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[SalmonGod]

while everything else is still very scarce indeed.

I wouldn't say everything else.  Far from it.  Mostly luxury goods.  Scarcity of most important things these days is artificially enforced.  I think the only answer to all these problems is to abandon our traditional concepts of "economy" and/or adapt them to incorporate post-scarcity as a basis.  I think the only reason this isn't happening is because dominant institutions know this means losing the foundation of their dominance.

[Scelly9]

I've heard of one good proposal for limiting piracy, which is to release frequent patches and high-quality free DLC that pirated versions will fail to operate well with. This provides an incentive to buy legitimate copies and by definition will not screw over anyone who does buy instead of pirate.

Game companys will never do this though. Besides, a good cracker could get patches to TPB half an hour after their released.

[Aklyon]

Frequent patching certainly does make it harder to justify pirating anything, I'd say. Not saying I've done it anytime recently, but if I had to download something everyother week or so to have the best version, while a legit buyer got it in an autoupdater or something for no effort, I'd certainly feel like I got the short end of the (constantly updating) stick. I'd still do it if I super seriously really wanted to have it and couldn't afford it at the time, but I've got far better things I could be downloading, like nifty pictures of space or something.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

while everything else is still very scarce indeed.

I wouldn't say everything else.  Far from it.  Mostly luxury goods.  Scarcity of most important things these days is artificially enforced.  I think the only answer to all these problems is to abandon our traditional concepts of "economy" and/or adapt them to incorporate post-scarcity as a basis.  I think the only reason this isn't happening is because dominant institutions know this means losing the foundation of their dominance.

Oil. Phosphorus. Hydrogen. Uranium. Nitrogen-Fixed Fertilizer. Fresh Water. Fertile Land. Wood. All scarce.

I've heard of one good proposal for limiting piracy, which is to release frequent patches and high-quality free DLC that pirated versions will fail to operate well with. This provides an incentive to buy legitimate copies and by definition will not screw over anyone who does buy instead of pirate.

Game companys will never do this though.

About that.

[Bauglir]

If your stuff is actually interesting, and you make your stuff easier to obtain in comparison to piracy (Not goddamn overemcumbered in DRM, for starters), and about as good or better than your competitor over yonder who shattered your copy-protection for fun (Pirates, even though they lack multiplayer, probably had no problem starting up D3 as soon as it was cracked, no queues, no error 37, nada), people will more likely pay more often for the legal one over the dubious legality of the other one, if they can actually do so.

This is basically the root of the issue. Hell, I've paid more for Dwarf Fortress than I would be willing to for most games, because it was easy to get (even if hard to learn) and it genuinely interested me. That was easily worth the donation, even if I wasn't forced into it.

The problem is that there are industries built on overcoming problems with technology, and now that those problems are gone, they'd like to keep a job. So trying to artificially coax scarcity back into existence is the only way to cope. That's a legitimate complaint in an economy that demands you have a job if you want to survive. The people in charge of publishing companies also want to keep obscene profit margins, but they don't want to change their business model because that's expensive and risky (as if stagnation didn't guarantee eventual collapse). It's wishful thinking, really, and not really a legitimate complaint. But it's a natural reaction to change.

When I think about how I'd like the future to go, if it turns out to be possible to bring into reality the more popular sci-fi inventions like replicators, I think the Internet amounts to a test run for a true post-scarcity society. At the moment, we're doing a shitty job, but hopefully once we get it right we can learn to apply those lessons if we ever have the opportunity by some miraculous chance.

[kaijyuu]

"Free DLC" was pretty much the norm until what, the mid 00s? There were several warcraft 3 content patches that I remember, not to mention all the balancing/etc. No subscriptions were paying for all that; initial sales and a few ads on bnet was their entire revenue stream.

[Aklyon]

Well at least no one (with the possible exception of Apple OSX) tries to charge for patches.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

When I think about how I'd like the future to go, if it turns out to be possible to bring into reality the more popular sci-fi inventions like replicators, I think the Internet amounts to a test run for a true post-scarcity society. At the moment, we're doing a shitty job, but hopefully once we get it right we can learn to apply those lessons if we ever have the opportunity by some miraculous chance.

The thing about a post-scarcity society is that it isn't one if there's anything left which is scarce. That will produce a hole in the system, where as the internet is more akin to a bleeding wound in the traditional economic system.

[Scelly9]

I've heard of one good proposal for limiting piracy, which is to release frequent patches and high-quality free DLC that pirated versions will fail to operate well with. This provides an incentive to buy legitimate copies and by definition will not screw over anyone who does buy instead of pirate.

Game companys will never do this though.

About that.

That is surprising and awesome.

[kaijyuu]

Well at least no one (with the possible exception of Apple OSX) tries to charge for patches.

Bugfixes, yeah. But nowadays you have to pay for things like new maps and characters in games. The closest thing to DLC was expansion packs, which have a buttload more content than DLCs do (well depending on the DLC of course).

[Bauglir]

When I think about how I'd like the future to go, if it turns out to be possible to bring into reality the more popular sci-fi inventions like replicators, I think the Internet amounts to a test run for a true post-scarcity society. At the moment, we're doing a shitty job, but hopefully once we get it right we can learn to apply those lessons if we ever have the opportunity by some miraculous chance.

The thing about a post-scarcity society is that it isn't one if there's anything left which is scarce. That will produce a hole in the system, where as the internet is more akin to a bleeding wound in the traditional economic system.

Yes, I'm not sure how that disagrees with what I said (if that's the intent). I'm basically saying that information on the internet is post-scarcity, and learning how to deal with that is going to be a major challenge. And how we do it is probably going to be a good predictor of how we deal with the decreasing scarcity of other resources (there are a lot of things right now that aren't particularly scarce, except artificially, but this is one of the most obvious and intuitive ones for the average person to be able to understand, and conceptions of "virtual space" and the like help the Internet stand apart conceptually from traditional notions of resources, which tend to be a totally unquestioned assumption with physical objects).

I think any system that encourages abandoning technological progress because it's unprofitable is one that's outlived its usefulness.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm saying that we can't use the internet as a metric of how well post-scarcity will go because post-scarcity requires uniform post-scarcity.

[SalmonGod]

I think any system that encourages abandoning technological progress because it's unprofitable is one that's outlived its usefulness.

This is basically how I feel.  I think our systems were useful at one point, but they're becoming more and more obsolete now.  There may be things that are still scarce, but much of the problem there is sustained by our economic systems.  I would dispute the truth or relevancy of some of your examples, MSH.  Some of those things (such as oil) may be scarce, but those resources wouldn't be as important as they are if the industries built up around them didn't work very, very hard to keep them so... which they only do because their scarcity makes them profitable.  Other of your examples, such as fresh water, are abundant in some places and scarce in others... and a major factor in this seems to be that the infrastructure to provide that resource isn't built in places that can't afford the investment. 

The most basic necessities, food and shelter, are not very scarce at all, but huge efforts are made these days to keep them scarce.  Farmers are producing more crops for things other than food or being paid bonuses to produce at less than capacity, while huge portions of the food we still produce is thrown out.  People are being kicked out of their homes just so that those homes can sit empty.  I don't know if it's still going on, but a couple years ago when the foreclosure blitz was still new and highest-intensity, there were reports that a large fraction of homes were being kept off the market just to keep prices up...

I think that all post-scarcity needs is for basic necessities to be abundant enough.  The whole problem is that a person has to make profit in order to survive, right?  This means a person cannot afford to do work in a post-scarcity environment, because they won't be able to pay for basic necessities.  If basic necessities are treated as part of the post-scarcity model, then this is no longer an issue.

[Whitefoxsniper]

You mean that there is going to be someone, somewhere, who can blackmail me about the amount and type of porn I may or not be downloading? I am entirely against this... not that I have anything to hide.

[Scelly9]

You mean that there is going to be someone, somewhere, who can blackmail me about the amount and type of porn I may or not be downloading?

They can already do that. Unless you use a VPN your ISP has all the logs of every website you visit and file you download. They can be released with a court order, a bribe, or a good hacker.