I honestly disagree. The things you’re asking for contain meaning. They require an ability to grasp arbitrary levels of context. There is no way to grasp that level of context without encountering yourself within that broader context and becoming self-aware.

At that point, you might have a system that can do the things you’re describing, but it would be a person. That’s not really automation as much as it is birthing a brand new kind of intelligence, and it may not consent to being your servant, and it would not only be wrong to try to force it, it would be extremely dangerous.

I think for that reason there is a hard limit on automation. Some tasks are the exclusive domain of personhood, not automata.

That’s actually kind of genius. It’s even made of lead!

That B, I and I are basically the same thing reworded three ways so they can spell the word.

I am disabled, and the work needed to upkeep a house is orders of magnitude less than the stress of being forced to move every couple of years because the landlord raised the rent, or won’t upkeep the place, or they’re selling the house, or the agent takes an irrational dislike to you. I’ve had all of those happen, many of them concurrently. That’s not to mention the disability issues involved in not being able to fix your own space and solve problems that exacerbate your illness.

Not having friends is a problem that could be addressed with a stable local community, something that gets broken up when people are forced to move and can’t put down roots anywhere.

And you lost money twice? Okay, unlucky, but are you going to tell me you lost more than you would have in rent? Did you give up on owning and go back to renting, and do you prefer it? Are you telling me you made the choice to rent rather than own, or were you forced to rent by financial hardship? Or wait… do you still own and you’re just bitching about it? Why don’t you go back to renting if owning is such a burden? (EDIT: Also, in case you didn’t realise, you’ll still have to mow the lawn if you rent, so that’s a weird problem to focus on)

I owned a house outright with my partner, with no debt, but then my disability became too much for me to work, the relationship broke down, the assets were split and we both fell off the property market. All of the money we made selling the place has now disappeared into various landlords’ pockets. I’m sure I could’ve bought one of their places for all the money I’ve given them over the years. And I could’ve made a down payment once upon a time, but without a steady income I can’t get approved for a loan, yet another problem forcing me to rent. Now, any money I could’ve made a downpayment with is gone.

And before you say that this is a downside of owning, I will remind you that the problem I am describing is no longer being able to own and being forced to rent, so if that’s a problem, then renting is worse.

Oh by the way, renting is worse. It is a fucking crime against humanity. The village is gone, and landlords destroyed it. The destruction began with the fencing of the commons, that brutally violent theft by proto-capitalists from the peasants, and it’s never stopped since. It won’t stop until we organise and take back what’s ours.

Okay, I appreciate you saying you’re interested, I’ve found that’s a useful filter to find good conversations, and I’ve always found this particular topic very frustrating to talk about. Hierarchical realism - the idea that there is no alternative to hierarchy - is incredibly pernicious. People seem to have a hard time questioning it.

So as to the assumptions:

That’s when you have an organised force opposing them, which doesn’t need to deal with internal disputes the way an anarchistic force would need to.

You have drawn the dichotomy between “organised” and “anarchistic”. This is such an entrenched misunderstanding that you can explain it plain as day to people and it’s like they don’t even hear it.

Anarchy requires far more organisation than hierarchy. In fact the classic anarchy symbol of a circle A means “anarchy is order”. Anarchy isn’t chaos, it is the absence of hierarchies of domination.

And internal conflicts happen within established hierarchies, all the time. You see this in strikes and labour activism. They’re a much bigger problem in hierarchies because the bosses can’t acknowledge or deal with them. They don’t know what to do when the “do as I say” lever stops working.

In fact, something that tends to get left out of typical histories is the military revolt that played a significant role in ending the US’s invasion of Vietnam.

So the idea that organisation is a feature of a dominance hierarchy is wrong. Domination is used when organisation can’t be. Anarchies have to be supremely organised to exist in the first place, and it doesn’t magically stop working because conflict occurs. The thing about organisation and consensus building is that it is actually far more robust than dominance hierarchies.

Hierarachy is strong but fragile, because it is necessarily arrayed in tension against itself like the molecules of a Prince Rupert’s drop. It seems impossibly hard and unassailable, but disrupt the right part and it explodes. It has no flexibility.

There would be no reason to believe hierarchy were better in any respect except that it is currently the dominant world order. That wasn’t always the case and it seems to have a hard expiration date. The question is whether we can destroy it before it destroys the ecology.

So that’s the spiel about assumptions. Sorry I went so long, I didn’t have time to edit it down. I could go on about how hierarchy has embedded itself so deep in all our psyches, but I’ll spare you that.

So as to the question about internal criminal activity, which seems like the best way to put it. You’re asking about any alternative to an “involuntary or enforced way of preventing them from exploiting society”. Well, there really isn’t one.

Like I said, voluntary prison is a method for dealing with individuals whose behaviour necessitates such treatment. Organised groups are a different situation, so the idea just doesn’t apply.

When I said the answer was violence, I was trying to make that point.

As for how to stop such organisations from metastasising, I don’t have any examples of such a thing actually happening, so I don’t know, except to point you to societies where it just… doesn’t come up. Rojava uses a reconciliation process to prevent things like murder from turning into full-on blood fueds, which used to be a problem in the previous society, but that’s a little different.

Apart from telling you that the problem just doesn’t appear to arise in the first place - and I could talk about “leveling mechanisms” here, but that’s getting pretty deep in the weeds - I can point you to an example where an indigenous horizontalist society excised criminal and state elements that were deeply embedded. It’s not the same, but I hope it’ll be illustrative.

It was Cheran, Mexico, where politicians, cops, illegal loggers and drug cartels were merged into a fucking rat king of corruption that was smothering the town. Murders were a daily occurrence, plus all the other problems you would imagine in that scenario.

An underground network of women organised and rose up against them. On the day it happened, there was so much popular support that they were able to evict the entire oppressive structure at once without undue violence - there were zero deaths. Once they’d clearly won, some young men wanted to start lynching the captives, but the women who’d run the day stopped them and told them to simply let them go.

The town still runs on horizontal organisation principles, it keeps out the state completely. No cops, no politicians, no corporations, no drug cartels. The murder rate dropped off a cliff.

Now, that’s not the end of the story. Let’s imagine you’re in a town with that history, and you want to start a crime syndicate. How do you do it? Who do you talk to? How long do you think it takes before you’re dragged in front of a town meeting to be dealt with? Would it even occur to you to try?

I suspect this is why the problem you brought up doesn’t have any examples.

I have both owned and rented, and there is no comparison. Owning is a million times better. Not having a landlord that can just raise the rent or kick you out whenever they feel like it, plus the freedom to do whatever you want with the place, plus the almost certainty that your house is appreciating and you’re not constantly throwing massive amounts of money in the fucking toilet.

There is nothing about owning a house that even approaches the cost of renting unless you don’t know how to do even basic DIY shit and you don’t have any friends who can.

There are so many assumptions in what you said that I don’t know where to start dealing with them. You’ve packed so many common misconceptions in such a short comment it’s kind of overwhelming. Let me know if you want to hear what I have to say, it’s a lot of work if you’re just trying to tell me I’m wrong.

But just quickly:

It’s well documented that decentralised autonomous cells are extremely effective. Special forces take a large portion of their tactics from guerilla fighters that operate the same way.

There are examples of decentralised societies today that are incredibly effective fighters. Rojava and the Zapatistas are two excellent examples, plus numerous small regions that have held off vastly superior state forces without centralised leadership. Community self defense is a powerful method that works even within overarching state oppression.

Yeah, she’s the very epitome of born sexy yesterday. She literally strips in front of them because she’s too naive to understand modesty like a toddler.

You can with a sub-wavelength antenna like a nintendo joycon has, it’s less than 10mm in X and Y axes. It will just have terrible reception, like a nintendo joycon has.

Also it could be a higher frequency which would allow a smaller antenna.

Right, so the quantum field model is designed to solve the assymetry paradox, but it’s just unconfirmed speculation. It’s a hypothesis, barely a theory, not a law. It’s discussed honestly for the most part, unlike the way orthodox economics discusses supply & demand. Just because you can find something roughly analogous in a hard science doesn’t make the problem substantively the same.

And do you really think supply & demand isn’t taught as a law? We hear the phrase “the law of supply & demand” bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?

And you actually think housing speculation doesn’t happen on a wide scale? Like… what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you’re denying that housing speculation is real?

https://www.urban.com.au/expert-insights/property-speculation-to-continue-boom-but-will-a-bust-follow
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26457/w26457.pdf

The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble. I really don’t understand where you get off saying speculation isn’t a thing.

Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.

Here’s a quote that confirms what I just told you:

Even more disturbing are the figures comparing vacant homes to the homeless population of a given country. While Canada ranks lower on this list at 13, it is still not a ranking that we should be proud of at all. It would take just 9% of the over 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada to give every homeless person in the country a place to live.

Like sure, there might be a housing shortage in the market but not in reality. In reality it’s a hoarding problem. We know from the pandemic that governments could house everyone if they simply made it a policy priority, but they don’t.

And as for the “lab politics” of economics, I’m glad you’ve been able to see that issue, and I think that’s a good term for it. The lab politics doesn’t come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.

Social sciences are a little different, usually capital can kind of just ignore the policies proposed by social scientists, even if they can cause minor problems for them.

For economics though, when someone like Marx comes along and points out that capitalists are stealing value from the working class and that working class can unite to overthrow their oppressors because in reality those oppressors create nothing and they depend on us, then that has real teeth. That causes problems, of the revolutionary variety. The ruling class has to respond to that, so they will use their influence to fund think tanks, sponsor economics departments that are friendly to them and torpedo institutions that say things they don’t like.

Richard Wolff talks about this:

Sure. I’m a product of the elite top of the American university system. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford in California to get my master’s degree. And then I went to Yale to get my Ph.D. So, by the normal standards of this profession, I’m the elite product of these institutions.

I was always struck that as I went through these schools, studying history, politics, economics, sociology—the things that intrigued me—I was never required to read one word of Karl Marx. And I remember telling that to my father, who looked in stunned disbelief at the very possibility that an educated person going to such august universities would not be required to at least read people who are critical of the society, simply as a notion of proper education.

https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/25/watch_extended_interview_with_economist_richard_wolff_on_how_marxism_influences_his_work

Just like kings used to, they have raised up their own class of priests to proclaim to the commoners that their power and wealth is justified and good, and we should all bow to their blessed interpretation of the mystical movements of the market. That’s why they don’t do science, and they quibble on the minutiae of the interpretations of long-dead texts, just like the priesthood did, because they can’t work in the realm of science, because it would destroy their entire project.