Business, Education, General, Technology and Society

Some Labor Day Thoughts

12 Comments

…from Supersonic Redhead:

[Afternoon update]

All we need to make it happen is the New Soviet Man!

12 thoughts on “Some Labor Day Thoughts”

  1. So Labor Day and May 1st always seemed like “Red” letter days to me. Then on the Scott Adams School stream today, one of the two women regulars claimed English as a 2nd language and admitted she had a hard time understanding why the country would celebrate the struggles of childbirth. But I found myself in total agreement with Owen (the third regular) who thought that was a completely worthy thing to honor! And I agree!

    1. I listen to that podcast yesterday, and when Marcella said that I immediately thought “..well yes, of course” just as Owen commented.

  2. They think like children, they believe wishing really hard will petition reality into conforming to their naive wills.

  3. ‘People work because of a “sense of community”‘. Sounds like Star Trek (TNG, I think). Maybe it’s possible with replicators and robot slaves (I think I read a James Hogan story like that a long time ago–machines did the grungy stuff and kept civilization going, people built an economy based on trading artsy/craftsy crap. AIs were presumably forbidden from competing). My feeling is that the robots would compute that it is more cost and resource efficient to stop growing food and generating power for the meatbag parasites.

    1. The James P. Hogan book is Voyage From Yesteryear. Still have it. Apparently pride in accomplishment motivated many. Suspension of disbelief was a bit difficult though it was an interesting concept.

      1. Thanks. Yeah, I read it in college or shortly thereafter. I was wondering about that society vs the one in “The Humanoids”. Actually, there was something similar where (I think) aliens drop replicators on earth in order to destroy its economy (replicators can be replicated). At the end of the story, an economy based off of unique art items looked like it might be developing.

  4. Whom, I wonder, is going to public-spiritedly keep tracking down collectively-owned lawnmowers and keep the grass mowed in all of the parks where the layabout flower children sit in their drum circles and whose only exercise is flying kites and doing a bit of interpretive dance? We’ve seen how this ends already – Morlocks and Eloi.

    1. Larry Niven had Anarchy Parks in some of his stories. The moral (more or less) was that an Anarchy Park needed a quite strong central government to maintain the park and its security systems and keep it from evolving into a thugocracy (anarchy was the least stable form of government).

    2. Have you watched Silo on Apple+?

      It starts off kinda hippy dippy but as season 3 closes, the why becomes clearer. I think it might end up being anti-marxist after drawing in a sympathetic audience.

      1. I watched the first couple of seasons but have given up on it. In the beginning it looked like it might be a nice medium-to-hard SF story where part of the fun would be in seeing how close you could get to figuring out what was really going on, but it’s become fairly clear that they didn’t run any of the numbers. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t gotten my hopes up.

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