Are we running out of resources? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#81

Post by yetihehe » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

softcactus wrote: post #80

chii wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have poor people in other countries doing it instead. and they become less poor afterwards. Eventually, they will no longer accept the low wages as their own wealth increases. i think this is a good outcome - all parties benefit from the transaction. This will take a long time to play out, and in the mean time, the research and development of tech would progress enough to find a solution to the energy and resour…

That's very easy for you to say in your current situation. I think you would not find it acceptable if you were one of the sweatshop workers. This is the exact logic that has been used to justify slavery/exploitation throughout history.

What is your argument exactly, that we should not give job to workers in poorer countries? So that they don't have any money?

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#82

Post by beaconstudios » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

rmah wrote: post #79

beaconstudios wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for. However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living i…

4 bil households (8 bil people) with each household living on a detached 500 sq m lot (20m x 25m or apx 1/8th acre) => 4,000,000,000 hh * 500 sq m => 2mil sq km. The earth has 149mil sq km of land area so those suburbs would take up about 1.7% of the land. If you subtract out antarctica (14 mil sq km), siberia (13 mil sq km) and 3/4 of canada (7 mil sq km), the sahara desert (9mil sq km)... you're still left with abo…

I didn't mean to imply that land area was the constraint - the constraint is energy/fuel use, traffic, and other symptoms of inefficient resource use.

We should be aiming to design houses so that minimal HVAC is necessary to maintain comfortable conditions, not building ramshackle houses in the desert and patching the inefficiencies with massively energy-consuming devices.

The broader point I'm trying to make is that we should be aiming for effective improvements in living standards - and there are two components in effectiveness, correct orientation and efficiency. American suburbs are pretty backwards in terms of cost/benefit: they're expensive to maintain infrastructure-wise, they isolate people from each other, and you have to drive for an hour to get to anything leading to even more expensive car-centric infrastructure. We should be aiming to fulfil human needs on a planetary scale, which means efficient use of resources.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#83

Post by beaconstudios » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

yetihehe wrote: post #81

softcactus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very easy for you to say in your current situation. I think you would not find it acceptable if you were one of the sweatshop workers. This is the exact logic that has been used to justify slavery/exploitation throughout history.

What is your argument exactly, that we should not give job to workers in poorer countries? So that they don't have any money?

the economy is not a binary choice between "pay people subsistence wages" and "don't pay them at all". We could pay people better, invest in the development of underdeveloped countries that we exploit (no, IMF loans do not count). We could focus on helping people instead of exploiting them for profit. Many options are available.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#84

Post by verisimi » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #67

verisimi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the wealth of billionaires is not cash, it’s locked up in their ownership of the companies they control. Elon Musk for example has 99% of his wealth in shares in Tesla, SpaceX etc. Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets. The point I'm making is that it if we are trying to find a solution to these problems, the easiest one would be to take the billions in wealth - more wealth that can be s…

>Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets. And do what with it? A value is just a number. What would you do with the assets and the value? I'm not being facetious, I'm really curious how you imagine this working and right now I honestly don't have any idea. Who would control these companies now that they're not owned by their founders and current owners? How would ownership and control work? Who woul…

I'm trying to formulate the problem in broad strokes. I say we have on the one hand huge amounts of wealth in the hands of very few individuals on the one hand, and lots of people that do not have enough on the other. There is a competition for resources and something needs to be changed.

I hope you accept that is a fair if broad formulation of the problem.

If you are neutral in approaching this, and trying to find an answer, which of the following would be easier: a/ to find a way to take wealth from the rich (still leaving more than they can spend in a lifetime) or b/ to micro manage everyone, decreasing population and options for 99.999% of the population?

As a problem, any neutral solution would say it is far more equitable and simpler to tackle the smaller billionaire group. Even though the billionaire class could lose lots of their wealth, they would have plenty to live. Trying to micromanage the world's population is much harder. Do you agree?

Apparently though, taking the wealth from billionaires cannot a conceivable answer. Yes their corporations have ravaged the natural world, yes they are geared to manipulate us via psychology, indoctrination, PR, etc to separate us from our monetary tokens, but somehow it is right that the population as a whole should foot the bill. Why?

But, even the question of what would be the best (fairest, equitable) allocation of resources is moot. The answer is b/ and the planned, controlled implementation has been underway for decades, and is finally materialising. Banking, the governance structure, education, technology, media, corporations, NGOs, etc are already managed by billionaires, and they do not want to give up their wealth or power. The institutions they manage have been bent in order to help them achieve their goals, in the name of serving us and the planet. What we are presently experiencing is a long planned move to greater power - it is not history unfolding naturally.

We are implementing technocracy, and we will be micro-managed. We will come to see it as neo-feudalism. To the 99.999% it will feel like hard slavery. But even this has been negative outlook had been planned and managed - they want us to choose the micromanagement. If the turkeys vote for Christmas, they want to be eaten, right? We are voting to get rid of cars, constrain our use of energy, move to UBI, etc - our lack of understanding and imagination means we vote for slavery.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#85

Post by f1yght » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

fennecfoxen wrote: post #43

volatilecarbon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather see public investment in projects that will make the world livable once energy and resources are no longer cheap. Rail transportation in particular. Every car a person is not required to own to live in America would save them ~$10,000 a year in costs today. When cars and gas are more expensive, they'll save even more. Those savings might even save them from losing their home or going hungry if things…

> Rail transportation in particular. ahem bus rapid transit

BRT is still reliant on using roads that cars are on and even if it were electric, requires recharging (Unless it's on a wire). So rail in this instance makes more sense as you get cars out of the way and you wouldn't need to charge it. If it's on a guided wire might as well make it a rail.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#86

Post by ahevia » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #77

revscat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve. This is a straw man. The arguments against humanity’s survival are not technological, but economic: we will not survive because our economic systems continue to poison the environment, to the detriment of all. Solutions exist, but bec…

But there are plenty of examples of changes, involving both changes in economic incentives and changes in technology, that greatly reduced pollution. To pretend there's some iron law connecting industry and pollution is simply dishonest.

There isn’t, but that change is slow & constantly challenged. Any progress towards protecting the Earth, our environment, and our resources are extremely hard fought, sometimes poorly-implemented, or at risk of being revoked when the government changed hands.

It is difficult not to blame industry because they profit off continued pollution & resource exploitation. The markets have a larger short term incentive to maintain the status quo

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#87

Post by yetihehe » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

beaconstudios wrote: post #83

yetihehe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your argument exactly, that we should not give job to workers in poorer countries? So that they don't have any money?

the economy is not a binary choice between "pay people subsistence wages" and "don't pay them at all". We could pay people better, invest in the development of underdeveloped countries that we exploit (no, IMF loans do not count). We could focus on helping people instead of exploiting them for profit. Many options are available.

Why don't you do this? If you don't have resources for this, why do you think other people have them? Ask yourself honestly, if you won a lottery yesterday, would you give it away to those workers in underdeveloped countries? I would not, because I'm too greedy, but I don't think you would really give money away either, and I supported Ukraine with about $100, which is probably the biggest donation I have done in my life, many people could live on it for two weeks where I live. Many options are available, but not all of them are as good as just giving them jobs. And if you wanted to give them better paying jobs - who will pay? Would you pay more for some laptop because it supported some unknown person on the other side of earth? Why don't you just send them some money today? You have that option after all.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#88

Post by TuringTest » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

f1yght wrote: post #85

fennecfoxen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rail transportation in particular. ahem bus rapid transit

BRT is still reliant on using roads that cars are on and even if it were electric, requires recharging (Unless it's on a wire). So rail in this instance makes more sense as you get cars out of the way and you wouldn't need to charge it. If it's on a guided wire might as well make it a rail.

The infrastructure for railways is considerably more expensive to build than a BRT, even with the dedicated lanes required for it to be fast.

A middle ground are light rail and tram, but those tend to be slower than a bus based-BRT system as the cheap rails don't support speeds as fast as a metro or railway.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#89

Post by teknopaul » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

slothtrop wrote: post #69

volatilecarbon wrote: post #13

There were a lot of words here to simply fall back on the argument that innovation will solve every problem and do so before there is significant suffering. I agree that life will always go on, but this idea that consumption and quality of life can do nothing but rise when it is so dependent on the limited cheap energy and resources that we only learned to exploit a century ago is insanity to me. Our ever increasing…

Population is projected to level out, so it's a moot point. We're facing a crucial need specifically for curbing emissions in the short-run, but we're unlikely to too rapidly exploit resources by virtue that growth in demand will stall and efficiency will continue to improve. Incidentally that can be a catalyst for change in the way society functions. The significant choice facing us is determining the path we take t…

Don't forget that GDP can go down. And so can wealth. Ukraine just had a trillion dollars worth of growth bombed out of existance. Coal isn't the only resource that can go up in smoke.

Re: Are we running out of resources?

#90

Post by f1yght » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

skywal_l wrote: post #21

verisimi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we should petition the governance structure to create a maximum threshold of 10 million dollars per person. Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit…

Over-utilization of resources and inequalities are two related but distinct problems. Reducing inequalities will typically means more consumption and resources utilization. Those two problems must be solved but solving one will probably amplify the other.

Conversely, could we not push to reduce consumption for the sake of reducing resource usage? There's a ton of waste from mass consumption.