I'm not challenging the freight train, I'm challenging the guys who pushed me onto the tracks and are keeping me there at gunpoint.
And you're probably on the tracks too, facing the same gunmen, and too fucking obsessed with the train to realize you'll be shot when you try to step out of its way.
Unless, as I'm beginning to suspect, you're one of the gunman keeping everyone else there, in which case I hope someone murders you as slowly and painfully as possible you despicable worthless waste of oxygen.
I am not saying I personally am going to make all of the necessary changes to save humanity myself right now.
I am urging other people to realize what is necessary if they don't all want to die when the time comes, and to collectively do something about it now while there's still time.
And you seem to continue under the misunderstanding that I'm advocating something against robots. Not at all. I'm pointing out a socioeconomic problem we already have, that we have a bandaid over, which bandaid will go away when the robots come, so we need to fix the underlying problem before that happens.
And you also fail to realize that I'm advocating largely the same endgame as you are, and only highlighting a problem with the means you propose. "Get to high ground", yes -- by the time the robots here we all need to be financially independent or we'll die. Well right now the high ground is guarded by men with guns who keep most people from getting to it. I'm not trying to bargain with the title wave, I'm saying both "goddamnit, let the fucking people up the hill already" and "hey everyone, if they don't let us up the hill we're gonna have to do something about it soon or drown else when the tidal wave hits"
You're ignoring the armed guards obstructing the way up the hill and telling people "just get up the hill" like it's simply a matter of choice and if they don't then they were just too dumb to live.
In this scenario they're not attacking you. They're ignoring you. And because you can't live with them ignoring you, you will attack them because they have resources you need.
No, they're not, and repeating that and ignoring when I point how how they're not just ignoring me doesn't change the facts.
Let's look at my case in particular here to illustrate. I own everything in my possession and have no debt to anyone and paid for it all with cash that I got from trading my labor fairly to other people in exchange for that money. I even own the structure I live in. But I don't own the land under it. So long as I keep giving some of the money I make from trading my labor to the guy who owns that land, he ignores me and leaves me alone. I am paying him off to ignore me, to leave me alone and let me be. What I want is for him to continue ignoring me. That would be great.
Then the robots come, and let's say I can even afford one, and I no longer have to pay anyone for services anymore, but nobody has to pay me for services either, and I lose my job. For the most part that's OK because everything I would get with the money from my job, I get from my robots instead. Except now I'm not paying off the landlord to ignore me and leave me be, and he stops ignoring me, tells me I have to leave, and eventually police(-bots) are sent to force me to go somewhere else.
Except everywhere else will do exactly the same thing, because there is no unowned land; if there were, I'd already be living on some of it instead of bribing someone else to ignore my existence on his. So anywhere I go, even if all I want to do there is exist alone inside my home and let my robots serve me, someone is going to come and threaten my life, because it's "their" land, not mine.
That's not ignoring me. That is forcing me into servitude at gunpoint and then telling me that my services are no longer required so here comes the gun. All I want is to be released from that forced servitude and allowed to just fucking exist somewhere.
If all I was being threatened with was being ignored, that would be no threat. But that's not the case, and sticking your fingers in your ears doesn't make it the case.
The irony is that if I am not allowed to rent out property, then poor people will have no where to live, they'll be homeless. So you'd actually rather they be homeless than to have some place to live and pay rent. Ponder that one for a bit...
So you'd rather take a complete loss on your investment in that property and let it lay unused than sell it? You are so vehemently opposed to someone actually acquiring a house when they pay for housing that you'd rather watch it all burn than let someone get a fair deal?
If rent goes away, there's going to be a lot of people needing somewhere to live, and a lot of "investment properties" generating no income, and no market for those properties as "investments" anymore because that kind of "investment" can't generate income anymore. So the only thing for people with those properties to do, other than accept a complete loss on the investment, is to sell it to someone who wants it, not for an investment, but to live in. And surprise, there's suddenly a whole lot more people looking to buy a house to live in. Of course they have limited means (which is why they couldn't buy before), which means the market price you can get for your house in this changed market will go down. But it's either sell at a price that the poor can afford or accept a complete loss on investment, your choice.
That is what the market would naturally look like, without the artificial economic instrument of rent. The existence of rent distorts that market, pricing housing outside of the reach of many people and forcing those people into a dependent relationship that recursively reenforces that preexisting wealth disparity.
I don't want the whole world to change. All I want is that when someone pays for something, they get it, and don't have to give it back (buy lose their money forever) so that they or someone else can be charged again for it. Let people keep living where they're living and paying on the kind of schedule they're paying, but they have to gradually acquire ownership in the thing they're paying for in return for those payments or it's just exploitation, they're paying for nothing.
(Fuck off with "I'm providing a service" before you even think about that bullshit. Allowing someone to do something is not serving them).
No... the issue is not that they're going to threaten to kill you.
Its that you're going to threaten to kill THEM.
You already did it in a previous post.
Violence in self-defense is justified. They are the ones saying "fuck off and die, don't set a foot on our land (i.e. any land) or I'll have my police(-bots) shoot you", i.e. just "I'm sending my police(-bots) to shoot you now... unless you make it worthwhile for me not to". They are the ones hoarding what could (especially in a robot utopia) be plenty for everyone, threatening people who just want to continue working to survive on their own, for daring attempt to exist in a world that they own.
If it were a case of the rich on their land having robot slaves and living the easy life, and the poor on their land continuing to farm for a living that would be one thing. But there is no such thing as "their land" for the poor. The rich have claimed the entire world for their own and will use force to murder anyone who dares try to live in it, unless those "trespassers" offer some kind of tribute. That is the gun at the head of the bulk of humanity. The tiny fraction of people who own the world aren't just telling the rest of them "make your own living", they're actively preventing them from making their own living, and forcing them into dependency. The poor didn't come begging to the rich asking to be their serfs. The rich claimed all the fields the peasants were working and said "pay me a share of your crops if you want to keep farming here". And everything we have today descends from that original theft of the commons.
You gain logistical independence or bow before those that can feed you.
Choose. Stand or Kneel.
For the vast majority of people there isn't a choice. The only option is kneel; if you try to stand you'll be forced back down to your knees and only the strongest can fight that off and stay standing. And when the robots get here, as you keep pointing out, the "kneel" option goes away, and gets replaced with "die". So for the vast majority of people, the only choice coming their way is "die". Telling them to stand harder is pointless; if they could stand, they would be already. Nobody is kneeling by choice.
All I'm saying is we should stop forcing people back to their knees, and ACTUALLY FUCKING LET PEOPLE STAND ON THEIR OWN FOR ONCE.
Do you realize that you are probably one of these people we're talking about? This isn't a "those poor people over there", this is "almost everyone". Do you rent, or have a mortgage, or owe any significant debt to anyone? Does anything you depend on technically belong to someone else? Almost everyone will answer "yes" to that question, and they're all going to die when those someone-elses take back their things when everyone loses their jobs (and let those things sit useless somewhere since nobody else can afford them either -- except for people who are wealthy enough to not need them).
And fuck, it just occurred to me, with property taxes it's not just "almost everyone", it's absolutely everyone. We all rent from the government in the end. Even if you "own" your own land and have robots to make everything else you need on that land, the government is going to want cash money from you every year or else their army-bots are going to come kick you off that land. Where are you going to get that money when everyone else's robots are providing for all their needs, and you're as useless to them as everyone else is to you? The government is the end boss of landlords in this scenario, the one really making the call about who lives and dies. And who do they answer to? Who will they answer to, by the time full automation arrives?
Also, maybe it's just tone being hard to read on the internet, but you seem awfully gleeful about the prospect of 99% of humanity being killed, like you think they just deserve it. Like I said before, I'm not arguing about your predictions about what would happen, but pointing out how terrible and undeserved that is and that saying "just don't be one of the 99% when that happens" isn't a sound response.
I thought we covered that one... they're going to meet your raggedy peasant ass with line of shiny killer robots and blaze away at you with belt fed machine guns supplied by bullet factories under the castle.
You continue to miss an important part of the point: that this is why it's important to act now, when we still have some semblance of a chance to fight back, some semblance of democratic power where the people can do something to get some kind of change out of those who are in power. They can't just kill us all off now, they still need us. By the time the robots are here it will be too late.
So long as there is luck involved somewhere, there isn't equal opportunity. Equal opportunity is like determinism: it means output depends only on input.
I don't want to try to force a world of equal outcomes, but I want to see a world where everyone who puts the same effort into the process gets the same results from it.
There is a problem that exists right now, and has existed for a long time, but it's (barely) tolerable for now because, although some people have significant leverage over other people, there's still something they want out of those other people, which they use their leverage to threaten out of them. Full automation will exacerbate that problem to the maximum, but since full automation is a good thing in its own right and probably inevitable anyway, the solution is not to fight automation, or really anything to do with automation at all; the solution is to fix that problem that automation will exacerbate, while there's still time to do so.
For an analogy: someone has you hostage with a gun to your head and is threatening to kill you unless you feed them certain bits of information (or something) they need from you. That's a big problem, but you can still make it through by giving them what they want, so it's not a completely hopeless problem. But circumstances could change where they get the information (or whatever) they need some other way, at which point there's nothing stopping them from pulling the trigger but the non-existent goodness of their own hearts, since they don't need you alive anymore. The problem is not the threat of those circumstances changing, and the proper response isn't just to wait until that happens and then hope you can offer them something else they want to spare your life a bit longer. The problem is that there is a fucking gun to your head in the first place, and the proper response is whatever it takes to make that no longer the case.
How exactly to do that is an open question, but it's what needs to happen. Focusing on the possible impending change of circumstance that could lead your captors to kill you is missing the fucking point. The fact that someone's threatening to kill you unless you can offer them a reason not to is the point. They shouldn't have that kind of leverage over you to begin with, and that is the problem you need to be focusing on.
No, the plan it to get all the peasants to storm the castle and start dragging some people out to the guillotine until changes get made. I mostly mean that figuratively, but historically that's the way it goes.
And the plan is to do that soon, while that's still an option, because once there's an army of robots serving the nobles that's not an option anymore, and anyone that's not the landed nobility themselves -- which is to say, almost everybody, coming back to the modern day meaning anybody paying rent or a mortgage or with any significant debt -- is just going to die when their labor becomes worthless but they still have to borrow capital to live.
Also, on a different note: you seem to be mostly describing what you think will happen given things keep going the way they are not, and what the consequences of that will be for whom. I don't really disagree with any of that. Yes, if we keep the same asymmetric capital distribution we've got now, where most people have to sell their labor to get money to borrow the capital they need to continue laboring and just living in (like just a place to legally sleep at night), then everyone who can't find some independence from that kind of modern-age serfdom is going to be completely fucked.
The problem is, with how we're doing things now, it is practically impossible for the vast majority of people to even approach that kind of independence right now (I make about twice as much as more than half of Americans make and I'll likely not be able to stop borrowing even a place to sleep at night until my 60s). So given those consequences as you spell them out, almost everyone is going to be fucked when the time comes, and yeah, there won't be shit we can do about it then. And that's not OK, and not some kind of deserved, natural consequence of the varying "usefulness" of different people; it's a consequence of artificial social stratification ultimately descended from the use of force to subjugate some people into service to other people.
So we better fucking do something about it now, before it's too late, because by the time we have full automation there won't be anything left to be done about it.
Consider for a moment the old systems of nobles and kings and warlords.
Why did they care for the welfare of the peasants? Because they needed them to work in the fields and provide bodies in wars.
You're still looking at the whole problem backwards.
The question is not what use are the peasants to the nobles.
The question is why the nobles get to decide who gets to live and work on the land.
The only reason the peasants need to be "of use" to the nobles is because the nobles claim the land the peasants would be living and working upon by force, and demand that the peasants labor for them if they want to borrow that land back.
If the nobles did not have claim to all the capital the peasants labor upon, the only person a peasant would need to prove his usefulness to is himself. And if robots came along and made all labor unnecessary, the peasants would benefit too, everyone would benefit, and we'd have the nice little world of thousands (millions) of independent household-companies you talk about.
But if the nobles own all the fields when that time comes, and the peasants are no longer "of use" to them, then they all dies -- it's not that the peasants keep on being peasants and the kings become gods, the peasants get kicked out of the whole fucking world that the kings claim to own -- and not because they were somehow less useful than the nobles who survived (who are they useful to?), but just because of an asymmetrical distribution of basic capital.
The hypothetical elimination of the value of labor due to automation severely highlights the problems all societies have (and have had since at least the time of nobles and peasants) with regards to capital. When full automation comes, "usefulness" becomes irrelevant, because nobody has to do anything, and capital is all that matters.
So we better fucking sort out the capital problems before that time comes.
Rent and interest are perfectly reasonable things to exist in an economy, without them many parts of our world wouldn't function as well...
You are completely wrong about both of these things, but I don't feel like arguing them yet again. Read some of my back posts if you really care to know why I think so.
I'm not going to provide a poor person a place to live, if I can't charge rent, why would I do that?
Renting is not the only option. If you want to make money off your capital, sell it. If nobody can afford it... sell it for less, or else waste your investment in it completely. Your choice. Charging money for something and getting to still keep it and charge more money for it again indefinitely is not a valid option, and that model is the root of all the problems with capitalism.
Frankly, poor people should be having fewer kids
That I can agree with. Most people are too poor to afford kids, and therefore should not be having them. However, it is a problem that most people are too poor to afford kids; and people being people, they're going to have them anyway, and the kids are going to suffer further still, and their kids further still...
I don't agree with your premise that it is a "large extent unearned". I worked my butt off for what I have, I wasn't given a bunch of money to start a business or invest in real estate.
In addition, I've had hard times, I've been poor, I never got a handout to get back on my feet, hard work did that. Now you might say that I've had a good education, or perhaps come from a nice family, but the reality is that I also put in the effort, a lot of people don't.
I started my first business at 19 years old with $500 and lots of dreams. Today I'm 40 years old and have a net worth approaching a million dollars (it would be a lot more if I wasn't so stupid with money in my 20s). I wasn't given capital to start, I worked my butt off. I never finished college, I am not unique or special, I'm just someone who didn't take no for an answer and didn't blame everyone else for my problems.
Anyone can do it, in my experience, most people are their own worst enemies at improving themselves.
It sounds like you must have taken a lot of risks and they paid off for you. No doubt it took hard work to get into a position where you were able to take advantage of such payoffs, but there's lots of other people who do the same hard work and take the same risks and fail miserably through no fault of their own, because risks are risky. (Most businesses fail.) And there's plenty of other people still who do all the same hard work, and realize what a terrible gamble the risks required for a chance to make it big represent, and take home only a mediocre payoff despite all their hard work.
And then there's people unlike you and I, who were born with advantages that make such risks not such a terrible gamble because they can afford to keep losing for a while until they win big. And then those born with such advantages that there really isn't any risk or work involved; just don't be a complete idiot, and leverage the advantage you've given, and continue to enjoy your privileged life. Those people are the problem, not self-made millionaires like you, unless you've now turned your self-made million into exactly such a leverageable advantage in which case you've made yourself part of the problem for the next generation, and for the rest of us in your generation who, despite the same hard work, didn't win out so fortunately.
Why would a future society that has no use for you, pay for you to continue to live when you do nothing but consume resources and offer the society nothing it wants?
Because I am a part of that society, involved in that decision. You're asking the wrong question. The question is not "Why should some other people have to use their power to provide for me", but "Why is all the power in the hands of those other people and not mine?" Why do some people have to be useful to other people, and the latter people are the ones to whom the former need to prove their usefulness? The kids who are born to the land-and-robot-owning overlords are not more useful than the kids who are born to the serfs dying in the streets. The question is not why should the former kids share the product of the self-productive capital they were born into; it's why should that self-productive capital belong to them, and not others?
If those "other people" are getting the money being taken from them to give poor folks a hand up by exploiting those very poor folks in the first place, like via rent or interest, then they can go fuck themselves with their objections.
"Earned and unearned" is exactly what I mean by "deserve", and the point is that wealth and poverty are to a large extent unearned; people putting in the same effort but thrown into difference circumstances get different results, so the outcome is not purely a product of input and cannot be said to be earned.
In particular, the more capital you have the greater opportunities there are for you to make unearned income and accrue even greater capital, and the less capital you have the more of your earned income has to go to borrowing capital from those who have it (which is where that unearned income for the rich comes from) and the less of the product of your own labor you see.
Giving people back what they've had to pay to borrow from the rich at the cost of the proceeds leveraged from that advantaged position by the rich is in no fucking way "just as unfair" as letting the poor continue to be exploited and the rich continue to give on their backs.
A lot of poor people can't afford cell phones. Certainly most of them can't afford smart phones, and there's plenty who can't even afford a dumb phone. I think you underestimate the depth and breadth of poverty; the poor person with an iPhone is the tip of the poverty iceberg, the small upper part below which is a much larger base that goes much further down.
And where are these bootstrapping robots going to get the materials they need to build more robots?
Also I'd like to see a source on an acre of land for $500. I live in a pretty rural, mountainous area myself and regularly see empty lots for sale for $200,000. And even if such land is available, moving is expensive and notoriously difficult for the poor, especially all of those who don't own a truck large enough to move with (or any vehicle at all). Also, there's a reason people don't living in deserts, etc. Are these magic robots also going to import water? Or make rocky soil arable? And, I guess, living in isolation far away from all other human beings isn't going to be a problem for anyone, never mind giving up everything and everyone they've ever loved in the place they grew up in the first place...
Being too poor to afford your own land and robots to do all your work for you does not imply that you are "useless".
Your are a blind self-entitled prick if you think that the rich deserve their riches and the poor deserve poverty. We do not have equality of opportunity, so outcomes are not only the product of hard work and intelligence. There are plenty of hard-working, intelligent, "useful" people in the world who, because of the circumstances of their birth and other bad rolls of the dice, are not fortunate enough to be in the position of the one to whom other people are deemed "useful", rather than the other way around.
I'm not saying the solution is everyone living off the welfare of some big centralize robot-and-land-owning minority (either government or corporations). The solution is to make sure everyone gets access to land and robots and gets to be "self-sufficient" on the back of that productive capital, the same way the stinking rich few who are already rich enough to charge others to borrow their capital and then pay those borrowers their own rent money back to labor for them are.
That will happen for everyone who's wealthy enough to have a home of their own, and robots of their own. Everyone else will get thrown out in the street when their job disappears and they can't make the rent or mortgage, and then starve to death. Or else riot en masse and take the homes and robots of the rich.
The solution to this isn't to avoid building robots, of course. Robots are great, and you're spot-on that nobody wants a job. But most people need a job, and would even need a job if they had a robot to do all the labor for them, because they lack the capital necessary to labor upon.
The solution is to make sure that by the time the robots take all the jobs, everyone's wealthy enough to have a home of their own and robots of their own.
Robots are coming for all jobs eventually. Not saying "soon", but it's a matter of time, the inevitable endgame of labor-saving technology, which is the whole point of technology: to enable us humans to get more done with less effort. People will never stop trying to get machines to do work for us until we never have to do work -- or pay someone else to do work in our stead -- again.
And that is going to be a gigantic problem for everyone whose life depends on other people paying them to do work in their stead, which is to say the lower-class majority of humanity, the ones with so little capital that they're dependent on borrowing the capital of others and have to trade their labor for that "privilege". Forget about income inequality, automation will make income irrelevant eventually. The real problem we need to have fixed by the time that happens is asset inequality, to make sure that everybody's got a little chunk of land to call all their own and enough cash in hand to buy the robots that will do all their labor for them.
Anyone who doesn't fit that description is eventually going to be completely fucked, and seeing as how only a tiny fraction of the populace has ever fit that description, we're all going to be completely fucked... and it's not the robots' fault, and the fuckers whose fault it is are going to pay sorely for it once the only options for the rest of us are either to make them pay, or lie down in the street and die.
A state is not just a larger level of social organization on the same scale of family-community-tribe-etc. Any of those could in principle be a state, and a larger social unit does not have to be a state.
A state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Anarchy is just the absence of a state: of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Anarchism is not opposition to all use of force; some use of force can be considered legitimate, and you can still have anarchy. Anarchism is not even opposed to having a special group of people whose job it is to go about using force in legitimate ways; that is to say, police.
Anarchism is only opposed to such a group of people having a monopoly on that job; to saying that force is only legitimate when they do it. So long as the police don't have any powers that the general populace don't, or conversely the general populace share in whatever powers the police have, you still have some form of anarchism. That was my original point: that one principle ("If the police can have it, then so should we the citizenry.") is strictly all you need to have anarchy, even if the rest of society looks exactly like it does today.
The hard question is how you can support an organization dedicated to the legitimate use of force (i.e. police) without permitting them to use force in ways that would be considered illegitimate if anyone else did it (i.e. without taxation), or without legitimating that behavior for anyone (i.e. letting anyone who wants to offer a service to society to demand payment from society for that service by force).
There's also a question of how you keep whatever group is taking responsibility for this legitimate use of force from unfairly favoring one segment of the population over another, but that's equally a problem for state police as it would be for anarchic police.
Tolerating trolls to some extent is the price you pay for freedom of speech.
Just as the threat of terrorism doesn't justify a police state, and at some point a society has to just accept the remaining risk instead of growing more draconian or else it ends up doing more harm than the harm it's trying to prevent; so too trolls and other assholes don't justify censorship, and at some point a community just has to put up with them instead of tightening the screws or else it ends up doing more harm than the harm it's trying to prevent.
You get crackpots in Slashdot comments, sure... and all but the most well-spoken of them get downmodded, and the ones that get upmodded get plenty of rebuttals that also get upmodding. You don't get the crackpots overrunning the site and drowning out everything with their crackpottery.
And that's how healthy discourse should go. It's fine if people who are wrong espouse their wrong opinions, so long as it's not drowning out all other conversation, and someone else speaks up to point out how and why they're wrong. In fact, the latter part is a good thing; letting wrong opinions be aired, so they can be publicly defeated, leads to (if I may analogize) great immunization of the discursive community from such wrong opinions, because they'll all have heard the rebuttals already.
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I'm not challenging the freight train, I'm challenging the guys who pushed me onto the tracks and are keeping me there at gunpoint.
And you're probably on the tracks too, facing the same gunmen, and too fucking obsessed with the train to realize you'll be shot when you try to step out of its way.
Unless, as I'm beginning to suspect, you're one of the gunman keeping everyone else there, in which case I hope someone murders you as slowly and painfully as possible you despicable worthless waste of oxygen.
I am not saying I personally am going to make all of the necessary changes to save humanity myself right now.
I am urging other people to realize what is necessary if they don't all want to die when the time comes, and to collectively do something about it now while there's still time.
And you seem to continue under the misunderstanding that I'm advocating something against robots. Not at all. I'm pointing out a socioeconomic problem we already have, that we have a bandaid over, which bandaid will go away when the robots come, so we need to fix the underlying problem before that happens.
And you also fail to realize that I'm advocating largely the same endgame as you are, and only highlighting a problem with the means you propose. "Get to high ground", yes -- by the time the robots here we all need to be financially independent or we'll die. Well right now the high ground is guarded by men with guns who keep most people from getting to it. I'm not trying to bargain with the title wave, I'm saying both "goddamnit, let the fucking people up the hill already" and "hey everyone, if they don't let us up the hill we're gonna have to do something about it soon or drown else when the tidal wave hits"
You're ignoring the armed guards obstructing the way up the hill and telling people "just get up the hill" like it's simply a matter of choice and if they don't then they were just too dumb to live.
In this scenario they're not attacking you. They're ignoring you. And because you can't live with them ignoring you, you will attack them because they have resources you need.
No, they're not, and repeating that and ignoring when I point how how they're not just ignoring me doesn't change the facts.
Let's look at my case in particular here to illustrate. I own everything in my possession and have no debt to anyone and paid for it all with cash that I got from trading my labor fairly to other people in exchange for that money. I even own the structure I live in. But I don't own the land under it. So long as I keep giving some of the money I make from trading my labor to the guy who owns that land, he ignores me and leaves me alone. I am paying him off to ignore me, to leave me alone and let me be. What I want is for him to continue ignoring me. That would be great.
Then the robots come, and let's say I can even afford one, and I no longer have to pay anyone for services anymore, but nobody has to pay me for services either, and I lose my job. For the most part that's OK because everything I would get with the money from my job, I get from my robots instead. Except now I'm not paying off the landlord to ignore me and leave me be, and he stops ignoring me, tells me I have to leave, and eventually police(-bots) are sent to force me to go somewhere else.
Except everywhere else will do exactly the same thing, because there is no unowned land; if there were, I'd already be living on some of it instead of bribing someone else to ignore my existence on his. So anywhere I go, even if all I want to do there is exist alone inside my home and let my robots serve me, someone is going to come and threaten my life, because it's "their" land, not mine.
That's not ignoring me. That is forcing me into servitude at gunpoint and then telling me that my services are no longer required so here comes the gun. All I want is to be released from that forced servitude and allowed to just fucking exist somewhere.
If all I was being threatened with was being ignored, that would be no threat. But that's not the case, and sticking your fingers in your ears doesn't make it the case.
The irony is that if I am not allowed to rent out property, then poor people will have no where to live, they'll be homeless. So you'd actually rather they be homeless than to have some place to live and pay rent. Ponder that one for a bit...
So you'd rather take a complete loss on your investment in that property and let it lay unused than sell it? You are so vehemently opposed to someone actually acquiring a house when they pay for housing that you'd rather watch it all burn than let someone get a fair deal?
If rent goes away, there's going to be a lot of people needing somewhere to live, and a lot of "investment properties" generating no income, and no market for those properties as "investments" anymore because that kind of "investment" can't generate income anymore. So the only thing for people with those properties to do, other than accept a complete loss on the investment, is to sell it to someone who wants it, not for an investment, but to live in. And surprise, there's suddenly a whole lot more people looking to buy a house to live in. Of course they have limited means (which is why they couldn't buy before), which means the market price you can get for your house in this changed market will go down. But it's either sell at a price that the poor can afford or accept a complete loss on investment, your choice.
That is what the market would naturally look like, without the artificial economic instrument of rent. The existence of rent distorts that market, pricing housing outside of the reach of many people and forcing those people into a dependent relationship that recursively reenforces that preexisting wealth disparity.
I don't want the whole world to change. All I want is that when someone pays for something, they get it, and don't have to give it back (buy lose their money forever) so that they or someone else can be charged again for it. Let people keep living where they're living and paying on the kind of schedule they're paying, but they have to gradually acquire ownership in the thing they're paying for in return for those payments or it's just exploitation, they're paying for nothing.
(Fuck off with "I'm providing a service" before you even think about that bullshit. Allowing someone to do something is not serving them).
But they're brainwashed into their servitude, which is good enough.
No... the issue is not that they're going to threaten to kill you.
Its that you're going to threaten to kill THEM.
You already did it in a previous post.
Violence in self-defense is justified. They are the ones saying "fuck off and die, don't set a foot on our land (i.e. any land) or I'll have my police(-bots) shoot you", i.e. just "I'm sending my police(-bots) to shoot you now... unless you make it worthwhile for me not to". They are the ones hoarding what could (especially in a robot utopia) be plenty for everyone, threatening people who just want to continue working to survive on their own, for daring attempt to exist in a world that they own.
If it were a case of the rich on their land having robot slaves and living the easy life, and the poor on their land continuing to farm for a living that would be one thing. But there is no such thing as "their land" for the poor. The rich have claimed the entire world for their own and will use force to murder anyone who dares try to live in it, unless those "trespassers" offer some kind of tribute. That is the gun at the head of the bulk of humanity. The tiny fraction of people who own the world aren't just telling the rest of them "make your own living", they're actively preventing them from making their own living, and forcing them into dependency. The poor didn't come begging to the rich asking to be their serfs. The rich claimed all the fields the peasants were working and said "pay me a share of your crops if you want to keep farming here". And everything we have today descends from that original theft of the commons.
You gain logistical independence or bow before those that can feed you.
Choose. Stand or Kneel.
For the vast majority of people there isn't a choice. The only option is kneel; if you try to stand you'll be forced back down to your knees and only the strongest can fight that off and stay standing. And when the robots get here, as you keep pointing out, the "kneel" option goes away, and gets replaced with "die". So for the vast majority of people, the only choice coming their way is "die". Telling them to stand harder is pointless; if they could stand, they would be already. Nobody is kneeling by choice.
All I'm saying is we should stop forcing people back to their knees, and ACTUALLY FUCKING LET PEOPLE STAND ON THEIR OWN FOR ONCE.
Do you realize that you are probably one of these people we're talking about? This isn't a "those poor people over there", this is "almost everyone". Do you rent, or have a mortgage, or owe any significant debt to anyone? Does anything you depend on technically belong to someone else? Almost everyone will answer "yes" to that question, and they're all going to die when those someone-elses take back their things when everyone loses their jobs (and let those things sit useless somewhere since nobody else can afford them either -- except for people who are wealthy enough to not need them).
And fuck, it just occurred to me, with property taxes it's not just "almost everyone", it's absolutely everyone. We all rent from the government in the end. Even if you "own" your own land and have robots to make everything else you need on that land, the government is going to want cash money from you every year or else their army-bots are going to come kick you off that land. Where are you going to get that money when everyone else's robots are providing for all their needs, and you're as useless to them as everyone else is to you? The government is the end boss of landlords in this scenario, the one really making the call about who lives and dies. And who do they answer to? Who will they answer to, by the time full automation arrives?
Also, maybe it's just tone being hard to read on the internet, but you seem awfully gleeful about the prospect of 99% of humanity being killed, like you think they just deserve it. Like I said before, I'm not arguing about your predictions about what would happen, but pointing out how terrible and undeserved that is and that saying "just don't be one of the 99% when that happens" isn't a sound response.
I thought we covered that one... they're going to meet your raggedy peasant ass with line of shiny killer robots and blaze away at you with belt fed machine guns supplied by bullet factories under the castle.
You continue to miss an important part of the point: that this is why it's important to act now, when we still have some semblance of a chance to fight back, some semblance of democratic power where the people can do something to get some kind of change out of those who are in power. They can't just kill us all off now, they still need us. By the time the robots are here it will be too late.
So long as there is luck involved somewhere, there isn't equal opportunity. Equal opportunity is like determinism: it means output depends only on input.
I don't want to try to force a world of equal outcomes, but I want to see a world where everyone who puts the same effort into the process gets the same results from it.
I think you're confused about what I'm saying.
There is a problem that exists right now, and has existed for a long time, but it's (barely) tolerable for now because, although some people have significant leverage over other people, there's still something they want out of those other people, which they use their leverage to threaten out of them. Full automation will exacerbate that problem to the maximum, but since full automation is a good thing in its own right and probably inevitable anyway, the solution is not to fight automation, or really anything to do with automation at all; the solution is to fix that problem that automation will exacerbate, while there's still time to do so.
For an analogy: someone has you hostage with a gun to your head and is threatening to kill you unless you feed them certain bits of information (or something) they need from you. That's a big problem, but you can still make it through by giving them what they want, so it's not a completely hopeless problem. But circumstances could change where they get the information (or whatever) they need some other way, at which point there's nothing stopping them from pulling the trigger but the non-existent goodness of their own hearts, since they don't need you alive anymore. The problem is not the threat of those circumstances changing, and the proper response isn't just to wait until that happens and then hope you can offer them something else they want to spare your life a bit longer. The problem is that there is a fucking gun to your head in the first place, and the proper response is whatever it takes to make that no longer the case.
How exactly to do that is an open question, but it's what needs to happen. Focusing on the possible impending change of circumstance that could lead your captors to kill you is missing the fucking point. The fact that someone's threatening to kill you unless you can offer them a reason not to is the point. They shouldn't have that kind of leverage over you to begin with, and that is the problem you need to be focusing on.
No, the plan it to get all the peasants to storm the castle and start dragging some people out to the guillotine until changes get made. I mostly mean that figuratively, but historically that's the way it goes.
And the plan is to do that soon, while that's still an option, because once there's an army of robots serving the nobles that's not an option anymore, and anyone that's not the landed nobility themselves -- which is to say, almost everybody, coming back to the modern day meaning anybody paying rent or a mortgage or with any significant debt -- is just going to die when their labor becomes worthless but they still have to borrow capital to live.
Also, on a different note: you seem to be mostly describing what you think will happen given things keep going the way they are not, and what the consequences of that will be for whom. I don't really disagree with any of that. Yes, if we keep the same asymmetric capital distribution we've got now, where most people have to sell their labor to get money to borrow the capital they need to continue laboring and just living in (like just a place to legally sleep at night), then everyone who can't find some independence from that kind of modern-age serfdom is going to be completely fucked.
The problem is, with how we're doing things now, it is practically impossible for the vast majority of people to even approach that kind of independence right now (I make about twice as much as more than half of Americans make and I'll likely not be able to stop borrowing even a place to sleep at night until my 60s). So given those consequences as you spell them out, almost everyone is going to be fucked when the time comes, and yeah, there won't be shit we can do about it then. And that's not OK, and not some kind of deserved, natural consequence of the varying "usefulness" of different people; it's a consequence of artificial social stratification ultimately descended from the use of force to subjugate some people into service to other people.
So we better fucking do something about it now, before it's too late, because by the time we have full automation there won't be anything left to be done about it.
Consider for a moment the old systems of nobles and kings and warlords.
Why did they care for the welfare of the peasants? Because they needed them to work in the fields and provide bodies in wars.
You're still looking at the whole problem backwards.
The question is not what use are the peasants to the nobles.
The question is why the nobles get to decide who gets to live and work on the land.
The only reason the peasants need to be "of use" to the nobles is because the nobles claim the land the peasants would be living and working upon by force, and demand that the peasants labor for them if they want to borrow that land back.
If the nobles did not have claim to all the capital the peasants labor upon, the only person a peasant would need to prove his usefulness to is himself. And if robots came along and made all labor unnecessary, the peasants would benefit too, everyone would benefit, and we'd have the nice little world of thousands (millions) of independent household-companies you talk about.
But if the nobles own all the fields when that time comes, and the peasants are no longer "of use" to them, then they all dies -- it's not that the peasants keep on being peasants and the kings become gods, the peasants get kicked out of the whole fucking world that the kings claim to own -- and not because they were somehow less useful than the nobles who survived (who are they useful to?), but just because of an asymmetrical distribution of basic capital.
The hypothetical elimination of the value of labor due to automation severely highlights the problems all societies have (and have had since at least the time of nobles and peasants) with regards to capital. When full automation comes, "usefulness" becomes irrelevant, because nobody has to do anything, and capital is all that matters.
So we better fucking sort out the capital problems before that time comes.
"muh", ">" strawquoting.... go back to 4chan, kid, leave Slashdot for the grownups.
Rent and interest are perfectly reasonable things to exist in an economy, without them many parts of our world wouldn't function as well...
You are completely wrong about both of these things, but I don't feel like arguing them yet again. Read some of my back posts if you really care to know why I think so.
I'm not going to provide a poor person a place to live, if I can't charge rent, why would I do that?
Renting is not the only option. If you want to make money off your capital, sell it. If nobody can afford it... sell it for less, or else waste your investment in it completely. Your choice. Charging money for something and getting to still keep it and charge more money for it again indefinitely is not a valid option, and that model is the root of all the problems with capitalism.
Frankly, poor people should be having fewer kids
That I can agree with. Most people are too poor to afford kids, and therefore should not be having them. However, it is a problem that most people are too poor to afford kids; and people being people, they're going to have them anyway, and the kids are going to suffer further still, and their kids further still...
I don't agree with your premise that it is a "large extent unearned". I worked my butt off for what I have, I wasn't given a bunch of money to start a business or invest in real estate.
In addition, I've had hard times, I've been poor, I never got a handout to get back on my feet, hard work did that. Now you might say that I've had a good education, or perhaps come from a nice family, but the reality is that I also put in the effort, a lot of people don't.
I started my first business at 19 years old with $500 and lots of dreams. Today I'm 40 years old and have a net worth approaching a million dollars (it would be a lot more if I wasn't so stupid with money in my 20s). I wasn't given capital to start, I worked my butt off. I never finished college, I am not unique or special, I'm just someone who didn't take no for an answer and didn't blame everyone else for my problems.
Anyone can do it, in my experience, most people are their own worst enemies at improving themselves.
It sounds like you must have taken a lot of risks and they paid off for you. No doubt it took hard work to get into a position where you were able to take advantage of such payoffs, but there's lots of other people who do the same hard work and take the same risks and fail miserably through no fault of their own, because risks are risky. (Most businesses fail.) And there's plenty of other people still who do all the same hard work, and realize what a terrible gamble the risks required for a chance to make it big represent, and take home only a mediocre payoff despite all their hard work.
And then there's people unlike you and I, who were born with advantages that make such risks not such a terrible gamble because they can afford to keep losing for a while until they win big. And then those born with such advantages that there really isn't any risk or work involved; just don't be a complete idiot, and leverage the advantage you've given, and continue to enjoy your privileged life. Those people are the problem, not self-made millionaires like you, unless you've now turned your self-made million into exactly such a leverageable advantage in which case you've made yourself part of the problem for the next generation, and for the rest of us in your generation who, despite the same hard work, didn't win out so fortunately.
Why would a future society that has no use for you, pay for you to continue to live when you do nothing but consume resources and offer the society nothing it wants?
Because I am a part of that society, involved in that decision. You're asking the wrong question. The question is not "Why should some other people have to use their power to provide for me", but "Why is all the power in the hands of those other people and not mine?" Why do some people have to be useful to other people, and the latter people are the ones to whom the former need to prove their usefulness? The kids who are born to the land-and-robot-owning overlords are not more useful than the kids who are born to the serfs dying in the streets. The question is not why should the former kids share the product of the self-productive capital they were born into; it's why should that self-productive capital belong to them, and not others?
If those "other people" are getting the money being taken from them to give poor folks a hand up by exploiting those very poor folks in the first place, like via rent or interest, then they can go fuck themselves with their objections.
"Earned and unearned" is exactly what I mean by "deserve", and the point is that wealth and poverty are to a large extent unearned; people putting in the same effort but thrown into difference circumstances get different results, so the outcome is not purely a product of input and cannot be said to be earned.
In particular, the more capital you have the greater opportunities there are for you to make unearned income and accrue even greater capital, and the less capital you have the more of your earned income has to go to borrowing capital from those who have it (which is where that unearned income for the rich comes from) and the less of the product of your own labor you see.
Giving people back what they've had to pay to borrow from the rich at the cost of the proceeds leveraged from that advantaged position by the rich is in no fucking way "just as unfair" as letting the poor continue to be exploited and the rich continue to give on their backs.
A lot of poor people can't afford cell phones. Certainly most of them can't afford smart phones, and there's plenty who can't even afford a dumb phone. I think you underestimate the depth and breadth of poverty; the poor person with an iPhone is the tip of the poverty iceberg, the small upper part below which is a much larger base that goes much further down.
And where are these bootstrapping robots going to get the materials they need to build more robots?
Also I'd like to see a source on an acre of land for $500. I live in a pretty rural, mountainous area myself and regularly see empty lots for sale for $200,000. And even if such land is available, moving is expensive and notoriously difficult for the poor, especially all of those who don't own a truck large enough to move with (or any vehicle at all). Also, there's a reason people don't living in deserts, etc. Are these magic robots also going to import water? Or make rocky soil arable? And, I guess, living in isolation far away from all other human beings isn't going to be a problem for anyone, never mind giving up everything and everyone they've ever loved in the place they grew up in the first place...
Being too poor to afford your own land and robots to do all your work for you does not imply that you are "useless".
Your are a blind self-entitled prick if you think that the rich deserve their riches and the poor deserve poverty. We do not have equality of opportunity, so outcomes are not only the product of hard work and intelligence. There are plenty of hard-working, intelligent, "useful" people in the world who, because of the circumstances of their birth and other bad rolls of the dice, are not fortunate enough to be in the position of the one to whom other people are deemed "useful", rather than the other way around.
I'm not saying the solution is everyone living off the welfare of some big centralize robot-and-land-owning minority (either government or corporations). The solution is to make sure everyone gets access to land and robots and gets to be "self-sufficient" on the back of that productive capital, the same way the stinking rich few who are already rich enough to charge others to borrow their capital and then pay those borrowers their own rent money back to labor for them are.
That will happen for everyone who's wealthy enough to have a home of their own, and robots of their own. Everyone else will get thrown out in the street when their job disappears and they can't make the rent or mortgage, and then starve to death. Or else riot en masse and take the homes and robots of the rich.
The solution to this isn't to avoid building robots, of course. Robots are great, and you're spot-on that nobody wants a job. But most people need a job, and would even need a job if they had a robot to do all the labor for them, because they lack the capital necessary to labor upon.
The solution is to make sure that by the time the robots take all the jobs, everyone's wealthy enough to have a home of their own and robots of their own.
Robots are coming for all jobs eventually. Not saying "soon", but it's a matter of time, the inevitable endgame of labor-saving technology, which is the whole point of technology: to enable us humans to get more done with less effort. People will never stop trying to get machines to do work for us until we never have to do work -- or pay someone else to do work in our stead -- again.
And that is going to be a gigantic problem for everyone whose life depends on other people paying them to do work in their stead, which is to say the lower-class majority of humanity, the ones with so little capital that they're dependent on borrowing the capital of others and have to trade their labor for that "privilege". Forget about income inequality, automation will make income irrelevant eventually. The real problem we need to have fixed by the time that happens is asset inequality, to make sure that everybody's got a little chunk of land to call all their own and enough cash in hand to buy the robots that will do all their labor for them.
Anyone who doesn't fit that description is eventually going to be completely fucked, and seeing as how only a tiny fraction of the populace has ever fit that description, we're all going to be completely fucked... and it's not the robots' fault, and the fuckers whose fault it is are going to pay sorely for it once the only options for the rest of us are either to make them pay, or lie down in the street and die.
A state is not just a larger level of social organization on the same scale of family-community-tribe-etc. Any of those could in principle be a state, and a larger social unit does not have to be a state.
A state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Anarchy is just the absence of a state: of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
Anarchism is not opposition to all use of force; some use of force can be considered legitimate, and you can still have anarchy. Anarchism is not even opposed to having a special group of people whose job it is to go about using force in legitimate ways; that is to say, police.
Anarchism is only opposed to such a group of people having a monopoly on that job; to saying that force is only legitimate when they do it. So long as the police don't have any powers that the general populace don't, or conversely the general populace share in whatever powers the police have, you still have some form of anarchism. That was my original point: that one principle ("If the police can have it, then so should we the citizenry.") is strictly all you need to have anarchy, even if the rest of society looks exactly like it does today.
The hard question is how you can support an organization dedicated to the legitimate use of force (i.e. police) without permitting them to use force in ways that would be considered illegitimate if anyone else did it (i.e. without taxation), or without legitimating that behavior for anyone (i.e. letting anyone who wants to offer a service to society to demand payment from society for that service by force).
There's also a question of how you keep whatever group is taking responsibility for this legitimate use of force from unfairly favoring one segment of the population over another, but that's equally a problem for state police as it would be for anarchic police.
1. If the police can have it, then so should we the citizenry.
2. We the citizenry should not have the ability to murder without consequence.
Therefore:
3. The police can't have that ability either.
(by modus tollens)
That first premise is actually remarkably useful and would in fact, if applied in practice, produce a police force entirely compatible with anarchism.
Tolerating trolls to some extent is the price you pay for freedom of speech.
Just as the threat of terrorism doesn't justify a police state, and at some point a society has to just accept the remaining risk instead of growing more draconian or else it ends up doing more harm than the harm it's trying to prevent; so too trolls and other assholes don't justify censorship, and at some point a community just has to put up with them instead of tightening the screws or else it ends up doing more harm than the harm it's trying to prevent.
You get crackpots in Slashdot comments, sure... and all but the most well-spoken of them get downmodded, and the ones that get upmodded get plenty of rebuttals that also get upmodding. You don't get the crackpots overrunning the site and drowning out everything with their crackpottery.
And that's how healthy discourse should go. It's fine if people who are wrong espouse their wrong opinions, so long as it's not drowning out all other conversation, and someone else speaks up to point out how and why they're wrong. In fact, the latter part is a good thing; letting wrong opinions be aired, so they can be publicly defeated, leads to (if I may analogize) great immunization of the discursive community from such wrong opinions, because they'll all have heard the rebuttals already.