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Comment by rogerrogerr | Hacker News Reader

Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn’t we just… make a parallel economy without the AGI? The world works today without AGI.

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Or use any of the wonders of military technology invented in the last 200 years to take back society. These fuckers have lived in prosperity for so long that they don't even think it is possible. But so many people throughout history thought they were untouchable until the masses decided they had enough of their shit. Kings with professional armies, full plate knights, men with cannons, mens with guns, machine guns, bombs, planes, tanks, helicopters, and yet at the end of the day when enough random people are pissed off enough the mass of people with nothing to lose are the ones who "win" in the end with the powerful dead or hiding.

When unrest happens the military sides with the ones that give better hopes of keeping the stream of money that funds the army flowing.

It sides with the poor only if the powerful (gov) are hopelessly inept at gathering money. If there's a chance that current civilian power can reform and keep collecting the money from the people and funding the army then the army sides with them and help quell the rebellion.

Those who hold kinetic power will never side with poor against the rich.

Not always .. see the peasants revolt of 1381, French Revolution in 1789-1793, Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, etc.

Im not talking about the military siding with the people, im talking about the military's side not being enough to prevent the people from rising up and taking down whoever is in power. Militaries require logistics, random people do not. Military needs a government or people to follow for direction, masses of angry people do not.

Every time a government or military force has decided they were unstoppable or untouchable, history has proven them wrong. Hell we spent 2 decades in Iraq and Afganistan with the most powerful military and military tech the world has ever known backed by the strongest economy in the world against guys with 60+ year old bolt actions and guns filed out by hand in caves living in mostly desert landscapes, and we still ended up abandoning it because it was too costly. How would the military fair any better against the best armed population in the world with direct access to their supplying economy and logistics networks?

Yeah sure masses of people aren't making aircraft carriers, but you don't need aircarft carriers to win a war at home. We have modern engineering and chemistry text books in every library across the US that will tell you how military technology works and its flaws, what technology you can utilize find or make yourself, and a supply of nearly any material someone could possibly want or need sitting in scrapyards across the nation.

> im talking about the military's side not being enough to prevent the people from rising up and taking down whoever is in power.

That's sheer fantasy.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9AdZVQuITM/?utm_source=ig_we...

Parallel economies are banned. Try making a new currency in the US.

Economies can work without currencies. It's a little inconvenient, but bartering/trading goods for services was common in the depression when nobody had any cash.

Interestingly, new ad-hoc currencies pop up all over in times like that:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/history/europes-economic-...

https://collectingpapermoney.spmc.org/wiki/Scrip_Issued_duri...

Printing money is lucrative for the printer so any time it might get even a little bit useful and feasible for other parties somebody will start printing.

Did we just ignore the last fifteen years of crypto?

No I had the speculative ponzi front of mind when making that comment.

Governments love crypto because it lets you seize lots of money from criminals across borders. And it is legal gambling where you can tax the winnings without reimbursing the losers (unless they can offset it but most probably can not)

> Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn’t we just… make a parallel economy without the AGI? The world works today without AGI.

Because you need things they want. Like why would they spare the electricity to heat your home, when it could go to "better" use powering a few dozen GPUs serving a billionaire? Why would they spare the land for you to grow food, when they could use it to build ziggurats dedicated to their power (or whatever else is their whim)?

The market sends the scarce resources to those with the most money.

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