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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Just finished reading Affluence Without Abundance https://www.amazon.com/Affluence-Without-Abundance-Disappear... about bushmen who live in southern Africa.

It turns out people have lived in southern Africa for 200,000 years, hunting and gathering.

Westerners show up, run out of water in a couple hundred years, and call them "developing."

The book is an eye-opener.

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The people you are speaking about, the Bushmen, were wiped out by the Nguni pastoralists and the European settlers. A few descendents remain. They are not in power here. As for Westerners... they haven't been in power for more than 20 years (if you call the Apartheid government western?). Infrastructural development has slowed down mostly due to graft. Secondly, we are talking about a tiny region of Southern Africa. The rest of it is mostly fine.

Turns out having the most guns doesn't make you the most enlightened.

Yes, but hunting and gathering in the bush doesn't do a damn about increasing technology and getting us off this planet. All it takes is one planetary scale disaster, and we're done for.

Actually from what I've read, hunter gatherers had 8+ hours of free time per day. They weren't constantly running in fear of predators as usually thought. There was plenty of time for invention if inclined.

We're spinning our tires aiming to expatriate from the planet in lieu of a planetary scale disaster. We are better equipped to fix our own damn rock in space than to fuck up another one.

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