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I understand, but from that perspective, pretty much everything in "developed" countries is non-essential, including personal computers (whether desktop, laptop

I understand, but from that perspective, pretty much everything in "developed" countries is non-essential, including personal computers (whether desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet) and forums like this one to discuss such things. Think of the toxic waste created by all those computers, and the greenhouse gases created by shipping them all over the place! And to what end?

grawprog 8y ago
Yeah you're right. I think that's the point the gp comment was making originally. It's not just developed countries either. There are massive industries supporting millions of people that are non-essential. The problem is many of them actually do provide a large increase to quality of life. The improvement granite counters make is questionable, things like computers, phones, vehicles and other large scale damaging things, while not necessarily essential, do bring a dramatic improvement to quality of life and paradoxically enough allow people to make money providing.what is likely another non-essential service or product. It's always been like this though. In the end, there's no reason for humans to have ever made most of the things we have over the millenia other than because we can and did. Once we had food and shelter and all these things pretty much taken care of, everythong else after was pretty much just for the fuck of it and we've always been at odds with the world and destroyed and altered our environments. The scale has just kept increasing to the point where there are massive global industries devoted to this. At the same time, humanity still follows our basic survival insticts. We still have that inner subconcious mentality of scarcity when it comes to essentials. So it ends up being treated the same way in our economy as luxury goods and you end up in this situation where people are trading non-essential things for essential things.

grawprog 8y ago

Yeah you're right. I think that's the point the gp comment was making originally. It's not just developed countries either. There are massive industries supporting millions of people that are non-essential. The problem is many of them actually do provide a large increase to quality of life. The improvement granite counters make is questionable, things like computers, phones, vehicles and other large scale damaging things, while not necessarily essential, do bring a dramatic improvement to quality of life and paradoxically enough allow people to make money providing.what is likely another non-essential service or product. It's always been like this though. In the end, there's no reason for humans to have ever made most of the things we have over the millenia other than because we can and did. Once we had food and shelter and all these things pretty much taken care of, everythong else after was pretty much just for the fuck of it and we've always been at odds with the world and destroyed and altered our environments. The scale has just kept increasing to the point where there are massive global industries devoted to this. At the same time, humanity still follows our basic survival insticts. We still have that inner subconcious mentality of scarcity when it comes to essentials. So it ends up being treated the same way in our economy as luxury goods and you end up in this situation where people are trading non-essential things for essential things.