Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You know, everyone blames the mega rich. I blame everyone else. If you're completely honest and you assume that shits going to hit the fan, would you care more about the happiness of 1 billion random people you've never met or the happiness of 100 that you know? On paper you'll say 1 billion, but in reality if someone shoots your mother you cry, if someone shoots someone in Syria you most likely won't ever notice.

But here's a list of things partly responsible:

1. The mere idea that justice is something that will be served at some point is ludicrous. There's no universal concept of morality to begin with. The more money you have, the less like you are to be indicted or pay penalties for virtually anything. Why would you give that might away?

2. That disgusting cult of happiness that is more prevalent in San Francisco than anywhere else in the world is the very foundation of forcing people to be happy with what they have. Institutions like Landmark Forum that are actually requirements for certain management positions make sure that people don't actually critique or change things that are messed up.

3. Everyone knows that we're eating up our resources and dump the rest into the seas all the while doing so. The result is that a lot of things available today will be luxury super rich items in the not too distant future. Tuna and Cocoa amongst them(just wait and see). If I had money I'd invest in huge warehouses to make money with those things in 20-30 years. That's exactly what superwealthy do. There have been more than one buyouts in bankrupt countries in the last couple of years. Buying resources while everyone is hoping for the utopia where we can create something from nothing.

4. The only way this stuff could possibly change we pull the handbreak right now. But it's absurd to think that that's a possibility. Nobody even so much dares to talk about the consequences of a full stop change. If you do, you're the pessimist. People don't want a change of course, they want the illusion of change so that can stay happy until they crash in the cement wall at 200mp/h.

At the very least I have enough Schadenfreude in me to always enjoy these arguably predictable changes like the refugee "crisis" in europe

Everyone knows that we're eating up our resources and dump the rest into the seas all the while doing so. The result is that a lot of things available today will be luxury super rich items in the not too distant future.

Not sure how old you are, i.e. did you live through the '70s "Limits to Growth" Zeitgeist era? If not try, say, watching the 1973 movie Soylent Green, where the two protagonists just marvel at a jar of strawberry preserves they found in the dwelling of a rich person, and then go to your favorite grocery store's jams and jellies section....

Maybe someday we'll see that future you envision, but having already lived through at least one cycle of this, not to mention the ongoing global cooling -> global warming -> climate change one, I don't worry quite so much (and by now have a lot more than just these surface level observations to base that on).

ADDED: And this was a major theme of Heinlein in his '50s juveniles, most directly his 4th, published in 1950, Farmer in the Sky, but also see his last really good book, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966, where it was plot significant that the moon colony (or was it colonies?) grew wheat and shot it back to the Earth using a mass driver.

Have you considered the possibility that those scary predictions were only wrong about the timeline rather than the eventual outcome? Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time.

Yes, I both can and do do math, "Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time" is not a true let alone useful statement. Although I'll grant it's demonstrably true of the doomsayers who made and continue to make such confident predictions while not accounting for many things, most especially human ingenuity (look at Paul Ehrlich for example).

They tend to have little or no grasp of the market mechanism ... well, they tend to be central controller types, without realizing the information theoretic limitations of that approach. For example, when faced with externalities, they invariably go high without even considering low (one example I remember reading was some European country requiring plant water intakes being downstream of outflows, and that's about as simple as you can get).

Anyway, one of my points there is that the demonstrated inability of those guys to predict the future should not be extrapolated to the rest of us ^_^.

Plus we haven't tapped the tiniest fraction of the the Solar System's resources, and much of the Earth's remain their for the picking, at some cost in money, and as of late in the West, to the fashion sense of our elites (although I grant you coal is nasty stuff).

Yeah, some day we'll run out of resources in the Solar System, but that's so so far in the future, we probably have to worry more about the Singularity, or too many nuclear wars ... see The Moat In God's Eye for a look at that, which has one co-author who thought well and deeply of the '70s Limits to Growth garbage. (And even took advantage of it to be able to write more realistic SF, if you freeze most scientific developments....)

How does anthropogenic climate change fit into your understanding of events and how our future on this planet is developing?

This apocalyptic view of climate change isn't based on reality. What is the big danger to the human kind?

Warming? Cooling? It won't make the earth inhabitable. Humans live in a wide range of temperature.

Permanent flooding? It won't happen overnight but over centuries. Humans move.

Drought? We're making huge progress on solar desalination (thanks to Israelis efforts). Humans are ingenuous.

And this is without taking into account Alaska and Siberia, two gigantic regions that would become more and more hospitable.

Fear-mongering is a useful persuasion weapon, until it backfires.

Ethically speaking, what should developed nations do to assist people living in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, who have no resources with which to relocate, and are already suffering the consequences of climate change? I consider it a catastrophic situation, even though I'm personally not among the sick, dying, or refugees. I don't think it's fear-mongering to acknowledge the massive harm industrial nations are causing to real human beings, and to demand solutions of policy-makers, even if those solutions are costly.

That might be reasonable to consider if we didn't keep getting better at making the resources we need and making them accessible. For something like 14 of the past 15 decades food production per capita has gone up worldwide despite a preposterous increase in population.

Some things are losing out, like the rainforests and it sucks. But them being cut down is not an existential threat to humanity. If can encourage even more globalization and event better trade maybe we can feed those still starving before they cut down all the rainforests for subsistence farming.

Sadly we have to trust that we can come up with some difficult but possible technical solutions to big problems. How are we going to capture CO2. If we can do that we can mitigate wars caused by droughts caused by climate change.

I'm probably one of the people you hate. Global warming is real and is accelerated by humans. I still don't give a damn. I will throw all my waste in the trash and drive gasoline vehicles. I'll let someone else fix it.

I'll care about the Earth when I can feel like I can actually own a piece of it. I have no skin in the game, really, other than some vague dread of total environmental collapse.

Ted Turner, now, he has a great reason to be an environmentalist. Let the burden of environmental protection fall primarily on those who claim the most ownership of it. If Ted wants me to separate my recyclables and watch TBS on a TV constructed from recycled material and powered solely by renewables, he can damn well pay me something to do all that.

You don't ask the team that loses by 50 points every game to start playing with their shoelaces tied together. And you don't ask the poor to sacrifice for the benefit of the rich. Developing nations are going to burn coal, and non-rich people are going to eat from disposable paper plates and then not recycle them. Environmentalism is a luxury, and only those who already have a sense of economic security will buy in to it.

But as long as I have an "at will" job and no more attachment to the land than a one-year lease, I'm not going to feel all that motivated.

Well some might consider their children as "skin in the game" but still. As far as I am concerned having children is also a luxury. At least it should be considered so, from my moral perspective.

Kids are not inextricably attached to any particular part of this planet. And many parents have no piece of it to give to them after they die, anyway. If I have kids, they would be in roughly the same situation I am in.

The situation is roughly analogous to the entire world being a city block filled with apartment buildings. A few people own all the buildings. Most people rent apartments from them. The buildings are not extraordinary. They need maintenance and repair, or they will deteriorate. But for whatever reason, the building owners are not responding to maintenance requests in a timely fashion. (But woe to you if your rent check is even half a day late!)

Some tenants, alarmed by the state of their surroundings, spend their own time and money, over and above their monthly rent, to do repairs. But none of the tenants can address all the problems on their own. At most, they can patch up a cracked window, re-wrap the ductwork with better insulation, tighten plumbing connections. No one has the resources to both pay the rent and also pay extra for all the repairs they might want.

Some tenants do nothing, because it is the landlords' responsibility to maintain the properties. Also, they don't have enough money to spend on it, anyway. If the landlords want to be slumlords, then surely it would be possible to move to a better-kept building when things get too bad. Except--whoops!--the landlords that do invest more in maintenance are not accepting new tenants. The properties for sale are too expensive for any slum-renter to buy.

In analogy form, the solution seems obvious, does it not?

And you have at most a 110 year lease on the matter of your body.

I'm going to try to leave this place better than it was given to me. Even if it is a small corner.

This is a prevalent theme of Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" (https://thischangeseverything.org/)

That the current system as it stands is not built to let us combat climate change, and we need to change the system too.

the tragedy of the commons

"There's no universal concept of morality to begin with."

There is universal morality, the one embedded in genes of most people. We are social creatures, and we understand concepts like tit-for-tat.

For a contrary opinion, I turn to the character of Lord Vetinari, written by Terry Pratchett:

> [...] "I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy.

> One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

The fact that we have morality (on average) doesn't imply it's always pretty. Nor does it imply that it scales well to modern society with billions of people.

If there is evil in this world, it lies in the heart of mankind.

-Edward Morrison

> universal ... most

wut

>Institutions like Landmark Forum that are actually requirements for certain management positions

Can you elaborate on that? I always thought of them as some occultish clowns.

Landmark forum is scary. I know a few people who are members. Most are deeply in need of mental health treatment.

There's nothing stopping you from buying cocoa futures and rolling them over indefinitely for the next twenty years. In fact, in an efficient market the cost of doing so is equal to the cost of maintaining your own warehouse.

Why "crisis"? The situation is not bad enough to warrant the term crisis, in your opinion?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com