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These photos are powerful, and say a lot about inequality in just a handful of scenes. The ideal situation would be for everyone to live in functionally identi

by zzt 8y ago

These photos are powerful, and say a lot about inequality in just a handful of scenes. The ideal situation would be for everyone to live in functionally identical dwellings that provide their every need. Somewhat like the world described by E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops, except without the dystopian aspect of fully enclosed spaces and unmaintained infrastructure. Until we reach that pinnacle of human existence, we should all work towards preventing the majority of the world's population living in poverty. A good start would be redistributing the ill-gotten wealth of that lucky minority who lord it over everyone else in a perpetual state of power-hungry me-too selfishness.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago
This doesn’t sound like the “ideal situation”, it sounds like a dystopian nightmare. One that will literally never, ever happen, but that doesn’t stop people from trying, no matter how many hundreds of millions suffer and die in the process. Edit: I’ll also point out the irony that nothing has impoverished and starved as many people as your vision of utopia, and nothing has pulled as many people OUT of abject poverty like the inequality that you’re railing against. You can’t have markets without some degree of inequality, and billions of people TODAY are not starving to death because of market capitalism. And yet you continue to blindly suggest we kill the proverbial goose. I don’t understand.
- zzt 8y ago
  On the contrary, as we gradually grow further toward work being almost entirely automated, capitalism as we know it will wither and die. There is no market if machines do all the work. It may take centuries but in the end, the only equitable answer is full communism, managed by a benevolent artificial intelligence.
  - noonespecial 8y ago
    Yes perhaps but just like letting toddlers drive your car, trying something that could be good in the future might have terrible consequences now.
    - zzt 8y ago
      Might do, might not. Either way, we need to plan for it.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    > It may take centuries but in the end, the only equitable answer is full communism, managed by a benevolent artificial intelligence. Sounds like hell to me. (I read a scifi story about this long ago. A man dies, and wakes up in a place where his every whim is instantly granted. After a while, he gets frustrated and tells the person in charge that paradise isn't what he expected. The person tells him he's not in paradise, he's in hell.)
AckSyn 8y ago
Sorry man, communist or socialist utopias have never and will never exist. There’s too much history as proof to ever conclude the opposite in human nature.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I assure you, my needs are not the same as yours. With 7 billion people, one-size-fits-all simply doesn't.
- zzt 8y ago
  I did not claim that the needs of everyone are identical, only that they should be met without favouring one individual over another.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    The ideal situation would be for everyone to live in functionally identical dwellings that provide their every need. Perhaps you can explain to me how my different needs can be met by being forced to live in a unit that is functionally identical to all others. Because I absolutely don't see it.
    - zzt 8y ago
      The function of the unit is to meet your needs. This function is identical for all units. The collective of units provides an equitable living solution for all humans.
      - didgeoridoo 8y ago
        I think what you’re describing is called “post-scarcity utopia”. It’s hardly an interesting point of view to say that this would be desirable. Pursuit of it, however, has killed more people than war in the 20th century.
        zzt 8y ago
        > Pursuit of it, however, has killed more people than war in the 20th century. How so?
    - taneq 8y ago
      I think they're talking about the end goal where a magical nanotechnological post-Singularity AI palace can supply literally every possible need for any possible person.
taneq 8y ago
> Until we reach that pinnacle of human existence, we should all work towards preventing the majority of the world's population living in poverty. Are talking about absolute or relative poverty? I absolutely agree that no human should go without food, clean water, shelter, and sanitation. But I absolutely disagree that a 50" flatscreen TV should be considered a human right just because Bill Gates has a 200" flatscreen TV. > A good start would be redistributing the ill-gotten wealth of that lucky minority who lord it over everyone else in a perpetual state of power-hungry me-too selfishness. So if you work hard, and are resourceful and inventive, at what point does your wealth become ill-gotten and subject to redistribution?
- cam_l 8y ago
  Well, the issue is of course that all wealth is relative. There is no absolute level of poverty except in death. The issue is, for both yourself and the previous post, where you draw the line. Hunger, health, contentment, education, or self actualisation? There is another level to this argument that is central to the reason why this inequality thing gets so much airtime (even though people, with views similar to what you have stated, don't see the problem). That is the secondary effects. At a certain level, the wealthy start to get a significant benefit just from being wealthy. They get to direct legislation to benefit further, they start to see themselves as deserving of their wealth, and their vice and their role. They start to see themselves as kings and the poor as a lesser kind of human (and historically as inhuman). This is the biggest reason for equality. If you can solve the proclivity of wealthy people toward self interest and dehumanisation of their fellow human, then by all means get as rich as you please.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    The problem is that human society does not seem to work very well like that. Either humans seem to think they have to do it themselves, or they think the state is fully responsible for them. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, and yet, either extreme is totally unlivable. > This is the biggest reason for equality. I would argue that by far the biggest reason people aren't equal is that people ... aren't born equal, and yes, it does "run in families" (that's the whole point of evolution of course). Perhaps this is not so much a reason for the day to day differences in their lives, but it is the root cause behind those differences. People are inherently different, both from a physical point of view (good health runs in families, in both the poor and the rich), and from a cultural point of view (there's a reason people are rich, and of course they raise their children to have that same property, to think the same way). Same with poor. For many there's a reason they are poor and they teach their children to, say, hate entrepreneurship, investment and risk (man, there's a LOT of that in Western Europe). The issue is twofold. You cannot fix ineqality by rewarding the poor. That works for a few of them, but not for many. That works for rich people that are in danger of falling out of the rich category, helps them get back in, but it doesn't lift many poor out of poverty. That leaves the other tactic. You can fix inequality by punishing, obstructing and outright attacking the rich/smart/powerful/... But of course that is done by actual people. Those people, whether in the Soviet Union, China, or indeed France (during the revolution), invariably judge themselves to be better than the plebs and start using those punishments and that power that they have to guarantee themselves a very high social position. I would argue that currently Erdogan and Putin are (very imperfect) examples of this in action. Furthermore, this destroys societies. The problem with "justice" is that it doesn't exist. People will always have to be in place to judge (and no, they're not judges) which situations are just and which aren't. And people ... lie, cheat, ... From an individual's perspective it's never directly for their own advantage. Of course people that work within the state to create equality need to use their power to guarantee their power stays, for of course their mission of eliminating inequality will fail if they fail to protect themselves. So they use that power to attack personal threats, or threats against the political status-quo. In many cases, that's sort of defensible, because they would indeed fail if they hadn't. If the communists get voted out in China, their mission, their dream for China will fail. Of course, in that case that's exactly what the population wants to achieve by voting them out, but it will still fail. TLDR. equality sucks. You cannot lift everyone up to wealth and high society. You can only push everyone down, destroying everything in the process.
Sophistifunk 8y ago
> functionally identical dwellings that provide their every need. Somewhat like the world described by E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops, except without the dystopian aspect The idea that we should all live in functionally identical dwellings is in itself dystopian.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

by zzt 8y ago

ryanwaggoner 8y ago

This doesn’t sound like the “ideal situation”, it sounds like a dystopian nightmare. One that will literally never, ever happen, but that doesn’t stop people from trying, no matter how many hundreds of millions suffer and die in the process. Edit: I’ll also point out the irony that nothing has impoverished and starved as many people as your vision of utopia, and nothing has pulled as many people OUT of abject poverty like the inequality that you’re railing against. You can’t have markets without some degree of inequality, and billions of people TODAY are not starving to death because of market capitalism. And yet you continue to blindly suggest we kill the proverbial goose. I don’t understand.

zzt 8y ago
On the contrary, as we gradually grow further toward work being almost entirely automated, capitalism as we know it will wither and die. There is no market if machines do all the work. It may take centuries but in the end, the only equitable answer is full communism, managed by a benevolent artificial intelligence.
- noonespecial 8y ago
  Yes perhaps but just like letting toddlers drive your car, trying something that could be good in the future might have terrible consequences now.
  - zzt 8y ago
    Might do, might not. Either way, we need to plan for it.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  > It may take centuries but in the end, the only equitable answer is full communism, managed by a benevolent artificial intelligence. Sounds like hell to me. (I read a scifi story about this long ago. A man dies, and wakes up in a place where his every whim is instantly granted. After a while, he gets frustrated and tells the person in charge that paradise isn't what he expected. The person tells him he's not in paradise, he's in hell.)

AckSyn 8y ago

Sorry man, communist or socialist utopias have never and will never exist. There’s too much history as proof to ever conclude the opposite in human nature.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I assure you, my needs are not the same as yours. With 7 billion people, one-size-fits-all simply doesn't.

zzt 8y ago
I did not claim that the needs of everyone are identical, only that they should be met without favouring one individual over another.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  The ideal situation would be for everyone to live in functionally identical dwellings that provide their every need. Perhaps you can explain to me how my different needs can be met by being forced to live in a unit that is functionally identical to all others. Because I absolutely don't see it.
  - zzt 8y ago
    The function of the unit is to meet your needs. This function is identical for all units. The collective of units provides an equitable living solution for all humans.
    - didgeoridoo 8y ago
      I think what you’re describing is called “post-scarcity utopia”. It’s hardly an interesting point of view to say that this would be desirable. Pursuit of it, however, has killed more people than war in the 20th century.
      - zzt 8y ago
        > Pursuit of it, however, has killed more people than war in the 20th century. How so?
  - taneq 8y ago
    I think they're talking about the end goal where a magical nanotechnological post-Singularity AI palace can supply literally every possible need for any possible person.

taneq 8y ago

> Until we reach that pinnacle of human existence, we should all work towards preventing the majority of the world's population living in poverty. Are talking about absolute or relative poverty? I absolutely agree that no human should go without food, clean water, shelter, and sanitation. But I absolutely disagree that a 50" flatscreen TV should be considered a human right just because Bill Gates has a 200" flatscreen TV. > A good start would be redistributing the ill-gotten wealth of that lucky minority who lord it over everyone else in a perpetual state of power-hungry me-too selfishness. So if you work hard, and are resourceful and inventive, at what point does your wealth become ill-gotten and subject to redistribution?

cam_l 8y ago
Well, the issue is of course that all wealth is relative. There is no absolute level of poverty except in death. The issue is, for both yourself and the previous post, where you draw the line. Hunger, health, contentment, education, or self actualisation? There is another level to this argument that is central to the reason why this inequality thing gets so much airtime (even though people, with views similar to what you have stated, don't see the problem). That is the secondary effects. At a certain level, the wealthy start to get a significant benefit just from being wealthy. They get to direct legislation to benefit further, they start to see themselves as deserving of their wealth, and their vice and their role. They start to see themselves as kings and the poor as a lesser kind of human (and historically as inhuman). This is the biggest reason for equality. If you can solve the proclivity of wealthy people toward self interest and dehumanisation of their fellow human, then by all means get as rich as you please.
- candiodari 8y ago
  The problem is that human society does not seem to work very well like that. Either humans seem to think they have to do it themselves, or they think the state is fully responsible for them. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, and yet, either extreme is totally unlivable. > This is the biggest reason for equality. I would argue that by far the biggest reason people aren't equal is that people ... aren't born equal, and yes, it does "run in families" (that's the whole point of evolution of course). Perhaps this is not so much a reason for the day to day differences in their lives, but it is the root cause behind those differences. People are inherently different, both from a physical point of view (good health runs in families, in both the poor and the rich), and from a cultural point of view (there's a reason people are rich, and of course they raise their children to have that same property, to think the same way). Same with poor. For many there's a reason they are poor and they teach their children to, say, hate entrepreneurship, investment and risk (man, there's a LOT of that in Western Europe). The issue is twofold. You cannot fix ineqality by rewarding the poor. That works for a few of them, but not for many. That works for rich people that are in danger of falling out of the rich category, helps them get back in, but it doesn't lift many poor out of poverty. That leaves the other tactic. You can fix inequality by punishing, obstructing and outright attacking the rich/smart/powerful/... But of course that is done by actual people. Those people, whether in the Soviet Union, China, or indeed France (during the revolution), invariably judge themselves to be better than the plebs and start using those punishments and that power that they have to guarantee themselves a very high social position. I would argue that currently Erdogan and Putin are (very imperfect) examples of this in action. Furthermore, this destroys societies. The problem with "justice" is that it doesn't exist. People will always have to be in place to judge (and no, they're not judges) which situations are just and which aren't. And people ... lie, cheat, ... From an individual's perspective it's never directly for their own advantage. Of course people that work within the state to create equality need to use their power to guarantee their power stays, for of course their mission of eliminating inequality will fail if they fail to protect themselves. So they use that power to attack personal threats, or threats against the political status-quo. In many cases, that's sort of defensible, because they would indeed fail if they hadn't. If the communists get voted out in China, their mission, their dream for China will fail. Of course, in that case that's exactly what the population wants to achieve by voting them out, but it will still fail. TLDR. equality sucks. You cannot lift everyone up to wealth and high society. You can only push everyone down, destroying everything in the process.

Sophistifunk 8y ago

> functionally identical dwellings that provide their every need. Somewhat like the world described by E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops, except without the dystopian aspect The idea that we should all live in functionally identical dwellings is in itself dystopian.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]