Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Realistically, you should make communities local and more self-sufficient, like they used to be.

This idea that you have to commute 20 miles to work every day, in a personal car, is less than 100 years old. People used to grow up, live, work, and marry and raise families in their villages. Not many would travel all the time. Mozart was probably the most traveled of his time, and he probably didn't go half as many miles as the average worker today.

Make it so people can work from home. Give them an unconditional basic income so they don't have to work.

The problem is capitalism, as much as many people here don't like to hear it. Capitalism is great at what it does -- but it doesn't care about externalities. If a person runs out of food, capitalism doesn't care. If a species goes extinct, the world is turned into farms and monocultures, or the planet is polluted or resources are depleted, capitalism won't care until it's done.



Self-sufficiency is rife with its own inefficiencies.

For example, using Mozarts timeframe and attempting it place it on our current planet leads to a situation where no logical comparison can be made. He is from around 1800, there were around 900 million people at the time. You could grow enough locally to feed the population locally in most places. This is no longer true. Mass transportation of food, water, and resources for survival are currently necessary.

The problem is not capitalism, the problem is people

Pretty much every living creature goes through stages of increased resource availability -> growth -> overshooting population capacity or resource reduction -> population reduction. As we can see, overpopulation of raccoons, antelopes, and alligators isn't caused by capitalism, it is caused by the biological imperative to breed -> consume -> breed -> consume. Furthermore your willingness to blame capitalism blinds you to knowledge and an impartial view of what is occurring. Such as, most first world capitalistic countries are experiencing population stagnation. Japan, US, and western Europe all have decreasing population, until you take immigration into account. Also many non-capitalistic countries have terrible problems with pollution (Russia anyone?), thereby again rendering your premise that capitalism is the problem. Blaming the wrong thing never fixed the problem, whipping boys don't lead to solutions.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: