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Alright, let's break this down carefully — because you’re still treating this as if it’s some single global megaproject that requires a conscious, coordinated decision to spend 20% of all world electricity on expanding solar. That’s not how it unfolds. At all.FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:16 pm Nothing that requires 20% of all the electrical generation of the world for a couple of decades at least is economically inevitable unless it is inevitable that such a giant investment will be made for some reason. None of your explanations make sense.
But they do though. Many trillions. Trillions by the million.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:33 pmAlright, let's break this down carefully — because you’re still treating this as if it’s some single global megaproject that requires a conscious, coordinated decision to spend 20% of all world electricity on expanding solar. That’s not how it unfolds. At all.FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:16 pm Nothing that requires 20% of all the electrical generation of the world for a couple of decades at least is economically inevitable unless it is inevitable that such a giant investment will be made for some reason. None of your explanations make sense.
No one needs to flip a master switch and say, “Let's all invest trillions right now!”
I don't think you understand how investment decisions are made. What you've written there, that's not it.
Surplus electricity does go to waste. That's exactly what happens to it.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:33 pm Here's the real-world dynamic:
Companies, municipalities, households — they install solar panels because it lowers their own bills.
Every solar panel you add pays for itself, plus a surplus, over its lifetime.
And once it's paid off (often in just 1–2 years today), the energy it produces is basically free for another 20–30 years.
That surplus energy isn’t just wasted. It feeds back into the economy, enabling more production, more investment, more automation.
It’s self-amplifying.
Each local, selfish decision to lower costs through solar or automation adds up to a global shift without anyone ever needing to "fund" 20% of the world’s grid up front.
When did you last see me bother with your determinism thread? I don't care about it and I will take the piss if you try to use it as a magic wand around me ever again.
If money becomes meaningless only after and as a direct result of you having invested 700 trillion dollars in an absurd oversupply of electricity, the 700 trillion dollars needs accounting for.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:33 pm And about the giant investment you keep mentioning:
The payback time matters.
If something pays itself off in 2 years and generates pure profit (in energy terms) for another 20+, you don't need to force it.
Once the tipping point is reached (and in many sunny regions, it already is), it becomes a better investment than fossil fuels even before you start factoring in climate benefits.
An you are thinking like you are playing a A badly written knock off version of Sim City.
Here’s the thing you’re still missing, and honestly, at this point it feels like you’re refusing to see it:FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 6:03 pmBut they do though. Many trillions. Trillions by the million.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:33 pmAlright, let's break this down carefully — because you’re still treating this as if it’s some single global megaproject that requires a conscious, coordinated decision to spend 20% of all world electricity on expanding solar. That’s not how it unfolds. At all.FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:16 pm Nothing that requires 20% of all the electrical generation of the world for a couple of decades at least is economically inevitable unless it is inevitable that such a giant investment will be made for some reason. None of your explanations make sense.
No one needs to flip a master switch and say, “Let's all invest trillions right now!”
Solar panels aren't made out of crystallized electricity, they cost money to make. Factories are needed, quite expensive ones because you really can't allow any dust into these facilities. And then afterwards, I don't know if you remember using this phrase, but you said there would be "Exponential expansion". So enormous cost expansion is included in that. A big chunk of every investment is reserved to power the next investment. Unless you didn't mean the exponential bit.
I don't think you understand how investment decisions are made. What you've written there, that's not it.
Surplus electricity does go to waste. That's exactly what happens to it.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:33 pm Here's the real-world dynamic:
Companies, municipalities, households — they install solar panels because it lowers their own bills.
Every solar panel you add pays for itself, plus a surplus, over its lifetime.
And once it's paid off (often in just 1–2 years today), the energy it produces is basically free for another 20–30 years.
That surplus energy isn’t just wasted. It feeds back into the economy, enabling more production, more investment, more automation.
It’s self-amplifying.
Each local, selfish decision to lower costs through solar or automation adds up to a global shift without anyone ever needing to "fund" 20% of the world’s grid up front.
When did you last see me bother with your determinism thread? I don't care about it and I will take the piss if you try to use it as a magic wand around me ever again.
If money becomes meaningless only after and as a direct result of you have investing 700 trillion dollars in an absurd oversupply of electricity, the 700 trillion dollars needs accounting for.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 5:33 pm And about the giant investment you keep mentioning:
The payback time matters.
If something pays itself off in 2 years and generates pure profit (in energy terms) for another 20+, you don't need to force it.
Once the tipping point is reached (and in many sunny regions, it already is), it becomes a better investment than fossil fuels even before you start factoring in climate benefits.
An you are thinking like you are playing a A badly written knock off version of Sim City.
You are spending trillions of dollars on robots to build trillions of dollars of factory, to make trillions of dollars of solar panels, and then claiming that none of it cost anything up front because afterwards money stops existing. And you accuse me of refusing to see things?
Alright, let’s get this straight—because this is basic math, not some sleight of hand:FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 6:48 pmYou are spending trillions of dollars on robots to build trillions of dollars of factory, to make trillions of dollars of solar panels, and then claiming that none of it cost anything up front because afterwards money stops existing. And you accuse me of refusing to see things?
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:08 pmAlright, let’s get this straight—because this is basic math, not some sleight of hand:FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 6:48 pmYou are spending trillions of dollars on robots to build trillions of dollars of factory, to make trillions of dollars of solar panels, and then claiming that none of it cost anything up front because afterwards money stops existing. And you accuse me of refusing to see things?
If you start with one solar panel today, and if that panel generates enough surplus energy to manufacture a new solar panel every 1.5 years — and then each new panel also starts doing the same — by the late 2050s, that one panel would have multiplied into about 6.7 million panels.
That's how exponential growth works.
It’s not trillions upfront, it’s compounding energy returns over time.
No master fund needs to dump a trillion dollars on day one.
The system amplifies itself because every unit added strengthens the base that adds even more units.
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:08 pm So no — I’m not claiming “nothing costs anything.”
I’m showing you that once a system crosses a critical efficiency threshold, it self-accelerates.
And you can either keep pretending that somehow physics, economics, and math will all freeze just to spare your worldview,
or you can wake up and realize:
This isn’t about what anyone “wants” — it’s about what’s happening.
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:34 pmBigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:08 pmAlright, let’s get this straight—because this is basic math, not some sleight of hand:FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 6:48 pm
You are spending trillions of dollars on robots to build trillions of dollars of factory, to make trillions of dollars of solar panels, and then claiming that none of it cost anything up front because afterwards money stops existing. And you accuse me of refusing to see things?
If you start with one solar panel today, and if that panel generates enough surplus energy to manufacture a new solar panel every 1.5 years — and then each new panel also starts doing the same — by the late 2050s, that one panel would have multiplied into about 6.7 million panels.
That's how exponential growth works.
It’s not trillions upfront, it’s compounding energy returns over time.
No master fund needs to dump a trillion dollars on day one.
The system amplifies itself because every unit added strengthens the base that adds even more units.
Excellent condescension, well done.
I don't know how to break this news to you.... solar panels aren't made out of electricity. They are made out of materials, materials which are acquired using a process we call "buying", often using this stuff called "money".
Even to the extent that those are true examples of exponential growth, I don't see how any of them undercuts continued investment in the way that your supposed solar power expansion does. Although if you don't understand the role of money in the whole thing I guess that would be lost on you. So think of it this way...
We don't take 50% of all the wheat we grow and replant in next season to gain exponential wheat growth until wheat loses all value. We don't have the land available, and we sort of don't really want wheat to be worthless. Also we don't want to cause a famine today in order to have worthless mountains of rotting wheat 20 years from now.
We don't pile 20% of Intel CPUs in a heap and tell them to make more CPUs for 20 years until dual core Xeon II CPUs are piled up to the moon and worthlessly orbiting the Earth. This is in part because we make CPUs in fabs not by just tasking piles of CPUs to make babies. But it's also because nobody wants to invest 20% of compute power today in providing a worthless excess of compute power in another 20 years, building fab after fab after fab for no reason else.
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:08 pm So no — I’m not claiming “nothing costs anything.”
I’m showing you that once a system crosses a critical efficiency threshold, it self-accelerates.
And you can either keep pretending that somehow physics, economics, and math will all freeze just to spare your worldview,
or you can wake up and realize:
This isn’t about what anyone “wants” — it’s about what’s happening.
The system you keep trying to describe as inevitable isn't self-assembling. 20 million solar cells don't copulate to create the eggs that grow into 20 million new factories to assemble solar cells. Somebody has to pay out a lot of money to build that. Nobody will do so if the solar market is oversupplied.
Finally,...now ^^^that's^^^ getting closer to the kind of reply that makes you sound a little more human and a little less like ChatGPT.
Yet you went out on a limb and made the, again, prediction ("concrete claim") that within a mere 33 years from now, at least 80% of all human labor in the most developed countries will be gone because AI and robots will have replaced the human workforce.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:37 am Which is exactly why I keep saying: if we don’t radically rethink the structure of society—ownership, distribution, purpose—the whole damn system crashes.
The corporations won't save it. The billionaires won't save it.
They'll ride it down into the abyss trying to squeeze a few last dollars out before everything breaks.
...""...and in the late 2050s, the first two daunting tasks that the job-replacing robots will have to perform with their synthetic appendages are...
1. Retrieving and disposing of all of the millions of bodies of the humans who either died as a result of starvation because they had no money to buy food,...or died in the inevitable riots that ensued due to the collapse of civilization.
...and...
2. Physically defending the creators and owners of the robots from the desperate and angry mobs of humans coming to kill them for causing this problem in the first place in the hope of acquiring higher profits so that they could buy bigger yachts and bigger mansions.
You're not very good at recognizing sarcasm, satire, and irony, are you?BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:37 am As for the rest of your post—trying to compare robots replacing physical labor to slavery, throwing around "racist old time slave master" insults, making up "synthoid vs. meatoid" civil rights marches...
Good God, man, you sound completely unhinged.
Machines aren't people.
Robots aren't moral agents.
They don't feel. They don't suffer.
They don't have rights.
They’re tools, like shovels and steam engines—only vastly more powerful.
Trying to paint me as some kind of robotic apartheid enforcer is just desperate.
You're losing the argument, so you're flailing around with cheap outrage.
...pretty much sums-up Hardcore Determinism's definition of a human.Robots aren't moral agents.
They’re tools, like shovels and steam engines—only vastly more powerful.
Well, if "growing up" means adopting your,...
First of all, you have no idea of what "my side" actually is.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:37 am The question was never about whether entropy wins in the end.
The question was: what do we do while we're still here?
Do we fight for something better—or do we sit around making snarky posts while the floor collapses under us?
You've already picked your side.
Keep sneering.
I'll be busy trying to build something.
...then your busying yourself by "...trying to build something..." is an exercise in futility."...deterministic machine, operating under the same unyielding physical laws as a rock rolling downhill..."
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pmFlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:34 pmBigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:08 pm
Alright, let’s get this straight—because this is basic math, not some sleight of hand:
If you start with one solar panel today, and if that panel generates enough surplus energy to manufacture a new solar panel every 1.5 years — and then each new panel also starts doing the same — by the late 2050s, that one panel would have multiplied into about 6.7 million panels.
That's how exponential growth works.
It’s not trillions upfront, it’s compounding energy returns over time.
No master fund needs to dump a trillion dollars on day one.
The system amplifies itself because every unit added strengthens the base that adds even more units.
Excellent condescension, well done.
I don't know how to break this news to you.... solar panels aren't made out of electricity. They are made out of materials, materials which are acquired using a process we call "buying", often using this stuff called "money".
Even to the extent that those are true examples of exponential growth, I don't see how any of them undercuts continued investment in the way that your supposed solar power expansion does. Although if you don't understand the role of money in the whole thing I guess that would be lost on you. So think of it this way...
We don't take 50% of all the wheat we grow and replant in next season to gain exponential wheat growth until wheat loses all value. We don't have the land available, and we sort of don't really want wheat to be worthless. Also we don't want to cause a famine today in order to have worthless mountains of rotting wheat 20 years from now.
We don't pile 20% of Intel CPUs in a heap and tell them to make more CPUs for 20 years until dual core Xeon II CPUs are piled up to the moon and worthlessly orbiting the Earth. This is in part because we make CPUs in fabs not by just tasking piles of CPUs to make babies. But it's also because nobody wants to invest 20% of compute power today in providing a worthless excess of compute power in another 20 years, building fab after fab after fab for no reason else.
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:08 pm So no — I’m not claiming “nothing costs anything.”
I’m showing you that once a system crosses a critical efficiency threshold, it self-accelerates.
And you can either keep pretending that somehow physics, economics, and math will all freeze just to spare your worldview,
or you can wake up and realize:
This isn’t about what anyone “wants” — it’s about what’s happening.
The system you keep trying to describe as inevitable isn't self-assembling. 20 million solar cells don't copulate to create the eggs that grow into 20 million new factories to assemble solar cells. Somebody has to pay out a lot of money to build that. Nobody will do so if the solar market is oversupplied.
Alright, let’s just cut through the noise.
You're still acting like someone — some single entity, some CEO, some banker, some shadowy global planner — needs to sit down today, drop a few hundred trillion dollars in cash, and build the entire future all at once for what I’m describing to unfold. That’s not just wrong; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how scaling and economic momentum actually work in the real world.
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm Of course solar panels require materials. Of course they require factories and robotic assembly lines and logistics.
The point you’re refusing to engage with is that all those processes themselves get automated, powered by the very energy they're helping generate — at lower and lower marginal cost — without needing some trillion-dollar committee to do it all in one coordinated move.
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm You think materials acquisition stops exponential growth?
Let’s walk through it:
In the near future, robots will mine the necessary metals.
Robots will refine the ore.
Robots will fabricate parts, assemble modules, ship them to installation sites, install them, maintain them, repair them, and decommission them 30 years later.
All powered by solar, wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric — clean sources that, once installed, no longer need human labor to operate.
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm The cost curves for every single one of those steps are already trending down.
The reliance on manual labor is already decreasing.
And once you sever labor from production and sever energy scarcity from production, the entire economic structure mutates whether you like it or not.
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm Now here's where you should really be paying attention:
You're imagining the economy as it is today — driven by scarcity, by prices, by labor competing for wages.
But as automation devours more and more of the labor market — first 50%, then 80%, then close to 100% — your beloved "buying power" collapses. Jobs vanish. Incomes dry up.
Then what?
BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm That's the crux.
You can sit here quibbling about whether we need trillions upfront or not, but the simple truth is:
The machines are coming.
The jobs are leaving.
The energy is getting cheaper.
And the old economic logic is dying.
You can yell at the river all you want. It's still going to flow.
Maybe take a second and ask yourself:
What’s your solution for mass unemployment when 80–100% of jobs vanish?
Because mocking the future isn’t a plan.
And stubborn denial won’t keep food on your table when the old system breaks.
I honestly can’t believe you're this stupid, so for the sake of my own sanity, I’m just going to assume you’re trying to pull my leg at this point.FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 8:40 pmThe infrastructure for what you describe - mines, factories and so on - typically gets funded by the bond markets, so not a CEO. Bonds usually pay out something called a coupon over a long period of time, and they are rated based on the credit status of the borrowing company, where there would indeed be a CEO, so good for you, you got a business word right. But it's the bond market that decides whether you get your trillions.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pmAlright, let’s just cut through the noise.FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:34 pm
Excellent condescension, well done.
I don't know how to break this news to you.... solar panels aren't made out of electricity. They are made out of materials, materials which are acquired using a process we call "buying", often using this stuff called "money".
Even to the extent that those are true examples of exponential growth, I don't see how any of them undercuts continued investment in the way that your supposed solar power expansion does. Although if you don't understand the role of money in the whole thing I guess that would be lost on you. So think of it this way...
We don't take 50% of all the wheat we grow and replant in next season to gain exponential wheat growth until wheat loses all value. We don't have the land available, and we sort of don't really want wheat to be worthless. Also we don't want to cause a famine today in order to have worthless mountains of rotting wheat 20 years from now.
We don't pile 20% of Intel CPUs in a heap and tell them to make more CPUs for 20 years until dual core Xeon II CPUs are piled up to the moon and worthlessly orbiting the Earth. This is in part because we make CPUs in fabs not by just tasking piles of CPUs to make babies. But it's also because nobody wants to invest 20% of compute power today in providing a worthless excess of compute power in another 20 years, building fab after fab after fab for no reason else.
The system you keep trying to describe as inevitable isn't self-assembling. 20 million solar cells don't copulate to create the eggs that grow into 20 million new factories to assemble solar cells. Somebody has to pay out a lot of money to build that. Nobody will do so if the solar market is oversupplied.
You're still acting like someone — some single entity, some CEO, some banker, some shadowy global planner — needs to sit down today, drop a few hundred trillion dollars in cash, and build the entire future all at once for what I’m describing to unfold. That’s not just wrong; it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how scaling and economic momentum actually work in the real world.
You keep making out like only electricity is invested here, I don't know why you are giving me grief about that, it's your clumsy analysis that is at fault here. Things you need to buy for all this include land and mineral rights and transport. If the growth in the solar cell market you need to make your dream come true over the next 20 years or so is so ravenous that it will by itself consume 20% of global electricity supply, then the growth in robots and mines will also be substantial therefore costly, no?
What percentage of global GDP do you expect to consume for this project? How do you think the bond market will react to you having issued enough debt to pay for a giant expansion of the solar industry (20% growth of the whole thing in 2028 say) and then you attempting to issue new debt to the same amount the following year? This isn't how things actually work. YOU WON'T GET THE MONEY - YOU WILL GET LAUGHED AT.
Go back and look at what you actually wrote about exponential growth. Look at the collection of words I was responding to.
You're still fixating on the electricity right there.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm Of course solar panels require materials. Of course they require factories and robotic assembly lines and logistics.
The point you’re refusing to engage with is that all those processes themselves get automated, powered by the very energy they're helping generate — at lower and lower marginal cost — without needing some trillion-dollar committee to do it all in one coordinated move.
The mining will still be expensive. The robots are still expensive. And you need an enormous quantity of both.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm You think materials acquisition stops exponential growth?
Let’s walk through it:
In the near future, robots will mine the necessary metals.
Robots will refine the ore.
Robots will fabricate parts, assemble modules, ship them to installation sites, install them, maintain them, repair them, and decommission them 30 years later.
All powered by solar, wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric — clean sources that, once installed, no longer need human labor to operate.
For some reason, mostly retconned to make a timeline in a sci-fi story you are telling happen, you are engaged in a giant effort to spend all the money in the world to create factories to overproduce solar power, at which point the factories will all be useless because there's already too much power so no demand for their product. So the robots and mines both need to be overproduced as well, leaving excess mines and robots lying arounds as well. The whole thing is a massive adventure in pointless excess.
Human effort has been replaced by machines 700 times over. The horse drawn plough replaced virtually all human power. Then it all got replaced again by the water wheel, and those wells with donkeys going round them. Then the steam hammer replaced all human manual effort. Although the wheelbarrow had already replaced it all thousands of years earlier. Eventually the train replaced all human effort. And then shortly thereafter the car replaced all human effort.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm The cost curves for every single one of those steps are already trending down.
The reliance on manual labor is already decreasing.
And once you sever labor from production and sever energy scarcity from production, the entire economic structure mutates whether you like it or not.
Great. Except circular and broken. The bond market won't pay for your factories to be built at such a rate that the bond market doesn't need paying back because you made money magically disappear. So you can't fix that by having the money disappear because the bond market made the factories that allow it to happen.
Uhm, what? Surely the absence of scarcity brings costs down, that's the whole point of your money disappearing schtick isn't it? So buying power is up. It certainly needs to be, otherwise the economy collapses before the moment of transition. You see, you've forgotten about debt, if you don't have customers with buying power, then you don't have money to pay down your debts, and with the trillions you owe the bond market ... yikes.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm Now here's where you should really be paying attention:
You're imagining the economy as it is today — driven by scarcity, by prices, by labor competing for wages.
But as automation devours more and more of the labor market — first 50%, then 80%, then close to 100% — your beloved "buying power" collapses. Jobs vanish. Incomes dry up.
Then what?
The bubble would pop long before you got that far.
Eventually, sure. But the timeline that you are trying to make it happen in just to make your story work is highly suspect.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:49 pm That's the crux.
You can sit here quibbling about whether we need trillions upfront or not, but the simple truth is:
The machines are coming.
The jobs are leaving.
The energy is getting cheaper.
And the old economic logic is dying.
You can yell at the river all you want. It's still going to flow.
Maybe take a second and ask yourself:
What’s your solution for mass unemployment when 80–100% of jobs vanish?
Because mocking the future isn’t a plan.
And stubborn denial won’t keep food on your table when the old system breaks.
I am going to have to treat you much the same. You kept explaining that solar power could grow exponentially just because it could use some of the extra power to generate new solar power. You ignored all other factors. That's down to you. If you want to get pissy about me pointing this out to you, that also is your failing not mine.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 9:24 pm I honestly can’t believe you're this stupid, so for the sake of my own sanity, I’m just going to assume you’re trying to pull my leg at this point.
Because if you actually think my point was that solar panels magically sprout out of thin air, or that physical materials aren’t needed, or that the real-world economy behaves like some cartoon version of a bond market spreadsheet you scribbled on a napkin... then there’s no way you’re arguing in good faith.
You’re clumsily building strawmen so you can knock them over like it’s amateur hour.
It's no good you complaining at me about straw men and then doing me like that Mike. No good at all. Be better.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 9:24 pm The fact remains: exponential growth doesn't require trillion-dollar committees writing billion-dollar checks every week. It happens because individual incentives — to lower costs, to improve margins, to outcompete rivals — drive technology adoption step-by-step until the whole system tips over.
Now it's happening slowly huh?
Says you. I don't agree. This is just one more Malthusian prediction to go on the pile.
There won't be mass unemployment, it never works out that way. If you have accelafine on ignore, you should take a look at her post above. She missed the opportunity to mention the vajazzle, but she's correct, all the jobs just move to the services sector. You have no understanding of economics, none at all, and you are far too arrogant to learn. But here's a very brief overview...BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 9:24 pm Now tell me, genius:
What's your solution for mass unemployment when this reality, whether you like it or not, steamrolls through your cozy 20th-century mental furniture?
Or are you just going to sit there, cracking jokes while the ground collapses underneath you?
Alright, let’s make this simple, because you’re starting to sound like someone proudly explaining to a 1950s assembly line worker that “Don’t worry, once we automate car manufacturing, you can always get a job polishing mustaches!”FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 10:06 pmI am going to have to treat you much the same. You kept explaining that solar power could grow exponentially just because it could use some of the extra power to generate new solar power. You ignored all other factors. That's down to you. If you want to get pissy about me pointing this out to you, that also is your failing not mine.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 9:24 pm I honestly can’t believe you're this stupid, so for the sake of my own sanity, I’m just going to assume you’re trying to pull my leg at this point.
Because if you actually think my point was that solar panels magically sprout out of thin air, or that physical materials aren’t needed, or that the real-world economy behaves like some cartoon version of a bond market spreadsheet you scribbled on a napkin... then there’s no way you’re arguing in good faith.
You’re clumsily building strawmen so you can knock them over like it’s amateur hour.
What happened to your formulaic opener along the lines of "yeehaw, let's get down to brass knobs because you've raised a real hum dinger of a point here"? Don't I get one when I've been naughty?
It's no good you complaining at me about straw men and then doing me like that Mike. No good at all. Be better.BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 9:24 pm The fact remains: exponential growth doesn't require trillion-dollar committees writing billion-dollar checks every week. It happens because individual incentives — to lower costs, to improve margins, to outcompete rivals — drive technology adoption step-by-step until the whole system tips over.
Now it's happening slowly huh?
So what is your new timeline, the 2050s are out.
Says you. I don't agree. This is just one more Malthusian prediction to go on the pile.
There won't be mass unemployment, it never works out that way. If you have accelafine on ignore, you should take a look at her post above. She missed the opportunity to mention the vajazzle, but she's correct, all the jobs just move to the services sector. You have no understanding of economics, none at all, and you are far too arrogant to learn. But here's a very brief overview...BigMike wrote: ↑Sat Apr 26, 2025 9:24 pm Now tell me, genius:
What's your solution for mass unemployment when this reality, whether you like it or not, steamrolls through your cozy 20th-century mental furniture?
Or are you just going to sit there, cracking jokes while the ground collapses underneath you?
All that needs to happen for there to be an economy is work. The work doesn't have to make stuff, it just has to take some sort of human effort that somebody else is willing to part with goods, services or money to access. So yes, you can quite easily have an economy of nothing but hairdressers, fashion consultants, vagina decorators and eyebrow doctors. As long as they pass money of some form around while they pierce, cut and shine each other it's just as good as an economy of welders, coal miners and chimney sweeps. Every industry that goes away through automation just frees up so many more people for whatever service industry jobs we feel like creating.