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Our future has really been stolen from us. Decades of pollution from greed and decadence and excess, as Thunberg says “fantasies of eternal economic growth”, ha
by gurumeditations 7y ago
Our future has really been stolen from us. Decades of pollution from greed and decadence and excess, as Thunberg says “fantasies of eternal economic growth”, have totally destroyed our future (speaking as a young person). Climate change robs us of a stable world, robots rob us of our livelihoods, and decades of ‘economic growth’ have poisoned our bodies and minds from birth through polluted water, air, and food.
Everything is an ecosystem. You can’t have wild growth without paying for it, and the people of the past 75 years have stolen our bright futures from us and stuck us with the bill. Your comment reminded me of just how fucked up everything is. I think the 21st century will be consumed by the efforts to clean up the giant mess the 20th century left us. Goodbye economic growth. They stripmined the timeline and left us nothing.
- twblalock 7y agoCleaning all that stuff up is an opportunity for growth. Entire industries will need to be involved in order to pull it off.
- rurp 7y agoIn some cases, sure, where there is a clearly identifiable problem. But widespread pollution is particularly insidious because it can cause large amounts of people to develop serious health issues that have no clear cause and no reliable treatment.
- gurumeditations 7y agoThat’s like saying poisoning is good for people because the sicker people are, the more hospitals and doctors you’ll need. The money has to come from somewhere. There is no profit in cleaning up messes, just loss reduction. The money, trillions of dollars just for climate change alone, has to come from somewhere. If past generations had not been so greedy, that money would be in our pockets. Instead, it will be burned because we have to clean up the unfathomable messes older people have created.
- ddingus 7y agoNo, it is saying that it is worth it to clean up after ignorance and folly. And there are eventually gains to be had. Those clean areas are worth more, the money paid to labor means demand, growth, etc...
- gurumeditations 7y agoIt takes a lot of money to fix all the disasters they’ve created. It takes trillions of dollars out of our pockets. It’s a loss because they were greedy and stole from us to fund their lifestyles. That’s trillions of dollars that could’ve gone to paying for healthcare and college for generations. Instead it’s picking up the toxic mess that older people have left for us to deal with.
- ddingus 7y agoWe can still do those things. Perhaps we need to value things differently. Instead of what could have been, we can and need to focus on what can be. Longer term, that is the better play. We all live here and are going to do that for a very long time yet. It is worth it to make sure living here makes sense, period.
- christophilus 7y agoSounds like the broken window fallacy: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fa...
- tlb 7y agoThe fallacy is that it's good to break windows. Even though it's not good to break them, fixing windows that are already broken is worthwhile.
- jdkee 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- amiga_500 7y agoOnly on hacker news would your comment be ok and the parent is downvoted
- bzbz 7y agoSure. That's great. But where are the incentives to promote this "opportunity" to those who want to do so without net loss?