http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=4972
We spoke about topics related to many of my more recent posts: post-scarcity economics, the leisure economy, urban land management, state capitalism, and mentioned an alt-center.
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Interview with Stark Truth Radio About Post Scarcity Economics
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9 replies on “Interview with Stark Truth Radio About Post Scarcity Economics”
The remark on the origin of the “just go starve then” mindset was brilliant. I think it’s also further pushed on by immigrant populations recently, and especially since WW2 and globalization: from their perspective, they went from living in small villages without internal plumbing or electricity to, some of them, flying to the other side of the planet, and owning land, having a car, the internet, and the works. Combined with the individualist mentality and the other version of the “just go starve then” attributed to boomers, “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” – I think a significant enough portion of them, at least the vocal ones, believe their fortunes were their achievements.
Some other comments:
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I’d love to do work and play the same rat race, but I’m basically not even allowed to. Look up non-Starbucks jobs in Silicon Valley; “entry level” is 3-5 years experience generally, 5-7 isn’t difficult to find either. “Entry level” is just a phrase in a search engine, it’ll mean whatever people putting up offers label it to be. Unlike maybe some other periods or locations, these numbers aren’t a joke – if they call you at all, they’ll ask about it, and then tell you you’re unqualified.
If you do get one that is “actually” entry level, they’ll give you 40k, or if you’re really lucky 50, and that sounds great if you live in “flyover country”, but even the feds classify low income in silicon valley from, depending on which area in it, as 80 to 105. 80k is *low* income. Also to qualify for california state health insurance, your income must be below 10. I won’t go into how much other health insurance costs here.
All the jobs are in San Francisco and San Jose, and at 6:30 in the morning it’ll take you, if you live in the wrong direction, 60 minutes to go 20 miles. Distance between SF and SJ is ~50 miles. There is a metro here called BART, which is a joke, has murders and robberies left and right, takes 15 years to build 1 station 5 miles from the previous terminal, and is essentially a glorified parking lot shuttle for SF (it doesn’t reach SJ). And it can’t even do that properly because people literally don’t use BART because there is no parking space.
The new station is “right next to” the TESLA factory. Quotes because even though property lines are bordering, it’s 2 miles from the exit of the station to the entrance of TESLA. 1 mile of which is no sidewalk, 45mph road, the other 1 mile being parking lots.
Guess we’re all just not passionate enough about our field / about saving the planet.
If within 30 years Silicon Valley isn’t another Chicago or Detroit, I will be thoroughly surprised. Those walled and guarded neighborhoods in South America will appear here for sure.
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Company housing is just marketing. I saw pictures about it 10 years ago in Popular Science. What have they done in the past 10 years? Buying up small lots to make a big one? They’re not going to do it.
On one hand they proudly allow articles to be published about their employees living in trucks in their parking lots to show how “motivated” their employees are, what a great company they are to work for etc. etc.
On the other hand it doesn’t get them anything. Google Fiber is no longer coming to a home near you because they decided doing all that extra work at that cost didn’t get them any money. Do you have any idea how unprofitable it is to build and then make back that moeny off of high rise apartments? That’s assuming they get around the zoning laws and NIMBYism, which they probably could if they wanted to simply because of how much money they have. But they don’t. They don’t care.
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ISPs make 97/98% profit margin. For reference, “rentseeking” is 12. This isn’t a secret, google “ISP profit margin” and you’ll even get one of those special highlighted articles at the top giving you the number. Hallelujah free market! Net neutrality infringes on the free speech of ISPs. That last one is actually from a judge.
Water/Electric utilities in America are being privatized too, if they aren’t already.
With the effect you’d expect.
Thanks, Korezaan.
The real stupidity of hard core cuck right wingers is giving the impression they’ll let people(including their own) go without basic food or medicine pretty much ensures they’ll never get real power. No one cares about “conservative principles” when they’re worried about dying in the street. Bread and butter first. And then they write reams of mournful Jeremiads about “why do conservatives always lose?”, “Why can’t conservatives conserve anything?” “Why duz Cthulu always swim left?” Blablabla
Bay Area sounds even more horrible than I thought. Of course any big city is amazing if you’re rich. But sounds like the whole place just screams that it’s oversaturated and desperately wants you to leave. Living in the DC area felt a lot like that. Everything pretty much designed to be uncomfortable and passive-aggressively spoil all the small pleasures in life. Spend long enough stuck in that kind of environment and that feeling you’re not wanted internalizes itself.
I figure ISP companies shouldn’t exist at all. High speed internet ought to be basically a guaranteed universal right in a modern country as a basic requirement for civic participation.
Selling out utilities should be regarded as treason. Privatizing prisons is a textbook exercise in perverse incentives.
This was great. The comment on how the Right has a clear view of human nature while the Left realizes you need to take care of people is brilliant and summerises a great deal in a nice package. Clarity. Very important.
“…not everyone can make a million dollars by placing a crucifix in a jar of urine…”
And how!
On distorting prices due to basic income. I don’t believe this is a big problem. First everyone is mostly living somewhere and eating now. Second the basic income will be low. Maybe it will raise the cost of medium cost food items but we have lots of land. Production could be increased easily. If people had basic income I believe that a LOT of people would move to smaller towns to live at a much higher level. You mentioned farm towns. I could see this. There’s a lot of beautiful places in the desert and mountains that now you can’t make a living in but with a basic income you could live great and make actual material products or digital products and sell online. Note that I found another graph and SSI, welfare and food assistance all comes to around $2.45 Trillion. So that comes to $8,166 per person but I don’t know how many people that covers already as they would all be moved to basic income.
https://media.nationalpriorities.org/cache/31/5b/315badf0cfdfe0a2d03fe20615ee052b.jpg
Here’s for over 18 @ $12,000.
Number of people age 18 and over 242,834,652
So we need $2,914,015,824,000 call it $3 Trillion for revenue for a basic income of $12,000 for everyone over 18. Budget is currently $3.9 Trillion.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/CBO_Infographic_2016.png
We need another trillion of revenue to get the above $12,000 per each over 18yr old. Killing the FED could give us 400 billion a year in interest payments and I thing we could find the other 600 billion somewhere. Cut the military and raise some taxes on the 1%. I think it’s possible. I also think having a basic income would raise revenue as people would be willing to take chances to build things they feel are more profitable. If they fail they will have just lived frugally for several years. If one thing didn’t work they try something else their whole lives.
Agenda 21 sucks if you want to use your property like you want. It’s total control of people’s property without paying you. It’s “ecology” for city dwellers that they don’t pay for. A good example is prosecuting people for building a small dam to trap water that falls as rain on your land. I find this an abomination. As if the water won’t eventually move down stream. I understand your views on regulation creating spaces like Korea but cities can already do this. Let them do this first as they already have the power to do so and leave the rural people out of your (forced) fantasy ecotopias. A lot of Agenda 21’s plans are not about making cities better but about taking away land rights from rural people and packing them into cites. Not everyone wants to live on cities or be crowded.
Role of Women in the post scarcity economy. I think that things will not change. Women want to have variety in their lives and right now they can marry and if they decide not to be a Wife they can easily divorce and stick Men with the bill. They can also stick Men with the bill through the daddy government. The thing that will change this is when Men can breed without Women. This will happen. Already a Women’s skin cell can be changed into a egg and it’s been found that like the ancients said it actually takes a Man’s sperm to turn the egg into a zygote. Connect this with artificial wombs of which a lamb has been raised in already and you get a society that is much like the old ways. Men will own their children. This will in the most dramatic way make Women equal. They won’t like this as whether they realize it or not they are like the pigs in “Animal Farm:, they are equal but more equal. It will be hard on them. Already have you noticed that Women see themselves as pussy? Look at the Women’s magazines and it’s all about sex, sex, sex. They realize that other than having children they aren’t offering a lot to Men these days. They know Men still want a traditional family and they know they either don’t really want this and\or not up to the job. It’s too much for them. Status demands they be “liberated” yet that negates their primary utility in the human race of raising children. Quite a dilemma.
Thanks about the show. I’m inexperienced at public speaking, my interviews with Rob Stark are pretty much all I’ve done. I feel like it gets easier as I do it a few times.
Now that I’ve pretty much wrapped up the Alt-Center stuff for now, I may be doing more on women, especially as relates to sexual markets and post-scarcity.
> Thanks about the show. I’m inexperienced at public speaking, my interviews with Rob Stark are pretty much all I’ve done. I feel like it gets easier as I do it a few times.
Stark and you both have a wooden, stilted speech cadence. Improved fluidity would make for much easier listening.
Otherwise content is great.
My speech patterns have been a bit stilted since I was a kid. Some of that comes from being a bit aspie perhaps, some from not knowing other kids in grade school who liked to talk about insect biology and the Roman Empire and thereby being socially isolated in key developmental windows. Also, I started watching what I was saying to try to tailor it to normie-ese, a huge strain for more than a few hours. A lot of those old habits die hard.
Listening to myself, I realize part of what I’m doing is thinking a lot about every word I say and pausing to revise in mid-sentence. With the written word I can work with a sentence until it has the exact sound and meaning I want it to have. A lot of speaking is the art of being fluid and spontaneous. I’ll keep looking at how I can improve and hopefully get some more practice.
Glad I’m getting good feedback about the content, though. To me, that’s the most important part.
I apologize if I came off harsh.
Regardless, I encourage you to keep doing more speaking. I think there are some valuable off the cuff observations that come up in a back and forth convo. The instant feedback from conversation partners often leads to new insights.
Ha, nothing to feel bad about. I was pretty much just agreeing with you after listening to myself. I like to ask myself where the weakest points were and how I could improve. If someone screamed “You suck!” in the comments I wouldn’t roll up in a ball and cry after all these years subject to public scrutiny on the internet. Good feedback, though, does mean a lot to me.
Here’s something that might interest you based on post scarcity. It’s a plan to house the entire world’s population in beach front condos, with the ability for each one to use four times the electricity of a US citizen and have all the food they could want…in 15 years. With almost zero bad effects on the environment. Really.
Exponential Remediation of Civilization’s Footprint
http://jimbowery.blogspot.com/2014/05/introduction-extinction-of-human-race.html
This would make one hell of a kick starter. Charge $100 or $??? to build the first two and after that they would multiply themselves with massive automation. First come first serve with higher condo prices for each tick up in progress. The buy in price would be small with a huge benefit. Get 10 million and you have a billion dollars to build the first two and then it’s home free.