31–40 of 133 posts
Continuous growth is necessary to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If there cannot be continuous growth, who becomes the arbiter of human potential? People who call growth cancer? You can't be serious.
Continuous growth is necessary to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If there cannot be continuous growth, who becomes the arbiter of human potential? People who call growth cancer? You can't be serious.
People grow (in height) for the first ~1.5 decades of their life, and then stop growing. It appears to me that there is more to it.
Continuous growth is necessary to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If there cannot be continuous growth, who becomes the arbiter of human potential? People who call growth cancer? You can't be serious.
People grow (in height) for the first ~1.5 decades of their life, and then stop growing. It appears to me that there is more to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No argument about the point on communism, but as regards the headcount--I was referring to what I've seen mentioned more than a few times in HN comments where, apparently, FAANGs or some teams therein have engineering manager positions where the size of the team that one leads greatly translates to that employee's success (perceived or real) in the company. It's also a good number to look at for recruiters when said…
>I was referring to what I've seen mentioned more than a few times in HN comments where, apparently, FAANGs or some teams therein have engineering manager positions where the size of the team that one leads greatly translates to that employee's success (perceived or real) in the company How does that translate into tech companies overhiring? Even if managers want more people on their team for progression purposes, th…
But, just going by what you said—if budget is supposed to be a constraint, well, FAANGs have the money to waste, don’t they? Also, hiring for hiring’s sake makes sense from a strategic standpoint especially during their respective growth eras—they needed to deplete the industry of the best programmers around, so that entrepreneurs can’t just startup and compete with them and take away their business.
I'd challenge the idea that this is unsustainable because of the specific system. Entropy and resource limits mean whatever we do is unsustainable under any system as far as we tell, both theoretically and in practical timespans. Nobody seems to have an argument for where the physical resources will come from, or how we deal with exponential population growth without just having regular famines (even worse than losin…
You lack holistic understanding of the science behind life and what cancer is. I will explain. And once I'm done, you should understand.
First off most energy on earth comes from the sun. Life feeds off the sun and energy that powers our infra all comes from the sun. Specifically most human energy comes from reservoirs of sun power stored in oil. So energy given to the world is limited in the rate it is delivered from the sun and the rate in which we can harvest that energy. In theory if we harvest energy at a rate slower or equal to the rate energy is given to us by the sun we can harvest energy indefinitely until the sun goes super nova.
That is the hard end. Once the sun goes super nova or runs out of energy, humanity is over. We are done. End of story. But that event is so far away that we don't have to consider it.
Second, cancer cells, are cells that are too efficient and too powerful in such a way that they consume resources too eagerly and commit a sort of suicide by consuming energy so quickly that the rates far exceed energy production.
Life in general DOES not FOLLOW this model. When you examine ecosystems throughout the world you will see that the multitudes of interacting internal systems within them that have evolved to be over-fitted to be extremely stable and operate at EQUILIBRIUM, completely different from cancer.
For example you may have deer keeping the population of grass in check and wolves keeping the population of deer in check in such a way that no population ever gets out of control.
Why does this occur? What black magic is making all ecosystems trend towards this perfect equilibrium? Natural selection. Natural selection happens on the genetic level, but it also happens at a more abstract level, the ecosystem level. Any ecosystem where some creature becomes too efficient overloads the entire ecosystem and it burns out that system. Thus the only thing you have remaining over eons of ecosystem evolution are systems that are in equilibrium because all the other systems overload and are naturally selected out.
You can actually see this happen when you introduce foreign species into a non-native ecosystem. The ecosystem will burn out, the foreign species was over-fitted for a harsher environment and was too efficient for the environment it was introduced to.
It is actually natural for ecosystems to burn out and die. Extinction is PART of natural selection. Suffering, death and destruction and famines are all part of the process of natural selection picking the ecosystem that is balanced, that works.
Humanity in this context is very different from life in general in the sense that we are definitely slowly overloading the system. Life cannot in general cannot be characterized as cancer, but humanity within the context of life CAN be characterized as cancer that's managed to survive for so long because we continuously find new energy reservoirs to exploit. Eventually we will run out given that the rate of energy coming from the sun is limited.
When you look at history at the scale of eons, it's normal. Humanity is suppose to overload. It's not all that bad when you view the situation from an even higher level of abstraction: Evolution and natural selection can happen at the cultural level of civilizations.
So in a sense you can say modern civilization is suppose to overload and humanity is suppose to regress to a more sustainable type of civilization. Hunter and gatherers or tribes that were more sustainable in the past.
Civilization regressing is better than humanity becoming extinct, but even that viewpoint is bleak. There is hope though. Humanity is different from all the overloading ecosystems and creatures that came before it. We are a bit unique in this sense. Humanity is like a cancer cell with a sort of meta awareness.
It's like if you had cancer and your cancer cells formed some sort of neural network and became aware that itself was a cancer. From this awareness we may be able to save ourselves. There is hope, but it's low probability it will pan out given our lack of self control.
>Nobody seems to have an argument for where the physical resources will come from, or how we deal with exponential population growth without just having regular famines (even worse than losing a job!).
This is what irks me. Truth and a solution to a problem are two different things. Just because something doesn't have a solution doesn't mean it's not the truth. Continuous unsustainable growth is bad, lowering entropy to produce technology at our current rate means consuming energy at unsustainable speed. There IS NO solution that will allow us to keep doing this, and you'll have to accept that because it's the bloody truth.
“Growth” at the individual level has become a euphemism It really means extrinsic motivation. It means being willing to play the game to hit whatever milestones are laid out for you. To push yourself for those milestones to reach a reward. Not because those goals are intrinsically rewarding - but because you want to demonstrate what you need for promotion or raise. If the goals were intrinsically rewarding, we would…
In my experience, the "goals" you hit are really capabilities. Can you design bigger systems? Can you lead bigger teams? Can you define winning strategy? Those aren't artificial milestones, they are real things (eg, you'd need them if you ran your own company) and growing from someone who "can't" to someone who "can" is exhilarating.
It'd be nice if managers could determine who can handle more responsibility, but it's basically a crapshoot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People grow (in height) for the first ~1.5 decades of their life, and then stop growing. It appears to me that there is more to it.
That's biology stopping growth. Do you think it'd be a good idea to let the government decide how tall people can grow, if we had the technology for that?
I'd challenge the idea that this is unsustainable because of the specific system. Entropy and resource limits mean whatever we do is unsustainable under any system as far as we tell, both theoretically and in practical timespans. Nobody seems to have an argument for where the physical resources will come from, or how we deal with exponential population growth without just having regular famines (even worse than losin…
The rest of the ecosystem is not benefited by humans being cancer. Humans are not benefited by obliterating biodiversity, although they may not have felt many of its effects yet. Growth is not inherently good, uncontrolled growth is certainly not.
Uncontrolled growth is simply a method of selection. Natural selection.
Continuous growth is necessary to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If there cannot be continuous growth, who becomes the arbiter of human potential? People who call growth cancer? You can't be serious.