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    Late Capitalism

    [URL]https://twitter.com/lastbookstorela/status/1157730384282619904?s=21[/URL]

    #2
    [URL]https://twitter.com/halaljew/status/1157701605568995329?s=21[/URL]

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      #3
      [URL]https://twitter.com/people4bernie/status/1157679307201736706?s=21[/URL]

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        #4
        [URL]https://twitter.com/xr_cambridge/status/1156508487100370946?s=21[/URL]

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          #5
          [URL]https://twitter.com/laurie_garrett/status/1157015875276464129?s=21[/URL]

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            #6
            [URL]https://twitter.com/igorvolsky/status/1157733178339147776?s=21[/URL]

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              #7
              [URL]https://twitter.com/jgsalesltd/status/1157370724689965056?s=21[/URL]

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                #8
                [URL]https://twitter.com/gmbwestmidlands/status/1157924101840953344?s=21[/URL]

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                  #9
                  Sorry if it's been said, but do you not think the "late" is a bit over-optimistic?

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                    #10
                    That is a very good, if profoundly depressing, point

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                      #11


                      one way or another change is inevitable

                      Anyway... optimism of the will ...and all that.

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                        #12
                        It's definitely late capitalism. Either capitalism ends or the world does.

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                          #13
                          That's why they are so obsessed with space travel

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by Reginald Christ
                            The end of capitalism as the ending of When Worlds Collide, with Musk and Bezos' private security firms mowing down people desperately trying to lash themselves to the last Falcon Heavy bound for Mars.
                            And then they find Musk and Bezos have embraced both penultimatism and ante-penultimatism

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by Guy Profumo View Post

                              And then they find Musk and Bezos have embraced both penultimatism and ante-penultimatism

                              Elucidate for us, please?

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                                #16

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                                  #17
                                  I don't think the world will end. There are about seven billion humans on this planet. Regardless of what happens, some of the earth will still be inhabitable and some of them/us will survive the next calamity and restart civilization.

                                  A lot of people, including many alive now, have been through calamities/atrocities that felt like the end of the world. Nothing that was truly global, of course, but I suspect we could learn a lot by listening to them.

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                                    #18
                                    We don't know that at all. There's no obvious limiting value on the population. Malthusian nonsense about being at capacity has been going on since Malthus, and yet there's no evidence that we're even close to capacity.

                                    There's evidence that population will go down - improved education and healthcare almost always reduces population growth, and reproduction levels are already below replacement across much of the world. But that doesn't mean we're at a Malthusian tipping point with unsustainable populations.

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                                      #19
                                      I don't think it has to. Who knows what we can sustain with better technology? But if we stay on the track we're on it certainly will. Large parts of the earth aren't going to be habitable. Famine, disease, superstorms caused by climate change, ecological collapse, etc, will kill a lot of people.


                                      Anyway, this is relevant.
                                      Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
                                      Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 07-08-2019, 20:16.

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                                        #20
                                        We appear to be able to sustain 7-9 billion people just fine, and we don't need to have a carbon based economy to do so. There's no reason that 9 billion people can't be broadly carbon neutral and live in exactly the kind of comfort that we're used to. I find the idea that we have to cull the population or we're all doomed to be both utterly depressing and not based in reality.

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                                          #21
                                          I don’t think we *have* to cull the population, but I think nature is going to do that for us.



                                          I think it will be a combination of successes and failures. There will be massive population losses in some areas followed by or maybe even accompanied by growth in others.


                                          For example, The Expanse series - which is awesome, both on TV and in print - posits that we’ll have about 25bn people on earth even after massive climate change, plus a few billion in bubbles on Mars and a few more million or billion in artificial environments among the outer planets.

                                          Life is hard for most people and many Earthers just live on basic universal income, which is better than starving but boring. Polygamy is common because it’s so crowded and it’s possible to make a child with the DNA of five people.

                                          But many choose to leave the planet. Not unlike, I suppose, people who left a hard life in Europe in the 15th-19th century for a chance at something less shitty in the Americas or other colonies.

                                          That all sounds very plausible. It assumes we’ll have all kinds of better materials technology, which I’m sure we will, as well as better nuclear technology to make space travel faster and more efficient, which seems likely but not certain. It also imagines we’ll have drugs that allow us to tolerate both low gravity living on spinning space stations as well as very high gravity aboard spacecraft accelerating at 5-10 G. Not sure about that either, but maybe.

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                                            #22
                                            Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                            Life is hard for most people and many Earthers just live on basic universal income, which is better than starving but boring.
                                            Why?

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                                              #23
                                              Instead of pushing for more babies, they could encourage immigration. But that’s not likely, is it?

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                                                #24
                                                Originally posted by Bruno
                                                Wouldn't it make a ton more sense for them to build themselves a really nice hermetically sealed sustainable bunker and work on perfecting the virtual reality immersion thing?
                                                I think the answer to this is that all these egomaniacal people think of themselves as pretty ubermenschy. Living underground and living out your life in luxury as the human race comes to a miserable demise is not the same as the eugenicish dream of sending yourself and your descendants to create a new uber-race on another planet driven by your superior DNA.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post

                                                  Why?
                                                  They don’t get into it in much detail in the books, but on the show there’s a brief moment with a guy who said he wanted to be a doctor but the waiting list is decades. Most medicine is performed by machines.

                                                  Everyone has enough to survive, but not much more. Even though there aren’t many jobs for people to do because of automation, wealth inequality is still extreme, social mobility is low, slots in universities are hard to come by, pollution is a big problem, and there’s a general feeling of decline and malaise in many parts of the world.

                                                  Mars’ culture is more militarized and it’s people are united by the long-term dream of terraforming Mars. Martians think Earthers are lazy and greedy. Earthers think Martians are militarist nutters.

                                                  The Belters are largely treated like shit by the big Earth-based companies that run the industries out there. They’re completely dependent on those companies because they live in a literal vacuum and need special drugs to survive the low G. They can’t travel to Earth. Bodies that grow in low gravity can’t survive Earth. But they have their own culture and their own language.

                                                  The first couple stories revolve around various Belter nationalist factions agitating and fighting for their rights. Then some other unexpected stuff happens.

                                                  It’s about big interplanetary wars and politics and the future of the species, but it centers on four people who share a ship and keep finding themselves in the center of everything important - a guy from Montana who has five parents, a guy from Mars with a sorta Texas accent because that’s how they talk there, a woman from the Belt, and a guy from the mean canals of Baltimore.

                                                  I heavily recommend it.

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