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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

That's great, but we're nowhere near that point. That is basically a post scarcity society.

If our enormous economic engines were devoted towards efficiency rather than profit motive, I think we would be there.

How many appliances do we build to last for a few years and then break? How many economic resources could we save by building fewer products to last longer? If the economic engine were tilted towards quality rather than churn, we could be much more efficient about our use of resources.

No, we're nowhere near it. Last mile labor needs are unavoidable at this time and energy and materials are still very much scarce.

Durable products would be nice.

The profit motive promotes efficiency by driving all prices towards marginal cost, as long as competition exists. Highly durable goods are not per se an efficient use of resources, but we probably disagree on the meaning of that word anyway.

If you wait until a post-scarcity to implement a UBI you will have violent collapse of society long before you reach post-scarcity. We walk a razor's edge of oppression - too little and society doesn't have enough peasants to grind into the machine to make the gears work, too much and the peasants destroy the machine.

And if you implement UBI now, you'll just shoot yourself in the foot and become less economically competitive because you're in a globalized economy. You cannot do this while you're still dependent on trade with other countries, which we are. You can do UBI when it really wouldn't matter if we didn't employ people in low wage jobs.

For all intents and prepared we already live in a post-scarcity society. We're just too shitty to make an effort to distribute the wealth, the food, the products etc.

s/prepared/purposes

Curse autocomplete/swipe keyboards

Not even close. Producing enough total food to feed everyone is not post scarcity. A massive energy crisis in europe is plenty evidence for this.

We produce significantly more food that is needed to feed everyone.

Energy crisis in Europe is entirely man-made because, as I said, we are shitty.

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