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Comment by goatlover | Hacker News Reader

You would, but realistically, a majority of people are not willing to live with significantly less (which would entail a contraction in the economy and loss of jobs). And that includes all the people in countries still catching up. Nuclear was the alternative decades ago, and we could have witched to it until renewable tech was up to scale.

So we decided a significantly warmer climate was better than dealing with radioactive waste. Now it looks like we made the wrong risk assessment.

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It does not have to mean a loss of jobs.

It would mean different jobs, and it means valuing work differently right along with things.

I was just about to add the same reply.

Realistically, which is all that matters for this issue, you're not going to change how everyone values their work and things. Maybe it changes once we get to 2.5-3 degrees warming.

All that really needs to happen is for enough people to value other kinds of work to make a market. Once that happens, it will compete with existing ones and that is just fine.

Could happen via government action, literally start paying for work and pay at a rate that seeds a market.

Could happen with individuals too. Think gig work without a company making billions at the top. While that is super attractive for some, it is entirely unnecessary, and in my view, a leaner overall model paying more to labor will prove a worthy device to move these sorts of ideas along. A variation on all this could be collectives. Companies owned by everyone in them, lean at the top, robust otherwise.

As for things, maybe we see a return to longevity in service life being more highly valued. I harbor this value now. Absolutely hate things that I know I cannot use for a decade or more. We can do so much better than the current churn of devices and software. A bit different priority and we could see more things as robust as say, Google maps still able to operate with devices made a long time ago.

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