Technology

the average person doesn't think they are working class, they think that's what poor people are.

my dad made a working class salary his entire life, but he always told us we were middle class and 'better' than those working-class idiot losers.

average people admire rich people and want to be them, and they hate working class people.

i'm a middle class person now, but i live around a lot of upper middle class people, and regularly they let me know I'm subhuman scum in their eyes. and working-class people i grew up with, think i'm a rich effete snob with my graduate degree and my expensive coffee and my compact car.

people generally are much more focused on the differences around them and feeling they are better than their neighbors is a far bigger concern than what rich people are doing. the person living across the street from you gets more upset about you getting a nicer car than them then they do about jeff bezo's wedding.

It's because Americans are comfortable with it.

You are imparting rationality on a system known for not acting rationally. Capitalists both act against their own interests and against the larger communities interests quite frequently. Economists sometimes describe it is "economic externalities" and recognised long ago that modelling players as rational actors was flawed. Why would companies risk their own futures by funding climate denialism?

Economies are strongest when small amojnts change hands often which is exactly the opposite of what the current concentration of wealth seeks to do. These are people who work and vote against minimum wage increases, unions, and who constantly push propaganda blaming the working class for spending money to deflect from the fact that they don’t pay enough.

It’s not “absurd” to say that the richest among us are trying to drain wealth out of the working class because it’s happening in broad daylight. We can all see it, they don’t give a shit about their employees. It’s to the point were every 4-day work-week experiment has been a success both for employee happiness and productivity but we still aren’t seeing that schedule being adopted.

The rich do not care about you, and if millions of the working class die they don’t give a shit. Slave plantations weren’t actually all that efficient but it didn’t matter because it the abuse was part of it.

The window in which these calculations remain relevant is rapidly closing with the development of robots and drones.

the issue with housing is that other people hate other people. they don't want more people living around them. they hate growth. they think people should live 'somewhere else' than their town/city/neighborhood.

i live in a city with over 120K people. if a housing project goes up that that adds say, 20 units for 30-40 people, people FREAK OUT. and oppose it and usually it gets downzied to like 12 units for 20 people, and only then it's approved for development. this is in already very dense city, it's worse in less dense places. anytime a major project, for like 500+ units is proposed, it has to be downsized by like 50% before anyone will approve it because the citizens REVOLT. they HATE new housing.

the last major development in my urban area added 8000 jobs, and 500 units of housing, and the major opposition was to the housing, all the feedback was 'no new housing, but more new jobs'. the plan with the highest approval from the citizens was the one with 10,000 new jobs, and 0 new housing. and th eone with 5000 jobs and 1000 units of housing, was opposed like 90%. and the plan that was approved only had a 1 vote margin...

this is what people want. they democratically oppose new housing at every opportunity.

Psychopathic capitalists don't feel like they're winning unless everyone else is losing.

They always weasel out of taxes. My idea was to give each person something like carbon coins that works like an emission permit. Give everyone the same amount each month and keep it within nature's limits. Then, if someone wants to do something polluting like run a datacenter, they'll just have to purchase the coins for that from the open market from those willing to sell. The end result is still money going to the poor but not as a tax, and hard limit on pollution.

Just replace "togas" with "mass graves" and we're good to go.

we lay in mass graves in that future, or at our hovels wishing we were at mass graves. The rich are ones laying in whatever the shit they are wearing, hunting us still alive for sport with drones.

They will buy their products and services from each other. That can still form a working economy. It would function just like any slavery based economy of the past, just with more slaves than usual

I just don't like it when a whole ethnic group is wiped out. It goes against my unimportant personal opinions, that's all.

They're gonna want something in exchange for UBI. Maybe we all have to give blood for their anti-aging research, or sleep in beds that harvest our body heat. Something.

Except that will never happen in a capitalist society

Sure but the system would only work if the rich agreed to pay for our expenses via taxes. Don't expect it anytime soon.