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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The memes of the climate
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The climate of the memes of the climate!
Planet is on fire!
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Seconded. It's so baffling to me that we have seemingly forgotten the purpose of the economy. It is supposed to be there to benefit our lives and instead it is costing us everything. Some slave away on their knees building streets and others waste the precious few laps around the sun staring at lights in a box. We have the technology to give everyone enough such that the average person would only have to work a few hours.
For a comparison in a very real sense:
Prior to the Neolithic revolution, which put an end to our nomadic past and turned our species into agriculturalists, it took more than 50 hours of labor (mostly gathering wood) to “buy” 1,000 lumen hours of light. By 1800, it took about 5.4 hours. By 1900, it took 0.22 hours. By 1992, 1,000 lumen hours required 0.00012 hours of human labor.
We've put the cart before the horse on an unfathomable scale. A good life for all (current humans and future) is within reach but the economic system that has created this bounty has grown out of control and serves nothing but itself anymore.
Skeezix’s Law: The purpose of the economy is to extract as much value from the populace as possible, but whatever means possible, in any way that offers an alibi.
In your grandfather’s day, choice, privacy, and leisure were humored by the economy. As the decades have passed, the economy has advanced to become a machine increasingly fine-tuned to extract value. As the world burns and resources run out, the economy attempts to adapt by strengthening its extraction methods further.
The average human sees 2000-5000 ads per day in one form or another.
It does provide some promise though because if we want to live good, peaceful, sustainable, educated lives, the technology is right there, but there is an external and only barely human force that is imposing a malignant culture on us all.