131–140 of 164 posts
So when I think “every important thing in my life is scarce”, that is just incorrect imagination? 11 billion people can live on a lake with perfect child and health care?
Is an 8-acre lake ok? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=world+water+area+%2F+wo...
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I think this is more a consequence of consumerism and the media-nature of modern society and not directly from increased populations. It just seems that way because science allowing for larger food crops, less child mortality, etc. coincided with the rise of media technology.
You are both (at least party) wrong since the demographic transition started as early as 1750 (in France) long before childbirth started to fall and even longer before media technology (unless you count the printing press as one, but then how come the transition happened more than a century later elsewhere in Europe?)
Abundance of food, and local peace is clearly the common denominator for demographic transition. The reason it did not happen in continetal europe is the amount of warring that took place there.
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You are both (at least party) wrong since the demographic transition started as early as 1750 (in France) long before childbirth started to fall and even longer before media technology (unless you count the printing press as one, but then how come the transition happened more than a century later elsewhere in Europe?)
To be fair, the black death killed France's first demographic transition, China might have had 2, and it is possible that one happened during the golden age of Islam too (and we don't know nearly enough about mesoamerican natives). Abundance of food, and local peace is clearly the common denominator for demographic transition. The reason it did not happen in continetal europe is the amount of warring that took place…
Never heard of that, any sources to recommend on the topic?
> Abundance of food, and local peace is clearly the common denominator for demographic transition
That sounds really suspicious as description of France in the eighteenth century…
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> but the full report does outline a path forward should sufficient numbers of people and companies take heed. Sure, but a path that depends on companies caring about anything other than profit is a dead end. Companies do not care about ethics, and exceptional (as in, exceptions to the rule) people like Yvonne Chouinard have had to go to great lengths to create atypical corporate structures that may not even work in…
In a way, companies are simply groups of humans working together. Who is to say that the rottenness emerges from the working together, or whether it is already present in the individual humans? Pre-capitalist societies are known to be even more murder-driven than the current one. Consult the Old Testament for some tips on how to be moral assholes.
I mean, no, companies are a lot more than that.
> Who is to say that the rottenness emerges from the working together, or whether it is already present in the individual humans?
Who cares? Certainly not me. The source of the rottenness isn't particularly relevant to the fact that it's happening and people aren't doing anything about it.
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> Ultimately you are right. We will ultimately and inevitably face resource constraints. How we respond and which resources will provide the limiting constraint is unclear. Why? Keep in mind that it is not evident that population will continue to grow.
You are absolutely right. In ecology (which mimics the scaling of any physical system) population responds to resource stresses. I consider this a signal of resource scarcity. As for why it's inevitable: we have unbounded ability to innovate and become resource efficient -market forces will guide this. However there are fixed constraints that will stress human behavior in ways we can't necessarily predict. Some of th…
Resource scarcity is not the only thing that causes population to plateau. Human intelligence is a pretty huge variable here which allows us to do things like fulfill our evolutionary urges without producing children. I'll agree that scarcity causes population to plateau, but I don't agree that a plateau in population is inherently an indication of scarcity.
It's rather silly to talk about hypothetical ecological populations in a void, when we can observe the actual populations we're trying to make predictions about.
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"Other human institutions cause harm, therefore it's okay for corporations to cause harm"? Really? I'm not trying to find a human institution that's pure, nor do I believe any other human institutions are pure. I'm trying to get people to a) stop believing that corporations are morally pure, and b) stop doing nothing about the fact that corporations aren't morally pure. EDIT: Let's not go the direction where you assu…
A 'corporation' is just a group of people who've signed a pile of contracts, sometimes all physically located in one jurisdiction, but often in multiple simultaneously. So it doesn't seem likely anyone on HN ever genuinely thought they all groups of people are 'morally pure'. If they seemed like it they were probably just pulling your leg or trolling. It's even less likely that anyone actually does 'nothing' when the…
Right, that was just a straw man argument the person I was responding to was making.
> It's even less likely that anyone actually does 'nothing' when they encounter groups of suspicious people in real life, unless they are an extreme doormat.
I have never been talking about abstract people doing nothing when they encounter abstract suspicious people. You're also making a straw man argument.
I'm talking about a pervasive culture of Hacker News who not only does nothing, but actively opposes doing anything to prevent corporations (not abstract suspicious entities) from causing harm. A significant portion of HN unequivocally opposes any regulation of companies and will defend all sorts of horrible corporate behaviors. This isn't an assumption, it's an observation of reality.
EDIT: It's literally an observation of a reality which is occurring in this chain of posts. You don't have to go far to observe it.
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K. Now you get to choose what "worthwhile" means. Borderline sociopathic self-gratification or communal striving for an improved human condition.
Who gets to decide what "improved human condition" means and what if large segments of the population disagree on what it means?
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K. Now you get to choose what "worthwhile" means. Borderline sociopathic self-gratification or communal striving for an improved human condition.
Vilifying opposing views on "worthwhile" as "borderline sociopathic self-gratification" seems dogmatic and perhaps even projective.
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"[A]ccess to resources is determined strictly by how competent individuals are at acquiring and hoarding resources" This claim seems highly implausible to me as well. There is enough food in my house to feed its occupants for about a week. Is that "hoarding"? I have retirement savings put by so that I will be able to support myself once I stop working. Is that "hoarding"? What determines what you call "access to reso…
>So their people have no incentive to create any wealth through cooperation and trade, since they're not going to gain any benefit from it anyway. In other words, they know they will have no private property rights in what they produce, so they don't bother producing. That sounds way too much like capitalism. >What determines what you call "access to resources" (itself a misleading way to put it, IMO) in developed co…
No, it's basic free market economics. "Free market" does not mean the same thing as capitalism, although many capitalists (i.e., people who want to get their hands on as much capital as they can, by hook or by crook) like to claim that it does. Free markets promote freedom and wealth creation. Capitalism can under some circumstances, but under others it undermines those things. Many people feel that currently it is doing the latter.
> "Trade" only makes sense to the extent that human labor is in demand.
Human labor is always in demand. Even for "resources" which are in "excess production", those resources still have to be transported to the people that need them. For example, food grown in the US in excess of what people in the US need to eat needs to be transported to somewhere else in the world where people are hungry. That requires human labor, and that need for human labor is ongoing, because people don't stop needing to eat when you've given them food once. That process represents wealth creation and is always happening.
Also, people have needs and wants far above bare subsistence. The medium in which we are having this conversation would not exist in a bare subsistence world. Neither would countless other things that people value even if they are not strictly necessary for bare subsistence. There are always things that can be produced and traded to create more wealth.
> A bullshit job, if you want to call it that.
Sure, there are lots of bullshit jobs, but even if you eliminated them all, you wouldn't be eliminating the need for human labor. You would just be redirecting human labor towards more productive uses, i.e., towards actually creating wealth instead of just pretending to. That's a good thing.
Even in some utopian future where the vast majority of production processes are automated, so the amount of human labor needed to, say, produce food, is minimal, there will still be human labor required to do other things--like decide what things to produce. Also, in such a world, the price of all those things produced by automation would be close to zero, since the marginal cost of their production would be close to zero. So the drastic reduction in human labor required to produce the necessities of life would be reflected in a drastic reduction in the cost of the necessities of life. That is what "no more scarcity" should look like.
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> but the full report does outline a path forward should sufficient numbers of people and companies take heed. Sure, but a path that depends on companies caring about anything other than profit is a dead end. Companies do not care about ethics, and exceptional (as in, exceptions to the rule) people like Yvonne Chouinard have had to go to great lengths to create atypical corporate structures that may not even work in…
Companies with shareholders, expecially long term institution investors, can be bent to care about more than simple profits - while still profiting albeit not as much as if they chased nothing but maximal short term gains. Pressure is on various traditional fossil fuel comanies to pivot into being long term energy providers rather than being solely relient on fossil fuel extraction . Countries are well able to strike…
I said companies care about profits, not short-term or long-term profits, and the distinction between short- and long-term still doesn't bring in ethics.
> Pressure is on various traditional fossil fuel comanies to pivot into being long term energy providers rather than being solely relient on fossil fuel extraction.
And that pressure isn't working, because corporations care about profits not "pressure".[1] Note that the downtick in production is clearly explained by the pandemic; oil and gas have returned to almost pre-pandemic levels, and coal, arguably the worst of the three, has surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
> Countries are well able to strike deal with fossil fuel extractors to invest in parallel atmospheric carbon extraction (although that's largely a kiss on a sabre cut to date).
This is exactly the sort of pro-corporate nonsense that I'm talking about here. Fossil fuel extractors should be forced, not asked, to pay, not get paid for the damage they are causing. Why on earth would we pay our tax money to subsidize the companies who knew about climate change and tried to discredit it for decades, and continue to profit from pulling carbon out of the ground and distributing it into our atmosphere? You're literally proposing we reward these companies for the harm they cause, at the same time as openly admitting it has so far produced no results.
At some point you've got to admit you are more pro-corporate than you are pro-solving climate change if this is the sort of solution you think is reasonable. Mind you, I'm not questioning your intentions here, I'm saying intentions don't matter here.
> That said large scale consumers, entire countries, purchasing blocs, can put pressure on resource providers to change behaviour, and on secondary processing to take increased input from recycled materials.
Recycling plastic isn't real, it's a greenwashing campaign by petroleum companies.[2][3][4] This is not a solution, will never be a solution, and was never even intended to be a solution.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-production
[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...
[3] https://www.earthday.org/plastic-recycling-is-a-lie/
[4] https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/the-passionate-eye/recyclin...