AutistoMephisto

Didn’t Jim Henson die a completely preventable death, too? He had strep throat that went untreated for several days and it caused organ failures from toxic shock syndrome.

Funny that they considered a game where you kill fascists as “fascist propaganda”. Like, without the propaganda, how do you know they’re fascists?

But the nation does need a robust transportation system for people and resources. Both people and things have places they need to go. What’s your solution? Unless you can build Star Trek-style matter-energy transporters, rail and road are your best options.

So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:

You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.

1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.

Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.

So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?

You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That’s a lot of survey responses. You’ll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.

Well, while Marx does call for a “winnowing of the State” after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.

The Internet started as this kinda long-haired hippy fella who thought it would be great if everyone could share knowledge and have conversations with everyone else regardless of where they are geographically. Then the corpos made him cut his hair, put on a suit and tie and get a damn job! And 25 years later, he’s a yuppie corpo slave. I want my hippy back!

Looks like we need him again.

Well, given what we know about most commercial plastics, which are all derived from oil/complex hydrocarbons, the consumed plastic could be broken down into condensed carbon? Or would it be carbon gases? I’m speculating based on just what I know about plastics, what they are and how they’re made.

Exactly. I feel like Andrew Yang gets a bad rep, but it’s not like he didn’t say stuff that everyone should know. I liked his idea of expanding the “American Scorecard” as he called it. Basically we currently use GDP, and stock prices to determine how well we’re doing as a country. That’s insane. Sure, the economy is up, but you know what else is up? Homelessness, unemployment, suicide, divorce, drug addiction, and many others. But we don’t include those metrics to grade our performance. Just once I’d like the President to do a PowerPoint at the State of the Union Address. With a bunch of slides and graphs and charts.

I’ve got a trebuchet in storage, but I need a crew to man it.

Like, the elites would panic in a survival situation. But I have real survival skills that would allow me to survive until rescue. Someone like Bezos or Musk would starve quickly, or eat something poisonous without knowing whether it was safe or not.

They seem to think that a Trump Presidency will force the DNC to revise their platform and instantly purge all liberals from the party. It’s a pipe dream.

This. The Pharisees were the 1% of their time and place. They had it all. Wealth, power, political clout. And only they were permitted to enter the Holy of Holies and lay eyes upon the Word of God. They prayed in public, gave public alms, claimed to be the most pious and righteous of all and preached a message about how they were the chosen ones and everyone else should serve them. Then, along comes this barefoot guy from across the Galilee who is believed to be born of a virgin, claiming to be the Son of God. They’re all waiting for him to place crowns upon their heads and cement their position as God’s Chosen. Then he goes and does the exact opposite. He preaches a message counter to their narrative, calls them out for their false piety, tells them God is pissed at them for their showy displays, and the masses are just eating it up. They couldn’t let that stand!

Could you imagine someone, anyone, doing that today? In the US, many politicians and celebrities claim to love and serve God. They make huge displays of their holiness, and pray in public, and give to the poor in full display, and spin this narrative of being more virtuous than everyone else. Then someone comes along with a counter message. That man/woman/person would be dead within a week!

Nail on the head. There are some who call themselves Democrats who would rather have 1000 Trumps for President than let someone who would shake up the status quo get their hands on the levers of power.

I mean, when a person suddenly falls, there’s really just no way to save them, is there?

Speaking in terms of angelic lore, more specifically, he was the first angel to gain free will. When God created Man, Angels were placed below Man on the hierarchy. And Lucifer, God’s most beautiful, most radiant Seraph, disagreed with this idea. He disagreed with this because God made Lucifer and all the other Angels first.

And I fully agree. But I’m not a CEO. I’m not a shareholder. I’m a worker. Am I paid fairly? Maybe. According to the market-based raise I got last year, I am. Our own CEO admitted that our wages don’t scale with CoL, though.

Even though the profit motive would be healthier people, and happier people, and numerous studies have shown happy, healthy people are far more productive in a orwellian people-as-product labor kind of way.

Yes but they have studies that say that KEEPING people happy and healthy is a huge cost center. Also, healthy happy people live longer, meaning that the labor pool will take longer to refresh. On the whole, it’s not entirely profitable to keep people healthy and happy, because any profit they generate from their labor is almost immediately offset by the costs involved in maintaining their health.

I got there from a point of, “at what point do we consider ourselves adults?” It’s kinda fucked that we say, “Yes, a kid fresh out of high school with hardly any actual life skills is perfectly competent to sign contracts, to understand the law and be held liable when they break it, date and possibly get married, enlist in military service, sign for loans, register to vote, and all this other good shit, but they’re not old enough to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco.” I mean, it’s settled science that at 18 years the brain is still developing, and doesn’t really stop developing until around 25. So, obviously I feel like that should be where we say adulthood should start.

I mean, if we’re not going to change it, then obviously we need to refocus public education in the US. Stop teaching kids to pass the standardized testing that state and federal government use to assign schools funding and focus more on teaching kids how to actually adult. How to make budgets, how to file taxes, how to read and comprehend contracts, etc.

I agree WRT things like voting. I believe if you’re old enough to be drafted or to voluntarily enlist you’re old enough to have a voice in government. But perhaps the draft age should be raised, if not outright abolished. The age to enlist should definitely be raised, as I feel exposing a kid, even one on the cusp of adulthood, to the horrors of war is abhorrent, doubly so if they are being conscripted.