Nope. The native population was replaced by white colonists, who wiped most of them out with guns and pathogens and aggressive expansion.

Wow, this thread really turned out great. What happened? lol

Well done, peeps!

Oh hell no.

We'll probably have blown each other to pieces long before it can ever happen properly.
We can hope that new processes revolutionising manufacture and food growing will make everything cheaper and more readily available for everyone but it's far more likely that (at first anyway) business will just keep prices high and pocket the difference, meaning people will lose jobs and no one but the big companies will actually profit.

But who knows, maybe humanity will surprise us all and actual manage something positive for once.

Do you feel companies shouldn't be allowed to use automation in order to replace human labor, or what? At least it is a negative thing that the companies should be ashamed of?

The problem I have with complaining about "companies automating jobs" is because normal people, you and me, do the very same every day. I buy gas from an unmanned gas station because it is cheaper. I buy digital GOG or HumbleBundle games because they are cheaper and more accessible than trying to buy all the same games in retail shops (where they would employ more people, including the staff in the store, the people delivering the games globally etc.). I wash my dishes and vacuum clean myself, heck I even buy a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner, or even a robot vacuum cleaner, who does that stuff for me effortlessly and cheaply.

I don't hire someone to clean my home and wash my dishes, or hire a cook to make me dinner every day, and I am pretty sure you don't either. You try to save money by trying to do stuff yourself, and automating them as much as you can. It seems to be in our human nature, trying to do chores effortlessly and cheaply.

Hence, while I of course feel it sucks I'd lose my job because either my employer transfers the job to India, or even automates it, I can't really blame them either as I do the same thing over and over again in my daily life.

I also feel the division to "working class" and "employers/ruling class" is vague, as almost anyone could be both. I could be an employer, by employing someone to be my personal cook and cleaning person at my home, but I don't do that because I want to save money. I don't think the head of Valve or Facebook were born as "ruling class" either, they just became rich after coming up with a service and company the launched off spectacularly. At the same time, many many others are trying the same but failing (e.g. I presume Twitter is still on red, and I was actually surprised to learn lately that Spotify is making constant loss as well; are the owners of these unprofitable companies "ruling class" too?).

EDIT: As for the profitable companies owing it to the society for making profit, don't most countries tax companies for operating in their area, especially when you have headquarters there?

Absolutely not and absolutely not. Automation can help us all. It can save us all. Automation can be one of the greatest achievements of mankind. However, it won't be if it's applied in a strictly capitalist system, in which it inevitably robs people of the few jobs that capitalism hasn't yet declared unsustainable long ago.

Ok I am unsure then what a capitalistic system is. Is Germany capitalistic, is Finland capitalistic? Or are there different levels of capitalisms, it is not just on or off?

I guess every country handles it their own way (e.g. how they tax the companies operating in their area, regardless of their level of automation. My main point was that I don't see any strict division to "working class" and "ruling class/employers"; in a way I just consider "employees" to just be people who offer their services to the "employers", for money. The "employer" decides where he wants to buy the services he needs, just like I as a consumer might decide whether I want to pay for the services that that same company wants to sell to me. Do I buy a game from GOG.com, Steam or HumbleBundle? Heyyy, HB offers the games the cheapest in bundles, maybe I should buy from them? But then I like the service better at GOG so maybe still pay a bit more for their better service...

And then I download my GOG games using a third-party robot tool called "gogrepo.py" which automatically downloads all my games in one swoop, instead of hiring ten Chinese workers to manually download all my GOG games for me.

Uh, congrats? Over in the wide world, tho, techbros are taking credit for taxpayer-funded research, reinventing buses and Soviet-style communal apartments, and glamorizing brain-eating amoebas.

The "problem" with robot workers is yet another social overhaul in which the majority gets boned. While clickbait "journalists" would like to portray it as something unprecedented so they can pull hot take thinkpieces out of their asses, this has been happening throughout history. The example most Westerners should be familiar with is the British textiles industry. Wool drove peasants off their lands to starve and die, cotton was powered by colonial slavery, and the Luddite uprisings happened because textile workers lost jobs to machines.

And throughout history, despite all the tech advancements, the only thing that resulted in gains for the working class (people working less and having more rights) was the Soviet Revolution. I don't mean the USSR itself - rather, the revolution scared the bougies shitless, which resulted in all sorts of socialist reforms such as progressive taxation in capitalist countries.

Being out of a formal job doesn't mean you're going to work less -- you're going to work more in the gray economy, have greater overhead and no security, rely on the commons to provide and disproportionately delete them to the point you'll no longer be able to. Already, there are traffic jams caused by Uber drivers out in the streets waiting for orders, meaning, a single driver has to spend more time working, burn more fuel, make fewer trips and earn less. More civilized states are going to redistribute resources from the relatively privileged formally employed to gray workers, leaving both just enough to survive. Meanwhile, techbros will be skimming the cream as all the gains go to onepercenters. Apple isn't huge because they made an innovative product, Apple is huge because they claimed taxpayer-funded research for themselves, dodged taxes, bribed their way into public schools and rely on third-world slavery and first-world social security to make the phones affordable.

TL;DR when the fucking New York Times is publishing monarchist screeds, [url=https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_AK1dUWAAAfOq_.png:large]there's only one solution[/url].

No disagreement there, Starmaker, none at all. I can hardly control myself adding heavily to that list. And I even believe that those 'techbros' are indeed living what is commonly known as the American Dream.

It's not even a graded straight line from not to absolute. It's a three dimensional spectrum that has more than two extremes, and the terms we often use to denote an opposite end have not yet found a sensible real life example that wasn't in truth more weakly rebranded fascist capitalism. Like the nazis calling themselves "socialist" or North Korea calling itself a "people's republic".

Oh I see. All's well if the economy makes the rules for itself. Capitalists make capitalism great again. Let's make all junkies pharmacists. Nothing can go wrong here, can it. So Shadowrun turns out to be a utopian vision of the future instead of a dystopian after all, we can imagine.

Also, I find the misapplication of the term "fascism" hilarious here. Reminder, the nazi regime was drop dead capitalist through and through. Corporations made the really big bucks, Hitler was well dependent on them. And not just German based companies. Krupp, Daimler, Hugo Boss, Kodak, Bayer, Volkswagen, Siemens, Coca-Cola Corp., Ford, IBM, Puma, Adidas, BMW, what have you.

I may not agree with Richlind on the mechanics that make fascist ideology rise and fall. I may not agree with him on the idea that the Nazi regime was "created" by the financial elite. I may not agree that all wars are orchestrated by rich fucks. But I do agree that mere greed, mere capitalist greed, has caused more wars and human suffering than we generally care to admit. Ending human suffering, hence, implies ending unfettered capitalism.

What people refer to as "capitalism" is crony capitalism, which is just elitism pretending to be something legit. Capitalism would work pretty well were it not for elitism, but because it's essentially an honor system, and elitism is inherently corrupt, we end up in an economic jungle where millions upon millions are left to rot in wretched misery. Socialism could also work well were it not for corruption, but if corruption is properly dealt with then ideology becomes irrelevant, as the ignorance associated with corruption would dissipate and people would be able to find their way without being told what to do.

As I said to Starmaker, it isn't ideology that's the problem, it's corruption, and the only socio-economic system that *might* withstand it's corrosive destructiveness is a dictatorship -- but good luck finding a benevolent dictator, and then another, and another, etc., etc., etc.

And again, it's important to distinguish capitalism from crony capitalism, which is really just elitism. Elitism is the real problem, and always has been.

Yes. But it self-corrects with wars that level the playing field, and frankly I don't think we can avoid a big one.

We've got growing inequality and desperation in multiple socioeconomic strata across most of the Western world, which is part of what's inspiring the retreat into fascism and militarized nationalism.

We've got the US pulling back from the global stage, which has it's good points but also means the Pax Americana is going away as well and there's an international power vacuum.

We've got China with a demographic imbalance and culture pushing it towards aggressive expansion making threatening moves at its neighbors, and then there's North Korea who may pull China into a conflict whether anyone else wants it or not.

We've got natural and man-made disasters destabilizing the center of Eurasia and Indonesia, causing refugee crises and instability across that continent and creating a class of angry, disenfranchised people.

We've got India, which, well, that country's just a mess and that's going to resolve somehow but probably not soon enough to stop a power vacuum from happening.

Then we've got Africa, that pretty much everyone except the Chinese ignore, leading to the Chinese having a stealth takeover well underway in that continent. No one's really considering what Africa might do if the ecological pressures get worse there, but it won't be pretty.


At this point, the only question in my mind is whether the increasingly disastrous natural disasters get us before a major war does.

Vaina, your conception of capitalism as exploitation is what is a misapplication, although you are clearly following on Marxist footsteps with that.

I am not surprised that you prefer to laugh instead of facing the fact that control of industry and commerce is a major tenet of fascist systems. Heck, in economic terms it is THE tenet. Being anti-liberal they have that in common with communist systems, just like both are inherently totalitarian due to their collectivist social focus.

I do hope that with the increased time that passes from WW2 and the cold war, the easier it becomes to see clearly what a brilliant soviet propaganda achievement it was to conflate capitalism with fascism.


Now to offer some provocation, I estimate that we are 10 years away from some historically ignorant marxist re-inventing "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".

PS: while digging through wikiquotes to remind myself of the verbatim original, found this one which is a doozy... "We are fighting to impose a higher social justice. The others are fighting to maintain the privileges of caste and class. We are proletarian nations that rise up against the plutocrats."
Or
"When the war is over, in the world's social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth's riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers. The Fascist revolution will make another decisive step to shorten social distances."

Oh, the cognitive dissonance...

Watch this:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5129818/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Wow, that was absurdly optimistic. What indication do you see that wage-to-cost-of-living is going down when taken into account for inflation? The last decades wages have stagnated while rent, mortgages, insurance and healthcare has increased moderately to severely. I suppose that might happen in many decades or a century or two but not realistic to happen for humans who are currently alive.

Indeed. While I don't think bitcoin or any current cryptocurrency will be able to make too much difference, it's a bet in the right direction but it will take time. Decentralised banking could be an interesting experiment.

At the same time, there's a problem with this progress:

As simpler jobs disappear, more education is needed (the masses can't become self-made entreprenurs realistically) and as we can see excluding a few socialist countries such as in Scandinavia post-high school education has become more expensive over time not to mention inflated value, soon you will need at least 2 bachelors in different subjects or perhaps at least 1 master / ph.D and a bachelor in something else to complement it. There will likely always be minimum wage type works which is the ones everyone hates and frankly should be the focus to automate away. With globalization this is going to be one hell of a competitive environment in terms of expected performance. I don't think this is good for mental health at all. The phase we are currently in before any type of idyllic universal basic income can happen is going to suck in my opinion unless you are born wealthy, connected or have a skill in demand way above average.

Exactly this. The faster we get rid of this new gig / grey economy, the better but I doubt it.

Ironically, viewing capitalism as exploitation is one of the only things Vaina gets right. It's totally about exploitation, it's just that people view exploitation in a bit of a strange way. There's a quote, I can't tell you the source but you can look it up if interested - "The only thing worse than being exploited by a capitalist, is not being exploited by a capitalist".

Capitalism at its core, despite all the monstrous responsibilities placed on it by people here, is just about who gets to own things. If you're socialist then you believe the state should own some/most/all of the productive assets, if you're a capitalist then you believe it should be the person/people with the "capital". Both have their place, neither are these bogeymen that people make out.

Lets take a situation where there's a mine (unworked), and a load of people without jobs. A capitalist comes along and says hey, if I buy that mine, give those people shitty jobs choking their guts out on fumes, I can make a profit selling the ore. The capitalist exploits the conditions to turn a profit, but in their wake there are a load of goods mined, a load of people with jobs (shitty ones, yes, but better than starving), and a capitalist with a bit more coin. It's how capitalism works, exploit an imbalance, gain arbitrage from a situation. It's all about exploiting, but those unemployed people desperate for work, prefered being exploited by that capitalist to when they weren't exploited at all.

Sure, "the people" could work the mine themselves, but they didn't. The capitalist made it happen, and that's why it has worked for us all these years. That's why I can sit at a desk typing into a computer, check my mail on my mobile phone, and enjoy electric lighting and central heating - because I am exploited. It's easy to turn those words around, call me a sheep, a mindless drone, a pawn of the system, but all I'm seeing here (not from you Brasas) are people that don't even know what capitalism is, I see them as the mindless herd regurgitating the rhetoric they had fed to them.