In star trek they only figured that out in 2024, so we are only a year late.
And honestly, the way us politics are headed, a "bell riots" type event doesn't even seem that implausible. (Learning from it on the other hand does seem implausible)
[For those not into star trek lore, the way star trek became a utopia was first the government put poor people in internment camps, eventually triggering violent riots in 2024, which eventually lead to people learning from their mistakes and a utopia society. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots ]
2024 Bell Riots were the tipping point[0], but there was still World War 3 a few decades later. A global nuclear exchange probably helped a lot in kicking human civilization off the dystopian but locally optimal path it found itself stuck on[1]. Meeting a technologically superior alien race a decade later also helped solidify a different perspective :).
But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone without the Bell Riots - Star Trek came this close to accidentally turning prophetic, as in the months prior things really felt like the Riots are going to happen on the date.
--
[0] - In that timeline, at least. We've already past several important world events that originally happened in Trek timeline, so the show keeps shifting the dates to keep with the overall premise of being imagined future of real humanity.
IIRC the writers now settled on "Romulan temporal agents meddling with timeline, desperate to stop the Federation from forming, and failing because apparently the cosmos really wants UFP to be a thing" as a convenient explanation to push WW3, Eugenics Wars, etc. forward every once in a while.
[1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.
But you are right that the concept was only made popular in the 80s, and a lot of the earlier works were classified or unknown and obscure to the public.
Back to the future 2 called a Chicago cubs World Series win in 2015. It actually happened in 2016.
My favorite fan theory as to why they went to a future of flying cars that’s so different from our own is that it was the events of the first movie (going back there and changing history) that ultimately led us to that different path.
Hoarding land and land speculation is really the root problem.
It's not bad for society if it was used to make building to provide rentable space to industries and business or to provide homes, or quite often both, but it doesn't provide easy money to investors.
Now sitting on land and seeing it appreciate with no hard work from you? That's easy money.
The key words here are "a basic" level of housing. A house in the most exclusive area of town will always be an investment (not necessarily a good one), because it primarily offers exclusion of other poorer members of the society from your surroundings, not habitation for yourself. It can't be affordable by definition.
But a basic level of housing is a human right, because it's a prerequisite for maintaining your humanity, ditto for healthcare.
It's also possible for housing to be neither affordable nor an investment. If there's an expensive area of town, and property tax is 100%, that would be expensive and I don't think people would consider it an investment.
Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead. It seems much better than the typical Western political system to me. But then again gays were only very recently accepted there, right?
> Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead.
I get the sentiment but accuracy is important here. It's a real democracy vs counties where voting is a sham.
But yes, it is widely managed by a single party that was setup by a benevolent dictatorship and the current administration generally does a good job and is voted in with strong support.
So agreed, they can do really interesting things because of their time horizons of control combined with willingness to work for the better of the people.
It can be sort of both. What you need is more housing built at affordable prices. But dont oberbuild. In that situation housing should act as store of value to avoid inflation loss, but not something that you get rich buy borrowing and buying up dozens.
You need socialism to do this efficiently. There isn't room for a profiteer. You need the government to invest (in the for people sense) in allocating land and building housing. Ideally dense housing.
oh we can “figure it out” trivially. There’s no technology or actual resources preventing that from happening.
But the status quo benefits many parties… alas, “people” problems are harder than technical ones. Most humans can be remarkably greedy, and also stupid in large groups.
We've figured that out, but certain members of society decided that extracting wealth through protectionist zoning/building code behavior is much, much more lucrative.
that just moves the figuring out one step to the right. knowing how something will work but not knowing how to get it implemented means the problem is not completely figured out yet.
Exactly. We haven't figured out how to solve the problem, because we still have the problem. Maybe it's unsolvable, and it's just a limitation in our ability to live together in large numbers. Or maybe we need to redirect our spending on (among other things) frightfully expensive experimental medicine and spend the money on things that are a lot cheaper and will help a lot more people.
Really? I think I can agree that the zoning isn't helping, but claiming we have figured it out seems like bold claim. Where _is_ it working? My impression is that housing costs are increasing faster than inflation and wages not only in North America, but also in the UK and EU, which don't have the same kinds of zoning laws.
Aren't Japanese homes super tiny? Even smaller than the already small homes and apartments in Europe? That's one reason. In the US, it seems that people live in bigger places, with higher ceilings.
My understanding was that Japanese housing costs are only good in USD because the yen is devalued. I had the impression that housing is expensive relative to local wages. Is that not true?
America spends a greater percentage of government money on healthcare than many systems with universal healthcare. Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs and Military medical spending are about 7% of GDP. Add another 1-3% and you would be ahead of almost everyone.
And that would still be a savings of 7% of GDP.
Not providing universal healthcare is entirely a political cocktail of wasting the money, letting big corporations loot it with tactics like using many partial vials of medicine instead of a full vial, letting the medical professional groups stuff up the pipeline of medical practitioners, and electing members who did all of the above to Congress.
Debt to who? If every country is in debt who is the creditor? Mars?
But you actually said every major country is in debt, so do all the major countries owe money to um...minor countries?
Perhaps it is not the country that is in debt at all, but the government? In which case it must owe money to entities like people and corporations. The government has powers to take money from entities in its jurisdiction and pay its debts, it is called taxation. In fact since the money is issued by the government in the first place, you could consider a token of government debt is actually a token meant to pay your taxes with. By lending money to the government you receive interest, or in other words a discount off your future tax.
All very neat, and why a government being in debt is no reason for it to not be able to pay for things.
In fact you might argue that government debt takes money out of the economy, so keeping inflation down. This means the government can spend more without causing inflation. If a government borrows a dollar and spends that dollar, there is the same amount of dollars circulating. However if it borrows it off someone who is hoarding it, and spends it then you create gdp growth. Magic.
Perhaps it's time to get past puritanical hatred of debt?
Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that narrative going:
Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many billions we still spend on the military can be better used elsewhere. There’s no need to cook the numbers to make that point.
Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military, housing, transit…
If you include things directly related to, but not classified as defense spending, like veterans benefits, VA, and the cost of foreign bases; the military is about ~20% of the total US budget.
>> poor value for money across a variety of sectors
Yup this. I went in for a cardiac stress test a few months ago. Less than 30 minutes in a room with a treadmill, an ekg machine and a low-mid level technician. $10k.
> Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare.
I don't think that's a hard claim to make in other terms than % of gdp—I can't imagine many americans want to devote that much of our gdp to it when other countries manage a high degree of care with much more efficiency. But we seem to have largely talked ourselves out of democratic control of such matters, somehow, for some reason, repeatedly over the last 70 years or so.
Even if you took all the money from the "rich" the goverment would shut down as usual the next year because the debt they create is way more than the private money available out there.
Insane take. Even if you confiscated ALL the money from all the billionaires (instant 100% wealth tax) and spread it to everyone worldwide, it would be a one time sum of under $2000. And what then?
You can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once.
It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
Billionaires generally do not have a knaxj for value creation. What they do generally have is an egregious amount of greed and a total lack of empathy which enables an incredible amount of exploitation.
Then the former billionaires won't have the ability to influence society to pass laws that favours them. We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
> We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
I assure you this isn't the only blocker and its naive to think that [other_set_of_humans] will not try to consolidate power for themselves after you remove the current set.
Most people are not in it for their fellow man and whoever sold you this idea that billionaires are the only impediment to, or even blocking now, a better society -- lied to you.
By all means get rid of the billionaires, I don't particularly care; just don't be so surprised when it turns out that was just a side quest.
I think there are other avenues here that are probably better spent to make society better.
Everyone in the US misses the 50s, marginal tax rates were crazy high. "Oh, but people had lots of deductions and not many people actually paid the top rates" - yeah, that's exactly the point, it encouraged money to be spread around more. And a whole lot of people prospered, while government revenue was less lopsidedly concentrated too.
Get people away from paycheck-to-paycheck debt loads and you've improved a lot of lives regardless of if those people are egalitarians who will then vote for utopian policies. We know that allowing more and more consolidation ain't the move.
We have 4-5x the normalized GDP per capita compared to the 1950s.
The amount of taxes we collect isn’t the problem. Excessive government spending and inflationary pressures on things like housing is (Which, btw seems to always go up regardless of what political side you want to point fingers at)
While the economic output per person has indeed increased 4-5x, the inflation adjusted median household income has only increased by 50% (1.5x). Government spending is not the issue here.
The things you mentioned are always a problem because even the far left in America is incredibly right-wing.
In star trek they only figured that out in 2024, so we are only a year late.
And honestly, the way us politics are headed, a "bell riots" type event doesn't even seem that implausible. (Learning from it on the other hand does seem implausible)
[For those not into star trek lore, the way star trek became a utopia was first the government put poor people in internment camps, eventually triggering violent riots in 2024, which eventually lead to people learning from their mistakes and a utopia society. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots ]
So we’re getting close in the US government is putting certain types of poor people in internment camps.
"Close"? It seems many Americans still live in a fantasy. Unless y'all start looking into your history, you're bound to repeat it.
I think we already ticked that box
the school to prison pipeline is talked about a lot.
2024 Bell Riots were the tipping point[0], but there was still World War 3 a few decades later. A global nuclear exchange probably helped a lot in kicking human civilization off the dystopian but locally optimal path it found itself stuck on[1]. Meeting a technologically superior alien race a decade later also helped solidify a different perspective :).
But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone without the Bell Riots - Star Trek came this close to accidentally turning prophetic, as in the months prior things really felt like the Riots are going to happen on the date.
--
[0] - In that timeline, at least. We've already past several important world events that originally happened in Trek timeline, so the show keeps shifting the dates to keep with the overall premise of being imagined future of real humanity.
IIRC the writers now settled on "Romulan temporal agents meddling with timeline, desperate to stop the Federation from forming, and failing because apparently the cosmos really wants UFP to be a thing" as a convenient explanation to push WW3, Eugenics Wars, etc. forward every once in a while.
[1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_t... https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/
> Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s,
Back in the 80s. In the 60s it was just megadeath, with a chance of mutants.
(The Krakatoa movie was in 1968, but the winter thing took a while to sink in)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter <- look at "Early work".
But you are right that the concept was only made popular in the 80s, and a lot of the earlier works were classified or unknown and obscure to the public.
Back to the future 2 called a Chicago cubs World Series win in 2015. It actually happened in 2016.
My favorite fan theory as to why they went to a future of flying cars that’s so different from our own is that it was the events of the first movie (going back there and changing history) that ultimately led us to that different path.
Housing can be affordable or an investment. It can't be both
Hoarding land and land speculation is really the root problem.
It's not bad for society if it was used to make building to provide rentable space to industries and business or to provide homes, or quite often both, but it doesn't provide easy money to investors.
Now sitting on land and seeing it appreciate with no hard work from you? That's easy money.
This should be an easy choice and yet…
The key words here are "a basic" level of housing. A house in the most exclusive area of town will always be an investment (not necessarily a good one), because it primarily offers exclusion of other poorer members of the society from your surroundings, not habitation for yourself. It can't be affordable by definition.
But a basic level of housing is a human right, because it's a prerequisite for maintaining your humanity, ditto for healthcare.
It's also possible for housing to be neither affordable nor an investment. If there's an expensive area of town, and property tax is 100%, that would be expensive and I don't think people would consider it an investment.
At a system level - in Singapore it is. HDB (public) for affordable, private for everything else. 75+% of housing is part of the HDB system.
Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead. It seems much better than the typical Western political system to me. But then again gays were only very recently accepted there, right?
> Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead.
I get the sentiment but accuracy is important here. It's a real democracy vs counties where voting is a sham.
But yes, it is widely managed by a single party that was setup by a benevolent dictatorship and the current administration generally does a good job and is voted in with strong support.
So agreed, they can do really interesting things because of their time horizons of control combined with willingness to work for the better of the people.
The west doesn’t have real democracy either.
For the gay stuff, like the west?
In 2001 Texas court prosecuted Lawrence for having gay sex in his home (supreme court decided against it 2 years later).
Counterhypothesis: housing that's not affordable is a bad investment.
It can be sort of both. What you need is more housing built at affordable prices. But dont oberbuild. In that situation housing should act as store of value to avoid inflation loss, but not something that you get rich buy borrowing and buying up dozens.
You need socialism to do this efficiently. There isn't room for a profiteer. You need the government to invest (in the for people sense) in allocating land and building housing. Ideally dense housing.
> housing should act as store of value
Why? Housing should act as a means to live decently. If my house depreciated to 0 once I'd built it, I wouldn't mind at all.
> You need socialism to do this efficiently
No you don't, you need to heavily tax empty and secondary residences and the issue solves itself in capitalism just fine.
> heavily tax ... in capitalism
Many of us are taught that heavy taxation is socialism, or at least incompatible with capitalism.
Those things have been figured out, you're just choosing not to implement them (you generally, not you specifically).
The US can't, but humanity as a whole can. Finland has both, for example.
The US can’t. This has long been solved in other countries, to varying degrees.
Very few examples of this. None in democratic countries.
Finland is a democracy.
can't? lol. more like doesn't want to. not everyone in the world shares your personal values.
We're slowly starting to realize that societal problems are as hard as (or even harder than) technological problems.
At least we seem to have figured out how to, um, steer large populations quickly, now we need to use that to effect positive change.
oh we can “figure it out” trivially. There’s no technology or actual resources preventing that from happening.
But the status quo benefits many parties… alas, “people” problems are harder than technical ones. Most humans can be remarkably greedy, and also stupid in large groups.
We've figured that out, but certain members of society decided that extracting wealth through protectionist zoning/building code behavior is much, much more lucrative.
that just moves the figuring out one step to the right. knowing how something will work but not knowing how to get it implemented means the problem is not completely figured out yet.
Exactly. We haven't figured out how to solve the problem, because we still have the problem. Maybe it's unsolvable, and it's just a limitation in our ability to live together in large numbers. Or maybe we need to redirect our spending on (among other things) frightfully expensive experimental medicine and spend the money on things that are a lot cheaper and will help a lot more people.
Really? I think I can agree that the zoning isn't helping, but claiming we have figured it out seems like bold claim. Where _is_ it working? My impression is that housing costs are increasing faster than inflation and wages not only in North America, but also in the UK and EU, which don't have the same kinds of zoning laws.
It’s working in Japan
I wouldn't believe most in the US would live in Japanese style housing at all.
Most homes in Japan aren't built in the traditional Japanese style at all IIRC.
I was referring to the little space and tiny storage. Pay isn't exactly great for the rent either.
Why not?
Aren't Japanese homes super tiny? Even smaller than the already small homes and apartments in Europe? That's one reason. In the US, it seems that people live in bigger places, with higher ceilings.
The American Dream has become living in a McMansion in suburbia?
My understanding was that Japanese housing costs are only good in USD because the yen is devalued. I had the impression that housing is expensive relative to local wages. Is that not true?
Sure we can, how do you think our governments have managed to avoid it so artfully all this time?
Classic whataboutism.
[flagged]
Tough problem when laziness and low IQ both correlate to high reproduction.
Provide with what money? Every major country is an ocean of debt
America spends a greater percentage of government money on healthcare than many systems with universal healthcare. Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs and Military medical spending are about 7% of GDP. Add another 1-3% and you would be ahead of almost everyone.
And that would still be a savings of 7% of GDP.
Not providing universal healthcare is entirely a political cocktail of wasting the money, letting big corporations loot it with tactics like using many partial vials of medicine instead of a full vial, letting the medical professional groups stuff up the pipeline of medical practitioners, and electing members who did all of the above to Congress.
Debt to who? If every country is in debt who is the creditor? Mars?
But you actually said every major country is in debt, so do all the major countries owe money to um...minor countries?
Perhaps it is not the country that is in debt at all, but the government? In which case it must owe money to entities like people and corporations. The government has powers to take money from entities in its jurisdiction and pay its debts, it is called taxation. In fact since the money is issued by the government in the first place, you could consider a token of government debt is actually a token meant to pay your taxes with. By lending money to the government you receive interest, or in other words a discount off your future tax.
All very neat, and why a government being in debt is no reason for it to not be able to pay for things.
In fact you might argue that government debt takes money out of the economy, so keeping inflation down. This means the government can spend more without causing inflation. If a government borrows a dollar and spends that dollar, there is the same amount of dollars circulating. However if it borrows it off someone who is hoarding it, and spends it then you create gdp growth. Magic.
Perhaps it's time to get past puritanical hatred of debt?
Taxing the land and removing zoning limits on it is the big hurdle.
https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/fy-2023-fed-bu...
Defense is only 13% of federal spending: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that narrative going:
https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...
Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many billions we still spend on the military can be better used elsewhere. There’s no need to cook the numbers to make that point.
Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military, housing, transit…
If you include things directly related to, but not classified as defense spending, like veterans benefits, VA, and the cost of foreign bases; the military is about ~20% of the total US budget.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2025-PER/pdf/BUDG...
>> poor value for money across a variety of sectors
Yup this. I went in for a cardiac stress test a few months ago. Less than 30 minutes in a room with a treadmill, an ekg machine and a low-mid level technician. $10k.
What's the pressure in the system keeping the price down? Many could supply a treadmill and ekg machine for a few hundred.
> Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare.
I don't think that's a hard claim to make in other terms than % of gdp—I can't imagine many americans want to devote that much of our gdp to it when other countries manage a high degree of care with much more efficiency. But we seem to have largely talked ourselves out of democratic control of such matters, somehow, for some reason, repeatedly over the last 70 years or so.
Actually tax the rich?
Even if you took all the money from the "rich" the goverment would shut down as usual the next year because the debt they create is way more than the private money available out there.
Insane take. Even if you confiscated ALL the money from all the billionaires (instant 100% wealth tax) and spread it to everyone worldwide, it would be a one time sum of under $2000. And what then?
Spend the money on things of actual value rather than distributing it equally among a group of people who will inevitably just spend it on an iPhone?
You can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once.
It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
We're capable of taking the money but not of investing it into useful projects. Inherent system flaw.
Billionaires generally do not have a knaxj for value creation. What they do generally have is an egregious amount of greed and a total lack of empathy which enables an incredible amount of exploitation.
[flagged]
Then the former billionaires won't have the ability to influence society to pass laws that favours them. We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
> We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
I assure you this isn't the only blocker and its naive to think that [other_set_of_humans] will not try to consolidate power for themselves after you remove the current set.
Most people are not in it for their fellow man and whoever sold you this idea that billionaires are the only impediment to, or even blocking now, a better society -- lied to you.
By all means get rid of the billionaires, I don't particularly care; just don't be so surprised when it turns out that was just a side quest.
I think there are other avenues here that are probably better spent to make society better.
Everyone in the US misses the 50s, marginal tax rates were crazy high. "Oh, but people had lots of deductions and not many people actually paid the top rates" - yeah, that's exactly the point, it encouraged money to be spread around more. And a whole lot of people prospered, while government revenue was less lopsidedly concentrated too.
Get people away from paycheck-to-paycheck debt loads and you've improved a lot of lives regardless of if those people are egalitarians who will then vote for utopian policies. We know that allowing more and more consolidation ain't the move.
We have 4-5x the normalized GDP per capita compared to the 1950s.
The amount of taxes we collect isn’t the problem. Excessive government spending and inflationary pressures on things like housing is (Which, btw seems to always go up regardless of what political side you want to point fingers at)
While the economic output per person has indeed increased 4-5x, the inflation adjusted median household income has only increased by 50% (1.5x). Government spending is not the issue here.
The things you mentioned are always a problem because even the far left in America is incredibly right-wing.
Maybe but society was more egalitarian when we did so maybe we start there.
That is not how macroeconomics works.
What does that even mean? Care to elaborate?
And who is on the other side of that debt? And how did it get there?