Historical and Social Reasons Why Sacrifice As a Plan Fails

64 thoughts on “Historical and Social Reasons Why Sacrifice As a Plan Fails”

1. Different strokes for different folks. There is a big market in NYC for small studio apartments that don’t cost an arm and leg. As for GM, GM isn’t stopping because there isn’t a market for sedan. Its stopping because it sucks at making sedans that people want.

2. It is like a mental sickness. The idea that the more you have the better isn’t actually truth. A human being has limits. A 10,000 sqft home isn’t better than a 5,000 sqft. You can only eat so much. And wear so much. And drive so much. And owning 10 acres as oppose to 5 acres. Or owning 4 homes as oppose to one. The incremental value of wealth isn’t as much as people would like to think it is.

3. When I was a child a house was where the day ended. It wasn’t a place where we spend our day. We got up and left. And the end of the day we returned. In a large part of the world this is still true. All the space we needed was a place to laid down.

4. Since the existence of the jobs is predicated on money being spent more for political reasons by government than economic ones, on top of the fact the payroll taxes are required by law to be “invested” in low yielding government debt.

5. Since when is providing jobs a drain? People in their prime productive years move to cities because that’s where the work is. Meanwhile, people in rural areas take the bulk of gov’t handouts and vote Republican : https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/business/economy/harlan-county-republican-welfare.html

6. No, the policies mandated by the cities’ populations drain more from the countryside than they do the cities. For example Socialist Insecurity is money taken from the population which an only earn the rate of the federal bond, depriving the older countryside of capital and it’s best RoI. The fact the cities see an influx of younger people means the cities don’t see the return in borrowed dollars spent as transfer payments to the elderly.

7. Oh, and as I’ve said above – “Al Gore’s a grifter who found a good scam he’s been milking for a long time, and it’s not at all uncommon for those who’ve been scammed to defend the person who took them for damn near all they were worth.”

   It’s an odd bit of the human psychology. Read up on scams and grifters – it’s very common.

8. If that’s the cost of getting out of the trap, they’ll stay in and hold the door closed, lol…

9. “Gore and Solyndra accomplished orders of magnitude more that the subculture that constantly cries about Gore and Solyndra”

   They don’t want to keep the lights on. I don’t see how that’s ‘accomplishing orders of magnitude’ of anything, except scamming their believers.

   Solar and wind’s not very low cost when you’re looking at 24/7 reliable, high output power. It’s VERY polluting to make (and that pollution’s nasty and permanent, as opposed to radiation which decays over time), high maintenance costs.

   Sure, low CO2. Woohoo.

   What friggin’ consequences for nuclear? Even with worst-case scenarios (like Fukushima, where nobody died from the reactor meltdown but thousands died from the tsunami, and Chernobyl where several hundred died BECAUSE they were going into highly radioactive areas with no protection to put out the fires) the death toll has been negligible.

   Chernobyl was designed in the 1950s and had none of the safety mechanisms the rest of the world was using. AND they were doing an ‘experiment’ to see how long it’d provide steam without cooling water.

   You really ought to read up on the subject. A lot of what you know may not be accurate. The ‘feel good’ stuff the environmentalists put out to support their claims aren’t as accurate as you may think.

10. Wrong drug … they use opioids for birth control in those states.

11. So what you are saying is that China becoming economically mature should not scare the US, as long as economies of Asia continue to improve. I just am so concerned with China and how they seem to be increasingly struggling to hold onto the day to day levers of power over their citizens. If they squeeze to tight they may find themselves in trouble with their population again.

12. Wow, did I get flamed on Ars Technica recently, when I claimed solutions to our major problems would have to be made economically advantageous to someone because, while some people are altruists, philanthropists, martyrs, and saints, no amount of preaching will ever create enough of any of these while we remain human.

    You will never rid most people of wanting more material things than they already have, even if some or many of those things are not what is best for the environment, society, or even for their next door neighbors.
     
    Campaigning for altruism, and against wanting material things, is not the same as dealing with resource depletion and pollution (see Tilting at Windmills). 
     
    If your system is vulnerable to being unbalanced by people striving to get material things that they want, then you need to redesign your system, not the people. 
     
    Asking people not to strive to attain material thing might work if people were ants. It does not work for people on other than a very personal level.

13. Making a buck is how everything is paid for, including what is actually charity. Thinking there’s something wring with that, is how you get to Zimbabwe, eating rats in Caracas, the Shining Path, the Final Solution, the Holodomor, the tumbrels, the skull pyramids of Cambodia. You embrace the evil the world must purge itself of, or die in fire, or ice.

    Liberty is the only way out of the Malthusian trap.

14. You are a person who has not read what I have said.

    Such intensive agriculture is not “agrarian” it is very high tech.

15. It can also work miracles in Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Louisiana, Montana, Carolinas, Kentucky, Alabama…

16. Gore and Solyndra accomplished orders of magnitude more that the subculture that constantly cries about Gore and Solyndra, that they’re justification for co2 is a cure for cancer or whatever nonsense.

    solar/wind is pushed because of its co2 footprint and low cost to entry. Low probability events, like nuclear meltdowns, does not mean zero probability. Given the consequences if it happens, most people will always support anything but nuclear.

    Nothing can exists unless it can make a buck, lets see where that awesome cultural worldview takes us.

17. Complaints can be made about people not needing SUVs. Maybe the electric cars win completely. But GM is shutting down passenger car factories. Ford and GM, Fiat are all going more to SUVs. Tesla will make electric SUVs and electric passenger trucks. Ford 150 to 450 series trucks crush the sales of the most popular passenger cars. Go ahead and tell people they don’t want them or don’t need them. They won’t talk about it with you. But look at their driveway or into their garages or at parking lots around the Costco.

    Tell people they do not need bigger houses. Over 40 years the average square footage is about double. Go ahead become a developer and make small shelters or tiny apartments. You will go bankrupt trying to move those things.

18. I rewrote the first paragraph to correct unintentional tone.

19. The intro sounds a bit like listening to Trump, believe me people I know, there isn’t anyone who knows it better then me, I know thousands that … Etc

20. Air conditioning is an underrated miracle of the age. As is electricity, modern plumbing and water supply!

    The ‘natural living advocates’ – I just shake my head. You go do that. I’ll watch from a distance. 😉

21. The best cure for anyone romanticizing the past ways, is to make them endure those old ways for a while.

    I also had the chance of doing farm boy work for a while as a kid, it taught me a lot but specially that I really wanted to become an engineer and work in a nice office job with a desk and a computer!

22. My father introduced me to ‘farm work’ of the kind he grew up with when I was a teen. Hoeing a garden patch is not fulfilling, shovelling the leftovers of horses is not pleasant, and not anything I ever wanted to do again after that summer.

    I’m damn glad we’re no longer an agrarian society. I, for one, am quite happy to pay our agricultural overlords for food that isn’t insect-ridden or e-coli infested, easily purchased at convenient places nationwide.

    YMMV, of course.

23. No, it can not.  Not even close.

24. What has Al Gore accomplished aside from finding an excellent scam that grifters worldwide could tap into?

    Solyndra was a bust. A very expensive bust, that the owners profited from handsomely. Massive solar plant in the Mojave uses nat gas to heat the system up to a working temperature in the mornings – and the power output from it will never pay for its construction and operation.

    Germany went whole hog to solar panels – and is now building brown coal power plants because Germany’s not known for its sunny climes and the price of energy’s too high for their industrial base… not to mention the people. England’s having people die because it’s too cold and they can’t afford to pay the rates needed for wind power, not to mention that in cold weather the output of their wind farms drop dramatically. That pretty breezeless snowy winter day means no electricity from wind.

    The folks pushing the solar and wind farms consistently overestimate output and underestimate costs, and tend to abandon the projects once the subsidies end.

    Of the countries who originally signed onto the Paris accords, the US is the only one that’s actively dropped CO2 emissions, because of fracking and an increased use of natural gas.

    The environmental costs of building solar panels and windmills are extreme, yet that’s the go-to goals of the green crowd. You want to keep the lights on? I’ll believe they really do when they start pushing nuclear the same way they’re pushing solar and wind.

25. It’s just the opposite. Cities, especially the big ones like NYC, contribute far more than they require, even with our high number of poor people. Rural areas, inclufing rural states, take more than a dollar in taxes for every dollar they pay. With cities it is the opposite, on both federal and state levels. NY State has been in a long-term decline for over a decade. NYC is booming, with new tech centers everywhere, rivaling Silicon Valley.

26. Sounds like a choice little slice of hell, even if it’s your idea of ‘heaven’. Not everyone’s an urbanophile, happy and comfortable packed into a city. If they were, you wouldn’t have to talk about forcing people into the conditions you like. If they were, the suburbs wouldn’t have sprawled like they did after WW2, when people who could afford it left the cities for their own plots of land.

    Because they didn’t like living in a beehive with loads of people on every side.

    “would encourage highest and best use of land” – in your opinion. The people who disagree – they’re just supposed to suck it up and pay the taxes so you can subsidise your urban lifestyle?

27. Huh? Those asking the sacrifices be made by others are usually seeking to relatively elevate their status by retaining more of their wealth and by being seen to succeed in making the demands.

28. ” That’s the view from the capitalists ” <– That’s the usual view seen by anyone who cares to look. Look and you’ll see people on welfare with $400 sneakers on. Bad choices.

    ” They think anybody with reasonable intelligence and ambition can become rich in a free-market economy ” <– That is in fact true. Very, very few people are so unlucky they have average intelligence and ambition and stay poor in even a relatively unfree market, let alone in those most free markets.

    ” If you come from money, you have the deck stacked in your favor. ” <– The fantastically wealthy familes of 100 years ago frequently have no great wealth today. It is as easy to lose familial wealth as it is to keep it, and both happen.

    No, most foreclosures were not caused by health issues, they were caused by investing with borrowed money in real estate bubble. The high cost of healthcare in the US is caused by the health care industry seeking to maximize their capture of government subsidies while enduring the compliance cost of useless regulation. End the subsidies and unconstitutional national regulation, and prices will fall.

    The cost of non-subsidized “elective” procedures is quite reasonable and not climbing far faster then economic growth, and the cost of care by cash only medical offices much the same.

29. ” It’s interesting that many on the right think poor people shouldn’t be helped ”

    Fool, and you are a fool, the people on the right are far more personally generous than the people on the left. The poeple on the left want to enable policital graft by being generous with other people’s money, via taxes — not really helping at all.

30. You need to get away from the stupidity of thinking material wealth is not wealth. It is.

31. Both are required. A book can have a great deal of evidence, but it has no belief.

32. Pt. 1

    It can be sustainable and have a low footprint and be fully “organic” — caveats are we have a lot more of the GDP cycling through farmers’ hands, and eat with far more of our choices dictated entirely by the seasons. Reason that won’t happen is, a third of us of do not want to be middle/low to low/middle income earners while picking bugs off of plants by hand, and most of the rest of us do not want 1/3rd to 1/2hf of our then lower income to go towards food. A fully organic food system is possible, but it is a lower investment, growth, & productivity society than what we now enjoy. It will not be successfully mandated.

33. Pt. 2

    In contrast to strictly organic farming — were a far more restricted use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers to be employed than is now common — it is not difficult for a quarter acre to provide 90%+ of a person’s needs in temperate zones, and with far lower labor costs and far smaller fractions of the labor pool devoted to it. It is still true in that case, food choices are more seasonal.

    Given the real link between many plasticizers and agri-chemicals and endocrine disruption and cancer incidence, I strongly suspect that absent subsidies, we would move quite far towards that second model; double or triple the number of farmers we have now, but less disease/ill-health at least making up for the cost. One thing is, the left side of the gene pool bell curve inevitably sees stronger selection pressure in such an economy — half of us are below average, we all have to eat (or riot).

34. One thing that will (and is) lead to more sustainability is urbanization. I’m sitting in an apt. where I share all my walls, ceiling and floor, as well as heating and hallways and elevators, with my neighbors. On the street, I share the sidewalk with thousands of people a day. I don’t need a polluting, wasteful car because everything is either walking/biking distance, or accessible by mass transit. True, I have to pay more, but rural areas are under-taxed and subsidized considering the roads, utilities, and services they use for a handful of people per sq. mile.
    Amazon, electricity, and farms have to get through rural areas to supply, power, and feed me, but droneports and driverless trucks operating 24/7, as well as urban seaports can do this better, with few actual people on the other end, or in between. Even toll booths do not have to be manned now with EZ-pass.
    The rural states are all emptying out and their tax base, and land resale values, all shrinking, with large cities doing what they’ve always done best: provide livings to millions of people.
    A Land Value Tax applied everywhere, in place of productivity-stifling taxes on wages, capital, and sales, would encourage highest and best use of land, in both urban areas and farms. Large, monoculture farms are not as efficient as crop-cover crop-rotating farms, which pollute much less too. Pollution at all levels needs to be heavily taxed too.

35. a big part of the third world already has very low birthrates.

    but even inside the same third world country, you have middle and high class and even poor class people having 0, 1 or 2 children… and miserable people having 5-8 children… “women” who emancipate from a fractured and violent household at 15, and go live with a boyfriend at his family’s home, and already start having children (and proving they are “adults”) and then in their 20s and 30s change “husbands” as much as they change their panties, and have a new baby with each new husband to “hold him”, though it never works…

36. They take care of their parents when they get old. In that respect, they are a pension plan. And they help with income as kids too, helping around the farm and such. In a city, they are an expense as they need to go to school and there are child-labor laws and such, so the economics are vastly different.

37. The thing about the overpopulation problem is that it’s the easiest of all our extinction-level threats to solve. People die, no “sacrifice” required. Also, no woman wants to have 10 kids. Tell girls how their bodies work, make the pill available, give women better opportunities than “baby factory for a man,” just your basic feminism, and there is no problem.

    The thing about “asking people to sacrifice” to solve environmental problems is its an idea by dirty liberals so bad it makes you think they are all mentally ill. There is no amount of sacrifice, short of killing billions of people and going back to preindustrial feudalism in literally 10 years, that will save the planet. Nor should this issue be about sacrifice; wealth is good. Not the corrupting wealth of the rich 0.1%, but the wealth of “rich nations,” where everyone has an indoor toilet. The problem was never wealth; the problem was always where the wealth came from.

    Slave power, animal power, power from wind and water, and finally power from fossil fuels, all have had their dark side. Each tech increased the amount of energy – the wealth – available to that society. Going technologically backwards cannot sustain the current population. Remaining technologically stagnant will kill all of us. A carbon-negative energy source that can plug in to existing infrastructure and provides even more energy for the economy is the necessary next step.

38. All billionaires would make a massive difference, if the money was spent wisely.
    After all, the top 5% owns something like 40% of all capital goods, all money, all GDP. Redistributing that would have to help the poor and could help damaged ecosystems recover. The key is doing it wisely.
    Bill Gates is attempting that with a good portion of his money, and he is making a difference. Warren Buffet is helping too. Oprah has done some good, but not on the same scale (yet). Chance the rapper is helping out Chicago inner-city schools with millions of his money.

    There are many people helping every day, making real differences. Don’t let a few negatives like Al Gore or maybe Ed Begley (don’t really know much about him) sway you otherwise.

39. Right. that’s kind of related to Brian’s idea of being tied to pension. In a rural setting, the kids work the farm and help you produce more, so more kids can be helpful.
    In an urban setting, the kids aren’t usually doing real work, and require money for education, so having more kids is expensive. Plus, you have less room for a bunch of kids to run around, and you can buy contraceptives at the corner store without your extended family judging you. And, with a salaried job instead of self-employed farm labor, you are more likely to have a pension, but I view that as a side-effect.

40. A good public transit system can lift everybody up and be a greener (and overall cheaper) option than every family owning two cars.

41. That’s the view from the capitalists. They think anybody with reasonable intelligence and ambition can become rich in a free-market economy (we’re rich because we deserve to be rich). Save your money, take good care of what you have, make smart purchases, and you will automatically become richer.

    It’s not the view I necessarily subscribe to. If you come from money, you have the deck stacked in your favor. Some people do make bad choices or waste their resources, but a lot of people also were never given good opportunities, or just had bad luck. Most house foreclosures in the U.S. in the last 20 years were because of health issues. Get in a car accident without health insurance, you owe the hospital big money, you probably lost your job, you might have trouble finding a new job, and two years later you’re in bankruptcy. In some countries with certain marriage traditions you can end up rich or poor depending if you have boys or girls.

42. ” Poor people got that way because they don’t know how to live within their means.”

    Really?

43. While everyone is entitled to their own opinions, not all opinions have merit.
    Evidence and beliefs, one is critical and the other is irrelevant.

44. And what exactly did Ed Begley Jr accomplish?-Nothing.

    Indications some random person takes the problem SERIOUSLY does not fix anything.

    If all billionaires magically become paupers tomorrow, that does not fix the problem.

    Feel good, yet ultimately meaningless gestures does not fix anything.

45. It’s interesting that many on the right think poor people shouldn’t be helped, because people only deserve what they make for themselves. Poor people got that way because they don’t know how to live within their means.
    However, they don’t realize that taking more from the land than it can sustainably produce means they are taking things away from their own children, borrowing from the future, and they themselves are not living within their means.

46. People marching with “end of times – repent” billboards are talking about religious salvation, they could care less about food production.

    Nobody rational is talking about a planned massive reduction of existing population, that would be insane. They may talk about better access to contraceptives and health care. There are some who secretly wish a natural virus takes out a good percentage of the population – as long as it doesn’t strike anybody they care about. Those people are not mainstream anything, don’t lump them in with other groups.

    “The world does convert to non-fossil fuels. However, it will not be through demanding it with sacrifice. It has to make more profit than fossil fuels and be compelling economically.”
    We need to give equal amounts of subsidies to green tech as we’ve already given to big oil and big coal. I recently saw a report that over 40% of current oil production in the U.S. would not be profitable without subsidies and tax incentives and low-cost land leases by the government.

47. And we are adept at survival despite the odds and whatever nature or fate throw at us.

    A mutated flu virus can be fought against with medicine, biotech and quarantines. World wide crop failures can be prevented and fought against with GMOs and technology.

    A big war is not a natural disaster, but so far the powers have also found a solution: make an all out war too expensive and too lethal to consider for all the involved parties.

    Terrorists and lunatics are a worse threat nowadays, given they don’t necessarily follow self interest, looking for making a political statement or because they are lunatics.

48. Free contraception and family planning education can also do miracles in third world countries.

49. Most large organic farms use animal waste from industrial meat producers, or other waste generated from conventional agriculture. They should, because otherwise, the waste would be more environmentally damaging, but this reveals Organic’s dependence on industrial agriculture.

50. We don’t have to. Nature is adept at pruning quickly growing populations. All it takes is a mutated flu virus, a series of world wide crop failures, or a war between the larger nuclear powers.

51. Watch out for social justice warriors, Kevin. You have stepped on some very sensitive feet. Remember, diversity is good, except when it is diversity of opinion!

52. Organic farming is anything but sustainable and with a low footprint.

    It’s posturing and virtue signaling for guilt tripped westerners.

    The folly of modernity. People are well fed but so disconnected from the biological realities involved with their sustenance and survival, that they attack the very technologies and methods allowing such blissful unnatural state.

    The “natural” state is being in permanent risk of starving, not eating for several days in a row and only do it from time to time, with whatever you can chew and not die of poisoning.

53. We already are – but the same people who demand ‘better at producing more with less’ are the same ones decrying the horrors of ‘corporate farming’.

    Apparently to them it’s more important that farmer have about 40 acres and a mule drawn plow practicing ‘organic’ farming than people actually have enough to eat.

54. It would indicate he took the problem SERIOUSLY.

    Ed Begley Jr. talked the talk and walked the walk.

    Al Gore’s a grifter who found a good scam he’s been milking for a long time, and it’s not at all uncommon for those who’ve been scammed to defend the person who took them for damn near all they were worth.

55. Actually the children are just ‘a nut’. Certainly not a pension plan. Need to get some TV screens with 24 hour TeleNovelae.

56. See here’s the thing, Al Gore is worth 100+ million, that would help.

    If the 100+ millionaire class and billionaire class got together to do something, it would defintatley help.

    But they’ll never do that, they’re more addicted to money than a coke head is to coke.

57. We need to get away from the idea that material wealth is real wealth. Not everyone needs a 5,000 sqft home and an acre of manicure lawn. Not everyone needs two 8 passengers SUV getting 8mpg. That’s not wealth. That is waste. What people need is enough food to eat. 100 sqft per person shelter. Healthcare. And education.

58. Neither the ones asking others to do the sacrifices.

59. We can’t de-exist a big mass of living humans requiring energy, services, food and shelter.

    Considering mass depopulation only works for hypocrites or damaged minds and will only produce crimes against humanity and rejection of the ideology behind it.

    We have to get better at producing more with less footprint. More efficiency and science, less guilt tripping and awfully criminal proposals.

60. China’s population is not stable. The will undergo a severe population decrease.

61. The number of children depends on whether the population is urban or rural. As people become urban the number of children decreases.

62. “…Al Gore flies on private jets and has multiple large homes…”

    if he stops stops flying, sell his large homes and buys a tent, does it fix the problem?-NO.
    If everyone in the world does the same, does that fix the problem?-NO.

    The problem cannot be fixed with individual action only token reductions, it’s an industrial problem requiring industrial level action.

    Since when is asking people to reduce the grievous harm they’re doing to literally every living thing on the planet considered to be a sacrifice?

    This “you fly on plane so co2 is good” kind of argument is best left to the folks from the hinterlands.

63. Children in Africa are not a pension plan. They are a labor force. They collect fire wood. They watch the flocks. They plant, they weed and they reap. You have as many as you have land or cows.

64. ” Historical and Social Reasons Why Sacrifice As a Plan Fails ” <– Because the people being asked to sacrifice never signed on to it in the first place.

Comments are closed.