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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

> but it is much more energy-efficient than power tools

Only if you forget to amortize the cost of supporting a human life for the extra marginal hours it takes

Industrialization and automation lead to higher human populations, so if your point was that the cost of supporting a human makes power tools more efficient than hand tools, I think you have it backwards.

Cheap energy makes efficiency less important.

sure, let's all maximise the time we have available to spend on a couch consuming mindless tv.

The "but it takes tiiiiime" argument against making your own things (and achieving a kind of satisfaction, control and learning that's hard to beat) is simply dreadful.

Who are you to decide what people do and don't want to do with their spare time? Some people don't achieve any satisfaction from making their own things; they just see it as a chore. Your disappointment in that is just your subjective opinion, not any reflection of objective truth.

You also seem to think that there's nothing "productive" anyone could do with the time they save from not having to make their own things, which seems obviously false.

It's nice to have the luxury of spare time. Many people don't. Or they have to budget it extremely tightly.

Don't project your use of spare time on everyone else. Some of us use spare time towards productive ends. I would personally prefer not to spend all my time living like a subsistence farmer from 1200 years ago.

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