Live data from Hacker News

Groups never admit failure

nav.al

21–30 of 370 posts

Re: Groups never admit failure

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fact. If you were born somewhere else you would be an entirely different person. You'd be speaking a different language, you'd be involved in different social arrangements and institutions, and you'd think the axioms of your reality were entirely different.

Where is your evidence for that claim?

That you'd be an entirely different person in another time and place? That's pretty obvious to anyone that has traveled anywhere other than the place they were born.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#23

Quoted post unavailable.

People like meat. People like suburbs. People like air travel. Whether they signal these preferences with their wallets or at the ballot box is immaterial (and to be clear, they already do in both). Environmental damage is guaranteed by the fact that production is connected to desire.

People seem to like heroin as well. What is your point?

Re: Groups never admit failure

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is the medium of transaction of human needs and desires. Profit causes global warming only in so much as it fulfills human needs and desires for light, heat, transportation, industry, and energy in general. Your argument is not with profit but with human nature, which in its infinite ambition always desires more. Removing the profit motive is like shooting the messenger, your fundamental issue remains unaddress…

> Your argument is not with profit but with human nature As capitalism and profit on capital only started on the steps to being the prevailing economic system in the fourteenth century, in pockets of Europe, I wonder what year it became "human nature" worldwide exactly - 1350? 1848?

[deleted]

Re: Groups never admit failure

#26

Quoted post unavailable.

People like meat. People like suburbs. People like air travel. Whether they signal these preferences with their wallets or at the ballot box is immaterial (and to be clear, they already do in both). Environmental damage is guaranteed by the fact that production is connected to desire.

> Whether they signal these preferences with their wallets or at the ballot box is immaterial

It's not, because when we make decisions with our wallets we're forced to weigh personal tradeoffs. No such constraint exists for preferences expressed at the ballot box.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like meat. People like suburbs. People like air travel. Whether they signal these preferences with their wallets or at the ballot box is immaterial (and to be clear, they already do in both). Environmental damage is guaranteed by the fact that production is connected to desire.

People seem to like heroin as well. What is your point?

What's your point? People do things they like. You can't stop them.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is the medium of transaction of human needs and desires. Profit causes global warming only in so much as it fulfills human needs and desires for light, heat, transportation, industry, and energy in general. Your argument is not with profit but with human nature, which in its infinite ambition always desires more. Removing the profit motive is like shooting the messenger, your fundamental issue remains unaddress…

This is a common confusion. My argument is with profits and not with human nature because human nature is malleable. People can change their eating habits, they can change their transportation habits, they can change institutional arrangements that favor profits over well-being, they can change the forms of market transactions they find valuable. This isn't anything deep. These are just basic facts.

Grandparent said.

> > Money is the medium of transaction of human needs and desires. Profit causes global warming only in so much as it fulfills human needs and desires for light, heat, transportation, industry, and energy in general.

Vs.

> My argument is with profits and not with human nature because human nature is malleable. People can change their eating habits, they can change their transportation habits

To the extent that people change to not demand things that cause global warming, providers of such things will not be rewarded with profits. So, I don't understand the gymnastics to point at a "profit" motive rather than intrinsic motivations from this "human nature".

Re: Groups never admit failure

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like meat. People like suburbs. People like air travel. Whether they signal these preferences with their wallets or at the ballot box is immaterial (and to be clear, they already do in both). Environmental damage is guaranteed by the fact that production is connected to desire.

People seem to like heroin as well. What is your point?

Not sure why the downvotes.

Addiction to ignoring destructive externalities should be a concern.

Industrial behavior is requiring more air conditioning which is requiring more industrial behavior.

We tend to think in loops but interlocking rings of an infinite number of loops (functions) is a far more interesting visual to me.

One little loop over on the bottom may not broadcast info such that it reaches a little loop up top after pivoting 90 degrees. There’s a lot of information noise in between.

Put a different energy source in that bottom loops coordinates though.

Physics beats social ideology every time. The free market is being used to destroy the species, and many people in charge believe in the right to force their human death cult on us.

Freedom from is being set aside for freedom to.

Eventually the masses will accept moral relativism as they have in the past if the options remain constrained to “what a minority of wealth holders say.” A whole lot of folks still live in “story mode” out there.

Post reply on HN