Are we running out of resources?
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Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked. It won't be the end of the world, but we will all be poorer and there will be suffering while we adjust. I too hope for some near free energy and material source to appear somehow and prevent this, but I struggle to see how you could blindly expect this to occur, not even entertaining the thought that even if such an innovation exists, we might not be able to discover it before the consequences of our current behavior sets in.
Sure, billionares will lose much of their wealth, and will try to hide in off shore funds (even more so than they do at present) but we can legislate for this and de-anonymise the wealth. We would then collapse those off shore legal structures, allocate the wealth to individuals, and apply the 10m limit.
It wouldn't be that difficult, it would leave everyone with plenty of wealth, and is a simple answer.
PS - I don't think this is the right answer. But then how can the answer to the environmental issues be to socialise the risks and expenses across all the population, while allowing the owners of the corporations that have exploited the world's resources for profit get keep and hide their immorally-gained wealth?
Those two problems must be solved but solving one will probably amplify the other.
The industrial revolution was arguably a by-product of huge amounts of wealth in the hands of a few. Efficiencies of scale may exist, but are not dependant on equal or inequal distribution of benefit. Seems to me historically rich people/nations have consumed more natural resources, often taking them from other people/nations, focusing not on global wealth creation but on moving resources in, at the expense of global wealth. On a global scale, inequality seems to have led to more consumption and destruction of someone else's long term resources. Equality seems to lead to more resource preservation, thus better utilización.
Inequality is the result of thinking about yourself at the expense of others, equality is the result of thinking about others, and those targeting equality are likely to include future generations in their definition of "others" and thus more efficient/conservation use of long term resources.
Interested to see any stats to back up the assertion that "reducing inequalities typically means more consumption" on a global scale.
Even for the conventionally wealthy, much of their wealth is in investments, so all those bonds and shares get taken and go where? Who manages them? Who makes investment decisions down the line? The current entire investment community can't, they've just had most of their assets taken away. So what you're talking about is the dismantlement of the ownership and management structures of huge swathes of the economy and what? Handing it over to who, civil servants?
It would of course also make it impossible for anyone to start a company and grow it to becoming large and successful, because as soon as it became significant, the founders would have ownership and therefore control taken away from them.
Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets.
The point I'm making is that it if we are trying to find a solution to these problems, the easiest one would be to take the billions in wealth - more wealth that can be spent in hundreds of lifetimes - away from the people who hold it and redistribute it to those who don't. This doesn't seem to be under consideration, but this is because it doesn't suit those that run corporations and governments - the elite aren't planning to shoot themselves in the foot.
As I said elsewhere, I don't think this is actually a valid solution. I only mention this as an equally invalid solution - putting the cost onto the population in general, ie the comparatively poor - is actively being implemented. Despite the obvious unfairness and greater complexity - the implementation of a technocratic system that allocates energy and resources.
So the new system is also insane and will be harder 99.9999% of the world's population, but does allow the billionaires to keep their comfort.
Which of these 2 insane options is better in your opinion?
And do what with it? A value is just a number. What would you do with the assets and the value?
I'm not being facetious, I'm really curious how you imagine this working and right now I honestly don't have any idea. Who would control these companies now that they're not owned by their founders and current owners? How would ownership and control work? Who would run the economy and how? I'm imagining millions (a $10m company isn't actually all that big) of founders, investors and CEOs retiring to the country with $10m retirement funds. Viva la Revolution! Who takes over?
What are the world's poor going to do with a handful of shares in e.g. Microsoft, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway each? probably you don't imagine it working that way, but you won't say how you do imagine it working.
You say 2 options, but I'm not clear what you think the other one is. We have many possible options.
I hope you accept that is a fair if broad formulation of the problem.
If you are neutral in approaching this, and trying to find an answer, which of the following would be easier: a/ to find a way to take wealth from the rich (still leaving more than they can spend in a lifetime) or b/ to micro manage everyone, decreasing population and options for 99.999% of the population?
As a problem, any neutral solution would say it is far more equitable and simpler to tackle the smaller billionaire group. Even though the billionaire class could lose lots of their wealth, they would have plenty to live. Trying to micromanage the world's population is much harder. Do you agree?
Apparently though, taking the wealth from billionaires cannot a conceivable answer. Yes their corporations have ravaged the natural world, yes they are geared to manipulate us via psychology, indoctrination, PR, etc to separate us from our monetary tokens, but somehow it is right that the population as a whole should foot the bill. Why?
But, even the question of what would be the best (fairest, equitable) allocation of resources is moot. The answer is b/ and the planned, controlled implementation has been underway for decades, and is finally materialising. Banking, the governance structure, education, technology, media, corporations, NGOs, etc are already managed by billionaires, and they do not want to give up their wealth or power. The institutions they manage have been bent in order to help them achieve their goals, in the name of serving us and the planet. What we are presently experiencing is a long planned move to greater power - it is not history unfolding naturally.
We are implementing technocracy, and we will be micro-managed. We will come to see it as neo-feudalism. To the 99.999% it will feel like hard slavery. But even this has been negative outlook had been planned and managed - they want us to choose the micromanagement. If the turkeys vote for Christmas, they want to be eaten, right? We are voting to get rid of cars, constrain our use of energy, move to UBI, etc - our lack of understanding and imagination means we vote for slavery.
There just isn’t that much wealth to be expropriated. It wouldn’t go very far.
So no, I don’t think you’ll get broad agreement that confiscating wealth from the very rich is even numerically a viable strategy.
Not to mention the fact that historically expropriation isn’t exactly associated with the generation of social welfare.
Now, as it happens, I’m in favor of higher progressive taxes!
But we can’t pretend we can create a social welfare state just by picking on billionaires. The middle class would need to be taxed generously for that to pencil out.
I don't think you are right about how much wealth the rich hold. The middle class would not need to be taxed. The illegitimate ruling class should just have the bulk of their wealth confiscated (at least according to the proposal I am trying to air here). The billionaires would still live well, but the rest of would have a chance to utilise all the assets that are currently being sequestrated away from us.
We see articles such as, 'World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam':
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...
I think this is a joke - we don't even know who holds what as it is all in off-shore, tax free funds and trusts, shares, etc. So the true amounts of wealth are bound to be far higher. Also, if it were possible to resolve the ownership structure, you would see that everything is owned by individuals - only living people own things. People direct the trusts, own the funds, corporations etc.
What I'm trying to get across is the fact that if we were genuinely seeking solutions, releasing this stockpiled wealth would be the simplest. It would be at least deserving of some consideration. And I'm not talking about releasing it into an NGO that directs how culture is to be created.
But we have the opposite - we are moving into a complex, AI managed world, where the poor are going to be paying carbon taxes, water taxes, have more expensive electricity and be unable to ever consider owning anything for themselves. This won't mean that ownership as a concept will have gone - it will mean the billionaire class will own everything, and the rest of us will be demoted to serfs, aka overt slavery.
But as I said I don't think this is viable answer either.
And I'm not sure what the right answer could be. For a start governments are a problem - they do not act for people, they are beholden to corporate interests. The legal system is also a problem - it only works for the rich - how can it be ok for the richest to pay no tax? Let's all not pay tax! Let's pay for the services we want. But, government has become a comfort blanket for most - most people are happy to pay 40% of their income to have their bins collected.
Wealth is control of economic assets - companies, resources and property. Transferring wealth means transferring that control. For example it means taking Tesla away from Elon Musk and giving it to someone else. So what I'm asking is, who would that control go to and how would it be exercised to better serve the average person? If you can't answer that question, you're not making a proposal it's possible to evaluate. I may disagree with Marxists, but at least they have an answer to this question.
If that paper wealth was confiscated and spent, it would lead to a significant increase in demand, so central banks would have to implement sharply contractionary policy, or see all that newly distributed wealth inflated away. How would that leave anyone better off?
After you take that stock, who do you sell it to? (Simply confiscating it doesn't move resources around.) What are they not buying so they can buy this stock? More to the point, why are they going to buy that stock if they're not buying it today.
I could buy Amazon, SpaceX, Facebook, Google, stock but don't. Under this system, AWS will be less expensive but what are the odds that it will appreciate significantly? I ask because I buy stock to make money.
Who is better off if I buy SpaceX instead of living on that money while I work on my startup? (If I buy said stock, I'll need to get a job to cover living expenses. Maybe that stock will go up in value so I can live off it later, but I'm eating this week.)
Rather think about money flows. How much money does e.g. Musk consume? Probably much more than the everage person. But will it be a significant boost to everyone's quality of life if Musk out only consumes as much as the average and donates the rest? Probably not.
There more interesting part is his power and what he does with his money. But that's a totally different point.
These billioniares and many more millioniares worth more than 10 million dollars by and large create their fortunes through certain lucky or careful investments and in the case of many of them, their wealth is locked up directly in stock that the public values highly enough for them to be worth that much. As many here have pointed out better than I will now, creating confiscatory policies on this would lead to the wealth itself mostly evaporating as if it never were. What you propose is in this sense a tired, economically irrational and self-defeating idea that tries to be the real world equivalent of the proverbial farmer and his golden goose.
Also worth mentioning that the total wealth of all the world's billioniares today amounts to 13.1 trillion dollars, give or take. The U.S. government alone spend 8 trillion just on its wars in the middle east and Asia between 2001 and and now.
This is only one example out of many of government funds being spent rampantly, in amounts that dwarf the wealth or annual income of the world's billionaires but with little or sometimes even negative productive results. And you'd like to confiscate these very often useful private sources of productive wealth to government bureaucrats that already receive trillions in tax revenues annually but somehow can't seem to make them definitively improve the world?
If you mean 10M assets, then you will now have to estimate the value for a lot of things, including stocks. It will also take motivation away from founders and investors - why they take a big risk if they have an upper limit of roi?
I agree that the current inequality is a big problem, but your solution is certainly not a "simple answer" unless you accept potential decline of quality of life for everyone.
Power? Influence? Popularity?
Popularity, well maybe. But I think it's only a part of what motivates people today.
In particular, I look at suburban areas with no stores or workplaces for miles, where the only transport option is the car, and I struggle to see how they won't become blighted slums (like what Detroit's became as it shrank) when gas and cars are too expensive for the average person to afford.
ahem bus rapid transit
A middle ground are light rail and tram, but those tend to be slower than a bus based-BRT system as the cheap rails don't support speeds as fast as a metro or railway.
no no no no NO. The whole point of it being Bus Rapid Transit (as opposed to just a series of buses) is that it ISN'T just using the same roads that cars are on.
In fact, it is quite amusing to see capitalists talk about free markets when the currencies they use quite literally exist to prevent free markets from forming. A precious metal currency is a tool for maintaining power with the aristocracy. Perpetual land ownership is effectively the same. Feudalism ended by giving everyone the freedom to become a feudalist, that's capitalism. It works much better but how about we stop the concentration of power for good?
When you are rich, you have the option of investing or lending. If you lend, then someone else must invest on your behalf. When you think about it, lending simply shifts all the risk of an investment onto the borrower. In an increasingly saturated economy, which the author of the original article doesn't even recognize as a thing, most investments are unable break even. The risk adjusted return of an investment is negative but you, the lender, can always pull out your money as cash to get guaranteed 0%, this threat makes banks unwilling to lower their interest rate below 0%. Banks stop lending to risky lenders. Saved money is no longer circulating in the economy. Deflation/low inflation sets in.
If the government does nothing or austerity, then you get a great depression very soon. If the government does something, then it must act as the borrower of last resort, who is creating artificial demand for capital. If I had to describe QE it is actually as if the government created a state operated investment fund for government bonds that is exclusively accessible to banks. It's not really money printing. It's a weird ass way of letting banks find a solvent borrower of last resort. When you deposit money on your bank account, the bank doesn't know when you are going to spend it. A bank reserve created by QE is just as liquid as money so it does the job. You can spend your money instantly and no bank is going to care. They can just shrug off the fact that they are lending out deposits that can be spent instantly for 30 years.
This is still better than doing nothing. For all we know, the money could be spent on climate change or whatever. However, it would be better to address the problem at its root and just tell the rich to get lost by no longer guaranteeing automatic capital accumulation and free capital preservation.
We'll heat ourselves to death before we'll run out of resources and energy, because humans are 100 watts space heater. The problem is not about the amount of energy but the side effect of pollution.
Rich/knowledgeable people can benefit from fission but poorer people are still dependant on simpler resources such as rain fall and fertile soil. We're he correct, we wouldn't see increased poverty right now. But we do. Knowledge itself is not equally distributed, just as resources aren't. Be good if countries relied on their own resources, protected shared resources, and shared knowledge. It's impirically incorrect to presume that some people having knowledge of how to effectively use resources is sufficient to end poverty for others.
People are still looking after themselves at the expense of shared (or imported) resources.
We see basic resources depleted.
We are in a boom of misinformation vs knowledge expansion.
It's odd that people think "we understand/we have the knowledge" when they themselves don't.
This is the line I'm straddling at the moment. If you're not realistic about our ability to take a catastrophic step backwards you'll always just see things as "business as usual" until "business as very unusual" hits.
I find it interesting to research technologies and methods that are potentials for replacing our unsustainable practices and some of what I learn gives me hope, but it's super naive to pin your hopes on "business as usual" continuing based on all of that panning out before the current system is pushed outside its safe operating envelope for too long and non-linear behavior kicks in.
To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based on pure thermodynamics is somewhere around 1 trillion people.
> Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.
This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
Beyond climate change, the consequences of pollution are very real. Many water sources can't be drunk anymore, and the agro industry is killing bees/insects (necessary for vegetal life) on a wide scale and depleting the soil of its water/nutrients turning it slowly into a desert.
Extinction is far off, but "doom" is a very likely outcome at this point given that no government is doing anything, besides advocating for "green growth" which is the opposite of what ecologists have been preaching for decades (green degrowth).
I couldn't find any data that proves this. Maybe you could share?
Sure, it's not your Hollywood catastrophe, but the burden will become heavier on all of us. And if the rich (which I'm part of, sort of) can get out of it, they'll have to live with more social unrest...
Are we already in one?
I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade, and for carbon capture to become a practical thing on the next one. But depending on what you want, even this isn't enough.
> I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade
That's really good news ! I mean it's so far away from what I know that I sure have missed something. Could you give a few pointers that illustrate your expectation ? (honest question)
But I do expect electrification to increase a lot this decade, and for renewables to take over the electricity generation so completely that other sources will only be able to compete with batteries, not with original renewable electricity.
If you extend our current trends, you will get into more than half of the energy being non-polluting. But most of it being new consumption, instead of replacing older sources.
Most sources on electricity agree to an unsettling level, so they are probably repeating each other. Here's one as good as any:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electricity-g...
For vehicle electrification, it's harder to find data, but everything has a huge rate of growth that will probably saturate on this decade:
https://www.iea.org/articles/global-ev-data-explorer
What will change on this decade that people usually don't take into account on their conclusions is that wind to a small extent and PV for a huge extent are already cheaper than most electricity sources, and getting cheaper by the day. The limits on PV price are so low we probably won't even be reach them this decade.
That places a real force on every process that heavily uses energy to take advantage of that cheap PV energy, or get outcompeted. Or in other words, the economic reality that have always got in the ways of renewables are now getting in the way of fossil fuels. So I expect the fossil fuel infrastructure to become obsolete and that new renewable energy that we will get to replace it instead of adding to it.
Notice that this is already happening on that data above. On a linear trend it's not fast enough to replace half of our emissions this decade, but on an exponential trend, it's more than fast enough. Well, the change into renewables has been exponential for decades already, that's how immature technologies work. Given that the limits on PV price are so low, I still don't expect it to change this decade.
It's clear that we can't, as the author suggests, "begin to run low of coal in the centuries to come".
I don't want to say "this time is different" (because I don't know that).
But we do find our self in a situation where technology hasn't peaked, but we aren't using the new tech we have
If we want to get serious right now about eliminating fossil fuels, the fact is the answer is a mix of renewables and nuclear.
At this point it's a race against the clock and we're losing it badly. If we can't transition to it before it's too late, then that we could do it in theory isn't worth a whole lot.
I think there is a big focus on "fossil fuels" but they are not the only resources we're using in an unsustainable way.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2nGHq40Xc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMHR6Mc4Bk
> This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.
I don’t agree with all of the article’s premises but this is not wrong. Population is still increasing, even if population _growth_ (first derivative) is declining. And energy usage is skyrocketing, according to the EIA (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/).
The long term problem will be population decline as the total fertility rate drops well below replacement.
Energy use is going up, because lesser developed countries are heading toward first world rates of energy use. But that plateaus or even starts to decline (due to efficiency) also.
If doomsday predictions about population growth are to be dismissed because technology has always kept up with the increasing needs of humanity, what is the argument against technology keeping up with the needs of a demographically shifted smaller population?
Is there not an aggregate level of people required to sustain the complexity of the technology required to keep all of it functioning below which critical links in the chain begin failing causing a chain reaction where it all completely breaks down?
Am I alone in thinking that? It's mildly obvious if you do a thought experiment where you reduce the population down to a ridiculously small number you can see such a scenario is indeed possible. The question is where exactly is that threshold?
I live in New Zealand and a good example of a weak link in the chain that got exposed by Covid when we completely shut our borders was that we couldn't get the seasonal workers required to operate some of the high tech farm equipment required for harvesting. I recall seeing on the news members of industry and government saying "it's not simply a case of just trying to hire more people locally as these machines are not simple to operate and require specific skills that take a non-trivial amount of time to train up on" etc. So, as we increase the complexity of the technology in order to boost productivity outputs it makes the system more and more fragile to such shocks. So, if we're relying on future technology we're by definition relying on even greater complexity meaning that critical threshold of people needed to maintain it goes up, which is a problem if the population is going down.
This is a straw man. The arguments against humanity’s survival are not technological, but economic: we will not survive because our economic systems continue to poison the environment, to the detriment of all. Solutions exist, but because it is taken as a matter of faith that economics is more important than environmental impact, no technological solutions are implemented. Capitalists fight almost literally to the death to maintain the status quo of a fossil fuel driven society, and has shown no ability to change in ways needed to stave of doom.
It is difficult not to blame industry because they profit off continued pollution & resource exploitation. The markets have a larger short term incentive to maintain the status quo
This is happening now. Everyone is focused on getting to "net-zero" and switching to natural gas as a "transition" to cleaner, more sustainable energy sources. This has resulted in nuclear/coal going offline and being switched out for natural gas and natural gas prices shooting up like crazy, then war breaks out and natural gas imports are at risk and people still need power, so policy makers turn to "well maybe its time to switch the nuclear power plant back on?".
When things shift such that the short-term incentives shift away from the push towards the sustainable, renewable direction then it goes back the other way and it can and will happen.
I think it causes cognitive dissonance in that people want the current world and lifestyle to be sustainable because they like it due to it having a lot of fun and comfortable things, and don't wish to consider the idea that it may just may be fatally flawed.
It's an uncomfortable feeling realizing we're basically doing it wrong.
Sure without regards to any other than food organisms and pulling a "puppeteer" world (Ala Larry Niven) I don't see it. And I won't either way.
(I think it's referenced in J. E. Cohen's 1996 book "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" but I don't have a copy of that in front of me.)
This is not at all to say that this would be a desirable situation, or that human population is a metric that should be maximized at the expense of any other metric.
Is it projected to level out or to decline? Because birth rates below replacement indicate decline, not leveling out.
Not only are we picking the low-hanging fruit in energy production, but we're picking it at a temporarily discounted cost (with carbon emissions not being priced in) at the expense of our future selves and future generations.
People believe what's convenient. It's inconvenient to be realistic and accept that we're heading in a bad direction (because then we all have to sacrifice comforts). Rome and its way of life fell, the British Empire and its way of life fell, and one day our global consumerist society and its way of life will fall too
I initially liked this book. But I eventually came to the conclusion that it didn't really explain anything and concocted an overly elaborate framework that did more to obscure what happened than to clarify. It felt like that old joke about philosophy, the field where "one kicks up a lot of dust then complains one can't see anything." It ended up being so complex that it's not falsifiable.
I was much happier with the narrative in another book, "The End of the Bronze Age", by Robert Drews. Drews presents the military-technological explanation. It's simpler and it just seems to fit better. It also explains why social organization in the Iron Age was so different from the Bronze Age.
We about to get some new entries
Even the most optimistic projections put the world population peaking well before 2100. Growth has slowed considerably and will likely continue to slow even more as worldwide economic malaise puts further pressure on birth rates (especially since the developing world is urbanizing and urbanization is correlated with a decline in births per woman).
As with the rest of the article, I'm really not sure if this is irony or hubris? If everybody had these conditions of living, we would either need a larger planet or a lot less people on it.
The earth has 149mil sq km of land area so those suburbs would take up about 1.7% of the land. If you subtract out antarctica (14 mil sq km), siberia (13 mil sq km) and 3/4 of canada (7 mil sq km), the sahara desert (9mil sq km)... you're still left with about 106 mil sq km so we're using about 1.8% of the land.
Density isn't evenly distributed you say? Well, let's look at only china then... Some 1.4 bil people in 9.6mil sq km. Everyone living on in 500 sq m lots means 350,000 sq km, or about 5% of the land. Lots of western china is too inhospitable you say? Fine, subtract out Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xining (forget the fact that 60mil+ people live there). That's half of china's land area! You're still left with around 4.860 mil sq km. So everyone's suburban lots would fit in about 7% of the land.
My point here is that the earth is not really as crowded as many people seem to believe. It only seems crowded if you spend the majority of your life in or near dense urban areas. Which most people do these days. So most see it that way. There are still vast tracts of nearly uninhabited land and even vaster expanses of sparsely inhabited land. Sure, these are typically not the really nice bits of the earth (from a human perspective), but we do have central heating and A/C now, right? :-)
We should be aiming to design houses so that minimal HVAC is necessary to maintain comfortable conditions, not building ramshackle houses in the desert and patching the inefficiencies with massively energy-consuming devices.
The broader point I'm trying to make is that we should be aiming for effective improvements in living standards - and there are two components in effectiveness, correct orientation and efficiency. American suburbs are pretty backwards in terms of cost/benefit: they're expensive to maintain infrastructure-wise, they isolate people from each other, and you have to drive for an hour to get to anything leading to even more expensive car-centric infrastructure. We should be aiming to fulfil human needs on a planetary scale, which means efficient use of resources.
I'd rather push for population control. I don't want to live in a world where humans have to live like insects, crammed into giant hive cities.
> However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).
I'd rather use cleverness to sustain our quality of life with smaller populations. If we had your sci fi utopia, we could have a population of 1 million total humans, each living like a king. I don't understand why you want to use sci fi magic just to have everyone live like an ant in a box
Not only is population control completely unnecessary, but it requires either mass murder or forced sterilisation. I would prefer that we not do either of those things.
As standards of living increase, population growth also naturally shrinks to even or below-even maintenance rates; so if you're worried about a future with 100 billion humans crammed into Hong Kong style bed cages, your best bet is to try to improve living standards around the world.
By whose definition? Living in a city is not a great quality of life for me. I've done it and hated it compared to living in a suburb.
> Not only is population control completely unnecessary, but it requires either mass murder or forced sterilisation. I would prefer that we not do either of those things.
Educated people have way fewer children than poor and uneducated people. Not to mention placing a cap on immigration, etc. Your argument is reductivist and leaves out a lot of valid ways to reduce populations.
Number of children is tied to economic status, not education - "poor and uneducated" should just be "poor". That's exactly what I said. A cap on immigration doesn't change the population - but with all your arguments put together, it certainly gives me a vibe of what you actually want.
have you lived in the US? there are lots of different kinds of suburbs. my suburbs have shops
> I have to drive long distances to get to the nearest economic hub because it was plonked down in the middle of nowhere
long distances is relative so I can't comment here.
> I want walkable human-friendly environments with a mix of high- and low-density accomodation to suit people's preferences.
I want low-density accommodations. I want everybody to have acres of land and I want to go days without seeing other people.
> A cap on immigration doesn't change the population
Take Japan, or any other country with negative rate of change in population. Without immigrants, how do you imagine their population will change?
> it certainly gives me a vibe of what you actually want.
Why so cryptic? I'll tell you what I want so you don't make some weird assumptions. I want to live in a world where people have the option to live with acres and acres of land. I want to be a hermit so I never have to see other human beings unless I have to go into town to buy groceries. People who enjoy cities should go ahead and live there if they want, but in your hive world, there are no countrysides or suburbs left, just sprawling concrete scars on the landscape where people go to rooftop mini-parks and think they're experiencing nature
Well, good - that's not the type of suburb I was taking issue with, as I would hope was apparent.
> I want low-density accommodations. I want everybody to have acres of land and I want to go days without seeing other people.
That's not possible. If everybody were to live in that kind of isolation, nothing would get done.
> Take Japan, or any other country with negative rate of change in population. Without immigrants, how do you imagine their population will change?
That doesn't change the population level globally. It's just shifting people between borders.
> Why so cryptic?
Because its just an impression and people tend to take suggestions that they have eco-fascist inclinations pretty badly. Talking about population control and low-education immigrants isn't definitive but it certainly smells bad.
> I want to be a hermit so I never have to see other human beings unless I have to go into town to buy groceries
I'm not against that, if it can be done in such a way where everybody gets what they want. I'm only really against hording of resources to the detriment of others.
> but in your hive world, there are no countrysides or suburbs left, just sprawling concrete scars on the landscape where people go to rooftop mini-parks and think they're experiencing nature
Nice 40k reference, but you have a strange impression of what I've said. I want a world where people's personal preferences are maximised, which includes living arrangements; we just have to do it sustainably so the biosphere doesn't collapse. I love nature too, see - I live just on the edge of the countryside myself.
If you want unbounded human population growth and unbounded immigration, that smells pretty bad, just not to you.
> I'm not against that, if it can be done in such a way where everybody gets what they want. I'm only really against hording of resources to the detriment of others
Then this is the closest point we have to common ground. I don't want to force anyone to live in the countryside, and in fact I would rather nobody did so I could live there alone, but I want people to have the option to, just like you want people to have the option to live in cities. However there's a limit to how much livable space we have and that means we can't just keep expanding cities forever. We do differ though on our view of property, it seems. Where you seem to view resources as inherently collective, I see property as a human right and reject the premise that we should take from those with plenty just because others have little. I'm all for taxes though,
> we just have to do it sustainably so the biosphere doesn't collapse.
IMO, that inherently means keeping urban development and population growth contained. I think the evidence speaks for itself: just look at how many animal species have died, how many biospheres have already collapsed, how much pollution and other climate damage has been done, just in the past century, when many countries were still developing and the population was much smaller. Now you're suggesting that with the current population continuing to grow freely, and urban development continuing freely, we'll somehow manage to both ensure everyone can live according to their preferred lifestyle and preserve nature? Sorry, but I think that's fantastically utopian. At the end of the day there's nothing I can do about it, but I do wish we were heading a different direction.
Car traffic and road maintenance are limiting factors here, but I don't see any reason why the private air conditioning and even heating a pool (the space for a private pool, on the other hand is a traffic generator) would be limited by energy availability.
Way too many people live in places where the environment temperatures are outside of the survivable range, or in places that get so hot, it's hard to do anything (often even at night). You just can't fight those by designing you building differently. You can improve the situation a little bit, but not enough.
Qanats seem like 'aliens did it' level of technological sophistication from my limited understanding of when and how they were built, but I guess that's more due to my lack of understanding than genuine alien influence.
But are there experts out there that know how they actually built them, and how would they rank qanats vs pyramids or great cathedrals? Like how many lifetimes were needed to plan and execute them?
Basically, everything that makes them so damn inhospitable also makes it easy to manage the temperature of a building.
You will have a much harder time on any other place.
So sand shortages, and water shortages are not a thing?
We have better solutions already, getting people to use then when they can abuse the situation for short term profit is the hard bit.
And ironically, if you intend to abuse the system for short term profit, one of your best moves is to claim the problem is not solvable (though only once claiming it's not happening stops working).
I'd say it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. They're definitely are physical limits to those things, and they are definitely subject to unpriced externalities at present. I think the water shortages in South Africa are a good case study where the public reacted to avert a crisis once they were made acutely aware that a crisis was imminent if they didn't act. People just take water for granted, until they no longer can. But in saying that there is almost certainly a point at which things just can't keep up, or the alternative cannot be procured/switched to in a short enough time to avoid the disaster. I see it less as a problem of pure physical limits and more as a problem in control theory.
I don't think it's malicious or anything - I just think that this perspective is a little ignorant of how the world really works.
and they become less poor afterwards. Eventually, they will no longer accept the low wages as their own wealth increases. i think this is a good outcome - all parties benefit from the transaction.
This will take a long time to play out, and in the mean time, the research and development of tech would progress enough to find a solution to the energy and resource problem - increasing efficiency, or finding new sources to extract (my money is on asteroids).
But the way it will play out, means that there's always a gradient of relative "conditions" - from the lowest, to the highest. As long as this gradient is always shifting up - aka, everyone's condition is improving - i think it is acceptable.
This doesn't happen when you're paid subsistence wages, which sweatshop workers are. It's exploitation of the poor, pure and simple - there's no trickle-down economics in play, they just get to stay poor but alive while the goods they make are sold to wealthier countries.
It would be really nice if free markets played out the way free market advocates say they do, but they don't.
> But the way it will play out, means that there's always a gradient of relative "conditions"
Personally, I'd rather we lived in a meritocratic system where hard work and innovation benefits the individual responsible, and everybody earns the value of their work. I don't like the idea of a perpetual underclass based on characteristics unrelated to personal capability, like nationality or race.
How did any country ever become wealthy? The US and UK for example went through the Industrial Revolution too, where people were paid subsistence wages and worked in sweatshops...
Then they had mass, deadly, pro- and anti-labor violence culminating in various labor protections which resulted in a less-miserable distribution of the rewards of industry, a process which has been interspersed with backsliding and repetition over time.
> This doesn't happen when you're paid subsistence wages, which sweatshop workers are.
I’m just trying to figure out if this is true or not. Seems to me the evidence is clear that such workers become wealthier over time. China, the United States, United Kingdom, and others seem to be clear examples of that.
Injecting a moral argument here doesn’t change the practical reality of how the world works. The opportunities presented to sweat shop workers are not great, and often times working at a sweatshop is the least bad option. But my point of contention was with this exchange of comments. I do think sweatshop workers become less poor over time, and the evidence I see is present in many countries where this happened.
My point is that sweatshop workers become less poor when they become tired enough of their conditions to rise up against their masters, not because they are able to put together savings or anything like that.
- Unionisation - helped for a while, then those companies where it was implemented didn't survive because they could not make anything effectively.
- building a cooperative-based economy - would be nice in theory if all people could cooperate. But in reality, they do not, there will be freewheelers who game the system.
- UBI - not tried yet is the only difference between UBI and communism. So, it's good but only in theory, we don't know practice yet. I personally believe it's the best solution out there, but life may verify that like communism.
- minimum wages - we have minimum wages in Poland, they don't help that much, but weren't updated and inflation eaten them away.
- nationalising important industries and resources - all nationalised resources are being wasted away for political reasons sooner or later. I know this from practice
- building systems of mutual aid - that helps, but if nationalised - they are squandered for political reasons. If commercial - being squandered due to greed. But yes, they are mostly working in most countries.
Options are many, implementable are not.
These options have actively been opposed by those in power, because left wing politics weaken their power. Case in point, all those coups backed by the US government against left-wing governments.
> Unionisation - helped for a while, then those companies where it was implemented didn't survive because they could not make anything effectively.
Not true - Hollywood is heavily unionised to this day. I'm curious to know why you believe this though; is it just an assumption because we don't see many union shops these days, or do you have other reasons to believe this? Because there are other reasons to credit for the lack of unions nowadays, namely anti-union propaganda and deliberate weakening of unions by neoliberal politicians (which is basically all of them nowadays, but Reagan and Thatcher are the classic anti-union tag team).
> - building a cooperative-based economy - would be nice in theory if all people could cooperate. But in reality, they do not, there will be freewheelers who game the system.
That's not what a cooperative economy is. A cooperative economy is an economy based in cooperatives; basically a company but owned by the people who work there.
> UBI - not tried yet is the only difference between UBI and communism
At least we're in agreement that UBI could be good. Love the 'real communism has never been tried' reference though.
> minimum wages - we have minimum wages in Poland, they don't help that much, but weren't updated and inflation eaten them away.
Yes, minimum wages should be pegged to standards of living. Otherwise politicians intentionally don't update them so they become redundant.
> nationalising important industries and resources - all nationalised resources are being wasted away for political reasons sooner or later. I know this from practice
That's not universally true. They're certainly trying to disassemble nationalised healthcare here in the UK, but it's usually done by right-wing politicians who are anti-nationalisation anyway.
> building systems of mutual aid - that helps, but if nationalised - they are squandered for political reasons. If commercial - being squandered due to greed. But yes, they are mostly working in most countries.
Mutual aid is community networks of people who help each other out, not a national or economic political project.
I do understand the skepticism around leftist politics - after all, many have failed under pressure from right-wing power structures. Some have devolved into worse systems than the ones they opposed (though it's important to point out that libertarian socialists and anarchists opposed the USSR right from the beginning). But don't assume that because leftism is not currently winning, it's because it's inherently flawed, rather than facing a stronger opponent that must be overcome.
Well, WHY did they fail. I agree with you that all your proposed solutions look and feel good and should work. But they don't work if we have right-wing power structures alongside them. If they were that good, maybe people would like that solutions more than right-wing power structures? My take: they failed because they require people to be universally good and don't account for selfish people gaining power. Selfish people WILL gain power because otherwise they couldn't do things they want for themselves.
>> nationalising important industries and resources - all nationalised resources are being wasted away for political reasons sooner or later. I know this from practice
> That's not universally true.
Nothing is universally true, including this statement. I have seen successful nationalized companies. But typically they work for the people employed there, a working product is only "byproduct" of their working. They don't stand a chance with companies making products to make best product out there. Alas, most companies making products now optimise for money given to CxO's and shareholders, so they have crap product anyways. Both pure communism and capitalism are bad.
>> Unionisation - helped for a while
> I'm curious to know why you believe this though; is it just an assumption because we don't see many union shops these
No, it's because my father worked in companies with strong unions from unionization start to bankruptcy and he told me how it looked, I have talked with other people and did my own thinking about this. Sorry, but I can't remember all those stories now, typically it goes like with all assured working conditions, where you can't fire worst performers because they have good connections, so they drag your company down. This is typical downfall of all communist-like companies and systems. Working people just work and don't care about politics. Those who don't want to work, just care about politics, are voted in and from then on, they are only parasites. You can't get rid of them, because they hold positions of power. If working people try to remedy this, they are fired until there are too many parasites for workers and whole system collapses.
Democracies of course are not immune to this, but a little more resilient, because you can change those in position of power, until you vote in some scumbags which change the rules. Only education helps with that.
It's not that they don't work adjacent to right-wing structures - it's that right-wing structures lead to powerful people with vested interests in maintaining dominance, and those people will do anything they can to collapse anti-hierarchical change. When Allende was elected in Chile, he took over the factories that US corporations were using as cheap labour. In response, those corporations (including Pepsi) petitioned president Nixon to enact a coup.
> But typically they work for the people employed there, a working product is only "byproduct" of their working. They don't stand a chance with companies making products to make best product out there. Alas, most companies making products now optimise for money given to CxO's and shareholders, so they have crap product anyways. Both pure communism and capitalism are bad.
I agree that the flaw of market entities is that they function in a self-serving capacity and thus making the best product will never truly be their primary goal. I think that's so-far unavoidable, unfortunately - and in either case, a corporation only cares about its shareholders where at least a cooperative cares about its workers.
> No, it's because my father worked in companies with strong unions from unionization start to bankruptcy and he told me how it looked, I have talked with other people and did my own thinking about this. Sorry, but I can't remember all those stories now, typically it goes like with all assured working conditions, where you can't fire worst performers because they have good connections, so they drag your company down. This is typical downfall of all communist-like companies and systems. Working people just work and don't care about politics. Those who don't want to work, just care about politics, are voted in and from then on, they are only parasites. You can't get rid of them, because they hold positions of power. If working people try to remedy this, they are fired until there are too many parasites for workers and whole system collapses.
This is where I think it's so important that organisations be as democratic as possible. If your union official becomes a parasite, you should be able to elect a new one. All organisations should be beholden to all of their members in a way that maximises their autonomy. This is the reason I also like Stafford Beer's VSM model: it constructs a larger company out of smaller, independent companies who operate semi-autonomously while still being structured to pursue a strategic direction. Mondragon is a working example of this.
I believe that any leftist project that eschews democracy is bad, so I think we're on the same page there. Of course, these aren't magic tools - unionisation is not a one-shot change where you get to stop fighting afterwards, as unions can be corrupt too. But generally speaking, opening up the economy to greater democratisation is a good thing in my eyes.
If you had a lot less people on it, you wouldn't have the labor force needed to keep that standard of living functioning :)
It's hubris in the extreme.
> But only because no resource has yet been discovered that is objectively better at producing electricity more cheaply.
Um, no. Only if you hide most of the deaths it causes off the balance sheet and pretend they don't exist.
The track record on this appears to be 100%. Are there any examples of a resource humanity has depleted and not effectively replaced or otherwise made irrelevant?
Even "safe" seafood is only recommended to be consumed 2 times a week now due to the build up of heavy metals.
It's also true that we'll always been able to purify water for consumption/use, but there is a cost to that and I don't see that cost decreasing.
Maybe it lowers your lifespan. That's not that big of a problem, humans have lived like that for the vast majority of their existence.
As for water, it's everywhere. Obviously, some people can run out of it, but then again a minority is always fucked in this world.
The vast majority of it is seawater, which humans can't drink because of its salt content. There's still enough freshwater in most places, but the regions where drinkable water scarcity is a problem are growing larger every year.
Desalination plants do exist, but it's up to 10x more expensive in most places (in California it's only about 2x more expensive because water is already pretty scarce there) and it's also not great for the environment either:
"The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy. Salt dissolves very easily in water, forming strong chemical bonds, and those bonds are difficult to break. Energy and the technology to desalinate water are both expensive, and this means that desalinating water can be pretty costly...It can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean...But switch the source to a river or an aquifer, and the cost of a cubic meter of water can plummet to 10 to 20 cents, and farmers often pay far less."
"There are environmental costs of desalination, as well. Sea life can get sucked into desalination plants, killing small ocean creatures like baby fish and plankton, upsetting the food chain. Also, there's the problem of what to do with the separated salt, which is left over as a very concentrated brine. Pumping this supersalty water back into the ocean can harm local aquatic life. Reducing these impacts is possible, but it adds to the costs.'"
https://scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-our-d...
And really, $1 is too expensive? How much do you need? I use ~10m3/month during summer for myself and a small garden.
If you use more, well, [thread title]. Smh, talking about resources running out and changing lifestyle.
But yeah, those further inland will have more trouble.
Ten years before the collapse of Easter Island, someone could have made the same argument: When we cut down all the trees so we couldn't hunt dolphins any more, we replaced that with clams. When the clams were gone, we began hunting birds. When the soil became so poor that we couldn't grow one crop, we replaced it with another one. Our track record is 100%; there's no reason to believe we can't go on replacing one resource with another forever.
And then one day they couldn't.
Or listen to Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
"Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief." [2]
So far we've been able to replace wood with coal, coal with oil, and so on; so far there hasn't been anything critical to civilization that we've run out of. But it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that something like that could happen.
[1] http://employees.oneonta.edu/allenth/Class-Readings-Password...
[2] As quoted in https://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-talebs-black-swan-tha...
If we were to have depleted something we need without finding a replacement, humans would be extinct by now, or at least on a path towards it.
We’re alive and, on average, extremely safe (life expectancy is higher than ever, despite obesity, opioids, etc)
So, if we assume that we’re better of than ever in history, I don’t think there can be any way the answer to that could be “yes”.
Of course, one can claim that assumption doesn’t hold. for some, having all the modern stuff may not make up for not being able to see dodos, passenger pigeons or huge herds of bison.
Even a resolute “no” answer doesn’t say much, though. Past performance is no guarantee for future results.
Keep in mind that until about 200 years ago we didn't consume anything even close to the scale of what we're doing now.
So far we basically replaced everything with petrol derived products (whale oil, coal, natural fibers, fertiliser, insecticide, &c.) and good luck replacing that, virtually anything you have in direct line of sight contains petroleum products. The fact that we did it in the past at some lower scaler doesn't really tell us anything about the future.
I always found the "fuck it we'll figure it out later (when I'm dead)" argument to be extremely questionable. Burning your bed to stay warm once your sofa is done burning doesn't really sound like a smart plan, but it seems to be the one we're adopting
This perspective also assumes enough creativity and capital available to do this will always there. If you're going to need to develop potentially more complex and expensive technology it's going to need a certain level of complexity and population to support that complexity available. With birth rates being below replacement level it seems population of young people is heading down generation after generation. So... I'm not so convinced this assumption will always hold. In fact, it's a concrete example of a negative feedback loop kicking in and correcting the status quo for us as in order to have a society capable of such a level of innovation it has to be structured such that it's population refuses to reproduce in sufficient numbers.
Why would we make the universe ape our biologically-inspired needs and desires, when we could transcend them and become so much more?
Why don't you transcend and stop using electricity? Needs and desires.
If you have not seen the Les Blank documentary Always For Pleasure, I highly recommend it
We're starting to wake up to the reality that all we're really doing is bending it out of shape and when we push it beyond the yield strength it will snap.
Maybe our wants, pleasures, ideas of how the universe should be, don't make any sense in the context of physical reality, just like moving at 1 billion m/s relative to a stationary observer doesn't make any sense in the context of physical reality.
edit: Hmm. I get a negative score for celebrating some optimism. How dare I step out of line.
More steel was manufactured per year [1] in the 2010s, than humanity produced in its entire history up to World War I. The whole century of the industrial revolution -- from the Eiffel Tower, to the steam ships, railways -- is but a drop in the ocean of material production by today's standards.
Most basic resources have a similar looking chart. And not everything is as abundant as iron.
- today "needed resources" might be different, at least partially, than tomorrow ones, as they are partially different than yesterday, but such differences are very hard to estimate since we know the past, but we can't really know the future, planning cover development with already or almost already known things, future scientific discovering are not predictable;
- resource estimate is done and sold as a "tangible number" however I'm not sure how approximate it can be. So saying on earth we can source X gazillion tons of a certain mineral for me is "probably near truth but until extracted we can't really know" and that's similar for agriculture production vs climate change;
- another issue is the meaning of "renewable" and "circular", wood is renewable at a certain rate of usage, recyclable one ore two time for different usage in a more or less significant percentage, Al is formally 100% renewable ad infinitum, glass the same, but the scale and the cost of such supply chains are not immediately measurable on scale etc.
Long story short my own personal opinion is: for actual technology, actual number of people, actual human development, we probably have significant resource issues witch does not means "we run out" in the broad sense, but we still are in a very bad situation. Planning moves to evolve is mandatory, but must be done at both scientific and social level, certainly not at economical level as is done today.
If we make even 10% of the entire earth's surface at that density, it will be an environmental catastrophe that would likely collapse the food web.
Over half the world's population lives on less than 1% of the land [0]. Only 14% of the land has been modified in any way.
Long before we turn the whole thing into a cityscape, the natural world on which we depend, from the soil biology, to the pollinators, to the apex predators, will all collapse.
Sure the author has a point about the transformative ability of knowledge, but he's also basically an idiot about system dynamics.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3389041/Wher... [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/human-impact-earth-pl...
We closed a remarkable bit of that gap in the 19th and 20th centuries - the gaps remaining are getting really difficult to fill. This is the counterargument to innovation will solve all our problems.
When you combine this with birth rates below replacement level that leads society in the direction where it's a) harder to fill those gaps, and b) much less people to fill them. So, having far less bandwidth available to do that discovery/work seems to be in general a trend people don't seem to acknowledge.
As an example, I've heard people say that if Russia shut off the gas supply, Europe would freeze to death. Maybe that's true at first glance, but it ignores that gas is used because it is the best option. But it's not like freezing to death is the second best option. Heated blankets that run on a fraction of the electricity of electric heaters, still exist. Wood stoves exist in older homes. Adults moving back to their parents homes with wood stoves exists. On and on. Most people aren't just going to give up because one resource dies out. Theyll just move to the second best option, that's more expensive. And that's ignoring innovation even.
My friend runs a shop that sells indoor and outdoor wood burners. I picked up a rather nice Belgian made outdoor heater from him too. It’s got a super tall chimney and is surrounded by glass panelling. Looks amazing.
I have always had a hard time believing this story. It assumes these Easter Island people were really dumb and irrational. It might be that this story is not what really happened.
> It is a compelling tale, but may be completely false, according to research published yesterday. The Easter Island population did collapse, not due to this “ecocide”, but instead something less remarkable: the arrival of Europeans, bringing syphilis, smallpox and slavery.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/european-disease-led-to-d...
Man-made deforestation of islands is fairly well documented. Iceland was largely deforested by early settlers as well.
Deforestation alone may not be what killed the settlers of Easter island, but it sure as hell didn't do them any favors to not have access to wood.
No it doesn't. It assumes a tragedy of the commons. Everybody who cut down trees did so out of rational self-interest. The same kind of thing happens even in supposedly advanced civilizations, e.g. with the Atlantic cod fishery. Coordination problems are hard to solve.
But it was a small island and they couldn't even read/write.
So do we have, today, enough resources on earth extract resources away from the island called earth? What if we run out of petroleum before we built enough rockets and launch systems and fuel?
Yet we do know with certainty that hundreds, if not thousands, of inhabitants were taken as slaves and the remaining suffered from rampant diseases that were introduced to that island.
So what killed them might not have been lack of resources but rather the same old story of more powerful nations exploiting them.
I don't understand where you're getting the cannibalism from.
Worried about farmland? Check out advances in vertical farming.
Worried about space to live? Just wait for a housing price correction.
Worried about energy? Check out the advances in Solar, Small modular reactors, and grid storage possibilities.
The better question isn't "are we running out of resources?" it's "should we be using different resources or the same resources differently?" to which the answer is yes and being explored by scientists and engineers
[1] Once generation IV nuclear powered is mastered, that is.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-rep...
If you look at the mass of material extracted from the Earth, fossil fuels > all mineral resources. To first order, the resource problem is the fossil fuel problem, and we're on a trajectory to get off fossil fuels.
I think we are infinitely resourceful and capable of re-imagining and re-engineering our environment - in a good way!
But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured. In the name of protecting us and the environment, the governance structure creates artificial rules on behalf of their stakeholders (corporations) that stops innovation and pushes the costs and risks on to the population at large.
> But the problem we face is vested interests and the institutions they have captured.
The second sentence contradicts the first one.
But if you have a vested interest, they will want government legislation to prevent alternative solutions. Now people who have an idea face legal repercussions fines, jail, etc if they try to offer a solution.
This is the case in many industries, from taxis, to rubbish collection, to banking, to medicine. There are artificial barriers to entry that support rent-seeking by those industries already in place.
Where's the infinite resourcefulness and infinite capability in that?
To resolve this, you would have to have a good idea and the capability to take governmental force (police, law). Do you feel lucky?
I don't think people even recognise the level of governmental force in this society - they think government is keeping them safe, rather than facilitating wealth extraction! No one has time to consider this - all are busy trying to get by, despite taxes, fines, etc.
But this force is going to become much more overt in coming years, technocracy will micromanage us. I don't think people will accept it. So I hope to see some solutions here too.
Right. But if you don't take into account the way that the force of government in your problem statements, you're not really "infinitely [...] re-imagining and re-engineering our environment", because our environment includes a society and how it reacts - of which having governments is an integral part. Any solution you'd imagine amounts to wishful thinking without a way to put it in practice in a real, pragmatic way. Calling those solutions "infinitely resourceful" seemed a huge stretch to me.
> I don't think people even recognise the level of governmental force in this society - they think government is keeping them safe, rather than facilitating wealth extraction!
I'd say that we consider government doing both. Wealth extraction is a good thing as long as it's used for the purpose that government was created - namely keeping us safe. As long as we perceive that there's enough of a safety net for when bad luck strikes and breaks all of our careful plans, people will tolerate that some of it is diverted to providing leaders with enormous luxuries (some even defend it as a matter of course to ensure that these leaders have sufficient resources to run the nation).
About government overstepping its bounds and harming us, there is a whole philosophical and political line that discusses how to defend ourselves against it. But when that line does not take into account at all the purpose of having a government to begin with, it becomes silly.
Edit: To correct myself, the docs https://docs.netlify.com/site-deploys/deploy-previews/ do say the URLs of such preview sites are different (they begin with "deploy-preview"), so I'm not sure why the URL of this submission is like that.
Are we wasting resources? yes