Everyone should know this. The fire he said "This is fine" about was a metaphorical one, after all. But then, Unionization has been important to have in the economic ecosystem as well, so it might just be that greatly-needed wildfire in a forest with too much corporate rot.

I think this is why I don't ready usernames on most places anymore. I get it's a joke, it just... I'm asexual and it makes me uncomfortable, no offense. I'm not expecting anything from you, I just thought I'd be clear it can be off putting enough to change someone's habits for the worse.

That being said, happy cake day. May you have many <insert preferred genders of lovers here> suck your wang, lol

I mean, with the exception of the shackles, this is just logistics 101. The more something needs to stay working or not accidentally trigger a huge problem, the more resources you dedicate to picking up where the regular guy left off because the "fleffingbridge transport 1" company's bus broke down in front of the regular guy and his bus got hit by a train. Solution? New bus, plant some trees. Prevention? Bridges and tunnels aren't cheap, but clearly we need one there now. We can't predict the future but we have to do our best to try or - simulated or real - the cost will be paid in blood. Obviously there's moral limits, but hiring more staff is not in and of itself immoral nor the wrong approach.

If I was in charge of a real life logistics operation, I'd be devastated if anyone died because of me. I can't say, however, that it can be avoided. Sometimes people die at random, that's not yet 100% avoidable and might never be, but I do care. I'd hope people who actually end up in logistics could learn to indulge their empathy enough to remember there are lives on the line, but I can't blame someone for being bitter that the actual work output is purely being fleeced for profit.

My point with the setting was that, at least according to verifiable evidence, certain aspects of society have been proven to run better in all implementations under circumstances that translate to all or many cultures, but we don't use them in most places because they're strange or because of demonization in the eyes of the more influential demographics.

In short, it's a setting that proposes "a near utopia would require a lot of planning and transition periods, but the biggest blocker now is greed, arrogance and hatred, not technology" in a fantastical way, but it's basic messages being relevant to today.

If people want to know the societal implications of technology, I wanted to give someone a reason to be able to trust technology when people are trustworthy, and that governments and corporations can only be trusted as long as that trust is unbroken, but individual people can change.

It is illegal in the setting for the oligarchs to remain in control if so much as ONE of them is ever caught with non-UBI currency, because you get one residence period and it's small because of the huge population size (~100 billion when the novels would have started) and that UBI includes the free residence. Which means the oligarchs are not just on UBI, they can't spend more than that UBI per month and it's in special corruption-resistant currency that has all transactions publicly visible. The only security the "council" gets is that they don't take 9 months to respawn if they get killed 3 times in a week.

That's not what drives the story, though. The corruption in business still exists to a degree, but besides that the inhabitants have time to heal from trauma, so much that though certain inanimate objects are made eternal, most are not because it would make life boring and economics (even if just as what could be compared to game mechanics rather than an actual economy) relies on a degree of scarcity.

The characters learn when they're resurrected that immortality is provided for it's own sake and because nobody deserves to stop existing, but not everyone is as easily swayed to the idea that there's no room in this setting for hatred. There are a lot of things that cause cynicism but all of them give a different kind of person a stress reaction to immortality not seen in people without significant mental trauma, which is what the story would have been about; learning to be okay with the realization you can never really reach a final destination, that if the afterlife is a game then you have to play that game to a degree or you'll just be miserably bored in unnecessary "tribute" to the idea that worth is based on numbers or reputation.

Unfortunately, even when I provided free samples of the stories, I only received blatant disapproval of the setting and outright demands to modify it to be something that is dystopian in practice, not just appearance. A big theme was supposed to be that the setting wasn't built to be beautiful, but because the people in it are not being constantly pushed down, and the structure of society resembles the best real life has ever had, and grafitti and personal additions for beautification is both legal and encouraged, even a world of creaking thousand year old buildings and standardized apartment modules with solar panel exteriors feels less like cyberpunk and more like solarpunk than solarpunk itself ever has.

Eventually I gave up, because people saying "your work should not be about how this society avoids dystopia, but about how I think of it as dystopia because people I disagree with are there" does not change the fact that if we had to pick restrictions, it would be to put a ban on people like Hitler running for any political position or keeping their original identity, not leaving them dead entirely because then everybody starts complaining that because they dislike Person X, that Person X not even be allowed to state their case. Once you start getting into resurrection and reprogramming reality itself, letting slippery slopes like that begin to crumble is essentially playing god with a Russian roulette. But no, people still think their personal standards are the center of morality and even defended leaving groups dead based purely on association. I write fantasies, not tragedies. If that's how people think, I'll be writing a much less kind assessment of what we can become that we each would actually deserve.

Take it from me, reality is a prison. If your issues are as bad as mine, escapism is the only solution and social media is the polar opposite of escapism. I'm not saying "do drugs", I'm saying "threaten to quit, and if they call your bluff, make an untraceable alteration to fuck the company over and quietly hand in your resignation" before taking a break to indulge hobbies while searching for another job.

And if you can't afford to lose your job at all for any length, you now have a morally-acceptable reason to kill everyone in your workplace because better death than slavery to a system this corrupt.

Unfortunately, an OS that covers such cases is a lost monetization opportunity, fuck the system, use a Linux distro, you get the idea. Microsoft makes money off of tech support for people too unversed in computers to fix it themselves.

Actually, I'm glad to know you're interested in utopian settings. I was mostly depressed because my utopian sci-fi story I published (I won't spam but DM me if you use Amazon for reading books) had been outright attacked by other writers for being "too optimistic"; for some inexplicable and seemingly irrational reason, the idea of an artificial afterlife built entirely by human hands is outright offensive to Atheists. It was, admittedly, an unorthodox utopia: Resurrecting 125 billion people at a rate of (iirc) ~2.5 people every four minutes (I did the math, I just no longer have the notes) for 30 million years (Homo Australopithecus to Homo Sapiens Sapiens) and giving all of them immortality (via respawns with a 9 month timeskip every time you die 3 times in a single week), mental health care, privacy, security, education, water, food, mail and courier service, library membership (they saved the books that were burnt or lost too), shelter (hey, some people like living outdoors), transit, electricity, television, internet, and recreational drugs in that order and without being the only provider.

Basically, a constitutional oligarchy with municipal elected officials with full intent and obligation to transition to full democracy on vote, and which strives to balance capitalism and socialist regulation of that capitalism (because yes, outright communism would never actually work, but socialism is the "parent category" of communism and is why we have both TGVs and Interstate Highways in real life; taxes and tax-funded public services are the definition of socialist policy and I honestly believe they're the best option seeing as it's worked more or less consistently since the 1950s) because the oligarchy are REQUIRED to survive on the smallest income in the entire society (the leadership live completely on the same Universal Basic Income as the poorest citizens, and thus must raise the UBI to raise their own income) which leads to greater equity without complicated systems of bureaucracy.

To be fair, I don't know if it would work, given all the historical factors involved, but I actually did research about what has and hasn't worked and relied on that over my own opinion as much as possible. So it really hurt for people to outright reject it because 'I don't want anyone to get inspired to create anything like it entirely based on my hatred of an unrelated religious philosophy' was/is(?) prominent among the current trend of 'the societal implications of technology (Hint: wE hAtE tEcHnOlOgY aNd NeRdS!!!!)' in the sci-fi writing community.

Long story short, thank you, optimistic readers who want optimistic stories are in short supply lately.

To be fair, it might be too late by then, but it also might be true that it's not just the fairy tales with happy endings that are not realistic. No sense worrying about T-1000s coming for you in real life when that whole movie was mostly special effects, if the world is about to die then I don't see it coming from machines. We don't know where free will comes from or even if it's just a math equation or something truly beyond explanation, but computers don't seem to have it.

Scarily enough, the Quran (of all the things that implies, I am not saying this is actually reality, only that parallels should not fall into place that way under random chance) points out that this conclusion was engineered in some sense, that electronics were never going to give us godhood due to the limitations of reality. It's kind of blunt in saying it, so I get why the skepticism needs to stay involved, but the idea is that our "household gods" of Siri and Alexa and such are really just basic circuitry compared to a housefly or mosquito, let alone to anything larger or capable of emotional attachment.

Sorry if this is preachy, I'm a writer who hasn't done enough writing lately and I'm just at a stage where I feel like it's too late for my writing to matter.

Unlike Japan in the 80s, I wouldn't trust the CCP more than products made in Democratic nations.

That being said, I am now VERY glad I switched to Graphene OS the moment I got this phone. Fuck this kind of shit, I bought this phone.