The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

NY Times ^ | June 11, 2019 | Aaron Bastani

[C19fan]

It starts with a burger.

In 2008 a Dutch professor named Mark Post presented the proof of concept for what he called “cultured meat.” Five years later, in a London TV studio, Mr. Post and his colleagues ate a burger they had grown from animal cells in a laboratory. Secretly funded by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, the journey from petri dish to plate had cost $325,000 — making theirs the most expensive meal in history. Fortunately, the results were promising: Hanni Rützler, a nutrition scientist, concluded that the patty was “close to meat but not as juicy.” The next question was whether this breakthrough could be made cheaper. Much cheaper.

The first “cultured beef” burgers are likely to enter the market next year, at approximately $50 each. But that won’t last long. Within a decade they will probably be more affordable than even the cheapest barbecue staples of today — all for a product that uses fewer resources, produces negligible greenhouse gases and, remarkably, requires no animals to die.

[freedumb2003]

>>The author has watched too many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.<<

God bless the Ferengi. After “we are too far evolved to use filthy money” the Ferengi were 100% clear: money is how we acquire. Aquisition requires money. Screw your egalitarian crap Federation. Captain Picard is paid the same as Ensign Redshirt? Yeah, right.

DS9 was a MUCH MORE REALISTIC portrayal of people in the next century. Holo porn, dabo girls, gambling — it may be distasteful but that is the very definition of freedom.

[freedumb2003]

>>Once they lick the obstacles on the replicator why bother going to work at all? <<

That comment sort of stands on its own. Proudly.

[Billthedrill]

But there’s a catch. It’s called capitalism. It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share round the fruits of technological development.

This said in a city where every welfare bum has a cell phone? The author's argument is essentially, "Capitalism has created unprecedented wealth and the potential for fantastic technological progress - let's get rid of it!" Some folks are too stubbornly dumb to teach without whacking them with a rolled-up newspaper.

[warsaw44]

Proponents of Socialism and Communism always envision themselves as part of the ruling elite.

They know what’s best for the peons, are smarter than the average American so where would else would they be on the food chain?

[Clutch Martin]

Okay here we go, this is very familiar territory if you read a lot of these statements by people or articles glorifying the Marxist Doctrine.

What it really means is that Marxism and its offshoots may have had problems in the past but that’s because... The writers of these articles or the opinionists were not personally in charge. Had they been personally in charge everything would have been totally okay...

[mjp]

a Professor that said the only way Communism will ever work is if we get to a point technologically where nothing has any value anymore,

For a creature that is not immortal and not indestructible, value depends on law of diminishing marginal utility, the law of time preference, and the specific hierarchy of values of each individual

[Justa]

Only tyrants and ingrates support communism.

Communism = The world owes you resources and services based upon your value to the state.

Capitalism = You owe the world services and resources based upon what you value in payment.

One system leads to ingratitude, selfishness and tyranny.

One system leads to self-sufficiency, gratitude and civility.

[Mr. K]

I am torn on the farming subsidies issue...

If there is a bad year and farmers go out of business then the next year things get worse.

We have no famines in this country.

[DoughtyOne]

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...this is a general all-purpose message, and should not be seen as targeting any individual I am responding to...

Just $236.00 dollars to 95.00%

[thoughtomator]

Even for NYT this is a new low. But at least they are flying their true colors on this one.

[VanShuyten]

One of the great lines from ST:TNG.

CDR. William T Riker: “We no longer enslave animals for food purposes.”

It was intended to show how much more morally advanced they were over us in the 20th Century, but it leaves one wondering for which purposes they continued to enslave animals.

[shanover]

The left seriously thinks American Communism or Socialism will work. They love China’s model.

[Category Four]

Aaron Bastani, the emperor of Dumbassistan.

[Dr. Sivana]

For example, Captain Kirk’s high rise apartment overlooking SF Bay, an original edition of “Tale of Two Cities”, Romulan ale, a signed baseball, etc. One still needs a price and monetary system to determine how these items get distributed.

And dilithium crystals! And, I imagine, the replicators themselves.

[justa-hairyape]

Actually what the world needs is to start paying rent. The planets landlord claims it’s been a couple thousand years. Lol.

[ctdonath2]

I once attended a state rep’s town hall meeting, dominated by farmers (a dairy region). The farmers were BEGGING for an end to the subsidies, so prices could go to sustainable levels; they couldn’t properly compete because it was economic suicide to _not_ accept the subsidies - either all stop, or none stop. I’m sure many of those present are long out of business now, taken over by corporations able to leverage short-term pain into long-term dominance.

[ctdonath2]

My response rant elsewhere:

---

Author is delusional.

"Ours is an age of crisis. We inhabit a world of low growth, low productivity and low wages, of climate breakdown and the collapse of democratic politics. A world where billions, mostly in the global south, live in poverty. A world defined by inequality."

Word thinking trumps any connection to reality in the article. A crisis is declared (no objective contrast with history), terms of badness are enumerated, and a glorious solution declared by removing the one thing that is getting us anywhere close to that goal.

No notice is taken that abject poverty has plummeted from majority thru history to single digit % in a few decades.

Growth may not be as high as it was, but is still in a historically high range. Low end productivity has risen; baseline standards are redefined. US poverty line is at 80th percentile of world income, which in turn has increased.

Climate is not broken. Change requires careful detection to discern, and measurements are debatable.

Democratic politics faces collapse only because Democrats refuse to accept outcome of elections.

Poverty exists, increasingly suffering from 1st world problems instead of 4th.

Having simply declared bad all things capitalist, author then hails sci-fi solutionsl (lab grown meat, asteroid mining, pervasive robotics) while explicitly disallowing the one thing motivating all progress toward those goals: profit motive.

Progressives chronically assume productivity & progress motivated & facilitated by profit will continue without it. They want Elon Musk to succeed (rockets, electric cars) without allowing the incentive of riche$ nor financial tools (able to throw billion$ at a problem fast).

Sam Walton made goods cheap & available, hiring millions in the process. Wouldn't have done without profit to enjoy & leverage.

Jeff Bezos made everything available to all, easy catalog/ordering/delivery. Motivated & enabled by profit.

Progressives fail to grasp that money represents productivity, that disincentivized productivity ends it (Soviet aphorism: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work"). Money is not a durable natural resource needing only redistribution.

Upshot: the article is not satire, it is distilled economic fantasy earnestly believed by many who believe their purpose is to slay the goose that they may enjoy endless golden eggs.

[VR-21]

Thank you for posting that poem. It was like running into an old friend. Like many my age, and embarrassing number of decades ago I was an avid reader of Richard Brautigan. Thanks again.

[ctdonath2]

“the Ferengi were 100% clear: money is how we acquire”

Further clarification:
Money represents productivity. ~$7.25 shows that someone produced _at_least_ one hour’s worth of goods/services. Those who acquire more $$$ do so because they did something worth at least that much.
Those who don’t produce, don’t acquire $.
For convenience, we use currency to represent & trade that value (doing so is more, er, productive than bartering).

Tangent:
Thanks to minimum wage laws, those unable to produce _at_least_ ~$7.25/hr of goods/services is literally forbidden to produce at all.
Minimum wage is codified suppression of the under-productive.

[ctdonath2]

Indeed; how many species went extinct precisely because they had no value as food or other goods? Other than those already wild in Argentina, cows would simply die off along with most un-maintained (due to cost) livestock.