oscarcity
Explanation
The Joke
The comic is titled "Funtime Activity: Turning Mathematicians Against Capitalism." It shows a man standing at a chalkboard with a graph diagram (nodes connected by arrows in a cycle), addressing an audience with revolutionary fervor: "Brothers! Sisters! If everyone already has what they need, the Traveling Salesman Problem will take ZERO steps!"
The speaker is essentially arguing that if goods and resources were distributed so that everyone already had what they needed, there would be no need for a salesman to travel anywhere at all -- reducing one of the most famously difficult problems in computer science and mathematics to a trivial solution. He is using this mathematical observation as an argument against capitalism (where a salesman must travel to sell goods people lack).
The Humor
The humor works on multiple levels. First, the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most celebrated unsolved problems in computational complexity -- finding the shortest route that visits every city exactly once is NP-hard and has resisted efficient solutions for decades. The speaker's "solution" is hilariously reductive: just eliminate the need to travel at all by giving everyone what they need. It is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but completely misses the point of the mathematical problem.
Second, the comic satirizes political rhetoric by framing a communist or anti-capitalist argument in mathematical terms. The revolutionary tone ("Brothers! Sisters!") combined with the chalkboard and graph theory notation creates a funny juxtaposition between political agitation and academic mathematics. The title suggests this is a repeatable activity -- as if there is a known recipe for radicalizing mathematicians by exploiting their frustration with hard problems.
References
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classic optimization problem in computer science and operations research: given a list of cities and the distances between them, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? It is NP-hard, meaning no efficient algorithm is known for solving it in general. The comic's title "oscarcity" is a pun on "scarcity," a fundamental concept in economics referring to the gap between limited resources and unlimited human wants.