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Comment by lyu07282 | Hacker News Reader

There is a profound disconnect between what makes sense to do as a rational, long-term thinking species and neoliberal free market ideology that we should not loose track off. Monoculture farming with fossile fuel based fertilizers, cancerous chemical pesticides across vast spaces of land using fresh water in excess with zero regard for the local ecological system in any way and shipping food across the world from poor to rich countries using cheap fossile fuel powered gigantic ships IS the most profitable way to make most of the food we eat, BUT that doesn't mean it also makes the most sense to do it this way.

There are things in this world we should do differently even if they are less profitable, if we forget this, we are already doomed for extinction.

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That ship has sailed? The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc. Techno-farming cost more, in fuel and resources.

And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.

It's easy to mark 'profit' as 'evil' but senseless to do so, as it correlates so closely with fuel etc. You want to find an egregious waste of resource to do something that can be done much simpler, well, look no further than 'vertical farming'

> The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.

This is a very distorted view of technological and human progress.

A huge factor in improvements in global standards of human living over the last century has been improvements in health care: hygiene, vaccination, antibiotics, basic medication, birth control and health education.

Far from being dependent on either the profit motive or global trade, they are largely public goods, have overwhelmingly been provided outside of private enterprise, and do not in the main depend on goods being transported globally.

The distribution of goods is vital to every part of that? Making it cheap enough to reach every citizen of Earth is what shipping containers have made possible.

Once a certain level of manufacturing competence is distributed throughout the world this need no longer exists. Information travels faster than freight.

Manufacturing of some goods still needs to be centralized to some degree because of the up front cost of tooling, e.g. extreme ultraviolet lithography machines and giant multi-megaton presses, among other things.

Obviously every human activity is somehow related to 'the distribution of goods'.

Are these healthcare advancements closely related to either private enterprise or modern globalized logistics? Clearly not, as in many cases they took place without either, due to local conditions. For around half the world these advances took place before shipping containers.

Health education, hygiene and birth control generally rely on the transmission of information and ideas but not of goods. The other three have been successful, in at least some cases, as public goods, advanced outside of the private sector. In many other cases they have happened because of, not despite, local rather than globalized manufacturing and distribution.

> The cost of food is a great estimate of it's cost in electricity etc.

Its of course impossible to argue with neoliberals about this, but my entire point is that sometimes we have to step back and look at the overall picture and consider if what we are doing really makes sense. The ecological destruction in land, fresh water, the depletion of finite resources vs. renewable, the sustained poverty in developing countries for the last century combined with subsidized farming in the western world combined with a globalized liberal food market, etc.

> And those gigantic ships? The absolute cheapest (in fuel) way to move goods, responsible for essentially every advance in living in the last century.

Is it really so impossible to imagine any other measure of cost than what has been determined by the liberal market? Finite resources, the cost of the destruction of biospheres, the human toll this all has, none of this is calculated into your holy all knowing invisible hand of the market. Meanwhile people are suffering, poverty increasing, air and water become scarce resources and children starve to death all over. Whatever you imagine works so great, doesn't really for a LOT of people you never see or think about.

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