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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Even without questioning the capitalist obsession for infinite growth (despite finite resources and markets),

Seeing how communist regimes aren't exactly practicing degrowth, I think it's more accurate to say it's a human obsession.

>we should not have had the practice of hiring more than is essential to run the business. Who thought it was a good idea to make a success metric out of headcount?

Ostensibly companies aren't hiring for the sake of headcount. What they're actually after is market dominance, which can be obtained by building a better product, which require people.

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No argument about the point on communism, but as regards the headcount--I was referring to what I've seen mentioned more than a few times in HN comments where, apparently, FAANGs or some teams therein have engineering manager positions where the size of the team that one leads greatly translates to that employee's success (perceived or real) in the company. It's also a good number to look at for recruiters when said managers start applying for jobs elsewhere.

>I was referring to what I've seen mentioned more than a few times in HN comments where, apparently, FAANGs or some teams therein have engineering manager positions where the size of the team that one leads greatly translates to that employee's success (perceived or real) in the company

How does that translate into tech companies overhiring? Even if managers want more people on their team for progression purposes, they can't exactly expand their team to whatever size they want. They're subject to budgets set by finance.

I could be wrong of course—after all my comment is from the POV of an outsider looking in.

But, just going by what you said—if budget is supposed to be a constraint, well, FAANGs have the money to waste, don’t they? Also, hiring for hiring’s sake makes sense from a strategic standpoint especially during their respective growth eras—they needed to deplete the industry of the best programmers around, so that entrepreneurs can’t just startup and compete with them and take away their business.

I think North Korea is doing a good job of limiting growth. Not as a determined goal of their communism but as a result of their corruption, totalitarian control and incompetence. Still credit where credit is due. They are not growing as fast as their capitalist brothers to the south.

The world will become a north Korea if unchecked growth continues unchecked.

When cancer is growing the tumor is healthy and happy. It's when the tumor consumes all available resources and begins dying that it becomes a problem.

We are currently in the growth phase of a tumor. The dying phase is for your children or your children's children. Or your children's children's children. We are not sure when it will happen, we only know that it will through logic.

One should not confuse growth as in producing more and more stuff with growth as in progress.

Of course you can't produce more stuff ad infinitum. A balance to reach net-zero stuff is necessary to be sustainable.

But nothing prevents you from advancing technology ad infinitum. It can be sustainable to keep progressing. You just can't exhaust the resources around you, but you don't have to to keep progressing.

No. Technology production requires an energy input. It's fundamental physics. Reversing entropy requires an energy input, and technology is essentially entropy reversing.

At the more scientific level you can see this occurring by simply correlating energy expenditure per country per capita with the technological achievements of the respective country. Western countries are among the top energy users and technology developers.

The only good thing about technology is it's relatively low rate of decay... or in essence low rate of velocity in the descent back into a high entropy state. Knowledge once gained is kept with minimal additional energy input. But make no mistake, the crystallization of knowledge itself requires a high energy input.

Transfer and translations of these technologies also requires energy input which explains why technology doesn't easily cross certain physical boundaries like the borders between countries.

And you are saying we are anywhere close to the maximal energy that humankind can harvest?

I'd say you have seen nothing yet. And history is on my side here.

Besides, creating smarter things doesn't necessarily need more energy. We are pretty wasteful with energy at the moment. What you are talking about, entropy in the sense of progressing anywhere, is a ridiculously small fraction of what we are currently using energy for. Most of it goes to waste. There are generations of better energy efficiency to come before energy availability that can't be compensated with higher efficiency even becomes an issue. By then, nuclear fusion will be paramount and/or our use of the energy that comes from the sun will be magnitudes improved from what we do today. Just look back 100 years.

If we haven't bombed ourselves back into the stone age before that. Quite a possible outcome too.

> And you are saying we are anywhere close to the maximal energy that humankind can harvest?

Nope. But any exponential growth in consumption of energy will hit the existing limit very quickly. Even if that limit was magically increased by 10x we'd still hit it very very quickly.

> higher efficiency even becomes an issue. By then, nuclear fusion will be paramount and/or our use of the energy that comes from the sun will be magnitudes improved from what we do today. Just look back 100 years

Technological gambles are speculative. The failure of fusion is unfortunately just as realistic of a possibility that must be considered in a logical analysis.

Again.

1. "Progress" does not need to imply "exponential growth in consumption of energy".

2. Even if it does, we may be many thousand generations away from hitting a ceiling.

>1. "Progress" does not need to imply "exponential growth in consumption of energy".

It doesn't need to imply it. But from historical evidence it DOES imply it.

>2. Even if it does, we may be many thousand generations away from hitting a ceiling.

Not necessarily true. We don't fully know that. We're hitting ceilings with oil already. In the US peak oil already happened and we shifted to shale. We have about 5 more years of that. We're not sure what's left of middle eastern sources.

Other sources aren't ready yet, they're up and coming but we can't fully be sure technology will play out the way we want it to play out.

Rather, the result of sanctions, i.e., the almost total absence of cross-border trade.

Historically it was through trade that societies/nations became successful, were growing, were eventually dominating. The early dominance of Europe was thanks to its long coastal lines, allowing to quickly connect to neighbors and thereby exchange goods, thus trade. The industrialization was kicked off in Great Britain, the culmination of extensive trade combined with the abundance of cheap energy (coal + steam engine). Which then took off in all of Europe, again trough trade.

If you artificially limit trade of a country, either externally because everybody hates you, or internally because you are crazy, then you automatically limit your development and thereby growth. Communism or not.

> Seeing how communist regimes aren't exactly practicing degrowth

Most are building industrial capacity and modern infrastructure. Degrowth is something you do after growth.

Presenting degrowth as something those countries would randomly engage in now is a misunderstanding of what degrowth is and when/why you would do it, and/or complete ignorance of the developmental stage of those countries.

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