Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

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Do we need 40 car companies working on the same problem ?

Do we need 40 PC companies releasing 20 new laptops each every year ?

Do we need 40 smartphone makers releasing 20 new phones each every year ?

Do we need humongous cars requiring humongous engines, humongous brake pads and tires (massive source of pollution)

How is using a three tonnes metal cage to displace your 80kg ass three miles efficient ?

Do we need earbuds with soldered batteries ? The earbuds should be good for decades but the soldered battery is toast after a few years, same for laptops

Do we need fast fashion and shitty gadgets from china ? 20%+ of france's post packages comes from shein/temu, that's an insane waste of resource and energy: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/vente-en-ligne-temu-et-...

&c.

Take a few steps back and look around you, what the fuck are we even doing ? 80% of all that shit isn't actually bringing anything in term of quality of life

You guys would have been really happy in the Soviet Union. Planned economies sound great on paper, I guess. (Though, to make my point: the standard of living there was below that of the West.)

I mean if the choice is between living with Soviet standard of living and burning in a wildfire, the choice sounds obvious.

Note that no one has argued for a planned economy.

Yeah because everything is binary and if you reject any bit of consumerism your dream is obviously to live in a gulag.

This place is filled with very smart dumb people...

Or, you can go full CERN. Two teams, same problem, under NDA except their teammates.

In CERN LHC teams, every problem is assigned to two groups, and their sensors are placed on the opposite ends of the accelerator relative to each other. Both starts from scratch, come up with completely different approaches to the same problem, and solve it independently, verifying each other in the process.

Higgs Boson is found by two teams, one week apart, independently verifying that it exists. You can apply this to any grand challenge. Space, AI, etc. Create two super-teams, NDA them, give them money and let loose.

I was unable to find the comment now, but a comment about fabric quality bothers me to this day:

Paraphrased: "The clothes had longer lives back then, because we were unable to weave fabric that thin (i.e. low quality). Since we can do now, we do it."

IOW: Things are more expensive and lower quality, because we want you to buy more things and spend more, so we can make more monies.

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