Foxnews, the fair and unbalanced news source, has a funny little article up. Yummy yummy mystery meat may be in our future! Every day I get a little more depressed at the thought that the stuff that is culture in Shadowrun might actually be the stuff that is culture in my lifetime. My parents had Star Trek, utopian socialist panacea, which was much more hopeful. We have post-apocalyptic cyberpunk noir....*sigh*

You kiddin'? Sign me up for cybereyes and some decent trids, chummer!

Why not? We already have semi-synthetic foods.

I lived on it for many years when I first moved here.

Reminds me of the UMISS soy chicken.
The real question is whether we will notice the switch to soylent green?

By all rights, they had two cloned cows 'accidentally' butchered and sold, and nobody noticed until a few months after everyone had finished nomming.

That sounds like nomminal results to me!

And our future is coming true first!
Yay us!

uh.. wait

To be fair.. our Parents had Star trek..which became a utopian socialist panacea after a 3rd world war, several world wide dictatorships, and the near extinction of our species.

So there's nothing to say that our post-apocalyptic cyberpunk noir isn't a necessary step to their Utopian Socialist Panacae

Hmmm.. Which is more utopian? Star Trek or Eureka?

Is there anyone who even writes anything as dystopian as Orwell, Harry Harrison, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, or Phillip K. Dick anymore? Everything I've read in Shadowrun is happy and cheerful compared to some of their tales.

Maybe that's why I have a hard time seeing Shadowrun as Dystopian. At least the soy burgers are made of soy.

not so sure one would lead to the other. usually a bleak present leads to a free future not a bleak future. Although the socialist Utopia could be the final step from dependency to bondage in the cycle of freedom.

well when you consider Utopian means something like Utopia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia. star trek seems utopian but I don't think Eureka seems like Utopia.

This is an old story. I think it was PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), that was actually supporting this financially. No animal is harmed or treated cruelly. The problem seems to be getting the texture right. Muscles are hard to grow. If you lose a muscle you a shit out of luck, transplants or limping around like House are your only two options. But the same funding that goes into growing replacement tissues and organs for humans will aid the research into cultured meats. In a way they are not really artificial.

Like the other networks are any more "fair and balanced"

Please, n0tthellama, in the future, drop the political bullshit. We're talking Shadowrun here, not "this RL news agency doesn't support my political beliefs and is shit". I mean just look at JournoList... these frakkers are really balanced...

It was a joke...chill.

this is the internet, people don't chill.
http://xkcd.com/386/

I want to groan, but I'll give you a slow clap instead.

hell, marx predicted that capitalism was a stepping stone towards true socialism. And considered bringing russia directly from despotism to socialism, bypassing capitalism, a fools errand.

thing is that the last couple of growth spurts have come straight out of large wars, wars that pushed funding for blue sky research forward. Then there was the ongoing cold war with its proxy wars and my ism is better at r&d then yours. A good hint that things where heading for a slump was the downsizing of xerox parc and bell labs. This meant less blue sky research and actual wealth creation, and more stock market gold mining. Only iraq and afghanistan have put some spring in the research step, with a focus on prosthetic and remote controlled vehicles.

its somewhat macabre to think about.

yea and he also thought socialism and communism could survive without getting a constant infusion of wealth from a free market economy. Considering that has not happened ever I think his predictions can be safely ignored; other than keeping an eye out for those trying to make his predictions come true like the recent anarchists and Saul Alinsky followers.

well the ones that have appeared on earth so far have been actively fought in one way or another by the existing capitalists, so i dont know if there is any conclusions to be made.

still, his observations on how capitalism works seems to be spot on.

and i wonder when the mods will slap a warning on me for not linking this or SR in any way what so ever...

I think you are mixing up capitalism and the more common corporatism, which is brought on by socialists and progressives not those supporting a free market economy.

and here's your link: SR is corporatism brought to the extreme. Corporatism is a nasty dystopian system where the guy at the top is important and the rest gets kinda collectivist. As seen in wage slaves working for the corporate or collective good, not their individual good.

Lets take this one step farther....

Having some time to think about my original post, I don't think Star Trek and Shadowrun are so far off from each other in some aspects...

You have got to think that in Star Trek if your wearing a red shirt, then you are working for the federations greater good but not your own cause you gonna die. Heck, what about the peons who run reports (TPS anyone?) for the guys who get camera time? You know, the peons who join starfleet to explore the galaxy and all they get to do is look at a windows screensaver in 10-forward during their off hours. Now, that has gotta blow chunks...cause they aren't even getting paid.

Moreover, this whole thread was started with fake meat, right? What the heck do the folks in good ol' starfleet eat? Replicated food is, by far possibly, the natural conclusion of vat grown meat (i.e. vat grown minus the vat)

Anyways, lets not beat a dead horse...lets eat it! It suffices enough to say that our reality mirrors our imagination and our imagination is inextricably linked to some base level of common sense (or at least i like to think so...). So, it only makes sense that Shadowrun, or at least parts of it, will become reality. I just hope that more of the good comes than the bad.

It has been said that Marx was a brilliant theorist.

But that he really needed to get out of the library and meet some real people more.






-karma

*Just sits back, eating a Vat-Grown Pulled Pork Sandwich, watching the Capitalists and Communists fight*

Reminds me of my childhood, watching the Cold War!

The 'utopian' Star Trek society works because they've solved the power generation problem and the resource scarcity problem - The first is handwavium, but the second is energy-to-matter conversion.

More handwavium, I know.

sometimes i wonder if we would solve the power supply issue if we could convert marketing directly to electricity...