Comment by solyin

> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.

False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.

So, by this logic, a homeless person with a used iPhone is better off than Louis XIV (who literally owned all of France) just because the king couldnt play Candy Crush?

This statement confuses global technological progress across centuries with an individuals actual financial security, social power, and quality of life within their own modern society.

I simply just cant understand why would someone repeat such a statement (and I have seen it everywhere).

Is there a definition of standard of living? A king would be entertaining, socialising, and strategising most of the time (along with a lot more pursuits of hunting, etc for leisure). While I understand they had less access to healthcare and variety of food, travel, etc...id still argue they had a better standard of living than someone that works 8-10h/day and then comes home to cook and clean?

Oh, great, then there is nothing to fix. We just apply medieval standards and everything is hunky dory.

Medieval poor likely had a higher standard of living than ancient kings, should they have complained?

I'm not sure a medieval king would take that swap. Maybe for EU poor.

Is that the bar? Who looks at medieval kings and goes "their standard of living should be our baseline"? Living in a cold stone building with no medical care questionable food, etc?

But also, no they don't. Standard of living includes one's agency over their environment. An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will. No one making $18,000 is having hundreds or thousands of people bending over to serve them.

Utter nonsense.

> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.

Do America’s poor have a standard thing like a roof on top of their heads? Nevermind a castle, just a basic house which has already been paid for.

They also work longer hours than medieval serfs, are more precarious in housing and food security and more separated from their family. Also slaves work the farms. Read tomatoland or the lives and deaths of the American workers.

> Technology makes a lot of things better. Like eliminating symptoms of 95% of cystic fibrosis victims.

Counterpoint: any leaking abandoned oil well. Check out YouTube videos documenting the abandoned oil wells in West Texas, which are dumping industrial volumes of water into abandoned land.

That is a silly comparison.

I believe the more accurate statement is that technology can reduce the burdens of survival (better access to food, medicine, information) but cannot provide longterm happiness, and in some ways impair it (social media, mass surveillance, reliance on technology).

We are social beings, and technology in the last decade especially has been gearing itself towards reducing communities both physically and digitally. Less people spend time together, more people feel lonely and isolated, and divisions between people are at all time highs with glorification of death to the “enemy”. Forums are almost entirely dead, the feed of information is both nonstop while being useless, and we have few outlets to feel true connection.

Harvard’s happiness studies finds that standard of living only impacts happiness to a point before facing a sharp plateau and socialization takes over as a dominant factor in longterm happiness, according to my memory at least. And, while I don’t entirely agree with Kojima’s predictions in MGS2, the AI seeking to provide “context” for the feeble human mind as rate of information on the Internet increases was prescient, though humans have adapted to this (albeit suffering shorter attention spans as a consequence).

IMO a true utopia would be similar to the Enterprise: people socialize and enjoy a life with comfort by technology, not at the behest of social media or the collective consciousness of others. Unplugged and connected in a more meaningful way.

No its not, not in America. Since this decade the highest IQ is on trend to having higher TFR than the lowest, since children are expensive

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela...

If I remember correctly, the crime statistic that they give in one of the movies is also much lower than many US cities.

The utopian bits were never really explained, either.

They mostly just said it was all great and fair and nobody needs money and is somehow trying to be their best selves… nevermind the numerous examples to the contrary.

They weren’t really post scarcity. They never explained how they’re not in a constant state of rioting when a weird government/military decides what everyone can have or do.

You just go with it, because that’s the backdrop. You have to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the story.

But also, Picard is the best Captain, by far.

we can pick it apart forever. Who gets the penthouse or the beach view property and who lives in the basement? Replicators will not solve all the reasons we have money today. Maybe uploading into cyberspace will but where you can have every place and every thing, though I'm sure someone will point out how that won't lead to utopia either.

I don't want to attempt to classify the entire franchise as that, or even Starfleet in its entire story arc.

But if we examine TOS and TNG, I could say it represented a "roving utopia" model where Utopia Meets Reality. The episodic nature and self-contained stories would typically examine the question: "what happens when the Roddenberry philosophy comes into contact with something unique?" and it would be a study in anthropology, comparative religions, or sociological questions.

I hadn't watched much Star Trek in the 1990s, but I was becoming excited about Babylon 5. One of the main points of departure was the planning of the 5-year story arc, and the character development that accompanied it. Every character in Babylon 5 was imbued with an origin, a narrative, and a destiny. Jumping into the story from the beginning, and riding along for all 5 imperfect years, it felt like we also had a destination, and threads came together, and there was resolution and revelation. The Babylon station was never a utopia in reality, only in its aspirations.

So I cultivated a disdain for Star Trek as it was in those days, but Trek was a product of its time, and had helped to cast the die for episodic and self-contained "Monster of the Week" type shows. However, I've rewatched all the films, and I commend them on great production values, acting, and interesting themes. The Star Trek franchise has grown to include something for everyone, including the Klingon-language performance of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which definitely captured my attention.

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Right, Banks' Culture seems fairly mainstream and because it doesn't need to make episodic adventures it often gets to actually do utopian stuff Trek wouldn't even if only as a backdrop to the exciting story. The repeated instances in which Culture children play happily, insulated from whatever terrifying stuff we're reading about is an example.

Or if Comic Books are in scope, obviously "Miracleman: The Golden Age" is a utopia. Explicitly so. It is about the ways people are still people in a utopia.

Less mainstream, Greg Egan's Amalgam is also clearly a utopia. The couple in "Riding the Crocodile" choose to die at the end of that story, more out of some sense that stories need endings than because of any outside force.