o_o

My point is that any meaningful capital is directly tied to resource usage. Our ability to produce energy directly depends on our ability to mine resources to build power plants and maintain them. Saying that we can increase energy production infinitely is reductive beyond any meaning, it’s like a physics problem about a perfectly spherical cow.

Not at all! To use real examples to avoid spherical cows:

Used to be that you needed wood to generate energy. Then coal (which is an order of magnitude better). Then oil (another order of magnitude). Then solar. Then fission. Then (hopefully) fusion. Then who knows what. At each step, we’ve taken something which previously wasn’t considered a resource at all and used it to generate exponentially more and more energy. There’s no limit to how often we can do this-- things which were previously not resources become resources once we know how to use them.

Another example is food production. I saw a graph recently-- if I find it I’ll edit this message to include it, but it showed how it used to be that we needed 100% of our population dedicated to food production. Now it’s less than 1%. Meaning that 1 person is producing enough food for 100 people. Incredible.

These examples (and many more) show that our ability to produce things are not subject to limitations of natural resources, because natural resources aren’t limited. There’s enough energy coming out of the sun to be infinite, for all intents and purposes.

Yes, natural resources are limited, but that doesn’t mean that capital is limited. What I mean is that: yes, we’re using more energy as a civilization, but thanks to the investment of capital, we’re also expanding our ability to produce more energy at the same time. And “how much energy our civilization is capable of producing” can increase infinitely.

Yeah, the problem of pollution is certainly an existential threat. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that the type of threat is “we’re running out of resources”. We’re not running out of anything, we’re just producing too much atmospheric carbon!

This is essentially the argument that Thomas Malthus (economist) made in the 1800’s. And he had a point!

In his time, history had shown that the entire output of a country/state was people’s productivity times some function of land and labour. Meaning you could increase the output of a country by making people more productive (limited), or increasing the land available (limited), or by increasing the labour available (also limited). Therefore, there was a hard limit on how much output a country could have. And therefore we were fucked because population increases exponentially but output only increases linearly and has limits.

I think this is similar to your lego analogy: the pieces (land, labour) are limited, therefore the output is also limited.

Then the capitalist revolution happened and once the capitalist-style legal framework was in place which allowed the ownership of capital, countries’ outputs broke from the historical trend. We realized that a different function better described the output of a country. Rather than land, the correct thing to look at was capital. So the new function was people’s productivity times some function of land and capital (hence, capitalism).

And unlike land, capital is, in fact, unlimited. Someone might build a factory on the land, and owning the factory, he/she has incentive to improve the factory. “How much you can improve the factory” is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. Therefore the output is also unlimited. This equation better described the growth in output that people were seeing in reality (GDP is an attempt to measure this), which has been growing exponentially ever since.

So… we’re not fucked? Well, it remains to be seen! We’ve certainly avoided being fucked so far! The standard of living of the average person on Earth has increased by a lot since Malthus.

Of course, this has come with negative externalities (pollution). We’re still seeing infinite growth riiiiiight up until we go extinct. The trick is to keep the infinite growth without going extinct!

EDIT: spelling correction

Really? Is there any evidence for this? I imagine they’d be open to huge lawsuits if they were exposing user data to any other parties.

I toss my KeePass file (encrypted database) in Google Drive.

That way I have all the convenience of syncing through the cloud, but I also get the benefit of having my database access and database storage be managed by separate companies.

If Google has a breach and my data gets leaked, sucks, but the database is encrypted so I’m good. If KeePass encryption is broken, sucks, but attackers would also have to find a way to gain access to my Google Drive.

My first sentence was:

There’s a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees.

As I indicate, I’ve read the discussion that was here at the time, and appreciate it. I’ve even responded to a couple of posts. In this comment, I was hoping to bring up a different angle.

If you don’t agree and/or don’t want to engage, that’s fine, but don’t assume that I’m just blindly soliciting responses without reading what people are saying.

There’s a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees.

The aim of Affirmative Action, as a policy, was to improve the following metric: “wealth of black Americans compared to wealth of white Americans”. (I’m using ‘wealth’ as a stand-in for all the good experiences we’re trying to optimize for, and ‘black’ and ‘white’ as stand-ins for the various groups at play). I think most of us agree that this was the aim of AA.

We can, of course, debate on whether AA was successful in improving this metric or not. I’m willing to concede that it may indeed have improved this metric.

But I don’t think that it’s a useful metric in the first place. And I can’t really articulate why. I’d welcome some responses to help me flesh out my thoughts.

I guess… it just seems racist to me to be comparing “oh, the Chinese group is making XYZ dollars but the Indian group is only making ABC dollars. Let’s make sure the Chinese give some of their wealth to the Indians”. That doesn’t seem to be a productive way of thinking. Who cares how much money the Chinese make compared to the Indians, as long as no individual is being treated unfairly right now.

Like I said, I’d welcome responses to help flesh out my opinions.

Yeah, a few times. It was especially helpful in finding causes of subtle UI bugs, to identify the exact commit which changed the UI.

Agreed! This is annoying for me as well, but still I like it a lot. Better than Reddit, even.

This is the bug I’ve subscribed to for updates on this issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3101

It’s surprising to me that it’s not the top priority. Needs more thumbs ups!