Message from @RyeNorth
Discord ID: 463477350332628992
1% would be more than 70 mil
~~the top 1% in the United States alone earn around $200,000 a year.~~
465,626 a year is the top 1% as of 2014.
this is aprox 3,5 mil ppl average?
My head hurts too much to find that.
I've been dealing with an infection all day, leading me to vomiting and dizziness all day...
ugh... nvm... my point is... there is a lot of wealthy ppl
sure.
anyway not all have power. But are influential enough
can be
okay, this thread in here seems to have missed a few things.
1) Labor is what creates value. Its out time and effort that is of value. which is why automation is so popular, its cheap. Because it does not labor. The cost of it comes from the labor put into maintaining it. As that gets more and more automated, that gets cheaper to the point of free.
2) if automation gets to a point where basically all our basic needs can be met by machines alone, why does someone need even a UBI? You just have a robot build your house, and visit the local food and drink machine for food and water. Then go to the doc robot.
3) if things are not yet to number 2 standards, where are wealthy people getting their wealth? The same principle applies today that applied when European explores first arrived anywhere. Right now poor people give an equivalent of shinny but useless stones to wealthy people, who view this as "expensive" or "fancy", in exchange for basically left over bread. Their wealth comes from treading something useless to them, in this example table craps, for something they find very valuable, aka the shinny rocks
Grenade's points are actually more eloquently put thoughts that I've had on the subject.
At least one and two are.
There is no magical wealth that comes out of no where in the system. the max wealth of the world is the total number of able body labors - non-able bodies + whatever offset our current tech level allows for.
Part of what I was getting at, referring to it not being comprehensible within any modern economy is well outlined in #2
Labor theory of value is Marxist in origin.
yes, but the problem is, that makes everyone equally poor
Perhaps in words, but it exists innately within capitalism
unspoken.
because if you follow Marxist theory, we all basically end up farming for ourselves, getting water for ourselves, and building our own house
The point of automation is to decouple human labor from production. But the means of production is still owned by someone.
what happens when you automate the entire process of making and maintaining a machine?
Which explains why countries that adhere to marxist doctrine appear to move backwards in time...
As was said, the entire point of automation is to make widgets cheaper.
which would ultimately the goal of automation
And just because the product of a machine is cheap doesn't mean you give it away. You still expect profit.
Otherwise why build or purchase the machine?
But on the axis of supply and demand
If you've created a huge supply, but you've impoverished the people in the process by cutting out labor
labor is also a shiny object. and it puts some ppl to dissadvantage... children, elderly, disabled
lets say we have 4 machine systems. 1 to make houses, 1 to create food, 1 to distribute water, 1 to maintain, replace, or increase the output of the other 2 systems. All these systems are fully autonomous, meaning its sub components work to get the materials it needs to operate.
If you create huge economic surplus due to automation, you just find different ways of utilizing that surplus. You're going to allocate productivity in different sectors. The ownership class will enjoy more spoils.
You wind up with a massive supply, with little demand due to lack of funds
you now have all your basic human needs met without any human labor
who owns these machines? and how much do they cost? I mean, you don't need to make more machines, the 4th one does it for you. So how much does the bread cost? the water? the house?
no humans are needed to keep this system going or maintain it
the only need for a human is to say when more of something is needed
Grenade, nobody is making those machines for free.
Nobody is investing the time and money to build them expecting no return.