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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

I have to say when I took an extended layover in Doah it gave me a different sense of urgency about climate change. It was just oppressive to be outside, even during the night and they air-condition their open air markets. It got me thinking that there are a lot of places like this which are probably on the edge, and where a few degrees of warming will make them simply uninhabitable to humans. It would be a strange thing to have "hot zones" like we have arctic regions where it's not possible to go without special equipment.

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Now is the time to buy a flat-ish block of land in Alaska or Tasmania that's a little back from the waters edge. Also make sure you don't have too many tree's too close to where you want to build your doomsday cabin. :) Really you don't be between the tropics of Cancer of Capricorn. in the future

When I think about such scenarios I can't help thinking that there might not be any social constructs left to enforce ownership of land :/.

When I was a teen I was sure we were headed for a bad future if we didn't act but I always thought it'd come after I am dead. Now I am scared I am going to be old and too frail to manage when life on earth will turn sour.

edit: maybe it's time we put out a a Pioneer 10 plate with messages of warning about our own failures. One we send to space, another one we leave on earth.

> When I think about such scenarios I can't help thinking that there might not be any social constructs left to enforce ownership of land :/.

I can only hope so.

How do you imagine that working in practice? I mean I'm not saying the current structure is perfect, but if everyone had equal claim to land it seems like land usage disputes would just end up being resolved through violence

This is the current model. In many places the violence may be out of living memory, but it's generally all very recent.

If it is out of living memory it isn't current.

If the model establishes a system where the people who are prepared to use the most violence end up with the land, and a couple of generations their descendants still have the land, then IMHO the model is still in play.

You could also argue that as the ownership is codified in laws and the state monopoly on violence keeps the oppressed in check, that threat of violence continues.

"If the model establishes a system where the people who are prepared to use the most violence end up with the land, and a couple of generations their descendants still have the land, then IMHO the model is still in play."

This is not about land ownership. Alone. You are talking about exclusive political and economic systems. In an exclusive system it's not just the ownership of land that is broken - you will find all economic activity is rigged against some segment of the society. Most well to do states are have inclusive political and and economic systems. In these societies land ownership is based on land registration and enforceable contract law - not entitlement of birth and violence.

I warmly recommend Daron Acemoglu's "Why nations fail" as it explains this topic far better than I ever could in a few sentences.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll look that up.

Maybe technically there’s a threat of government violence in the background, but that’s pretty far from most people’s consciousness in developed countries.

Can you propose a different model for property ownership which doesn’t require the individual to invest more resources in physical security?

I'm not sure about "most developed countries" but there is still very strong memory of past violence in Great Britain. Some of the tail end of it still bubbling.

On another tack, there are plenty of homeless people in the UK. Can you imagine what would happen to them if they broke into expensive uninhabited properties in London? There would be violence.

I have no idea of alternatives, I was just pointing out the origin of a lot of current land ownership.

Pay the non-owners enough rent to make it their economic interest to respect and protect the ownership

Just a few years ago, the weekend before May Day, a lawyer was stopped by the police here in Panama. The police searched through their database and found the lawyer had been accused of "economic terrorism." The lawyer was immediately put in jail. He worked pro bono defending the rights of informal settlers who have lived for years in vast areas of land owned by a very rich family. Given the amount of time these people have lived there, some argue they should at least be allowed to pay water and electricity. Instead, the government sends riot police to pull them out of their homes. The lawyer was released a few days later. This is only the most recent case that comes to my mind here in my country. I don't think it is that different in the rest of the world. Ownership of land is tied to violence.

Actually I just remembered a more recent case. After a very rich old lady showed up in TV last year explaining to people how access to drinking water is not a human right, videos came out on social media showing bulldozers destroying orchards in one of the Pearl Islands. They've been doing it since at least 2012. The rich lady's family wants to build some nice hotels there.

The problem in this case is not land ownership but exclusive political and / or economic system which rigs the game against a certain percentage of a population on all fronts.

State enforced private land ownership is one of the key economic fundamentals of a prosperous society.

Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all land).

Do you have any grounds why you would want it abolished?

> Historically societies with private land ownership have been wealthier and more inclusive than without (the alternative has been state ownership of all land).

Am I correct to assume you include communist and feudal regimes ?

Well, in Feudal system you don't really own the land. You can tax the peasants farming it in exchange for military services for the state. But for example you can't parcel it to small farms and sell those for their owners to keep, or anything like that. You can't use the land as your own capital, with all the financial potential of an asset.

I'd love to hear counterexamples, but that's the general gist of it in the large scale I think.

Land ownership is not a silver bullet but in general smart parcelling policies have made nations wealthier. So basically, most wealthy states today at some point in their history have issued a parcelling policy that has distributed land ownership among farms. This has made the economic basis more vibrant and more durable. And, probably also affected the evolution of their political institutions to be more inclusive.

For example, see the parcelling in my country Finland (which was Sweden at the time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Partition_(Sweden) and earlier in British enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

I hope private ownership will remain the same, given the fact that climate change is gradual enough to keep the status quo (which is also a huge downside that prevents humanity in taking coordinate and efficient actions against it)

Now is the time to aggressively pursue reforestation, especially in the tropics.

Alaska might end up seasonally uninhabitable -- they have periods of the year where the sun doesn't set, with increased greenhouse gases in the area it could become intensely hot for periods of the year. Combine that with periodic ozone holes that appear over arctic areas and it might be just as nasty as areas we worry over today...

Areas near large bodies of stable fresh water are likely going to be livable for the longest periods as the planet rapidly shifts away from what we humans need.

Re: Alaska, beavers are already getting there first and exasperating the climate effects upon the tundra. A fascinating read: https://alaskatrekker.com/2017/11/beavers-moving-northern-al...

s/exasperating/exacerbating/

;-)

Thanks. I'm getting slopping here in the house with only a single conversation partner most days!

I'm assuming by Doah you meant Doha, Qatar?

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