Hacker News Reader

Getting a new smartphone is what people want. They wouldn't have an exciting thing to gift or to receive on Christmas. They would get tired of the way it looks all the time. They wouldn't be able to show it off to their friends. They wouldn't be delighted with the new UI. Life would be a bit more boring in one more way.

Why would you say no to them?

Not the most important thing in the world? Sure. Something that millions of people want and are willing to spend 1% of their annual pay check? Yes.

Saying that it makes no sense constitutes a very destructive thinking. When you start thinking of what "makes" or "not makes" sense, you stop being empathetic. There's always a better, "more right", more proper thing to do and millions of people are just wasting their time on something they don't need. But aren't they human beings? Isn't having irrational wants rooted in the humanity itself?

Planned economy was dealing in the same maxims. "People need food". "People need shelter". Also tools and military equipment. Fashion clothes? Nah, screw that, useless. Beauty items? Shenanigans of capitalists. Some variety of food? We don't have resources for that.

We know how that ended up.

I think it's a false dichotomy.

We use money and investment as a distributed resource allocation system.

It's kind of worked so far, but it is fundamentally flawed and on a catastrophic trajectory.

We've created a self-amplifying dissipative system without any kind of braking system, and we're already wasting the earth away faster than it regenerates.

The growth religion must be dispelled. I hope we can find a system that captures the positive aspects of capitalism while stopping the current destruction/consumption wave.

> Why would you say no to them?

Maybe you misunderstood my point, but I certainly wouldn't say no! Planned economy is far worse: it's mostly the same thing, but without the smiles.

Isn't it funny, the amount of things like this that go on in the system we've created. Like how weird is it that "competition" - two companies both working on the same things against each other, without sharing what they know - can be better for the consumer than if both companies worked together. None of this is really going to change unless we can somehow make a world where making the world a truly better place can be a more powerful driver than money.

It isn't so weird when you remember that is how evolution works with biological creatures as well. If we all got together and tried to agree on the next singular mutation to our DNA, the whole thing just wouldn't work.

It seems to me like competing companies actually are incentivised to share information with each other. That would allow them both to cut costs. Does anyone know why they don't do this? Or know of examples where they do do this?

Of course competition would force them both to lower prices after they cut costs, but this will lead to increased demand so both companies should be making more profit. Also if they have a third competitior then they will both be gaining customers from them.

EDIT: Actually this happens all the time, just mediated by money. My economist brain switched off for a second. I was imagining a situation like "You tell us that trade secret in exchange for this one". But this situtation would require a "coincidence of wants". Money alleviates that problem. So this does happen all the time, it just looks more like "Even though you're our competitors we'll give you secret X in exchange for $n".

> Does anyone know why they don't do this? Or know of examples where they do do this?

Just about any capital-intensive industry cooperates. Your computer is made by any one of a few dozen companies; open it up and you'll see a bunch of parts made by suppliers. Open up a computer made by a competitor and you will see that most of the parts come from the very same suppliers.

The auto industry is both the same and different. I worked for an automotive electronics company in college. We'd get a binder full of specification in Japanese or German or French, translate it to English, and run the validation on the same part that went into a Ford or GM car, but with a few changes to the firmware to satisfy the differences in specifications. Most of the time, these things went out the door with no labels so the companies could put on their own.

Then there is collaboration between the automakers themselves. The new 10-speed transmission in Ford and GM trucks is a joint venture between the two. For decades, all automatic transmissions in BMWs came directly from GM. The new Mercedes Benz pickup truck is based on a Nissan. The upcoming Toyota Supra was joint developed with BMW. The new Diesel engines in Fords are co-developed with PSA. It goes on and on...

Exactly.

But what are people meant to do? The information isn't there.

Should I chuck away my diesel car and buy a Tesla? I'd certainly have a psychological reward for that, but what about the huge amount of energy/resources already invested in the diesel car? "But your old car will be used by someone else" people will say, and then it all starts to get complicated.

We need tools to make this decision clearer.

Depends how much you use it. The heuristic I use it that eventually they money I spend goes to a consumable, so if I spend as little as possible by focusing only on what actually makes me happy then I’m also being as environmentally friendly as possible. I’m basically retired already. That’s as much due to inheritance as frugality, but even without inheritance I think I would’ve managed to retire by 48 at this rate.

You should probably keep your car but use it as little as possible. Try getting a bike.

But I would still have the energy/resource investment that is the car. As underutilised car is a problem too.

If the government implemented Pigovian taxes on pollution and carbon emissions then you wouldn't have to worry about this. The decision about whether it was environmentally sound would be baked into your decision about which option had better value for money.

I found this insightful, but disagree with two points.

First is that people think working on adtech is important. It may be fun or offer a good lifestyle, but they seem to know it's not the most meaningful, important work to do.

Second, that retirement portfolios are a major beneficiary of all this heat loss. Most of the value is captured lower on the food chain by employees, execs, and money managers.

Your statement about new shiny smartphone being a heat loss implies that there's some objective measure of what's worthy of resources and what's not. I don't think so.

Life has no meaning, and there's no inherent value in anything. How people decide to spend resources that they have is their responsibility. Thankfully, money, together with open markets is an extremely effective mechanism of conciliating millions of such decisions. So, if millions of people decide that they would rather buy a new phone than, I don't know, help starving children in Africa – it's their responsibility. Blaming it on advertisement is a view that presents these millions of people as helpless children, who are so easy to manipulate that they can't even be responsible for their own decisions – which is very far from the truth.

which is very far from the truth

I'm not sure it is, it's hardly as if adverts are just lists of facts about the product you are buying. All that changed with Edwards Bernays. When I see an advert on television that is telling me I need to buy a specific model of car to be a good father then I know I'm seeing propaganda.

Your comment is true but it doesn't contradict my point in any way. Of course it's propaganda. But you're still an adult who is fully responsible for your actions.

Also, people are much more rational than economists give them credit for. You don't need a new car for transportation. But you may need a psychological boost of self-respect. You may need to feel like those people from the commercial. You may need social status, validation, a lot of other tangible things that economists and software engineers are so quick to label as "stupid"; and buying the car for those reasons is often a very rational and wise thing to do, even if you don't admit the real reasons to yourself.

> But you're still an adult who is fully responsible for your actions.

That's what the law says, and maybe what you believe but there is a lot of scientific evidence to the contrary.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational and https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober... for an oversight of (some of) the ways you can be manipulated.

Yes, of course I can be manipulated. By the way, "manipulation" is a very loosely defined term: you're trying to change my mind right now, which is also a form of manipulation. It doesn't contradict the fact that my decisions are still my responsibility.

Responsibility is a juridic notion.

Those decisions are not necessarily rational in the sense that economic theory defines economic actors that always act for their best interest.

Another great resource on the topic is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

Most of our decisions are not the result of conscious, deliberate thoughts. Our deliberate selves can be manipulated, but that's our instinct that's the most prone to manipulation.

Advertising is designed to make us act for the benefit of corporations, not necessarily our own benefit. It is nowadays built on the science that I've linked to, and they pour billions of dollars into it because it's so damn effective.

Speaking of phones, status symbols may have been important for survival 10,000 years ago, but they aren't anymore (or much less), and yet we still seek them, and corporations take advantage of that instinct to milk us by selling more and more useless, shiny junk. The ego boost is short-lived though because the next best thing is always around the corner, keeping us on the chronic dissatisfaction treadmill.

Responsibility is the basis of any moral judgement.

And I find repeating myself again: I agree with most of what you wrote, but it doesn't contradict my point in any way.

Perhaps we need some form of central authority to regulate perceived value. On an unrelated note, anybody here interested in buying a Trabant?

> advertising where we convince people to buy things they don't really need is a far worse form of heat loss.

The core business of advertising is making people chronically dissatisfied with their life. Not only does it cause economic waste, but it brings people down. Ad blocking (online and IRL) is not only a matter of privacy, it is a matter of sanity.

On your original point, please sing along gaily...

    Grow theee...
    Grow theee...
    Grow the economy

    Exponentially
    we rise and we rise
    and we tear up the skies
    we...

    Grow theee...
    Grow theee...
    Grow the economy

    Like a kick-ass cancer
    Hyperinvasive
    And when everything's ruined
    What will we do?
    What will we do?
    Cancer thank you!

    Grow theee...
    Grow theee...
    Grow the economy

    Just like rabbits in Australia
    Grow the economy
    Wildfires in California
    Grow the economy
    Nagasaki, Hiroshima
    Grow the economy

    The earth is like an apple pie...
    Let's eat it and let's die!

    Do you want some more? It's delicious :-)