I am of the opinion that life is probably common, an inevitable property of resource availability, like rust where iron and oxygen are present. I suspect it is *everywhere*.
I also think that the variation we see on Earth is an indication of both how varied life forms are and how parochial our perspective is. We live in a place that got DNA. All the life has DNA and we think that means that 'life' means DNA. Considering the fact that those lifeforms range from humans to bacteria to lichens and that we can only communicate with mammals tells me that 1) we are stuck in a local paradigm and, 2) we are not taking the lesson.
The Fermi Paradox seems apparent because we imagine that life out there resembles us but, there could be a thousand trillion civilizations of dolphins and we would never know because their life habit makes the sky and stars and radios irrelevant. There could be lichen civilizations that develop and communicate at glacial speed and, having no thumbs, don't build tools, only communicating by chemical signals.
There are forests of thousands of acres that are a, genetically, a single individual connected by their roots and chemicals they secrete into the air. There is absolutely no reason to think that the interactions among them are not some amazing form of poetry.
The final piece of the puzzle, in my view, is the fact a mobile, tool building lifeform stands a really good chance of killing itself off well before it could make itself apparent to us.
The Fermi Paradox reflects a failure of imagination based on an arrogant belief in our own superiority and importance.
People complain about the civil rights consequences of No-Fly lists. Mysterious bureaucracy than can truly ruin your life with no recourse.
I complain about the credit rating companies. Another mysterious bureaucracy that can ruin your life.
One is the government. We love to note that the Constitution applies to them, not corporations. Facebook, we note, can selectively stop covid disinformation and should, even if our ideas of free speech are violated by that.
The story here is that the credit card processing companies are making decisions about what sorts of goods and services we can buy, about how people can make money and force changes in corporate policy.
Imagine, I digress, if the cellphone companies decided you were no longer allowed to phone Democratic congress people. You would be outraged, of course, but it's a corporation and it is allowed to have policies it prefers.
In that case, politicians who have power would probably beat them into submission. But, what if the affected party had no power? The policy would stand.
It turns out that sex workers have no power. The companies that run the movement of money around our countery don't like them. As with the cellphone companies in my example, they have simply told companies, you can't do business with them.
And so, OnlyFans.com is forcing them out of business in order to stay in business itself.
Someday we are going to have to wake up and force some changes. Our capitalist system is supposed to provide a free market, to provide options and the variety of services desired by the market.
There was an idea called "lassez faire capitalism" that was fully discredited in the Gilded Age, the time when the Rockefellers and Edisons and other wealthy people wielded their unlimitted wealth so ruthlessly that it resulted in the trade union movement, anti-trust legislation, and other reforms. Laisez faire capitalism, capitalism with no limits, was stopped.
Well, slowed down because it's been on the rise again since Reagan and it's become as pernicious as before. Obamacare is hobbled because he had to bend a knee to insurance companies. The Great Recession produced barely any reforms because the wealthy would not allow it. Our society is again brutally dominated by wealthy people and their corporations.
And so, sex workers pummeled by the technology that ruined the pornography business found a new way to make a living and have a decent life. And so, a cadre of corporations said, "We don't like that," and took it away.
Did you have any say in it? According to this article, the 'free' market said it was a good thing. According to studies, almost all of us use porn. But, the corporations do not like it so and their rules are enforceable while yours are not.
I do not know what the solution is because their power is so entrenched. Violent revolution honestly seems like the only possibility except that they control the security apparatus. Troops in Portland last summer were there at the behest of the rich people.
It requires some thinking, though. The future of freedom in America, well, really, the world, is bleak if we are limited to only doing things that are in the interest, religiously or economically, of the wealthy and their corporations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opinion/onlyfans-porn-sex-workers.html
The notion that higher minimum wage discourages hiring is entirely unproven. In plenty of places, employment is up in the years after an increase. In general, a few years later, you cannot see any difference.
This notion is a conservative canard without merit. There are two huge flaws in addition to the superficial inaccuracy. First is the notion that employment at the current minimum wage is something that should be encouraged. Spending forty, fifty or sixty hours a week at an activity that does not provide enough money to support even one person, let alone a family, is a bad thing for everyone except the employer, both society and the worker are worse off.
The worker is deprived of almost everything that people claim to believe makes us human. Time with family, opportunity to learn, fun, self-improvement, child and elder care, exercise, you name it never happens. Add food insecurity, no preventative health care and it is slavery.
Society still has to cover much of the cost of support for that person and his or her family. Minimum wage workers require subsidized health care, subsidized food and subsidized rent. People at that wage level are often forced to engage in criminal activities to supplement their income so that children can eat so society is also required to spend more on policing and social services. And, where there is crime there are gangs and that adds to the social burden, too.
But, corporations win so we stick with the canard. Somehow we are convinced that there are tons of unskilled workers being employed to do things that the business can live without. The theory is that a business will spend large amounts of capital money to automate jobs rather than give more money to poor people. It is a ridiculous idea. Most low wage jobs are not really subject to automation (have you ever seen a robot janitor?) and, of course, the research does not support this idea anyway.
It is another conservative effort to make sure that workers are poor and afraid. Paying them a decent wage will only make them prosperous and unafraid. Better conditions, better benefits, better hours, better lives. The horror!
Paying unskilled labor a decent wage would demonstrate that people have value beyond the value of their work. Americans don't want that. Americans hate poor people.
So don't clothe your moral distaste for those less fortunate in economic theory. Stick with the real reason: People who don't have important economic skills are worthless and deserve shitty food and bad lives.