I have seen a few of these with similar story lines and realized we are living it right now. They have the best healthcare, the best food, the best everything and most of us are a few dollars from disaster. That scares some of us to death literally from all the stress it causes.
Elysium!
You’re not wrong. And anybody who could afford to stop them is too busy fighting a culture war to organize. Who do you think is stoking animosity? MLKJ wasn’t assassinated for civil rights, it was for the Poor Peoples Campaign. The only thing that could stop them is the unity of all those living paycheck to paycheck, regardless of religion or race.
I feel like a movement is actually happening, but slowly. Look at all these unions forming and people striking all around. It gives me hope, to be honest. The media is fighting it hard and somewhat succeeding, but just to an extent. We will win
That sounds like a pretty terrible dystopian movie that should not be made into real life.
So, please, support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Hopefully there will be some good news soon.
Don’t forget the UAW!
Of course. We are all in this together.
Any news on the strikes? Isn’t there three different strikes going on at the same time? Writers, Actors, and CGI Artists I think.
WGA strike is basically over now, SAG-AFTRA strike is still going.
Just get your negligent employer to irradiate you and give you cancer, making you a man with nothing to lose and then go up there and get your cure while toppling the status quo. Easy.
Just give me a cool robotic exoskeleton and I’m sold
Bravo
It’s okay. There will be no Elysium. They’ll die on this molten rock right here with us if they’re still alive by then.
I think our reality is more like Idiocracy than Elysium.
The people in Idiocracy were wiser because when they found the smartest person they put him in charge pretty much straight away.
Can confirm! Just rewatched Idiocracy.
it won’t be a space station but on earth. the rich been building bunkers in new Zealand. which…has a really fucked up wealth disparity and cost of living crisis before it was cool.
good luck staying safe fuckers
If you want to hoard your supplies during the collapse of civilization, all you did was made yourself a target to the person with a bigger gun.
Bunkers ain’t gonna do shit if they can’t grow food
Well, you’ll be pleased to know there are a lot of projects working on indoor vertical farming. Both as a method to spin up food production in heavily populated cities, and as a method for sustainable Mars and Moon bases. Which are effectively just bunkers, in space.
I think there will still be many places that will be livable even if the temperature rises to +10, such as Nothern Canada and Russia. So it seems probable “rich” people could be able to have their own colonies their, though it’s probable rich will have a different meaning then, maybe more about water and food than numbers on the internet. Our species is far from endangered, it’s rather our civilisations that are, the bad and the good in them.
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Wait, so you mean the absurdist comedy movie made by the guy that made Beavis and Butthead doesn’t go deep into the causes of the issues experienced nor tackles potential solutions?
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I think you have a really good point.
I’m anti-eugenics, I just want good sex education and free birth control and abortion. Educate people, and empower them with personal agency.
I think the genetics/natural-selection part of Idiocracy is wrong and in bad taste - ignorance and stupidity are far more correlated to economic insecurity, poverty, food deserts, underfunded schooling. We can and should fix these.
I suspect most people would ultimately agree with this over eugenics, even if they reference Idiocracy.
I think you missed the point of the movie there, champ.
Also, if you don’t like Carls Jr., then fuck you.
Good sci fi usually isn’t about the future, aliens, etc. It’s about the present, but portrayed in a strange way so as to bypass your existing preconceptions about the situation, so you can look at it with fresh eyes.
It also makes it ‘safe’ to discuss controversial topics, because it’s ‘only scifi’ (or horror/fantasy).
Allows creators and authors to fly under the radar with stuff that could potentially get you arrested, censored, cause controversy or end your career. Prime example, Tarkovski movies like Solaris or Stalker, which are full of religious metaphors, despite being released in the USSR.
All I know is the second the very second that we are sure they’re starting to build the cloud cities, we need to start murdering people. You can’t let him finish the cloud cities. Cannot happen. The second construction starts we start cutting off heads. That’s our only chance.
We should start cutting off heads right now tbh
The ends do not justify the means
Oh no, they are not means. They are retribution.
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Also: guns are bad, ban them all, only the police and military should own them…
Am I right???
Ah nice, the “everyone who isn’t a conservative is on the left” tactic. It lets you compress 80% of all ideologies into “the left,” which means you can accuse everyone in “the left” of the stupid shit tankies and liberals believe at the same time!
Stopping things now would be easier than the future. In the future they’ll perfect the killer dog robots etc. and things will get harder.
Mass surveillance is more powerful than killer dog robots and they already have it.The idea of solving our problems by mass murdering rich people was always stupid, but it’s already too late for that anyway.
I am worried about the robot dogs. But Dave Anthony from the dollop brought up a great point. Someone figures out to hack the robot dogs, turn them on their masters, that would be pretty fucking awesome.
If that was a realistic scenario we would have already seen it with insurgents being slaughtered with drones and missiles turning the tables. How are you getting your stockpile of zero day exploits for military hardware? It’s pure fantasy.
Military drones HAVE been hacked.
Literally anything can be hacked if you have the time and resources.
Sounds interesting, can you link a source? Who was doing the hacking? Whose drone? what was the exploit and how severe was it?
Still, as a broad strategy it’s absurd. It isn’t true that literally anything can be hacked. A correctly encrypted message? You’re never decoding it, ever, with any amount of time or resources. The impression that everything is vulnerable comes from how much of our technology was built with a massive attack surface and no concern for security, it doesn’t mean there’s no need to worry about murderbots enforcing the will of a totalitarian state because you can always just hack them. The task of building them to keep that from happening is something they can put a lot of thought into and largely succeed at.
And again, it’s pointless, because mass surveillance is already more powerful. You want to hack something, why not turn the NSA backdoors to your own purposes? It’s not realistic.
They’re not building a cloud city though. They are trying to get away with rockets and space ships.
Kill now
You mean something like NEOM The Line in Saudi Arabia?
Nah, that’s just the stupid ideas from stupid people that the actual arcology architects are saying “Let them cook!” about. It will be a case study when the real Elysiums start getting built.
The line . They are already building arcologies.
It is almost like Elysium was a metaphor for something
That’s unpossible
“Cyberpunk was a warning, not an aspiration,” == Mike Pondsmith (creator of the Cyberpunk TTRPG)
People working 40 hours to make 10 things. Technology improves so that one person can make 20 things in 40 hours. People now get paid twice as much? People now only work 20 hours? Nope! Half as many people now work at the same pay. The rest have to go find something else to do.
The things being made today are a lot more complicated, and there are a lot more of them. People are drinking coffee out of self-heating mugs with LED readouts and companion apps, so you can raise the temperature of your already poured coffee while you’re taking a dump.
Without all this horse shit we could probably do what you’re talking about, but try putting that genie back in the bottle.
You’re right that we have more luxuries today, many that we could live without. And we have them because of higher efficiency and specialization. One person operating machines can farm what took 40 people before. One person in a factory makes thousands of shoes vs making one pair by hand. We’re able to create immense value. The issue is that people who own land and buildings and machines take an oversized share of the value being created, while some workers struggle to meet basic needs. Of course there are many people who live middle class lives. There are also plenty of people who work very hard and still have a low quality of living. We should commit to meeting everyone’s basic needs.
things being made today are a lot more complicated
There’s a kernel of truth here- yes, a lot of everything is more complex (and a lot of it, like cars that now have better safety features and standards- is just better) today than it was- but that’s not the whole story behind why everything is more expensive today, particularly in terms of labor’s buying power.
Today, there are things that haven’t improved in power or technology or quality (looking at you, broadband cable and cell phone connectivity, and basic foodstuffs, and commodities like fuel and timber, and health insurance, and housing) but cost so much more because largely none of these markets are elastic or competitive, and there’s been so much ‘vertical integration’ in these spaces that in years past would have run afoul of basic antitrust enforcement of laws on the books.
Speaking of things that used to be illegal and still should be but aren’t, stock buybacks account for a lot of money that used to go to payroll, but which now sidesteps payroll and goes directly to capital in seriously tax-privileged ways.
Basically, that means capital has been getting regular raises since the 70s but labor’s rates mostly haven’t kept up with inflation- and as such, ought to be regarded to be pay cuts.
Broadband cable and cell connectivity hasn’t improved? What?
These are perfect examples of things that at scale should become cheaper but don’t. Yes, there’s more of it and that cost something to deliver, but the cost of delivering bandwidth per Mbps has decreased drastically (like, by 80+ percent) while the price of having a plan does not in any way reflect that. Likewise, the cost of delivering cell phone service has gone substantially down but the dollars-and-cents price of having a cell phone more than tripled between 2006 and 2020.
Sure, they’re better and faster than they were, but there’s no good reason for them to cost more, other than you have money and they want it
What’s your counterargument when I mention that technology creates jobs and specialty positions? Especially for autistic people.
I’m pretty sure @randon31415@lemmy.world was trying to create a simplified example. To include a generic autistic tech we can modify the example to “40 people making 10 things an hour. A clever autistic person comes along and writes a computer script that improves efficiency. Now 19 people make 20 things an hour, the autistic tech makes 5 times as much as one of the original people and has the specialty job of maintaining the script, the business owner lays off 20 people (4x of their pay compensates the tech) and the business owner pockets the other 16x as extra profit”
The 19 people still employed don’t get any more pay for their extra efficiency, nor do they get any more time off.
The 20 people who were let go at no fault of their own now apparently don’t get to eat or live or have any kind of security until they reeducate themselves to a new line of work.
The autistic tech doesn’t understand where their additional pay comes from, but is happy to get rewarded well for their good work.
If questioned about why the 20 people needed to be let go, the business owner will blame the scripts efficiency instead of their own decision to pocket the money.
However, to answer your question directly: it does not matter how many new jobs or specialty positions are created - if the net pay available to workers is reduced and the net jobs workers can fill are reduced, some workers are destined to get the short straw.
People have been complaining about technology forever. The south complained about machinery that would make slavery obsolete. There’s no pleasing these people.
This guy wants all of the benefits of technology at a low price, but doesn’t want any of the change that occurs from that benefit. What happens if you make everyone work 20 hrs in his example? Everyone makes half what they did before and can’t afford anything. What happens if you fire half the workers in his example? Half the workers can afford the tech but no one else. Which one allows the company to keep selling the tech? The scenario where half are fired… BUT How about we keep all the people like he claims is possible? Then the price of the tech must double. But this guy doesn’t want that because that must be a greedy company. So how will they pay all those employees? What happens when someone else makes the tech with fewer employees and thus lower cost?
So yeah… Tech always requires some to retrain. But society always benefits as a whole.
The only certainty in life is that life is uncertain. To complain about change is just being lazy and refusing to accept change.
|What happens if you make everyone work 20 hrs in his example?
If they are paid for what they make and not the time they spend, everyone earns the same and the workers have more free time. It is this insistence that pay = time which divorces productivity gains from benefiting the worker.
Competition. Someone is highly likely to figure out how to shave costs. Then the company can’t even sell the thing and the people lose their jobs.
The point of an hourly wage is that it’s a contract to be paid some hourly amount regardless of how many things are sold. The company bears most of the risk. Sales are always dynamic. So how can the company pay the employees for every widget made if the things they make aren’t selling for a price that covers the cost of paying the employees?
Any thing created will never sell consistently and never sell forever. So again, skill must change. Marketable skills are always changing. During tech change, the price and demand of the old product drops.
From 1900 to 1920 millions of people lost their jobs to cars. They spent their entire lives around horses. Leather work, carriages, blacksmiths, farm equipment, etc. In just 20 years the horse and carriage was toast. Everyone had to reskill for cars and other jobs because cars took fewer people to make than trending to all the horse stuff.
A modern example is computers. Until the 80s and 90s there were huge work forces processing everything with paper. It wasn’t just those workers that had to reskill. The paper mills had to reduce output. Fewer printing houses. Fewer printing press repairmen. Fewer parts manufacturers for the presses. Less ink. Less forestry management for paper. And so on.
Then how do we incentivize the non-shareholders into more efficient practices? Remember, Occam’s Tweezers
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Battle Angel Alita is exactly what I was thinking, it’s also a great movie it deserves a sequel!
It surprises me how many people dont realize that most rich people are rich because of poor people.
Stop change your phone each year, stop buying brand clothes, stop going to movie and music concerts. Start buying clothes by your local people, support new artists.
Well on the plus side cardboard drones laden with explosives are cheaper than ever. /s
That /s is doin some heavy lifting
It wouldn’t fly without the lift.
If anything they’ll start tunneling under the Earth to escape the brutal conditions they created on the surface.
How long until they farm us and eat us?
Ah, who am I kidding? Morlocks and Eloi would never happen. They wouldn’t give us free food.
I think you have that analogy backwards. The point was that the industrial proletariat stayed underground while the bourgeois regressed into the eloi bc they had built the overworked utopia and had no need to do anything. This is the literal way the rich.
They’re safer going to mars or Venus. Once they are in their bunkers, there’s nothing to stop a whole lot of us from sealing the air intakes with concrete.
I feel like we’re actually the prequel to WALL-E
You should check out the movie Elysium.
I knew this reminded me of a movie, just couldn’t remember the name. Thanks.
It has never been any different. It’s worse and exponentially more visible, but is not new by any means.
No, we still have a chance.
We could stage a revolution, overthrow the oligarchs and restart with whatever we want.
But it ain’t gonna happen.
The problem: human nature is such that those who overthrew the tyrants would shortly find themselves in power. They might even be just and true leaders. But inevitably, greed will out. I suppose the silver lining is the resulting system of oppression might not be so… efficient as it is now.
The current system is in part because the rich got there by taking it from the previous leaders - every country has it’s revolution story, sometimes multiple ones - and they don’t want it to happen to them.
So more likely the new system would be even more efficient.
I believe it starts with Gen Z. Millennials are getting too comfortable, too safe, many have families and more to lose. Revolution is a game of young men. The problem is it requires a wise leader with vision, likely elder, manipulating and pulling the strings. And it’s so hard to be heard nowadays. You’d basically need the movement to go viral.
Or… we could Europenize America so everyone wins.
