Business as usual during alterations12/9/2023 ![]() John Ringo's Troy Rising: The Glatun, the friendly galactic race, have 30% of their population permanently unemployed.This lasts perhaps 100 pages into the book, before things go straight to hell. There is a small scale economy in the background, with some luxury goods produced and traded, but it's hardly essential to the setting. Society and Technology have made it so that everyone gets a ration of power each day, more than enough to provide for a comfortable lifestyle. John Ringo's Council Wars series applies before the war.Still, the people who have jobs that can't be automatized are depicted as the lucky ones, since permanent vacation isn't all that it's cut out to be, and as a result adult education flourishes. The system has its problems to a careful reader - one would imagine that people would cry foul when major parts of the formerly working class populace get a free lunch without doing anything, while others continue to toil at least until someone in their ranks manages to mechanize that particular industry, as well. Robert Anton Wilson's Schroedinger's Cat trilogy studies a number of Alternate Universes, including a Utopian one, where a manual laborer who invents a way to automatize his work will get a high standard of living for lifetime, and everybody else in the same business gets a comfortable one, as machines multiply the production rates, allowing a part of the surplus to be used this way, since capitalism requires consumers in order to function.Said change caused a huge, permanent sea-change that required the society to have a type of currency (based on reputation and work you do) to limit resource usage. In fact, the last novel of the series called "The Extras" deals very well with the fallout when one of the Pretties' "enhancements" is fixed with the Brain Rain. We find out later in the first novel this is true, but not solely because of the highly advanced technology the society has. ![]() The Pretties (read: 16-2x year olds) could have nearly anything they want just by asking for it.
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