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Comment by qplex | Hacker News Reader

It's not like there is no food, or other supplies, but some people just don't have the money to buy them.

Better to throw it to trash than give it to the poor, right?

How about air pollution dropping to record lows? Just can't wait for everybody to get back into their cars and idle in traffic, and for the smog to return.

Anybody who advocates unchecked economic growth as some sort of magical savior is an idiot. On the scale of the planet the current situation is very positive.

If we could keep the emissions down like this, the large ecological trends that _really_ matter could be reversed, but I'm pretty sure everything will bounce back to normal.

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> Anybody who advocates unchecked economic growth as some sort of magical savior is an idiot. On the scale of the planet the current situation is very positive.

Anyone who thinks the current situation will lead to anything other than mass poverty and death is an idiot.

The only thing that has prevented riots and general instability of governments is mass bailouts that are hardly sustainable for 2 months, let alone indefinitely.

>The only thing that has prevented riots and general instability of governments is mass bailouts

Yes. This is more to the point that the current economical doctrine is very much misguided.

What I was of course talking about is how positive the situation is for the biosphere.

It's way more grim if the biosphere can not support us anymore. The fact that human political systems cause mass death, poverty and suffering is not news.

It’s sustainable forever since it is just money going around in a circle.

Is having the pump on in your hot tub unsustainable Just because you believe the tub can run out of water?

That only works if the things that are exchanged for money aren’t destroyed on use, which doesn’t apply to most of the services industry, the food industry, etc.

If everyone just gets free money from the government, nobody will actually do work to receive money from everyone else.

Money is not a closed system. It’s only useful when it’s traded for something that isn’t money.

Keynes described what was wrong with the economy in the 1930's as 'magneto trouble'. Then as now all of civilizations farms, factories, and houses. All oil wells and dams and coal mine were still there.

There isn't any reason the world cannot be fed during the current crisis. Do I need new clothes? Not really. Do the people who make and sew clothes need to be fed? Yes.

Harvesting food is terrible work. How do we motivate people to do it when we aren't making any stuff for them to buy?

It's a modern disease to think the only reason people work is because of money and the fear of being homeless.

In WWII the US increased agricultural production in order to feed Britain and the Soviet Union. Despite very tight limits on non essential goods. Workers took their wages, paid off debts or them in the bank.

Even if we somehow completely shut down production of stuff to buy, and all existing stocks disappeared... there are plenty of people that would accept large paychecks to save for later. We need less than one percent of the population to be harvesting food.

We use machines to do it and improve productivity. Then we employ people to make the machines.

We can only motivate them because their alternatives are much worse.

Eh? People will harvest food to not starve. You don't even have to pay them.

To avoid starvation, people only have to harvest enough food for themselves. They don't have to harvest food for millions of other people who aren't harvesting food themselves. But there's no way for all those millions of other people to go and harvest their own food. That's just not the way food production is set up. Nor should it be, if we want to have anything more than a bare subsistence standard of living.

> There isn't any reason the world cannot be fed during the current crisis.

But there is!

The reason we can't consume as much in this crisis is that we don't produce as much, because a lot of people aren't working anymore.

But the people that are working are the ones producing the needed goods and services.

Which suggests that most of what we need is produced by about 10% of the workforce and the rest is largely busy work.

The longer this goes on, the more that will become apparent.

Then the discussion starts about what the 90% have to do so the needed 10% do a full week to look after all of us rather than just stopping on Tuesday when they have made enough for themselves.

I think classifying goods and services in "needed" and "unneeded" is a fool's errand.

It's also none of our business what people choose to do with their life and money. If they want to waste it on frivolous things, that is their choice and privilege.

It would be a nice silver lining if first-world countries could come out of this and continue consuming less. Keep some/most jobs WFH, stop trying to produce just for the sake of it (as in, we don't need a new phone/car models every year), work <40 hours/week, keep unemployment insurance healthy. It'd be a huge boon for both the environment and people.

I think we'll stop we will naturally stop buying a new phone/car when it stops being worthwhile buying them.

To be honest these days I couldn't fit a bigger TV in my living room if I tried nor can I appreciate the difference between 4k and 8k, so as far as I'm concerned there are close to zero reasons for me to want a new model of this particular technology.

Phones are much the same. I see phones coming out with 5 cameras on the back. I just need one.

It'll all naturally slow down. I'm happy for it to run it's course. So far the innovations have been pretty good. It has to end somewhere eventually.

There is absolutely nothing good about what is happening.

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