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[SalmonGod]

*Whistles* Thoughts on today's science.

I'm just waiting for brain-upload tech to happen, so I can finally get rid of this body that I hardly ever use.

I use mine so much I can't put it down.  Still wouldn't mind an upgrade.

[RedKing]

Relating to what Truean said about the death of merit....let me cross-post this from the rage thread:

*(#^&(*#^)(*%&@^)$#(*&%^)@(*$^%)(*&$@^%*()$&@%(^
Saw that ATF had 40 openings for IA positions (basically the bottom of the ladder in intelligence work) posted yesterday. Spent some time last night polishing the resume, was going to sit down and apply today.

The position(s) were open for ONE FUCKING DAY. And based on some of the calls and email I'm seeing, most of those positions have already been filled. Meaning they already had people they wanted lined up to go.

The entire nightmare that is the Federal hiring system is explicitly designed to prevent this kind of nepotistic bullshit and give all citizens a fair shake at getting hired. GODDAMN IT MOTHERFUCKERS......I have a Master's Degree, want to work in intel, studied so as to be able to do intel, and am willing to make a major pay cut to fucking DO INTEL. And I can't get hired because you assholes already have the job prefilled before you announce it. FUCK ALL YOU SONS OF BITCHES.

That's it. I'm done. I'm looking for jobs overseas and blowing this fucking popsicle stand of a shit-ridden country.

I still believed that -- despite all the incompetent employees I deal with regularly -- the Federal civil service was one of the last bastions of meritocracy in the land. After all, the hiring system was designed to find and hire only the best candidates, right? If I kept failing to get hired, it just meant I wasn't good enough. I just need to make myself better, and then that job will be mine, right?

Jesus Christ.....I've wasted the last six years of my life. D:

[Descan]

RedKing, come up north. CSIS could use someone well versed in China >_> I bet, at least. :3

[Trollheiming]

Goddamnit, why did I read the last few posts in here. That was depressing and you're only a decade or so ahead of me.

Only depressing because the last few generations of Americans have expected more from life. Unquantifiably more. Drama-waiting-to-happen more. Honestly, don't ask us thirty somethings about either jack or shit, because we don't know anything yet, and we're tremendously dull company with our constant "Coulda been a contenda, Charlie" soliloquies. Maybe our wispy hipster facial hair can grow into full-fledged gray beards of wisdom in a few decades, but right now it just ain't happening, so reserve questions for better generations than us.

Regardless, I'm here to comment about the short story Manna.

Eric then began buying other resources he needed -- factories, mines, companies around the world. He also began building new factories in Australia, all of them completely automated, to build robots. With his $1 trillion, he needed to buy all of the resources necessary for one billion people to be completely self-sufficient. He was able to accomplish that goal in Australia for about $600 billion."

Sorry, SalmonGod, but that short story is hopelessly unrealistic.

$600 billion will not purchase the resources necessary for a billion frigging people to live self-sufficiently. $600 a person barely gets them all transported to Australia. Now you've got a billion penniless people in Australia, how do you even begin feeding a billion people in a place that will inevitably need to import food from other countries? What about homes? The math is off by orders of magnitude.

Eric also started with several core principles that govern life for people [...] Another is complete recyclability. The resources owned by the project are finite, and by making everything completely recyclable, they are reused over and over and never diminish.

Perpetual motion machines! I thought we had debunked those conclusively. Someone has figured out how to break the Second Law of Thermodynamics and get complete recyclability, it appears. Even the most successful recycling process, that of recycling paper, eventually wears out the fibers of the cellulose, and they can't make good paper pulp after about seven cycles. You can't perpetually sustain consumption on old resources. In the real world, recycling can sometimes be effective, but no one has seriously posited that you could ever get everything back in a recycling process. Until now.

And also, who repairs robots that break down? Everyone else can float along in a blissful state of extreme gratification of desires, but who is doing the drudgery of keeping the robots serviced and sacrificing his own free time? Who is doing the programming? It's cute to say that the laws are being made by a democratic system and enforced by robots, but then the key is, who is converting the laws and regulations understood by humans into machine-readable instructions for enforcement?

Probably... Eric?

That's the underlying problem, the role of Eric is messianic. Chapter 5 is all non-stop "Eric this" and "Eric that." Eric realized, Eric foresaw, Eric knew, Eric created rules. I might go so far as to guess that Eric is, in fact, Marshall Brain himself under a Gary Sue. I'd rather be oppressed by robots than one man's vision of what humanity needs. And being oppressed by robots is one man's vision of what humanity needs.

"The refs are robots. They watch your sensory feed as it is coming in and look for rule violations. For example, let's say you start screaming obscenities at someone in public. The refs would flag that and detain you. It's against the rules to scream at someone in public, mainly because no one wants to be around when it happens."

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, when Australia Project was being talked about as a utopia in comparison to dystopian Manna-driven America, and yet every moment of everyone's lives was being recorded, and robots were enabled to shut people's nervous systems down. I was awaiting for a literary masterstroke where Australia and America are ultimately revealed to be nearly the same in reality, but the flip never occurred, and the Australia Project was unironically being presented as utopia.

The only reason that the poor people in America are living in foam housing, and the people in Australia are living luxuriously is a miscalculation of the resources necessary to actually sustain such a difference. There aren't enough resources in the world to accomplish that lifestyle for a billion people. The only difference between the roboguards detaining people in the foam housing project in America, and the refs in Australia is even greater control of freedoms.

It's a scary damn story. I sincerely hope that most readers are freaked out by it.

[Dutchling]

I must agree with Troll here. That story just shows that there might be yet another way for humanity to destroy itself. Or make it wish it had done so when it still had the chance.

[SalmonGod]

I linked the story because of the Manna system therein.  I agree the ending is rather dumb.  We had a discussion about that in the sad thread yesterday.  But the Manna system, like I said, increasingly represents what daily life as a corporate pawn feels like.

[Dutchling]

Ah, I thought it was your view of a perfect world...

[Trollheiming]

I linked the story because of the Manna system therein.  I agree the ending is rather dumb.  We had a discussion about that in the sad thread yesterday.  But the Manna system, like I said, increasingly represents what daily life as a corporate pawn feels like.

Fair enough then. There is a race to squeeze the last drops of productivity out of workers during the downturn, and that can demoralizing. I also thought it was the new system that you refered to in the Election thread.

[SalmonGod]

I linked the story because of the Manna system therein.  I agree the ending is rather dumb.  We had a discussion about that in the sad thread yesterday.  But the Manna system, like I said, increasingly represents what daily life as a corporate pawn feels like.

Fair enough then. There is a race to squeeze the last drops of productivity out of workers during the downturn, and that can demoralizing. I also thought it was the new system that you refered to in the Election thread.

Nah.  My political views are pretty close to social libertarianism.  I think our system of values is outdated.  Our economics are built to manage scarcity, and anything that isn't scarce breaks the system.  Huge portions of the economy are propped up right now on artifically enforced scarcity, which is easiest to observe in the conflicts over intellectual property.  I also think we need to reject mechanisms by which people extend control over obscene amounts of resources.  Basically, I think the concept of property needs to be subverted in our culture, and replaced with the concept of possession.  Any claim made by a person to something that they do not personally relate to is illegitimate.  Finally, I believe that mass communications gives us the ability to organize more directly, and we can begin to peel away the layers of abstraction in our society that we previously depended on.

[Muz]

My generation's been doing pretty damn well. Everyone's accomplishing things at half the age Gen X did

[alway]

I think you'll appreciate this, Salmon; it's an SMBC webcomic from a few weeks ago which more or less describes what you were saying in regards to scarcity:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Edit: There's also this one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Aklyon]

SMBC can be rather spot on at times.

[SalmonGod]

That was the best retort to the "something to hide" bullshit I've ever seen.  Exactly the opposition that was stirring in my head but would never come out as such.  Thanks for sharing.

[Scoops Novel]

Whats your perception of the media, in particular film? In this case, partial blame is justified. I'd also like to hear more about your thoughts on working within the establishment. Finally, what do you feel guilty about?

[Scoops Novel]

How do you expect us to live up to the challenge? Will we be any better then our forebears?