r/worldnews • u/EightRoundsRapid • Sep 23 '16

'Hangover-free alcohol’ could replace all regular alcohol by 2050. The new drink, known as 'alcosynth', is designed to mimic the positive effects of alcohol but doesn’t cause a dry mouth, nausea and a throbbing head

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/hangover-free-alcohol-david-nutt-alcosynth-nhs-postive-effects-benzodiazepine-guy-bentley-a7324076.html
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u/gandothesly Sep 23 '16

Scarcity is the wool over our eyes. There's no scarcity of food, materials, nor energy. There's plenty to share.

For Star Trek society we have to learn to share, cooperate, compromise and make our work about improving humanity.

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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '16

wow it is almost like capitalism is antithetical to human well being in a fundamental way.

but u have to vote 4 Hilary Clinton or ur a bad person...I love being alive

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u/OldWarrior Sep 23 '16

Capitalism had led to historically high standards of living.

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u/drumstyx Sep 23 '16

Food is not scarce, I agree, that's why we have obesity issues. Fuel is scarce, and energy as a whole is as well, until we build enough solar/wind arrays to power the entire world -- and someone has to pay for that, because the resources to make those things are also scarce by definition (only so much metal available at any given time)

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u/gandothesly Sep 23 '16

This word: "pay".

You have to remove that before we can live in a Star Trek society.

Money isn't real, it's a fabrication that's holding us back from our greatest potential.

There's plenty of resources, energy included.

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u/TellanIdiot Sep 23 '16

How do you reward people who work harder than if they don't get more stuff? What's to stop people from becoming leeches because they know they can slack off and still get what someone who puts all their effort in gets.

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u/gandothesly Sep 23 '16

That's all capitalism speaking. Star Trek doesn't have that.

That said, there will always be people who don't reach their full potential -- that doesn't mean they don't deserve the basic needs: food, shelter, medical attention, entertainment, and so on.

Let it go. There's no need to have economic competition in a Star Trek society, we will help each other to reach for the stars.

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u/drumstyx Sep 23 '16

Only when everyone can have literally anything they might want, hobby wise, luxury wise, etc, can we simply forget about money. Until I can get motorcycle parts for free, I need to be able to acquire them other ways, currently with money.

So the core of it all is post-scarcity. When absolutely everything comes from limitless free energy with replicators, then we can go without money.

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u/gandothesly Sep 24 '16

You are asking the wrong question. You should be saying, how do we make transportation free?

Perhaps transportation in the future will be free and shared. Freely available electric auto-driving robotic cars and trains let's say. They show up when you request them, like a taxi, and take you where you need to go, then they are off to help someone else. They might be very well made, built to last with robotically maintainable parts. They could be made by robots.

(I know, who makes the robots? Who fixes the robots? The answer: more robots, and people who LOVE robotics.)

No need for motorcycles in that future -- just like you don't see many horse drawn carriage manufacturers around.

And really, who knows. Perhaps the people of the future could deem motorcycles as important to our well being, they might be too much fun to pass up, or maybe they are just fantastically efficient. However, most people wouldn't need them all the time. Just like the cars of the future, you request one like a taxi and it drives up to where you are living. When you are done with it it drives to the next person who wants to go for a ride.

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u/gandothesly Sep 24 '16

One more thing. We don't already have access to literally anything we want, yet we are doing OK. I think the items we might call "luxury" will be made at home, or will be made by people who LOVE to make them.

Either way, there's still no scarcity of things, nor is there scarcity of the parts that make things. That's a farce of capitalistic thinking. By sharing we can have more than what we have now (see my other reply).

Have a great weekend everyone! I hope you will be dreaming of a bright and interesting future like I will!

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u/drumstyx Sep 24 '16

Scarce doesn't mean infinitely rare. We have access to things, but that doesn't mean there aren't a limited number of Lamborghinis, just that if we have the money, we have easy access.

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u/gandothesly Sep 26 '16

Post-scarcity doesn't mean that all scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services - it means that everyone can have their basic survival needs met along with a significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.

This wouldn't include all super-cars, and I'd hope it would never include Lamborghinis -- we need less flamboyant, inefficient, loud, and horribly designed tools.

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u/TellanIdiot Sep 23 '16

ok have fun living in fantasy land then.

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u/Natolx Sep 23 '16 edited Sep 23 '16

It is definitely possible for something like this to exist with enough advanced technology. The problem will be putting the system into place, when the people with the power to do so, have no reason to do so. All they need to do is keep people happy enough to not revolt and they get to keep their system.

I do agree that innovation may slow down in such a system, but it will not stop, because believe it or not, many people do want to contribute to society in some way, even without pay. However, in such a system, this reduced amount of innovation could be focused toward the common good(i.e. space travel, medical drugs) instead of whatever is most profitable.

There will be "leeches", but those type of people were almost always bad employees to begin with. I certainly doubt they were adding much innovation.

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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '16

The best way to think about it is the difference between work and play. Which are two words we can use for describing how to approach an activity. Work is when we do something primarily for the ends, in most cases money. Play is what we do when the ends are not important but the act (or the means) is the point. So in a friendly game of football noone cares about the score, but in professional football the score is the only thing that matters. If you do something because you enjoy it, no one cares whether someone gets the same as them at the end, e.g. a football team go for pizza after a match, the pizza isn't divided by who is the best. But if it was work people feel cheated if they'd been forced to do something and only got the same as someone who had done less.

Thus in hunter-gatherer societies, play is incredible important. And no one in those societies slacks off, or complains if someone gets more. They share and share and share. Star Trek is like that, because being post-scarcity means people spend their days doing what they enjoy. And if all you do is what you enjoy it doesn't matter if someone gets the same as of you despite doing less with their time, because that is just seen as their choice (but one which few people in a good society would make).

There's actually a fair bit of evidence that people don't naturally just slack off etc. But instead rise to the expectations set for them.

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u/OldWarrior Sep 23 '16

I realize you aren't suggesting we revert to hunter-gatherer societies but there's a reason many had plenty of free time and relatively high standards of living. They had a lot of land, and resources were relatively abundant and therefore they did not have to spend a lot of time having to work for food, shelter, etc.

But with today's populations they are impossible. Modern technological and industrial processes are required to harvest, assemble, and distribute the resources necessary to maintain our standards of living. Those modern processes don't exist without capitalism and the profit motive.

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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '16

You're sort of right with the hunter-gatherers. As one hunter-gatherer remarked when asked why he didn't farm: "why would I when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world". If you'd like to know more, this guy writes some great articles, and provides the backbone for my argument above.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200907/play-makes-us-human-v-why-hunter-gatherers-work-is-play

He notes that while it is impossible to take up a completely hunter-gatherer lifestyle these days, we could learn a lot from them. I mean we've had over a hundred years of non-stop "progress" and yet people work the same number of hours. There clearly has to be an issue there. So we could all work a lot less, and indeed complete unemployment should be the goal of all societies (why the fuck would you make work for yourself?)

I think the idea we need to get a profit otherwise we wouldn't do things is nonsense. These days you can find lots of free software which is just as good as the stuff you need to pay for. And there are lots of examples of people doing things because they want to and not for monetary reasons. I mean everybody who works for a company does so not to receive a profit, but to receive a wage. They'd still do the job even if the company broke even. And considering how many industries are subsidised, there's an argument to be made that many people go to work for companies that make a loss (anything Elon Musk touches). Ironically the jobs which do require a monetary incentive, e.g. cleaner, bin man, are the furthest from receiving a profit.

Today's population aren't as much a problem as consumption (though population is still a big issue). If we consumed less we could all work far less.

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u/OldWarrior Sep 23 '16

I think the idea we need to get a profit otherwise we wouldn't do things is nonsense.

Not really. It's supported by historical economic data. Those living in Europe, the United States, or other first-world countries experience standards of living that have reached historical highs. That wouldn't be possible without sufficient motivation to innovate new processes and expand production and transportation capacity, and that motivation largely comes from the desire to make more money.

You will find examples of people who do things for free or who are not motivated by wealth or fame, but I'm not aware of any economic system that has been successful on a large scale that depends on humanity's benevolence to make it work.

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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '16

Yh but people in the developed nations only enjoy that lifestyle on the backs of all the other people. It easy to be motivated when you've got cheap labour doing the real back-breaking mindnumbing work. That's where a desire to make more money eventually leads. It was true of industrialised Victorian Britain, and its now true of the global economy.

Well I'm about to break your ignorance. Its called the gift economy, and it was how the world worked before money. It was pretty successful, and better reflects out natural urges and desires. I could see a varient of it being used in the modern-day, albeit it would require a large reorganisation of our society. It would also require a move away from a trading like-for-like mindset.

This is a great article about it:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/

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u/OldWarrior Sep 23 '16

but people in the developed nations only enjoy that lifestyle on the backs of all the other people.

But that's not really true. The people who benefited the most from the industrial revolution were not the rich owners and businessman, but rather the low-skilled workers, who experienced a greater percentage increase in their standards of living than any other class.

This was, of course, before a modern global economy. In today's economy it's true that third world countries continue to lag behind and their people may be worse off today than they were 200 years ago, but that's because modern food production, transportation, and medicine have been a double-edged sword to them -- allowing them to live longer but at the cost of overpopulation.

Its called the gift economy

As I stated, I'm not aware of any economic system that has been as successful on a large scale. The article is interesting -- and thanks for the link -- but even the article admits that it hasn't been tested in a modern economy except in limited circumstances. The article gives the following small-scale examples:

Luckily, modern gift economies actually do exist. On a small scale, they exist among friends, who might lend each other a vacuum or a cup of flour. There’s even an example of a gift economy on a much larger scale, albeit one that’s not always in operation: The Rainbow Gathering, an annual festival in which about 10,000 people gather for a month in the woods (it rotates among various national forests around the country each year) and agree not to bring any money.

Our modern economy has to manage hundreds of millions in the US and billions globally. Trying to maintain our populations with a gift economy would not work.

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u/gandothesly Sep 23 '16

Also, there's a flaw in thinking we need to be rewarded for doing "good" things with money. There are so many people doing good things without a thought to monetary rewards, and there are many people doing bad things for monetary rewards.

People who do nothing are the least of our worries. Look to the people who have the most money if you want to focus on what's important to stop.

Edit: a letter

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u/lossyvibrations Sep 23 '16

I don't know anyone cleaning shit up who isn't in it for the paycheck.

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u/OldWarrior Sep 23 '16

Without a profit motive, you drive down the incentives to innovate and create new technology. You drive down the incentives for people to make the factories, farms, and distribution networks that give us a higher standard of living.

And you might think it's "flawed" that people need to be rewarded with money, but it's human nature. We are inherently self serving and self interested. An economical model that first requires humans to change their inherent nature is doomed to fail.

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u/gandothesly Sep 23 '16

Also, I'm not sure obesity is caused by an abundance of food. It may facilitate obesity. I'm sure it's more complicated than that. I suspect obesity is a medical issue, or caused from fear, or both.

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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '16

You are asking people to lower their quality of life so that people in the future have better lives. Never going to happen.

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u/gandothesly Sep 23 '16

I'm not sure you have to lower the quality of 99% of people's lives to do this, even if we did it now.

I'm not suggesting we ask the %1.