Skitterdoc 2077

[Glau]

Capitalism is not the problem, people is, people in charge will always abuse technology regardless what type of economic model the state are run on.

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And yet, some systems are vastly more pleasant to live in than others.

Just because the top level label doesn't matter much, does not mean that good governance does not. It just means people tend to fight about the wrong thing.

 

[Ace Dreamer]

And yet, some systems are vastly more pleasant to live in than others.

Just because the top level label doesn't matter much, does not mean that good governance does not. It just means people tend to fight about the wrong thing.

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A bit of a look at systems with a lack of feedback/poor information flows, and the sort of mental shortcuts humans use (Type 1, Type 2, thinking), as well as 'tribal logic', may allow you to say a lot about which systems are likely to work better...

You, of course, are entirely entitled to disagree.

Might make you wonder what a real 'social Thinker', not bent by the purposes of Entities, might come up with...

 

[Glau]

I don't know that there is actually a good system for keeping us, an organism that evolved to live with a few dozen others in migrating groups without real property, properly happy and fulfilled in a world full of people where everything is already claimed.

We do the best we can, but theorists are always best when pointing out problems. Much better than trying to design solutions.

 

[Aurora Moon]

There's no such thing as a perfect system. but I'll go with the one that has killed humans the least.

Communism looks good on paper, but in reality, it killed roughly 60 million people all over the world (though this has petered out as it gets less popular in most countries save for places like Korea recently).

Fascism is a close second in most people killed per year, though like communism it peters out due to it becoming less popular in modern times.

Under those two systems, they deliberately engage in genocide and mass killings.

Capitalist crimes on the other hand-- modern-day deaths are very rare, and mainly due to poor people not being able to afford things like food, heat, etc.
it is definitely guilty for past historical crimes on the other hand, such as the death of slaves due to American greed and things like that. one could argue that capitalism killed more people than communism and fascism put together historically, but I think a lot of people confuse capitalism and monarchy together.

But nowadays the deaths are mainly to failures in the system, rather than an intentional death to satisfy the ideology.

But. we're getting off-topic. is there a thread where we could discuss this instead?

 

[Falsehaven]

Communism looks good on paper, but in reality, it killed roughly 60 million people all over the world per year

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this is such a stupid number I want to know where you got it from because the whole post is dumb but this takes the cake 60m people per year what?

 

[Winged One]

"Comrade, You are expected to work 20 hours a day for the glory of the Soviet Union" - spoken by a fat elite to a starving polish child while he is eating a whole bucket of chicken wing.

Capitalism is not the problem, people is, people in charge will always abuse technology regardless what type of economic model the state are run on.

The powerful elite will always take advantage of things, blame human nature on an economic framework is a very dangerous fallacy, it would be like believe Hitler to be the sole problem of Nazi Germany, and thinking replacing him with Himmler will somehow fix things.

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The difference is that when that shit happens in communist states, it's corruption. When capitalism does it, it's working as intended.

 

[Placid Raccoon.]

I wonder how much electronics and cybernetics techs hire for in cyberpunk. I mean we talk about Taylor not having huge skills in purely those areas, but how much would it cost her to hire some expertise, or instead, she is really smart, why couldn't she just get some training and education in this area to improve her skills. ;-) .

A second point I just noticed, I could be wrong here, but where is her ice for the computer node she has and does she have security if that node itself is compromised? You would think she would run all external comms through the dedicated ice she has on each body to ensure someone doesn't take her out by going through a centralized node (edgerunners hitting a secure area are a thing after all). She could get around this by also using different nodes for different bodies and making sure there is no unintentional cross connection via her hyper-dimensional comms. I think there is some need for each body have an external connection and security because the central nodes while super useful are static targets, but maybe I missed something.

 

[deadlyham]

What has Taylor been doing with all those extra brains? Kiwi's team must be collecting parts for her, but it's not like there are more Kumokun surgery bots.

 

[dob]

"Comrade, You are expected to work 20 hours a day for the glory of the Soviet Union" - spoken by a fat elite to a starving polish child while he is eating a whole bucket of chicken wing.

Capitalism is not the problem, people is, people in charge will always abuse technology regardless what type of economic model the state are run on.

The powerful elite will always take advantage of things, blame human nature on an economic framework is a very dangerous fallacy, it would be like believe Hitler to be the sole problem of Nazi Germany, and thinking replacing him with Himmler will somehow fix things.

Click to shrink...

To be fair. Cyberpunk isn't lacking in unemployed.
There seems to be a huge portion of the population who seems to be perpetually unemployed, and they are mostly fine. And a great deal of nomads who can take care of themselves just off what they can get in the wild.

Corporations don't need to get every hour possible from low level workers. Because their are so many possible workers around.
So if they note inefficiency of cost to how good the work is. They would probably be fine dropping hours.

This is mostly on the low skill end. Since there is still demand for high-skill workers. But there are limits on how much you can work people, before they think it might be better to just try and find a easier job.
Unless your a big enough corp to subtlety threaten them and are sure they can't go to a powerful competitor.

 

[prometheus110]

this is such a stupid number I want to know where you got it from because the whole post is dumb but this takes the cake 60m people per year what?

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Well, 67.1 million people died in 2022, so it's made up. Like, there's no way to actually sugarcoat a take like that. The number was completely made up and bears no relation to reality whatsoever.

It's also one small part of a take that's full of nonsense, but I'm too lazy to take the rest of it apart.

 

[Nyvis]

"Comrade, You are expected to work 20 hours a day for the glory of the Soviet Union" - spoken by a fat elite to a starving polish child while he is eating a whole bucket of chicken wing.

Capitalism is not the problem, people is, people in charge will always abuse technology regardless what type of economic model the state are run on.

The powerful elite will always take advantage of things, blame human nature on an economic framework is a very dangerous fallacy, it would be like believe Hitler to be the sole problem of Nazi Germany, and thinking replacing him with Himmler will somehow fix things.

Click to shrink...

Blaming socially constructed frameworks way beyond what humans figured out in the wild on human nature is just refusal to analyze society. And if you refuse to analyze, you'll never make any useful conclusion. This is just intellectual nihilism.

Comparing material analysis to great man theory to dismiss it is also a joke because it's its polar opposite as far as analysis methods go.

There's plenty of analysis to be made on why the soviet union ended up replicating some of the failures of capitalist systems and creating its own unique ones, and "muh human nature" fall very short of it. As does looking at cyberpunk anything and going "the problem is not capitalism". The whole point of cyberpunk is asserting that technological progress isn't inherently liberating on its own as long as the structures of capitalism remain on top of it.

To be fair. Cyberpunk isn't lacking in unemployed.
There seems to be a huge portion of the population who seems to be perpetually unemployed, and they are mostly fine. And a great deal of nomads who can take care of themselves just off what they can get in the wild.

Corporations don't need to get every hour possible from low level workers. Because their are so many possible workers around.
So if they note inefficiency of cost to how good the work is. They would probably be fine dropping hours.

This is mostly on the low skill end. Since there is still demand for high-skill workers. But there are limits on how much you can work people, before they think it might be better to just try and find a easier job.
Unless your a big enough corp to subtlety threaten them and are sure they can't go to a powerful competitor.

Click to shrink...

I wonder how much of the population is actually unemployed (and still feeding itself) and how much is actually subsisting on a shitty gig economy that never gives them guarantees but gives them just enough work to pay for enough to survive.

 

[TheArcanist]

There's no such thing as a perfect system. but I'll go with the one that has killed humans the least.

Communism looks good on paper, but in reality, it killed roughly 60 million people all over the world per year (though this has petered out as it gets less popular in most countries save for places like Korea).

Fascism is a close second in most people killed per year, though like Commuism it peters out due to it becoming less popular in modern times.

Under those two systems, they deliberately engage in genocide and mass killings.

Capitalist crimes on the other hand-- modern-day deaths are very rare, and mainly due to poor people not being able to afford things like food, heat, etc.
it is definitely guilty for past historical crimes on the other hand, such as the death of slaves due to American greed and things like that. But nowadays the deaths are mainly to failures in the system, rather than an intentional death to satisfy the ideology.

But. we're getting off-topic. is there a thread where we could discuss this instead?

Click to shrink...

>killed people the least

the British Empire, perhaps the single largest liberal capitalist political project of all time, would regularly kill tens of millions of people through policy induced famines in India alone

 

[SemiRational]

Communism looks good on paper, but in reality, it killed roughly 60 million people all over the world per year

Click to shrink...

This is logistically impossible, assuming a start date of say 1920 in the USSR it would terminate its population sum total in a decade.

In general the mainstream estimate is somewhere between thirty and sixty million people over the entire 20th century killed "because of communism" Even a very intellectually dishonest publication called the black book of communism only managed to inflate those numbers to ninety eight million. They did this by among other things, counting Wehrmacht soldiers killed by the Red Army and counting the Ukrainians Byelorussians and Russians killed by the Nazis in WW2 as dead because of communism.

This leads to the second problem with this is how do you even measure the dead because of an ideology? Some 3.1 million kids die per annum in various, mostly capitalist countries on account of starvation. Perhaps inevitable since capitalism is the current dominant economic system. Do those kids count as dead because of Ideology?
For that matter at what point does it cease to be because of ideology?

This reductive way of looking at mass death also ignores actual lessons learned and fails to contemplate concrete reasons for why these things happen. You could just blame five million Ukrainians or Bangladeshi people on communism or capitalism, respectively. Or you could actually analyze them.

 

[spiritualatheist]

I think it's entirely fair to blame the eight million or so poverty-related deaths per year on capitalism because capitalism is the system that immiserates people. It would be perfectly possible to give everyone on this planet a decent standard of living if we tried, but capitalism can't do that because it fundamentally relies on exploitation and precarity to force people to participate in it. If you'll starve if you quit your shitty job you'll be much more likely to put up with unsafe working conditions, long hours, etc.

 

[brokenTower]

this is such a stupid number I want to know where you got it from because the whole post is dumb but this takes the cake 60m people per year what?

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Reagan's National Security Council created a think-tank to deny the true extent of the Holocaust called the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, staffed by by the sort of disgusting exile demographics that inspired the Guard Tower joke.

Back when they pretended to be serious academics they not only counted abortions as murder, but also count the families that aborted babies totally would have had.

 

[Aurora Moon]

>killed people the least

the British Empire, perhaps the single largest liberal capitalist political project of all time, would regularly kill tens of millions of people through policy induced famines in India alone

Click to shrink...

you're confusing the monarchy system with the capitalist system. There were brief times in history when the two were bedfellows as they were both expansionists and helped support each other in return for sweet profits, but the two are very much different.
things done under the order of the king and queen aren't the same thing as humans doing that shit out of sheer greed.

I think it's entirely fair to blame the eight million or so poverty-related deaths per year on capitalism because capitalism is the system that immiserates people. It would be perfectly possible to give everyone on this planet a decent standard of living if we tried, but capitalism can't do that because it fundamentally relies on exploitation and precarity to force people to participate in it. If you'll starve if you quit your shitty job you'll be much more likely to put up with unsafe working conditions, long hours, etc.

Click to shrink...

Honestly, I wish we lived in a star trek-like society. Which is a moderate and balanced form of communism now that I think of it. but unfortunately, this kind of communism isn't likely to work without starving people to death and junk unless we in fact have things like replicators that would void things like money useless forever.

this is what I mean by how things only sound good on paper but suck in reality because we simply haven't reached the kind of tech or lifestyle possible for it to become a true utopia instead of a nightmare. nowadays, it causes problems like starvation instead.

But again, this is going way off topic. let's start a new thread. or DM me, I guess.

 

[brokenTower]

you're confusing the monarchy system with the capitalist system. There were brief times in history when the two were bedfellows as they were both expansionists and helped support each other in return for sweet profits, but the two are very much different.
things done under the order of the king and queen aren't the same thing as humans doing that shit out of sheer greed.

Click to shrink...

Mercantilism, the economic system based on fighting over trade routes to China and goods China liked, was long dead by the Victorian era.

It got overturned by the trade in wool coats and North Sea wine smuggling.

 

[prometheus110]

Oh, so we're just moving past the claim that Communism is responsible for 89% of all deaths every year (in fact, the claim that Communism kills up to 1.2 times what Hitler managed throughout all of WW2 every single year) and instead confusing a method of organizing economies with a method of organizing governments. I see.

 

[Aurora Moon]

start a new thread and tag me in it of you want. this is a fanfic thread for spira's story, not discussions on the merits of which system is better and telling me how wrong I am on things.
we don't want mods to come down on us hard.

 

[spiritualatheist]

Honestly, I wish we lived in a star trek-like society. Which is a moderate and balanced form of communism now that I think of it. but unfortunately, this kind of communism isn't likely to work without starving people to death and junk unless we in fact have things like replicators that would void things like money useless forever.

this is what I mean by how things only sound good on paper but suck in reality because we simply haven't reached the kind of tech or lifestyle possible for it to become a true utopia instead of a nightmare. nowadays, it causes problems like starvation instead.

But again, this is going way off topic. let's start a new thread. or DM me, I guess.

Click to shrink...

I was actually referencing UN climate reports—turns out that according to even that most lib of institutions it is totally possible to eliminate poverty entirely while also cutting emissions by 50+% with nothing but modern tech. You are just staggerly ignorant and uninformed on this topic.

Debunking Demand: An Ode to Chapter Five

IPCC Mitigation Report 2022 Analysis — Part One

www.earthisland.org

Poverty is a choice, and we can refuse it.

 

[Aurora Moon]

I was actually referencing UN climate reports—turns out that according to even that most lib of institutions it is totally possible to eliminate poverty entirely while also cutting emissions by 50+% with nothing but modern tech. You are just staggerly ignorant and uninformed on this topic.

Poverty is a choice, and we can refuse it.

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look at my post above. I'm happy to discuss this but will somebody please start up a new thread so that mods don't come down on us. I'm not repeating this same mistake again.

Edit: apparently y'all thought I was exclusively talking about American communism when in reality I was talking about GLOBAL communism and the effects it had on the entire world. this is according to a DM conversation I had. 🤔
No wonder why you all seemed to be laughing at me when you completely misread my posts. pffft.

 

[prometheus110]

start a new thread and tag me in it of you want. this is a fanfic thread for spira's story, not discussions on the merits of which system is better and telling me how wrong I am on things.
we don't want mods to come down on us hard.

Click to shrink...

look at my post above. I'm happy to discuss this but will somebody please start up a new thread so that mods don't come down on us. I'm not repeating this same mistake again.

Edit: apparently y'all thought I was exclusively talking about American communism when in reality I was talking about GLOBAL communism and the effects it had on the entire world. this is according to a DM conversation I had. 🤔
No wonder why you all seemed to be laughing at me when you completely misread my posts. pffft.

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A) I see you're doing the classic tactic of spouting some wild claim and then trying to hide behind SV's rules when people start calling you on it. It's far from the first time I've seen it done and very likely far to be the last time. If someone doesn't start a thread on this topic soon, I guess I'll do it.

B) No, everyone assumed you were talking about communism the world over. Nobody misread your posts. As people like me have clearly proven, you've both been fed a load of bullshit and are repeating it, mate.

 

[Aurora Moon]

A) I see you're doing the classic tactic of spouting some wild claim and then trying to hide behind SV's rules when people start calling you on it. It's far from the first time I've seen it done and very likely far to be the last time. If someone doesn't start a thread soon, I guess I'll do it.

B) No, everyone assumed you were talking about communism the world over. Nobody misread your posts. As people like me have clearly proven, you've both been fed a load of bullshit and are repeating it, mate.

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I was in a DM conversation with a spiritual atheist, actually. and they told me that they thought I meant that communism killed millions in the USA every year. so I was wondering if others read my posts the same way.

And I would honestly love a thread started on this so I'm making it right now since nobody else is.

edit: here's the link!
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.c...tical-system-kills-the-most-over-time.118067/
there we can discuss to our heart's content without going too off topic!

 

[prometheus110]

I was in a DM conversation with a spiritual atheist, actually. and they told me that they thought I meant that communism killed millions in the USA every year. so I was wondering if others read my posts the same way.

And I would honestly love a thread started on this so I'm making it right now since nobody else is.

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Except I'm also talking to Spiritual Athiest and I know that they were using the US population as a point of comparison. They were literally asking you if you legitimately think communism kills the equivalent of 1/5th of the US population each year.

 

[Martin Rudat]

From the SB discussion, it was suggested that the optimal survival strategy with a limited number of nodes is that each node wants to be a viable respawn point.

I suggested that this means Taylor wants to start a chain of walk-in clinics with attached research and manufacturing facilities where the head doctor (Taylor) could take over duties while the local Taylor is on break due to respawning.

What would the hypothetical clinics be called, and which nationalities would they be?

I wonder if Taylor will ask Wakako to keep an eye out for deceased qualified doctors, or perhaps clone up some 'interns' (also Taylor) to go to medical school to act as head doctors?

She should continue to make money fast enough to afford that to establish future identities, I guess.