• 14 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • This is just a long-winded way to ask “how do we pay for it?” The answer is taxes. That’s always the answer.

    Let’s call it 10 trillion total: 20m rental properties x 500k average home price. If we allocated half the annual military budget—400bn—to buying private rentals and making them social housing, it would take 25 years to get through the whole market.

    The financial scale of the solution is not so large as to be insurmountable. The US government’s priorities simply lie elsewhere.


  • If you’re aware of public and social housing then why are you asking how community ownership and management works?

    In any case, yes, of course all rental housing should be publicly owned. Vienna’s Gemeindebauten and Singapore’s HDB, among others, have proven that pretty definitively.

    I’m not certain that all housing should be public, though. Privately owned primary residences are probably fine, in the grand scheme of things. But rental housing for profit should obviously be abolished.



  • Eh. I can see it working.

    Humans are social creatures. We like to feel useful and connect with others. In a world with a replicator in every home, dining out is much more about the social experience than the food. Working in a restaurant would be about community and shared interest. People would volunteer to staff them for the same reason people do any form of volunteer work: they enjoy the sense of purpose, skill-sharing, and camaraderie that comes with it. Plus, with replicators making preparation and cleanup trivial, there’s a lot less labor associated with food service.

    Lastly, consider that post-scarcity dining establishments that would have no tolerance for rude customers. If someone went full Karen on a volunteer, they’d be banned in a hot second. The social dynamics of such an arrangement would entirely favor the staff: if there are no “paying customers” then there’s no entitlement to go with it.

    I don’t find it all that difficult to envision a set of social incentives that would keep restaurants alive.



  • “Is Discovery canon?” is an interesting question because the only real purpose canon serves is to give us boundaries for where it’s reasonable to stop expecting (searching for?) a degree of consistency throughout all of Star Trek

    When someone says “that’s not canon” what they’re usually telling you is that they don’t care to reconcile it with other Trek

    Given that Discovery is two seasons of “top secret classified never happened” and three seasons of “800 years later than any other series,” even if we decided it was canon in some technical or legal sense, it gives us basically nothing that could potentially influence other Star Trek, before or since. In other words, it’s not canon in any practical or meaningful sense.

    tl;dr yeah I guess you’re right














  • You’re preaching to the choir. “Concede the point” is a figure of speech which means the speaker is going explore an assumption despite not believing it themselves.

    My point is that the whole “capitalism is the best economic system we know about because humans are greedy” argument is sophistry. It doesn’t even make sense in the context of its own flawed premise.