Yes that, or traded up in their brokerage account, or didnt pay rent with, or didnt pay their student loans for 3 years with, or collected unemployment + amped up state benefit for a year plus while not paying those other things
But about those savings: nothing about our economy is about rewarding savers, every single aspect of monetary and fiscal policy is to promote transactions in the economy
If not to another person for consumptive reasons, they want savings to go into assets
If you want to save in its currency the governments will tax you the most, up to 55% if you’re self employed anywhere Americans have a 1/3rd chance of living
If you do what the government is pointing at with big blaring neon signs, you’ll often get taxed 0% and be paid a tax rebate for doing do.
>But about those savings: nothing about our economy is about rewarding savers, every single aspect of monetary and fiscal policy is to promote transactions in the economy
Because saving is not stuffing money under a mattress, it is investing it for a presumed return. And many major voting blocks benefit by hitting the presumed returns, which happens by promoting transactions.
> Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age.
I think the OP would say oil is "basically not a catastrophic resource shortage." This seems like a typical misinterpretation of exponential growth as linear growth. There's literally fixed mass on the planet. Growth cannot continue forever no matter how many geniuses it might produce.
When it comes to our ability to just find a substitute, past results don't predict future results. The author is like somebody who thinks because a stock went up in the past it's a good buy without looking at the fundamentals.
Oil made the 20th century absolutely explode in terms of population growth, we went from less than 2B to more than 6B in the 20th century and 8B now. Whale oil, elephant tusks, and seabird guano did nothing like that. How does one reasonably expect to replace a miracle? Electrification comes nowhere close, not that it isn't worth doing.
You mean... Kind of like living? Are you the same now as you were a year ago? I find it scarier to think that my personality might become static! Plasticity is the ability to learn new things.
Well, no, and that's the point! It's not like living, it's an alteration to the natural course of life. Whether it's without negative consequences or not remains to be seen.
This is kinda the nature of life. I struggled with depression until my mid-late 20s. At 35, my high school years seem like a blur - my college years are starting to feel the same. I'm pretty ok with this.
You honestly don't think they "knew how seeds work"? It's not like you can't turn over leaves and see a literal plant growing out of a seed.
Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on? Why would you try growing something that doesn't want to grow there? Particularly "crops" that ultimately end up destroying the native life of islands. See palm/rubber/coffee/tea plantations.
There’s more to knowing how to manage seeds effectively than knowing plants grow from them.
>why…when you get enough..
That’s the problem, you don’t always get enough, and when you don’t people die. Usually the children and old folks first. Creating your own food supply reduces that risk.
>ultimately end up destroying…
You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow.
Hunter gatherers range over vast expanses of territory, they have to. A few fields is insignificant in comparison. Of course that grows with the population, but that’s the far future for anyone trying to survive right now at the point agriculture becomes an option.
There's a lot to indicate at least the vast majority of the tribes didn't understand seeds (or sex-childbirth link for that matter).
>Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on?
So that you don't have to walk many miles a day foraging and kill all but one of your babies at a time, cause you can't carry any more. Basically, same reason as anyone else who went from hunting/gathering to farming.
Also Aborigines had no trouble burning forests to make grounds more attractive to animals they hunted, eventually converting varied biomes to eucalyptus forests, so the purported do-no-harm attitude is proven bullshit.
> Here's this one example, so therefore this is proven bullshit
Nice logic.
What is "a lot" that indicates the majority of tribes didn't understand that babies happen when sex happens? Have you ever heard folk stories or native stories about birth and death?
If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster. This much is on obvious. The goal of living isn't to create as many more humans as possible.
It's like you're offended that humans would follow the same natural path as animals where access to resources is finite. Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources
It's not one example, there's plenty. If you want another, Aborigines hunted down everything larger than a kangaroo to extinction.
Aboriginal stories largely say that it's Rainbow Serpent that brings in babies. This more or less matches the pattern of constant hunger that made women infertile outside of a small window around the rain season. It's understood that the rest of the world figured out the link from observing domestic animals, something absent in Australia of the time.
There are multiple papers trying to tackle this non-understanding, including ridiculous propositions that they all kinda know, but "repress" the knowledge.
>If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster.
Having to kill your own children is disaster.
>Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources
Yes, it's very much desirable that nobody is hungry, sick, or murdered. Yes, learning to get more resources from what you have is also very much desirable. And yes, it's bad and evil if instead people kill babies and murder each other over food like animals.
Before you ask, yes there are plenty of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories depicting someone stealing food and getting killed.
And there's no counterpart to the Genesis myth that would say that X shagged B and they had a child.
So the ideal is no one ever dies (most good!) while everyone makes more people (more good!). I guess eventually we'll figure out how to eat rocks. It's not sustainable. Earth is an island that has finite resources. We're covering it in crops to feed humanity, but in the process of doing so are making the planet less hospitable. Should we act now to prevent what we know will happen if we continue pretending like expansion is the only way?
There might be no ideal, but it's very much preferable that everyone has a good run and nobody has to kill their kids or die of pneumonia at 20 or some such.
How much to breed is a separate question, but equilibrium with the environment doesn't have to be at the point of paleolithic misery.
I think I can agree there's a happy middle ground somewhere between "paleolithic misery" and "late stage capitalism climate change induced neolithic misery". Both are extremes of misery of a sort. There's still plenty of suffering now... More if you consider the difference in population between the paleolithic and now.
A global society which works collaboratively to maintain both our modern technosphere _and_ a livable, habitable biosphere. Progress doesn't have to come with all of its current negative externalities -- most of them are driven by short-term profit driven thinking that doesn't take our collective biosphere into account.
Guess we could think of the Giza Pyramids as a counter-example. Plenty
of religious monuments got built on the bones of slaves.
But I wonder, factoring out the physical toil, whether future generations
might look at giant technological monoliths, maybe The Internet of 2100
and say;
"Those techies were unhappy slaves. they laboured in basements and
cubicles. They wrote code just to eat! It was obscenely inhuman."
Or maybe historians might pore through HN archives and say;
"Those who believed in the Great Singularity", devoted their lives
out of religious fervour. Many of them wrote code without being
paid, just because they had a vision. "
Or maybe there will be no trace of us. Anyway, history can tell us
facts about what happened, but maybe isn't so good at telling us what
went on the minds and dreams of people past.
> Guess we could think of the Giza Pyramids as a counter-example. Plenty of religious monuments got built on the bones of slaves.
im not arguing it they died during construction. My point is that a lot of them were undoubtedly proud of the work they produced, not even all the workers on the pyramids were slaves so thats pretty telling imo. Also i am one of those "techies" and i have been involved in projects i didnt initially have passion for, and in all cases i ended up coming around because it was something i worked on daily. Thats what im saying happened with the workers in churches/pyramids, surely some of them.
Is this saying that slavery is justified as long as the goal is something "monumental"? As long as some slaves are "proud" of the work they're being _forced_ to do _on penalty of death_ then we can at least rest assured that their pride in humanity was boosted at the amazing spectacle of a giant pile of rocks built on behalf of an oppressor. Oof.
I read this the same way. Any divide will be exploited to keep us from getting mad over all time high corporate profits unaccompanied by any benefit to the workers, the actual value creators.
"Ahh, cool, you want me to help blue collar workers unionize to get more leverage and agency against low empathy high status demanding usually elderly (55+) management. You got it boss."
> I'd also submit that he and his cohort has no idea—no idea how much anger there is about what he and his cohort have done to make every aspect of life flatter and crueler and riskier and worse, and no idea how lucky he is that all that rage is still being pointed in, and not up.
