[ExI] portable toilets, was: RE: Watch robots make pizzas from start to finish at an automated pizzeria

[Adrian Tymes]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 2:34 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> We may be talking about two kinda different things Adrian.  I can’t see
> any practical way of superimposing a San Francisco-sized city on an
> existing city.
>

A million-person housing unit, done compactly and as high rises, turns out
to be much, much smaller than San Francisco.


> What I envision is to load up urban campers with visions of sugar plums
> dancing in their heads (the free dope)
>

What of urban campers who don't care for dope, or don't trust that it
wouldn't be poisoned?


> The employment there would be primarily in food processing, products not
> to be exported but rather consumed on site.
>

That wouldn't employ even a single percent of the people, especially if
it's just processing and not growing the food.  Even adding in police,
medical, power, and other support people, employment only to serve the
community would be less than half and possibly less than 10% of the
workforce (population, minus those who can't work - such as school-age
children).  What does everyone else do?


> We would be setting up a reservation of sorts, free of police brutality
> entirely, because it wouldn’t have police.
>

Not possible.  Even if you try to bar local police, federal police will
come in to enforce the law, otherwise criminals will flock to the place as
a haven.

Even if it was possible to have no police, that would just mean you'd have
brutality worse than police-grade.  Police are there in part to enforce the
government's monopoly on violence; when that monopoly ends, humans are all
too quick to assert their claim to it.


> It would be a communist utopia, where true communism could be tried for
> the first time in history
>

HA HA HA HA HA - you actually, literally, used that phrase!

"...true communism could be tried for the first time in history" is a
classic phrase where you lose all credibility.  It's almost as famous as,
"what could possibly go wrong?", except that some people honestly ask that
question instead of trying to imply that nothing can go wrong.

I've never seen people use it outside of parody before.

In case the sarcasm is unclear: "true" communism is (currently)
impossible.  Every single attempt inherently winds up with someone in
charge, someone more equal than others - if only because some people are
(far) more adept at gaining leadership than others.  The moment that
happens, and the person favors some group over another, it is no longer
"true" communism.  (In theory an AI could be programmed to rule without
such bias, but we do not yet have access to AIs which could do this and
rule at all effectively, entirely aside from the issue of getting people to
trust and allow leadership by such an AI.)
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