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That's a lot of text to just say you don't trust the government or corporations. This argument is orthogonal Of course efficiency is the goal. Wouldn't you arg

That's a lot of text to just say you don't trust the government or corporations. This argument is orthogonal Of course efficiency is the goal. Wouldn't you argue our current use of natural resources is unsustainable long term? The only way out of that is to improve efficiency. Ignore Walmart. If we were to rollback farming to the methods used just a few decades ago, the world would starve. So, yes, we need to continue to improve efficiency. It's required due to resources being limited.

rglullis 4y ago
> The only way out of that is to improve efficiency. Or by stopping/reducing consumption of things that we don´t really need and have been shoved on us by the corporations. Stop focusing on the symptoms and focus on getting rid of the disease. Let's get rid of fast food, fast fashion, let North America abandon the failed experiment that is called "Suburbia" and get rid of its car dependency. Let's stop expecting overnight shipping for whatever stupid gadget we want to buy, etc... If the US reduces its consumption to the average of the developed world, instead of having growth-addicted Corporations and Goverments pushing to make the rest of the world consume like the average American, I can bet that we can improve our overall quality of life even on a smaller GDP per capita. Also, even if you disagree with that: the argument is not against "improving efficiency". The argument is against optimizing for it while ignoring other costs and especially ignoring the fact that most of these optimizations have diminishing returns. E.g: airline travel is something that has been optimized beyond imagination, but it will never be as sustainable as an economic activity as traveling by train or boats. Between trying to "optimize" air travel even more, I'd rather we just decided to ban short haul flights altogether and reallocated our resources to the (re-)construction of decent rail roads and passenger boats.

rglullis 4y ago

> The only way out of that is to improve efficiency. Or by stopping/reducing consumption of things that we don´t really need and have been shoved on us by the corporations. Stop focusing on the symptoms and focus on getting rid of the disease. Let's get rid of fast food, fast fashion, let North America abandon the failed experiment that is called "Suburbia" and get rid of its car dependency. Let's stop expecting overnight shipping for whatever stupid gadget we want to buy, etc... If the US reduces its consumption to the average of the developed world, instead of having growth-addicted Corporations and Goverments pushing to make the rest of the world consume like the average American, I can bet that we can improve our overall quality of life even on a smaller GDP per capita. Also, even if you disagree with that: the argument is not against "improving efficiency". The argument is against optimizing for it while ignoring other costs and especially ignoring the fact that most of these optimizations have diminishing returns. E.g: airline travel is something that has been optimized beyond imagination, but it will never be as sustainable as an economic activity as traveling by train or boats. Between trying to "optimize" air travel even more, I'd rather we just decided to ban short haul flights altogether and reallocated our resources to the (re-)construction of decent rail roads and passenger boats.