The existence of poverty/hunger/homelessness in a post-scarcity world. if we wanted to eliminate those problems we could, but humans are blocked on how it can be done without hurting their own wealth.
We're not yet in a post scarcity world. We're tantalizing close, but not quite there yet.
There are three main areas we need to work on.
First is power generation. We need more, and it needs to be decupled from fossil fuels. Nuclear is the obvious answer for massive amounts of power output without using massive amounts of land, but fossil fuel lobbies have been hamstringing development since the 50s.
The important thing here isn't just replacing fossil fuels. That would just leave us were we are now. No we need to double or triple world power generation as a start.
The second area that needs work is connected to the first. Transportation. Not just electric cars, but container ships and trains and everything in-between.
This is where that added power generation comes in. We need to make it basically free to move things from point A to point B. There are some ways to do this, particularly for container ships. But we need the raw power available before they become viable.
The final area is automation. We need more. Once people need to be put out of work in massive numbers. We need to decuple work from life.
That final step is the hardest with the most pitfalls. It will happen. Well, the automation and unemployment will happen. After that we can either spiral into a hell scape or rise above into a post scarcity utopia...
It really depends on when and how the guillotines come out
You’re right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of “we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don’t because we’re frozen in place by greed” instead of “this is something we could do with infrastructure today”. If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we’re stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.
Under capitalism, food isn’t produced to eat but to make profits. When it’s not profitable to sell, they will rather dump foods, starving the people rather than to plainly donate. We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates. Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.
I study a lot of geopolitics and history and I have read of many different aid programs, domestically for citizens or abroad to poverty and war stricken countries.
Unfortunately it’s not as easy as dumping a bunch of money, food or whatever resource into the problem. For example there are cities with tons of homeless shelters but many stay on the streets. There are massive teams of social workers dedicated to helping people in need but many of them refuse their help.
When it comes to countries sometimes this aid is embezzled and only given to those loyal to the government. Sometimes used to fuel armies to continue conflicts, or just disappear into corruption and resold by crooked politicians to make a profit. Additionally it can hurt local, and in turn, the wider economy. The aid distributed for free kills many local businesses and livelihoods because you can compete with free.
Especially when you have some stupid company pulling a publicity stunt to send their own products as aid to struggling countries. One example was this brand of shoes that would donate a pair for every pair sold. This “friendly gesture” killed off all local cobblers, shoe manufacturers, shoe stores and prevented anyone from doing so to make a living, not to mention preventing self sufficiency of the country. That’s just one example, there are a lot of companies and misguided companies that do exactly this and many economists recommend that these poor countries should refuse this aid.
first. my current dog learned to deal with this as a puppy. I was astonished. My last dog I was trying to train the concept her whole life. Never saw a dog be able to handle it before but at this point if my current dog starts to go on the other side of an obstruction I say this way and she immediately corrects. For some reason for all other dogs I find they instinctively want to go the wrong way. So its not even random, they think wrapping more is the way to go. As for humans:
"The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race Is Man’s Inability To Understand the Exponential Function"
Amazing video, now thirty years old. By now, you would expect this analysis of population, economic & consumption growth would be essential learning in schools. My feeling is that the world today caries on with even greater ignorance of the consequences of this exponential growth than it did back then.
The counterargument for this line of thinking is that it’s just theoretical. You don’t have actual experience with the scenario, so you can’t truly know how you’d behave.
We all like to think we’re paragons of virtue. But when the chips are down, most people behave in ways they never expected to.
In the words of an eminent poet, “Everybody got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Sure, I don’t know how I’d react. I know for sure I’d do dodgy, illegal things. I also know that legal and moral are not synonyms. And I also know that the only person I have no choice but to live with is myself, and I have no intention of doing anything that makes me hate myself. Stopping time doesn’t change that.
Reasonable! I usually need music to focus on work. I also have music going any time I’m driving, for sure. And sometimes I even have it going when I sleep–although, I don’t think I did a lot of night music in 2023. Definitely more 2022. I think my number was in the 180s last year, maybe because I’ve been watching more Youtube videos this year. I should cut Youtube out and go back to music–probably a healthier use of my time lol.
Thanks I was kinda shocked when I saw the link it gave me lol. I have no intention of earning referral money or anything. I wasn’t even logged into Ali express when I copied the link.
Oh dang, that’ll save me a bit of time stripping that stuff out. It’s amazing how easy it is once you have just a little bit of understanding of how URLs work. My most common URL hack is getting youtube shorts to play with full controls. You just replace /shorts/[videoID] with watch?v=[videoID]
I used it today to go through this video frame by frame to discover that she in fact didn’t hit her face:
Last I checked my desktop was probably on for like 5 or 6 days, I’ll have to check it tommorow, but I’ve gotten over a month before having to reboot for updates, also I usually just put my system to sleep when I go to bed(was trying to get around slow HDD boot times, I now have NVME but haven’t broken the habit, plus nvidia drivers are being buggy and my viewport settings keep getting g reset upon reboot, plus I like to resume where I left off)
I’m on the same page as you, dude! My first thought was that I could take naps ANYWHERE at ANY TIME. It’d be a dream to never feel tired and always refreshed. Also to have absolutely no pressure from time commitments. I’d just be a happy guy most of the time.
Honestly I’m having trouble imagining what terrible things others here seem to be considering doing if they had the power to stop time. Hopefully it’s not more than stealing money from a bank vault?
I suppose it depends a lot on the nature of said time-stopping power. Using it to threaten some of the most powerful people on the planet into using said power to do good (or at least not bad) would be on the list of stuff to do.
For instance - a note threatening Putin with the loss of a toe or something (and further escalating consequences) unless he makes a public statement announcing the intent of Russian Armed forces to withdraw from Ukraine.
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