Yet another Hacker News

35 points kitkut 3 hours ago 5 comments

rafterydj 3 hours ago | parent

The sentiment behind this post is, I fear, felt by too many normal people in the world today and not enough leaders. This is usually due to the network graph of leaders (above a certain scale threshold) being correlated with the most out of touch and wealthy - they are the last to hear about the insurance rates for campgrounds.

That said, the keyword used more than once in this post is "impotent". There is simply nothing the majority of us can do. And that worries me for obvious reasons.

OgsyedIE 2 hours ago | parent

The problems he describes all fit into three buckets

* Insurance industry rent-seeking

* Ennui (literal definition: not getting enough mental sustenance from things that previously gave enough)

* Symptoms of grossly rising population densities (most of the complaints raised there)

I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism but the laws of supply and demand do apply to the space we occupy and would like to roam around in as much as anything else. With food scarcity mostly abolished (until this year incidentally, the 2026/27 winter will be terribly bad for humanity) the Malthusian pressures all went away, leaving the human race to operate inside of the overshoot loop dynamical system instead:

https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/overshoot-loop-evolution-under-...

skew-aberration 57 minutes ago | parent

> I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism

But you do want to assert that it is true, without being aware of its meaning?

Malthusianism is the notion that some people must be poor / hungry because humans choose to reproduce until they reach the limits of the environment to provide for them (especially those Irish potato farmers, according to Malthus), and that increases in productivity will not change this - they will just be absorbed by a growing population (which ought to be 'swept away').

In reality, growing populations have led to more than adequate improvements in food production efficiency and people are choosing to reproduce less rather than more.

There is an excellent summary and rebuttal of Malthusianism in the book 'Progress and Poverty' by Henry George, which offers an alternative view of how supply and demand for finite land (your words) rather than reproductive instinct (Malthusianism) creates poverty.

yhjc2692 1 hour ago | parent

This post wasn’t exactly what I came for (looking at the title) and a bit more stream of consciousness than expected, but nonetheless rings true. Enjoyed the bit on materialistic consumerism and Wall-E.

hingler36 58 minutes ago | parent

I grew up in Texas and lots of people who hear me talk about it assume I absolutely hate it there. In reality, I have a lot of the same complaints as this author and think it's citizens should demand better. The state seemingly has zero interest in investing in community resources, and what few of these exist are constantly at risk.

Fairfield Lake State Park is a perfect microcosm of this. The lake exists primarily to provide water for a power plant. The state park exists on land leased at very low cost from the power company. The power company closed the plant, and the state could have bought the land to secure the state park. It already had all of the infrastructure you need to run a state park, and had staff lined up to do so. Instead they let the land pass into private ownership and made a halfhearted effort to recover the land after the fact.

A lot of Texans that I talk to assume that the vast public land of the Rockies and Sierras is a geographic inevitability. In reality much of this public land exists because of specific, concerted efforts by communities and municipalities.