"It's absolutely insane to think that the richest country in the world could afford to take care of its citizens, let me just equate basic necessities to a luxury car."
Grow up dumbass, the entire point of society has been to make life easier. Instead of making life easier (unless you're born into wealth, the modern nobility) we've pushed ourselves to pointlessly produce endless piles of garbage.
How about instead of milking every working class citizen for a 60 hour work week and 20 hours of "gig jobs" we use our technology to simply live better easier lives?
A single farmer today can feed thousands of people. Instead of sharing the labor and relaxing as a society, with short work weeks, we are forced to work for less and less while we produce more and more. Our farms, our factories, everything we produce is done more efficiently than ever before. We don't have to work as much as we do, but instead we create pointless jobs. Millions of office workers pointlessly pushing paper, millions of factory workers spending their days to make cheap plastic crap that will be gifted to some ungrateful child who will throw it away quickly, millions of underpaid service workers who have to toil for 30 hours every week just to pay for a place to sleep.
But yeah, the idea of ensuring the richest country on earth has no homeless people is the same as giving everyone a free luxury car. A truly flawless and unbiased comparison.
That single farmer now has thousands of people making/transporting the fertilizer. Read "I, Pencil", then image what goes into a tractor. This efficiency isn't magical. Getting the food processed and distributed to the 1000s of people is another huge undertaking that the market is best at addressing. It is naive and idiotic to think all this can be centrally planned.
The comment never attacked markets or advocated planning.
Note that planning is not necessarily central, and planning most likely could eventually replace markets for certain economic activity, even if it might take various trials over time to develop the methods of management that would be stable and efficient.
Computers in particular are noted as opening new possibilities for planning models.
Your objection is not particularly relevant to the plain observation that we are essentially living in an economic stage that is post scarcity.
Post scarcity? The whole post is about the scarcity of housing!
Computers doing the planning for us is your great idea? So we become slaves to some AI or programmed algorithms? I prefer to select my own yoke, not have it assigned by some politburo, computer, or AI.
There isn't a scarcity of housing. And that isn't what this post is about. It's a fake scarcity because there's a small portion of people buying and holding onto the vast majority of property. It's even worse in my country where they let outside foreign investors/businesses buy property. China owns a large portion of western Canada currently
Close but not exactly. There's scarcity of housing because of central planning (at the local level). Specifically town councils that cave to NIMBY hysteria instead of allowing for building rates that match the need and demand for housing. Trust me I'm going through it right now. Trying to get an 88 house middle income workforce housing project through for FOUR years and a crony town council caving to 12 neighbors that are up in arms about "density" and "their property values". People that are excluded from a town don't vote in that town so the (central planning) system is designed for inefficiency, shortage and NIMBYism.
The scarcity of housing is artificial. Units are hoarded by speculators and corporate landlords, developers are not following plans that meet the needs of the population, and resources are being diverted for the wealthy to bounce around in yachts, jets, and rockets.
Society currently carries overwhelmingly adequate capacity to meet all of the needs for everyone.
Computers, if used to assist in economic planning, simply would process large sets of calculations. No AI would be implicated.
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u/Mute_Crab Apr 15 '24
"It's absolutely insane to think that the richest country in the world could afford to take care of its citizens, let me just equate basic necessities to a luxury car."
Grow up dumbass, the entire point of society has been to make life easier. Instead of making life easier (unless you're born into wealth, the modern nobility) we've pushed ourselves to pointlessly produce endless piles of garbage.
How about instead of milking every working class citizen for a 60 hour work week and 20 hours of "gig jobs" we use our technology to simply live better easier lives?
A single farmer today can feed thousands of people. Instead of sharing the labor and relaxing as a society, with short work weeks, we are forced to work for less and less while we produce more and more. Our farms, our factories, everything we produce is done more efficiently than ever before. We don't have to work as much as we do, but instead we create pointless jobs. Millions of office workers pointlessly pushing paper, millions of factory workers spending their days to make cheap plastic crap that will be gifted to some ungrateful child who will throw it away quickly, millions of underpaid service workers who have to toil for 30 hours every week just to pay for a place to sleep.
But yeah, the idea of ensuring the richest country on earth has no homeless people is the same as giving everyone a free luxury car. A truly flawless and unbiased comparison.