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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Wow.

I kind of agree - but really let's say we listen to our inner doubts, we mutiny and throw Ahab overboard, we are still on a whaler in the middle of the ocean. Now what?

Our (global?) society is on course for destruction on the ocean - but that course is also sailing use closer to the promised land. Every innovation, every step closer to the singularity requires us to move faster, land more sure-footedly. Yes we could balls it all up, start a mindless war that tips the balance, refuse to cooperate in trade or keep the next Einstein in a poverty stricken barro to die of diseases we cure with a single needle.

but then we could not - we could survive on the knife edge - learn how to sail better, close to the wind.

Destruction is not inevitable - it is just somewhere between likely and probable. All the more reason not to give into dsspair - not let Ahabs obsessions distract him from the survival of the ship, but for us to watch and honestly discuss the ships course - and find a way for the whole world to choose together our next course.

(yeah a little too flowery language - sorry. it's late)

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I question whether you even read, or worse, understood what Hedges was getting at with this piece. Hedges is essentially saying we should become Marxist, but here you are saying that maybe we can redeem ourselves and survive on the 'knife edge'. Hedges addresses this by quoting Emma Goldman about half-way through. Capitalism can't be fixed with a few patches here and there, it must be abolished and trying to appear moderate makes you no different than the crew members of Pequod who played into Ahab's mania.

The assumption here is that moderation is what has prevented the course of Pequod (and decaying civilizations) from correcting their course. You question what happens when we throw Ahab overboard while ignoring the fact that each passing minute and hour you let Ahab run free, your security and well-being are threatened. Why fuss over what happens when you toss Ahab over when Ahab poses a nearly immediate threat to your well-being? That's just more of the moderation that silently rationalizes Ahab's actions.

Hedges brought up a number of revolutionary thinkers from all walks of the revolutionary left, yet proposed we follow no single system. The subtext being that we need to move away from capitalism, and generally need to move to the left. Whether that's straight up Marxism or more moderate forms of radical schools of thought are secondary or even tertiary. The point is we need to change the course of the ship immediately, or we'll just repeat history for the thousandth time.

Oooh an actual reply :-) Thank you - I did miss it however.

> Capitalism can't be fixed with a few patches here and there, it must be abolished and trying to appear moderate makes you no different than the crew members of Pequod who played into Ahab's mania.

This may sound silly but is there a common definition of capitalism? It seems rather woolly compared to say, Marxism. Capitalism seems to me to be something we have been doing for tens of thousands of years. Saying "no capitalism is what Marx said it was so that he had something to be against" is kind of backwards. (that may not be what you are saying, but its what I got from the article)

To my mind the biggest difference between capitalism and communism (as practised) has been the use of price as a signalling mechanism (see the way China moved away from a centrally planned model).

Otherwise capitalism seems to have covered a vast vast range of practises over centuries, but perhaps can be boiled down to trade or trade with price as a signalling mechanism.

If this "definition" of capitalism is right, then it seems that it gets fixed often.

BTW, I am in favour of massive change, including the dunking of captains, the fundamentals of our society are creaking and there is a new approach needed. Its just that the next workable approach is not an approach anyone has so far tried, and probably not thought of, (although much more open transparent decision making and information is almost certainly going to be involved thanks to the Internet).

So chucking Ahab overboard when we do not know what course to set after is a bad idea, but chucking him overboard if he threatens to sink the ship is a good idea. We are just disagreeing on whether this current bout of mad behaviour (whatever it may be) is a threat to the ship or not.

Thank for the reply anyway.

let's say we listen to our inner doubts, we mutiny and throw Ahab overboard, we are still on a whaler in the middle of the ocean. Now what?

We know what happens next, because it's already been tried. What happens when you mutiny and throw Ahab overboard: the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror; the Soviet Union; the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Revolution doesn't work because you can't fight destruction with destruction, and that's what revolution is: destruction.

Absolutely, this cannot be repeated enough. And I say this as an unemployed member of the masses, not as a large shareholder with my fingers in a bunch of pies.

This of course raises the question of what is to be done; the answer is: live within your means, be responsible, know your neighbors, and don't be a weird conspiracy theorist.

what is to be done

All the items you give are good ones; I would add a few more:

* Be skeptical. Much of what passes for "common knowledge" because it is promulgated by the government or the mainstream media is false. Use your own independent judgment.

* Be knowledgeable. You can't use your own independent judgment if you don't understand how things work. Yes, that means you have to spend time and effort learning about things like science or economics on your own, rather than just accepting that whatever you were taught in school is true. (For why you can't just accept that, see "be skeptical" above.)

* When people who are in power make mistakes, particularly large and egregious mistakes, don't let them off the hook. People in power love to make excuses when they screw up. Don't let them. They also like to say that they didn't mean to do anything wrong, but they're human so they make mistakes. Don't let them get away with that either; if you're in a position of power, you should be held to a higher standard than an ordinary person, because your decisions have broader consequences. For an ordinary person, making a bad decision means you learn to do better next time. For a person in power, making a bad decision should very often mean they're no longer in power.

Most of all:

* Don't look at politics as a way of imposing your view of what is right on others. Look at politics as a last resort for people with fundamentally different values to use to figure out how to peacefully coexist without either side imposing its views on the other.

> This of course raises the question of what is to be done; the answer is: live within your means, be responsible, know your neighbors, and don't be a weird conspiracy theorist.

I personally think that collapse is coming. If I had to guess I would say 20-30 years out but to be honest, that's a guess. It could be ten years and it could be a hundred. I don't think the system can reform itself. The fundamental question is how we, our children, or our children's children can plan to survive when nemesis follows hubris.

The things you have mentioned are the beginning but I will give you a few more.

1. Collapse isn't the end of the world. As Joseph Tainter pointed out, nutrition for many Romans improved after the fall of Rome. I would add that already nutrition among the poor in Indonesia (at least from what I have seen living here) is better than it is among the poor in the US, so we have already crossed the threshold where collapse makes sense to a large part of the population.

2. Trade locally. Build up local economic ties.

3. Plan on retiring with your kids. Raise them with this in mind. Part of this is inviting your parents or parents-in-law to retire with you so your kids grow up seeing this as normal.

Ah come on. I'd say there's at least a 50% chance that the US military and the Department of Energy find a workable new energy source in that timeframe (I have -very- little faith in the European academics who have locked themselves down on ITER and are at this point actively sabotaging other attempts. This is beyond stupid as ITER's timeframe is known and is too little, to late. The project should be cancelled, as there's only 2 outcomes : either it fails before the collapse. Or it doesn't, in which case there's zero chance of completion).

Alternatively we could prepare for failure. The only way to do that is to make sure we have 150 new nuclear power plants built all around the country in the next 10-15 years though. That should be Obama's Manhattan project. Again, there's two outcomes : either we find something better and it's wasted money (that would be great !) or it saves our collective asses, and gives us another 100 years to come up with something better.

If the US army/govt does find a new energy source, it's likely to be a nuclear one (the only real solution to our needs), and our energy problems are over until our grandchildren die.

You still have two fundamental problems that can't be solved just by inventing new energy sources.

The first is smelting and materials. You can recycle steel with just electricity (that's a lossy process) but you can't produce it without burning coal. The same goes for copper and most other metals (aluminum is the only exception to my knowledge). If one wants to support exponentially increasing material consumption, that means, supporting exponentially increasing fossil fuel consumption at this point, since we are already way beyond what we can support there by using biomass for reduction smelting.

The second problem is that no matter what you do, if you push for ever-increasing consumption this will have massive environmental costs. We saw what happened at Fukushima and frankly I think the real lesson there is that natural disasters will always have a significant chance to overwhelm human engineering. It's easy to say "well, if they had the newer designs" but I am not aware of any real experience there seeing more recent designs of nuclear power plants go through a massive earthquake and tsunami. At best we can say "well, if we didn't miss something..." but reality is always more complex than our models. So I don't see nuclear as the answer.

The only real way to prepare for failure is to reduce consumption, and if you listen to the macro-economists, that would cause failure.

For exponentially increasing consumption of energy, even without greenhouse gas emissions you have the problem of the second law of thermodynamics, which leads to a warming planet even with a constant atmosphere. Our path is not sustainable and no amount of technological intervention will make it so. The only breakthrough that could possibly matter in that regard would be the development of perpetual motion machines.

exponentially increasing material consumption

Which isn't necessary, because first, the population is no longer increasing exponentially; IIRC the current projection is that world population will level off by about 2050; and second, the amount of material required to accomplish particular things is decreasing as we find new materials and new ways of using them. For example, the structure of cars used to be entirely steel; now much of it is composites, which contain less material and are less energetically expensive to make.

if you listen to the macro-economists, that would cause failure

It depends on which macro-economists you listen to. Some of them understand that increasing wealth does not have to mean increasing consumption of materials or energy.

> Which isn't necessary, because first, the population is no longer increasing exponentially...

The problem you run into there is that for a long time the elderly population will be increasing exponentially, and care for the elderly falls on the shoulders of a smaller portion of the population.

> the amount of material required to accomplish particular things is decreasing as we find new materials and new ways of using them.

This would suggest that capita energy consumption of countries with cutting edge technology is well ahead of per capital energy consumption in countries where people have simpler societies and less manufacturing technologies, right? Is that borne out by numbers and evidence?

> Some of them understand that increasing wealth does not have to mean increasing consumption of materials or energy.

Please define "wealth."

for a long time the elderly population will be increasing exponentially

Not "for a long time"; for the length of one generation.

No, because per capita energy consumption depends on how wealthy you are as well as how efficient your technology is. What it does suggest is that per capita energy consumption rises more slowly as a function of wealth than one would expect based on your assumptions about increasing use of resources, and that over time, the per capita energy consumption for some fixed level of wealth will get smaller.

Please define "wealth."

The best definition I know of is that wealth is choices: the more things you could choose to do with the resources available to you, the wealthier you are. One could also try to factor in some measure of the quality of the choices; for example, Bill Gates and I can both choose to fly somewhere, but he can choose to fly there on a private jet whereas I can only choose to fly on a commercial airliner. But the key is that nothing requires the resources needed to fly somewhere to be constant; as technology improves, the same goal--such as flying somewhere--can be accomplished with fewer and fewer resources. That means the same level of wealth--the same choices--can be achieved with fewer and fewer resources.

> What it does suggest is that per capita energy consumption rises more slowly as a function of wealth than one would expect based on your assumptions about increasing use of resources, and that over time, the per capita energy consumption for some fixed level of wealth will get smaller.

I am not sure that works in practice unless one has a lot of resources going to enforce property rights over intangible assets, and unless those rights are the only growth one expects in the economy. The fact is, I may download and play a computer game as a factor of what you call "wealth" (not my definition btw), but as soon as I want to do anything(like go to the store to buy groceries), I have to use energy and materials to do that.

Similarly for the video game developer, the FTC regulator, or anyone else possibly involved, to show up to work you have the same questions of materials and energy. What you end up with instead is greater demand for less and less useful products because good materials become more and more expensive. That sounds like inflation to me, not an increase in wealth. I think we are already heading down that spiral.

As for a definition of wealth, this may seem old fashioned, but I will paraphrase one of the more insightful definitions I have read:

Humans are dependent on material culture since we can't live without clothing or shelter, and tend to have to prepare food in some way. Wealth at its core is a desirable modification to goods and materials in our environment. Wealth is created when we modify something to make it more useful.

0.025% annual growth is still exponential. You can't demand a constant rate of compounding rate of growth without the problem that this demands exhausting all natural resources.

a constant rate of compounding rate of growth

The rate isn't constant; it's decreasing. That's the point. For example, you say it takes energy and materials to go to the store or go to work; but it takes less per person now than it used to. (One obvious example is that lots of people can telework now because we have the Internet, conference calling, etc.; I do that several times a week, saving a significant chunk of energy and materials.)

Wealth at its core is a desirable modification to goods and materials in our environment.

Which is done for lots of reasons in addition to food, clothing, and shelter. Your definition of wealth is way too narrow. There are plenty of countries where people have food, clothing, and shelter and nothing else. We call those countries "poor" for a reason.

Another big exception is plastic, which covers the vast majority of usecases. Also we're nowhere near "peak" coal, so metal is not going to be a problem any time soon. Eventually, yes, but not this century.

Frankly what happened at Fukushima is over-cautiousness with nuclear power. The stupid fact is that if they hadn't shut down the entire plant, they wouldn't have lost cooling, and we would all have been perfectly fine. Of course, whoever took that decision would have been fired, and skinned alive, allowed to heal, and skinned alive again. I even read at one point that the operators knew this, but followed procedure.

I would also like to say the death toll of Fukushima compares favorably with wind-power related deaths during the same circumstances, and compares insanely favorable compared to fossil-fuel related deaths (some people actually died inspecting a refinery reactor when the wave knocked it over, most are from pipes exploding due to over-pressure. Total is several hundred). Total area rendered inaccessible due to Fukushima also compares favorably compared to area polluted to the point humans can't safely live there any more for fossil fuel plants and refineries.

> Another big exception is plastic, which covers the vast majority of usecases. Also we're nowhere near "peak" coal, so metal is not going to be a problem any time soon. Eventually, yes, but not this century.

Coal matters if one is concerned about CO2 emissions if nothing else.

> The stupid fact is that if they hadn't shut down the entire plant, they wouldn't have lost cooling, and we would all have been perfectly fine.

Do we know for sure that containment wasn't lost due to structural damage from the earthquake?

> I would also like to say the death toll of Fukushima compares favorably with wind-power related deaths during the same circumstances...

Is death toll the only factor though? I don't know about you but I think the major impact of Chernobyl of Fukushima will not be, in a hundred years, the death toll but the fact that you have areas of land that are no longer useful for many purposes, like growing food.

American War of Independence?

i dig this.

the author laments the hubris and arrogance present in all societies, as if these exaggerations were bugs, and not features.

the arrogance of the leaders and the peddling of hope are there because we are all afraid, and nobody wants to admit it. he talks about the chasm of human reality and how you get burned if you get closed to it, and i agree - it makes sense. i came out burned. i was mad at the world for a while and wanted to tear the whole thing down, but i went back for a closer look because i figured there must have been something i'm missing. there is beauty at the bottom of it, and we can get through it.

there is still new land to be explored - we just can't get there by walking or sailing. the ENTIRE GALAXY awaits us if we can just get off this damned rock. let's peddle all the hope we need and beat our chests all day long; let's spread the gospel to heathen civilizations on other planets if that's what it takes for us to move out of this place and into another one. maybe we're just delaying the inevitable and the end of the galactic civilization will be that much more spectacular when it comes, but it's not as if we can go back in time to change all the "best guesses" our world was built on and the gentle lies that sustain it.

we are now heathens living on easter island. we know our civilization is built on a lie. we can either stop telling that lie and kill each other out of anger over mistakes our ancestors made doing the best they could, or we could all keep telling the lie, keep playing our assigned parts with a wink and a nod, and put fewer resources into enforcing what everybody knows is a sham story, and devote all our efforts into finding the new land we think might be out there over the great waters.

the only way through is forward. the only way out is up.

> the only way through is forward. the only way out is up.

And that is going in the quote archive. Nice :)

That's great if you haven't made any mistakes. In the maze of reality you may make a wrong turn. If so, admit you are wrong, and take a new or old course.

This reminds me of the question of are we some of the last humans to exist (species ends on earth) or some of the first (great golden galactic future)

Either way we won't ever find out - so how we behave is really a matter of faith - not in God but in our descendants ability to keep going up.

I'm voting for optimisim :-)

"We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always t..."

/watch?v=zGmfiKowrYU

The ecological situation can be improved (damage slowed) by putting resources into it, or encouraging a shift in resource use through laws. Encouraging the onward march mindlessly is not helpful. There has to be some self-reflection and reevaluation of current strategies on how to get to the next technological age, if we are to get there without: nuclear holocaust; human-made plague; trashing our planet so badly we can no longer eat or drink; using up the resources needed for computers and therefore causing computer infrastructure to stagnate and decay just when we need it to run an AI; using up all our hydrocarbon energy reserves and running out of energy that we need to keep up the onward march...

There are many pitfalls that might cause this march into the future to end abruptly and miserably, even if the goal of a new technological era is physically and strategically possible given our current resource constraints. We would do well to avoid falling into a pit along the way, and a social dialogue about possible pitfalls is a necessary part of that.

> The ecological situation can be improved (damage slowed) by putting resources into it, or encouraging a shift in resource use through laws.

But this itself has a long-term cost in terms of both consumption and complexity. Put another way, you can't solve the environmental problems, really, if you demand that consumption continues to rise exponentially over time.

What I think we are actually being sold with the green energy agenda is a way to continue to grow consumption because this is important to macroeconomists. The problem though is that this leads to permamently debt-ridden, destitute workers robbed of social context in order to make the wealthy even more rich.

The environmental damage could be contained by taxes to reduce consumption but that has very significant implications for our way of life. Reducing consumption though is the only way out.

One barrier is that there are collective action problems all over the friggin' place. If it's profitable to pollute, and Company A does while Company B does not, Company A will prevail.

Okay, well, this is what we have governments for. Polluting is outlawed, and both companies are prevented from defecting.

But there's more than one country in the world. And clean industry is expensive. So if country A pollutes, and country B doesn't...

My point is that it's not enough to just "decide" to tone it down, because societies that don't (although they carry the seeds of their own destruction) will dominate ones that do.

Don't apologize, the flowery language was quite refreshing on a site like this, programmers are usually really poor expositors and can really make you forget how enjoyable good writing is. On this site, you usually only get conciseness without elegance or verbosity without elegance, basically rarely any elegance!

Lol, I think you're in the minority. Most of the writing advice I've seen says flowery language comes across as pretentious. I have to agree. A quote from 7th link in a google search on flowery language:

> Make clear statements in plain English. Attempts to sound “intellectual” usually result in the sort of vague, stilted, polysyllabic confusion shown in the first two ... [1]

Also, my experiences indicate that the typical hacker is a better expositor than most.

> Learn to write your native language well. (A surprising number of hackers, including all the best ones I know of, are able writers.) [2]

The qualities that I personally look for in writing are clarity, conciseness, and impact.

The most important and least difficult is clarity. A lack of clarity might manifest as a reader's overt confusion. But it can also manifest in more subtle ways such as: false equivocation; poor diction; surface analogies; digression; lack of examples; lack of structure; etc. Without clarity, the article is worthless.

After clarity, conciseness is next important. Synonyms might include "efficiency" and "economy". Why say in 1,000 words what one can convey in 10? It's not about shortness per se, but density of information; it shows respect for a reader's time.

Impact is the least important and most difficult. Writing which has impact has an immediacy of experience. It makes for an easy and enjoyable read. The opposite is hiding behind a dense wall of flowery euphemisms.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=flowery+language&rlz=1C1GGGE...

[2] http://wwwu.edu.uni-klu.ac.at/epirker/unix/hacker-howto.html

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