I believe that's what they are doing. I was removed from the committee after sharing the studies I found so I'm just pushing the buttons they tell me to push at this point.
I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to. Everyone living on hand outs is the road to hell
That is a 1st world country point of view. Reality is that we don't have an unified, global living standard now, and neither probably by the Expanse point of time.
And if a critical amount of people decided to try luck working on asteroids, it might mean that they didn't had a comfortable way of life down here at the start of the process, and probably by the end of it too.
and if air quality worsens now that the EPA decided climate change isn't real, it paves the way for more entrepreneurs of this kind ("see? economic growth!!")
Yes, the economy of Earth in The Expanse is an extractive colonial one not unlike what we have now in the US. It is the logical extrapolation of the current neo-liberal economic model we have now projected into space.
The people of Earth live relatively cushy lives at the expense of the belters. The UN and corporations extract resources from the belt, they overthrow democratically elected leaders to prop up corrupt puppet leaders to do Earth's bidding. All the while, the belters see little of the riches that they're force to extract. Also, unfortunately for the poor of Earth, that wealth also doesn't trickle down to them.
It is a pretty accurate analogy of the current state of affairs of Earth today, but the divide is between the Global North and the Global South.
The people of Global North live relatively cushy lives at the expense of the belters. The governments and corporations of the Global North extract resources from the belt, they overthrow democratically elected leaders to prop up corrupt puppet leaders to do Global North's bidding. All the while, the working class of the Global South see little of the riches that they're force to extract. Also, unfortunately for the poor of Global North, that wealth also doesn't trickle down to them.
The Earth of The Expanse is a warning, not an aspiration.
> I think The Expanse did a much better job of modelling the reality of future economics than trek ever got close to.
That is because The Expanse does a lot of "the stuff that happen(s)(ed) on Earth, but in space!". Don't get me wrong, it also does a lot of great scifi stuff, but the factions and people are quite one-dimensional unimaginative analogues of known factions.
This approach makes it relatable (and commercially more successful) but not necessarily more realistic. It's like predicting flying horse carriages and flying cars versus helicopters, planes, and rockets.
Related: IMHO, one of the worst things about the 'relatable extrapolation of the present' aspect is that it limits popular scifi enormously. There's usually some special space carved out for humans or very human-like creatures doing very human things with the environment pretty magically being incredibly Earth-like all the time for hundreds or thousands of years in the future, even though the lives of humans today are already incredibly alien compared to those of humans just 200 years ago.
If food, energy, medical care and transportation was as cheap as it is in Trek then it might actually make it to post scarcity. One thing that makes Star Fleet such a successful organization is combination meritocracy and diversity. I think any organization that nails that will be very successful.
In The Expanse the economies are much more relatable ones of exploitation, poverty, and extreme scarcity. Specifically watching the nationalist Martian society collapse was very interesting and felt realistic.
Land, labour and dilithium crystals are still scarce in the Star Trek universe.
And AFAICT even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense. The replicator can replicate replicators so that and any goods that a replicator can create seem not scarce, but the replicator still requires energy to run. Energy is crazy cheap and abundant in Star Trek, but it's not unlimited.
> Land, labour and dilithium crystals are still scarce in the Star Trek universe.
Land can't be that scarce. How many times did we see an entire planet colonized by like 200 people? Also, it seems like very few cities in the future have put hard caps on building height.
People have their own replicators, as you say; and cheap abundant energy. The need for labour is vastly reduced.
And dilithium, while 'rare' is not an essential commodity for anything except space travel.
> even energy and material goods are scarce in the economic sense.
Sure; but they are abundant enough that 'fair distribution' hardly matters, which I think was the OP's point.
Land is still rare in Star Trek universe for the same reason some land in the US sells for $10/acre and others for hundreds of millions per acre. If you want land in the middle of nowhere it's cheap, but travel still takes significant time between star systems so land on significant planets is still quite valuable.
I'm not so sure. In most of the US if people only used water for drinking and bathing then water would be so abundant fair distribution wouldn't matter. But when it's free-ish then people abuse it and we have water shortages.
Fair is undefine-able. Is it a set volume of water per person? Or is it a set volume of water per person per kilogram? Is it different by gender? By age or physical ability?
For the purposes of distributing a limited resource, it seems a power law formula is most fair, with a sufficiently steep curve to keep total consumption within resource limits.
That does not mean anything. How is it fair if large people get the same amount of water as small people? Or people who work jobs where they get dirty getting the same amount of water as office workers?
Not sure where you're getting your information from.
My FSD (v13.2) has driven unmapped roads, including gravel roads, hills, narrow roads, and switchbacks, in the backwoods of Tennessee. From watching the display, it clearly identifies the road features and navigates them.
I'm building a community site DevOptimize.org: The Art of Packaging[0] for this type of content. Would be glad to host with an interested editor(s). Near-term roadmap includes wiki editing, currently in git.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), as the author of the GPL and LGPL licenses, maintains that any software running in the same process space qualifies as "linked" under the terms of these licenses. This includes dynamic and static linking, plug-ins, loadable modules, and, in some cases, even interpreted code.
However, some developers who use GPL licenses interpret these requirements differently and permit certain uses that the FSF does not. A notable example is the Linux kernel, which allows proprietary kernel modules under specific conditions.
For proprietary software authors, the best-case scenario is having to convince a court that the license they accepted, by redistributing GPL-licensed software, permits linking without the obligation to disclose their own source code, as otherwise required by the license.
some developers who use GPL licenses interpret these requirements differently and permit certain uses that the FSF does not. A notable example is the Linux kernel, which allows proprietary kernel modules under specific conditions.
this is not necessarily a different interpretation of the license but it is an exception the authors make. and they can do that because they are the authors.
the interesting question is if they could change their mind and remove the exception. i believe they could. should they though? that's another question altogether.
If it helps any, at two companies I was responsible for ensuring that all FOSS was made available to customers in an easily re-buildable, re-imageable way alongside our proprietary binaries.
Permissibly licensed software does not require you to provide sources or the changes to it.
Copyleft licenses require the source, including changes, to be provided.
The original purpose of copyleft is roughly the "right to repair". When you buy a product: you receive the necessary source, build instructions, and tools in some cases, to update and replace the software you received. The use of copyleft software passes those requirements on through proprietary users.
Note that one can still build a proprietary product as long as all the copyleft pass-through software can be modified and replaced on the product.
Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, and myself, among many, "sell" GPL software that are used by others as part of their proprietary products.
Each of those, and the customers, are required to make the source they received (not their own proprietary source), including changes, available to those that receive the software (thus indirectly back to the public and the authors). AGPL is similar but includes the case of providing sources for products used in Internet services.
