Because the good of humanity doesn’t heat the house or put dinner on the table. Never has and never will. If you were a human, you’d have learned that from experience.

I don’t know man, money doesn’t heat my home or grow food. It’s the skilled maintenance worker who fixes the central heating, the farmers growing my food and the logistics personnel ensuring it ends up on the supermarket shelves. It’s just good people doing the work that needs doing, I don’t think it’s a given that anyone needs monetary compensation for that.

Who gets to make the decisions as to how?

This is why we invented democracies.

Those are the folks who should be running the show.

Haha, hell yeah! Just imagine decision makers having actual experience doing useful labour, I imagine things would turn out better indeed! :)

you just can’t afford things like electricity, sewage treatment and antibiotics. We only have those things because of the economies of scale that society allows.

We have those things because people do the required labour, economies of scale make it require less labour, but one can’t afford it because it’s privatized. Why wouldn’t people do this simply for the benefit of humanity?

genetically greedy, so we must genocide that out of the population

What’s with the disgusting eugenics? Just expropriate their wealth.

At some point someone built that house.

Yeah people built a lot of houses, so let’s use them? And build more if needed?

it’s difficult and miserable on a relatively small number of people. Those people probably aren’t going to keep farming at industrial scale for the fun of it.

Right, so let’s distribute the burden of this labour instead of having a small number of people do it for a lifetime.

We do the job at all because if we don’t, it’ll cause a few million cases of cholera. Who do you think should pay for the hose that guy is using?

Since the labour protects all of us, all of us collectively. Again, for the benefit of humanity and let’s distribute the burden.

Every person who suffered through depression is gonna tell you that, to feel enticed to do something, there has to be some emotional reward connected to it

I was going to disagree on this, but I think it rather comes down to intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards. I ascribe my own depression largely to pursuing, sometimes unattainable, goals and wanting external reward or validation in return which I wasn’t getting. But that is based on an idea that attaining those rewards will bring happiness, which they often don’t. If happiness is always dependent on future reward you’ll never be happy in the present. Large part of overcoming depression, for me at least, is recognizing what you already have and finding contentment in that. Effort that’s not intrinsically rewarding isn’t worth doing, you just need to learn to enjoy the process and practices of self-care, learning and contributing to the well-being of the community. Does this sometimes involve hard labour? Of course, but when done in comradery I don’t think those things aren’t rewarding.

it’s a mathematical fact that not everyone who’d start scrubbing tubes on a starship could eventually get into high positions since there simply aren’t that many of those

And of course these positions aren’t attainable for all, but it doesn’t need to be a problem that they aren’t. This is only true in a system where we’re all competing for them, because those in ‘low’ positions struggle to attain fulfillment. Doesn’t need to be that way if we share the burdens of hard labour equally and ensure good standards of living for all. The total amount of actually productive labour needed is surprisingly low, so many people do work which doesn’t need doing and don’t contribute to relieving the burden on the working class

It also recognizes that life is expensive. If you want people to rise above barely subsisting and invent something, you’ve got to make it worth it to them. Why bother doing the research, spend the time tinkering in the shed, if it’s just going to be taken from you?

Life is only expensive under capitalism, humans are the only species who pay rent to live on Earth. The whole point of Star Trek is basically showing that people will explore the galaxy simply for a love of science and knowledge, and that personal sacrifice is worthwhile for advancing these.

Ada or Ardor, by Vladimir Nabokov. Sweet Blue Flowers, by Shimura Takako, is my favorite comic.

Haha I’m always arguing with a friend over which is best, I prefer MLO out of the three.