How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
This is the same as asking me to tell you what the next hip cool music or book or movie trend will be, there are entire industries of people desperately trying to do that with a huge profit incentive to succeed and not managing it. It's another sci-fi magic option, I'll just employ my knowledge of psychohistory to perfectly understand and predict society. Then, even if you do finally capture the je ne sais quoi, all that allows you to do is know what the next hip cool place will be, it doesn't change the fact there is one.
Building "good and worthwhile" places isn't sufficient, there are plenty of good and worthwhile homes in Kansas but I like living in NYC instead despite the crazy prices here. Telling me I'll suddenly want to live in Kansas when you even get rid of the cost pressures is wild. You can't force someone to like the new thing you build, you can't make it cool, and if your crazy OCP newly built Delta City does become trendy then congratulations, now that's more desirable than San Francisco or London and now has value.
There are so many more examples, beyond even physical scarcity, of things with purely sentimental value held by entire societies, that you could personally own. Earlier you made a huge fuss about distinguishing between personal property and private property. OK, my personal property includes the Mona Lisa. I don't care how many copies you print out, my original is priceless and your copies are worthless. There's no rational reason people value the original more than the print, it's the exact same image, but they do. Other people have Rembrandts and whatever as their personal property, oops now we have an art market of incredibly valuable private property.
I'm just so glad we have you all saying these crazy ideas openly, my friends never believe me about internet leftists. Being able to link to this thread will be great.
And yet, plenty of people live in places that aren’t New York City, and plenty who are happy not living there.
It is almost as if we can actually create enjoyable, livable cities just about everywhere fit for human habitation. it’s practically one of humanity’s personal calling cards!
That is the point I’m trying to get across to you guys! We are an entire species of creatives, of designers, of planners, builders, consumers! Every time I try to engage you people with this, all I see in return is a stagnant world view with no more idea of possibility, only the staid existence of what is as though that is now all that shall ever be?
Where is your drive, where is your determination? Where is your imagination and gumption?! These aren’t crazy leftist ideals! This is raw humanity!
This is not an answer to my question, this is another evasion. I agree we can make really beautiful and fantastic things. Then everyone wants to live there because it's so amazing. There will always be some places that are more desirable than others, and you now have a real estate market trading power and influence to enjoy those desirable places. What's your solution?
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Society was created by humans. We didn't get plopped into it by an outside force. We also see similar patterns in other primates and social amimals in general. The environment is a major factor (myth of the alpha wolf based on caged wolves etc.) but this comes from us. Even if it all stems from original abnormal trauma that happened to our ancestor Grug the cave person, the response to it is human.
Any system that seeks to improve our lot needs to acknowledge and work with/around/against the full scope of the species, rather than just hoping it goes away.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
There are many unique places in this world. You can't just make an extra Monterey Bay or Grand Canyon to handle the surplus demand.
You say this as if the everyone on the planet is trying to live in Monterey Bay and the… Grand Canyon.
The latter of which is literally a national park. It is literally held in the commons. It is available so that everyone can visit it.
This shit is why I don’t think you guys actually are engaging with these ideas in the way that human beings actually, like, live or consume things. It’s always weird hypotheticals where everything is some zero sum engagement and we’re all savage, brutal beasts clawing over each other for our share.
Some houses on the Monterey coastline go for eight digits. Natural beauty and local culture are things many people desire, and these cannot be mass produced. If you're happy living in any random place that's fine, but that's not how everyone works.
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
Lanlaorn is talking about CPW and French vineyards, and you're wondering why they're unique and cannot be replicated? I mean I guess I could drop a joke about New Jersey, but are you seriously wondering why certain locations are unique, desirable, and not-replicable? Like why can't we just make a second Manhattan? Or create more land that has a Mediterranean coastline and is chock full of tasty stinky cheeses?
So these places then just… magically existed, birthed from the land like Athena from the forehead of Zeus?
No… history behind them? No years of design and cultivation by human hands to make them what they are? Just utterly unreplicable cities and towns, their pleasing features forever locked within their borders?
It’s like reading the accounts of European settlers descending upon the Americas and thinking what they’d found were natural gardens of Eden made for their arrival, instead of recognizing the agricultural work of the indigenous nations that lived there before the settlers were even born
Do you understand that a location is not just the sum of the buildings placed there?
Yes, but I also realize that societies are things we build, that we invest with value and worth by our actions as people! That we create the worth of these places.
Hogwash. Humanity found wonderful places and grew into them, we didn't create the worth of these places, we recognized it and then contributed to it.
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
This is the same as asking me to tell you what the next hip cool music or book or movie trend will be, there are entire industries of people desperately trying to do that with a huge profit incentive to succeed and not managing it. It's another sci-fi magic option, I'll just employ my knowledge of psychohistory to perfectly understand and predict society. Then, even if you do finally capture the je ne sais quoi, all that allows you to do is know what the next hip cool place will be, it doesn't change the fact there is one.
Building "good and worthwhile" places isn't sufficient, there are plenty of good and worthwhile homes in Kansas but I like living in NYC instead despite the crazy prices here. Telling me I'll suddenly want to live in Kansas when you even get rid of the cost pressures is wild. You can't force someone to like the new thing you build, you can't make it cool, and if your crazy OCP newly built Delta City does become trendy then congratulations, now that's more desirable than San Francisco or London and now has value.
There are so many more examples, beyond even physical scarcity, of things with purely sentimental value held by entire societies, that you could personally own. Earlier you made a huge fuss about distinguishing between personal property and private property. OK, my personal property includes the Mona Lisa. I don't care how many copies you print out, my original is priceless and your copies are worthless. There's no rational reason people value the original more than the print, it's the exact same image, but they do. Other people have Rembrandts and whatever as their personal property, oops now we have an art market of incredibly valuable private property.
I'm just so glad we have you all saying these crazy ideas openly, my friends never believe me about internet leftists. Being able to link to this thread will be great.
And yet, plenty of people live in places that aren’t New York City, and plenty who are happy not living there.
It is almost as if we can actually create enjoyable, livable cities just about everywhere fit for human habitation. it’s practically one of humanity’s personal calling cards!
That is the point I’m trying to get across to you guys! We are an entire species of creatives, of designers, of planners, builders, consumers! Every time I try to engage you people with this, all I see in return is a stagnant world view with no more idea of possibility, only the staid existence of what is as though that is now all that shall ever be?
Where is your drive, where is your determination? Where is your imagination and gumption?! These aren’t crazy leftist ideals! This is raw humanity!
This is not an answer to my question, this is another evasion. I agree we can make really beautiful and fantastic things. Then everyone wants to live there because it's so amazing. There will always be some places that are more desirable than others, and you now have a real estate market trading power and influence to enjoy those desirable places. What's your solution?
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Society was created by humans. We didn't get plopped into it by an outside force. We also see similar patterns in other primates and social amimals in general. The environment is a major factor (myth of the alpha wolf based on caged wolves etc.) but this comes from us. Even if it all stems from original abnormal trauma that happened to our ancestor Grug the cave person, the response to it is human.
Any system that seeks to improve our lot needs to acknowledge and work with/around/against the full scope of the species, rather than just hoping it goes away.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
There are many unique places in this world. You can't just make an extra Monterey Bay or Grand Canyon to handle the surplus demand.
You say this as if the everyone on the planet is trying to live in Monterey Bay and the… Grand Canyon.
The latter of which is literally a national park. It is literally held in the commons. It is available so that everyone can visit it.
This shit is why I don’t think you guys actually are engaging with these ideas in the way that human beings actually, like, live or consume things. It’s always weird hypotheticals where everything is some zero sum engagement and we’re all savage, brutal beasts clawing over each other for our share.
Some houses on the Monterey coastline go for eight digits. Natural beauty and local culture are things many people desire, and these cannot be mass produced. If you're happy living in any random place that's fine, but that's not how everyone works.
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
Lanlaorn is talking about CPW and French vineyards, and you're wondering why they're unique and cannot be replicated? I mean I guess I could drop a joke about New Jersey, but are you seriously wondering why certain locations are unique, desirable, and not-replicable? Like why can't we just make a second Manhattan? Or create more land that has a Mediterranean coastline and is chock full of tasty stinky cheeses?
So these places then just… magically existed, birthed from the land like Athena from the forehead of Zeus?
No… history behind them? No years of design and cultivation by human hands to make them what they are? Just utterly unreplicable cities and towns, their pleasing features forever locked within their borders?
It’s like reading the accounts of European settlers descending upon the Americas and thinking what they’d found were natural gardens of Eden made for their arrival, instead of recognizing the agricultural work of the indigenous nations that lived there before the settlers were even born
Do you understand that a location is not just the sum of the buildings placed there?
Yes, but I also realize that societies are things we build, that we invest with value and worth by our actions as people! That we create the worth of these places.
Hogwash. Humanity found wonderful places and grew into them, we didn't create the worth of these places, we recognized it and then contributed to it.
Incenjucar do you know how many current Nice Places were once fetid swampland in this country alone?
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
This is the same as asking me to tell you what the next hip cool music or book or movie trend will be, there are entire industries of people desperately trying to do that with a huge profit incentive to succeed and not managing it. It's another sci-fi magic option, I'll just employ my knowledge of psychohistory to perfectly understand and predict society. Then, even if you do finally capture the je ne sais quoi, all that allows you to do is know what the next hip cool place will be, it doesn't change the fact there is one.
Building "good and worthwhile" places isn't sufficient, there are plenty of good and worthwhile homes in Kansas but I like living in NYC instead despite the crazy prices here. Telling me I'll suddenly want to live in Kansas when you even get rid of the cost pressures is wild. You can't force someone to like the new thing you build, you can't make it cool, and if your crazy OCP newly built Delta City does become trendy then congratulations, now that's more desirable than San Francisco or London and now has value.
There are so many more examples, beyond even physical scarcity, of things with purely sentimental value held by entire societies, that you could personally own. Earlier you made a huge fuss about distinguishing between personal property and private property. OK, my personal property includes the Mona Lisa. I don't care how many copies you print out, my original is priceless and your copies are worthless. There's no rational reason people value the original more than the print, it's the exact same image, but they do. Other people have Rembrandts and whatever as their personal property, oops now we have an art market of incredibly valuable private property.
I'm just so glad we have you all saying these crazy ideas openly, my friends never believe me about internet leftists. Being able to link to this thread will be great.
And yet, plenty of people live in places that aren’t New York City, and plenty who are happy not living there.
It is almost as if we can actually create enjoyable, livable cities just about everywhere fit for human habitation. it’s practically one of humanity’s personal calling cards!
That is the point I’m trying to get across to you guys! We are an entire species of creatives, of designers, of planners, builders, consumers! Every time I try to engage you people with this, all I see in return is a stagnant world view with no more idea of possibility, only the staid existence of what is as though that is now all that shall ever be?
Where is your drive, where is your determination? Where is your imagination and gumption?! These aren’t crazy leftist ideals! This is raw humanity!
This is not an answer to my question, this is another evasion. I agree we can make really beautiful and fantastic things. Then everyone wants to live there because it's so amazing. There will always be some places that are more desirable than others, and you now have a real estate market trading power and influence to enjoy those desirable places. What's your solution?
build more nice shit
The thing we have literally done for millenia
No matter what gorgeous city on a hill you build in eastern North Dakota it will never hold the same beauty or attraction as living next to a place of unique natural beauty.
+5
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
i think using human nature as an excuse for bad behavior is wrong; it's human choice, not human nature. That choice can be affected by things outside of an individual's control, such as upbringing, education, cultural/societal influences, etc. But it's still always a choice. I don't buy the nihilist view that humans are inherently evil
I'm just so glad we have you all saying these crazy ideas openly, my friends never believe me about internet leftists. Being able to link to this thread will be great.
Let's not do this.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Lanz I don't agree that scarcity of location is going to be wholly predicated on how much nice shit is in a place.
Ok, sure, the new and improved Cody, Wyoming has great transit, it's own brand of natural beauty, a reasonable selection of local jobs, a university, a symphony, a theatre, etc etc.
And you grew up there. But the famous theatre company never plays shows in Cody. The university over in Seattle has the most acclaimed medical program with highly respected professors. Your favorite band pretty much only tours on the east coast. You've always wanted to go deep sea fishing.
Hell, a bunch of your good friends moved to San Francisco because they got jobs at starfleet, and you wish you could hang out more.
If every piece is equally nice then either nothing seems nice at all, or people will still find the differences. I think you're proposing that people will manage to self-sort into their preferred locations and that's what happens anyway but it's really hard to believe that you could balance the system so perfectly that there'll never be more demand for a specific location than supply.
Like yes, you can eliminate the dead and dying cities that nobody wants to live in, and that reduces pressure on the cities everybody wants to live in, but that's not going to perfect match the supply and demand.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
This is the same as asking me to tell you what the next hip cool music or book or movie trend will be, there are entire industries of people desperately trying to do that with a huge profit incentive to succeed and not managing it. It's another sci-fi magic option, I'll just employ my knowledge of psychohistory to perfectly understand and predict society. Then, even if you do finally capture the je ne sais quoi, all that allows you to do is know what the next hip cool place will be, it doesn't change the fact there is one.
Building "good and worthwhile" places isn't sufficient, there are plenty of good and worthwhile homes in Kansas but I like living in NYC instead despite the crazy prices here. Telling me I'll suddenly want to live in Kansas when you even get rid of the cost pressures is wild. You can't force someone to like the new thing you build, you can't make it cool, and if your crazy OCP newly built Delta City does become trendy then congratulations, now that's more desirable than San Francisco or London and now has value.
There are so many more examples, beyond even physical scarcity, of things with purely sentimental value held by entire societies, that you could personally own. Earlier you made a huge fuss about distinguishing between personal property and private property. OK, my personal property includes the Mona Lisa. I don't care how many copies you print out, my original is priceless and your copies are worthless. There's no rational reason people value the original more than the print, it's the exact same image, but they do. Other people have Rembrandts and whatever as their personal property, oops now we have an art market of incredibly valuable private property.
I'm just so glad we have you all saying these crazy ideas openly, my friends never believe me about internet leftists. Being able to link to this thread will be great.
And yet, plenty of people live in places that aren’t New York City, and plenty who are happy not living there.
It is almost as if we can actually create enjoyable, livable cities just about everywhere fit for human habitation. it’s practically one of humanity’s personal calling cards!
That is the point I’m trying to get across to you guys! We are an entire species of creatives, of designers, of planners, builders, consumers! Every time I try to engage you people with this, all I see in return is a stagnant world view with no more idea of possibility, only the staid existence of what is as though that is now all that shall ever be?
Where is your drive, where is your determination? Where is your imagination and gumption?! These aren’t crazy leftist ideals! This is raw humanity!
This is an incredibly goosey position that does a lot of harm to creative laborers, by arguing that somehow we are all obliged to "create", as opposed to the reality that not everyone is disposed to do so, and that creative labor is not something that can be forced.
Not to mention that the idea that somehow the answer is to build out is counter to the reality that our footprint is way too spread out as is.
Ive entirely lost the train of this argument. Is it that communism doesnt have a way to distribute scarce goods?
It's that some goods cannot be made non-scarce.
You said earlier that you can’t live inland because you grew up near the ocean and it has informed your identity.
There is nearly 100,000 miles of coastline across the US alone.
I live in Seattle, where the ocean seeps into the sound. We have jellyfish and harbor seals and orcas in the water here. As a result, I pay a lot of rent. It suffices to keep me from being anxious. There is also a sweet volcano and a lot of great cultural stuff which is somehow not in Florida or Coastal Texas.
What happens in a communist society where there is a disagreement about how the resources should be distributed? When one group doesn't want to volunteer the resources another group feels they need?
Like I live near Chicago, and I roll my eyes every time it is suggested we route water from the Great Lakes to California to help with droughts down there.
Id find arguments that we can regulate and welfare our way out of the malign effects of class based capitalism more persuasive if we werent seeing an across the board failure to do so as we speak.
Yet the failures of real life implementations of communism don't count.
Of course they count, but there's a fundamental silliness in these debates where communists have to spell out the meeting minutes for the hypothetical land use committee for the 4th Wisconsin District's January rulings on private vs personal property while also having to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that their system is better than an elusive form of liberal capitalism that gets to selectively take credit for everything good now while brushing off the system's sins by actually being the hypothetical ideal liberal capitalism that has yet to manifest.
When you are proposing a massive fundamental restructuring of society I think you have to prove that it is going to be better than the status quo. And obviously the magnitude of the burden of proof depends in part on how bad the status quo is. Personally I think most people in the developed world are not bad off enough to be sold on radical solutions, but I'll admit that as collapse accelerates that may change.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
This is the same as asking me to tell you what the next hip cool music or book or movie trend will be, there are entire industries of people desperately trying to do that with a huge profit incentive to succeed and not managing it. It's another sci-fi magic option, I'll just employ my knowledge of psychohistory to perfectly understand and predict society. Then, even if you do finally capture the je ne sais quoi, all that allows you to do is know what the next hip cool place will be, it doesn't change the fact there is one.
Building "good and worthwhile" places isn't sufficient, there are plenty of good and worthwhile homes in Kansas but I like living in NYC instead despite the crazy prices here. Telling me I'll suddenly want to live in Kansas when you even get rid of the cost pressures is wild. You can't force someone to like the new thing you build, you can't make it cool, and if your crazy OCP newly built Delta City does become trendy then congratulations, now that's more desirable than San Francisco or London and now has value.
There are so many more examples, beyond even physical scarcity, of things with purely sentimental value held by entire societies, that you could personally own. Earlier you made a huge fuss about distinguishing between personal property and private property. OK, my personal property includes the Mona Lisa. I don't care how many copies you print out, my original is priceless and your copies are worthless. There's no rational reason people value the original more than the print, it's the exact same image, but they do. Other people have Rembrandts and whatever as their personal property, oops now we have an art market of incredibly valuable private property.
I'm just so glad we have you all saying these crazy ideas openly, my friends never believe me about internet leftists. Being able to link to this thread will be great.
And yet, plenty of people live in places that aren’t New York City, and plenty who are happy not living there.
It is almost as if we can actually create enjoyable, livable cities just about everywhere fit for human habitation. it’s practically one of humanity’s personal calling cards!
That is the point I’m trying to get across to you guys! We are an entire species of creatives, of designers, of planners, builders, consumers! Every time I try to engage you people with this, all I see in return is a stagnant world view with no more idea of possibility, only the staid existence of what is as though that is now all that shall ever be?
Where is your drive, where is your determination? Where is your imagination and gumption?! These aren’t crazy leftist ideals! This is raw humanity!
This is not an answer to my question, this is another evasion. I agree we can make really beautiful and fantastic things. Then everyone wants to live there because it's so amazing. There will always be some places that are more desirable than others, and you now have a real estate market trading power and influence to enjoy those desirable places. What's your solution?
build more nice shit
The thing we have literally done for millenia
No matter what gorgeous city on a hill you build in eastern North Dakota it will never hold the same beauty or attraction as living next to a place of unique natural beauty.
Even besides the natural beauty places aren't just the objects, they're the people living there. The culture in NYC is different than the culture in San Francisco, we can tell from their insane real estate markets that both have a huge ratio of people who want to live there to space available there, and despite the fact that I readily admit that California weather is so much nicer, I'd always prefer to live here than there.
You can build artificial islands and a brick for brick recreation called Manhattan 2 a few miles south on the Jersey Shore and despite being identically beautiful in terms of nature and artifice if the people living there are Jersey Shore types then I still would prefer my poorer apartment here than a better one there.
Nevermind the question of a volunteer based relying on "some people just like the demanding labor of construction" society even accomplishes such feats of engineering.
Also like, assuming some degree of regional autonomy people will definitely want to live in certain areas over others for political reasons, just like they do today.
There will be more desirable places to work, even in the same industry. If there Cobbler's collective in one city is know for producing the most exciting new trainers with the sweet designs and colors, and the collective in this other city just mass-produces rubber galoshes I have a guess who's going to be getting more applicants.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
It of course, again, varies, but there are plenty of communist models where your years studying and working as a pediatric oncologist means you get a nicer house and can dine out more. Or your work repairing sewer lines. Society gives to you in proportion to your ability and willingness to give to society, while maintaining a comparatively level class structure and a good baseline quality of life.
If you are stratifying society, based on education, skill set and training, and you provide some strata with greater benefits than others, that is literally a class-based society. Also, I don't think the saying is, "to each according to his abilities." Like, this is starting to sound like Bizarro World communism.
Like I said, there are various schools of communism and they don't all agree, but we're discussing a model where direct and, to varying degrees, special, contributions to society earn you a life with more creature comforts. It doesn't mean you're establishing an owner class nor is it predicated on another's poverty. A classless society is not the goal in and of itself, its what you get by removing class from society, and there's plenty of thought on how a rewards system for skill and work effects that.
God knows its a fairer distribution criteria than capitalism's.
Except you are establishing an owner class, because somebody has to decide who's getting those increased benefits and comforts, and what the criteria for them are. And something tells me that the people making those choices, the high-level managers who can organize large business enterprises and are the guiding voice in who works where or what is produced, those people are going to wind up among the haves, rather than the have nots.
No, having a nicer house because your job really sucks does not mean you are an ownership class. We're talking about who owns the means of production. Getting a better wage doesn't mean you're owning the means of production.
There is no effective difference, because the people at the top will still have a monopoly on power, if for no other reason than because they are part of the rare few that can actually organize and steer the means of production in any meaningful, beneficial way. Like, the system you are describing is pretty much the Soviet system, and for all their claims, they very much had an elite class who, if not in name, in action controlled the means of production.
"The people at the top" here are worker collectives and worker committees. Like yeah this might all fall apart but that doesn't mean compensating people based on the difficulty of the labor is the same as creating an owner class.
Then the entire project is doomed to failure. If things are being run by a collective, and everyone in a large enterprise has an equal say in how it is operated, it will suffocate itself with poor management. The people who have no clue how to manage something of that scale is always going to outnumber the people who do by a very hefty margin. That’s why effective administrators who can successfully manage an operation involving hundreds or thousands of people command such a high salary.
As one of those effective administrators you’re talking about, I think you’ll find that on the whole, without the profit motive there would be a much greater sharing of information and knowledge. Right now there are a few folks with a genuine desire to educate their fellow managers, and a majority who are grifting on a superficial model of management to get rich
If we remove most financial means to get ahead, and give more money and prestige to those with management experience, what makes you think this management class is going to be eager to dilute that prestige by making more managers?
People (not all, maybe, but enough) yearn to feel superior. That creates some perverse incentives.
I don’t believe that there should be additional tangible rewards for management. I know that was sort of but not really floated by others ITT, but I don’t hold that view, just to be clear.
It’s important to remember we are also talking about a monumental shift in culture. You might have seen me post the below before but it really is very illustrative of how orthodox marxists think about how society interacts. It is fair to assume, based on this paradigm, we would see a significant shift in attitudes commensurate with the shift in the base. We can get into this in more detail if you’d like, but essentially, it’s about an erosion of the hierarchical mindset folks take into and from the workplace.
Additionally, there is far less incentive to hang around a shitty boss in our glorious new world order. Retention becomes far more dominant, as it will directly 1:1 correlate with results. If bosses lose their coercive power over their folks, they’d better hope that they’ve built a solid utilitarian or principles based source of power, or their people are gonna hit da bricks. Naturally, there are folks who will put up with shit bosses for a variety of reasons; but I have absolutely no doubt they will be in the minority given “I need this job to feed myself/my family” is no longer a real going concern. Hell, who knows. It’s not unheard of for socialist workplaces to elect their managers. If you’re a power hungry prick, there’s a good chance you’ll get voted out.
Semi-relatedly, but I also think the role of manager significantly changes also. Certainly, the hiring and firing portion does and in our current society, that’s the part most people tend to focus on.
I've asked the question before if folks think we're going to find a way around human nature, or transcend it. You seem to be on team Transcend. Which is a position I can respect, even if I don't find it plausible. There's an exhaustive body of literature showing that humans go out of their way to create hierarchies so they can place themselves at the top, even if it means they're worse off overall.
Talking about hierarchies is not an effective analysis, from my materialist perspective. For historical materialists, we seek to understand what these things we call hierarchies are and why they exist. For instance, its all well and good to say that there’s a ‘hierarchy’ with white people on top and poc on the bottom, but that has no explanatory power. A historical materialist analysis of race, such as that given in the book Settlers by J Sakai shows how racism originates in colonialism and slavery and is maintained by black and brown peoples’ proletarianisation, lumpenisation and both subtle and blatant genocide. These are class issues, not something to do with skin colour or ‘race’, but a ‘hierarchy’ analysis is unable to understand that because it accepts hierarchies as given, is thus metaphysical and not dialectical, and therefore cannot truly challenge such systems. Essentially, hierarchies are a symptom, not a cause
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
This is the same as asking me to tell you what the next hip cool music or book or movie trend will be, there are entire industries of people desperately trying to do that with a huge profit incentive to succeed and not managing it. It's another sci-fi magic option, I'll just employ my knowledge of psychohistory to perfectly understand and predict society. Then, even if you do finally capture the je ne sais quoi, all that allows you to do is know what the next hip cool place will be, it doesn't change the fact there is one.
Building "good and worthwhile" places isn't sufficient, there are plenty of good and worthwhile homes in Kansas but I like living in NYC instead despite the crazy prices here. Telling me I'll suddenly want to live in Kansas when you even get rid of the cost pressures is wild. You can't force someone to like the new thing you build, you can't make it cool, and if your crazy OCP newly built Delta City does become trendy then congratulations, now that's more desirable than San Francisco or London and now has value.
There are so many more examples, beyond even physical scarcity, of things with purely sentimental value held by entire societies, that you could personally own. Earlier you made a huge fuss about distinguishing between personal property and private property. OK, my personal property includes the Mona Lisa. I don't care how many copies you print out, my original is priceless and your copies are worthless. There's no rational reason people value the original more than the print, it's the exact same image, but they do. Other people have Rembrandts and whatever as their personal property, oops now we have an art market of incredibly valuable private property.
I'm just so glad we have you all saying these crazy ideas openly, my friends never believe me about internet leftists. Being able to link to this thread will be great.
And yet, plenty of people live in places that aren’t New York City, and plenty who are happy not living there.
It is almost as if we can actually create enjoyable, livable cities just about everywhere fit for human habitation. it’s practically one of humanity’s personal calling cards!
That is the point I’m trying to get across to you guys! We are an entire species of creatives, of designers, of planners, builders, consumers! Every time I try to engage you people with this, all I see in return is a stagnant world view with no more idea of possibility, only the staid existence of what is as though that is now all that shall ever be?
Where is your drive, where is your determination? Where is your imagination and gumption?! These aren’t crazy leftist ideals! This is raw humanity!
This is an incredibly goosey position that does a lot of harm to creative laborers, by arguing that somehow we are all obliged to "create", as opposed to the reality that not everyone is disposed to do so, and that creative labor is not something that can be forced.
Not to mention that the idea that somehow the answer is to build out is counter to the reality that our footprint is way too spread out as is.
I am not saying people are obliged to create; I’m saying that’s what we do, and have done, for as long as humans have been humans.
Because people keep telling me in this thread that a better, more equitable world isn’t possible, and cite as their reasons Van Gogh’s artistic output, the Beatles, and apparently that not everyone can live in New York City, Seattle or the Grand Canyon
It’s facile nonsense rooted in an eternally stagnant present. It is ignorant of the vast amount of history that went into creating these places and making them special, in favor of a mysterious qualia that is utterly unreplicable, and an extraordinarily limited view of what constitutes natural beauty across an enote planet with a breathtakingly diverse biosphere.
Ridiculous, limited and without imagination, the lot of it. It is an insult to the potential of humanity, in favor of the commoditized status quo we’ve been conditioned as late twentieth/early twenty-first century Americans to accept as the only possibility.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
It of course, again, varies, but there are plenty of communist models where your years studying and working as a pediatric oncologist means you get a nicer house and can dine out more. Or your work repairing sewer lines. Society gives to you in proportion to your ability and willingness to give to society, while maintaining a comparatively level class structure and a good baseline quality of life.
If you are stratifying society, based on education, skill set and training, and you provide some strata with greater benefits than others, that is literally a class-based society. Also, I don't think the saying is, "to each according to his abilities." Like, this is starting to sound like Bizarro World communism.
Like I said, there are various schools of communism and they don't all agree, but we're discussing a model where direct and, to varying degrees, special, contributions to society earn you a life with more creature comforts. It doesn't mean you're establishing an owner class nor is it predicated on another's poverty. A classless society is not the goal in and of itself, its what you get by removing class from society, and there's plenty of thought on how a rewards system for skill and work effects that.
God knows its a fairer distribution criteria than capitalism's.
Except you are establishing an owner class, because somebody has to decide who's getting those increased benefits and comforts, and what the criteria for them are. And something tells me that the people making those choices, the high-level managers who can organize large business enterprises and are the guiding voice in who works where or what is produced, those people are going to wind up among the haves, rather than the have nots.
No, having a nicer house because your job really sucks does not mean you are an ownership class. We're talking about who owns the means of production. Getting a better wage doesn't mean you're owning the means of production.
There is no effective difference, because the people at the top will still have a monopoly on power, if for no other reason than because they are part of the rare few that can actually organize and steer the means of production in any meaningful, beneficial way. Like, the system you are describing is pretty much the Soviet system, and for all their claims, they very much had an elite class who, if not in name, in action controlled the means of production.
"The people at the top" here are worker collectives and worker committees. Like yeah this might all fall apart but that doesn't mean compensating people based on the difficulty of the labor is the same as creating an owner class.
Then the entire project is doomed to failure. If things are being run by a collective, and everyone in a large enterprise has an equal say in how it is operated, it will suffocate itself with poor management. The people who have no clue how to manage something of that scale is always going to outnumber the people who do by a very hefty margin. That’s why effective administrators who can successfully manage an operation involving hundreds or thousands of people command such a high salary.
As one of those effective administrators you’re talking about, I think you’ll find that on the whole, without the profit motive there would be a much greater sharing of information and knowledge. Right now there are a few folks with a genuine desire to educate their fellow managers, and a majority who are grifting on a superficial model of management to get rich
If we remove most financial means to get ahead, and give more money and prestige to those with management experience, what makes you think this management class is going to be eager to dilute that prestige by making more managers?
People (not all, maybe, but enough) yearn to feel superior. That creates some perverse incentives.
I don’t believe that there should be additional tangible rewards for management. I know that was sort of but not really floated by others ITT, but I don’t hold that view, just to be clear.
It’s important to remember we are also talking about a monumental shift in culture. You might have seen me post the below before but it really is very illustrative of how orthodox marxists think about how society interacts. It is fair to assume, based on this paradigm, we would see a significant shift in attitudes commensurate with the shift in the base. We can get into this in more detail if you’d like, but essentially, it’s about an erosion of the hierarchical mindset folks take into and from the workplace.
Additionally, there is far less incentive to hang around a shitty boss in our glorious new world order. Retention becomes far more dominant, as it will directly 1:1 correlate with results. If bosses lose their coercive power over their folks, they’d better hope that they’ve built a solid utilitarian or principles based source of power, or their people are gonna hit da bricks. Naturally, there are folks who will put up with shit bosses for a variety of reasons; but I have absolutely no doubt they will be in the minority given “I need this job to feed myself/my family” is no longer a real going concern. Hell, who knows. It’s not unheard of for socialist workplaces to elect their managers. If you’re a power hungry prick, there’s a good chance you’ll get voted out.
Semi-relatedly, but I also think the role of manager significantly changes also. Certainly, the hiring and firing portion does and in our current society, that’s the part most people tend to focus on.
I've asked the question before if folks think we're going to find a way around human nature, or transcend it. You seem to be on team Transcend. Which is a position I can respect, even if I don't find it plausible. There's an exhaustive body of literature showing that humans go out of their way to create hierarchies so they can place themselves at the top, even if it means they're worse off overall.
Talking about hierarchies is not an effective analysis, from my materialist perspective. For historical materialists, we seek to understand what these things we call hierarchies are and why they exist. For instance, its all well and good to say that there’s a ‘hierarchy’ with white people on top and poc on the bottom, but that has no explanatory power. A historical materialist analysis of race, such as that given in the book Settlers by J Sakai shows how racism originates in colonialism and slavery and is maintained by black and brown peoples’ proletarianisation, lumpenisation and both subtle and blatant genocide. These are class issues, not something to do with skin colour or ‘race’, but a ‘hierarchy’ analysis is unable to understand that because it accepts hierarchies as given, is thus metaphysical and not dialectical, and therefore cannot truly challenge such systems. Essentially, hierarchies are a symptom, not a cause
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
But sammich, the qualia! The mysterious and ephemeral qualia!
How much of people being greedy assholes is “human nature” and how much is conditioned by environmental factors and culture
I think there is a starkly nihilistic bent being taken as fact here
That is: there is nothing to “transcend,” there’s just a set of conditions to construct society around so it stops producing amoral, greedy bastards.
Even if we completely accept your premise, you can never eliminate the environmental factor of scarcity. Earlier you declared that a cover band concert or a recording of a concert by a the current trendy huge star band is the same as attending the actual event, which frankly I think is a ridiculous premise but let's return to something more concrete: Real Estate.
There's only so much "Central Park West". There are only so many "vineyards in the South of France". There will always be a hip, cool place to live and more people who want to live there than space available. This is a scarce resource you can do nothing about and even freed from all other want, people will have assigned value to these places.
This isn't starkly nihilistic or even someone being a "greedy asshole", people like what they like and so do many other people. Most of those things are scarce so not everyone can have one. Right now the method to determine who gets what is a naturally arising unit of measure of human desire and effort in money, and then letting people judge for themselves how much effort they're willing to expend on a certain desire.
The only solutions to this issue I can possibly see are sci-fi in nature, for example we build The Matrix and everyone in the world willingly hooks up into it, everyone gets to live their wildest fantasies free from the constraints of reality.
Tell me why the hip cool places to live are the hip cool places
Materially, what makes them so unique and beyond replication?
What is the mystic qualia at hand than prevents us from creating enough good and worthwhile places for people to live and enjoy?
This is the same as asking me to tell you what the next hip cool music or book or movie trend will be, there are entire industries of people desperately trying to do that with a huge profit incentive to succeed and not managing it. It's another sci-fi magic option, I'll just employ my knowledge of psychohistory to perfectly understand and predict society. Then, even if you do finally capture the je ne sais quoi, all that allows you to do is know what the next hip cool place will be, it doesn't change the fact there is one.
Building "good and worthwhile" places isn't sufficient, there are plenty of good and worthwhile homes in Kansas but I like living in NYC instead despite the crazy prices here. Telling me I'll suddenly want to live in Kansas when you even get rid of the cost pressures is wild. You can't force someone to like the new thing you build, you can't make it cool, and if your crazy OCP newly built Delta City does become trendy then congratulations, now that's more desirable than San Francisco or London and now has value.
There are so many more examples, beyond even physical scarcity, of things with purely sentimental value held by entire societies, that you could personally own. Earlier you made a huge fuss about distinguishing between personal property and private property. OK, my personal property includes the Mona Lisa. I don't care how many copies you print out, my original is priceless and your copies are worthless. There's no rational reason people value the original more than the print, it's the exact same image, but they do. Other people have Rembrandts and whatever as their personal property, oops now we have an art market of incredibly valuable private property.
I'm just so glad we have you all saying these crazy ideas openly, my friends never believe me about internet leftists. Being able to link to this thread will be great.
And yet, plenty of people live in places that aren’t New York City, and plenty who are happy not living there.
It is almost as if we can actually create enjoyable, livable cities just about everywhere fit for human habitation. it’s practically one of humanity’s personal calling cards!
That is the point I’m trying to get across to you guys! We are an entire species of creatives, of designers, of planners, builders, consumers! Every time I try to engage you people with this, all I see in return is a stagnant world view with no more idea of possibility, only the staid existence of what is as though that is now all that shall ever be?
Where is your drive, where is your determination? Where is your imagination and gumption?! These aren’t crazy leftist ideals! This is raw humanity!
This is an incredibly goosey position that does a lot of harm to creative laborers, by arguing that somehow we are all obliged to "create", as opposed to the reality that not everyone is disposed to do so, and that creative labor is not something that can be forced.
Not to mention that the idea that somehow the answer is to build out is counter to the reality that our footprint is way too spread out as is.
I am not saying people are obliged to create; I’m saying that’s what we do, and have done, for as long as humans have been humans.
Because people keep telling me in this thread that a better, more equitable world isn’t possible, and cite as their reasons Van Gogh’s artistic output, the Beatles, and apparently that not everyone can live in New York City, Seattle or the Grand Canyon
It’s facile nonsense rooted in an eternally stagnant present. It is ignorant of the vast amount of history that went into creating these places and making them special, in favor of a mysterious qualia that is utterly unreplicable, and an extraordinarily limited view of what constitutes natural beauty across an enote planet with a breathtakingly diverse biosphere.
Ridiculous, limited and without imagination, the lot of it.
People aren't saying that a better and more equitable world isn't possible.
People are saying that when your solution is underpants gnome level of ??? and the answers for big bold first bullet point questions are 'slave labor' to 'owner class, but committees this time' to 'power of friendship' when they aren't just handwaved away as 'we don't need specifics' people are going to be SKEPTICAL about trying a path that failed over and over again almost every time and every way it was tried.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
Ive entirely lost the train of this argument. Is it that communism doesnt have a way to distribute scarce goods?
It's that some goods cannot be made non-scarce.
You said earlier that you can’t live inland because you grew up near the ocean and it has informed your identity.
There is nearly 100,000 miles of coastline across the US alone.
How much more do you need for that to not be scarce?
Coastline is very difficult to measure, and that 100,000 number is almost meaningless in terms of owning waterfront property. For example, think of a serpentine pattern. The actual length of the land-water barrier can be vastly higher than the number you'd get if you drew a straight-ish line.
But even then we can't just think about coastline. A property isn't just binary "desirable" (coastal) or not. There are different features that add or subtract value. A huge chunk of that 100,000 mile number is from Alaska. Is Point Barrow a desirable place to live because it's coastal? A city is considered desirable. How much of that 100,000 miles of coast is high-density urban? You would presumably make rural/suburban lots larger to increase their desirability, but how fast is that going to start eating into the best parts of the non-urban coast? What happens when you need commercial use of that coastline, too?
Trying to handwave it away as "oh yeah there's plenty of coast to go around" kind of misses the point, even if there actually was enough coast to go around.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
You are a member of a species that has a ridiculously broad swath of preferences among every potential axes.
Yet you are speaking of “the nicer spots” as if they were some objective thing instead of inherently subjective.
It of course, again, varies, but there are plenty of communist models where your years studying and working as a pediatric oncologist means you get a nicer house and can dine out more. Or your work repairing sewer lines. Society gives to you in proportion to your ability and willingness to give to society, while maintaining a comparatively level class structure and a good baseline quality of life.
If you are stratifying society, based on education, skill set and training, and you provide some strata with greater benefits than others, that is literally a class-based society. Also, I don't think the saying is, "to each according to his abilities." Like, this is starting to sound like Bizarro World communism.
Like I said, there are various schools of communism and they don't all agree, but we're discussing a model where direct and, to varying degrees, special, contributions to society earn you a life with more creature comforts. It doesn't mean you're establishing an owner class nor is it predicated on another's poverty. A classless society is not the goal in and of itself, its what you get by removing class from society, and there's plenty of thought on how a rewards system for skill and work effects that.
God knows its a fairer distribution criteria than capitalism's.
Except you are establishing an owner class, because somebody has to decide who's getting those increased benefits and comforts, and what the criteria for them are. And something tells me that the people making those choices, the high-level managers who can organize large business enterprises and are the guiding voice in who works where or what is produced, those people are going to wind up among the haves, rather than the have nots.
No, having a nicer house because your job really sucks does not mean you are an ownership class. We're talking about who owns the means of production. Getting a better wage doesn't mean you're owning the means of production.
There is no effective difference, because the people at the top will still have a monopoly on power, if for no other reason than because they are part of the rare few that can actually organize and steer the means of production in any meaningful, beneficial way. Like, the system you are describing is pretty much the Soviet system, and for all their claims, they very much had an elite class who, if not in name, in action controlled the means of production.
"The people at the top" here are worker collectives and worker committees. Like yeah this might all fall apart but that doesn't mean compensating people based on the difficulty of the labor is the same as creating an owner class.
Then the entire project is doomed to failure. If things are being run by a collective, and everyone in a large enterprise has an equal say in how it is operated, it will suffocate itself with poor management. The people who have no clue how to manage something of that scale is always going to outnumber the people who do by a very hefty margin. That’s why effective administrators who can successfully manage an operation involving hundreds or thousands of people command such a high salary.
As one of those effective administrators you’re talking about, I think you’ll find that on the whole, without the profit motive there would be a much greater sharing of information and knowledge. Right now there are a few folks with a genuine desire to educate their fellow managers, and a majority who are grifting on a superficial model of management to get rich
If we remove most financial means to get ahead, and give more money and prestige to those with management experience, what makes you think this management class is going to be eager to dilute that prestige by making more managers?
People (not all, maybe, but enough) yearn to feel superior. That creates some perverse incentives.
I don’t believe that there should be additional tangible rewards for management. I know that was sort of but not really floated by others ITT, but I don’t hold that view, just to be clear.
It’s important to remember we are also talking about a monumental shift in culture. You might have seen me post the below before but it really is very illustrative of how orthodox marxists think about how society interacts. It is fair to assume, based on this paradigm, we would see a significant shift in attitudes commensurate with the shift in the base. We can get into this in more detail if you’d like, but essentially, it’s about an erosion of the hierarchical mindset folks take into and from the workplace.
Additionally, there is far less incentive to hang around a shitty boss in our glorious new world order. Retention becomes far more dominant, as it will directly 1:1 correlate with results. If bosses lose their coercive power over their folks, they’d better hope that they’ve built a solid utilitarian or principles based source of power, or their people are gonna hit da bricks. Naturally, there are folks who will put up with shit bosses for a variety of reasons; but I have absolutely no doubt they will be in the minority given “I need this job to feed myself/my family” is no longer a real going concern. Hell, who knows. It’s not unheard of for socialist workplaces to elect their managers. If you’re a power hungry prick, there’s a good chance you’ll get voted out.
Semi-relatedly, but I also think the role of manager significantly changes also. Certainly, the hiring and firing portion does and in our current society, that’s the part most people tend to focus on.
I've asked the question before if folks think we're going to find a way around human nature, or transcend it. You seem to be on team Transcend. Which is a position I can respect, even if I don't find it plausible. There's an exhaustive body of literature showing that humans go out of their way to create hierarchies so they can place themselves at the top, even if it means they're worse off overall.
Talking about hierarchies is not an effective analysis, from my materialist perspective. For historical materialists, we seek to understand what these things we call hierarchies are and why they exist. For instance, its all well and good to say that there’s a ‘hierarchy’ with white people on top and poc on the bottom, but that has no explanatory power. A historical materialist analysis of race, such as that given in the book Settlers by J Sakai shows how racism originates in colonialism and slavery and is maintained by black and brown peoples’ proletarianisation, lumpenisation and both subtle and blatant genocide. These are class issues, not something to do with skin colour or ‘race’, but a ‘hierarchy’ analysis is unable to understand that because it accepts hierarchies as given, is thus metaphysical and not dialectical, and therefore cannot truly challenge such systems. Essentially, hierarchies are a symptom, not a cause
What is the actual point you're trying to make?
If I understand Jeffe correctly, his position is that people are drawn to hierarchy and people want to be at the top of that hierarchy, and nothing can really be done about that. My argument is seeing the hierarchy-establishing behaviour as an innate factor of the human condition is wrong-headed, and it’s possible to analyse the material conditions surrounding the situation to better shape the outcome.
It of course, again, varies, but there are plenty of communist models where your years studying and working as a pediatric oncologist means you get a nicer house and can dine out more. Or your work repairing sewer lines. Society gives to you in proportion to your ability and willingness to give to society, while maintaining a comparatively level class structure and a good baseline quality of life.
If you are stratifying society, based on education, skill set and training, and you provide some strata with greater benefits than others, that is literally a class-based society. Also, I don't think the saying is, "to each according to his abilities." Like, this is starting to sound like Bizarro World communism.
Like I said, there are various schools of communism and they don't all agree, but we're discussing a model where direct and, to varying degrees, special, contributions to society earn you a life with more creature comforts. It doesn't mean you're establishing an owner class nor is it predicated on another's poverty. A classless society is not the goal in and of itself, its what you get by removing class from society, and there's plenty of thought on how a rewards system for skill and work effects that.
God knows its a fairer distribution criteria than capitalism's.
Except you are establishing an owner class, because somebody has to decide who's getting those increased benefits and comforts, and what the criteria for them are. And something tells me that the people making those choices, the high-level managers who can organize large business enterprises and are the guiding voice in who works where or what is produced, those people are going to wind up among the haves, rather than the have nots.
No, having a nicer house because your job really sucks does not mean you are an ownership class. We're talking about who owns the means of production. Getting a better wage doesn't mean you're owning the means of production.
There is no effective difference, because the people at the top will still have a monopoly on power, if for no other reason than because they are part of the rare few that can actually organize and steer the means of production in any meaningful, beneficial way. Like, the system you are describing is pretty much the Soviet system, and for all their claims, they very much had an elite class who, if not in name, in action controlled the means of production.
"The people at the top" here are worker collectives and worker committees. Like yeah this might all fall apart but that doesn't mean compensating people based on the difficulty of the labor is the same as creating an owner class.
Then the entire project is doomed to failure. If things are being run by a collective, and everyone in a large enterprise has an equal say in how it is operated, it will suffocate itself with poor management. The people who have no clue how to manage something of that scale is always going to outnumber the people who do by a very hefty margin. That’s why effective administrators who can successfully manage an operation involving hundreds or thousands of people command such a high salary.
As one of those effective administrators you’re talking about, I think you’ll find that on the whole, without the profit motive there would be a much greater sharing of information and knowledge. Right now there are a few folks with a genuine desire to educate their fellow managers, and a majority who are grifting on a superficial model of management to get rich
If we remove most financial means to get ahead, and give more money and prestige to those with management experience, what makes you think this management class is going to be eager to dilute that prestige by making more managers?
People (not all, maybe, but enough) yearn to feel superior. That creates some perverse incentives.
I don’t believe that there should be additional tangible rewards for management. I know that was sort of but not really floated by others ITT, but I don’t hold that view, just to be clear.
It’s important to remember we are also talking about a monumental shift in culture. You might have seen me post the below before but it really is very illustrative of how orthodox marxists think about how society interacts. It is fair to assume, based on this paradigm, we would see a significant shift in attitudes commensurate with the shift in the base. We can get into this in more detail if you’d like, but essentially, it’s about an erosion of the hierarchical mindset folks take into and from the workplace.
Additionally, there is far less incentive to hang around a shitty boss in our glorious new world order. Retention becomes far more dominant, as it will directly 1:1 correlate with results. If bosses lose their coercive power over their folks, they’d better hope that they’ve built a solid utilitarian or principles based source of power, or their people are gonna hit da bricks. Naturally, there are folks who will put up with shit bosses for a variety of reasons; but I have absolutely no doubt they will be in the minority given “I need this job to feed myself/my family” is no longer a real going concern. Hell, who knows. It’s not unheard of for socialist workplaces to elect their managers. If you’re a power hungry prick, there’s a good chance you’ll get voted out.
Semi-relatedly, but I also think the role of manager significantly changes also. Certainly, the hiring and firing portion does and in our current society, that’s the part most people tend to focus on.
I've asked the question before if folks think we're going to find a way around human nature, or transcend it. You seem to be on team Transcend. Which is a position I can respect, even if I don't find it plausible. There's an exhaustive body of literature showing that humans go out of their way to create hierarchies so they can place themselves at the top, even if it means they're worse off overall.
Talking about hierarchies is not an effective analysis, from my materialist perspective. For historical materialists, we seek to understand what these things we call hierarchies are and why they exist. For instance, its all well and good to say that there’s a ‘hierarchy’ with white people on top and poc on the bottom, but that has no explanatory power. A historical materialist analysis of race, such as that given in the book Settlers by J Sakai shows how racism originates in colonialism and slavery and is maintained by black and brown peoples’ proletarianisation, lumpenisation and both subtle and blatant genocide. These are class issues, not something to do with skin colour or ‘race’, but a ‘hierarchy’ analysis is unable to understand that because it accepts hierarchies as given, is thus metaphysical and not dialectical, and therefore cannot truly challenge such systems. Essentially, hierarchies are a symptom, not a cause
What is the actual point you're trying to make?
If I understand Jeffe correctly, his position is that people are drawn to hierarchy and people want to be at the top of that hierarchy, and nothing can really be done about that. My argument is seeing the hierarchy-establishing behaviour as an innate factor of the human condition is wrong-headed, and it’s possible to analyse the material conditions surrounding the situation to better shape the outcome.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
But sammich, the qualia! The mysterious and ephemeral qualia!
We're gonna move you to the middle of North Dakoka. This should be fine since qualia don't exist, right?
I don't understand the logic here. People find certain locations more desirable to live than others. While yes not everyone has the same preferences enough people do to cluster around those areas which creates conflict for space that has to be managed. This is not rocket science.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
You are a member of a species that has a ridiculously broad swath of preferences among every potential axes.
Yet you are speaking of “the nicer spots” as if they were some objective thing instead of inherently subjective.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
You are a member of a species that has a ridiculously broad swath of preferences among every potential axes.
Yet you are speaking of “the nicer spots” as if they were some objective thing instead of inherently subjective.
Folks are using real estate costs to highlight there is more preference for some spots than than there is supply and the reason for that preference is not something within human capability to recreate elsewhere
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
Being concerned about making sure there's enough luxury apartments for people to live in, when there's a housing shortage for those looking for affordable housing? That's capitalism right now, my friend!
The survey, conducted by the federal Census Bureau between February and mid-July 2021, presents a sweeping review of New York City’s housing stock, median rents and individual borough vacancy rates that reflect the city’s affordable housing crunch. In Manhattan, more than 10 percent of apartments sat vacant. In the Bronx, the vacancy rate was less than 1 percent. In Queens and Staten Island, the vacancy rate was 4.15 percent. It was 2.73 percent in Brooklyn.
The median monthly asking rent on vacant apartments was $2,750 during the survey period, meaning household income would need to top $110,000 for a tenant to pay less than 30 percent of their earnings on rent, the threshold at which a tenant is considered “rent-burdened.” More than half of New York City renter households met that threshold last year, the report found. At least 13 percent of tenants reported missing at least one rent payment.
The findings also mean that the median household income for renters—$50,000, according to the survey—would have to more than double to keep up with median asking rent.
...
At the other end of the spectrum, 12.64 percent of units priced above $2,300 were vacant and available for rent; just over 4 percent of apartments priced between $1,500 and $2,299 were empty, the survey found.
The vacancy rate disparities reflect the dwindling supply of affordable housing citywide. Between 2017 and 2021, New York City lost about 96,000 units priced below $1,500 per month while adding about 107,000 units renting for $2,300 or more, the survey found. That dramatic loss of affordable housing continues a 30-year trend across the five boroughs. New York City has lost about 500,000 apartments priced below $1,500 since 1991 while adding about 500,000 priced at $2,300 or more.
...
New York City housing production trails population growth by a wide margin, but another factor is also driving rising rents and limited supply: more than 353,400 units remain vacant but are not available for rent—up from 248,000 in 2017—the HVS found. Nearly 103,000 of those units are second homes, or pied-a-terres, according to the survey, a finding that could renew calls for a “pied-a-terre tax” on empty units used seasonally or sparingly.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
You are a member of a species that has a ridiculously broad swath of preferences among every potential axes.
Yet you are speaking of “the nicer spots” as if they were some objective thing instead of inherently subjective.
I'm from upstate New York. I love the mountains. The ocean is an eldritch horror that's worth at best the occasional visit. Actually living there would be appalling to me.
But that doesn't mean you can't look at broad opinions. If enough people prefer coastal homes to non-coastal homes relative to the availability of coastal homes, then the value is going to increase. You don't even need a majority of the population to prefer coastal homes if they don't make up a majority of housing.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
Being concerned about making sure there's enough luxury apartments for people to live in, when there's a housing shortage for those looking for affordable housing? That's capitalism right now, my friend!
The survey, conducted by the federal Census Bureau between February and mid-July 2021, presents a sweeping review of New York City’s housing stock, median rents and individual borough vacancy rates that reflect the city’s affordable housing crunch. In Manhattan, more than 10 percent of apartments sat vacant. In the Bronx, the vacancy rate was less than 1 percent. In Queens and Staten Island, the vacancy rate was 4.15 percent. It was 2.73 percent in Brooklyn.
The median monthly asking rent on vacant apartments was $2,750 during the survey period, meaning household income would need to top $110,000 for a tenant to pay less than 30 percent of their earnings on rent, the threshold at which a tenant is considered “rent-burdened.” More than half of New York City renter households met that threshold last year, the report found. At least 13 percent of tenants reported missing at least one rent payment.
The findings also mean that the median household income for renters—$50,000, according to the survey—would have to more than double to keep up with median asking rent.
...
At the other end of the spectrum, 12.64 percent of units priced above $2,300 were vacant and available for rent; just over 4 percent of apartments priced between $1,500 and $2,299 were empty, the survey found.
The vacancy rate disparities reflect the dwindling supply of affordable housing citywide. Between 2017 and 2021, New York City lost about 96,000 units priced below $1,500 per month while adding about 107,000 units renting for $2,300 or more, the survey found. That dramatic loss of affordable housing continues a 30-year trend across the five boroughs. New York City has lost about 500,000 apartments priced below $1,500 since 1991 while adding about 500,000 priced at $2,300 or more.
...
New York City housing production trails population growth by a wide margin, but another factor is also driving rising rents and limited supply: more than 353,400 units remain vacant but are not available for rent—up from 248,000 in 2017—the HVS found. Nearly 103,000 of those units are second homes, or pied-a-terres, according to the survey, a finding that could renew calls for a “pied-a-terre tax” on empty units used seasonally or sparingly.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
You are a member of a species that has a ridiculously broad swath of preferences among every potential axes.
Yet you are speaking of “the nicer spots” as if they were some objective thing instead of inherently subjective.
You can just say that you don't know.
No I’m saying your premise is fundamentally broken
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
...how on earth do you have a market in a classless, moneyless, stateless society?
Are we bartering goods and services directly for preferred real estate?
It of course, again, varies, but there are plenty of communist models where your years studying and working as a pediatric oncologist means you get a nicer house and can dine out more. Or your work repairing sewer lines. Society gives to you in proportion to your ability and willingness to give to society, while maintaining a comparatively level class structure and a good baseline quality of life.
If you are stratifying society, based on education, skill set and training, and you provide some strata with greater benefits than others, that is literally a class-based society. Also, I don't think the saying is, "to each according to his abilities." Like, this is starting to sound like Bizarro World communism.
Like I said, there are various schools of communism and they don't all agree, but we're discussing a model where direct and, to varying degrees, special, contributions to society earn you a life with more creature comforts. It doesn't mean you're establishing an owner class nor is it predicated on another's poverty. A classless society is not the goal in and of itself, its what you get by removing class from society, and there's plenty of thought on how a rewards system for skill and work effects that.
God knows its a fairer distribution criteria than capitalism's.
Except you are establishing an owner class, because somebody has to decide who's getting those increased benefits and comforts, and what the criteria for them are. And something tells me that the people making those choices, the high-level managers who can organize large business enterprises and are the guiding voice in who works where or what is produced, those people are going to wind up among the haves, rather than the have nots.
No, having a nicer house because your job really sucks does not mean you are an ownership class. We're talking about who owns the means of production. Getting a better wage doesn't mean you're owning the means of production.
There is no effective difference, because the people at the top will still have a monopoly on power, if for no other reason than because they are part of the rare few that can actually organize and steer the means of production in any meaningful, beneficial way. Like, the system you are describing is pretty much the Soviet system, and for all their claims, they very much had an elite class who, if not in name, in action controlled the means of production.
"The people at the top" here are worker collectives and worker committees. Like yeah this might all fall apart but that doesn't mean compensating people based on the difficulty of the labor is the same as creating an owner class.
Then the entire project is doomed to failure. If things are being run by a collective, and everyone in a large enterprise has an equal say in how it is operated, it will suffocate itself with poor management. The people who have no clue how to manage something of that scale is always going to outnumber the people who do by a very hefty margin. That’s why effective administrators who can successfully manage an operation involving hundreds or thousands of people command such a high salary.
As one of those effective administrators you’re talking about, I think you’ll find that on the whole, without the profit motive there would be a much greater sharing of information and knowledge. Right now there are a few folks with a genuine desire to educate their fellow managers, and a majority who are grifting on a superficial model of management to get rich
If we remove most financial means to get ahead, and give more money and prestige to those with management experience, what makes you think this management class is going to be eager to dilute that prestige by making more managers?
People (not all, maybe, but enough) yearn to feel superior. That creates some perverse incentives.
I don’t believe that there should be additional tangible rewards for management. I know that was sort of but not really floated by others ITT, but I don’t hold that view, just to be clear.
It’s important to remember we are also talking about a monumental shift in culture. You might have seen me post the below before but it really is very illustrative of how orthodox marxists think about how society interacts. It is fair to assume, based on this paradigm, we would see a significant shift in attitudes commensurate with the shift in the base. We can get into this in more detail if you’d like, but essentially, it’s about an erosion of the hierarchical mindset folks take into and from the workplace.
Additionally, there is far less incentive to hang around a shitty boss in our glorious new world order. Retention becomes far more dominant, as it will directly 1:1 correlate with results. If bosses lose their coercive power over their folks, they’d better hope that they’ve built a solid utilitarian or principles based source of power, or their people are gonna hit da bricks. Naturally, there are folks who will put up with shit bosses for a variety of reasons; but I have absolutely no doubt they will be in the minority given “I need this job to feed myself/my family” is no longer a real going concern. Hell, who knows. It’s not unheard of for socialist workplaces to elect their managers. If you’re a power hungry prick, there’s a good chance you’ll get voted out.
Semi-relatedly, but I also think the role of manager significantly changes also. Certainly, the hiring and firing portion does and in our current society, that’s the part most people tend to focus on.
I've asked the question before if folks think we're going to find a way around human nature, or transcend it. You seem to be on team Transcend. Which is a position I can respect, even if I don't find it plausible. There's an exhaustive body of literature showing that humans go out of their way to create hierarchies so they can place themselves at the top, even if it means they're worse off overall.
Talking about hierarchies is not an effective analysis, from my materialist perspective. For historical materialists, we seek to understand what these things we call hierarchies are and why they exist. For instance, its all well and good to say that there’s a ‘hierarchy’ with white people on top and poc on the bottom, but that has no explanatory power. A historical materialist analysis of race, such as that given in the book Settlers by J Sakai shows how racism originates in colonialism and slavery and is maintained by black and brown peoples’ proletarianisation, lumpenisation and both subtle and blatant genocide. These are class issues, not something to do with skin colour or ‘race’, but a ‘hierarchy’ analysis is unable to understand that because it accepts hierarchies as given, is thus metaphysical and not dialectical, and therefore cannot truly challenge such systems. Essentially, hierarchies are a symptom, not a cause
What is the actual point you're trying to make?
If I understand Jeffe correctly, his position is that people are drawn to hierarchy and people want to be at the top of that hierarchy, and nothing can really be done about that. My argument is seeing the hierarchy-establishing behaviour as an innate factor of the human condition is wrong-headed, and it’s possible to analyse the material conditions surrounding the situation to better shape the outcome.
What data is your premise based on?
The material conditions for the situation in question.
Wrt to housing, the inherent scarcity argument confuses me. Like yeah not everyone can live in NYC, but its hardly clear this is an insurmountable problem. Some people are drawn to a specific place for specific reasons but mostly it seems to me that people just want reasonably nice homes in reasonably nice neighborhoods with the usual sorts of accomodations and distances and so on. There's no real material reason we cant deliver on that.
So who gets the nicer spots?
You are a member of a species that has a ridiculously broad swath of preferences among every potential axes.
Yet you are speaking of “the nicer spots” as if they were some objective thing instead of inherently subjective.
You can just say that you don't know.
No I’m saying your premise is fundamentally broken
*shrug* If you don't understand the power of place, I'm not arrogant enough to think I can demonstrate it to you when thousands of authors have spent their lives doing so already.
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This is not an answer to my question, this is another evasion. I agree we can make really beautiful and fantastic things. Then everyone wants to live there because it's so amazing. There will always be some places that are more desirable than others, and you now have a real estate market trading power and influence to enjoy those desirable places. What's your solution?
Hogwash. Humanity found wonderful places and grew into them, we didn't create the worth of these places, we recognized it and then contributed to it.
build more nice shit
The thing we have literally done for millenia
Incenjucar do you know how many current Nice Places were once fetid swampland in this country alone?
No matter what gorgeous city on a hill you build in eastern North Dakota it will never hold the same beauty or attraction as living next to a place of unique natural beauty.
Let's not do this.
It's that some goods cannot be made non-scarce.
You said earlier that you can’t live inland because you grew up near the ocean and it has informed your identity.
There is nearly 100,000 miles of coastline across the US alone.
How much more do you need for that to not be scarce?
Sure, but I think some people are really overestimating how many of those there are, for a realistic definition of "non scarce" of course.
Ok, sure, the new and improved Cody, Wyoming has great transit, it's own brand of natural beauty, a reasonable selection of local jobs, a university, a symphony, a theatre, etc etc.
And you grew up there. But the famous theatre company never plays shows in Cody. The university over in Seattle has the most acclaimed medical program with highly respected professors. Your favorite band pretty much only tours on the east coast. You've always wanted to go deep sea fishing.
Hell, a bunch of your good friends moved to San Francisco because they got jobs at starfleet, and you wish you could hang out more.
If every piece is equally nice then either nothing seems nice at all, or people will still find the differences. I think you're proposing that people will manage to self-sort into their preferred locations and that's what happens anyway but it's really hard to believe that you could balance the system so perfectly that there'll never be more demand for a specific location than supply.
Like yes, you can eliminate the dead and dying cities that nobody wants to live in, and that reduces pressure on the cities everybody wants to live in, but that's not going to perfect match the supply and demand.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
This is an incredibly goosey position that does a lot of harm to creative laborers, by arguing that somehow we are all obliged to "create", as opposed to the reality that not everyone is disposed to do so, and that creative labor is not something that can be forced.
Not to mention that the idea that somehow the answer is to build out is counter to the reality that our footprint is way too spread out as is.
I live in Seattle, where the ocean seeps into the sound. We have jellyfish and harbor seals and orcas in the water here. As a result, I pay a lot of rent. It suffices to keep me from being anxious. There is also a sweet volcano and a lot of great cultural stuff which is somehow not in Florida or Coastal Texas.
Like I live near Chicago, and I roll my eyes every time it is suggested we route water from the Great Lakes to California to help with droughts down there.
When you are proposing a massive fundamental restructuring of society I think you have to prove that it is going to be better than the status quo. And obviously the magnitude of the burden of proof depends in part on how bad the status quo is. Personally I think most people in the developed world are not bad off enough to be sold on radical solutions, but I'll admit that as collapse accelerates that may change.
Even besides the natural beauty places aren't just the objects, they're the people living there. The culture in NYC is different than the culture in San Francisco, we can tell from their insane real estate markets that both have a huge ratio of people who want to live there to space available there, and despite the fact that I readily admit that California weather is so much nicer, I'd always prefer to live here than there.
You can build artificial islands and a brick for brick recreation called Manhattan 2 a few miles south on the Jersey Shore and despite being identically beautiful in terms of nature and artifice if the people living there are Jersey Shore types then I still would prefer my poorer apartment here than a better one there.
Nevermind the question of a volunteer based relying on "some people just like the demanding labor of construction" society even accomplishes such feats of engineering.
There will be more desirable places to work, even in the same industry. If there Cobbler's collective in one city is know for producing the most exciting new trainers with the sweet designs and colors, and the collective in this other city just mass-produces rubber galoshes I have a guess who's going to be getting more applicants.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Talking about hierarchies is not an effective analysis, from my materialist perspective. For historical materialists, we seek to understand what these things we call hierarchies are and why they exist. For instance, its all well and good to say that there’s a ‘hierarchy’ with white people on top and poc on the bottom, but that has no explanatory power. A historical materialist analysis of race, such as that given in the book Settlers by J Sakai shows how racism originates in colonialism and slavery and is maintained by black and brown peoples’ proletarianisation, lumpenisation and both subtle and blatant genocide. These are class issues, not something to do with skin colour or ‘race’, but a ‘hierarchy’ analysis is unable to understand that because it accepts hierarchies as given, is thus metaphysical and not dialectical, and therefore cannot truly challenge such systems. Essentially, hierarchies are a symptom, not a cause
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
I am not saying people are obliged to create; I’m saying that’s what we do, and have done, for as long as humans have been humans.
Because people keep telling me in this thread that a better, more equitable world isn’t possible, and cite as their reasons Van Gogh’s artistic output, the Beatles, and apparently that not everyone can live in New York City, Seattle or the Grand Canyon
It’s facile nonsense rooted in an eternally stagnant present. It is ignorant of the vast amount of history that went into creating these places and making them special, in favor of a mysterious qualia that is utterly unreplicable, and an extraordinarily limited view of what constitutes natural beauty across an enote planet with a breathtakingly diverse biosphere.
Ridiculous, limited and without imagination, the lot of it. It is an insult to the potential of humanity, in favor of the commoditized status quo we’ve been conditioned as late twentieth/early twenty-first century Americans to accept as the only possibility.
What is the actual point you're trying to make?
But sammich, the qualia! The mysterious and ephemeral qualia!
People aren't saying that a better and more equitable world isn't possible.
People are saying that when your solution is underpants gnome level of ??? and the answers for big bold first bullet point questions are 'slave labor' to 'owner class, but committees this time' to 'power of friendship' when they aren't just handwaved away as 'we don't need specifics' people are going to be SKEPTICAL about trying a path that failed over and over again almost every time and every way it was tried.
So who gets the nicer spots?
Coastline is very difficult to measure, and that 100,000 number is almost meaningless in terms of owning waterfront property. For example, think of a serpentine pattern. The actual length of the land-water barrier can be vastly higher than the number you'd get if you drew a straight-ish line.
But even then we can't just think about coastline. A property isn't just binary "desirable" (coastal) or not. There are different features that add or subtract value. A huge chunk of that 100,000 mile number is from Alaska. Is Point Barrow a desirable place to live because it's coastal? A city is considered desirable. How much of that 100,000 miles of coast is high-density urban? You would presumably make rural/suburban lots larger to increase their desirability, but how fast is that going to start eating into the best parts of the non-urban coast? What happens when you need commercial use of that coastline, too?
Trying to handwave it away as "oh yeah there's plenty of coast to go around" kind of misses the point, even if there actually was enough coast to go around.
You are a member of a species that has a ridiculously broad swath of preferences among every potential axes.
Yet you are speaking of “the nicer spots” as if they were some objective thing instead of inherently subjective.
If I understand Jeffe correctly, his position is that people are drawn to hierarchy and people want to be at the top of that hierarchy, and nothing can really be done about that. My argument is seeing the hierarchy-establishing behaviour as an innate factor of the human condition is wrong-headed, and it’s possible to analyse the material conditions surrounding the situation to better shape the outcome.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
What data is your premise based on?
How does communism allocate housing? Depends on how your communist government works. It could be a market, it could be assifned based on industry, "you work in government and this is where your department office is" etc.
We're gonna move you to the middle of North Dakoka. This should be fine since qualia don't exist, right?
I don't understand the logic here. People find certain locations more desirable to live than others. While yes not everyone has the same preferences enough people do to cluster around those areas which creates conflict for space that has to be managed. This is not rocket science.
You can just say that you don't know.
Folks are using real estate costs to highlight there is more preference for some spots than than there is supply and the reason for that preference is not something within human capability to recreate elsewhere
Being concerned about making sure there's enough luxury apartments for people to live in, when there's a housing shortage for those looking for affordable housing? That's capitalism right now, my friend!
The number of available apartments for low- and middle- income New Yorkers reached a 30-year low in 2021, according to the results of a vacancy survey used to determine whether rent stabilization laws will remain in place in the five boroughs.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I'm from upstate New York. I love the mountains. The ocean is an eldritch horror that's worth at best the occasional visit. Actually living there would be appalling to me.
But that doesn't mean you can't look at broad opinions. If enough people prefer coastal homes to non-coastal homes relative to the availability of coastal homes, then the value is going to increase. You don't even need a majority of the population to prefer coastal homes if they don't make up a majority of housing.
"Hey look a squirrel" is a piss-poor answer.
No I’m saying your premise is fundamentally broken
...how on earth do you have a market in a classless, moneyless, stateless society?
Are we bartering goods and services directly for preferred real estate?
The material conditions for the situation in question.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
*shrug* If you don't understand the power of place, I'm not arrogant enough to think I can demonstrate it to you when thousands of authors have spent their lives doing so already.