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Ordinary Abundance

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Re: Ordinary Abundance

#171

Post by aianus »

goda90 wrote: post #44
incorporeal wrote: post #6

I think about this stuff a lot. It's crazy how I, like, water plants with clean water that's literally on tap. Warm showers on-demand are a daily miracle. Immediate illumination for why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this would be achieved by replacing the aesthetic of this presentation with mis-matched uncomfortable and ugly furniture picked up off the side of the road, in a cheap split-level or ra…

If we could somehow start getting the upper-middle class and the upper class, and the upper-upper class to appreciate the ordinary abundance, it might cure them of the greed that drives wealth extraction at the detriment of those in lower classes. Like if everyone in the healthcare industry, from clinician to supplier to R&D to administrators, were satisfied with an ordinarily abundant life, then those medical bills…

Elon and Bezos aren't extracting anything from me.

The investments of the rich (at least in America) translate directly into employment and innovation.

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#172

Post by zug_zug »

Maybe the takeaway is that the things we assume we really want aren't the things that make us happy. Okay living in our own perfect little apartment sounds ideal in our head, but a completely mundane risk-free modern life that is entirely regimented and has no interdependence, though comfortable, may lose us far more essential emotional pieces than it gains us.

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#173

Post by circlefavshape »

nradov wrote: post #123
techblueberry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like in discussions about nostalgia, there can be this default presentish reaction which talks about all of the things that are better But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farmin…

Happiness doesn't matter. It's not a useful metric for anything important.

What? 100% disagree! Do you actually mean this? What do you think is important?

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#174

Post by throwthrowuknow »

xg15 wrote: post #168
nradov wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be a capitalist instead of a laborer then you can just go do that. There's never been a better time to start a company and be your own boss.

Yeah, just become an Uber driver and you can be your own boss... oh wait, suddenly your only customer - Uber - can dictate exactly how you do your job. We've had that game before. Ask yourself why a the capitalists are so eager to make everyone else a "capitalist" too: Because the relationship between companies is even more adversarial and bent on domination than a formalized employer-employee relationship. Every CEO…

Being an Uber driver has nothing to do with starting your own business.

You don’t even need to start a business to be a capitalist, just buy capital that can earn you money. That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#175

Post by techblueberry »

watwut wrote: post #162
techblueberry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like in discussions about nostalgia, there can be this default presentish reaction which talks about all of the things that are better But in the hedonic adaptation sense like - and comparisons are complicated - people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farmin…

> people aren’t by and large happier now (because of the hedonism this is sidestepping the argument of how well distributed it is, and I’m talking the past 50-100 years not compared to subsistence farming and the like early Industrial Revolution etc et al Funnily, this range contains WWII, great depression, run up to them and falldown from them. It all involved a lot of royally unhappy desperate people. It is also sh…

I mean it also includes 2008, COVID and the Ukrainian war. I’m talking about material hedonic adaptation, not have things ever sucked in the past 100 years.

Suicide rates are also up and s/alcoholism/fentanyl addiction/. Funny you bring up gambling because gambling is also up. Rural areas famously peaked in the like mid 20th century and haven’t recovered.

My argument isn’t the typical “gosh the good old days”. It’s more just like the iPhone didn’t make us happier. I might also predict many of the trends you identified are more correlated with economic success than technological evolution.

If we keep on the trend we’re on and America has lost its post war economic domination, those numbers are going to keep looking worse, cute cat videos be damned.

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#176

Post by palmotea »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #174
xg15 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, just become an Uber driver and you can be your own boss... oh wait, suddenly your only customer - Uber - can dictate exactly how you do your job. We've had that game before. Ask yourself why a the capitalists are so eager to make everyone else a "capitalist" too: Because the relationship between companies is even more adversarial and bent on domination than a formalized employer-employee relationship. Every CEO…

Being an Uber driver has nothing to do with starting your own business. You don’t even need to start a business to be a capitalist, just buy capital that can earn you money. That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.

> You don’t even need to start a business to be a capitalist, just buy capital that can earn you money.

Step 1: be rich.

> That can be as simple as putting a portion of your savings in stocks or as proletarian as buying a lawnmower and a trailer and mowing people’s lawns for extra cash.

No, that's not being a capitalist. You're not living of the proceeds of your capital, you're living off the proceeds of your labor. The proof: if you stop pushing that mower, your business (or your profits) collapse. "Being your own boss" != being a capitalist.

Now if you can buy 100 mowers and 100 trailers and hire 100 people to push them (plus a couple managers), you might be able to become a bottom-rung capitalist.

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#177

Post by nradov »

saturn8601 wrote: post #122
xnx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a Netflix Chaos Monkey tool for modern life. Each week one modern convenience stops working for a day: indoor plumbing, air conditioning, electricity, wifi, automobile, air travel etc. after one day without, you will again appreciate those things for the next few years

I don't know about others...but thats just home ownership or life in general ha ha Life is a series of maintenance tasks + a few moments of rest and happiness followed by death. I think millenials like minimalism for many reasons but some may be the trauma of having clutter in their boomer parents home as well as the idea that each item is a liability. Each item needs a place to rest, possibly time spent maintaining…

The living experience you're describing might be annoying but it's not actual trauma. I think some younger people are too quick to use that word and it trivializes real trauma.

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#178

Post by nradov »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #136
tshaddox wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hedonic adaptation is a very good thing. Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization. Open-ended progress is the only chance civilization has to survive (and even that's not a guarantee). There is an infinite sequence of future problems to be solved. Each time you solve a problem, you don't reduce the total number of future problems, but you are left with one or more better problems than you…

> Culture or technological stasis is a death sentence for civilization Why?

Stasis leads to increasing entropy and a sclerotic inability to adapt to changing circumstances. You're either growing or dying: there is no middle ground.

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#179

Post by nradov »

breuleux wrote: post #137
tshaddox wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anything like a "general speed limit applied to experimentation" makes sense. In general we should move as fast as possible. When there's a specific explanation why a specific experiment should move slowly (or even be prohibited), I respect that, but the explanation can't just be "we don't know all the bad things that might happen as a result of this experiment." That's the precautionary principle, whic…

I'm describing a speed limit applied to production , not experimentation. We can progress science, knowledge and technology all we want without necessarily committing every resource we can find to producing ten times more stuff than we need. Moving too quickly in terms of production can be detrimental to progress: first movers can and often do take over entire markets, leaving no room for the often better-designed se…

Nah. Rapid, unconstrained growth in the early production and use of fossil fuels was one of the greatest factors ever in saving lives and improving quality of life worldwide. Stopping that would have condemned millions to poverty, darkness, and death.

And it's a moot point anyway because there was no way to slow down even if some people wanted to.

Re: Ordinary Abundance

#180

Post by idiotsecant »

techblueberry wrote: post #35
idiotsecant wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, OK but this is clearly romanticizing away the fact that you are deeply dependent on these services. See how long you can just sit and enjoy the stars when your indoor plumbing and refrigeration goes away, and more importantly when your neighbors go away, not to mention the billions of little moving parts that must operate flawlessly for something like the global supply chain that brings you those shorts you wea…

Fair enough, but I do think there are diminishing returns beyond the basics, and there’s a hierarchy. We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people. Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe a…

Wood burning fireplaces are, in general, very dirty. There are pellet stoves that are cleaner but it's not a suitable heating method for high population densities. It's fine for rural areas. Many people have them in rural areas, myself included
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