I agree, I have no idea what's supposed to be fun about these games either. I think they're idiotic. Then again, I think most spectator sports are a complete waste of time and not interesting at all (esp. baseball!).
Even so, suppose instead of sports games, their forte was dungeon games like I used to enjoy when I was younger and had a lot more time for such things (DnD, Ultima, etc.). No one needs to play dungeon games, even if I really like them personally, and if their only advantage over some other companys' competing dungeon games is that theirs are (let's say, I'm trying to come up with some supposed hypothetical advantage here) official Ultima spin-offs, or official TSR-endorsed games, or whatever, I'd still be a complete idiot to buy their games given the horrible reputation EA has earned over the past 10+ years for both the quality of their games and the way they treat customers.
So what? No one needs to play a football game, much less one with particular real-life teams hardcoded in rather than fictional teams.
If people think they absolutely need such a game that much, then they're a fool and they deserve to be separated from their money. I have zero sympathy.
Of course they care about profits, it's all they care about. However, they're not too worried about that when suckers keep buying their crap, regardless of how shitty it is. The vgcats comic is right: if you don't like the game, why did you buy it? Yes, it's hard to try games before you buy them, but MS and EA have long reputations for shittiness, so at this point if you buy anything from them, you deserve whatever you get. It's not like you're taking a chance on some new indie game studio's product; I've been reading stories about how awful EA is for well over a decade now.
Well I suppose this probably is splitting hairs, but my point was that Marx said that the period of violent revolution, and the whole transitional phase, was not actually "communism", but that "communism" was the end state (which has never been achieved). Basically, the Stalinist states got to that horrible transitional phase, and got stuck there. But you do have a good point with your last paragraph.
Again, you're thinking inside the box. You're thinking that Hawaii is a much better deal than Detroit, always. I'm saying technology can change the balance.
No, it can't. Technology can't change the climate so that it's balmy and warm all year round in Detroit. At least not without Kardishev Type II civilization-level technology (Dyson spheres), or perhaps The Matrix (which isn't physical reality at all). We're not talking about that, we're talking about, at best, Star Trek-level technology (Star Trek depicts a Type I civilization). Even Star Trek, with warp drives and phasers and replicators and transporters, does not show technology capable of turning the whole planet into Hawaii. In fact, Star Trek has many, many episodes showing human settlers on colony planets, because apparently there's too many people for the planets they have, and they don't have the technology to build Dyson spheres, so they send ships full of colonists out to empty planets to settle them. They even invented the Genesis Device to try to make more usable planets for colonization, but even that was limited in its capabilities (it could basically take an existing planet or collection of matter and turn it into an Earth-like planet, complete with different biomes, some probably really nice like Fiji and Hawaii, and others kinda shitty like Antarctica, Saudi Arabia, and North Dakota). And honestly, the Genesis Device really stretched suspension of disbelief even for Star Trek physics; the amount of energy needed to pull of such a feat would be enormous, and they didn't show how this device supposedly got enough energy to do such a thing, especially since it was only the size of a photon torpedo, and even those don't have that much energy in them.
Or he could just be Patrick Stewart (who did in fact dated the then-20 something Lisa Dillon for a time)
There's always a few women attracted to older men, but Patrick Stewart was a famous (and presumably rich) actor, and also unusually attractive for a bald man (or even any man for that matter). If he wasn't so attractive, and neither rich nor famous, and his goal was to bang young chicks, he wouldn't have had much success at that, unless he settled for some very unattractive ones. Lack of money isn't going to change this. Genetic engineering and various medical treatments could though. I only brought this up because of your quote about people in the 24th century supposedly not caring about baldness, which I think is bullshit. Lack of scarcity of most resources would change many things, but certain facets of human nature will never change unless we change ourselves so that we're no longer human. Lack of scarcity isn't going to make us all not care about physical beauty, or not be attracted or unattracted to other people based on physical appearance.
There's only so much arable land available for producing food. We've gotten a lot more efficient at growing food, but part of that is because of the use of petroleum-based fertilizers. Petroleum is a non-renewable and dwindling resource (and not exactly ecological either). We haven't quite gotten to the point where we've really run out of good land for growing, but it's coming. It doesn't help that the places that are good for growing food also happen to be favored for living in; farmland is constantly being turned into subdivisions in this country. There's tons of open land here in the US where people could live, such as North Dakota, but no one wants to live there (gee, wonder why), and those places are also terrible for growing food because they're not arable land (too cold, not enough water, etc.).
Building roads in Africa isn't going to help people feed themselves; the warlords and gangs will fight over the roads, bomb them, etc. The various powers there do not want people to feed themselves, because then they won't have power over those people. It's entirely a political problem there.
Yes, Vegas and Phoenix are very wasteful with drinking water. However, they (and LA) get their water from the Colorado River, and it's running dry. They also get water from aquifers, which also are running dry. Pretty soon, they're going to hit a shortage, and it's going to be ugly. The shortage of water in the Colorado River has already decimated farmland in Mexico, causing a large portion of the illegal immigration from that country into the US: those people can't work as farmers in northern Mexico any more because there's no water left for irrigation, so they come here looking for work. There's only so much freshwater available, and places like Saudi Arabia have to use desalination to make enough for their people. Desalination requires a ridiculous amount of energy.
Fission reactors can't generate enough power for everyone: where do you dump the waste heat? Fission reactors work by generating heat from fission, and then exploiting the difference in temperature between that and a nearby heatsink to drive steam turbines. That heatsink is usually a river. Rivers only have so much heat capacity before you screw up the local ecosystem or worse. There's been many cases of nuclear reactors (I remember some in Tennessee) having to shut down during peak times in the summer months (when everyone has their A/C on), because the river got too hot. Any power generation technology that relies on heat cycles (this includes fusion) will have this same problem. The only technology that doesn't is photovoltaic power. Of course, this doesn't work that well during the night, but if we can invent better energy-storage technologies that'll be solved. There's plenty of roofspace and parking lot area that can be covered with PV panels, even in the rich countries that don't have as much sunlight; the only problem is that PV is currently expensive compared to fossil fuels. But if we need more power than that, the real answer is orbital solar power collectors.
I completely disagree. You might be able to dress up an apartment in Detroit to be fairly nice inside, but it's still going to be surrounded by thugs, and even if you can fix that, it's still going to be located in a place where the climate just isn't that great. If I want to live in a place where I can wear short sleeves year-round and listen to waves on a beach when I'm at home (and not with a recording, but being able to see them out my window), Detroit isn't going to cut it, I'm going to want to live in Hawaii, or Fiji, or someplace like that. If I'm stuck with an apartment in Detroit, while someone else gets a beach house in Hawaii under this supposedly "equal" system, I'm going to be pissed, and I'm going to cause a lot of problems because someone's getting a much better deal than me. Maybe some people would actually prefer the apartment in Detroit for whatever reason, but surely a lot more people will want the Hawaiian beach house, creating higher demand for that property.
As for baldness, I think that's BS too. Since genetic engineering is illegal in the Federation (except for the 2nd season TNG episode where it wasn't), people will still be the same as they are now, which means that some people will be more attractive than others because of genetics. People will want to make up for that, and bald people will surely want to fix this deficiency, just as they do now, to make themselves more attractive, more youthful, etc. (Obviously, this assumes a society where youthful looks are valued; this isn't true for all human societies in history, but I see no reason to believe that people in the 24th century are going to resemble tribal societies where old age is revered more; it's possible, but it would have nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with the fact that societies evolve cultures over time that have various values for various reasons, besides only technology.) If Picard wants to bang chicks in their early 20s, for instance, he's going to want to make himself look younger so he can be more attractive to women in that demographic. Lack of scarcity isn't going to change that, and make 22-year-old women want to jump in bed with 40-60-year old balding men.
What you describe isn't true communism, it's the state supposedly required to get to communism. If you knew the first thing about Marx's writings you'd know this. No one's ever achieved communism, according to Marx, only totalitarian authoritarian socialist states.
Because there will always be scarcity, unless we all become part of The Matrix. While manufactured goods can become free in a society with free energy, some items will have sentimental value. If I like woodworking, for instance, and instead of just asking my replicator to make me a nice wooden table, I have it make me an old-fashioned hand plane and hand saw and other tools, and use those to make my own (imperfect) table, that table will have sentimental value to me that can't be replaced (or, if I give it to my wife, it'll have perhaps even more sentimental value to her). When you kid draws you a crappy painting in art class and you hang it on your refrigerator, that painting has no value to anyone else, but it has immense sentimental value to you (or so I've heard from people with kids). People will always want to own such things. Even on Star Trek, the characters all had treasured possessions in their quarters that they kept for sentimental reasons, even though the possessions didn't have any real value to others; even Data had a (weird little cylindrical) case of his treasured items (including service medals) in the episode where they put him on trial and Riker took his arm off. Picard had his little flute from the episode where he lived a lifetime on some long-since destroyed planet. Picard would have been pissed if some asshole decided to steal his flute, even if it's technically possible to replicate. He wouldn't care about someone taking his boots or comm badge, since those can be easily replaced by the replicator, but he doesn't want a copy of his flute, he wants the real thing.
As for a permanent abode, it comes down to two things: sentimentality and the work necessary to set it up. People fill their abodes with things they treasure, like handmade items, their kids' crappy drawings, etc. They also set them up in a way that pleases them: painting the walls colors they like, arranging the furniture the way they like, putting in countertops they like, etc. You can't just walk into another place and set things up like that in a few minutes, and who the hell wants to move from banal, boring, ugly apartment to apartment, decorated by someone else or worse designed to offend as few people as possible? Maybe eventually technology will get to the point where you can walk into a place and it's instantly transformed according to your preferences, but then we're back to technology that's near the level of that needed to build Dyson spheres, or living in The Matrix, which is so far advanced beyond what we have it's almost pointless to think about. Even Star Trek with its replicators does not show a society with that level of technological capability: the Enterprise did not have the ability to instantly set peoples' quarters up according to their preferences, so they all had the same boring furniture and paint schemes, unless they had taken the time to change them (like Worf's quarters).
You mean tricoders, clothes, etc? We're talking about a post-scarcity society: you just go up to your replicator and tell it to make you those things. If there's infinite supply, there's really no reason for those things to not be free for all. Money exists because there's scarcity, causing things to have value, and we use money as an analogue for that value (because it's a lot more convenient than the barter system). Without scarcity, there's no reason for money, and conversely, to have a society without money, you have to eliminate scarcity. I'm just pointing out that while, while in such a society things like food, water, clothes, gadgets, etc. can all be free for the taking (which doesn't mean you get to take someone else's, just that you can have your own made for you for free), real estate will not be non-scarce for the foreseeable future (not until we can build Dyson spheres), and people always want to live in nice places, which is why beachfront and penthouse property costs so much more than treeless plots of barren, infertile land in the desert or North Dakota.
Why wouldn't you own property? Or otherwise temporarily live in property?
You have to live somewhere. People require dwellings; it's part of being human. People like to live in nice places (like Hawaiian beaches), not in shitty places (like Detroit). There's only so many nice places to go around, and you can't just use a 3D printer to fabricate new ones (we're not at Ringworld/Dyson sphere technology yet), so there's going to be some kind of competition for those places. That's inherently unequal.
Actually, it could work, if you had some overseer who was good at judging peoples' actual abilities, and then assigning them jobs, and judging peoples' needs, and assigning them resources, and then setting up an enforcement apparatus so that people who refuse to work are punished or otherwise motivated to do the work they're assigned. The problem, of course, comes back to human nature: every time someone tries setting up a governmental system with that much power (the proper term is totalitarianism), it's a disaster because the people granted that much power become corrupt or incompetent. Plus, even if corruption weren't such a problem, the whole thing (a central planned economy) is just so ridiculously inefficient that it doesn't work. If you have a government looking at every citizen's life with intense scrutiny, that requires having a huge number of government agents, who of course have to be scrutinized themselves.
That's not fast enough when your wife wants something right now.
However, I really should be grateful to Best Buy: their incompetent handling of my case and their horrible return policies cured my wife of that forever, it seems. I got her a new (actually refurbished) laptop last year to replace the one we got on Newegg years ago in that incident, and she was perfectly content to let me order something online and wait for normal shipping (and after that, to wait even longer for me to install Linux Mint on it because WinXP had caused her so much grief before and Linux worked fine for her on the old laptop after I switched her to it).
That's too bad; I haven't had to order anything from them in quite a while, so I was just going on my past experiences which were all good.
The other responder's suggestion of Directron was good; I just checked them out and while their site kinda sucks (it's slow, apparently it's a Yahoo store), they do seem to have a really good selection and prices.
I never said communism was evil, just that it was completely infeasible. I don't think I've ever met anyone who thought the basic idea was "evil" (quite the contrary in fact), just that it doesn't work in the real world because of human nature.
You're right, with enough cheap energy you can do everything else artificially. However, earth-based farms still consume valuable real estate, and I question the idea of putting farms underground: there's only so much area available underground (with mines and such), and it seems like it'd be cheaper and easier, once we have the technology, to just build massive space-station farms than to dig enough tunnels (and worry about them collapsing) to grow food. Of course, by that time, we'll probably come up with some artificial way of synthesizing food rather than growing it.
I've seen the same thing in MS stores in Scottsdale AZ and northern NJ. It utterly befuddles me why anyone would bother walking into an MS store unless they just want to laugh at it, but they do.
With Best Buy's high prices on larger items, and astronomical prices on accessories, having to pay sales tax on Amazon and Newegg purchases isn't going to drive people back to BB.
I don't know what's with these comments about MS stores being empty. While I wish it were true, every time I walked past the giant MS store in the Scottsdale mall in Arizona, it had quite a lot of people in it, plus people playing on the Kinect system in front of it. And when Surface was being released, there was a long line of hipsters standing outside waiting to buy one.
Maybe Arizonans are just idiots.... but then again, now I live in northern NJ and the MS store near here isn't exactly empty either.
I once paid nearly twenty dollars for a Sansa data cable (Don't ask. My wife was involved.)
I think wives are a big reason Best Buy is still around.
My wife wanted a laptop several years ago; I wanted to get one off the internet, but she didn't want to wait for shipping. So off to Best Buy we went, even though I hated that store. We got a demo unit that worked fine in the store, but a day or two after we got it home, the monitor started acting flaky. So we brought it back, and they refused to take it as a defective return (because when they looked at it, it was working fine), but only as a return/refund. But because it had some software I had installed on it, they wanted to charge some ridiculous fee for Geek Squad to uninstall the software so they could resell it (seriously: instead of wiping and reinstalling, they were going to just resell the machine as-is. I could have installed keyloggers or other malware for the next customer to be victimized by). So I had to stand there and uninstall it myself to avoid this fee. Then, while I was in the middle of this process, the monitor finally gave out completely; when they saw that, they went ahead and refunded our money on the spot, but the experience was an ordeal.
After that, my wife swore off ever buying from Best Buy again, and let me buy a laptop from Newegg.
It's not a horrible idea: if a large portion of the population leads idle lives, some fraction of those will do something with their time that turns out to be useful, such as creating art or music (things which right now don't usually pay well so not that many people take the risk of dedicating time to these pursuits because they're busy working normal jobs to support themselves and their families), or inventing something new.
The main problem with the whole idea is that resources are scarce, and likely will be for quite some time: freshwater, food, and energy are all in scarce supply. Eventually, maybe we'll be able to build giant orbital ships which grow food using solar energy or something, but for now and the foreseeable future those are going to be big, and growing, problems.
Well Star Trek must not have been one of these utopian societies because they had plenty of shit jobs, one big one being working on a security detail (with a red shirt).
Even then, there'd still be a need for money and wealth, because nothing can ever be really equal. My favorite example of something where you can never have equality for everyone is real estate. I for instance want a luxurious house on the coast of Hawaii. I'm sure lots of other people want a house in such a location too, judging by the property prices on the Hawaiian coast. There's simply no way 8 billion people can each have their own luxurious house on the Hawaiian coast: it isn't that large. (I also want my luxurious house to be surrounded by rain forest, not a bunch of high-rise condos.) Even if you take into account the fact that not everyone wants to live in exactly the same place (some people like mountain properties, some people want to live in Manhattan, some people want to live in the French Riviera, etc.), there's only so much property to go around, and a lot more people than the amount of really prime locations. How many people would really live in Fargo if they had the choice to live anywhere in the world they wanted?
So who gets the nice properties? Now we're right back to some kind of class structure, where people in the upper classes get the nice properties and the people in the lower classes get the less-desirable properties.
The only way this idea works is if you abandon all physical reality, and move everyone into The Matrix (or perhaps the Nexus thing in ST: Generations), where they can create whatever reality they choose.
Except now you've replaced economic disparity with a different kind of disparity, where instead of people having differing amounts of money, they have differing amounts of power: the patricians at the top and the plebeians at the bottom. That's not much of an improvement.
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I agree, I have no idea what's supposed to be fun about these games either. I think they're idiotic. Then again, I think most spectator sports are a complete waste of time and not interesting at all (esp. baseball!).
Even so, suppose instead of sports games, their forte was dungeon games like I used to enjoy when I was younger and had a lot more time for such things (DnD, Ultima, etc.). No one needs to play dungeon games, even if I really like them personally, and if their only advantage over some other companys' competing dungeon games is that theirs are (let's say, I'm trying to come up with some supposed hypothetical advantage here) official Ultima spin-offs, or official TSR-endorsed games, or whatever, I'd still be a complete idiot to buy their games given the horrible reputation EA has earned over the past 10+ years for both the quality of their games and the way they treat customers.
So what? No one needs to play a football game, much less one with particular real-life teams hardcoded in rather than fictional teams.
If people think they absolutely need such a game that much, then they're a fool and they deserve to be separated from their money. I have zero sympathy.
Of course they care about profits, it's all they care about. However, they're not too worried about that when suckers keep buying their crap, regardless of how shitty it is. The vgcats comic is right: if you don't like the game, why did you buy it? Yes, it's hard to try games before you buy them, but MS and EA have long reputations for shittiness, so at this point if you buy anything from them, you deserve whatever you get. It's not like you're taking a chance on some new indie game studio's product; I've been reading stories about how awful EA is for well over a decade now.
Well I suppose this probably is splitting hairs, but my point was that Marx said that the period of violent revolution, and the whole transitional phase, was not actually "communism", but that "communism" was the end state (which has never been achieved). Basically, the Stalinist states got to that horrible transitional phase, and got stuck there. But you do have a good point with your last paragraph.
Again, you're thinking inside the box. You're thinking that Hawaii is a much better deal than Detroit, always. I'm saying technology can change the balance.
No, it can't. Technology can't change the climate so that it's balmy and warm all year round in Detroit. At least not without Kardishev Type II civilization-level technology (Dyson spheres), or perhaps The Matrix (which isn't physical reality at all). We're not talking about that, we're talking about, at best, Star Trek-level technology (Star Trek depicts a Type I civilization). Even Star Trek, with warp drives and phasers and replicators and transporters, does not show technology capable of turning the whole planet into Hawaii. In fact, Star Trek has many, many episodes showing human settlers on colony planets, because apparently there's too many people for the planets they have, and they don't have the technology to build Dyson spheres, so they send ships full of colonists out to empty planets to settle them. They even invented the Genesis Device to try to make more usable planets for colonization, but even that was limited in its capabilities (it could basically take an existing planet or collection of matter and turn it into an Earth-like planet, complete with different biomes, some probably really nice like Fiji and Hawaii, and others kinda shitty like Antarctica, Saudi Arabia, and North Dakota). And honestly, the Genesis Device really stretched suspension of disbelief even for Star Trek physics; the amount of energy needed to pull of such a feat would be enormous, and they didn't show how this device supposedly got enough energy to do such a thing, especially since it was only the size of a photon torpedo, and even those don't have that much energy in them.
Or he could just be Patrick Stewart (who did in fact dated the then-20 something Lisa Dillon for a time)
There's always a few women attracted to older men, but Patrick Stewart was a famous (and presumably rich) actor, and also unusually attractive for a bald man (or even any man for that matter). If he wasn't so attractive, and neither rich nor famous, and his goal was to bang young chicks, he wouldn't have had much success at that, unless he settled for some very unattractive ones. Lack of money isn't going to change this. Genetic engineering and various medical treatments could though. I only brought this up because of your quote about people in the 24th century supposedly not caring about baldness, which I think is bullshit. Lack of scarcity of most resources would change many things, but certain facets of human nature will never change unless we change ourselves so that we're no longer human. Lack of scarcity isn't going to make us all not care about physical beauty, or not be attracted or unattracted to other people based on physical appearance.
All wrong.
There's only so much arable land available for producing food. We've gotten a lot more efficient at growing food, but part of that is because of the use of petroleum-based fertilizers. Petroleum is a non-renewable and dwindling resource (and not exactly ecological either). We haven't quite gotten to the point where we've really run out of good land for growing, but it's coming. It doesn't help that the places that are good for growing food also happen to be favored for living in; farmland is constantly being turned into subdivisions in this country. There's tons of open land here in the US where people could live, such as North Dakota, but no one wants to live there (gee, wonder why), and those places are also terrible for growing food because they're not arable land (too cold, not enough water, etc.).
Building roads in Africa isn't going to help people feed themselves; the warlords and gangs will fight over the roads, bomb them, etc. The various powers there do not want people to feed themselves, because then they won't have power over those people. It's entirely a political problem there.
Yes, Vegas and Phoenix are very wasteful with drinking water. However, they (and LA) get their water from the Colorado River, and it's running dry. They also get water from aquifers, which also are running dry. Pretty soon, they're going to hit a shortage, and it's going to be ugly. The shortage of water in the Colorado River has already decimated farmland in Mexico, causing a large portion of the illegal immigration from that country into the US: those people can't work as farmers in northern Mexico any more because there's no water left for irrigation, so they come here looking for work. There's only so much freshwater available, and places like Saudi Arabia have to use desalination to make enough for their people. Desalination requires a ridiculous amount of energy.
Fission reactors can't generate enough power for everyone: where do you dump the waste heat? Fission reactors work by generating heat from fission, and then exploiting the difference in temperature between that and a nearby heatsink to drive steam turbines. That heatsink is usually a river. Rivers only have so much heat capacity before you screw up the local ecosystem or worse. There's been many cases of nuclear reactors (I remember some in Tennessee) having to shut down during peak times in the summer months (when everyone has their A/C on), because the river got too hot. Any power generation technology that relies on heat cycles (this includes fusion) will have this same problem. The only technology that doesn't is photovoltaic power. Of course, this doesn't work that well during the night, but if we can invent better energy-storage technologies that'll be solved. There's plenty of roofspace and parking lot area that can be covered with PV panels, even in the rich countries that don't have as much sunlight; the only problem is that PV is currently expensive compared to fossil fuels. But if we need more power than that, the real answer is orbital solar power collectors.
I completely disagree. You might be able to dress up an apartment in Detroit to be fairly nice inside, but it's still going to be surrounded by thugs, and even if you can fix that, it's still going to be located in a place where the climate just isn't that great. If I want to live in a place where I can wear short sleeves year-round and listen to waves on a beach when I'm at home (and not with a recording, but being able to see them out my window), Detroit isn't going to cut it, I'm going to want to live in Hawaii, or Fiji, or someplace like that. If I'm stuck with an apartment in Detroit, while someone else gets a beach house in Hawaii under this supposedly "equal" system, I'm going to be pissed, and I'm going to cause a lot of problems because someone's getting a much better deal than me. Maybe some people would actually prefer the apartment in Detroit for whatever reason, but surely a lot more people will want the Hawaiian beach house, creating higher demand for that property.
As for baldness, I think that's BS too. Since genetic engineering is illegal in the Federation (except for the 2nd season TNG episode where it wasn't), people will still be the same as they are now, which means that some people will be more attractive than others because of genetics. People will want to make up for that, and bald people will surely want to fix this deficiency, just as they do now, to make themselves more attractive, more youthful, etc. (Obviously, this assumes a society where youthful looks are valued; this isn't true for all human societies in history, but I see no reason to believe that people in the 24th century are going to resemble tribal societies where old age is revered more; it's possible, but it would have nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with the fact that societies evolve cultures over time that have various values for various reasons, besides only technology.) If Picard wants to bang chicks in their early 20s, for instance, he's going to want to make himself look younger so he can be more attractive to women in that demographic. Lack of scarcity isn't going to change that, and make 22-year-old women want to jump in bed with 40-60-year old balding men.
What you describe isn't true communism, it's the state supposedly required to get to communism. If you knew the first thing about Marx's writings you'd know this. No one's ever achieved communism, according to Marx, only totalitarian authoritarian socialist states.
Because there will always be scarcity, unless we all become part of The Matrix. While manufactured goods can become free in a society with free energy, some items will have sentimental value. If I like woodworking, for instance, and instead of just asking my replicator to make me a nice wooden table, I have it make me an old-fashioned hand plane and hand saw and other tools, and use those to make my own (imperfect) table, that table will have sentimental value to me that can't be replaced (or, if I give it to my wife, it'll have perhaps even more sentimental value to her). When you kid draws you a crappy painting in art class and you hang it on your refrigerator, that painting has no value to anyone else, but it has immense sentimental value to you (or so I've heard from people with kids). People will always want to own such things. Even on Star Trek, the characters all had treasured possessions in their quarters that they kept for sentimental reasons, even though the possessions didn't have any real value to others; even Data had a (weird little cylindrical) case of his treasured items (including service medals) in the episode where they put him on trial and Riker took his arm off. Picard had his little flute from the episode where he lived a lifetime on some long-since destroyed planet. Picard would have been pissed if some asshole decided to steal his flute, even if it's technically possible to replicate. He wouldn't care about someone taking his boots or comm badge, since those can be easily replaced by the replicator, but he doesn't want a copy of his flute, he wants the real thing.
As for a permanent abode, it comes down to two things: sentimentality and the work necessary to set it up. People fill their abodes with things they treasure, like handmade items, their kids' crappy drawings, etc. They also set them up in a way that pleases them: painting the walls colors they like, arranging the furniture the way they like, putting in countertops they like, etc. You can't just walk into another place and set things up like that in a few minutes, and who the hell wants to move from banal, boring, ugly apartment to apartment, decorated by someone else or worse designed to offend as few people as possible? Maybe eventually technology will get to the point where you can walk into a place and it's instantly transformed according to your preferences, but then we're back to technology that's near the level of that needed to build Dyson spheres, or living in The Matrix, which is so far advanced beyond what we have it's almost pointless to think about. Even Star Trek with its replicators does not show a society with that level of technological capability: the Enterprise did not have the ability to instantly set peoples' quarters up according to their preferences, so they all had the same boring furniture and paint schemes, unless they had taken the time to change them (like Worf's quarters).
You mean tricoders, clothes, etc? We're talking about a post-scarcity society: you just go up to your replicator and tell it to make you those things. If there's infinite supply, there's really no reason for those things to not be free for all. Money exists because there's scarcity, causing things to have value, and we use money as an analogue for that value (because it's a lot more convenient than the barter system). Without scarcity, there's no reason for money, and conversely, to have a society without money, you have to eliminate scarcity. I'm just pointing out that while, while in such a society things like food, water, clothes, gadgets, etc. can all be free for the taking (which doesn't mean you get to take someone else's, just that you can have your own made for you for free), real estate will not be non-scarce for the foreseeable future (not until we can build Dyson spheres), and people always want to live in nice places, which is why beachfront and penthouse property costs so much more than treeless plots of barren, infertile land in the desert or North Dakota.
Why wouldn't you own property? Or otherwise temporarily live in property?
You have to live somewhere. People require dwellings; it's part of being human. People like to live in nice places (like Hawaiian beaches), not in shitty places (like Detroit). There's only so many nice places to go around, and you can't just use a 3D printer to fabricate new ones (we're not at Ringworld/Dyson sphere technology yet), so there's going to be some kind of competition for those places. That's inherently unequal.
Actually, it could work, if you had some overseer who was good at judging peoples' actual abilities, and then assigning them jobs, and judging peoples' needs, and assigning them resources, and then setting up an enforcement apparatus so that people who refuse to work are punished or otherwise motivated to do the work they're assigned. The problem, of course, comes back to human nature: every time someone tries setting up a governmental system with that much power (the proper term is totalitarianism), it's a disaster because the people granted that much power become corrupt or incompetent. Plus, even if corruption weren't such a problem, the whole thing (a central planned economy) is just so ridiculously inefficient that it doesn't work. If you have a government looking at every citizen's life with intense scrutiny, that requires having a huge number of government agents, who of course have to be scrutinized themselves.
Had you not heard of overnight shipping?
That's not fast enough when your wife wants something right now.
However, I really should be grateful to Best Buy: their incompetent handling of my case and their horrible return policies cured my wife of that forever, it seems. I got her a new (actually refurbished) laptop last year to replace the one we got on Newegg years ago in that incident, and she was perfectly content to let me order something online and wait for normal shipping (and after that, to wait even longer for me to install Linux Mint on it because WinXP had caused her so much grief before and Linux worked fine for her on the old laptop after I switched her to it).
That's too bad; I haven't had to order anything from them in quite a while, so I was just going on my past experiences which were all good.
The other responder's suggestion of Directron was good; I just checked them out and while their site kinda sucks (it's slow, apparently it's a Yahoo store), they do seem to have a really good selection and prices.
I never said communism was evil, just that it was completely infeasible. I don't think I've ever met anyone who thought the basic idea was "evil" (quite the contrary in fact), just that it doesn't work in the real world because of human nature.
You're right, with enough cheap energy you can do everything else artificially. However, earth-based farms still consume valuable real estate, and I question the idea of putting farms underground: there's only so much area available underground (with mines and such), and it seems like it'd be cheaper and easier, once we have the technology, to just build massive space-station farms than to dig enough tunnels (and worry about them collapsing) to grow food. Of course, by that time, we'll probably come up with some artificial way of synthesizing food rather than growing it.
I've seen the same thing in MS stores in Scottsdale AZ and northern NJ. It utterly befuddles me why anyone would bother walking into an MS store unless they just want to laugh at it, but they do.
With Best Buy's high prices on larger items, and astronomical prices on accessories, having to pay sales tax on Amazon and Newegg purchases isn't going to drive people back to BB.
I live very close to a gigantic Home Depot store, and they actually do have a Dunkin' Donuts store inside.
I don't know what's with these comments about MS stores being empty. While I wish it were true, every time I walked past the giant MS store in the Scottsdale mall in Arizona, it had quite a lot of people in it, plus people playing on the Kinect system in front of it. And when Surface was being released, there was a long line of hipsters standing outside waiting to buy one.
Maybe Arizonans are just idiots.... but then again, now I live in northern NJ and the MS store near here isn't exactly empty either.
I once paid nearly twenty dollars for a Sansa data cable (Don't ask. My wife was involved.)
I think wives are a big reason Best Buy is still around.
My wife wanted a laptop several years ago; I wanted to get one off the internet, but she didn't want to wait for shipping. So off to Best Buy we went, even though I hated that store. We got a demo unit that worked fine in the store, but a day or two after we got it home, the monitor started acting flaky. So we brought it back, and they refused to take it as a defective return (because when they looked at it, it was working fine), but only as a return/refund. But because it had some software I had installed on it, they wanted to charge some ridiculous fee for Geek Squad to uninstall the software so they could resell it (seriously: instead of wiping and reinstalling, they were going to just resell the machine as-is. I could have installed keyloggers or other malware for the next customer to be victimized by). So I had to stand there and uninstall it myself to avoid this fee. Then, while I was in the middle of this process, the monitor finally gave out completely; when they saw that, they went ahead and refunded our money on the spot, but the experience was an ordeal.
After that, my wife swore off ever buying from Best Buy again, and let me buy a laptop from Newegg.
It's not a horrible idea: if a large portion of the population leads idle lives, some fraction of those will do something with their time that turns out to be useful, such as creating art or music (things which right now don't usually pay well so not that many people take the risk of dedicating time to these pursuits because they're busy working normal jobs to support themselves and their families), or inventing something new.
The main problem with the whole idea is that resources are scarce, and likely will be for quite some time: freshwater, food, and energy are all in scarce supply. Eventually, maybe we'll be able to build giant orbital ships which grow food using solar energy or something, but for now and the foreseeable future those are going to be big, and growing, problems.
Well Star Trek must not have been one of these utopian societies because they had plenty of shit jobs, one big one being working on a security detail (with a red shirt).
Even then, there'd still be a need for money and wealth, because nothing can ever be really equal. My favorite example of something where you can never have equality for everyone is real estate. I for instance want a luxurious house on the coast of Hawaii. I'm sure lots of other people want a house in such a location too, judging by the property prices on the Hawaiian coast. There's simply no way 8 billion people can each have their own luxurious house on the Hawaiian coast: it isn't that large. (I also want my luxurious house to be surrounded by rain forest, not a bunch of high-rise condos.) Even if you take into account the fact that not everyone wants to live in exactly the same place (some people like mountain properties, some people want to live in Manhattan, some people want to live in the French Riviera, etc.), there's only so much property to go around, and a lot more people than the amount of really prime locations. How many people would really live in Fargo if they had the choice to live anywhere in the world they wanted?
So who gets the nice properties? Now we're right back to some kind of class structure, where people in the upper classes get the nice properties and the people in the lower classes get the less-desirable properties.
The only way this idea works is if you abandon all physical reality, and move everyone into The Matrix (or perhaps the Nexus thing in ST: Generations), where they can create whatever reality they choose.
Except now you've replaced economic disparity with a different kind of disparity, where instead of people having differing amounts of money, they have differing amounts of power: the patricians at the top and the plebeians at the bottom. That's not much of an improvement.