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Eiba posted:Well. So much for my "Basic isn't that bad" theory. Turns out Earth is explicitly a dystopian hellhole. Yeah, that's a huge departure from the books, where Basic definitely includes housing, food, clothing, healthcare, network access, etc. None of it's the greatest, but it's readily available. People on Basic can literally get new clothes from free vending machines on the street, for instance. I initially thought Bobbie had stumbled into fallen-through-the-cracks territory along the lines of what Amos was describing, but nope, they're in the system. I don't know, I feel like slum-Earth is less interesting. Dystopias are a dime a dozen. Just within The Expanse there are some good examples, at least on a smaller scale. On the other hand, I haven't seen too many settings where we've gotten our poo poo together just enough to more or less take care of everyone, but not in a post-scarcity way, and people aren't magically content with having no prospects and no purpose.
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Mar 30, 2017 08:16
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Even in the books' take on Basic is pretty bad, dude. It's basically described as enough to survive on but not to live on. I've said before that the network access is basically a severely cut-down version of the normal Internet or whatever. It's not the 'greatest', at all. It's subsistence only. It's really not a huge departure.
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Mar 30, 2017 08:42
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AMOS: How many times do I have to telegraph my horrible past to the audience/!?!
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Mar 30, 2017 08:46
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Milky Moor posted:It's basically described as enough to survive on but not to live on. I'm not sure what distinction you're making here. It doesn't provide an especially rewarding life, but book-Basic definitely does not resemble a hobo camp. In terms of meeting physical needs, the biggest deficiency I can recall is waitlists for medical care. It might take months to see a doctor, but you'll be waiting in your (small) apartment, at least, not under a bridge.
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Mar 30, 2017 08:57
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The depiction of basic was way too depressing, for a system to work like that without dealing with constant civil unrest and domestic terrorism I'd expect some pretty orwellian systems of population control have to be put in place.
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Mar 30, 2017 09:31
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emanresu tnuocca posted:The depiction of basic was way too depressing, for a system to work like that without dealing with constant civil unrest and domestic terrorism I'd expect some pretty orwellian systems of population control have to be put in place. Not necessarily civil unrest, and a book thing (though not a spoiler for anything), but there does exist unrest on Earth. It's not all happily and peacefully controlled by the UN iirc.
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Mar 30, 2017 09:36
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It's just that providing housing for everyone should be pretty trivial for the sort of organization that is capable of hollowing out asteroids and putting them under spin gravity, you could easily feed and house everyone on earth with the kind of engineering feats that were seen in both show and books, if Ganymede can produce enough food to feed its own population and tens of millions more in the belt you'd expect that on earth with the far more ideal conditions the government could easily produce enough food to feed everyone on earth and luna comfortably. I guess that sequence just offended my nerd sensibilities, what can I say.
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Mar 30, 2017 09:45
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Since you guys seem nerdy enough for a quick question (or two). I just sort of caught up with the show, but one thing sort of puzzled me in an early episode. When they are fighting the stealth ships aboard the martian capital ship, they say CQB now we use the rail guns or something to that effect. One, why would anyone want to fight in close range and two why aren't railguns good at distance? There is no gravity and a railgun round theoretically should be traveling hideously fast without gravity to drag it back down. I am assuming with futuristic targeting computers they could make best guesses for long range.
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Mar 30, 2017 09:50
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emanresu tnuocca posted:It's just that providing housing for everyone should be pretty trivial for the sort of organization that is capable of hollowing out asteroids and putting them under spin gravity, you could easily feed and house everyone on earth with the kind of engineering feats that were seen in both show and books, if Ganymede can produce enough food to feed its own population and tens of millions more in the belt you'd expect that on earth with the far more ideal conditions the government could easily produce enough food to feed everyone on earth and luna comfortably. It's easy enough for us to do right now. It's pretty realistic in that regard.
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Mar 30, 2017 09:54
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unlawfulsoup posted:Since you guys seem nerdy enough for a quick question (or two). I just sort of caught up with the show, but one thing sort of puzzled me in an early episode. When they are fighting the stealth ships aboard the martian capital ship, they say CQB now we use the rail guns or something to that effect. One, why would anyone want to fight in close range and two why aren't railguns good at distance? There is no gravity and a railgun round theoretically should be traveling hideously fast without gravity to drag it back down. I am assuming with futuristic targeting computers they could make best guesses for long range. They got close because they were trying to board the ship. At long range you can dodge railgun rounds? I guess it depends on how they're defining "close" in space terms.
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Mar 30, 2017 10:37
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Yeah, railgun rounds at "long" range (in space) would either miss by the time they got there due to the enemy ship's combat maneuvers, or be purposefully dodged. The closer you get, the more accurately you can hit with them. Conversely torpedoes can be trained on a moving target but are probably much less safe to use when the enemy are doing loops around your own ship. The stealth ships knew exactly what they were doing when they got into CQB, because they couldn't take on the Donnager's torpedoes or something.
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Mar 30, 2017 11:32
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Longbaugh01 posted:
Every single book title starts with a literary, biblical, classical, or historical reference like that.
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Mar 30, 2017 12:30
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Eiba posted:Well. So much for my "Basic isn't that bad" theory. Turns out Earth is explicitly a dystopian hellhole. Honestly, it seems like Ceres (at least Miller's neighborhood) and Tycho actually have things better. Yeah- a really rewarding episode IMO. I think the decision to show blood-and-guts Bobbie early in the season paid off a lot here, and also the Holden/Naomi stuff was pretty good because you're seeing a more self-righteous side of Holden come out, and the show isn't rewarding him for it at all.
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Mar 30, 2017 12:49
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emanresu tnuocca posted:The depiction of basic was way too depressing, for a system to work like that without dealing with constant civil unrest and domestic terrorism I'd expect some pretty orwellian systems of population control have to be put in place. Well, everyone gets chemically sterilized at birth and needs to prove economic stability to get it reversed, IIRC.
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Mar 30, 2017 12:49
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Quorum posted:Well, everyone gets chemically sterilized at birth and needs to prove economic stability to get it reversed, IIRC. There exists a sizeable underground population though.
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Mar 30, 2017 12:52
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Are we sure that the people we saw on Earth were on basic, rather than some hobos living under a bridge that Bobby found by going to the wrong neighbourhood?
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Mar 30, 2017 13:01
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You'd think they'd want to give people on basic a bit more money so that they actually contributed to consumption. There's no real point to basic if you lose all of it to the grey and black markets. You'd think corporations would be lobbying the poo poo out of the un to increase it.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:37
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Baronjutter posted:I always think the expanse got the geography and politics entirely wrong, but it makes for a decent fictional setting. We know you have an unrelenting boner for O'Neill cylinders but that's not the only way to view space man. There's a whole genre of work, fictional and non, on how hard is it to keep small, artificial ecosystems going.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:37
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Grand Fromage posted:We know you have an unrelenting boner for O'Neill cylinders but that's not the only way to view space man. There's a whole genre of work, fictional and non, on how hard is it to keep small, artificial ecosystems going. Yeah, look at what's happening on Ganymede in the show. And that's on a moon.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:47
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I think any depiction of any fictional government (no matter how rock hard the science) is going to run into a wall of people with protractors and slide-rules who are ready to prove that Smurf society isn't viable and can't sustain itself beyond a few generations of drone Smurfs.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:49
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vermin posted:I think any depiction of any fictional government (no matter how rock hard the science) is going to run into a wall of people with protractors and slide-rules who are ready to prove that Smurf society isn't viable and can't sustain itself beyond a few generations of drone Smurfs. This sort of talk now runs into the Donald Trump problem.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:50
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It's more that other people said Basic in the books is presented as being a lot better. Which would make more sense and allow Basic to actually work.
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Mar 30, 2017 15:52
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:You'd think they'd want to give people on basic a bit more money so that they actually contributed to consumption. There's no real point to basic if you lose all of it to the grey and black markets. You'd think corporations would be lobbying the poo poo out of the un to increase it. At least in the books, Basic is explicitly not a universal basic income, just provision of necessities. Without a job (legal or illegal), people on Basic literally do not have money. I don't think it's completely spelled out how that works, but it seems like what you get through Basic is either rationed somehow (housing, healthcare), or is common and inferior enough to make hoarding or resale pointless (cheap food and clothing). In the show, the Basic-hobos were asking for scrip, so maybe there's a separate sort of currency for Basic.
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Mar 30, 2017 16:15
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With 30,000,000,000 residents, I can see resource limitations being a real problem.
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Mar 30, 2017 16:19
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Basic in the books just seemed... well, basic. You had a tiny apartment, rationed access to necessities, enough food/simple clothing/etc to survive on. If you had any ambition for anything better you had to fight tooth and nail to get a job or some sort of training. If you were satisfied with just vegging out in your shoebox on the space internet forever then you were taken care of. Then there's an underclass that fell through the cracks in a variety of ways that isn't on Basic, which is what Amos talks about and what I assumed we were seeing this episode.
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Mar 30, 2017 16:21
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Accretionist posted:With 30,000,000,000 residents, I can see resource limitations being a real problem. EVERYTHING goes in the recycler. OVER AND OVER. Sob.
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Mar 30, 2017 16:23
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:It's more that other people said Basic in the books is presented as being a lot better. Which would make more sense and allow Basic to actually work. It works until you have to live within it and subject to the system. I know a lot of wonks here are fascinated with the mechanics of how the Basic system works in The Expanse, but I believe its more of a cautionary narrative, like a lot of tropes in Sci-Fi that depict the impact of technology that advance without constraint. It's literally the conclusion of the progressive agenda, and contrasts sharply with the optimism of the Star Trek depiction because it factors human nature into the quotient. The result and impact on the population is not supposed to be a good thing.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:06
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Errinwright's confession was an interesting twist. I wonder to what extent he and Avasarala will work together from here, or if Mao's going to screw him over for snitching.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:12
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R-Type posted:It works until you have to live within it and subject to the system. I know a lot of wonks here are fascinated with the mechanics of how the Basic system works in The Expanse, but I believe its more of a cautionary narrative, like a lot of tropes in Sci-Fi that depict the impact of technology that advance without constraint. It's literally the conclusion of the progressive agenda, and contrasts sharply with the optimism of the Star Trek depiction because it factors human nature into the quotient. The result and impact on the population is not supposed to be a good thing. What's the progressive agenda and how are billions of people unemployed due to automation and climate disaster linked to that? Or is the progressive agenda not having soylent trucks scooping up the lazy poor?
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Mar 30, 2017 17:30
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Kassad posted:That's still not even remotely enough to reach 30 billion. Africa is growing this fast because it's the last continent going through a demographic transition towards low birth and death rates (they'll get there by 2100). World population is most likely going to plateau at around 10 or 11 billion. Unless Hans Rosling is wrong. FTFY
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Mar 30, 2017 17:31
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Grand Fromage posted:Basic in the books just seemed... well, basic. You had a tiny apartment, rationed access to necessities, enough food/simple clothing/etc to survive on. If you had any ambition for anything better you had to fight tooth and nail to get a job or some sort of training. If you were satisfied with just vegging out in your shoebox on the space internet forever then you were taken care of. The guy said he'd been on the vocational list since he was 17. He's got basic.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:34
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Demiurge4 posted:The guy said he'd been on the vocational list since he was 17. He's got basic. Again, just because they might have Basic doesn't mean they wouldn't be out on the streets trying to make money (scrip), acquire other things, or participating in other things. Again, Basic doesn't equal money/scrip.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:40
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Bobbie seeing the sea was cool, but the fact that there was a beach at all was a little offputting. Shouldn't the sea be up against the flood wall? They way they portrayed it implies the big walls are just in case of a huge storm surge or something. Just happened to be low tide? This is influenced by me just having read Aurora which has a whole section pointing out that we'll have 0 beaches soon due to sea rise. It takes a long time for sand to happen. NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 17:48
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NmareBfly posted:Bobbie seeing the sea was cool, but the fact that there was a beach at all was a little offputting. Shouldn't the sea be up against the flood wall? They way they portrayed it implies the big walls are just in case of a huge storm surge or something. Just happened to be low tide? Um the beach was quite small with not much room between the wall and the water. Plus it could've been low tide, who knows.
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Mar 30, 2017 17:56
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Maybe no natural beaches. Artificial ones already exist and don't look that different.
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Mar 30, 2017 18:00
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Toast Museum posted:Yeah, that's a huge departure from the books, where Basic definitely includes housing, food, clothing, healthcare, network access, etc. None of it's the greatest, but it's readily available. People on Basic can literally get new clothes from free vending machines on the street, for instance. I initially thought Bobbie had stumbled into fallen-through-the-cracks territory along the lines of what Amos was describing, but nope, they're in the system. Free clothes that are basically on par with the lovely paper gowns you get from the hospital. The food is also horrendous, being on basic was always a terrible thing. Hell in The Churn the escape plan Amos had was a big goddamn deal that cost a shitload of money and it was literally "You can go to vocational school". Because the alternative is slowly rotting away in some poo poo hole of an apartment that's overcrowded to poo poo, which the government can relocate you on a whim with practically no chance for appeal, while eating heavily processed food that might as well be cardboard and wearing clothes that would be thrown out at a Goodwill. Oh yeah and the internet is throttled to poo poo as well. The medical care is pretty nice until the government decides that you're not worth taking care of and restricts it to disease and pain management only, effectively killing you slowly. Being able to exist a whole different beast than being able to live Demiurge4 posted:The guy said he'd been on the vocational list since he was 17. He's got basic. University students who are on basic still have to pay for some things, in the books a lot of them work their rear end off for a year or two before heading off to college to just barely make it by. If they don't find employment a couple years out of college they also get thrown back on basic and all that work was for effectively gently caress all
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Mar 30, 2017 18:02
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Longbaugh01 posted:Again, just because they might have Basic doesn't mean they wouldn't be out on the streets trying to make money (scrip), acquire other things, or participating in other things. Again, Basic doesn't equal money/scrip. Bolow posted:University students who are on basic still have to pay for some things, in the books a lot of them work their rear end off for a year or two before heading off to college to just barely make it by. If they don't find employment a couple years out of college they also get thrown back on basic and all that work was for effectively gently caress all Yeah but that wasn't what I was addressing. Grand Fromage was saying that the people we saw were probably the underclass that exists below basic, but they aren't, basic is just that lovely. It's kind of strange though. Because my impression of basic was that it was just above squalor because it's a measure to ensure social stability. But if your underclass lives that like it's gonna be anything but stable.
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Mar 30, 2017 18:17
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My city has a huge "street people problem" and my friend actualy works in the welfare office. Most of the people you see sleeping on the street or gathered in hobo camps or what ever are actually receiving "basic" from the government. It's supposed to be enough for housing and food but it doesn't always work out. Sometimes you just can't find any cheap enough housing, but more often you're mentally ill and or addicted to drugs so everything goes to that. They can get really creative with it too. Sometimes they have to prove they are indeed staying at a shelter and not living on the street and blowing everything on drugs, so a group of addicts will sort of bed-sit in a shelter apartment covering for each other and splitting the rent just so they have an address. Sometimes none of them will stay in the actual shelter space, preferring the street, and to make more money they'll sub-let their shelter apartment out to someone else on the waiting list. A bunch of them don't really want their "basic" and rather just have more spending money in their pocket and are used to the street living lifestyle and find ways to convert what ever they get into cash. They sell their transit passes on the street, they sub-let their shelter space, they use their free medical care to get as many prescriptions as possible to then sell. The hustle becomes a full time job, but due to their addictions or mental illnesses it's the only job they can hold down. I imagine in the expanse there's plenty of people who are willing to trade their basic on the black market to convert into actual currency which they can spend how they like, even if it means sleeping under a highway. I also imagine living on earth creates all sort of psychological problems and can lead to serious mental illness. I'd just love to know how long this has been going on. With the draconian "sterilize everyone" population control they apparently have and the apparently lovely food and medical care there's no way the population problems on earth couldn't be solved within 50-80 years. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 18:20
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My understanding from the books was that basic would be an improvement for more than 80% of the world’s current population.
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Mar 30, 2017 18:23
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Bolow posted:Free clothes that are basically on par with the lovely paper gowns you get from the hospital. The food is also horrendous, being on basic was always a terrible thing. Hell in The Churn the escape plan Amos had was a big goddamn deal that cost a shitload of money and it was literally "You can go to vocational school". Because the alternative is slowly rotting away in some poo poo hole of an apartment that's overcrowded to poo poo, which the government can relocate you on a whim with practically no chance for appeal, while eating heavily processed food that might as well be cardboard and wearing clothes that would be thrown out at a Goodwill. Oh yeah and the internet is throttled to poo poo as well. The medical care is pretty nice until the government decides that you're not worth taking care of and restricts it to disease and pain management only, effectively killing you slowly. Re: The Churn, It's been a minute, so maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought Amos's ticket out was such an expense because it was originally his boss's escape plan, complete with a bunch of forged identifying information that a crime boss would need to avoid detection. quote:University students who are on basic still have to pay for some things, in the books a lot of them work their rear end off for a year or two before heading off to college to just barely make it by. If they don't find employment a couple years out of college they also get thrown back on basic and all that work was for effectively gently caress all Those prospective students aren't even working to cover expenses; they're volunteering to demonstrate that they're willing and able to work, so the universities don't waste a slot on a slacker. If they don't get in anyway, they don't even have a little income to show for it.
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Mar 30, 2017 18:29
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