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Amusingly this is something that I see as being a huge divide in rural and urban politics. Yes, it’s inefficient. Yes, some people want that!
by naming_the_user 2y ago
Amusingly this is something that I see as being a huge divide in rural and urban politics.
Yes, it’s inefficient. Yes, some people want that!
- fragmede 2y agoRight. Living is not an optimization problem.
- badpun 2y agoUnless not until the oil and other essential stuff run out.
- tambourine_man 2y agoOur problem is not that we are running out of stuff, but that we’re drowning on it.
- exe34 2y agowhat it means to not optimise though is that some people end up better off and many others are worse off.
- bmicraft 2y agoSorry to put it so bluntly, but you're basically saying: "I don't care it the climate's fucked, I want to live away from civilization and drive 100 miles a day everywhere" Of course we shouldn't hyper-optimize everything, but sooner people realize our environment depends on not everyone getting exactly what they want whenever they want the better. Living in a (walkable) city is just one such concession towards the environment we ought to make, even if we don't "want" to.
- naming_the_user 2y agoOr we could just compete with each other for resources as we have since forever. I’d rather do that than have no choice but to live in Kowloon. Just whack an externality tax on fossil fuels and things like cutting down wilderness, job done.
- xerox13ster 2y agoOr we can stop acting like there’s only two options: living in wide-open fields with a clear horizon or the fucking walled city of Kowloon. Also, you have the mindset of a typical anti-social coastal elite who thinks “oh no big deal we can just raise the cost of living for all the poor rural types by sticking on a tax because I want to go LARP as a Victorian manor lord. And people don’t bend to my every whim immediately or live exactly like me so I want to be in total control of the 50 miles around me.”
- naming_the_user 2y agoSure. All I'm saying is that the efficiency arguments are silly unless you are comparing like for like. If we're suggesting that people simply do less because it's more efficient, well, no-one is going to do that without an incentive. Everyone having 50 sqmi obviously isn't realistic (there actually is not enough space on the globe), but equally, if the idea is that everyone _has_ to live in a metropolitan apartment because each person has to use (1/7billion) of the resources, you're going to see an uprising, that just won't fly with people. The best outcome is probably to convince as many people as possible to live in a shoebox so that the rest of us can still have a decent life. It seems to be working!
- consteval 2y agoMaybe, but the resources it takes to live are an optimization problem.