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I obviously have nothing to back this up with, but my instinct is that it’s the over exploitation that makes it such a powerful economy. But just like Saudi Ara
by halfdan 4y ago
I obviously have nothing to back this up with, but my instinct is that it’s the over exploitation that makes it such a powerful economy. But just like Saudi Arabia’s oil it will eventually stop being a sustainable source for the economy. Alaskan fisheries collapsing, rivers that support water hungry crops in the desert running dry might be first indicators of many that things are collapsing.
- frozenport 4y agoThe value of some large tech companies is orders of magnitude above the entire Alaska fishery. The US’s wealth is in it’s people not it’s fisheries.
- Jensson 4y agoI think they meant the political climate in USA where corporate profits is the top of every political agenda, that helps all companies and not just Alaskan fisheries. If the government listened more to workers then USA probably wouldn't be as dominant as it is.
- mgraczyk 4y agoOn the other hand, the servers at restaurants in SF make more than most software engineers in Western Europe now. So probably good to focus a little more on economic growth.
- actionfromafar 4y agoI don't think so necessarily, the US is still a huge, solid market market. If anything, I think it could be even richer and more powerful if more its populace were lifted from poverty.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoAye, about 2.5% of it's people
- MSFT_Edging 4y agoHuh, its almost like infinite growth is impossible in our context of the natural world. Who would have thought spreadsheets and magic market numbers had little material connection to the resources extracted to extrapolate those numbers.
- gretch 4y agoWell yeah, obviously _infinite_ growth is not possible given the laws of physics. But the whole premise of technology is that you can break the zero-sum and reach arbitrarily high levels. For example Deuterium–tritium fusion runs on hydrogen that's pretty common to find. Yes, if we learn to exploit it, we will one day run out, but by then we'll have new sources of fuel. Similarly solar energy is just 'free' energy that rains down on our planet. We could use that energy to farm fish or cultivate natural populations. We don't do that which is bad, but it's not some impossibility.
- secstate 4y agoWhile you're not technically wrong, the idea of net-zero sources of energy does not address what happens when you start concentrating "free energy" in new places. Fish farms are ecologically monstrosities in most places they exist. Electricity is only one input, fresh water is another, and we haven't figured out where to get that much fresh water for free yet. In many ways these arguments of "there's free energy from hydrogen fusion" feels similar to arguments about solving invasive species with another species because we haven't figured out that the new species will be invasive yet. And in a similar fashion, the local ecology may eventually re-balance (indeed, likely will) but what time scale are we looking at? Humans need human time scales.
- greedo 4y agoAlmost all our agriculture AND aquaculture are ecological monstrosities because we don't make the producers pay for externalities.
- kiba 4y agoEh, only within the current context of society and technology. For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet. The reason why fisheries are collapsing is because we don't spend much making our environment more habitable and pollute or use up what's already there.