It's 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better (2016)

Where is the best place to live where creating things that truly make the lives of your community better gets rewarded sustainably?

Where people show each other simple respect regardless of the color of their skin, their gender, and their personal beliefs that do not infringe on the reasonable rights of others? Where weapons in any form are left at the gate?

It's not about that, it's about the power structure. Imagine a hypothetical small town with several owner-operated grocery store, a local power station, owner-operated service companies, etc. Each of the involved actors is knowledgeable about what they are doing. They are hard to replace, their experience is important, so they have more bargaining power and can charge higher for their work. The wealth is more or less evenly distributed among the community. Most people can afford a house and a good living. They also have to maintain business relations with other people (as opposed to faceless corporations). They need each other, are nice to each other and can relate to each other's problems.

Now look what happens when centrally managed grocery chains, power companies, repair services, etc. move in. All management is centralized. All locals are now employed by one of the big companies following corporate protocol. They are now easily replaceable, so 80% of the town works on a minimum wage after completing a one-week training course. Most of the wealth gets transferred to the corporations. Another 10% of the town works as middle management for the corporations, stuck playing dirty political games. The luckiest 10% keeps positions that cannot be taken by corporations: small niche businesses, trades, doctor practices. Since most of the people are replaceable, people don't really need other people. They depend on corporations instead, so maintaining interpersonal relations becomes unnecessary. People hate each other over small disagreements. They envy others' jobs. They consider life very unfair because in the absence of a clearly visible connection between the merit and the outcome, the grass on the other side always looks greener.

The "well-regulated economy" usually implies raising the taxes for top earners and redistributing the wealth to lower earners. Except, the corporations usually find tricks to avoid it, so you end up taxing the few remaining non-replaceable people, and redistributing it down the road. Supply/demand comes into play, so asset prices rise accordingly, 80% of people still cannot afford a decent living from their salary. Self-improvement still doesn't pay, since the corporations want people to be replaceable. So, social tensions are still high, and on top of that, we start having a shortage of doctors, niche shops, etc., because with the higher taxes and hostile attitude from lower-earners, it's just not worth the hassle anymore. On top of that, we now have a class of social justice politicians, who appeal to groups of people by pitting them against other groups and promising better treatment at the expense of other groups. So not only the pie is shrinking, but we are now supposed to fight for it.

If you want to fix the problem, you need to incentivize personal self-improvement again. Tax the hell out of monopolies, platforms and aggregators. Make sure running your small business (and learning how to make your customers happy) becomes viable again. Give the economic leverage back to the people putting their time into it, and not to the abstract corporations.

I don't know. Except for the whole "my living room gets used for business meetings when I'm not there," thing and the bit about no privacy, I think this sounds wonderful, and we can do these things without sacrificing all of our privacy:

> It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

I guess maybe I'm an indoor cat?

They want to define happiness as the ultimate goal in life.

For me it is not happiness, but intelligence.

Two weeks ago, the economist asked: Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing? [1]

Yes. It is dangerous. For them.

They want to push happiness. They want to replace GDP with a Gross National Happiness.

Their wet dream is a populace of happy but unquestioning people.

[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/10/24/c...

I definitely agree with getting cars out of neighbourhoods. I would happily park my car out of town and use my bicycle to go and get it. However, it would only work if everyone was bound by the same rules and I was treated like a first-class road user on my bike.

Maybe only affluent people currently use Zipcars. I really don't want to share a car with certain people and neither do you. The more I think about it seems like it would do more to divide people than anything.