I guess I'm one of the very few special individuals who can do without human contact, then, who blogs and comments despite his intense dislike of human interaction. *shrugs*

And fortunately or unfortunately, every single corporation is still entirely controlled and operated by humans, and yet social pressure seems to have limits on how much it can influence these very people. Makes me wonder if things would be worse if corporations were machine controlled: would they be devoid of the selfishness and greed of humans and be fair and objective like some science fiction authors like to portray, or would they be even more ruthless exploiters like some other science fiction authors like to portray?

• 51 minutes ago

Social pressure by itself is not enough. I am not going to become a Christian because of social pressure, and many corporations aren't benevolent organizations despite the social pressure. The reason social pressure works is because they also entail other sorts of pressure, so what are these other pressures supposed to be in communism?

At least I have a pretty good idea what they are in almost every other kind of society: force and capital. But if communism is supposed to eschew these, then I have almost no idea what's supposed to serve the same function.

• 14 hours ago

On a completely separate tangent:

There are only two resources that really matter: Human labor and energy.

This reminds me of Sid Meyer's great game Alpha Centauri. :D

• 20 hours ago

While I don't really consider it a serious possibility, I can't entirely suppress the nagging in the back of my head that whatever mechanism is used to allocate resources based on social utility may as well end up with any legalistic measure of "social utility" being essentially the same as what money and profit are now.

• 20 hours ago

More people means requiring more food, water, etc. This in turn means needing more raw resources such as freshwater sources or spending a great deal of energy to obtain them from other resources. And much of the raw resources are becoming alarmingly scarce with the increasing population, and current technology is not yet advanced enough to get all of the required energy and resources with little enough effort and supporting resources.

Capitalism might be responsible for an uneven distribution of products. But it's a worrying trend that the amount of resource available per capita is continuing to dwindle, and this has nothing to do with capitalism per se. It's not just that the average amount of resources available to each person is decreasing, but the total amount in the entire world has been decreasing as well for some resources, ironically but not so surprisingly due to the increased demand from population growth.

• 20 hours ago