Labor-based production is such 20th century thinking. Modern companies don't try to make products, they try to acquire capital. Intellectual property, industrial capacity, housing, utilities access, etc. Cornering a market is so much more profitable than trying to compete in it.

Why do you think there's so much money going into AI? They can't wait to rid themselves of their human workforce so that humans starving to death won't affect their production targets.

If capitalists get their way, capitalism will outlive humanity. Inefficient humans and their annoying ecosystem dependency will be left to boil to death or something while Von Neumann probes owned by AI-managed corporations spread across the universe. Just imagine, one share in SpaceX would be worth several galaxies. You won't find a better ROI anywhere in the universe!

It would be cool if you could get tickets for showings with either yelling or no yelling.

If not for capitalist modes of production, would your home still be designed in a way so ill-fitting to the environment that you need a thermostat right now?

Sorry for not engaging with the content, but please add paragraph breaks. kthx

A human drawing a thumbnail in 15 minutes consumes 0.025 kWh. An AI creating an image consumes between 0.06 and 0.3 kWh, so between 3 and 12 times as much. Both have massive supply chains that go into producing and maintaining them.

Run where? An even less hospitable planet?

Buy up primary resources that are unlikely to devalue from climate change (such as indoor farming, solar panel factories, and housing in walkable areas that are less vulnerable to climate disaster like Dublin).

Buy up the tools by which the powerful will desperately cling to power (such as the military industrial complex, media/propaganda channels, and privatized human rights like health care).

Bribe politicians, fund authoritarian-capitalist propaganda, and organize coups to put fragile dictatorships in charge of valuable strategic/industrial resources (like lithium, rare earths, fossil fuel, uranium, etc.).

People have survived "deadly" wet bulb temperatures long before electric refrigeration. Air conditioning is a patch for colonial societies and those that emulate them that have stupidly built western European style (Cfb climate optimized) housing in tropical climates.

Universal solidarity doesn't just mean solidarity with the poorest US citizens, it means solidarity with the billions of people who don't have AC or a car. Giving US citizens who already have AC and a car free electricity will probably be less effective and less equitable than a more egalitarian degrowth-based distribution of resources.The OOP mentions electric cars, which are simply a luxury when public transit and utility vehicles (kei trucks, vans) exist. Air conditioning likewise can be a luxury when passive design exists. Cisterns, shade, plant respiration, air flow management, high roofs, large communal spaces that reduce outer surface area, etc.

People have a right to live a cool and comfortable life, but that does not mean the right to live in a nuclear family suburban home with paper-thin walls and not a tree in sight, basking in full sunlight, with AC on full blast, using your electric SUV to drive half an hour to the grocery store or school. A tropical longhouse shared with your community, a natural or artificial cave system, or living somewhere that isn't trying to kill you (as badly) can serve that purpose just as well.

So instead of pushing for free electricity for American citizens, I would much rather push for degrowth of the American economy, with smarter designs that simply need less electricity.

John Brown was a based terrorist. The British Suffragette movement had a bunch of based terrorists. Mother Jones was based, and as much of a terrorist as most of Al Qaeda (i.e. not personally involved in terrorist attacks, but supporting movements that did engage in terrorism).

All you need is a sufficiently abhorrent status quo and terrorists who are otherwise decent human beings.

It's an interesting open question what we would want to replace intellectual property with.

My brain is so used to capitalism that I would be inclined to preserve things like artists having a contractual obligation to turn their work into a finished product if they got paid for it by someone that wanted a finished product. But if you look at some of the great renaissance artists, many of them were infamous for just skipping town and leaving unfinished works left and right when they got bored of making them. So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.

One thing that does seem very important is crediting the actual artists and people that made it possible. Not to deny the right to copy or distribute, but to make it so people just know who is responsible and who they want to support or praise or communicate with. You would need infrastructure for that to make it easy to check, to remove duplicates, and to make sure entries give credit correctly.

Another important thing is the location, maintenance, and integrity of physical pieces. Hoarding seems bad, especially behind closed doors and especially without the permission of the creator or their (cultural) descendants. Letting artpieces decay seems bad, especially if others would pay to maintain them. Defiling artpieces seems bad, perhaps even with the creator's consent. But how do we decide which measures, if any, are okay to address these issues? I honestly don't know.

I don't know if it's necessary to do anything beyond these two that is specific to art. As long as there is a digital currency and wealth is already fairly distributed, voluntary patronage and donations (using the crediting infrastructure to make sure it ends up at the right places) may just be the best system for deciding which artists get what budget and how much of the world's resources and labor go to art. If wealth weren't fairly distributed, poor people would have less say in what gets made than everyone else, but the solution to that is to redistribute the wealth, not to patch that up with special rules for art. If there is no digital currency, then it's inconvenient to pay artists remotely.

Foelly

That's the neat thing about workers' rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product's quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.

Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.