Well I suppose this probably is splitting hairs, but my point was that Marx said that the period of violent revolution, and the whole transitional phase, was not actually "communism", but that "communism" was the end state (which has never been achieved). Basically, the Stalinist states got to that horrible transitional phase, and got stuck there. But you do have a good point with your last paragraph.
Again, you're thinking inside the box. You're thinking that Hawaii is a much better deal than Detroit, always. I'm saying technology can change the balance.
No, it can't. Technology can't change the climate so that it's balmy and warm all year round in Detroit. At least not without Kardishev Type II civilization-level technology (Dyson spheres), or perhaps The Matrix (which isn't physical reality at all). We're not talking about that, we're talking about, at best, Star Trek-level technology (Star Trek depicts a Type I civilization). Even Star Trek, with warp drives and phasers and replicators and transporters, does not show technology capable of turning the whole planet into Hawaii. In fact, Star Trek has many, many episodes showing human settlers on colony planets, because apparently there's too many people for the planets they have, and they don't have the technology to build Dyson spheres, so they send ships full of colonists out to empty planets to settle them. They even invented the Genesis Device to try to make more usable planets for colonization, but even that was limited in its capabilities (it could basically take an existing planet or collection of matter and turn it into an Earth-like planet, complete with different biomes, some probably really nice like Fiji and Hawaii, and others kinda shitty like Antarctica, Saudi Arabia, and North Dakota). And honestly, the Genesis Device really stretched suspension of disbelief even for Star Trek physics; the amount of energy needed to pull of such a feat would be enormous, and they didn't show how this device supposedly got enough energy to do such a thing, especially since it was only the size of a photon torpedo, and even those don't have that much energy in them.
Or he could just be Patrick Stewart (who did in fact dated the then-20 something Lisa Dillon for a time)
There's always a few women attracted to older men, but Patrick Stewart was a famous (and presumably rich) actor, and also unusually attractive for a bald man (or even any man for that matter). If he wasn't so attractive, and neither rich nor famous, and his goal was to bang young chicks, he wouldn't have had much success at that, unless he settled for some very unattractive ones. Lack of money isn't going to change this. Genetic engineering and various medical treatments could though. I only brought this up because of your quote about people in the 24th century supposedly not caring about baldness, which I think is bullshit. Lack of scarcity of most resources would change many things, but certain facets of human nature will never change unless we change ourselves so that we're no longer human. Lack of scarcity isn't going to make us all not care about physical beauty, or not be attracted or unattracted to other people based on physical appearance.
All wrong.
There's only so much arable land available for producing food. We've gotten a lot more efficient at growing food, but part of that is because of the use of petroleum-based fertilizers. Petroleum is a non-renewable and dwindling resource (and not exactly ecological either). We haven't quite gotten to the point where we've really run out of good land for growing, but it's coming. It doesn't help that the places that are good for growing food also happen to be favored for living in; farmland is constantly being turned into subdivisions in this country. There's tons of open land here in the US where people could live, such as North Dakota, but no one wants to live there (gee, wonder why), and those places are also terrible for growing food because they're not arable land (too cold, not enough water, etc.).
Building roads in Africa isn't going to help people feed themselves; the warlords and gangs will fight over the roads, bomb them, etc. The various powers there do not want people to feed themselves, because then they won't have power over those people. It's entirely a political problem there.
Yes, Vegas and Phoenix are very wasteful with drinking water. However, they (and LA) get their water from the Colorado River, and it's running dry. They also get water from aquifers, which also are running dry. Pretty soon, they're going to hit a shortage, and it's going to be ugly. The shortage of water in the Colorado River has already decimated farmland in Mexico, causing a large portion of the illegal immigration from that country into the US: those people can't work as farmers in northern Mexico any more because there's no water left for irrigation, so they come here looking for work. There's only so much freshwater available, and places like Saudi Arabia have to use desalination to make enough for their people. Desalination requires a ridiculous amount of energy.
Fission reactors can't generate enough power for everyone: where do you dump the waste heat? Fission reactors work by generating heat from fission, and then exploiting the difference in temperature between that and a nearby heatsink to drive steam turbines. That heatsink is usually a river. Rivers only have so much heat capacity before you screw up the local ecosystem or worse. There's been many cases of nuclear reactors (I remember some in Tennessee) having to shut down during peak times in the summer months (when everyone has their A/C on), because the river got too hot. Any power generation technology that relies on heat cycles (this includes fusion) will have this same problem. The only technology that doesn't is photovoltaic power. Of course, this doesn't work that well during the night, but if we can invent better energy-storage technologies that'll be solved. There's plenty of roofspace and parking lot area that can be covered with PV panels, even in the rich countries that don't have as much sunlight; the only problem is that PV is currently expensive compared to fossil fuels. But if we need more power than that, the real answer is orbital solar power collectors.
This has been tried before. It's called a ground level power supply. Trams in Bordeaux use it. The sections are powered on and off in 8-meter sections. When a section is off, it's grounded. For safety, there are two levels of switching. The 8-meter sections each have their own power control box, and there's a second level of control which monitors a number of sections and will cut power for many sections if something is live that shouldn't be. The trams have battery backup so they can get through dead sections. Bordeaux only uses the system in their scenic historic area. Once out of that area, the trams raise pantographs to connect to overhead wire. Two other small cities in France have installed that system, but only short sections in the city center use that system. Dubai is putting in 14km of a similar system.
Drainage, water, and ice are big problems. (Not in Dubai, though.) So is cost. There's a lot of high-voltage switchgear involved.
I completely disagree. You might be able to dress up an apartment in Detroit to be fairly nice inside, but it's still going to be surrounded by thugs, and even if you can fix that, it's still going to be located in a place where the climate just isn't that great. If I want to live in a place where I can wear short sleeves year-round and listen to waves on a beach when I'm at home (and not with a recording, but being able to see them out my window), Detroit isn't going to cut it, I'm going to want to live in Hawaii, or Fiji, or someplace like that. If I'm stuck with an apartment in Detroit, while someone else gets a beach house in Hawaii under this supposedly "equal" system, I'm going to be pissed, and I'm going to cause a lot of problems because someone's getting a much better deal than me. Maybe some people would actually prefer the apartment in Detroit for whatever reason, but surely a lot more people will want the Hawaiian beach house, creating higher demand for that property.
As for baldness, I think that's BS too. Since genetic engineering is illegal in the Federation (except for the 2nd season TNG episode where it wasn't), people will still be the same as they are now, which means that some people will be more attractive than others because of genetics. People will want to make up for that, and bald people will surely want to fix this deficiency, just as they do now, to make themselves more attractive, more youthful, etc. (Obviously, this assumes a society where youthful looks are valued; this isn't true for all human societies in history, but I see no reason to believe that people in the 24th century are going to resemble tribal societies where old age is revered more; it's possible, but it would have nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with the fact that societies evolve cultures over time that have various values for various reasons, besides only technology.) If Picard wants to bang chicks in their early 20s, for instance, he's going to want to make himself look younger so he can be more attractive to women in that demographic. Lack of scarcity isn't going to change that, and make 22-year-old women want to jump in bed with 40-60-year old balding men.
What you describe isn't true communism, it's the state supposedly required to get to communism. If you knew the first thing about Marx's writings you'd know this. No one's ever achieved communism, according to Marx, only totalitarian authoritarian socialist states.
Because there will always be scarcity, unless we all become part of The Matrix. While manufactured goods can become free in a society with free energy, some items will have sentimental value. If I like woodworking, for instance, and instead of just asking my replicator to make me a nice wooden table, I have it make me an old-fashioned hand plane and hand saw and other tools, and use those to make my own (imperfect) table, that table will have sentimental value to me that can't be replaced (or, if I give it to my wife, it'll have perhaps even more sentimental value to her). When you kid draws you a crappy painting in art class and you hang it on your refrigerator, that painting has no value to anyone else, but it has immense sentimental value to you (or so I've heard from people with kids). People will always want to own such things. Even on Star Trek, the characters all had treasured possessions in their quarters that they kept for sentimental reasons, even though the possessions didn't have any real value to others; even Data had a (weird little cylindrical) case of his treasured items (including service medals) in the episode where they put him on trial and Riker took his arm off. Picard had his little flute from the episode where he lived a lifetime on some long-since destroyed planet. Picard would have been pissed if some asshole decided to steal his flute, even if it's technically possible to replicate. He wouldn't care about someone taking his boots or comm badge, since those can be easily replaced by the replicator, but he doesn't want a copy of his flute, he wants the real thing.
As for a permanent abode, it comes down to two things: sentimentality and the work necessary to set it up. People fill their abodes with things they treasure, like handmade items, their kids' crappy drawings, etc. They also set them up in a way that pleases them: painting the walls colors they like, arranging the furniture the way they like, putting in countertops they like, etc. You can't just walk into another place and set things up like that in a few minutes, and who the hell wants to move from banal, boring, ugly apartment to apartment, decorated by someone else or worse designed to offend as few people as possible? Maybe eventually technology will get to the point where you can walk into a place and it's instantly transformed according to your preferences, but then we're back to technology that's near the level of that needed to build Dyson spheres, or living in The Matrix, which is so far advanced beyond what we have it's almost pointless to think about. Even Star Trek with its replicators does not show a society with that level of technological capability: the Enterprise did not have the ability to instantly set peoples' quarters up according to their preferences, so they all had the same boring furniture and paint schemes, unless they had taken the time to change them (like Worf's quarters).
" What do *you* think should be done to address the problem(s) that concerns you? What is your contribution?"
Not really sure there is anything that can be done. The genie is already out of the bottle. You can pass laws and try to suppress it which will slow beneficial use and do nothing to hamper malevolent use.
There are already people actively trying to alter organisms in their garage and on kickstarter. I assure you there are nation states like North Korea who have the capacity to do malevolent work. It is also well with in the range of well funded extremist groups.
Probably the best thing I can contribute is the thing I did contribute. Remind everyone that this technology is extremely powerful, if you are going to dwell on the upside you should at least remain aware of the downside. Since you seem to be actively involved in the field your dismissive attitude towards the dangers makes me more concerned, not less.
Your assertion that no one will ever try eugenics again is delusional. There are groups and people who are fully committed to it today, all they need is the power to implement it. Hungary for example is already drifting towards an anti semitic neo nazi state in the heart of Europe. As Greece plunges in to an economic abyss, a fascist state is a highly possible outcome. Genomics would have been a boon to the final solution and breeding a master race.
Claiming your commitment to "wisdom of civilization and culture" while you sling epithets like "redneck" and "skinhead" doesn't put you or your cause in a positive light. Labeling people as "rednecks" indicates you have a tendency to stereotype people the same way eugenicists do.
You mean tricoders, clothes, etc? We're talking about a post-scarcity society: you just go up to your replicator and tell it to make you those things. If there's infinite supply, there's really no reason for those things to not be free for all. Money exists because there's scarcity, causing things to have value, and we use money as an analogue for that value (because it's a lot more convenient than the barter system). Without scarcity, there's no reason for money, and conversely, to have a society without money, you have to eliminate scarcity. I'm just pointing out that while, while in such a society things like food, water, clothes, gadgets, etc. can all be free for the taking (which doesn't mean you get to take someone else's, just that you can have your own made for you for free), real estate will not be non-scarce for the foreseeable future (not until we can build Dyson spheres), and people always want to live in nice places, which is why beachfront and penthouse property costs so much more than treeless plots of barren, infertile land in the desert or North Dakota.
Why wouldn't you own property? Or otherwise temporarily live in property?
You have to live somewhere. People require dwellings; it's part of being human. People like to live in nice places (like Hawaiian beaches), not in shitty places (like Detroit). There's only so many nice places to go around, and you can't just use a 3D printer to fabricate new ones (we're not at Ringworld/Dyson sphere technology yet), so there's going to be some kind of competition for those places. That's inherently unequal.
Actually, it could work, if you had some overseer who was good at judging peoples' actual abilities, and then assigning them jobs, and judging peoples' needs, and assigning them resources, and then setting up an enforcement apparatus so that people who refuse to work are punished or otherwise motivated to do the work they're assigned. The problem, of course, comes back to human nature: every time someone tries setting up a governmental system with that much power (the proper term is totalitarianism), it's a disaster because the people granted that much power become corrupt or incompetent. Plus, even if corruption weren't such a problem, the whole thing (a central planned economy) is just so ridiculously inefficient that it doesn't work. If you have a government looking at every citizen's life with intense scrutiny, that requires having a huge number of government agents, who of course have to be scrutinized themselves.
Liar! Everyone knows that if you give software away for free you don't need money.
That's why you don't have to pay for movies, songs or programs any more. You just go to Pirate Bay and get them for free.
You must be living in a fantasy world if you think money is needed to make software.
Had you paid attention, Leslie Winkle has already told you where to put the electrode:
Leslie: You stick electrodes in a rat's brain, give him an orgasm button, he'll push that thing until he starves to death.
Leonard: Well, who wouldn't?
Leslie: Well, the only difference between us and the rat is that you can't stick an electrode in our hypothalamus. That's where you come in.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
