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Comment by blurbleblurble | Hacker News Reader

Rentier capitalism results in artificial scarcity. With rentier schemes and behavior dominating aspects of life so fundamental as housing and health care, conditions of artificial scarcity have stretched their tendrils into the fabric of our wellbeing: into our mental, spiritual, social health, into our very sense of having the time to freely work in pursuit of healthy lives.

And the most difficult thing of all is that this is all a wicked pyramid scheme, one that is hard to break without seeming violence against people we care about. We are dependent.

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Get this guy in front of cspan... artificial scarcity is rarely written about yet its blaring.

Food scarcity is one of the largest perpetrators of artificial scarcity. Massimo Bottura whole model for food for the soul is based on the appalling 30% of food waste he witnessed first hand. If you ever have the pleasure to hear this beautiful man speak, you will understand the little effort, but extreme creativity that goes into combating waste. It is quite sad some chefs throw out half the meat to get the perfect box for the plate. Use the scraps for ‘family meal’ aka staff meal and boom all that waste is gone. Such simple effort is apparently extremely innovative.

We have taken the thanos mindset too far ‘I yield this powerful glove that can do anything, the universe is over populated so destroy half the universe’. It’s so obvious that you can also create double the space. The exponential growth will be the same either way, maybe a couple years lean on the destruction, eventually they will equal out when your curve goes to infinity. It’s like people learned calculus 2 and are like ‘ahaha this is bullshit it has no real world applicability’. No look at your decisions and their consequences, create a curve and measure the area under the curve, see they converge at the same axis and realize regardless of the x shift the curves both converge at the same y. Like that math has an abstract application which should be used for critical thinking application. It is very sad to see people write ‘teach me about finances and taxes calculus is useless’. The very passive application of calculus has helped me go from being in the biggest rut of my life to actually feeling productive in the field.

Anyways I diverged 3 times sorry.

I once worked a few shifts in an extremely posh hotel.

One day, we had a lot of leftover desserts, like several trays of untouched fancy desserts. I was instructed to throw them all in the bin.

I asked the manager if I could instead take these trays with desserts to the staff room so that people could eat them during their lunch break.

This would have taken 5-10 minutes max, there was nothing urgent that needed to be done.

Manager got upset at the question, told me off, I had to throw out all that fancy food.

It’s such a shame how not only is this accepted but is also apparently supposed to be vase case. Any question of use of food is deemed as divergence and handled without care... honest bullshit

What artificial scarcity do you have in mind, bearing in mind that there is a true scarcity (or at least fixed supply) of land close to desirable places to live?

>fixed supply

Aka artificial scarcity. Wealthy landowners prevent housing of adequate density being built. Public transport is hard to fund due to the expense driven by negotiating with landholders.

Landowners are creating artificial scarcity; the thing that is not scarce is land; it is habitable spaces proximate to quality employment opportunities.

Consider this:

It's become normalized for people to buy houses/condos with large amounts of inflating debt. Because you're indebted, you can't simply sell what you've bought for any less than you owe, eat the loss and walk away, as you might do with something you flat out own. You'd still owe your lender, with interest.

I'd argue that this game creates a significant incentive for people to hold onto a housing units and pass debt onto renters, that it turns would-be owner-occupants into virtual speculators/landlords. I say "virtual" because they are really just tenants of their lenders (banks), and many of them aren't really in it for the "win", they're just in it by coercion, in it for the "not loss".

This whole scheme, and many others like it, artificially restricts supply and inflates prices.

Try buying a house in the sunset and turning it in to flats.

Try buying a house and selling it for a similar or lower price without walking away in debt.

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