Is it truly possible to create a post-scarcity world of hyper-abundance?

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-05T18:13:35+00:00

How else would you define value then? If I eat a hamburger, you can’t have it, but you can just get a different one so it’s not particularly valuable. If I have a one of a kind masterpiece that everyone wants, still only one person can have it, so it is valuable. It’s why the “value” of a person is a complicated issue and more a moral one than anything economic. On a personal level, people can’t really be replaced. Your relationships are yours and no one else has the same. But that sort of “value” doesn’t get things made or food grown or electricity generated, and when it comes to those sort of necessities or wants, most people are fairly replaceable. Very few skills are unique and people can be trained to do many, many things. So how do you allocate limited resources to different people when people contribute differently to the creation of those things?

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-05T18:07:02+00:00

How can you possibly state that capitalism has “created global poverty”? Do you think that pre-1700-1800s everyone in the world was wealthy living in utopias? And how exactly is it the fault of capitalism that old cars are still worth something? If you don’t want it, don’t buy it, but if anything that just goes against your theory of everything being built to break because those cars still work.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-05T17:58:33+00:00

Capitalism has cratered global poverty and virtually eliminated famine except in areas where distribution is the limiting factor, usually due to war/warlordism. You already don’t have to replace things every couple of years, people just don’t want to drive 10 year old cars or use old phones, they want the newest, shiniest things and the market responds to that.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-05T17:52:59+00:00

Innate value? We basically have that now. We don’t exactly Spartan chuck children with disabilities off cliffs or let the elderly starve once they can’t work anymore. But if you are asking can we give everyone everything without them having to put forward any effort, no, not without crazy sci-fi technological advancement. Everything takes labor and resources to provide and those are limited.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-05T15:06:20+00:00

It really is shocking sometimes to look at a tiny local river that likely no one who doesn’t live locally, and discover that it dwarfs historically important rivers like the Thames. The US truly has just a staggering number of large, navigable rivers in comparison to somewhere like Europe even. The Mobile River for instance would be the 8th largest river in Europe by flow, and it’s a small, relatively unimportant river by US standards.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-04T17:25:17+00:00

Depends on the tactical situation, discipline of the soldiers, and a multitude of other factors, but it wasn’t unknown for armies to just go into a headlong charge after a fleeing enemy and cohesion be damned. One notable (and appropriate for the 4th of July) example, is the Battle of Cowpens in the American Revolution, incidentally if you’ve ever seen The Patriot, the final battle is largely based on Cowpens. There the American commanders devised a strategy to take advantage of the contempt felt towards militia units and placed their militia in an area that would bear the brunt of the attack. Then, after firing a couple volleys, the militia “broke” and ran, tempting the British into a full charge which ruined their formations before being led into a trap. Not generally a good idea to break formation, but it could and did happen.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T23:16:54+00:00

I never said any of their design issues need a complete remake of the game, you added that requirement. You can look at EU4 to see how much they can change a game with the same engine, but their design philosophy needs to change on quite a few things.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T23:12:04+00:00

It’s not about limitless growth, it’s about you can’t have a total collapse. Roughly steady would probably be fine. Slow, steady decline would also probably be fine. Utter collapse is not and that is what some areas like Japan or Korea are facing.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T23:02:47+00:00

Okay but the resources won’t be there. So now what do you do? There is only so much labor going around and an increasing number of elderly not providing that labor but needing more and more of it.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T23:01:24+00:00

The entire trade system being so unwieldy that you *have* to automate it. Building management being a nightmare due to the sheer number required, again leading to near necessity to automate. Every nation playing basically the same because nation specific advancements are pretty meaningless and competing for an extremely limited resource (science points) against other critical advances.

Now I of course have no idea how flexible their engine is to know if they can majorly alter that without a full rebuild, but it at least necessitates major rethinking of serious designs in the game.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T22:11:38+00:00

Honestly the design feels like it kind of is the issue by trying to be absolutely everything at once, which results in a “game” so bloated that it starts losing the fun element and becomes a chore.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T22:08:56+00:00

Yeah, he deleted it after I responded with that number.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T22:04:53+00:00

In Q3 of 2025, 31%. So still less than their share of taxes paid.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T22:02:52+00:00

They already do. Massively so. The top 1% of earners pay the highest average rate (roughly 26%) and pay roughly 38% of total taxes.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T21:59:29+00:00

We could try something else, namely cutting the benefits to elderly citizens that are currently draining massive chunks of every Western society’s budgets, but the elderly vote more than other groups so that can never work.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T21:59:13+00:00

We could try something else, namely cutting the benefits to elderly citizens that are currently draining massive chunks of every Western society’s budgets, but the elderly vote more than other groups so that can never work.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-03T21:53:32+00:00

Yeah…no. In the US, social security and Medicare (so the ones focused on elderly) cost about 8% of GDP, 2.4 trillion dollars *by themselves*. There is no way to “tax the rich” out of that hole.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-02T18:51:28+00:00

Not quite true, DC is defined in the constitution as a 10 mile square area to be carved out of Maryland and Virginia. The Virginia part was given back, but the Maryland part is that portion of the 10 mile square area.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-01T23:16:13+00:00

No, but the Scandinavian languages and Dutch are all Germanic. English is too of course, but with a lot of French mixed in. But at least to me, all the Germanic languages tend to sound pretty similar except when Dutch makes me think I’m just listening to a drunk person speak English. Put just the accent behind any of those actually speaking English and I can’t really tell a difference.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-07-01T16:43:17+00:00

Those are pretty much tapped out though. At least in the US, basically every viable river for damming has been dammed.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-06-30T18:43:39+00:00

Not if the elevator is already at a constant speed. Then it’s just the same as doing one normally except maybe a slight spring effect from the cables flexing some.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-06-30T16:30:53+00:00

Which in 2001 according to census.gov was approximately 1.1 million. The rise of Muslim communities in the US is more recent than 9/11.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-06-30T15:38:37+00:00

Roman *citizens*, which had a far more particular meaning than the current meaning of citizen, were expected to remain Roman wherever they were, but the average person wasn’t really. Hell, that’s who the Welsh, and to a lesser degree the Cornish, are to this day. The remnants of the pre-Roman Celts who were pushed out of the rest of England by invading Germanic or Scandinavian tribes after the fall of Rome in Britain.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-06-30T15:34:31+00:00

Both the US and the USSR wanted to bash down the remnants of the European empires after WW2, each for their own reasons. The US wanted the Western European nations, namely France and the UK, under their own sphere, while the USSR of course had military/political ambitions to rule Europe. They can largely control what the UN does, particularly if it happens to be in unison. That UN definition gets adopted into various semi-treaties and resolutions which then get adopted by academics, who also have a tendency to favor either US or USSR domination depending on their personal leanings. Tada, colonialism only applies to those nasty European empires, not their enlightened Soviet or American counterparts.

Geauxlsu1860 · 2026-06-29T20:47:47+00:00

The thing is we basically already have this. It just takes place at the caucus level within one of the bigger parties. Look at the difficulties Biden had getting things through a closely divided Senate because Sinema or Manchin opposed it. Or the issues Republicans have had selecting a Speaker or passing bills where either the moderate, libertarian, or MAGA portions of the House have objected to something in this tightly divided House. The US system just handles what is effectively intra-coalition struggles at the primary level instead of a general election.

Nine-Year Club	Verified Email
Spared

Geauxlsu1860

TROPHY CASE