Yes it was. Fascism is certainly among the highest scorers in any corpse counting contest.

For the love of Janice, is no one going to say, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"?

The soviet experience of communism, such as it was, was no more an 'experiment' than our 'experiment' in democracy, such as it is. Which is to say, they were both altogether in earnest.

People have busily tabulated the flaws of both the Soviet Union and the United States (and numerous other countries) so I don't need to do that. You all have your own preferred list; so do I.

with central managers being coal workers or shoe salesmen, then it wouldn't seem hard to conclude that the whole endeavor would have failed. — Shawn

They had shoe salesmen in the Soviet Union? Why was I not informed?

Look, there's nothing about shoe salesmen or coal workers which prohibits them from being good managers, but various revolutionary sources assign workers managerial tasks only as they become educated and experienced enough to be effective managers. Motivated shoe and coal workers can acquire managerial skills on the job and in classrooms. I know American workers who, though lacking BAs and MBAs, have the talent and experience to be great managers. The higher in the organization one goes, the more that is expected. We all know professional managers, with Harvard MBAs to boot, who should or will or did get the boot.

Corpse counting is tricky, so there is that. Just off the cuff, I'll grant that communistic and authoritarian regimes have an outstanding record of killing people who got in the way. Perhaps capitalistic, democratic-ish nations and empires have have crappier figures for millions of dead victims, but I am pretty certain that the figures are high enough so that we will not be too embarrassed.

One could even say that great enterprises like revolution, colonialism, imperialism, communism, capitalism, and so on generally entail breaking trainloads of eggs on the way to the grand soufflé.

"Freedom", like Truth, Goodness, Evil, Beauty, etc. is one of those grand concepts that are often deployed but damned hard to pin down.

In a world where there are many constraints imposed by physics, biology, culture, politics, law, other people, etc., "freedom" is clearly constrained from the getgo. Perhaps it is more productive to identify small spheres of activity in which we are "free" to / from / and of per @Vera Mont. I am, presumably, free to respond to your post, or not. I am not free of a lifetime of hearing freedom defined in various ways. I am not sure whether or not I am free from a compulsion to talk about freedom.

Better to be a sad Socrates than a smug swine — 180 Proof

John Stuart Mill said in an essay titled A PIG, A FOOL, AND SOCRATES: It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

That's not quite as pithy as your version.

The underlying observation of Solipsism is that we only ever experience Sensory Data. — Treatid

You are underestimating sensory data.

If you are relaxing at the beach, eyes closed, listening to the waves, day dreaming... and somebody dumps a bucket of ice water on you, that's a very compelling wash of sensory data. Or, if you wade out into the water and a shark bites your leg off, that's another compelling experience of sensory data. If you have enough pennies to dine at a really fine restaurant, you will have one course after another of splendid sensory data.

Your senses have evolved over 600 million years of contact with the harsh sensory data of the world. In the case of ice water, shark bite, and fine food, it seems like you are in pretty direct contact with objective reality.

Your mind isn't in direct contact, but your body is.

I'm reminded of the Gom Jabbar test in Dune: — punos

This film depicts the scene and the characters from the book the way I imagined it. Always a plus.

Dogs seem to be able to suppress desires -- like not lunging forward to grab the treat dangling in front of it until an OK is registered. For sure, not an ability the Bene Gesseret would find interesting, but a capacity in animals upon which we built (in evolutionary time).

What a relief! There is nothing wrong with your eyeballs -- the problem is behind them.

Riffing on @punos...

There is such a thing as muscle memory. While I type this, I do not -- cannot -- control my fingers consciously. In the same way, I have difficulty fitting my bicycle lock into its holder IF I look at it while perform the task. My arm and hand muscles know how to do this; visual information gets in the way.

If you use your phone a lot, you are using muscle memory to touch the various 'points' on the screen that result in actions. Having 3 home screens complicates the task. Points that deliver one result on screen 3 won't do the same thing on screen. You know that already.

I am not a heavy mobile phone user, but I also have 3 screens. Being an occasional user, I have to look at the screen to navigate and touch the right points.

Precisely coordinated eye/hand actions, or coordinating two separate actions on an object (sliding the screen right or left and touching point 'x') is not a sure-fire thing--as the video shows.

Fortunately for all of us, there is no risk of you launching nuclear missiles by touching the wrong app icon.

Any performance can usually be improved. I suggest you slow down (at the cost of semi-seconds).

1 Practice picking up the phone and determining which screen you are on. Focus. (A semi-second?)
2. Practice sliding the screen WITHOUT touching the app icon automatically. In other words, suppress the automatic action. (This may be slightly painful. You will survive.)
3. Visually confirm that you are looking at the desired screen. (<1/2 second)
4. Touch the desired icon,

Rearranging the icons would help you slow down (again costing you a second or two). Or, maybe only the most important icons should be on screen 1. You can afford to slow certain actions in order to achieve more accurate results.

Some athletes have improved performance by visualizing how they carry out a given move, like pitching a ball. The visualize themselves carrying out the action perfectly. This, alone, isn't going to make a huge difference, but it can help improve performance along with actual practice.

Happily, your mobile phone and you will have a long and happier relationship.

We exist within a simulation, and as it happens the software has developed glitches. There is nothing the occupants of a simulation can do about the software/hardware.

Just joking.

On the one hand, there is the function of the eyeballs. Various factors can affect the way the images are received by the retina and then transmitted. On the other hand, there is the way the visual cortex in the brain processes the signals from the eyes, Other parts of the brain are involved in responding to vision (or hearing, taste, touch, smell, proprioception, balance, and so on).

That's about the extent of my understanding. Do you have perceptual aberrations (if that's what you are experiencing) in other contexts? Are you under the influence of any drugs -- prescribed or otherwise? Are your visual experiences problematic for you (like, it interferes with visual tasks besides the cell phone problem)?

As noted above, all this is in the bailiwick of ophthalmologists. You could make an appointment to have your vision checked out.

Given the wholesale slaughter caused by trolleys, banning them is way overdue. Also ban fat people, bridges over trolleys, and switches. If there are no trolleys, no one will be run over. No fat man will be thrown from the bridge to save 5 thin people. Promiscuous travel in the city will be sharply curtailed with resulting gains in public health. Best of all, the creative destruction of the hazardous trolleys will open the opportunity for Uber and Lyft.

were you as monogamous as your typical hetero male/female couple — Hanover

I was not as monogamous as heterosexual-male/female couples are supposed or alleged to be.

My question then is whether actual lesbian behavior is as promiscuous as man on man affection — Hanover

My impression is that lesbians are generally not as promiscuous as gay men have tended to be. However, my information is now quite dated. The lesbians on Grey's Anatomy were certainly quite frisky. I haven't been out mixing in the gay community for 35 years. Did legalized marriage change behavior? Perhaps. The broader culture changed as well. "Gay Liberation" was partly a consequence of the '60s, rolling on into the 70s. AIDS brought the free-for-all up short by the mid '80s.

Have social / sexual norms grown more conservative over the last 40 years? It seems like it, but if more conservative society isn't more stable. If anything, society seems less stable now. Does instability lead to more cautious social behavior?

The physical environment in which sexuality is enacted has changed. Places that facilitated promiscuous sexual activity -- like bath houses, police-free parks, cruisy locations, etc. have been eliminated in many cities. The gay bar business isn't as lively as it used to be, owing to the increased use of social media.

There were about 1.2 million same-sex couple households in the United States in 2021, according to recently released Census Bureau data.

Roughly 710,000 of the same-sex couple households were married and about 500,000 were unmarried.

That seems like a lot, but if 4% of the population are gay or lesbian, then that is only 1.1 million who coupled and/or married out of 10.3 million over the age of 18. Inquiring minds would like to know what all the 9 million single gays and lesbians are doing.

"Straight men aren't promiscuous like gay men because straight women don't let them." she said.

Women, families, mortgages, careers, churches, etc. all tend to tame straight male behavior. Gay marriage, mortgages, careers, churches, etc. tends to do the same thing for gay male behavior.

Men who do not live within the usual sex-limiting social structures can be more promiscuous. For that matter, men and women who do not live within the usual social structures of marriage, mortgages, careers, churches, and so on are perhaps freer to be political outsiders as well.

Humans are not naturally and deeply civilized. "Civilized behavior" is a hard-won achievement. Loosen the bonds, and we dispense with inconvenient trappings of civilization. Promiscuous gun use, promiscuous sex. In both cases there are resulting fatalities.

Parsnip and rhubarb combo? I don't believe I've encountered that particular bouquet.

I am less willing to be patient with slipshod artists than I used to be.

Compare these two items by William de Kooning and Louise Nevelson. Both were in a large show of Abstract Expressionists at one of the Guggenheim museums:





They both are abstract expressionist, but De Kooning applied paint to canvas--quickly, it appears. Nevelson's assembled objects then painted them black. I wasn't there when the works were done, but it seems like Louise Nevelson applied more effort and thought to the work than did de Kooning. Perhaps De Kooning labored mightily to choose just the precise colors and brush strokes to express "Villa Borghese". Perhaps, like the elephant, he just labored mightily and brought forth a gnat.

Nevelson's Night evokes more response from me. The monochrome shapes and forms are definite, deliberate. Not so much de Kooning's summer day color scheme.

I've stood in front of a number of Pollock's works, and I found them to be reasonably compelling -- even knowing how he went about producing them (it wasn't a painfully skilled process). The thing is, one of them is enough. Several square yards of smeared paint doesn't need endless repetition, while one might enjoy many different paintings of mountains, or a particular biblical scene, or a classical topic, or a rodeo -- whatever.

It can be criticized as a television program. Television programs have their own separate criteria to consider them good or bad. — Vera Mont

The way television works (and not just television) is that the real product is access to the audience's eyeballs, for which advertisers pay what they consider 5 million pairs of eyeballs worth. Programming is the bait.

"Good programs" mean large audiences (eyeballs) and profit for the platform (CBS, Netflix, whatever). Bad programs have paltry audiences and little income. Is the bait good? Well, the mice go for the cheese in the trap whether it's fine cheese from France or it's Velveeta. Now there is a difference between Great Performances on PBS (high quality cheese) and schlock on the networks and cable (Velveeta). But networks don't want to feed the masses with high quality French cheese. Let them eat caca.

the same thing applies to newspapers. When Google and other systems selling advertising grabbed the eyeballs, the newspapers starting going broke. It didn't make much difference how good the column inches of newsprint were.

But most of the content is not of the show itself, and none of the artistic content is. — Vera Mont

Isn't that true for most programs? Unless the show is entirely scripted for an untalented group of repertory performers, talented performers make it happen, or it doesn't. Whether it's AI or the Tonight Show or SNL, it's the talent that make the show, even when working with scripts. It's the writers, cover artists, and cartoonists that make THE NEW YORKER a great magazine -- not Condé Nast's offices and tons of glossy paper.

No, he wasn't saying that at all. — Baden

I don't think he was declaring all urinals to be art. I don't think his particular urinal is art, and I don't believe that calling something "art" makes it art. All that was his meshuggeneh. Urinals, toilets, sinks, bidets, tubs, and plumbing can be quite interesting, even aesthetically pleasing (ask the Kohler Corporation)

but they are objects whose commercial value and practical utility are the foremost considerations for designer, producer, and consumer. They are not Art, "art", or art.

When one considers bathroom and kitchen fixtures, one wants to know if it will fit, will it hold up under normal or heavy use, does it match the wall, flooring, and other fixtures, how much does it cost, and similar questions. Shoppers don't ask, "What does this toilet mean?" "What is the message of the sink".

Target didn't design its red plastic shopping carts to be art or beautiful. The intention was to underline the Target Brand with the particular shade of red; the logo; the sturdiness of the cart, etc.

A discussion at any company headquarters about logos, stationary, signage, in-store fixtures, advertising, and so on might sound "artistic". "What does our logo MEAN to the public? Is this particular shade of green fashion forward enough or will it be perceived as anachronistic? Does this store sign REALLY distinguish our fine fried food from their greasy crap? Probably a lot of high-sounding imponderables are being tossed around. It's business; it's not art.

there is an objective which "ought" to override the subjective. Should the same apply to art? — ENOAH

I don't know about the "ought" part, but we can apply objective criteria to art if we wish. A program like American Idol involves way too much hype. I'll leave it alone.

Art is produced in large quantities, if one counts everyone who can be said to be "doing art" and a lot of it isn't very good. The performances are not skilled enough, sufficiently prepared and practiced. The works of art are often extremely imitative, derivative, or just plain ripped off in works of 'art' that are "art-like".

All that is why we have critics, curators, museums, performance halls with narrow entrances (so to speak), and so on, sifting out the gold from the crap.

A long time ago, in TV land, anyway, Marcel Duchamp was involved in the creation of an anti-rational, anti-art, proto-Dada cultural movement in New York City. In 1917 he "produced" (purchased) Urinal, a piece of "ready-made" art--in this case, a urinal. Duchamp claims that something is art if someone declares that it is art.

So, nothing too remarkable about declaring American Idol, or any other television program, Art.

Call it "art" if you want. It is, after all, it's a production involving music, movement, a stage, cameras, an audience, and so on.

If it is art, then it can be criticized as art. Is American Idol "good art"?

That's great.

There are presumably 'non-goofy people' who refer to "pregnant persons", "persons with vaginas, cervixes, uterus.", rather than saying an (apparently) unspeakable gendered term like "woman" or "man". Given the tortures that language endures, it is not surprising that some people are confused about pregnancy being natural or disease.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of very goofy people at large who ought to be apprehended and returned to school for the basic education they missed during the first round (assuming, of course, that goofy people aren't running the schools).

Don't we all.

The world is full of suffering, inequality, injustice, and death — Truth Seeker

Last things first: death is unavoidable. Sooner or later we all die, along with every other living being.

Suffering: reducible but not eliminable.
Inequality: reducible but not eliminable.
Injustice: reducible but not eliminable.

Why? The world is an unsatisfactory place. Resources, population, good government, favorable weather/climate are unevenly distributed. The absence of tectonic events, disease, pestilence, war, famine, flood, drought, etc. are nice but just can't be counted on. We just never know where disaster will strike next.

There is not enough of the good stuff to go around (decent housing, plentiful food, clean water, good climate, nice weather, proper civil government, education, health care, and so on). The good stuff costs a lot of money (and labor) to produce and maintain. The more people there are in the world and the hotter the world gets, the more likely it is that there will be less to go around in the future.

We can do better, but even meeting a fairly low bar is difficult.

Despite all that, we might as well be upbeat and optimistic.

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum! Not sure, but we have very few participants who are Russian.

This sounds like an AI generated thing. — Paine

I'm not sure what Paine meant, but you are doing the best you can to get over the language barrier. My impression of Google Translate is that the quality of its translation is not always very good.

Slavery was a social arrangement, of course, and a central, critical feature of Southern state societies. It was also a tremendously important part of the American economy -- North and South, both. Roughly 12% of the whole American workforce was slave. The slaves produced about 12% of the nation's output (though a much higher percentage of output in southern states).

Some authors claim that 50% of the economic value of output was slave produced. This is unlikely, because the products slaves produced -- mostly agricultural products -- did not have a high per-pound value. A bale of cotton became much more valuable after it landed in an English mill and was turned into cloth, and more valuable still when the cloth was cut up and sewn into clothes. But all of that did not happen in the south, or in the north either.

The slave economy wasn't isolated in the south. Banks, importers, exporters, insurers, shippers, and so on were located in Philadelphia, New York, Providence, and Boston (and some other northern cities). Southern plantations and companies depended on northern companies for all sorts of financial services.

There was friction between free labor and slave labor systems--mainly between the north and south, but also within the south. Support for slavery was not universal in the south. Support for secession was also not universal in the south.

Reconstruction after the Civil War largely failed. Blacks were subjected to systematic repression after the Civil War until roughly 1970, by which time major civil rights legislation had passed on the federal level, and courts had ruled various forms of segregation unconstitutional. I am white, and have never lived in the south, so I am not in a position to judge what conditions are now from a black person's perspective.

The Southern states had a powerful stake and influence upon Federal policy. — Paine

Indeed they did, and this influence continued long after the Civil War was over. 70 years later, the southern block of senators and congressmen (from formerly slave states--the "solid south") were able to exclude blacks from some of the premier New Deal programs -- particularly housing programs (the FederalHousing Act), Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance. The exclusion of blacks from home purchase programs was explicit. The SS and UI programs excluded farm workers and household help (maids) from coverage. Most blacks worked on farms or as household help.

The post WWII housing programs that enabled millions of Americans to establish a property stake in the suburbs and build family wealth excluded blacks, specifically. Housing programs provided rental housing for blacks. Some of the rental housing was quite good, but within 30 years, the huge urban rental housing projects were in a spiral of deterioration owing to bad rental policies and neglect of maintenance by city housing programs.

Yeah, life is a bitch and then you die.

Oh, sorry. You were perhaps looking for something more uplifting, upbeat, and positive sounding?

Actually, I don't think life is all suffering. Some of it is suffering--more for some people, less for others--but life is also joy and festivity--not all the time for anybody, but once in a while for most people. Life is mostly the reasonably pleasant area mid-stroke of the pendulum's sweep between simply marvelous and fucking awful.

That's as cheery as I can manage. So spend as much time as you can living in the moderately pleasant middle zone.

n the present model, no economy is sustainable, not even if waste were reduced (on the present model, it cannot be eliminated), not even if assets were redistributed — Vera Mont

I agree.

Some people used to think that the potential for universally beneficial economic growth was unlimited. Some very optimistic socialists used to think that.

If a no-growth, steady-state economy is possible, it will have to be conducted at a considerably reduced level. Fewer people, less energy use, less extraction. Strict requirements for sustainable manufacturing and agriculture. Very strong states to enforce the limits, and assure equitable distribution would be required too. Etc.

Ecological / economic / environmental collapse might pave the way to a no-growth economy, but that is not something to hope for. Recovering from the devastation will be immensely difficult, if even possible.

So, it's all just fate or happenstance; we have no control? — Vera Mont

I may have hit the bleak anvil of dark fate too hard. It certainly is the case that millions of ordinary humans do see the long-term positive and negative consequences of past and current practices. Maybe the number is even in the billions. Unfortunately, nobody lives in a democracy of the wise, or even fairly sensible. The world is run by people with great ambition for power and wealth, and they are calling the shots.

An axiom of some UN relief programs is that "famine is a political problem". Many, if not most, famines are caused by very incompetent, corrupt governments. The climate crisis is also a political problem of incompetent and corrupt governments--which includes some of the best ones. The governments of the G6 economies have not been able to meet their own targets for reducing CO2 emissions,

Balance, though, balance... Texas, a state up to its knees in oil and grease, is more enlightened than it looks:

In 2022, Texas produced the equivalent of 31% of the electricity it consumes from solar, wind and geothermal power, compared with just 10% in 2013. Texas ranks 13th for the percentage of power coming from renewables. The first ranked state, Iowa, got 83% of its power from wind and solar last year.

Iowa, the corny state, may be producing 83% of its power from the wind, but it grows a lot of corn that goes into alcohol production as an automobile fuel supplement. Next door, Minnesota is producing about 33% of its power from wind, solar, and hydro (some of which comes from Canada). MN is also growing corn for automotive alcohol. Running cars on a corn/petroleum blend is just stupid, stupid, stupid.

So, mixed bag.

If we wanted badly enough to survive, we'd make a conscious commitment to establish balance. — Vera Mont

When we decided to leave the trees and walk on two legs, we didn't know where that would lead us. When hunter-gatherers started collecting wheat kernels, and using the biggest ones for seed, they didn't know where that would lead them. They didn't know where their first settlements of huts would lead them. They didn't know where devising writing would lead them. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes didn't know where taking over the island of Britannia would lead them (it led to the British Empire).

Our great-great-grandparents didn't know where digging up fossils and turning them into plastic would lead. The next generation didn't know where electricity would lead them. Or the automobile, or television, or computers, or the tens of thousands of unique plastic materials would lead them.

We just aren't 'built' to find something nice and new (polystyrene coffee cups, delicious spring water in plastic bottles, plastic siding for our house, cell phones--you name it) and set it aside for 10 years while we research it's long-term impact on society, the economy, the environment, and older products. No, we seize it and rush it into production--the same way we would do if we came across a delicious fruit in the forest --we'd stand there and eat it till it was all gone.

It isn't that we are stupid or evil; we just are what we are -- smart opportunists who seize the main chance without looking back [edit: or that far forward].

When it comes to the ant and the grasshopper fable, we play the part of the grasshopper. We are less like squirrels which store up food for the winter, and more like rabbits that make no long-term plans when the leaves turn in the fall.

We can't want badly enough to be what we are not. Yes, we are smart enough to see trouble down the line; we just can't hardly avoid it. That's our tragic condition.

What's true of non-entities like myself is also true of the presidents, generals, captains of industry, the super rich, et al. They can't help but be what they are.

most other organisms live in balance with their ecosystem — Vera Mont

Is this because they are committed to live in balance with their ecosystem, or is it that other organisms prevent them from getting the upper hand? That is, the condition of the 'natural balance' is just a stalemate between predator and prey.

And then we may face the problem of insufficient workforce to sustain the population. — Janus

Japan is approaching that situation; China (maybe surprisingly) will also. Quite a few countries have birth rates below replacement level.

Exponential population growth has been made possible by the exponential growth in technologies, notably medical technology. — Janus

Yes and no. Two areas of technology have (imho) have contributed the most to population growth: The Haber Bosch process of converting nitrogen and hydrogen gas to ammonia (for fertilizer) enabled huge increases in food production, (The same process is also used in making explosives; the # of people blown up is less than the # of people fed well.). The other area of technology is civil engineering: Clean water and sewer systems which take sewage away, ideally never to be seen again. Better civil engineering cut the number of people who died young from infectious diseases. Joseph Bazalgette built the big interceptor sewers in London in the 1860s. Norman Borlaug's 'Green Revolution' in plant breeding is another contributor to food production.

Medicine is an important technology, absolutely. Better understanding of disease and better treatments have significantly increased the age at which people die of heart disease and cancer. That's not a small accomplishment. Infectious disease has not disappeared, but the list of biggest killers is different now than it was in 1920, say. Polio has never been a leading cause of death, but it is now quite rare. TB was the leading cause of death from infectious disease in 1900. It hasn't disappeared, but in many parts of the world it is quite rare. More people died in the US from Covid 19 (1,000,000+) than died in the 1918 Influenza epidemic (around 650,000). The next big change could be epidemics of antibiotic resistant infections. Various diseases have developed strains which are no longer treatable. Gonorrhea for instance has untreatable strains. Staphylococcus aureus (a 'hospital infection') has become much more difficult to cure.

it seems impossible to see how more technological innovation, however brilliant, will be able to halt the damage being done to ecosystems, the degradation of which is proceeding apace and not, overall slowing down, but rather accelerating. — Janus

I'm pessimistic about the future of the next few generations. Life is going to be very difficult for them. Whether human life will even be possible say in 2150 or 2200 is open to question,

The thing about human beings is that "we are what we are" just like every other species. Scarab beetles roll shit into balls. Sharks are voracious feeders. Woodpeckers drill holes wherever. Wasps often sting and ask questions later. The kind of world we have ended up with is a result of us being "what we are".

Experience is our best guide to what is good. We can spin theories about what is good forever, but until we act, and experience consequences, we have no solid data to go on.

Very good questions about growth/no growth.

If consumption were even distributed, there would be some dramatic changes. The wealthiest people consume a lot of air travel (first class, business class, frequent flyers, and private planes). Their contribution to CO2 is highly disproportionate to their population size. Most people don't fly at all, or rarely.

The consumption of salad might not change much -- I don't think that anyone is eating a vastly disproportion share of green leafy vegetables. But some people in affluent societies do not have access to fresh salad without making a major effort in travel (food deserts).

Private automobiles, a major polluter (even electric ones--manufacturing, etc.) and economic driver are already pretty evenly distributed. What isn't evenly distributed is good quality public transit. Most people don't use it or don't have access to it. Public transit has to be manufactured as well, but 1 bus or 1 train car will carry far more people than 1 car, over their lifetimes. A switch to mass transit would require a significant redistribution of manufacturing.

Quality housing is evenly distributed within economic classes, but is not evenly distributed between better-off and worse-off classes. A small percentage of the population are living on the street, in shelters, or in very substandard housing.

IF (GIANT 'IF') we produced for need and not for profit or for artificially stimulated wants (too many to shake a stick at) consumption and production could be lowered significantly.

For an analogy to at least a less growth economy: The average American family uses about 30 kWh of electricity per day. The average family could reduce its electricity usage to say 24 kWh (picking a figure out of thin air) without living in the Stone Age. They would need to be more careful about lighting; hot water use; refrigeration and cooking; heating and cooling (a bit cooler in the winter, a bit warmer in the summer); and other changes, depending on what they owned. This family would need less income to maintain themselves. Their energy supplier would still be in business, with a lower level of production (assuming everybody reduced energy consumption).

It's easy to fall into the debate trap of always summerizing anything against companies as having pure capitalist interests, but trying to solve AI tools is kinda the worst attempt if all intentions are just profit. — Christoffer

This is obviously a topic dearer to your heart than mine. Not criticizing your lengthy reply, just observing the depth of your response.

No, it isn't the case that corporations are merely greedy thieves who think of nothing but making money. However, corporations do have a fiduciary requirement to generate profit for their shareholders. So, making money is the name of the game. The people who make up corporations, especially when engaged in new, cutting edge projects, clearly have lots of intellectual interests aside from the fiduciary requirement. I'm sure developing AI is an engrossing career for many people, requiring all the ingenuity and creativity they can muster.

The Manhattan Project was also an engrossing, intellectually stimulating, technologically high-end project which some of the participants greatly regretted being involved in once their product was used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I'm not claiming that CHAT-GPT, for example, is the same thing as a big city-destroying bomb, but the final uses to which this technology will be applied are not at all clear, and I don't trust corporations -- or their engineers -- to just do the right thing,

The motto of 3M, one of our local corporate heroes, is "Innovative technology for a changing world". Sounds nice. They have made a lot of fine products more complex and important than Post-it Notes™. Many of their products contain PFAS. At one time PFAS was thought to be biologically inactive. Turns out it is not biologically inactive, and everything from polar bears to penguins now carry a load of the stuff. Plus, 3M dumped a lot of waste products from its production into landfills from which it promptly leaked out. They are paying out billions of dollars in fines and very expensive clean-up costs.

Just an example. True enough, it's not quite the same as AI. But corporations regularly do things that turn out to be harmful--sometimes knowing damn well that it was harmful--and later try to avoid responsibility.

Thanks. I'll need a bit of time to watch and chew it over.

That makes it more of a question of trading off lower (perhaps at times negative) growth versus longer term benefits. Unfortunately, our institutions are not well geared for this sort of thing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Institutions--legislatures, schools, corporations--are indeed ill-equipped to make enlightened trade-offs. Being generous here, it isn't always a matter of cupidity or stupidity. Partly it is a problem of having sufficiently far-sighted and wide-angle vision to appreciate the whole problem and possible solutions. Executives in corporations and legislators always have time pressures which prevent necessarily time-consuming contemplation of possibility. Our species isn't good at large-scale long-range planning. Our brains and emotions just aren't equipped for it.

A steady-state economy requires thinking within a different framework than within a steady growth model.

Around 25 years ago I was traveling in rural Uganda. We often came upon stacks of bricks. What were these for? The stacks were accumulated as cash became available to make more bricks. When enough bricks were accumulated, a small brick house would be built. It might take them 10 years (rough estimate). The resulting house would consist of maybe two rooms and a tin roof -- perfectly adequate for a house located on the equator. Over time amenities could be added.

Americans could live frugally for 10 years and save cash to make a large down-payment on a house, and avoid credit costs. The prospective house might not be very big, but be perfectly adequate for places with cold winters and hot summers. Amenities could be added over time. The same thing applies to automobiles. Buy conservatively and save for the cars replacement maybe 8 or 10 years down the line.

Saving for future consumption, rather than buying credit for immediate consumption slows down one's budgetary merry-go-round a lot. It does require budgetary discipline (so does paying for credit) but it is generally less stressful. Aren't middle class people supposed to be good at delayed gratification?

Maybe not so much.

Economic growth doesn't just come from population growth or increased resources consumption. Increased human capital (e.g., education), new technologies, improved efficiency, etc. can all lead to GDP growth even when the population and the total amount of natural resources is decreasing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A local example of good growth is the share of Minnesota's electricity generated by wind and solar -- 33%! The other 66% comes from nuclear power plants, coal plants, and hydropower. Coal, however, is on the way out and the largest plant is expect to close in about 6 years. Nuclear power has radioactive waste problems, of course. Natural gas sounds clean but its production and distribution leaks a lot of methane.

Transportation and agriculture have moved into first place as Minnesota's largest CO2 emitters.

28% of Texas electricity production is wind. The rest is natural gas, nuclear power, and coal in that order.

Wind and solar production are not consumption-free, obviously. It takes a lot materiél to build wind and solar replacements for coal and natural gas.

Bronze age cultures were no-growth. They remained stagnant for centuries. One assumes new ideas appeared from time to time, but died, possibly because life was precarious and holding to tradition was viewed as a matter of survival. Our own high-growth is made possible by technology, which was made possible by high-growth, so it's a cycle. — frank

And before the Bronze Age? Very slow change, except for development of agriculture and settled towns. The dispersion of bronze (tin and copper alloy) was a significant change. Bronze was possible because of the relatively low melting temperature, and the earlier development of kilns to fire pottery which were hot enough to melt tin and copper.

More recently, the European economy was pretty much static between the collapse of the Roman Empire and 1500 -- a period of a thousand years. Large swaths of civilizations around the globe have experienced no-growth conditions for thousands of years.

The technologies that made the current growth regime possible at first took decades to have an effect (like the consequence of global exploration launched in the 15th century). New technologies spur growth seemingly in minutes.

then there was something odious for me to just get a degree and start working somewhere — Shawn

That's basically what I did. I didn't have a 5-year plan when I started college. I finished school and took a job with VISTA (now called Americorps). VISTA was a great follow-on to college.

Degrees help one get jobs, or did back in the late 60s, early 70s. The degrees launched me. Once you get the job there is a period (sometimes) of unofficial on-the-job training. If you are reasonably clever, you find a job you can actually do.

Was college worth anything beside getting a job? Absolutely.

I have a learned a lot more since leaving college than I learned while there, but college served as an orientation to what to learn and how to learn. I'm 77 now and still learning.

This is a quite different topic, but related: Who, in a given society, tends to revolt first: the lumpen proles at the very bottom of society, or the dissatisfied skilled workers who participate in a system where they have something substantial to lose?

I don't see welfare recipients, the homeless, the long-term unemployed who are not looking for work and not collecting benefits of any kind--the lumpen proles at the bottom--revolting. It seems to me more likely that workers who are several rungs up the economic ladder (identifying as working class) are the group likely to revolt. Some of these people think of themselves as "middle class" because of their material acquisitions, but a lot of the so-called middle class are just comfortable working class people.

Real middle class people are very much part of the administrative system and are not likely to revolt (because they would be one of the main targets of revolution).

SO, I don't think UBI is intended to prevent a revolt of the masses, it's to keep them minimally contented. It's a nuisance to manage their discontent and unhappiness, not a major threat. Groups that are any sort of real threat to the establishment are not bought off with a basic income. They are confronted and attacked by the police.

In any volatile situation, where revolt could grow out of riot, the police shoot to kill. lumpen proles (like George Floyd) have been treated pretty harshly by the police when they get out of line. It's not an aberration, it's policy.

Interesting information, thanks.

I have a distant memory of swathing wheat. Back in horse-drawn and hand harvested wheat days, the swaths of wheat (oats, rye, barley...) were 'shocked' -- gathered up in loose bundles (shocks) and stacked against each other for drying before being collected and thrashed.

Roundup results in weeds drying up. So I understand how it would help wheat harvests, causing the wheat to dry up. One of the articles mentioned the difficulty of applying Roundup close to harvest -- the machinery knocking down too many plants.

In wide open flatland production, American grain fields are very large and spraying them before harvest would probably not be cost effective. That's probably true in Ukraine and Russia, too. It's one thing spraying corn months before harvest; it's quite unappetizing to spray an herbicide on wheat a week before harvest, contaminating the grain kernels.