Quote from: Rassah on July 05, 2011, 02:03:36 AM

Woah woah woah! This here is a BIG heaping serving of fail. Sidewalks are nowhere NEAR free. Sidewalks, roads, and transportation in general is usually the biggest part of a state budget, is in many states (in mine, too) is most of where your tax dollars go to. If you think automated hydroponics can be supported the same free way that sidewalks are supported, do I have a HUGE tax burden surprise for you...
Which, of course, leads to the question, do you work, pay huge taxes to build and maintain these hydroponics, and help support everyone, or do you not work, relax at home, and have others work and make money to pay taxes to support your food production?

The reason sidewalks, roads, and transportation in general take such a big part of a state budget is that the companies providing these services need to adhere to the cost-efficiency mechanism, therefore there will be crappy streets that need to be rebuilt every few years. If we were to build in the most efficient and optimised manner, where the criteria were maximum efficiency and strategic allocation of resources, not profit, we could unleash such an incredible abundance that humanity has never seen before, nor can many people even imagine.

Profit makes companies create crappy, shitty products, using highly inefficient and wasteful methods, due to the structure of the market.

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Or, I guess since there's no money or profit, do you just have faith that there will actually be people who will be boring enough to be excited by hydroponics and will work to build and maintain those machines and maintain that knowledge for nothing?

I don't need any "faith", I'm looking at the evidence. People are already doing these things for free, in a fucked up system where they have to work a dayjob to survive, and in their limited spare time they still do awesome things.

If they didn't have to work a dayjob, they would have more time to do awesome stuff, stuff that is actually useful to humanity. And I don't need any faith, I personally know hundreds of people like that. I am one of them.