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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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It doesn't matter how many iPhones or how much fried chicken you can afford if housing is unaffordable and most of "wealth" is actually just zero-sum status games anyways.

This obvious sign this is true is people complain about "income inequality" not "poverty"

See also the invention of the new phrase "food-insecure"

In the future, egalitarian causes will use newer phrases that describe the future ways that the relative-low-status are relatively low status. That means ignoring the number of spacecrafts that the average poor can fabricate.

It is all envy, all the way down

Yeah. Whenever this subject comes up, some people will bring up smartphones and touchscreens, how they didn't even exist, how much memory they process etc. It's just a nonsensical misdirection. In 1980, I'm pretty sure you could work as some well-off bigshot lawyer with one phone nr. and two rotary phones in your fancy office. Today if you're the lowliest subcontractor / gig worker / part-time employee wagecuck, you're still expected to have a smartphone and have one or two DM apps installed because you're expected to be available anytime, any place.

I liked the book Accelerando. At one point in it they are post scarcity. The Hello Kitty artificial intelligence introduction speech to newly created people says things like monster trucks are free. Only original art, human made fashion and weapons are not distributed by Hello Kitty. Snobbish and exclusive positional goods like new fashions are the only really hard to get things.

Great book, horrible ending. Which is about in-line with anything Charlie Stross writes.

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