6 ms·

I think you're missing a golden opportunity here. You can take all the people who agree with the commenter you're talking to and put them in giant Tokyo-style m

I think you're missing a golden opportunity here. You can take all the people who agree with the commenter you're talking to and put them in giant Tokyo-style megacities, with ultra high-speed rail, blazing-fast internet, free housing, the works. Then we can tear down the cities, towns, and suburbs they moved out of, establish a bunch of small towns with lots of forest and prairie, and produce goods for them to consume, on the condition that they stay in their megacities. It would be like a Morlock/Eloi situation, except that we'll all be Morlocks. They'll do the missile defense systems and the smartphone OS's, and I'll grow the corn and mine the rare earth minerals. We can all even adopt a bicameral government, one that governs areas of population density above a certain value and one that governs areas below a certain value.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
Morlocks ate Eloi. It was a story where the subtext was "And after you rich assholes have become helplessly dependent on your servants, the servants will take over the world and eat the rich because you people are becoming sheeple." I have difficulty seeing any world where the goal is Morlocks and Eloi as some kind of positive thing to shoot for as a goal. Personally, I would like to see a world where fewer people have reason to bitterly suggest that we should eat the rich.
- quacked 5y ago
  Perhaps my sentence structure wasn't clear enough; I mean "we'll all be Morlocks", in that the cities shall serve the non-cities, and vice versa. You can't have a functioning nation of all urban or all small-town.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    I agree that we need both big cities and small towns.
stale2002 5y ago
> you can take all the people who agree with the commenter you're talking to and put them in giant Tokyo-style megacities So, funnily enough, this is actually a similar argument that I often make. I believe it benefits everyone, if yuppies like myself, get what we want with Tokyo megacities, so that we don't cause all these problems with the rest of society, with our high income, driving up prices of everything around us. Someone who described this very well, was noahpinion. He called this strategy, the Yuppie Containment Protocol. Society creates "Gentrification Containment Units", so that we the Yuppies don't cause this horrible harm, of extra income and wealth, hurting everyone else. Us yuppies, bringing in demand for gentrified coffee shops, fancy skyscapers, and upscale restaurants drives out existing residents. It is better to just give us a couple megacities somewhere, so our horrible terrible income and wealth, and willingness to spend it on the economy doesn't hurt those gentrification vulnerable people.
- Talanes 5y ago
  I'm with you up to this weird high-earners fixation. Who exactly is working in those coffee shops?
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    > Who exactly is working in those coffee shops? Perhaps high-earning, artisanal baristas who specialize in getting the most out of perfectly-roasted-that-morning civet-excrement-extracted coffee beans? While I also advocate ultra-high-density (Tokyo is a piker compared to #1 density Manila) cities, I freely admit that rentier dynamics in those settings in capitalist contexts remains an unsatisfactorily-addressed problem, and service workers get hit especially hard.
  - stale2002 5y ago
    > Who exactly is working in those coffee shops? Well since there is now all this extra living space in other places that is freed up, because all the high earners don't live in other places, then I guess it would only be people who actually want to live in that area or work these jobs. If nobody wants these jobs, because cost of living is high in those areas, then wages would have to increase to attract people who want to work there. People would not be forced to live there, because of all those extra empty homes in other cities, that the yuppies moved out of.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Morlocks ate Eloi. It was a story where the subtext was "And after you rich assholes have become helplessly dependent on your servants, the servants will take over the world and eat the rich because you people are becoming sheeple." I have difficulty seeing any world where the goal is Morlocks and Eloi as some kind of positive thing to shoot for as a goal. Personally, I would like to see a world where fewer people have reason to bitterly suggest that we should eat the rich.

quacked 5y ago
Perhaps my sentence structure wasn't clear enough; I mean "we'll all be Morlocks", in that the cities shall serve the non-cities, and vice versa. You can't have a functioning nation of all urban or all small-town.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I agree that we need both big cities and small towns.

stale2002 5y ago

> you can take all the people who agree with the commenter you're talking to and put them in giant Tokyo-style megacities So, funnily enough, this is actually a similar argument that I often make. I believe it benefits everyone, if yuppies like myself, get what we want with Tokyo megacities, so that we don't cause all these problems with the rest of society, with our high income, driving up prices of everything around us. Someone who described this very well, was noahpinion. He called this strategy, the Yuppie Containment Protocol. Society creates "Gentrification Containment Units", so that we the Yuppies don't cause this horrible harm, of extra income and wealth, hurting everyone else. Us yuppies, bringing in demand for gentrified coffee shops, fancy skyscapers, and upscale restaurants drives out existing residents. It is better to just give us a couple megacities somewhere, so our horrible terrible income and wealth, and willingness to spend it on the economy doesn't hurt those gentrification vulnerable people.

Talanes 5y ago
I'm with you up to this weird high-earners fixation. Who exactly is working in those coffee shops?
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  > Who exactly is working in those coffee shops? Perhaps high-earning, artisanal baristas who specialize in getting the most out of perfectly-roasted-that-morning civet-excrement-extracted coffee beans? While I also advocate ultra-high-density (Tokyo is a piker compared to #1 density Manila) cities, I freely admit that rentier dynamics in those settings in capitalist contexts remains an unsatisfactorily-addressed problem, and service workers get hit especially hard.
- stale2002 5y ago
  > Who exactly is working in those coffee shops? Well since there is now all this extra living space in other places that is freed up, because all the high earners don't live in other places, then I guess it would only be people who actually want to live in that area or work these jobs. If nobody wants these jobs, because cost of living is high in those areas, then wages would have to increase to attract people who want to work there. People would not be forced to live there, because of all those extra empty homes in other cities, that the yuppies moved out of.