If you think this current brand of capitalism requires plebs to have money, I’m not sure how you explain the fact that when taking inflation into account wages have been either stagnant or actually going down ever since the 70’s / 80’s, the amount of wealth owned by the same plebs compared to the “financial ruling class” (mainly executives and such, and especially the banking sector thanks to deregulation) has shrunk dramatically, and cost of living keeps getting higher, while at the same time the compensation for the “financial ruling class” has grown at a frankly exponential rate.
Sufficiently advanced AI will, if anything, make it even more likely that that “ruling class” will realize they don’t need quite as many of us around because all we do us suck up their resources and complain how we haven’t eaten anything but cup noodles in a week and our teeth hurt.
They should replace workers and people should deserve to live without being workers, but it should also be painfully obvious that our current economic system won’t support this idea, and won’t until we do some pretty drastic things.
It’s not that we couldn’t build a post-scarcity society probably even right now given some pretty radical adjustment of resource allocations, we just don’t want to build one – “we” being the 0.01% that have such insane amounts of wealth that they’ve essentially taken over the whole economic system, largely thanks to eg. dumb fucks like Reagan and sociopathic fucks like Thatcher and the people who idolize them buying into the idea that they too can be that rich because the wealth will somehow magically trickle down.
lol and here I was thinking I had a gap in my Trek trek meme knowledge.
Also, don’t be too hard on yourself: considering the frankly ridiculous amount of information that we modern humans cram into our craniums, tripping up on an actor’s name is prettty minor 😀
Ha, I never actually paid attention to that. I think the fact that I’m not a native English speaker could be why “dampener” never sounded weird to me.
Although looks like the Oxford English Dictionary says both have the meaning “thing or person that has a restraining or subduing effect”, so I guess they’d both be correct in that sense?
And, frankly, without conservatives in general. They’re an existential threat, starting from the fact that they’re opposed to doing anything about climate change (well anything that doesn’t make it worse, anyhow), not to mention that a nontrivial percentage of them would love to see me and others like me murdered because of our gender identity