sologoub

If you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that’s more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don’t want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards where they seemingly don’t belong.

In general, the availability of credit has been a positive economic factor that helps enable capital expenditures that otherwise would only be available to the wealthiest. Lack of such credit leads to capture of means of production and rent seeking behaviors in economic terms.

However, it’s become more and more clear that not all credit is created equal and what you spend the resulting capital on matters a lot. If one buys a house to live in or equipment to make money with - that’s generally good use of credit, assuming costs do not outweigh the benefits. I can’t think of a situation where buying lunch that one has to finance is a good thing (as different from credit card points harvesting/optimization). The implications of anything similar to payday loans going mainstream feels like a large societal risk.

Those links are so oversimplified to not be useful. The arguments are for an ideological point of view and not a real analysis. Just consider that population growth is stagnating and going into decline. While energy use per capita is likely to increase, it’s not clear at all that things will continue as before even a 100 years from now. Even the AI race is seeing smaller models perform as well or better a year old ones. We are definitely in a fast growth phase of energy use there, but will it continue to grow indefinitely or will we become much more efficient and hit diminishing returns stalling further investment or plateauing energy use? Who knows… On the scale of the next 100 years, humanity can definitely meet its energy needs with nuclear and clean sources if we have the collective will. Will we? Time will tell.

These are only finite within Earth. Add even modest solar system travel capabilities and a lot more resources open up. Mining asteroids is just one idea there.

If the finite resources here are fossil fuels then the idea is to never use them again. It was a bad idea to continue using these a long time ago and it will still be a bad idea in the future. Sustainable energy production is not about deferring something, it’s about not poisoning where you live. That does not mean giving up on useful technologies. For example, synthetic hydrocarbon fuels can be made in a carbon neutral way, it’s just very expensive today. These would solve for some applications where EVs are not yet practical, etc.

The growth is unsustainable argument is very strange to me. We absolutely have the technology to make growth sustainable, but societies choose to go for other things because overall growth and advancement of humanity is not generally a goal at mass individual level.

For example, currently society is busy transitioning to electrified transport. Los Angeles had a vast network of that 80+ years ago (red car light rail system). We also have had nuclear power as an option for a very long time. And yet, red cars were scrapped, rail removed, freeways built, we still burn gas and what not for power, and California has a ban on new nuclear… It’s not that we can’t do all this, it’s that for various reasons we choose not to.

It’s quite human-centric to assume that all other possible civilizations will make the same choices. It seems more likely that there will be as many choices and value systems as there are possible life sustaining planets out there. This doesn’t answer the paradox of course.

Agree, the forced two-party system is very limiting and the identity tied to politics is emblematic of modern US. In EU, as I believe in India from the anecdotes in the article, a lot of the identity is tied to the place you are from and the social strata the family occupies. Those are somewhat immutable things (where you were born and what family you are from), so deciding to break off communication with that community is “expensive” socially because there is no other community that will readily accept you as their own. Whereas in US, it’s quite normal to change social circles at will. Density/proximity makes it much more obvious, but the semi-fixed social circles I believe have a lot to do with it. Many US expats report loneliness when moving abroad for similar reasons - it’s hard to find a new inner circle in societies built around other identities.

Infra in CA is not going so well. Roads as an example are terrible compared to most developed countries. When last years winter storms damaged many roads, the newly paved replacements are not very smooth at all and some have been redone multiple times in the span of a single year. I don’t know what the causes are, but when comparing to EU where they have to account for freezing temps, CA doesn’t seem THAT complicated. Yet EU highways on average are a lot better.

From your reply you haven’t actually lived in either Europe or Japan. They generally do not have people die on the streets and you enjoy some excellent infrastructure. It would be nothing short of amazing to get half the services or protections people in other developed countries take for granted.

The community college system does a good deal here. As an example in California, students can get a great deal of their undergrad lower division work done at a community college for a fraction of even UC or State university cost (which for instate students is already fairly low).

Community colleges are also where folks would normally turn to for casual the classes they wanted to take but didn’t necessarily want the formalities of the full degree. Online delivery of there helped further but vs MOOCs, CC has geographic and residency restrictions for who can actually study there.

To take this a step further, I’d argue such framings encourage either creation or amplification of risk perceptions in order to sell the remedy (and for political gain), at least in the US. Kids aren’t really allowed much autonomy the way even their parents enjoyed. All interactions are in a sense supervised and structured.

From a scientific perspective, the text is very rich and shows somewhat chronological evolution of beliefs and society systems. Coupled with responses to catastrophic events/influences, like the Babylonian captivity influencing what heaven and hell were understood to be, there’s a lot to study/research. There are many university courses on the subject that are not a religious class.