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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

>"The land is a finite resource, thus it can only appreciate in value."

This is a non-sequitur; lots of things are limited, but often collapse in value. As a former Saudi energy minister once said: 'the stone age ended, but not for lack of stones'.

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land is the one thing almost never goes down because we can't create more of it. for almost every other aspect of our lives, they are alternative solution to the problem but you can't create more land. Building vertical to increase density is only kicking the can down the road in a context where the humain population is always increasing.

Well, apparently worldwide population will peak sometime and then slowly fall. The mitigating factor being that it probably won't happen in most of our lifetimes yet. That said, some countries might experience their population plateauing sooner than others. So perhaps if we kick the can down the road for a while longer, it will indeed have been enough.

> That said, some countries might experience their population plateauing sooner than others

And all of these countries (except japan/Switzerland) are planning to bring more immigrants in to make sure the population is always increasing faster. Something that most people in first world countries don't realise is that the entire population of their country is smaller than the number of millionaires in china+india. Even if all if america+EU became sterile, there would still be enough foreigners to buy more unit and push the bubble further if they open borders. And they would, because the entire economy depends on it.

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