13 million illegal without insurance… Why would they need it, they get treated for free in most ER despite legal status. Not to mention immunity from taxation. Ever tried to take an illegal to court? I’m working with a mother now who’s baby daddy is an illegal, and she’ll never see a dime of child support even though he’s working a good paying job. This same baby daddy was a gang banger who killed a guy a few years ago. He went back to Mexico for a year till the heat was off, now he’s back again…

As far as a disappearing middle class… Right now there are more wealthy Americans than ever before. A large percent got their start as part of the lower or middle class and moved up. Upward social mobility is common place in America today. Surveys show that a large percentage of Americans are optimistic about their economic futures. The economy is on fire. All aspects except for the housing and sub prime markets are doing very well. Unemployment is very low, and many of the “unemployed� do not even desire jobs. Talking about the “disappearing middle class� is nothing but class warfare intended to inflame jealousy and fear to produce votes and raise the upper tax bracket. American politics is based on playing one group against the others and making people feel they need government intervention. American culture is strongly influenced by political desires. Most journalists, bloggers and educators have a political agenda to push, making most social commentary highly bias.

Firstly, no health insurance doesn't make life a dystopia. Again, health insurance is a relatively new concept, yet we don't consider 1900 America to be dystopian.

Secondly, yes, 12M people (and to say they're living like slaves is a VAST exaggeration. I happen to know a few personally. Yes, SOME are, but not the entire 12M) is a small minority in a country of 300M. That's about 1 out of 30 don't have a green card. Maybe half of those can be broadly considered to be living in 'slavery' like conditions, if we're being generous. 1 out of 60 is not enough to define a society.

I would just add that no matter how wretched an illegal alien's life may be in the US, they still find it preferable to life in their home countries. That says a great deal.

oh, the sweet bitterness of denial

and nezumi, I never meant to say it was dystopian. just fucked up.

That I can agree with, but that's business like normal. At least we're moving in the right direction.

Johnny Rotten isn't Rotten anymore... that's all you have to know about punk nowadays

I blame Hatchetman in Field of Fire.

Besides sounding exactly like a friend of mine (John), he pulsates a large negative 'Style over...'.

I don't know that the middle class is disappearing, but it's definitely shifting. Middle class is no longer manufacturing. It almost universally requires a college education. Unfortunately that means a lot of people are getting left behind. Still not dystopian though, since that also means a lot of new positions are opening up, meaning social mobility isn't just more possible, it is absolutely required.

Nezumi nails it.

Defining the middle class, sociologically, economically, or even politically...Is nearly impossible.

One: There is no globally-standard definition of middle class.

Two: There is not and has never been a historically-consistent defitnition of middle class.

Three: Ergo, saying that the middle class is growing or contracting is impossible to prove or disprove - there's an easy way to measure the poor (the poverty line may be fickle, incomplete, and easily manipulated, but it's -something-) at least within a country. There are no really consistent ways of defining the rich in a country, let alone globally. There's really no way to define "middle class".

Keep in mind, the middle class as it might be thought of is a very modern thing, dating really from (being generous) the 1600s at the earliest.

Montgomery County Maryland defines low income housing as anything worth less than 450K.

Bill Gates is a rarity. And Michael Jordan isn't one of the ultra rich. No American athletes make that cut, some of the F1 drivers do.

Break the billion mark and your in the ultra rich category. That is for money/resources under your direct control. Don't trust the Forbes list of the richest people, it only covers public assets.

I knew a guy who bought a house for 10,000 in Gary Indiana. He felt pretty good about this until the 3rd time they robbed his house, when they used a power saw to cut open the back wall.

If the percentage of the population that is classified as poor is growing, and the percentage of the population that is classified as rich is growing, then wouldn't it be the case that no matter how you choose to define/describe the 'middle' class, it is shrinking?

Firstly, keep in mind that the middle class is not simply the space between poverty and riches. It is possible to be poor and middle class at the same time.

Secondly, the definition of poverty is changing. At one point the poverty line was the ability to afford housing and food and basically nothing else. Now it includes the ability to afford a car, televisions, cable, assorted appliances and so on. It's difficult to look at someone who can't QUITE afford the $450k home, has three tvs and enough time to go catch every Skins football game in town and believe he's truly 'poor' in the conventional sense of the word.

And unfortunately, you're going to see the squeeze put on a little tighter in the next few years. This year alone, the price of milk jumped up about $2/gallon due to increased overseas demand. Same will happen with steel and oil soon. If you've ever been considering retraining to get a new job, now is definitely the time to do it.

And of course, that is part of what feeds into a dystopia. You find yourself locked into a position, either through poverty or through being held by other things (corp script, keeping your family as collateral, an illusion of being unable to compete elsewhere), but the pressure of costs of living keep you from being able to simply drop out of the race. You're in a prison enforced by financial realities.

The "$140,000" average net worth is not accurate. The top percent of our country owns most of the net wealth, so the average is skewed in the extreme.

However, the median is still quite high (for white people): $79,400. Only $7,500 for black people. This is a perfect example SINners vs non-SINners.

Im Canadian

Explain it in beer

...beer prices in the US are still relatively affordable even given the higher cost of craft brews. For example in here a pint of craft beer runs about 3.5 - 4$ whereas in the UK a pint of halfway "decent" ale will run you about 5 - 6$ US equivalent.

...now for cheap pisswater, like Bud or Miller...well you get what you pay for which is usually followed the next morning by a nasty hangover and "lagermouth".

Now here in the TT...er...Orygun, there is talk of significantly raising the tax on our most precious commodity. That is an artificial increase in the price which only serves to hurt the smaller breweries by negatively impacting sales.

Oh. I thought one guy had ten beer.(me ) . And 20 guys where fighting over the other 2(u guys)


If the math doesn't add up I blame the beer

Party for me Distopia for You all explained with beer

And before u send Ninja's be warned i've got priates And their lookin at ur 2 beer

Welcome to our forum eh <urp>

I always thought the word 'hoser' would make for good Shadowrun slang.

it does stand to reason that if one can be hosed, then logically there must be a hoser.

The person holding the Ingram?

...while we are off topic...(well sort of)

Back in the Ronnie Raygun days when he constantly kept pissing off the Russians with his comments (and the Doomsday Clock ticked down to three minutes to midnight), I came up with an interesting plan called the "Ground Zero" party.

The party would only occur once we learned events were deteriorating so badly and the unthinkable was imminent. The event was going to be held somewhere on Marginal Way outside of Boeing Field which was (is) a primary target. As the focus of the party there would be a case of assorted liquor (which I actually did purchase). After driving up near the airport we would wait listening to the news reports. Once we got the confirmation of the launch, a bottle of your favourite would be passed to you and you had to start drinking with gusto. By the time the Soviet warheads detonated overhead (about 40 min after the "go code") everyone would be so gone already (if not passed out) that we probably would never notice.

The rationale was better to go out quick and happy. The only alternative would be dealing with a totally wrecked world that included fallout, radiation sickness, wacko survivalists and the onset of Nuclear Winter. Back during those days I frequently had "Nukemares" (nightmares about nuclear war), some of them rather vivid. Even today I still get a momentary flash now and then of what the scene would be like in the aftermath of a "city killer" detonation. As bad as it was (and I mean not to diminish the tragedy), in away we were fortunate it was fuel laden airliners on 9-11 and not an unaccounted for Ukranian warhead.

Having lived though another time when the clock ticked down to midnight (The Cuban Missile Crisis) enduring countless Air Raid tests, being subjected to sonic booms (which were not yet restricted), and forced to watch those now laughable Civil Defence films in school, the early to mid 80s had a feel of deja vu to them (we actually had built a home bomb shelter in our basement from the CD plans).

"...remember kids, when you see the flash, there's only one thing you should do...Duck and Cover..."
[…yeah, right... ]

While I play and enjoy Shadowrun as a form of fictional entertainment, were the setting of the world real, I don't think I would actually fare very well in it.

...apologies for getting a little heavy here

hmm, "kid"?

...I try to think "young". Helps me put aside the aches, pains, and cynicism gained through all the years at least for a little while.

...of all my fears the worst is becoming another Andy Rooney (I'd rather be a Tom Lerher and at least have a sense of humour about it all).

My stumbling block on the Utopian/Dystopian point is that neither really works for a game. In a perfect world, there's nothing to do. In a world without hope, nothing you do matters. From a storytelling perspective, it breaks down at either extreme. (Plus, its hard to imagine a world without misery or a world without hope. And if you don't treat them as ideals, at what point does a shitty world become dystopian. 51% hopeless? 90%? 99?)

That any world (ours, Shadowrun's, Canada) is not instantly recognizable as dystopian isn't really a mark against. If you know a world is dystopian and you have even 1% hope or choice left to you, why would anyone live there/put up with it? It would seem like any world on the dystopian side of things would require a certain amount of delusion among the populace to avoid open revolt. There's probably a lot of people in Shadowrun with not much hope or choice left but who just don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness.

I should point out I never read a lot of cyberpunk. Or fantasy.

Dystopias are never hopeless as long as your characters have the ability to flip out and kill people, just look at Equilibrium. Horrific totalitarian dystopia, but young Batman solves all of society's problems by flipping out and killing a bunch of people.

...nothing beats a good Saturday Night Firefight.

...really

Saturday night is right for firefighting?

I'm a bad boy and I skipped most of the pages since it was mostly talk of Canadians and beer but how can you blame me when it is 5:10 in the morning and I'm stuck at work in a Maximum security prison. Anyways, when the question of cyberpunk rises, I have to agree that it is the players and GM's responsibility to decide on what type of game they want to play.

Now don't get me wrong. SR4 looks more like the Ghost in the Shell/Richard K. Morgan Altered Carbon type of cyberpunk instead of the nitty gritty of Phillip K. Dick's Blade Runner. Is either one the correct way? That depends on what game you want to play. The books even tell you to play the game you want to play. You want it more nitty and gritty? Don't allow a good amount of the cyberware and make combat more deadly. If you like the glitz and galmour of being able to be chromed to the gills and try to make Chuck Norris cry (and notice I said try) then it is all up to you.

But the biggest thing that anyone has to remember is this:


[I]It's all about style...[I]

auguer/qknoy -

Keep in mind that the definition of 'poor' has also changed. At one point it was unthinkable for the poor to be able to afford television sets. Now it's unthinkable for them not to (in the US). A poor person in my area can easily expect to retire and own a house in South Carolina, or to afford a public college for his kids, simply because the line that demarks poor from rich is relatively very high compared to say West Virginia.

Some have included home ownership as a major defining feature of the middle class, and in that regard the middle class certainly is shrinking. As qknoy pointed out, controlled supply but increasing demand forces prices up. In my area a lot of middle class people live in condos or apartments simply because the costs of housing are so incredibly high (again, $300k buys a rowhouse). Are they not middle class?

Some have defined the middle class as having enough discretionary income to have hope (for instance, Thomas Friedman, author of the World is Flat). They have the available income to invest in their children and themselves in order to make things better in the future. They don't have to own a house or a car in order to meet this criteria, and the middle class in say China makes a third as much as the middle class in the US, but can still be called the middle class.

Buster -
Do those numbers include outliers? As you yourself pointed out, outliers skew the results, and I believe the majority of billionaires or millionaires are white.

mfb -
Yes, they do live on $10 a day because a big mac is five cents. That's the nature of currency exchange. I won't say they're not poor, because that's simply not true. But for $10 a day in Bangladesh, you likely own a hovel and can afford three meals a day. In the US you live under an overpass.

Now could you argue that we're in the ultra-elite rich because we can afford healthy, nutritious meals, medical care and a home that won't fall over in a strong wind? Yes. But that has nothing to do with income measured by the global US dollar. You might as well measure wealth by how many goats I own.


To your second argument, yes, I agree that MOST people would not recognize they're in a dystopia. However, if you bother to define dystopia, it can be easily recognized based on those objective criteria. I notice that I have provided several definitions for 'dystopia', you have provided none. How can you say this world is a dystopia when you don't say what a dystopia is? To rehash, and going off Wiki, a dystopia should have one or more of the following conditions:
1) Lack of social mobility
2) Severe restrictions on peoples' lives
3) Strong conformity among citizens
4) Lack of any social group except the State (in SR, this has been replaced by the corporation, but I think that exchange is suitable)
5) Disconnection from the natural world (I feel like SR really fails here, since so much of the US has been reclaimed by nature and nature-loving Native Americans)
6) The State controls the world economy (again, in SR this is the megacorps)

A wide gap between rich and poor is not necessarily dystopian. Not being able to cross that gap is (social mobility). All of your posts about so many people being poor and me being rich are completely irrelevant. There have always been and always will be rich people and poor people. Unless you want to say that the entire universe of human experience is dystopian, and therefore the term 'dystopia' has no useful meaning, bringing rich vs. poor is a waste of time.


In the context of beers, a dystopia is:
A world where the State makes a set number of brands. It tells you which brand you can buy, if you will enjoy it and how you go about drinking it. You MUST drink the given brand in the manner specified and enjoy it to the appropriate level or your beer drinking privileges may be revoked permanently. You may not brew your own beer, nor drink the beer brewed by anyone else. Attempting to do so is treason. State-owned beer is made from all-natural oils and high-tech polymers, which taste about as good as they sound like they should, although they may include an opiate so you won't mind so much. Enjoy your Natty Fed!

Mercer:
The reason the people in Shadowrun don't revolt is because to do so is basically guaranteed suicide. People in the barrens stage a threatening revolt against the corps and they'll get gunned down. People inside the corp try to seriously change things and they'll simply disappear. Shadowrunners are the exception because, by and large, they already are 'dead'. They are ghosts in the machine. You can't prove they exist and generally they don't have any connections. That's why the game orients around them, because they've traded in their lives for the freedom to do something.

@nezumi: I don't disagree, its just that whether or not SR is a dystopia (depending on how one defines dystopia and if that definition applies to SR), the majority of the people in that world probably wouldn't identify it as such. Pretty much every classic example of a dystopia is a society that purports itself to be utopian. If a true utopia is impossible because people are inherently flawed, they will screw up any society you give them. All the runner-up "perfect" societies are dystopic on the theory you can get pretty close to utopia if you take away hope, choice and freedom. (This reminds me of my personal political axiom, Anarchy is better than no government at all.)

People in SR don't revolt because it would be suicide, but also because the vast majority of them can look around (even in the barrens) and think, "Hey, this ain't so bad." The people in the corporate enclaves can say, "At least we're safe." And the people in the barrens can look around and say, "At least we're free."

----------------------------------------------

@Gamble: As an aside, "Maximum" security prison? I always found that mildly humorous, the maximum/minimum security prison distinction. (Are the other classifications of prisons, btw?) Its like one group of guys got together and said, "All right, we're going to make a prison. And we're going to be really serious about security." And another group got together and said, "All right, our prison is going to be secure. But we're not going to go crazy with it."