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Comment by esens | Hacker News Reader

It never actually seems to come though. I wouldn't count on it.

I believe that getting something for nothing is usually not sustainable. Just because you serve no purpose to those giving the things away for free. Something will give (some type of resource constraint will arise, even if it is just competitive/alternatives) and it will fail if you are not providing value.

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If you think in terms of money, then yes. But people can certainly provide value that cannot be measured in money and profits. And for me that's the whole idea of have a post scarcity society where you don't have to work.. I'm fairly sure that most people would actually start providing value on their own and for the good of society if they weren't forced to think about money.

It's only been, what a few hundred years since the industrial revolution began? We haven't given it enough time for the innovators to figure out how to manufacture the needs of society in an overflowing plentiful way that's also automated & low effort. Some things never will be of course.

On the other hand, here in the US we throw out something like 60% of the food we produce and have an obesity problem. One could argue that we've kinda already reached post-scarcity for feeding people, yet people still go hungry.

> and have an obesity problem.

I'd argue that's because we have a ton of junk food availability.

If I wanted to eat a roast and veggies from a local farm not covered in glyphosate, I'm going to pay for it.

Doritos and Cheerios are cheap af. But they're killing people.

We are arguably post scarcity of low quality corn and wheat, but what good is that? And that only comes because of subsidies.

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