One problem about it is that without growth, there's no way European pension commitments will be paid. Growth was baked into these promises and we don't have any.
The system is not designed, and it does not assume indefinite growth. But another way to capture your point is to say our society strives toward constant improvement, which I don't really see an obvious end to. It is always possible to improve, isn't it?
You have to go deeper than that, I think in the end our whole species’ goal is growth at all costs and this is subconsciously baked into every decision we make…
Western political systems, by design, are aiming to make government incapable and gridlocked, in order to prevent dictatorship, and usually do the job quite well - as it seems from the last by-elections, even a very determined would-be dictator with a wide support base, is failing at that.
This is what we want from the government - fuck off, and not get in the way. Sure, it has to tax us in order to keep the serfs from revolting, we understand this danger so are willing to chip in, but that's about it.
Which, given times we live in, makes them look like a great investment. Just look at which stocks made enormous gains in the last 10 years! Perhaps the only large company that did the real thing is SpaceX but you can't buy their stock. The rest sold us bullshit or tools to build even more bullshit (Nvidia that gave us crypto, then NFT, then "AI" - my pet theory is that all of this stuff was invented by their proxies to boost GPU sales).
It's simply a company that operates in a rare industry where safety and reliability is more important than time to market or cost. Which makes risk-averse, hyper-conservative and consensus-seeking European culture at a relative advantage vs American "fake it till you make it" one.
The ROI of using a diesel-powered pump isn't so high so few farmers have one. It means, they work well and those who don't have one, still get some water for their fields, too.
A solar pump is many times cheaper to run. It means ROI of using it is huge and many more people will get them. But it doesn't mean there will now be magically more groundwater to pump!
Which mean, those who don't have a pump, will soon find themselves completely without water - it will be all sucked out by people with pumps. So they will also HAVE to install those pumps.
As a result, no one will be better off because same amount of water will be redistributed among same number of farmers. Even an "arms race" of more and more powerful pumps is likely when people will realise theirs are not working as good anymore now than everyone has one.
All until the point where ROI of having a solar pump will become negligible.
Farmers will not be better off - they will be worse off. Chinese will make money - money funded by Western funds for "reducing" carbon emissions which do not really reduce anything as they are "replacing" diesel pumps 90+% of which did not exist.
And yes, people will also have a little bit of electricity at home - about 100x less than in grid-connected Western homes - a 200-watt panel per household at about 15% average output or maybe 20 KWh per month. It's not enough to run a blowdryer, or kettle, not even a fridge. But enough to charge a tablet to watch online TV - and become far right.
Bingo, enshittification comes to Africa, in it's purest form.
Only good thing about it is that money will go to Chinese vs Arabs for diesel fuel. Chinese are a problem that will gradually solve itself due to demography, while Arabs will not.
I meant to say: this is a new sleek tool to make people compete more intensely against each other in the race to exhaust a limited resource. Just like freelance sites made life of everyone miserable while extracting cash out of them, simply because they did not increase the amount of work available - just forced everyone to compete stronger and pay to play. Until the work was ruined and people simply churned out.
No, what made it unaffordable was scrapping the penalty on not having health insurance. If you force health insurance to cover everyone then you also need to force everyone to have health insurance to keep the system balanced. One way to do that is have everyone automatically covered in a public system: rejected. Another way is to tell people they don’t have to sign up for health insurance but they do have to pay into the system.
Indeed, i have lost 10% of my weight (going from "quite a bit overweight but not obese" to "just barely within normal limit"), and my wife lost whopping 26%, going from obese to totally normal. Idk why.
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