In a perfect world we would be divesting from car dependency as quickly as possible. Every policy move we make should be made with the intent that less people need to own a car. But no lawmakers actually agree with that position. They are content for us to pave the world and watch it boil.

Relevant XKCD

Datum? I hardly knew 'um!

The nice thing about torrents is how lightweight they are. If one thing goes down, ten mirrors of that thing can pop up to take its place.

Nothing. It’s fine. I can’t fathom why people are out here paying for their piracy. Seems like it defeats the purpose. I still find everything I ever want on the same sites I’ve always gone to.

It’s above your pay grade. If I were you, I’d reach out privately and suggest that the customer seek a competitor’s product that has the features that want, and tell them that there is no desire within the company to support free software or self hosting.

Yeah I’m not out here saying socialism is bad. I consider myself quite left of center. But it’s like… they have literal magic. The words we use to describe different ways of allocating resources do not apply to them. They don’t have an economy. An economy is a system of logistics and trade for moving scarce things to the people who want those things. Everyone and their dog has a transporter and a replicator. Logistics and resource allocation are irrelevant. Why would anyone trade anything for anything else if they have infinite everything?

In fact one of the main points of the article is that Montreal has been building faster than population growth and housing is still drastically going up in price.

That’s because Montreal doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s maybe the only city in Canada with a remotely good approach to urbanism, and as a result one of the most affordable cities to buy housing in Canada. So there is added demand for Montreal real estate from the rest of the country, which contributes to rising prices.

Building more density in well-designed, walkable neighbourhoods is absolutely part of the answer.

We need to make it so that there are about as many homes as people who need homes. Right now the numbers are wildly out of wack. The reason prices won’t go down is because the government is resistant to opening the floodgates of density (as you said, because too many of their constituents are homeowners).

If we just abolished single family zoning and said anyone can build dense housing anywhere that is residentially zoned, we’d have affordable housing within a few years. Zoning is an artificial bottleneck on the supply of housing. Imagine if every shitty carbrained suburb suddenly could house 2x or 3x as many people! But then of course we would need to make them a bit less carbrained by introducing more walkability, better public transit, and more mixed use. That can all be done gradually by relaxing zoning restrictions.

That’s still good though. If there are people willing to move into those luxury places, they are probably freeing up some other capacity, and so on. More supply is never bad. As long as they are building in density, it will help with housing affordability.

Socialism isn’t a binary thing. It is an ideology that can be worked toward with various different degrees and measures.

But also I clarified further down this thread that my intent is not to give a definition of socialism, but rather to say that no definition of socialism makes sense in the context of ST’s federation and the magical impossible technology they possess.

Yeah that’s the cynical and IMO more realistic take. I’m mostly just taking the world presented in the show at face value. It’s not realistic at all.

But even then, it wouldn’t be the replicators that are scarce, it would be the software. Because in theory if someone is charging you to use their replicator, you could just pay to print out the parts for your own replicator, and then replicate yourself ten more replicators. What would prevent this? Proprietary software.

They use replicator rations as currency and exchange them for goods and services. In a world that frequently says that society has progressed beyond the need for money. As soon as things become scarce they start using a market again. Thus, the lack of scarcity in the Federation precludes the concept of an economy at all.

And yeah Starfleet ships are always militaristic, but people can choose to leave if that’s still an option. I believe this was why RDM left the writing team, but it never seemed right that Janeway just appointed herself dictator when this ship was potentially in for a multi-generation journey. BSG handled that sort of thing much better.

Yeah that’s my point. As soon as they no longer had access to the magical impossible logistics network of virtually free energy, they immediately regressed to capitalism with a side order of martial law.

There is definitely still private ownership in Star Trek. Replicator programs and other software are regularly seen as being treated like intellectual property. Schematics as well. You think anyone can just go down to their local print shop and replicate the parts for an Enterprise class ship themselves?

Again, the Ferengi are a bad example since they aren’t part of the federation. But my point was simply that this stuff wasn’t thought through. Why do the Ferengi exist? Because the writers wanted some capitalists to use as a contrast to the Federation.

I firmly believe that ST’s worldbuilding mostly handwaves the questions of economics and scarcity, at least within the Federation. The writers didn’t want to come up with good reasons for these things that actually make sense when you think about them.

It’s a great franchise, but we shouldn’t try to apply real-world economic ideas to it when that was so clearly not at the front of the writers minds when they created it.

And with only one unfortunate exception that I can think of, matter replication is treated as a net energy loss - it isn’t free.

Well sure, it’s energy negative, but they also have basically free energy. We see in Voyager that as soon as they are cut off from that free energy, they regress to a market-based economy by like the third episode of the show. Doesn’t seem very socialist to me.

Socialism isn’t a binary yes/no thing. It’s an economic ideology that can be realized in many different ways

Because the writers recognized that too many story tropes would be entirely unreasonable in a post scarcity world and so wrote in a bunch of stuff that really makes no sense if you think about it too hard. Like why would someone pay for a drink at Quark’s when every residence on DS9 has a replicator? Because the writers wanted DS9 to be a frontier town and a frontier town needs a saloon.

Also to be clear, everything I was saying in my above comments was primarily in relation to the Federation. I recognize there are parts of the galaxy where replicators are not common.

Social ownership of what? Resources? Means of production? Neither of those means anything when replicators are a thing.

There are a million different definitions of socialism depending on who you ask. I gave one above but I’m not claiming it’s the only one. However it is ultimately an economic model, and it doesn’t make sense to apply it in a world where economics is meaningless because the laws of thermodynamics have been broken.