Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
In a weird way, I'm somewhat at peace with that. An extra century of life and sudden death in a car accident certainly beats Cancer or Alzheimer's, whilst your body is already falling apart.
The Great Reset and The Man Behind the Curtain
- Thread starter LifeisTiresome
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In a weird way, I'm somewhat at peace with that. An extra century of life and sudden death in a car accident certainly beats Cancer or Alzheimer's, whilst your body is already falling apart.
Typhonis
Well-known member
My father had six strokes and at the end was having trouble breathing with black mucus being expelled from his mouth. That was not a good way to go.
This is essentially watermelon science fiction economy. Of course it's going to do nonsensical things and bankrupt itself as such if ever tried, because it's made to appeal to watermelon sensibilities above following the market.
Also Rifkin is a massive watermelon infamous for comments that could arguably earn him the title of enemy of mankind.
What would happen if there were two extant copies of you? Which body gets the soul, then? 🤔
I used to be a watermelon. If you asked me to go through one of those political compass tests, I'd come out the other side some flavor of "Green Syndicalist".
I had a great time as a green syndicalist. I tried to convince people we didn't need so much plastic consoomer sweatshop-made junk, but eventually, anti-consumerism became the domain of the Right and I was left holding the bag. Meanwhile, everyone and their mother told me I was a wordy and insufferable asshat, and then kept on buying Funko pops and plastic totes from Walmart that reek of phthalates so they could keep getting their all-too-brief endorphin hits from shopping.
One day, I whimpered and fucked off and sat down behind my Ultrawide FapStation 3900 with the NVIDIA Polygonfucker, realized I wasn't as anti-consumerist as I thought I was, and shut up about green shit. My life improved immediately.
Sorry, planet. I need these tits on my modded Skyrim character to have perfect bounce physics, and keeping Earth from becoming a barren ball of dirt is lower on my list of priorities.
I don't get how people think this "eating bugs and living in the pod" bog-standard degrowth stuff is new, like it came out of nowhere. Greens have been saying "we need to like, knock down all the polluting factories, live in bamboo huts, and start practicing entomophagy" for what, decades?
It's a new ascetism for a new cult, which aren't really different from old ascetisms and cults, just a new skin for the old. And the skin is just a slightly edited over skin copied from history books, worshipping nature\the planet is not an original idea at all. It's biggest achievement is that it sneaks de facto religious dogma under the radar meant to detect it for purposes of separating church and state by deliberately not becoming an official religion. If you dig enough into the green ideologues like Rifkin they don't even stray away from hitting the esoteric and philosophical grounds with their bullshit.
Another oh so stereotypical behavior of cult leaders is a gratious offer from the leader to take and hold the burden of worldly possessions of the followers so that they can serve the cult and feel good about it without such distractions (and the cult leaders are spared the distraction of being poor while at it).
There's another thing I should mention. When I started running the numbers on degrowth, I realized that Gamesguy was basically right all along and greens basically wanted children to fucking starve. We can see the consequences of degrowth right in front of us with the COVID-19 lockdowns. Those consequences are called food insecurity for millions of people, and millions more being driven into intolerable poverty.
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And ot already is one of early sign of what a shitshow of a recipe for a great future this is - after all, it's specifically the people currently living the closest to the watermelon accepted lifestyle who are hit with the food insecurity, not the westerners with their evil carbon footprints.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Neither; because in this thought experiment, your soul isn't housed within your body. It controls it. Think of your soul as the person with the video game controller in their hands, and the body as the character in the video game they're controlling. Adding another copy just gives them another character to control, and as the soul exists beyond our mortal conceptions of time and space, there's no reason it can't control multiple versions of the body simultaneously. Or perhaps it's like those games with persistent worlds where your characters become NPCs when you're not controlling them, and you can actually go and interact with a character you've created previously with the one you're currently controlling.
Forget any theoretical copies of ourselves; perhaps you and I have the same soul.
All this bullshit about "carbon footprints" is just a red herring anyway. They push CO2 as some kind of external enemy, when really, it's ordinary wage laborers that they have in their crosshairs. Let's face it. The climate change myth is nothing more than rich eugenicists pushing for deindustrialization and depopulation to conserve Earth's resources for them and their spawn at the expense of everyone else. That's all it has ever been. Psychopathic, Neo-Malthusian Royals and Rockefellers strutting around like "there are too many people, I wish I could be reborn as a virus and kill some of them".
Funny thing none of it absolutely none of it is nessary.
The solar system is litterally filled with resources waiting to be used and because of investments the launch costs are starting to go down. That isn't even going into how many problems we could solve by simply going nuclear en mass. Its just hateful cultism at the end of the day.
Worse. Seen that Rifkin quote? This shit is why they also oppose nuclear power. Much like the socialists in government that they are natural allies with, they want the citizens/serfs to live in poverty, so that they are in desperate need of favors from the government and for corporate leaders, those may well be considered doing them a favor by allowing them to work at all, so they have a dog in the champagne socialist's fight too.
As the old political joke goes "Democrats love poor people, they love poor people so much that they want to make more of them".
Of course a world with artificially, politically escalated scarcity of energy, resources and real estate is very conductive to moving towards such a perfect society of desperate serfs of a socialist-crony capitalist alliance in power, and the green agenda is perfect for justifying such artificial restrictions on availability of such things (which, as basic market economics say, causes these things to get very expensive).
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
The trouble with that is, off-earth colonies are going to eventually want to get their own independence and the Powers That Be aren't keen on getting any new competition, especially competition that potentially has access to unlimited resources in space and might easily supplant them. They're going to keep the lid on space exploration/exploitation until they can do it entirely with robots that won't want to found an independent nation of their own.
No, technology is the showstopper for now and it's going to be very hard to change that, while everyone has their own grifts and pet projects that are not hard, they are guaranteed to make money for the right people even if they suck. For resources, and twice as badly for major colonies, this would be the equivalent of oil rigs in international waters claiming independence.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Nonsense. A space mining colony is going to have to be far more independent than any oil rig due to the tremendous distance of supply lines and massive expense of shipping things such distances. We're talking months instead of hours.
It would be equivalent to 13 colonies along the east coast of a newly discovered continent deciding they weren't going to keep obeying a king across the ocean.
Note that the same pricing applies to its vital supplies and products.
If you can move those affordably, the same applies to military forces.
The difference is that in 13 colonies there was plenty of free real estate that many, many people could live in, cheaper than in the Old World even. Just build a cabin out of local wood, while in Europe both the land and the wood already belonged to some lord or the state and it was sold at premium prices, if at all. And then there was all the farmland free to claim...
In space, you have to build very expensive real estate with life support for everyone. No cheaper than a submarine, yet we don't see people getting those to live in international waters, even though technically it should be much cheaper as no spacelift is involved.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
No. Supplies can be sent the long way, on very high-efficiency low-speed paths, taking months to reach their destination, because stored goods don't need to breathe and eat along the way. Soldiers cannot, aside from robots which, as I've said, is what the Powers That Be want to send into space instead of humans in the first place.
A submarine isn't producing anything it can sell for income, making it a non-starter. By definition, the mining colony doesn't have that problem.
Further, people have tried to seastead. They always get strangled by red tape.
The Satoshi also offered a chance to marry two movements, of crypto-devotees and seasteaders, united by their desire for freedom – from convention, regulation, tax. Freedom from the state in all its forms. But converting a cruise ship into a new society proved more challenging than envisaged. The high seas, while appearing borderless and free, are, in fact, some of the most tightly regulated places on Earth. The cruise ship industry in particular is bound by intricate rules.
It's not a technological problem, they're prevented because the Powers That Be don't want the extra competition and have placed a bewildering array of legal barriers to anybody trying to make their own sea nation.
They absolutely can, it's only a matter of sufficient mass and delta v budget.
There are plenty of resources in and under the sea. Extracting them is expensive and technologically complex though. Just as it is in space, hence the oil rig comparison.
By the time we have space colonies, we will also have red tape in space.
It will take a certain scale of civilization in space and polishing of engineering needed for that before independence movements become even remotely feasible.
It's a program with one ship and an economic strategy inherently dependent on dealing with normal economies in something they consider dodgy already. If there will ever be serious attempts in it, it will be something straight from Seaquest or Bioshock, involving selling many freighter's worth of deep sea oil, gold or lithium to the highest bidder on the world markets. Your insistence on sticking with the 13 colonies example is, funny enough, a perfect argument for what these other "mysteriously failed" distant independent colonies are lacking - scale. That's one thing the 13 colonies absolutely didn't lack. In 1776 they had population about similar to Sweden, a fairly significant, even if second rate European power at the time, with much more land at their disposal, plus the distance advantage you mentioned.
It would be the equivalent of a modern seasteading or space colony project involving something between 20 and 80 million people and second to first world GDP equivalent proportional to that. And if these projects ever get even close to that scale, then yes, independence is absolutely on the table. But that's not going to happen anytime soon.
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Bassoe
Well-known member
They’ve already been doing this. Asteroid mining and powersats have been theoretically economically competitive since the Cold War space race, but we’re only seeing the likes of spacex and amazon showing up and progressing now, as automation technologies near the necessary sophistication.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Motte and Bailey tactics. "They might have a sufficient mass and delta v budget" is a very, very different animal from your previous position that military forces can be shipped as easily as supplies and mined goods.
Goalpost move, a submarine (which you were replying to) isn't capable of extracting resources like an oil rig.
Yes, that's kind of my point.
You... do realize you just massively undercut your own position that the issue is technological and not legal/sociological there?
Yes, exactly so. It's not a technology problem, they don't want humans to be going off and forming Zeon up there so they have strangled space exploration/exploitation until they could get the resources with robots that will never decide to go form Zeon.
No, don't shift it to silly rhetorical battles. It's not "they might have a sufficient mass and delta v budget". It's "if the technological-economical situation allows such colonies, then any government willing to pay for it *will* have sufficient mass and delta v budget". It will be just a matter of funding at that point.
Sure, you can argue that the defender's advantage in space will be considerable, much like in American Revolutionary War, but that won't help much when the colony in question is just few thousands of weirdos and the economic advantage of the founding country is measured in orders of magnitude.
In that analogy, just because the British Empire couldn't crush the rebellion of the 13 colonies, doesn't mean it couldn't crush a rebellion on the Pitcairn Islands.
Yet. I'd like to inform you that the same applies to space resource extraction so far.
In fact sea colonization is often something that is used as a comparison for the engineering challenges and economics to space colonization, in which some factors are very similar, minus the launch costs\tyranny of rocket equation.
How are those mutually exclusive?
When technology barely allows the endeavor to function at all (or as currently it is, technology isn't there, in which case no effort is needed at all), even tiny, token efforts from the powers of status quo are enough to derail it. When technology and economy allows colonies to get bigger and more economically powerful, then it takes a lot more effort from the founding powers to hold them, and the colonies may slip away if they are in crisis or have better things to do.
No they aren't competitive, because the sufficient engineering isn't even there yet? If they were feasible, screw economics, world powers would absolutely want powersats because they are strategic scale weapons doubling as innocuous energy infrastructure, and they wouldn't hold back under the threat of competitors building their own first.
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