The problem is that the more we automate, the supply exceeds demand in the labor market. That in turn allows employers to easily suck up the excess potential workers at low wages, and also makes further automation or even repairing the machines we got uneconomical.

Stagnant weak demands screws over big things like nuclear power plants and subways.

We need things like a UBI and further shrinking of the workweek (perhaps as an "automatic stabilizer" based on pop vs total working hours vs popuation!) in order to not stagnate technology and get back our free time.

I think we just have to rethink what being a good person is. Workers have way wayyy more power than people think, they just need unity and the ability to say 'Fuck you' to the systems and people that harm more than help.

And keep in mind; of course those systems and their people tell you that they help more than harm. UBI is totally not necessary. The market works with minimal intervention if people are able to live fearlessly.

> Workers have way wayyy more power than people think

Explain? Individual workers are quite weak. A lack of large scale workplaces in the service sector make organization hard. Overall weak demand and lack of competition makes "capital strikes" in response to worker unrest especially easy to pull off.

We are seeing more strikes now precisely to do stimulus checks making 2020 a better year on average for bottom quintile workers, and increased demand further making labor markets somewhat tight for the first time in 20 years.

Unions are a good start, so long as they don't think the path to victory is through legislation. Increasing the spirit of fearlessness and proximity to nature should be sufficient to make the society resistant to corruption. Stimulus was necessary and had many beneficial consequences for labor, but it should not be mistaken for liberation.

I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.

> Unions are a good start

Yes

> so long as they don't think the path to victory is through legislation.

That is definitely true.

> Increasing the spirit of fearlessness and proximity to nature should be sufficient to make the society resistant to corruption.

It's good to be in nature, but it's important to distinguish between nature the soother of souls, and nature the means of sustinence. We can build trains to ferry people to and from great parks, but we are too numerous for people to all resist through subsistance agriculture or foraging.

> Stimulus was necessary and had many beneficial consequences for labor, but it should not be mistaken for liberation.

Of course not, but we need a "starter motor" to get the labor market tightness to give people the leverage to rebuild those bonds. unionize, and shrink the workweek enough (by norms and laws, that's a safer sort of labor law than NLRB-type appeasement) to keep the labor market tight.

> I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.

Unionizations and organizing more broadly are nothing if not societies within society. We can critique the whole, but if take up a primitivism which is against all advanced human structures we offer ourselves no hope and way out, and commit ourselves to a path towards the dystopias we can merely cynically take pride in predicting.

I want to believe that we have the technology available to make subsistence farming, water treatment and power generation available to huge numbers of people. The key factor to this is keeping the benefits of the internet, while moving away from the main body of society. I have hope that starlink or another technology will make this possible within my lifetime.

I am all for trying to maximize technology advancement / alienating division of labor. (This is why I spend so much time on https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs/ to untangle our great open source commons and make even in it's totality it graspable!), but "everyone gets to be a farmer too" is like the hardest-to-achieve form of that, and a failed attempt could easily wipe out what nature remains.

I would much prefer to abolish all non-highly-intense agriculture and try to return as much and to parkland as possible. IMO it's no coincidence California, Korea, and Japan are all prosperous. Mountains containing developing to smaller areas greatly improve things. We need the political will to do same thing in the flat areas by fiat.