• NottaLottaOcelot@lemmy.ca
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      15 hours ago

      If anything, it seems like an opportunity for billionaires to have indentured servants who are stuck in outer space mining until their term is up. That’s probably some of the reason they have been investing so heavily in prisons.

        • faintwhenfree@lemmus.org
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          5 hours ago

          You may think that you are scared. But you are not. That is your sharpness. That’s your power. We are Belters. Nothing in the world is foreign to us. The place we go is the place we belong. This is no different. No one has more right to this. None more prepared. Inulada go through the ring. Call it there own. But a Belter opened it. We are The Belt. We are strong. We are sharp and we don’t feel fear. This moment belongs to us. For Beltalowada!

    • Inucune@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Given none of the supply chain and infrastructure to support mining and retrieval exists, it would need to be researched and constructed. That money would be invested in the market and flood down for tooling, manufacturing and manpower.

      Once you have the rock, you’ll need to process it into usable materials.

      Low price gold flooding the market may be bad short term, but there are processes that will benefit from cheap gold in manufacturing. The market will stabilize.

      It is more than just magicing the rock to someone’s bank account in liquid currency. There is a lot of money they will have to put in up front before they would see a financial return.

      • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        In today’s age they’ll fill 95% of that supply chain with robots and automation. Even if it’s 40% less effective at retrieving the material, that will still probably result in better overall profit margins.

        The one thing capitalism has proven to be excellent at innovating is wealth extraction. Giving more to one person in every way possible. By the time we have this infrastructure built blue collar workers will be largely redundant.

        It happened to my industry (broadcast television)

        It happened to my father’s industry (animation)

        It happened to my step father’s industry (biotech)

        It happened to my brother’s industry (manufacturing)

        My sister and brother in law just saw their industries stop receiving funding (librarian and environmental scientist)

        Don’t count on new fields creating news jobs anymore. That’s the way of the old world.

        Whatever benefits having more gold would bring will only be given to the ultra wealthy who control that gold. Even if it brings the cost of phones down by 15% it won’t make a difference in how much the average person struggles. In fact, the resources consumed in retrieving and processing the gold will probably end up hurting most of our cost of living.

        We need to work on our social sciences before any other science can bring anyone real benefit anymore…

        • 7101334@lemmy.world
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          13 hours ago

          We need to work on our social sciences before any other science can bring anyone real benefit anymore…

          Well said. I have associate degrees only in Bio/Chem, and I was going to keep going but… why? To work for an evil pharmaceutical company? To work in the shitty corporate cannabis industry? To advise rich assholes on how to cut down our national forests in a way which makes it appear like it’s not the end of the world?

          The only STEM career I’ve found which seems guaranteed to be ethical is the people who do wildlife surveys, finding endangered bees and whatnot to block bullshit luxury real estate. But going through all that education to aim for a single, specific, probably-not-very-common position doesn’t seem very smart.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        16 hours ago

        And where do you think the majority of the wealth is going to be concentrated? Or do you think everyone on Earth will magically become a billionaire?