Hitoshi Sakimoto once composed an entire album for Lia to sing, and the results were spectacular. Lia is a lot like Sarah Brightman, always singing for somebody else's sake, but her voice is without question worthy.
Even when I can't find any more video game music from Hitoshi Sakimoto, it was still possible to expand my Hitoshi repertoire with the addition of this album. Long live Hitoshi music in whatever form it may appear.
The album netted me 7 new songs. Sakimoto's total contribution is 323 songs, and the music hall of fame as a whole is 4836 songs, still 10.9 days in length.
Meanwhile, Lucky Star's manga is being scanlated for the first time with chapters not found in the anime. Before it was possible to purchase the manga, but it's not good enough to pay for, so this is the first time I've actually gotten to read the manga. It's now the 74th manga in my good manga hall of fame. Long live free Lucky Star.
It's possible for a single Kansas farmer to farm 1,000 acres of wheat on his own, which can feed 7,000 people per year. What are the other 6,999 people supposed to do? Of course, some are needed to build the tractors, mills, bakeries, warehouses, railroads, fertilizers, herbicides, gmo seeds, pesticides, etc. But all of these business are also very streamlined and automated. How long until 3d printing can churn out houses for basically free? How long until tractors can be made by machines only? How long until the trucks and railroads can drive themselves?
I don't see employment opportunities centered around farming for those 6,999 other people. Which means we can feed more people than are reasonably necessary to produce the food in the first place. Once people have food they have very few remaining expenses or needs. The jobs that can reasonably be provided to take care of other, lesser needs just aren't that many. Houses can be 3d printed for the cost of concrete, wood or other cheap materials. Cars can be mass manufactured in robotic assembly lines. Electricity can be found cheap via natural gas deposits or windmills. If there's ever any shortage of water we can just use desalination plants via the aforementioned cheap energy. Humans have lots of needs, but all of them can be provided cheaply and without many human jobs needed to get the work done.
Most people these days aren't employed providing others with basic necessities. Instead they're all phony jobs that promise the world but don't actually provide anything, like health care, the military or education. We're basically parking most of those 6,999 people in make-work nonsense, directing the vast majority of our gdp to these phony workers by requiring taxpayers to fund them, and then averting our eyes from reality.
And the situation only worsens every year. Farmers are still finding ways to increase their yield per acre every year. Houses, cars and the like will become more automated every year. Electricity is only going to get cheaper and cheaper. Battery technology is improving. Eventually we'll even master fusion power.
It's unreasonable to think that productive work can be had from everyone on Earth. If one person can feed the other 6,999, it's silly to demand the 6,999 all 'pitch in their fair share too.' Sure, as soon as you give all of them their own 1,000 acres of prime farmland. . .
It's also unreasonable to require people to purchase products of no real use so as to employ people who aren't actually doing anything. Today we learned that only 4 Eurofighter Typhoons in the entire German air force can actually fly battle ready missions, the rest are all stuck in various stages of disrepair. After pumping infinity dollars into their military, they couldn't win the battle of Waterloo much less any modern war. It's obvious that we're just burning money to make it look like we're doing something, as opposed to investing it in anything productive. Why do we have to continue living by lies?
The only reasonable option is to thank farmers for their miraculous increases in productivity, say they've done a great job providing all the surplus food the world needs, and hand out a universal basic income to everyone so that they can buy this amazingly plentiful wheat which would just pile up in landfills and be fed to rats otherwise.
We have a unique opportunity where the few people who want to work as a hobby can do so and provide everything that's needed in life for the many people who want to pursue unproductive, non-capital-intensive hobbies. Everyone can get along and everyone can be happy. The workers like working, the non-workers like not working, and the capital is distributed to its most productive use. We have already reached a land of milk and honey, of unlimited plenty. There is no scarcity left in food, shelter, energy, clothing, water, or anything else anyone could need. It can be handed out for free to everyone, because it is essentially free to produce at this point. That's just how efficient, streamlined and productive the industrial revolution has become.
There is no reason why anyone has to work in order to avoid poverty. There's plenty of money and basic goods for everyone. Work for work's sake is as ludicrous a formula as pain for pain's sake or sadism for sadism's sake. Surely no one could seriously argue that people should be forced to dig ditches and then fill them back in for money instead of just being given the pay upfront. Unless you can point these laborers into a real product that people are demanding and they can provide, you have no right to demand they work at anything. Or in other words, unless you are willing to offer them a job yourself, you have no right to demand they get a job. If governments wish to require people work in order to eat, they should have to simultaneously offer a decent paying job to said required people. Otherwise you're admitting that you're asking the impossible, because if you have no clue what productive use laborers could be put to, why do you think the laborers themselves would know?
I fully support Bernie Sanders' plan offering anyone who wants to work a free job, paying $15 an hour with benefits. This is a great step towards the basic income. Because once the government honestly tries to find a job for all these people, they'll realize there are none. And then they'll just start paying them to show up and sit around all day. Eventually people will realize how stupid and inefficient this is, and just pay them without their having to show up. And then we have a basic income. The chain of causality is unbreakable. Once we admit scolds do not have the right to scold people to go work unless they themselves can provide a job to said workers, the basic income is a historical inevitability.
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