Too Expensive to Exist | Hacker News Reader

Too Expensive to Exist

mapwriting.substack.com

83 pointskitkut20 comments

The problems he describes all fit into three buckets

* Insurance industry rent-seeking

* Ennui (literal definition: not getting enough mental sustenance from things that previously gave enough)

* Symptoms of grossly rising population densities (most of the complaints raised there)

I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism but the laws of supply and demand do apply to the space we occupy and would like to roam around in as much as anything else. With food scarcity mostly abolished (until this year incidentally, the 2026/27 winter will be terribly bad for humanity) the Malthusian pressures all went away, leaving the human race to operate inside of the overshoot loop dynamical system instead:

https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/overshoot-loop-evolution-under-...

> I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism

But you do want to assert that it is true, without being aware of its meaning?

Malthusianism is the notion that some people must be poor / hungry because humans choose to reproduce until they reach the limits of the environment to provide for them (especially those Irish potato farmers, according to Malthus), and that increases in productivity will not change this - they will just be absorbed by a growing population (which ought to be 'swept away').

In reality, growing populations have led to more than adequate improvements in food production efficiency and people are choosing to reproduce less rather than more.

There is an excellent summary and rebuttal of Malthusianism in the book 'Progress and Poverty' by Henry George, which offers an alternative view of how supply and demand for finite land (your words) rather than reproductive instinct (Malthusianism) creates poverty.

How about point 4 - the litigiousness of American society leading to those high insurance costs, given that any accident on a playground can result in a multi million dollar payout?

I think litigiousness is a symptom of the lack of a social safety net so you are pressed to push for financial support from Wherever you can.

I see it more as a symptom of deaths and incapacities becoming orders of magnitude more rare than they were a century ago. We've always not had a social net (and relatively speaking, we have more of a social net now than before); it's the human perception and familiarity with suffering of those around them that has shifted drastically. If you were alive 100 years ago you would have likely expected to have one or two children passed away and dozens of deceased or incapacitated friends/family members by your thirties; such was life, as disease, malnutrition and other dangers were rampant. Nowadays we have such a lower incidence of death and harm that the relative emotional impact of one is staggering, to the extent that people will go out of their way to assign blame and sue to the greatest extent possible rather than see risks as an inherent part of life.

Completely ignoring the extreme inequalities in ownership and just basic control about the general direction that economic development goes to, so I can't really take this seriously.

Also not sure how large-scale ecosystem destruction counts as "Ennui".

There is zero objective necessity for the current data center gold rush, and yet it takes away an enormous amount of resources.

Meanwhile, China somehow manages to turn deserts back into fertile land.

The sentiment behind this post is, I fear, felt by too many normal people in the world today and not enough leaders. This is usually due to the network graph of leaders (above a certain scale threshold) being correlated with the most out of touch and wealthy - they are the last to hear about the insurance rates for campgrounds.

That said, the keyword used more than once in this post is "impotent". There is simply nothing the majority of us can do. And that worries me for obvious reasons.

> The sentiment behind this post is, I fear, felt by too many normal people in the world today and not enough leaders.

This brings to mind a recent article from a Toronto newspaper: we recently had municipal elections, and the article noted that most city councillors are home/land owners, but in the new council there are now a few renters as well:

> With the election victory Monday night that saw her become the councillor for Parkdale—High Park, the longtime tenant advocate has taken one giant step toward altering the economic makeup of city hall. Before the election, Toronto had no councillors confirmed to be a renter like McNally, and now it will have three. She told the Star she wanted to bring that perspective to the fight against Toronto’s affordability crisis.

* https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/city-hall/half-of-toronto-r...

* https://archive.is/l26SW

I grew up in Texas and lots of people who hear me talk about it assume I absolutely hate it there. In reality, I have a lot of the same complaints as this author and think it's citizens should demand better. The state seemingly has zero interest in investing in community resources, and what few of these exist are constantly at risk.

Fairfield Lake State Park is a perfect microcosm of this. The lake exists primarily to provide water for a power plant. The state park exists on land leased at very low cost from the power company. The power company closed the plant, and the state could have bought the land to secure the state park. It already had all of the infrastructure you need to run a state park, and had staff lined up to do so. Instead they let the land pass into private ownership and made a halfhearted effort to recover the land after the fact.

A lot of Texans that I talk to assume that the vast public land of the Rockies and Sierras is a geographic inevitability. In reality much of this public land exists because of specific, concerted efforts by communities and municipalities.

I remember growing up in Texas reading somewhere between 80-95 percent of all land in Texas is privately owned in various civics texts, my libertarian civics teacher was proud of this for some reason. It’s an exceptionally high percentage compared to the states to west of Texas. It’s a Texas issue dating back to Spanish rule and continued under successive governments. I don’t think this happened to other western states formerly under Spanish rule.

The amount of public land sort of follows when states were admitted to the union. At a certain point we saw what happened to the East and decided not to let it keep happening. Thanks in large part to early conservationists like Gifford Pinochet and Teddy Roosevelt

> I talked to the owner. She told me how upset she was to have to do it but insurance costs keep going up, and she can’t afford to pay them.

> This is the invisible hand of the market at work. This is the invisible hand giving me the middle finger.

Misdiagnosed. Insurance is a competitive business, and operators who overcharge lose customers.

It's the trial lawyers, and their own state legislators giving them the middle finger. The insurance coverage that's gone up and driven the park to shut down is of course that for accident claims, driven by excessive jury awards to victims .

This post wasn’t exactly what I came for (looking at the title) and a bit more stream of consciousness than expected, but nonetheless rings true. Enjoyed the bit on materialistic consumerism and Wall-E.

I think a lot about the decline of wilderness and just want to mention that animal agriculture drives a huge amount of the land pressure driving conversion of intact ecosystems into degraded states. 3/4 of the world's ag land is devoted to grazing or growing livestock feed. If the world went vegan then biodiversity and ecosystem loss would probably reverse. I think even the marginal impact an individual choice is significant. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

It begs the question of how to not be impotent. What can those who feel this way do?

We have a little bit of land, just over 2 acres with woods around. I really enjoy seeing deer and turkeys. Coyotes not so much.

It doesn’t “feel” like everything is caving in while at home. But when we leave, it really does. Like the traffic on the way to the airport this morning.

There seems to be a lot of latent stress. I think that’s what this post is talking about. It’s hard to sum it up in a single sentence. Not even “everything is getting unaffordable” lands…because of all those new full sized pickup trucks.

Something doesn’t fit and even I have a hard time putting my finger on it. I go to the local grocery store which is in a lower income area and I ask myself how all of these people survive. But they do.

But even as someone not struggling to survive by any means I feel what this post is saying.

Hypernormalization

For a more positive spin on the situation (also set in Texas), check out the book "A Natural History of Empty Lots" by Christopher Brown.

One way out of this is to carry a pocketful of poppy seeds. Throw them on the soil of the empty lots and the dividers in the parking lot. The urban fabric can, and does, get rolled back.

This learned helplessness is as much the problem as anything else. The author rants about how once nature is destroyed it can never be recovered, and resigns himself to the thought that nothing can be done about it. Bullshit. One man in Brazil planted 40,000 trees and singlehandedly created a park in a desolate urban strip. You are not impotent unless you choose to be.

>Are you kidding me? She can’t let people walk on her land and sleep on her dirt because of the fucking insurance costs?!

By proxy this is attributed to lawyers, third party litigation funders, and large jury awards. Have you seen the cost of umbrella policies these days?

Yes, very sad, but that is what you get based on how people vote these days.

But no worries, decendents of all the people moving south will eventually end up as climate change refugees in 50 to 100 years. Then we get to watch a whole new environmental habitat develop in the deep south :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com