Hacker News Reader

Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

Lacks depth: in order to be innovative we need focus, in order to have focus we need to be specialized, in order to be specialized we need to not focus on growing food when we program (or do brain surgery or rocket science). These support structures are necessary for competitive innovation (though I completely feel your pain).

So if you want to make this argument, you need to figure out a way that it doesn't matter if the US competes globally anymore. That's the only way this works. Otherwise you just make us non competitive in the global market. When everyone else stops growing we can too, but unfortunately until then it's going to be pretty hard to convince people to stop consuming.

View on HN

I think he was trying to get us to focus on not being called consumers first. Personally, I agree, it's an assumption that puts too much power in corporate hands. I agree with you as well, though, that it would require quite a large change for us to stop being consumers.

I think he has conflated two words: "consumer" and "buyer" - he doesn't seem too concerned with consumption as he is with buying things.

We are all consumers - I eat 3 square meals a day, I burn some amount of fuel to keep myself warm, and I breathe an awfully large amount of air. The author here doesn't seem too concerned with whether this consumption is excessive, though.

Whether or not we start producing more of what we consume, or we go back to a barter economy (which, if you'd pardon the bluntness, is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard recently) doesn't change our level of consumption, so his real problem is with buying crap.

So let's not confuse the two terms.

But we are also producers; most of us have to be in order to acquire money with which to purchase goods to consume. His point, initially at least, was that choosing to label ourselves as consumers leads to a discussion framed in terms of that behavior, at the expense of really evaluating all our options.

Well it's probably not good to not call us consumers if that's what we are doing. I'm a big believer in being honest and trying to be happy with your lifestyle, not repressing the truth to find happiness.

As for the comment about us being producers, while partially true the ratio between what you produce and what you consume is much more arbitrary than it should be. So we all sort of have to produce, but few do it in sync with the amount they consume (not pointing fingers or saying I do - I definitely don't).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com