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Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

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Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#81

Post by jhbadger »

StudentStuff wrote: post #76
kakwa_ wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve. I don't understand why, free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free. Not going to the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization, governments could use part of their tax revenue and pay salary and/or for the harvest to the farmers and redistribute the result. Given the amount of subventions in the US or the EU, we are p…

> free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free. Definitely, we already heavily subsidize farmers, if the sole source buyer became the federal gov't we could cut out the middle men (Kroger, Walmart, the distribution warehouse chains, food staple speculators) and create a stable food supply for everyone. Perhaps charge a piecemeal amount beyond a certain quantity, to reduce waste. > the extreme failure that…

And the idea of government-run stores ironically already exists in some of the most conservative parts of the US -- not for food, granted, but in several states (North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Utah) liquor stores are state-run in order to control sales. Amusingly, the lack of a profit motive means that often they have better prices than private liquor stores (generally worse selection though).

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#82

Post by vidarh »

petercooper wrote: post #26
skissane wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity. When people talk about "post-scarcity", they are talking about the basic necessities of life becoming so cheap they are basically free. But, even in such a "post-scarcity" world, we will always still have finite resources, and human aspirations wil…

Agree with most of your post except: as long as they know it is not the real thing, they'll want the real thing instead. The way both video gaming and social media have exploded as cultural forces makes me think inauthenticity won't be a problem for the majority at some point. Many people already seem more than happy to judge themselves by their friend counts, Instagram likes, and go on voyages and have experiences o…

I think so too, in as much as I noted elsewhere I think a large part (not the whole picture, but a large part) of why authenticity is a big deal today is the perception (though not always, true) that what is authentic is better in some tangible way. While it may be wrong sometimes, that idea persists because it often is true.

But at some point the virtual Venice will be better than the real thing: the temperature will never exceed what you find comfortable even if your travel companions have different preferences; there will never be too many tourists; your hotel room is more luxurious than anything you could hope for in real life; somehow you always find what you were looking for even when you read the map wrong. You always get a seat at your favorite restaurant. The buildings are cleaner. The "flaws" are just at the appropriate level to make you feel it's authentic.

More importantly, virtual plain-old Venice will have to compete with virtual Space Venice, where canals float between islands floating in space, or Renaissance Venice, or Black Death Venice for the horror fans, or Vegas-style Venice, or Godzilla-attack Venice, or Lego Venice, or any number of crazy variations.

Places like Venice are also important to us now because it stands out so much. But to people growing up with higher and higher quality virtual environments it will seem more and more boring and bland when compared to modern re-interpretations.

To put it another way: "My" Superman movie was the first Christopher Reeve one. It's the "authentic" one. I measure the new Superman actors against that one. I measure new Zod's against that one. But it was not first Superman movie, and I haven't even seen the older ones. And to many in my sons generation, it's some old movie that's far too slow-moving that most of them have not seen or heard of.

To take another example: The painting Scream, that to some already is "that painting that looks a bit like the Scream mask".

To generations growing up with virtual Venice 2100 with taller, more impressive buildings, more dramatic bridges, and other "upgrades", real Venice may soon enough become "that boring city that looks a bit like virtual Venice 2100 but isn't as nice".

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#83

Post by vidarh »

jdmichal wrote: post #13
komali2 wrote: post #9

I'm ambivalent about all the weirdness about digital books. On the one hand, I kinda get why San Francisco Public Library has to "pretend" it can only loan out 20 "digital copies" of "The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck" at a time, because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book? Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's l…

> I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity. I would only want to see that if we were already post-scarcity. Otherwise, there's going to be a lot of bloodshed as people figure it out and realize they don't have any way to continue buying the things they require to live. Post-scarcity is great…

Marx agreed with you:

> For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced

(The German Ideology, first chapter, section 5)

Though he was writing about the pre-conditions for socialist revolution, a central tenet of his writings was this idea that redistribution in any form first becomes tenable under advanced capitalism, because never before have we been close to be able to produce so much that we could conceivably reach a stage where redistribution doesn't simply make everyone poor (or feeling poor).

And unfortunately we got to see the consequences of ignoring that warning many places where attempts at forcing through socialist revolutions in places that did not meet the preconditions failed spectacularly.

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#84

Post by hinkley »

Gargoyle wrote: post #43
hinkley wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonny Bono was the Representative for District 44. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_44th_congressio... He was referred to in some circles as "The Representative from Disney".

That's the current 44th. When he was in congress, the 44th was more Inland Empire than Los Angeles. "The district encompasses eastern Riverside County, including the sprawling suburb of Moreno Valley, the agricultural fields of the Coachella Valley and such cloistered country club communities as Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage." Of course, being a former recording and tv star, he had a number of ties to Hollywood.

I wondered about redistributing. Wonder if the author made the same mistake.

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#85

Post by winstonewert »

kakwa_ wrote: post #73
winstonewert wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scarcity in economics doesn't mean "not enough" right now, it means that if it were free there wouldn't be enough. If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve.

> If food were free, production would drop sharply and most of would starve. I don't understand why, free food doesn't mean that farmers would work for free. Not going to the extreme failure that was the Soviet collectivization, governments could use part of their tax revenue and pay salary and/or for the harvest to the farmers and redistribute the result. Given the amount of subventions in the US or the EU, we are p…

If you are paying the farmers, the food isn't free. Its just that the people using the food aren't the ones paying for it.

Whether or not that's good thing, food is still scarce in the economic sense.

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#86

Post by jmcqk6 »

komali2 wrote: post #9

I'm ambivalent about all the weirdness about digital books. On the one hand, I kinda get why San Francisco Public Library has to "pretend" it can only loan out 20 "digital copies" of "The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck" at a time, because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book? Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's l…

>Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's literally nothing but arbitrary law and DRM preventing the free distribution of an already-digitized volume.

It's only fake from a very narrow view of the world. It's not a technical limitation, to be sure, and I personally despise DRM and the copyright law, but those things are not fake. They exist for reasons, and even though people like you and I disagree with those reasons, it doesn't make them any less real.

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#87

Post by [deleted] »

posterboy wrote: post #68
komali2 wrote: post #9

I'm ambivalent about all the weirdness about digital books. On the one hand, I kinda get why San Francisco Public Library has to "pretend" it can only loan out 20 "digital copies" of "The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck" at a time, because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book? Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's l…

> because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book Corolary, why would anyone ever write a book, except to make money, right?

[deleted]

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#88

Post by xg15 »

stcredzero wrote: post #39
komali2 wrote: post #9

I'm ambivalent about all the weirdness about digital books. On the one hand, I kinda get why San Francisco Public Library has to "pretend" it can only loan out 20 "digital copies" of "The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck" at a time, because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book? Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's l…

I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity...Highly highly unlikely... Is there ever going to be a post-scarcity era, or is scarcity contextual? Perhaps it is just going to be a moving target, like AI seems to be? Once a chess playing program that could beat the world champion was a pipe dream…

So why not give it a try? Why not let the libraries lend an unlimited number of digital copies and see what happens? Some constraints are real, but if scihub is any indication then some of those eternal truths might actually be mostly groupthink, fear and vested interests.

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#89

Post by xg15 »

skissane wrote: post #24
komali2 wrote: post #9

I'm ambivalent about all the weirdness about digital books. On the one hand, I kinda get why San Francisco Public Library has to "pretend" it can only loan out 20 "digital copies" of "The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck" at a time, because I guess if you could just instantly use the Libby app to throw it on your kindle and renew endlessly, why would anybody ever buy a book? Still, it is "fake" prohibitions. There's l…

> I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity. When people talk about "post-scarcity", they are talking about the basic necessities of life becoming so cheap they are basically free. But, even in such a "post-scarcity" world, we will always still have finite resources, and human aspirations wil…

The venice example would actually work pretty somewhat week with a socialist-style central authority: Make sure everyone can live in Venice for a time, then pass on their flat to the next on the list.

Re: Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated

#90

Post by stcredzero »

xg15 wrote: post #88
stcredzero wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity...Highly highly unlikely... Is there ever going to be a post-scarcity era, or is scarcity contextual? Perhaps it is just going to be a moving target, like AI seems to be? Once a chess playing program that could beat the world champion was a pipe dream…

So why not give it a try? Why not let the libraries lend an unlimited number of digital copies and see what happens? Some constraints are real, but if scihub is any indication then some of those eternal truths might actually be mostly groupthink, fear and vested interests.

In the case of publishing scientific research, there is already funding in place. It's definitely vested interest there.
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