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I mean, we have enough food for everyone now. We are post scarcity right now with regards to food. Yet people starve. Usually due to war and conflict, not corru

by tormeh 8y ago

I mean, we have enough food for everyone now. We are post scarcity right now with regards to food. Yet people starve. Usually due to war and conflict, not corruption, but still.

Abekkus 8y ago
We are post scarcity for food, clothing, and shelter. In our lifetimes, we could easily move education, entertainment, and some definition of basic medicine into a post-scarce realm. Unfortunately, before any of that happens, security, police, and military will be going post-scarcity, while those in power are pretty selfish.
conanbatt 8y ago
You still require humans to exert labor in all those steps. Post scarcity would require virtually no labor for them. We are very far away from that
Someguywhatever 8y ago
Yes there is enough food in location A but we would have to transport that food to where it is needed. That costs money, there is spoilage etc. Who pays that cost? Obviously only the people with the money to pay it can pay it. So lets say we make people in the west pay (involuntarily) to ship excess food to other places. If you make it voluntary then nobody would pay it, since it is essentially voluntary now and nobody pays it. All that would happen is those other places would become dependent on the free food we send them, and certain of their domestic industries would be destroyed as they couldn't compete with the cost of free food being dumped into their economy. Also here domestically excess food would no longer be produced as if you don't produce any excess you don't have to pay the cost of shipping it, or doing anything with it. Everything would become "just in time" or made immediately 1 to 1 with a specific request. So the post scarcity impression we have now would go away pretty fast. So I don't think we actually are post scarcity with regards to almost anything currently. Efficiency is very high I would say, so high, and we're so productive that we occasionally end up with wasted resources caused by poorly estimating demand.

by tormeh 8y ago

I mean, we have enough food for everyone now. We are post scarcity right now with regards to food. Yet people starve. Usually due to war and conflict, not corruption, but still.

Abekkus 8y ago

We are post scarcity for food, clothing, and shelter. In our lifetimes, we could easily move education, entertainment, and some definition of basic medicine into a post-scarce realm. Unfortunately, before any of that happens, security, police, and military will be going post-scarcity, while those in power are pretty selfish.

conanbatt 8y ago

You still require humans to exert labor in all those steps. Post scarcity would require virtually no labor for them. We are very far away from that

Someguywhatever 8y ago

Yes there is enough food in location A but we would have to transport that food to where it is needed. That costs money, there is spoilage etc. Who pays that cost? Obviously only the people with the money to pay it can pay it. So lets say we make people in the west pay (involuntarily) to ship excess food to other places. If you make it voluntary then nobody would pay it, since it is essentially voluntary now and nobody pays it. All that would happen is those other places would become dependent on the free food we send them, and certain of their domestic industries would be destroyed as they couldn't compete with the cost of free food being dumped into their economy. Also here domestically excess food would no longer be produced as if you don't produce any excess you don't have to pay the cost of shipping it, or doing anything with it. Everything would become "just in time" or made immediately 1 to 1 with a specific request. So the post scarcity impression we have now would go away pretty fast. So I don't think we actually are post scarcity with regards to almost anything currently. Efficiency is very high I would say, so high, and we're so productive that we occasionally end up with wasted resources caused by poorly estimating demand.