A Boring Dystopia

Good old days when the factory owner comes outside to see a rope on a streetlight and suddenly working conditions get a lot better

We had to say goodbye to my father a couple years back, so it is now my mothers 'job' to cost the pension paying company as much as possible. It's hard work, but it honest living.

Mr. Dent, do you have any idea how much damage this bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?

I hate we’re going through this, but it does help to know I’m not alone. I try, I really do. I am near done with grad school and work full time, but in my free time I’m too drained to do much more than just zone out for hours.

I’ve realized that there are lots of ways societies can become great, but they all involve discipline. The people as a whole need to be trusted to show up when they say they will, not steal things as soon as they can, and actually do the things they’re tasked with.

I have basically zero personal discipline, which is a pretty big problem for me personally, but I think it’s even worse for a society. If I stay in bed instead of doing homework or going to work, I might flunk or get fired. If I steal from my job or pretend to work while half assing it, I get fired and/or arrested. If everyone does it, we can’t individually punish everyone, we just either have a less reliable society, which leads to decreased social trust, or we have different social and legal requirements for different classes of people, which has not been working out great so far.

I guess what I’m saying is, if capitalism by default drains people of their initiative and discipline, maybe it’s just not a very effective system.

It has, but instead of workers getting better hours CEOs just get more money

We have different forms of such tech for a century now. For most people it reduces the work load to zero, as in they get fired. All the while one person (with this new tech) has to do the work of many and their load doesn't get reduced. Finally, the person not doing any of the work, the owner, pockets the extra profits.

We've had over a century of continuous development of technologies that effectively work as a force multiplier in terms of work done per person. The current "AI" craze just being the latest of those.

At every point, business had the option of using this technology to improve the work/life balance and improve overall the lives of people, or improve the size of their bank accounts. They have always chosen the latter.

AI, if it improves threatens to be the straw that breaks the camel's back here. It cannot replace all human workers, but it can certainly reduce the demand for them (and thus how much they need to pay those that remain).

Now, I'm not going to say we're at the point where capitalism cannot function any more. While society needs work done by humans. There will still be a place for the carrot on a stick method it provides, and I'm yet to be convinced there's a better way to achieve this. But I do think capitalism needs to be heavily regulated to prevent this wealth accumulation by so few that could never in a million years spend all their winnings. This is the primary failing with the system, and all the other problems stem from this accumulation culture.

It has, now one person can do the work of ten... so now there's only one job, where there used to be ten.

I think that one could be partially valid based on the subtitle, we just have too many chores and BS that we have in our lives that there is no balance. I don't agree with the headline but I can see some validity in it.

Hiring a Hitwoman

The prostitute just can't be trans as she would then think she was punched by a man.

Anyone who's had a pacemaker, prosthetic joint, cataract surgery, one of those pumps to manually inflate an otherwise impotent penis, a tooth filling, a peg leg, etc... is a cyborg.

We crossed that line a LONG time ago.

The first step towards becoming cybermen.