capitalism has had some examples of lowering costs in many sectors but also had increasing costs in other sectors. it isn’t always an increase though.

basically they’re going to try to maximize profit so they’re going to do a business calculation. if there is a segment of the population, (lets say 30% of people for example) don’t order an uber or food delivery because of the costs, and they can cut their costs by 40% per delivery by making cars self driving, they might lower costs for food delivery by $9 to get that 30% of people that are too price sensitive to use their service to become customers. i for one am one of those people that almost NEVER orders food delivery or ubers solely because of the cost. but if it went from $22 to $13 i might consider it. that’s just an example and im making up numbers to demonstrate the point. there’s always a business calculation when it comes to whether they lower costs or not. sometimes lower cost increases profit. when businesses make a new product or service usually when it’s new that service is really expensive, and their main goal is cutting the cost so they can sell to the average consumer and have a huge market share rather than just selling to an elite few.

happens

steam machine actually sold well. it’s on a waitlist now because of volume of sales despite the high price. i know on reddit there was a big storm about the price, but in the general population people i talked to were really excited about buying a steam machine. a lot of it is more about buying a luxury item, like how people want the latest iphone always when they’re expensive and androids are better. valve has that brand name and loyalty.

walkabout cities dont really work with big outer neighborhoods and suburbs with single family homes on large plots of land, and those necessitate cars. personally i like living in the suburbs. that being said, if enough people want walkable cities they can build them. i personally prefer 15 minute drives more than 15 minute walks tho, lol.

well both can be true at once. a business that hires at $40 per employee with 10 employees is going to have to charge more than a business that hires $20 per employee with 10 employees, but regardless both are gonna to charge whatever is going to maximize their profits

Does this have to do with safety regulations or something? Like what is the reasoning behind it? Because I heard these Chinese cars dont have good safety regulations

i mean they’re gonna charge whatever makes them the most profit regardless

they’ll charge whatever’s most profitable but if two self driving transportation companies are in competition with each other and they both want to dominate the market, one might set their prices lower than the other to steal the market share. the only way that wouldn’t happen is with two monopolies agreeing to not undercut each other, which happens. but in general when a company has lower operational costs their goods will cost less too.

how would you shift suburbs into walkabout cities and neighborhoods? personally i live in a suburb and i like it. but assuming they do suck, how would you transition already created suburbs into a walkable city? personally i think having the option to live in a suburb and being able to own your own car or in the future rent a self driving car would be preferred to having to live in a city.

true.

i agree it’s a valid concern. but i don’t think the solution to not getting a reduction in work hours is to halt technological progress. i personally like andrew yangs idea. instead of halting progress we put a tax on the robots that replace our jobs and use the money generated to give back to the people. andrew yang supported a universal basic income program. there’s a couple routes we can go. one is to halt the technological progress and keep the jobs that are currently here. that is status quo and personally it’s not the worse outcome, but it’s also not the best outcome. i’d rate it average, just staying where we are. (average scenario)

there’s option number 2. we allow the technological progress but don’t put any new taxes or regulations in place to let the new technological progress benefit the people. people lose their jobs and are not subsidized after losing their jobs and end up jobless, with no money, worse off than they were, while the rich tech people take even more profit than they’ve ever made before. goods will be produced at a much cheaper and more rapid rate, but less people will be able to afford their or basic living on their own. goods might also become cheaper because of the increase in supply and the lower cost of goods, but it doesn’t make up for the amount of money or meaning lost in people’s lives where they’re jobless and have no source of income. (worst case scenario)

and then there’s option 3, we allow the technological progress, but we regulate it and put taxes on the companies and corporations that profit from the new automation and machines. the money goes to the corporations partially, but a large chunk of it also goes to the people. in this scenario goods are produced cheaper, people that lose their jobs don’t lose as much value because they still get compensated through the taxing and spreading of wealth, and jobs that are repetitive and menial end up getting done by robots while more meaningful jobs that robots can’t do continue to be done by humans. (best case scenario)

personally i like option 3. i’d love to see self driving cars replace ubers, truck drivers, etc. i’d love to see fast food workers replaced by machines. all those shitty jobs that pay shit anyway and nobody wants to do get replaced by robots, and the people that lose those jobs still get compensated so they have a salary to live on.

what we’ve been doing is option 2, which is probably the worst case scenario. we need to move to option 3. more productivity is always good, we just need to spread the gains of our productivity to the people. you should look up andrew yang if you want to know more about this type of solution. the fact is though it’s not going to come by just trusting to corporations to tax themselves and spread their gains amongst the people, we need to elect someone that will enforce it. just like nobody would pay taxes in general if they didn’t have to.

we have public transit in the US, just not in low density suburban areas. because you can’t walk to a bus stop in the suburbs. it’s too far. you can’t just “invest” in that, at least not in an economically feasible way either. also there’s just annoyances, like a train can’t park in a parking lot. there’s a lot more walking to do. if public transit were this magical solution we would’ve already done it.

I would be happy to tell these extremely rich people so. I don’t see this as a problem. That’s how human creativity worked for centuries.

if they weren’t extremely rich would you still be okay with it? what if someone finds an obscure person’s world built universe from 7 years ago that got no traction, decided to make their own fanfiction within that universe and it got extremely popular? in that case the one who did all the world building gets nothing but the person who used the original world builder’s creation got everything. i only used examples like harry potter, game of thrones, and dune because they are the most popular world built universes i know about, but stealing another person’s world can come from worlds built from unknown people too.

I just don’t think that’s true and I don’t think there’s a reason to believe it’s true. Go look at fan fiction. There’s whole thriving, rich, communities of it. Fascinating ideas and remixes. Almost all of it violates copyright. But it’s creative and people love it. Some of those authors go on to write their own original work. Why would you want to kill all of that?

you don’t think that if people can just make fanfiction off other people’s universes that they would opt to do that more often than doing their own world building and making their own universe? world building is hard and requires talent and a lot of work, if that is already done for you of course less people are going to make original works and more people are going to piggyback off other peoples universes.

fan fiction is fine. just dont try to sell it when all the world building and characters came from someone else’s ideas. if they have talent i encourage them to go make their own original work. i don’t want to kill fanfiction, i just don’t want to pay people who are profiting off someone else’s ideas but not compensating them for it. make as much fanfiction as you want as long as you don’t try to profit off it until you make your own original ideas.

I really don’t think it “fucks over” the author. They got their art out there. They inspired people. They can still sell copies. I don’t think they are entitled to a lengthy copyright.

basically just harkens back to what i said back up there. what about an author that does great world building, their world never becomes popular or makes money, and then someone else 7 years later sees their world building and makes their own story within that world and makes all the money and fame from it while the original author gets nothing?

The scenario where someone gets fucked over, in my mind, is they write something original and a megacorp scoops it up without payment or attribution. That’s something a short copyright could protect. So when some nobody writes a cool story or song, Disney can’t use their massive budget to capitalize on it without paying the author anything. That’s why I would accept a short copyright.

i agree but i think copyright protects people from both megacorps and regular people who also can just scoop up someone else’s idea without payment too. also i don’t know if a 7 year copyright would even be long enough to stop megacorps even in your proposed scenario for protection.

i agree with you they would try to profit more, (they’re a business so of course). but i think lowering operational costs allows them to lower their prices too, while also profiting more. we need a good way to ensure monopolies don’t just all agree to set a standard price and not compete with each other, i haven’t thought of one yet except outright monopoly busting. but i do think in general lowering costs to create goods allows goods to be cheaper especially when they’re facing and trying to undercut other competitors/competition.

it’d be more than thousands of people. but the thing is, when productivity is increased and more wealth is generated and people aren’t needed to do certain jobs anymore we have more free time or time to focus on stuff that we like or stuff that’s more productive like other work, that’s a good thing. the problem is when that excess wealth is generated it only going in the hands of the few. i would say it would be a good idea to tax the robots that start replacing jobs so that the wealth is spread amongst the people that lost their jobs and not just into the hands of the wealthy few. andrew yang talked about this a lot back in 2020 and a lot of what he predicted came true. he proposed a universal basic income to help redistribute wealth.

i think people should still be allowed to own their own cars, but getting rid of the need to own cars with cheap self driving transportation as an option sounds good to me. more options is always better. not everyone can afford to own their own car either. and if it also reduces deaths because self driving cars are better at driving it will also be a public service.

basically not having to pay delivery drivers, the work itself is cheaper, so they can lower costs. a lot of times high costs is due to operational costs which includes employees and if operational costs are brought down prices on things like doordash would go down too.

well the theory of how self driving cars would eventually become is if you have an app that can order a self driving vehicle, the closest one to you will be there for you. you can set the time you need it ready by and it will be there. we kinda already do that now with transportation apps, but with self driving cars i think it would be more efficient. idk. i guess owning, driving, and parking your own car will probably always be a little faster because its in the parking lot of your store or of your house right where you left it, but it wouldn’t be that much faster.

You were saying people wouldn’t create without copyright. And yet, copyright didn’t exist for much of humanity. Therefore, copyright is not necessary for people to create. If it was, they wouldn’t have created all the stuff they did.

my claim isn’t that people wouldn’t create. that’s preposterous. my claim is that people wouldn’t create as much and it would encourage more spinoffs of existing ideas, (ideas better than the people making spinoffs could’ve made on their own) and less incentive to create your own new IPs. world building is a huge thing in creating IPs. someone might be a great story teller, but lack the ability to build worlds. that person could essentially steal the world building skill of someone else and make their own better story in that other person’s world with their characters and make more profit than the original creator. you might say “sure, that means better content is created” but i’m more concerned about what’s fair and if the original creator is satisfactorily compensated. to me, the only way they will get compensated fairly is if they own their own worlds and have the ability to either keep profiting off it on their own or sell them. that’s what’s fair to me at least.

And they can still profit by creating new work, or selling people the authentic copy. People go see live music despite video existing. People buy designer bags despite bootlegs existing.>

tell that to a guy like george RR martin, or JK rowling, or whoever created dune that “okay, it’s been seven years. now everyone can make stuff in your own universe that you spent your entire time world building and can make money off your universe without your permission. you had 7 years, your time to make money on it is up. if someone can make a better story in your universe it’s theirs now for them to make profit on.”

If anyone can write a spiderman comic, then the ones that are the best will presumably do the best.>

not necessarily but i’ll agree with the premise. that still fucks over the original author who came up with the idea.