what white supremacists like to talk about to make you frightened of change. And I think the only problem he’s going to be able to fix by shooting it is threats to his power.
Glad someone else saw that.
The amount of damage 2% of the population can do is proportional to how much power they have. 2% with guns? More than if they just have sticks. How about 2% with nuclear weapons?
Probably exactly one nuke’s worth of damage before we have to find a way to prevent that? It makes no sense to structure society around predicting what a handful of assholes might do, is my point. I mean they let Trump have access to launch codes, I don’t think there could be any one person worse for that job, and it happened even though there ARE safeguards that are supposed to put ultimate power in the hands of those who are more capable of handling it, which I think proves two things: It’s not possible to entirely keep assholes from finding ways to gain power over people (just look at Deus fixing to take over the world because he wants to own more stuff), and we don’t need to.
You don’t think it’s worth trying to prevent some awful person from killing as many people with a nuclear weapon until after it’s happened?
The entire point of any social structure is to predict and prevent worst-possible outcomes. The rest is hardly worth worrying about.
If your system doesn’t address global genocide until after it’s happened… It doesn’t address it at all.
And heck, ten generations before the super population becomes the majority? That’s a lot of time for people to get used to massive social change. To take an example from history, unless I remember something wrong, the Westphalian nation-state model, the Magna Carta, the separation of church and state and the rule of law pretty much happened within the same generation as the birth of industry, colonialism and chattel slavery. And how much chaos and bloodshed did all that social upheaval cause? The amount of people killing each other per capita went “down”, and has kept going down every century since.
This might explain why Deus is so focused on tech-ing up his nation and acquiring alien tech. A lot of conflicts derive from material conditions – if you can get everyone to Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism then there’s much less reason to go to war. Heck, even at the level of personal conflicts, it can help by, say, giving you enough money to leave an abusive spouse.
But I don’t see why he’d need to wage a super-and-demon-powered war of expansion to do that. Maybe that’s just what he does for fun when he’s not trying to stop the collapse of global order.
the way he is talking I suspect that he suspects humans getting super powers and the number increasing each generation may be some test (for whatever reason) by some serious high grade species and should humanity fail this test (which he believes is the most likely outcome), this species could (wipe the board clean) and start again.
humans failed the power test, well experiment X7566 is a failure, okay load up the bipedal crabs..that once again Maskan has given breasts to…whatever, and let’s get experiment X7567 underway.
I demand snakes with breasts. make it so!
Make that into a pun so that I can send a ninja hit squad after you for saying that.
Snitties. Booba Constrictor. Co-bra.
Thank you Ro. A ninja hit squad will be with you shortly.
Transcendent Oppai-lescense. (Go into the light!)
google image search- it will change your life.
if you go to the right place you may see or experience snakes on boobs.
r/ChimeraSquad or r/Xcom (though they may have finally gotten over that obsession.)
sadly, I am udderly baffled on how to milk this concept for a pun.
heck I could have linked some stuff I’ve written, a lot of people love them some good Lamia, Naga, Ophidian alien women, etc..
I refuse to do that after I googled ‘banana hammock’ last strip.
Lol. Made you look.
Also palmvos, a ninja hit squad will be en route to your home as well for the puns on line 4. Please leave the door unlocked so they don’t have to break through your window.
Yah! the generator can spin again. I can use my lighting wall!
*evil laughter with thunder ensues*
The internet have convinced me that things like that will happen sooner or later. Time to invest in the mad geneticist industri.
yeah, don’t even need some type 4 or above world cultivators for that, genetic engineering, bio-android/techno organic hybrid, hologram snake waifu, prosthetic body with snake features,
If I’m reading Deus’s intentions right, he believes that he’s on a very tight timescale to get everything united and reformed before it all blows up. If a “Super-and-Demon-powered war of expansion” is the best means currently available to convince neighbouring regions to swallow their pride and get with the programme, then it’s the means he’ll use.
I’m assuming that her “armament of humanity” is the artificial production of supers. My guess is that Deus will reply that the acceleration is already under way, and he needs to get ahead of the curve to help control the direction. Huh, just a thought… A short story I once read suggested that one good way to lead people, is to convince them that they are _chasing_ you. (Which I think actually happened: a munitions ship caught fire in a harbor, and a guy snatched a baby and ran for the town limits with a mob in pursuit… then the ship blew up.)
It’s not only the “bad” people you have to worry about. If superpowers are being given out evenly, the number of them from the impoverished bottom half of society are going to vastly outnumber those from the elite 1%. How long until they realise that money isn’t the only power anymore?
The webcomic Strong Female Protagonist touched on this. A female super had started executing rapists that evaded the justice system. One character when asked if she was surprised explained the above and finished with “Am I surprised this is happening? Absolutely not. I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”
This is the narrative problem with writing a superhero/superpower story in the modern age, you’re dealing with a setting where normal people have access to a new kind of agency. One that doesn’t always conform to the typical structures of political and social power. And once you give normal people that kind of agency, and potential for non-conformity, and non-compliance with institutional power – you *must* ask the question: “Why wouldn’t they revolutionize the world into something less oppressive?”
The answer might not always be satisfactory, or realistic, or answered in full – but you have to answer the question. By creating a world with super-powers, you have already destroyed the status quo. Now you have to explain to your audience why it doesn’t progress further.
to be fair. nobody’s found an archeological record of the blood eagle yet. the only historical entry was a between 1020 to 1038 skaldic verse named Knútsdrápa written by a poet named Sigvatr Þórðarson
You know why there is no archaeological record of the blood eagle? What happens to a body after a few years of being dead? Nothing but bone, with no way of determining cause of death unless something happened to said bones
I think he means someone writing it down, or preserving the apparatus in their hall of death machines.
I mean its not like wooden poles keep but we know as a fact people were tied to said poles and left to die, or have their intestines cut out, those tied to the poles and forced to run around the pole to unwind their intestines *be surprised how long blood loss and shock can take; the gut can take a disturbing amount of damage before you die from it.
that aside, yeah, I think the point Wilder is making is the lack of written records and preserved devices. Its like the horned Viking helmet thing, it was “everyone knew it was real” but there is no evidence real Viking age Vikings ever had horns on their helmets like that.
Doubt they would have had a special tool made when a simple knife or dagger would suffice
Wait. Dues is an altruist?
He is a evil supervillain but so pragmatic about it that he often acts like a altruist.
Bread and circuses is a PROVEN method for getting people on board with your agenda. So, yeah, Deus works hard to keep his people happy – and to show other people just how happy they could be if they, too, were his people…
Feeling Deus is channeling a bit of The Incredibles there but he’s not wrong. If the world continues to develop Supers as a normal part of humanity everything will change. But I think I might see the best reason to share his knowledge/method of how supers are made.
If you possess the capability to produce supers you may also end up with the ability to stop supers. The power to develop tech that can just remove powers or stop a child from being born a super would throw some of the chaos of normalized supers back in line.
Imagine robbing a bank with your super strength and flight but then some non super cop shoots you with a bullet meant to strip you off your powers mid crime.
A lot of super criminals will think twice if they know normal citizens/ police can havr access to anti super methods.
But that’s my theory
Hmm … Dues talking points here … remind me what the Operative said in Serenity (Movie).
Makes me nervous about what (or who) he is willing to sacrifice to achieve his “New World”.
I believe what he plans to sacrifice is the current “Normal.” of the world. Deus seems to want all of humanity on an even playing field for whatever his endgame plan is. If supers become the new normal then everything changes. Money no longer rules all when you havr become as strong as characters you’ve read in comics. But I stated in my comment above that most likely anti super methods will arise to keep supers in check.
Now the interesting thing to note is that if that comes to pass Deus himself will still be in the top position of power on Earth. He has actively gone out to pursue quite the assortment of non earth assets of power. Including but not limited too (far as we know) aliens, alien tech, literal contracted demons, and a possible Lovecraftian being masquerading as human. Not to mention the wealth and debts inevitably owed to him if he shares the method that can 100% produce supers
So while the rest of the world is trying to make supers the new normal or pull the X Men plot and remove whatever causes them, Deus is sitting back in his country once again the better part of 10 moves ahead.
He says he is slowly taking over the world but I feel he already has and he is just waiting for the rest of the globe to realize it.
I wonder whether Deus has ever read the Dune novels with the God Emperor and his golden path.
I start liking him. I hope I keep liking him. Would be great if he kept his ego to play activities and his major actions to solid responsibal thinking.
Power: the ability to act.
*waits patiently to see my post about the only entry of the viking thing being an 11th century verse by a poet*
MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION:
Why does Deus have those red, blue and green buttons on his sleeve? Are they just normal buttons and he likes fancy ones? Or do they do anything? Can they be pressed to activate something? Normally buttons tend to be black, grey, blue or the same colour as the sleeve.
Of course they activate something like superweapons, reveal hidden supervillain lairs or release monsters. He just loves acting like a stereotypical supervillain.
On one version of his suit, they were top tier gems from Diablo 3, but those are complicated to draw and everyone thought they were infinity stones anyway. They never got a good closeup to differentiate them so I just kind of got lazy and started putting three plus his cufflink. No idea what the orange gem is supposed to be though.
Oh that’s cool! I like it, they look visually good!
Pretty sure in the past it was noticed that each sleeve has 3 different colors, and matches up to him having the full set of 6 ‘infinity’ stone cuff links.
I think part of the problem is that “bad” is often the easier, simpler solution to problems than “good”. For instance, maybe you’re stealing because you’re hungry and have no means. Well in general stealing is a lot easier than trying to grow your own food, or the uncertainty of begging and relying on others.
Evil may be more pro-active.
But good can cooperate to put Evil down. Good does not need force or coercion to agree on being good.
Evil has issues cooperating. They barely do “alliance of convenience”. They alwasy want to be the “Biggest, baddest” evil in their neck of the woods. It fights itself, as much as it fights good.
Even ‘Good agrees on being Good’ is not a given. You may agree with their motives, while deploring their methods for focusing too much on either the small scale or the big picture. You may be convinced that your motives are Good, while someone else with irreconcilably different motives is equally convinced that theirs are Good. There is no guarantee that an alliance to take down the greater Evil will not fall apart into factional bickering as soon as that job is done.
The primary advantage of “good” is efficiency. Cooperation and trust means you waste less effort on fighting, defending, double-checking, and redundancy.
What did Japan do to China? World history wasn’t taught much at school – we just remembered the locations of countries
Google Rape of Nanking for a main one, although there were a great deal of other stuff who’s specific names I cannot recall, medical torture and such.
Thank you – I’ve learned a lot more about history today! And now I can’t sleep… shocked to the core.
What JoeSchmoe said. Basically, The Holocaust, but actually like three times worse. It’s the kind of thing that will turn you into a cynical misanthrope.
Thanks! Just googled it. It’s an atrocity and it’s hard to imagine how the human mind is capable of all that happened.
Google Unit 731.
What Japan did in WW2 is so bad that they have basically written the entire history of that period out of their schoolbooks.
I’m dead serious. There’s a famous internet video on it, contrasting it with the Germans. It’s so bad that Japanese had the impression they were sitting around minding their own business, and American came along and nuked them.
Yes, that bad!
If they want to learn about their own history, they have to go overseas for the information.
Just saw the video and it is as you said. It saddens me that so much can be swept under the rug for such a long time.
Didn’t Deus note that the “Superion” field appeared to be “bespoke”. If wide spread societal consequences were the fear, a field externally imposed could likely be suppressed, or potentially turned off at the source.
Maybe a 3rd tier civilization magic field generator.
but this sounds like a 4th or above sub-quantum field interwoven structure.
So unless you can find a rival civilization or entities at that same level to join your cause and suppress it, its not likely.
if anything suppression would likely be more possible at the receiver end. Protein based nano-bots that suppress the genome sequence that decrypts the field access in the first place. the opposite of what Deus is doing where he is flipping that switch to connect inside people.
-there could be all sorts of problems doing this, but infinitely easier for humans to do than trying to suppress a woven in to the substrate of reality quantum field.
You have the numbers for the rise in hipsters wrong: not enough numbers on the left of the decimal
I feel like the hipster trend kind of peaked in the mid-2010’s, but I don’t frequent coffee shops enough to be sure.
Deus has explicitly stated he intends to overturn the status quo, not preserve it.
Hipsters are, in many ways, like Vals (Valley Girls). While some of the original strain persist, mutation has resulted in new species that have largely gone unremarked, because they deviate just enough from the expectation to avoid being targeted.
It should be closer to 22, not 2.
Hipsters are a blight upon the land. :)
are you saying you hated hipsters before it was cool?
Yes!