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We're at the point where the United State can either become utopia or dystopia. Automation can either allow everyone to do whatever they want with almost unlim

• andrewmcwatters 9y ago
  lol, yeah like large corporations and investors (which includes many of us here) want to give away free cash or inflate wages without cause the answers to these problems are rarely simple
  • cmahler7 9y ago
    paying a fair tax rate would be a start Do you really think Google should be paying 3% tax?
    • poikniok 9y ago
      No I think they should be paying 0% tax. Double taxation is fundamentally unfair.
• simonsarris 9y ago
  Minor point but the French Revolution was the bourgeoisie (middle class, lawyers, landowners, tradesmen, local officials, "tax payers" of the increasingly onerous taxes at the time) rising up against the nobility & clergy, not quite the plebes.
  • cadlin 9y ago
    Minor point on your minor point, the French Revolution may have begun that way with the calling of the Estate General, but actions by the "passive citizens" (lower classes) spurred the overthrow of the monarchy, Louis's subsequent execution, and universal male suffrage. They didn't direct things from the top, but the mob's opinion was accounted for.
• BenoitEssiambre 9y ago
  It's not the robots, otherwise we would have seen skyrocketing productivity. Also, the easy solution to the robot problem is to allow everyone to own robots.
  • tangent128 9y ago
    Everybody's already allowed to own robots; the sticking point, especially for the unemployed, is affordability.
    • AstralStorm 9y ago
      Especially affordability of advanced components like high power motors, quality bits and spindles, and of course batteries. Rest is relatively easy to work around or cheap one time purchase. Another problem is actually having skills to program the machine and devise even a basic industrial process. Then there is a game of finding right suppliers for smaller volumes...
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• gramstrong 9y ago
  >Automation can either allow everyone to do whatever they want with almost unlimited leisure This will literally never happen. The labor force will look a lot different, the average person will be much more educated. But we are never going to be in a perpetual state of leisure, or anything resembling it, lest we want to halt human progress in place. All automation does is allow us to focus on larger problems, or create new ones.
  • cmahler7 9y ago
    majority of people simply won't be able to help with the complex problems that push human progress forward. What do you suggest we do with them?
    • gramstrong 9y ago
      Educate them with all of the free time created from automation, then put them back in to the work force.
      • Jtsummers 9y ago
        That requires economical access to education opportunities, which is presently not the norm in the US.
        • gramstrong 9y ago
          Neither is unlimited leisure. I'm proposing the former in place of the latter.
      • cmahler7 9y ago
        you can educate people as much as you want, the majority aren't going to be able to become engineers and physicists. Unless we can get to the point where we can manipulate genes to increase intelligence that's not a solution to the problem
        • 9y ago
• posguy 9y ago
  The bible speaks of Jubilee, the 50th year where debts are wiped clear, and land is pooled and redivided among the people. There are Christians who believe this should be a thing in modern society, and it is quite practical. Note: I say this as an Atheist, ex-Catholic. Jubilee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%28biblical%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%28biblical%29
  • _rpd 9y ago
    > and it is quite practical. It would be brutal. Very few would be able to get credit, and those that could would come under constant pressure to liquidate assets. > land is pooled and redivided If the government tried to seize and redistribute private land, there would be civil war. I think we have different definitions of practical.
    • posguy 9y ago
      Wiping away your debts wouldn't horribly destroy the credit bureaus, and short of the 1% rising up I doubt there would be civil war. Lending did not stop in ancient palestine due to Jubilee, if anything it provided a pressure relief in the form of a second chance where everyone was equalized in assets. Circling back to an uprising by the 1%, I'd be impressed if there weren't sufficient people ready to quell the rebellion, as it is in the interest of the vast majority to have a Jubilee year. If it is not in the interest of the majority of people to have a Jubilee, then wealth is likely not significantly stratified.
      • LyndsySimon 9y ago
        > Wiping away your debts wouldn't horribly destroy the credit bureaus, and short of the 1% rising up I doubt there would be civil war I don't believe you have a full understanding of American society, particularly in the rural areas of the country.
• _pmf_ 9y ago
  > The anger that got trump elected is just the beginning if things don't change Try to get a single Democrat to acknowledge this. They are still belitteling and stigmatizing those who share these concerns (and riduculing them for their audacity of hoping that Trump will be able to change anything).
  • grzm 9y ago
    Increasing partisan rancor by generalizing across large groups of people does nothing but make the situation worse. Please don't do this. If this is something you care about, and it appears you do given you chose to comment on it, do what you can to improve the situation.
  • magic_beans 9y ago
    I'm a Democrat (or a bleeding-heart liberal if you will). I completely understand why people voted for Trump. I'm simply puzzled as to why many of the poor folks who voted for him would do so, as his election is clearly not going to help anyone who isn't in his tax bracket.
    • Stryder 9y ago
      Because an obviously incompetent hustler feels like the lesser of two evils compared to a well qualified snake who's secretly stabbing you in the back. Not saying it's rational, or correct, or wise. Just saying that I'm pretty sure that's how people feel.
    • metaphorm 9y ago
      economic self-interest is not even close to the top priority of people when making their voting decisions.
    • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      For many people, voting for an insider felt like voting for the status quo. Hillary was definitely an insider, and was from the same party as the sitting president. If your current conditions are terrible, why vote for more of the same? Note well: I agree that electing Trump won't actually help these people whatsoever. But honestly, I'm not sure that electing Hillary would have helped them very much either...
• okreallywtf 9y ago
  I agree with you, but unfortunately the elites will be the last to suffer. They have been quite effective in blaming the victim for years and will continue to blame immigrants, pc-culture, mexico, regulations and any number of manufactured boogeymen. Once immigrants have been stomped down, minority rights done away with and the environment wrecked maybe people will turn on the elites but by that time we won't have much worth saving I'm afraid.
  • cmahler7 9y ago
    I think this is why the media focuses so much on race and democrat vs republican. Divide and conquer. Keep the people at each others throats instead of at the people who are actually responsible
• temp-dude-87844 9y ago
  It's difficult to imagine a violent uprising in a state with such militarized police and widespread, distributed armed forces presence as the US. When even outside of times of unrest, encounters with the police result in getting fatally shot or seriously injured much more frequently than in comparably high-HDI states [1][2], it would take the cooperation of police and the military to allow unrest to take its course instead of being quickly crushed; this is culturally unlikely in the US which holds public order and the continuity of government in high esteem. [1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-12/when-it-comes-police-shootings-us-doesnt-look-developed-nation https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-12/when-it-comes-police-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
  • Retric 9y ago
    It's one thing to turn a foreign country into a police state, when you need to actually be a productive society that simply stops functioning with large scale unrest. The problem is not direct force of arms, the problem is society needs a vast number of soft targets to continue to operate. If large numbers of people chose to simply take down power lines there is almost nothing the police or military could do. City's water supply pipes are similarly easy to destroy and difficult to replace. Roads are harder to destroy, but easy to prevent most civilian traffic.
    • temp-dude-87844 9y ago
      I'm not sure whether you're saying that sabotage of infrastructure performed by the populace is a good way to perpetuate unrest in a way that a militarized state can't squash, or whether you're saying that the state can quickly destroy key pieces of infrastructure to cause pain to people who refuse to fall in line. Because both are true, but the latter is far more likely and effective: after all, who wants to destroy the last remaining enablers of their comfort, shelter, and livelihood just to prove a point... and then what? One only need to look at the city of Flint, whose water pipes continue to deliver lead-laced water to households black and white, but society has largely routed around the damage: we carry on with our lives and ignore it's a problem. It's only a problem for those in Flint. Meanwhile, the military and police can turn off utilities, blockade towns, enact curfews, and isolate even the flow of information, all without firing a single bullet. This way, pockets of unrest can be abated before they become a movement so pervasive that the military themselves defect.
• metaphorm 9y ago
  we've been in the dystopia column for a long time