I don’t think anyone ever really sat down and thought about the economics of the Star Wars universe. Mostly it’s just meant to be visually interesting.
Like take all the derelict star destroyers on Jakku. Other than local scavengers like Rey, why is no one interested in millions of tons of abandoned warships and raw materials just sitting in some desert? Is it because it’s too expensive to send proper salvage teams to collect any remaining value? Or is because it’s just cheaper and easier to build new giant ships from scratch?
I think the whole point is that it’s suppose to be a Galaxy with massive wealth disparity (especially under the Empire). You have some planets full of “palatial luxury” while on others humans scrounge through the scraps of old starship to trade parts for food.
Never got the concept of post scarcity. The owners of the technology will get wealthier and wealthier. The working class not.
In terms of people working when droids could do the jobs … two options:
People could make a better value proposition compared to droids. Do good quality work for not much pay and no big expense up front. Work done and fire them, not stuck with sunk cost on the droid.
Or. It is in the wealthy class’s best interest that the poorer are not living idle or too hungry. A job, a task, keeps them busy, gives a sense of purpose. The metal ringer is clearly invested in his task. Without that he might be more likely to bang his hammers on changing the social structures.
In such a setting, “ownership” of technology would be unlikely, wealth meaningless, and working unnecessary. That droid factory in the Oort cloud I mentioned? It would first make more droid factories, which would make more droid factories, which would make more droid factories. Make a droid factory for each person on the planet, mining the trillions of Oort cloud objects to prodvide any material needs. Including living space. (The Book of Boba Fett established the SW universe having orbitals.)
Seriously why do you think those who funded the first droid factory would do other than to restrict the capacity to make droid factories to themselves, using their own corporate enforcers and government enforcement as needed? Your view is a Roddenberry Star Trek optimism, expressed some for the Union of The Orville … but even there “work” is something people do, to give life meaning, purpose, and to have a reputation socially. The Star Wars universe, especially as presented here, is more cynical: power is the ability to get what you want including getting other people to do what want them to do; wealth is a means of power; power is always relative, only having meaning by having more than others; many of those with power want more, be they Jedi, Sith, Bo-Katan, or company foreman. For many having something only has meaning if others do not have it. In the Star Wars world scarcity does not need to exist, but it does, as a function of the nature of beings.
Actually more Iain Banks Culture novels, with a smattering of Cory Doctorow’s Printcrime and Chales Stross’s Singularity Sky. Star Trek doesn’t know jack shit about post-scarcity.
How do you think someone is going to control access to a technology, permanently? Even assuming that the Star Wars universe never, anywhere, had the equivalent of limited-term patents, how do you expect space copyright owners to defend against piracy, hacking, or reverse engineering over the course of thousands of years? Do you think there would be no DECSS for droid factories found? No open source comunites, no Creative Commons communities, no Makers communities, no EFF equivalents? No Linus Torvalds of Von Neumann tech? Information wants to be free, and information wants to be freed, and all it takes is one open-source implementation of freely-available Von Neumann tech over the course of thousands or more years and millions or more civilizations for that tech to be openly available permanently. And you don’t have to worry about a fleet of Star Destoyers taking it away from you when you use the tech to build your own fleet of star destroyers to defend yourself.
I think the show’s biggest stroke of genius so far is giving its antagonists human faces. Star Wars baddies have been predominantly faceless mooks, or embodied evil—either stormtroopers and droids, or the likes of Darth Vader. All easy to hate and kill without looking back.
But here, the bad guys are really mall cops led by an overzealous superior—when they get blown up, it’s at best a morally grey issue, especially because their original grievance is legitimate: Andor really did kill those guys. Sure, they jumped him and things escalated, and presumably he knew that he wouldn’t see another day if he’d left the other one alive, but still: basically, those are people doing their jobs, so when they die, it has some impact.
I suppose the question is “why would someone do that?” Presumably, even in the Star Wars universe there are finite resources that can only be acquired in specific locales or through complex manufacturing processes. Star Wars technology might allow them to do things on a much larger scale than modern Earth can, but their civilization is also many orders of magnitude larger (being Galactic and all). IOW, what possible reason would someone have to build an orbital automated factory to improve the standard of living on Tatooine? What would Tatooine have to trade? Other than maybe sand to be used to make the space concrete they use to construct those squat space-adobe structures that seem ubiquitous throughout the Star Wars universe.
They have cheap, powerful AI. We know it is cheap because we see human (and beyond?) level AIs everywhere, even casually junked. Those AIs can be designed to operate droids that do anything, including every step of mining and manufacturing, including the manufacturing of more AIs and droids.
They have cheap antigravity. We know that it is cheap because it is used casually everywhere, even in small toys for children. That antigravity means that anything can be mined without having to worry about lifting the raw materials or finished products out of a gravity well with chemical rockets like we do. They can disassemble not only asteroids and comets but also moons, rocky planets, and gas giants.
They have cheap, extremely high levels of FTL. We know that it is cheap because while not everyone has a personal FTL-capable interstellar spacecraft, they are far more common than they would be if staggeringly expensive. So think something similar to the price of a luxary car or a tractor trailer. This means that the self-replicating robot factories can mine anywhere, in your own system or in a dead system elsewhere. Trillions and trillions of tons of potential raw materials for each sentient in the galaxy.
This isn’t pie-in-the-sky thinking, it is simply extrapolating from the technologies existing in that setting. (Other things to help—extremely high-density energy storage and blades of energy that can quickly cut through almost anything—very useful in mining and manufacturing.) Those technologies would lead to a society exponentially different from what we have and what we see on-screen.
You don’t seem to understand the concept of “post-scarcity”. “Trade” is only necessary when there are limits on resources that are distributed unevenly. Nobody would trade anything at all with Tatooine because nobody would have anything that Tatooine needed because everyone on Tatooine would have everything they needed for free from their droid factories disassembling everything in their solar system not Tatooine. (And if they even bothered to live there, they would replenish their oceans from comets and wherever else it is found in their outer solar system.)
Certainly looks like Perrin Fertha:(Mr Mothma) is certainly not ANTI empire.
How closely are other senators being watched? I’m guessing Mon Mothma is getting special attention because she is suspected (correctly as it turns out) to have rebel sympathies.
I’m guessing there are EU references to the other rebel groups whose names I have forgotten.
I’m loving this show even more than the Mandalorian. Can’t think of a single misstep so far. A perfect fit into the universe suggested by R1 and ESB, which I think are the two best movies.
It is hard for me to even compare it to The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian was/is a fun cartoonish comic book of a show, that initially played with various classic tropes applied to the SW universe. This is more an adult graphic novel. The shot of Mon Mothma in the window of the vehicle pulling away after the meeting in the antiquities store is dramatic in a completely different manner of dramatic than we expect to see in SW shows as a general rule. The characters, their motivations, their ethics … are all much more complicated and … real … than we mostly see in this universe.
I seem to be the only person who hates it. I hate that three came out at once. I hate that it’s on while She-Hulk is still doing new episodes. I hate that it’s released on Wednesdays. I hate that the official SW twitter was posting shit about the episode this afternoon and while it wasn’t spoilery, it wasn’t technically spoiler free and some of us have like… sleeping and working and schooling to do. Save that kind of post for 48 hours later.
I had a lot more that I hated but the board ate my post and I don’t remember my rant.
I do think it looks great and since it’s short I’ll just finish it in case it has an end so great it makes me rethink the whole thing. But I’m not optimistic about that.
I hate to complain about such a great show but was anyone else completely taken aback by the rebels straight up having AKs? There didn’t seem to be any sci fi gimmicks on them, and having just seen the toys on hasbro’s reveal event they looked more like GI Joes than Star Wars toys.
I’m really enjoying it so far. I like that the big action scenes are being rationed out - we had two slow episodes followed by Karn’s attempted arrest, and then a couple of quieter ones before (presumably) the big heist.
I really liked the scenes of the attack on Ferris - the whole thing reminded me of a British WWII movie (not one specifically, just in general), and also a bit of Zulu as well. I think it’s the Sergeant Major character.
I found the scenes on the “heist world” (I forget the name of the planet they’re on) beautifully filmed, and I enjoyed the rapid cuts from the grey, misty mountains and woodland to the brightly lit art-deco Coruscant scenes.
I’m amused that in such a technologically advanced society, they’re still paying their soldiers in actual physical cash. I’m 45, and I’ve never had a job where I wasn’t paid by direct electronic deposit into my bank account.