the Death Star was FREE

[Kurgan]

Who knew, right?

You have to pay for both droids AND Clones (clones even more... they are VERY expensive). You have to invest in each to produce a unit that will produce work for you.

And the tadpole cannot hop like a frog.

This is a 20,000 year old society Kurgan. I'm sure that /at one time/ they had no 'first droid' but the thing to remember is that things are now so advanced that droids supervising other droids is the norm (3PO is a 'human cyborg relations' interpreter, not a butler).

Which effectively is where, once you start a Von Neumann process, sophistication builds geometrically with the expansion of the program through different resource exploitation levels.

Look, just because they have droids and a galaxy of materials, doesn't mean that suddenly they have to operate without money or without costs. So I disagree with both of you on that.

/Have to/? Oh my.

How about -want to-.

If you need something and owe no one any debt of labor because you are frankly not worth the cost of your being part of the system, it being /cheaper/ to let you feed yourself with a given allocation of manufactured goods than to try and maintain the round robin of salary:housing:food:work ethic. i.e. For them to GIVE YOU what you want, from a reserve surplus capacity.

Even if it is nothing more than raw materials for the multipurpose mini-factory you have out back your own house.

At which point, it becomes time for a lesson in real-world macroeconomics.

We live in a world so desperately overrun with interdependence that we often forget how much we LOSE to synergy. How much the process itself steals from efficiency.

A man who delivers for Pizza Hut does so because a man who works for Ford Motor Company cannot take the time out of his life to cook his own food. BOTH those men may be dependent on the same third guy whose small factory produces nuts and bolts sufficient to make an automatic oven or a robotic car assembly line work. But the reality of their existence is not that they help each other as part of their own system but rather they are artifacts of distributionist capitalism which seeks to insert more and more make work job categories to support a lifestyle of the megawealthy.

What's the one secret of this elite class? They KNOW, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they must /never/ _work_ for anyone. Because they can never be paid what their lifestyle costs, let alone what they are worth.

The less work you do, the more effectively you can allocate that work to other people with a 'percentage off the top' that is effectively free.

What this does is ensure the stupid are enslaved to a system which provides for their every need by refusing to allow them to learn to sustain their own.

In the process, it keeps them too busy to be at each other's throats or demanding more from their employers because, after all, that would be 'wanting more than you are worth'. Just look at all the other little groveling wage slaves.

Comparatively, the Government is the greatest self-exsanguinating vampire of all.

Because they hire private corporations to PRINT MONEY, to a given representative amount equal to but not surpassing the economic value of a market driven society.

To pay for this privilege of having their money printed (something which they could do on their own for pennies per hundred dollars), the Federal Reserve typically donates a precious metal equivalent backing collateral which external (wealthy) private individuals and groups are supposed to match until a given fraction of the existing economic system is created as a kind of guarantee that you are not building on a vacuum.

Except it never happens. Because as soon as the wealthy gain their filthy lucre _from us_, The People whose initial investment capital represents, they loan it right back out, usually to themselves of business investment. Now, nominally, you should never be able to exceed a given fraction of the total reserve that the gold represents. Say 10% but because they take the payments on the initial loans as _their own money_, they can relend that as well. And so on and so one.

Ad infinitum.

The result is exponential growth but also exponential failure. As bad risks or bad luck cause major defaults and THE SAME BANK moves in to recover the property (and destroy lives) while the defaulter on the loan runs away back to his rich friends.

The problem gets to be when such huge amounts of the reserve are in the system that the amount of money exceeds the amount of value in the economics. Suddenly you have massive inflation which is like revving a car on ice. The harder you floor it, the more it spins for nothing as goods are sold undervalue until they become scarce and money cannot buy anything. At the same time that interest on loans accumulates at original values and you get a contraction in the business cycle.

By defaulting on the loan, the real value of the properties is bought up by the banks and distributed amongst the elite classes INCLUDING those who defaulted (that's right, you /engineer/ failure) as 'payment' for removing excess currency in the system because real property has it's own value.

Unfortunately, for the rest of us, the loss of that real property represents the loss of ability to live our owned-as-own lives. And we become dependent on a system of business commerce which functions by harvesting the wealth of the middle classes every once in a while and then using the value of their work to redistribute AGAIN as a function of expanding currencies into 'new markets'.

Which can also be fleeced through artificial currency standards and contractions.

The ultimate reality being that WE DO NOT KNOW how much the Fractional Reserve Lending system is in over it's head at the moment. It may be 200%, it may be 2,000%.

It may be 2 million.

To the government it doesn't matter because it they tell the Federal Reserve (which is NOT a Federal agency at all but entireley privatized) to create 20 billion in accessible capital, it happens. And noone has the oversight to say if it's real money or printed toilet paper.

What we do know is that explosive growth has inspired horrific wars over false representation of poverty vs. wealth and that original growth estimates for the 13 Colonies before the introduction of forced Bank Of England currency systems (what originally led to the Revolutionary War was the insistence upon using BOE currencies) was much more stable and balanced between the value of individual Colonial currencies and the value of the markets they represented _because_ those governments had a vested interest in NOT destroying their own internal economics relative to trade among each other.

That being where the other factors of FRL come in: FRL along with default or fiat currency standards allow you to force someone to buy goods and services from a specific vendor using a designated exchange rate which allows them to suck all your manufactured goods out while contributing NONE of their own.

Profiting simply by taxation and fees.

It is why the U.S. managed to hang on without collapsing throughout the Cold War and why we were twice as ready to fight a nuclear over the Middle East as Europe, because Oil could only be traded in U.S. Dollars and everyone who wanted oil had to have good relations with the U.S. to maintain a stockpile of currency to buy with. i.e. The REAL reserve for the U.S. was in other countries.

Such is the evils of allowing foreign moneychangers (cough, Rothschild) into a society based on free and equal exchange of work, private ownership of REAL property and no debt.

It is exactly what a good Imperial government would want to avoid being subject to in the 'Banking Clans'.

And it is what, among a class of stupid worker drones, represents the ultimate (unending) evil of 'a system' that destroys the value of work as an owned process in trade for it's distribution and division through multiple levels of society.

And the ultimate irony is that it has led to a point where NO JOB has value sufficient to sustain itself and we ALL live under the shadow of a monetary-illusion called debt. And a very real indenturement to a collapsing environment and depleting resources.


ARGUMENT:
Did you have no job but simply an allocation of resources (house, oven, electricity, ingredients, recipe, time) sufficient to keep The System from having to employ a useless Pizza Hut employee, you could make your own Pizza Hut quality pie.

Did you own a tireless droid which expected no payment and could do more things with greater skill than you could anyway, you wouldn't need to worry about how much time you were losing relative to other 'fun' or necessary activities.

And because you did not support The System, the amount of resources wasted (as population overburden) in giving Pizza Boy his own wage slave status would be reallocateable to you.

That is the ultimate definition of risk that is a banking system of currencies rather than energy or resource or work driven 'barter'. Because those who create the process of paying in an abstract format create an insulative system whereby their own wealth depends NOT on the efficiency of work trade at the individual level. But the profligacy of work distribution at the societal one.

Marx was right-


The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

He just didn't quite have the insight (in 1848) to see the correlation between environmental limits on the appetites of the distributionist capitalist and the intelligent tools which could replace his sheep with something infinitely cheaper than the cheapest slave.

So (for once) was Jesus-


My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations... But you have made it a den of thieves.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_ ... y_Changers

CONCLUSION:
Where our temple is the value of life and 'all things created by it' (money, especially electronic money, does not exist), we don't need Lucas filling our minds with BS economics derived from our worlds' woes. Because, as represented, his world is the ideal. Only his intent to prove our own system's guilt by vapid imitation of the imperfect model by the perfect one is in error.

[Dooey Jo]

What in the fuck is he even talking about? Is he trying to say that the GFFA is a place where everyone is a self-sustaining producer, or that the state provides everything for everyone? Sounds like he might need a lesson in real-world shut-the-fuck-up.

And where does he get the idea that the droids in SW are magical, super-smart, can do anything, and runs on free energy? Did he watch the films or was he too busy projecting his own fantasies onto them?

[18-Till-I-Die]

He seems to be one of those "post scarcity" wankers who thinks as soon as we have self-reproducing machines we'll instantly have infinite free everything.

Cause fuel and resources will materialize out of thin air, don't cha know.

[Omeganian]

Well, the DS, if not quite free, was largely removed from normal economics, because otherwise, an attempt to calculate the cost leads to nonsense, and secrecy becomes impossible. The specialists were paid, but the resources and droid labor were at the very least made very cheap (the cost of resources, with rather cheap droid labor, can make one assume significant artificial increase in price).

BTW, do you know that in the USSR, a most militarized country, the military budget (somewhere in the 70-80's) was 27 billion rubles? A very small sum. But when everything goes from the government back to the government, cost kind of loses its meaning.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I really doubt Xizor gave the services his of his mercantile navy for free.

[Cykeisme]

A slight digression from the core topic, but just checking.. with the massive number of Imperial ships of all sorts available, why did they need to contract Black Sun for shipping materials?

[NecronLord]

A slight digression from the core topic, but just checking.. with the massive number of Imperial ships of all sorts available, why did they need to contract Black Sun for shipping materials?

Every little helps, and I expect XTS' guys have a fair bit of experience flying under the radar as it were.

[Ender]

As near as I can tell, he has a coherent premise for an argument, but then rather then follow the premise to its conclusion and arguing that as his argument, he decides 2+2=duck and rants about the world's economic system.

[Vehrec]

A slight digression from the core topic, but just checking.. with the massive number of Imperial ships of all sorts available, why did they need to contract Black Sun for shipping materials?

Probably to dangle an extra lure or two for the Rebels to snap up.

[Junghalli]

He seems to be one of those "post scarcity" wankers who thinks as soon as we have self-reproducing machines we'll instantly have infinite free everything.

Cause fuel and resources will materialize out of thin air, don't cha know.

I was going to say he reminds me a lot of the replicator wankers we see among Star Trek fans, and the nanotech wankers on OA.

[Chris Parr]

Wait—new, perfect droids, for free?

So why are people, like Qui Gon Jin and Owen Lars paying for second hand junk?!

[18-Till-I-Die]

He seems to be one of those "post scarcity" wankers who thinks as soon as we have self-reproducing machines we'll instantly have infinite free everything.

Cause fuel and resources will materialize out of thin air, don't cha know.

I was going to say he reminds me a lot of the replicator wankers we see among Star Trek fans, and the nanotech wankers on OA.

Yep, they're all basically the same.

The root cause of all of this is these people dont understand that, even IF you have machines that can, theoretically, reproduce anything infinitely they're still bound by what resources or fuel they depend on.

Weather it be replicators, nanotech, von neuman machines, whatever. Unless they materialize something from thin air, literally for free, then you still depend on outside resources.

[Kurgan]

Basically I thought he was going to argue that since in the movies we don't see the Empire actually dealing in money (though there's talk of "rewards" and stuff like that), and Tatooine is assumed to be outside the Empire (as it was outside the Republic), the Empire must not have money.

But the stuff about free energy and free droids (after the first one) was just... arggh.

He pretty much argues the same way on each topic. Bring something up, and he'll switch it to how the movie SHOULD have been, because what we see onscreen doesn't make sense in the real world, or how he thinks the real world would be with that technology.

I should have asked... if the Death Star was free, why not make a fleet of them? Heck, why bother with jealously guarding habitable planets, just build planets for people to live on! (and so it would go)

[Junghalli]

Yep, they're all basically the same.

The root cause of all of this is these people dont understand that, even IF you have machines that can, theoretically, reproduce anything infinitely they're still bound by what resources or fuel they depend on.

Weather it be replicators, nanotech, von neuman machines, whatever. Unless they materialize something from thin air, literally for free, then you still depend on outside resources.

I think it's utopianism. They don't like the way society works and very much want to believe the present set-up will be just inevitably rendered obsolete by further progress.

I mean, it's really obvious with this particular case. The guy goes on a rant about how terrible it is that a host of people are employed in pizza delivery related fields because people can't make their own pizzas. Of course modern society absolutely demands specialization like that because it's totally impractical for one person to produce everything they need, so his individual self-sufficiency ideal is totally unworkable. How convenient that as soon as self-replicating machines hit the market it'll be totally practical.

[Thanas]

I really doubt Xizor gave the services his of his mercantile navy for free.

He and Vader even "discuss" price rates in the book SotE - with Vader stating that they will be paid "the usual rate".

[Darth Hoth]

Wow, I actually had not read this before in its entirety...

*Snip* rants and ravings

Try as I might, I cannot see any point in 95 % of his ramblings, besides him being a protectionist Communist conspiracy nutjob. His actual argument could be summed up in the single sentence "Droids equal post-scarcity". If he spent less time on bullshitting, he might be able to see for himself how that argument fails.

[PainRack]

A slight digression from the core topic, but just checking.. with the massive number of Imperial ships of all sorts available, why did they need to contract Black Sun for shipping materials?

Probably to dangle an extra lure or two for the Rebels to snap up.

The official reason was to help "conceal" the Death Star Project. Given the vast swath of the galaxy that's aware of the Imperial AND Rebel buildup, I suspect that the other official reason is more true. To play Vader against Xizor, with another possible reason that Black Suns would leak the information out too.

[Swindle1984]

The only thing I got from that huge, incoherent rambling mess was "blah blah I'm a commie bastard, blah blah blah, droids = post-scarcity blah".

[JGregory32]

Some of what he said makes some sense, other parts are complete gobbly-gook and I can't see how it Star Wars in the least as we see several times where money is used.

Now my attempt to make the Death Star cheap, well we could strip mine a couple of planets with scaled down versions of World Devestators. In addition to extracting raw resources they could also produce most components. Assembly and transport of materials looks like the big bottleneck. However with the liberal use of droids, imperial engineers/technicians, and slaves the cost could be reduced.
Still there are several componets where it would be best to obtain elsewhere, I'm thinking mostly the generator, computer cores, and hyperdrive engines would have to be purchased from the corporate market. Still the only challenge ( I can forsee) would be the sheer scale of the devices needed.
Not insurmountable but just thinking about all those possible information leaks give me the shivers.