Things like apps, media, or art can be more valuable without taking any more resources. Plus through greater efficiency, the same resources go much further. But it’s often easier to grow by just consuming more, so companies to that since they don’t really care. The sad thing is, I think we can have limitless growth if it’s slow and deliberate and conscious of it’s impact to the planet. But the current system doesn’t incentive that, instead everyone is flooring the growth pedal to catastrophic effect.
Things like apps, media, or art can be more valuable without taking any more resources.
They take energy and memory on the local devices and in the cloud. Uploading and downloading also does. Better software often needs better (new) hardware. The developers take office space and hardware and energy. Do you want me to go on?
The bigger question for my is why growth is supposed to be a good thing. With all the technology, we could work less but on the whole, we work more.
R&D resources are usually small compared to the efficacy improvements they allow. You don’t need advertisement. Though to achieve sustanability , you’d also need a very long life on products and almost complete recycling.
The topic is growth. There is no growth in sustainability. For your company to grow, you need new features, new customers, … People say this is achievable without resources, I doubt it. That’s what I’m saying.
I try to use my phones as long as I can and I ran into situations where I couldn’t update or install apps because my phone didn’t meet the requirements
Games, but games can also just be better and more optimized on the same hardware. It’s just easier to throw more silicon at the problem, and we don’t incentive caring about the planet enough.
Limitless growth of what? Limitless growth of time past is inevitable for example. Wealth can grow with increased comfort, so I guess to come to maximum wealth you’d need to achieve total human fulfillment. I hope you can agree we’ve got a long long way to go till that.
You think money can’t buy happiness? Somehow some rich people manage to still be miserable, but most poor people would be free to be much more happy with more money.
Infinite growth of what? Is infinite growth of happiness possible?
People need to meet their most basic needs, doesn’t have to be through money. We’ve just set up society to work that way.
Capitalism in particular, is an incredibly stubborn idea that’s difficult to throw away. And we’ve rigged the system to make it difficult (almost impossible) to give up.
Hell, the U.S. is notorious for trying to overthrow governments around the world who don’t subscribe to capitalism, and the U.S. governments way of thinking.
Oh yeah, you could distribute resources differently. Money is just very effecent at matching supply to demand. Something like a UBI could retain that while decreasing inequality inherent to the increased efficiency.
It also consumes human labor when people absorb the marketing. This is an externality not accounted for in the cost of marketing, it is large, and it makes resources unavailable for more productive tasks.
Things like apps, media, or art can be more valuable without taking any more resources. Plus through greater efficiency, the same resources go much further. But it’s often easier to grow by just consuming more, so companies to that since they don’t really care. The sad thing is, I think we can have limitless growth if it’s slow and deliberate and conscious of it’s impact to the planet. But the current system doesn’t incentive that, instead everyone is flooring the growth pedal to catastrophic effect.
They take energy and memory on the local devices and in the cloud. Uploading and downloading also does. Better software often needs better (new) hardware. The developers take office space and hardware and energy. Do you want me to go on?
The bigger question for my is why growth is supposed to be a good thing. With all the technology, we could work less but on the whole, we work more.
But better ones don’t require any more resources than worse ones. So you can increase value with the same resource consumption.
The development of better ones does and so does design, advertisement, …
R&D resources are usually small compared to the efficacy improvements they allow. You don’t need advertisement. Though to achieve sustanability , you’d also need a very long life on products and almost complete recycling.
The topic is growth. There is no growth in sustainability. For your company to grow, you need new features, new customers, … People say this is achievable without resources, I doubt it. That’s what I’m saying.
You don’t need more customers, you could deliver greater value to those customers
Example?
I try to use my phones as long as I can and I ran into situations where I couldn’t update or install apps because my phone didn’t meet the requirements
Fuck vendors who do not publish kernel sources.
Games, but games can also just be better and more optimized on the same hardware. It’s just easier to throw more silicon at the problem, and we don’t incentive caring about the planet enough.
By definition limitless growth is impossible. It just doesn’t work.
Limitless growth of what? Limitless growth of time past is inevitable for example. Wealth can grow with increased comfort, so I guess to come to maximum wealth you’d need to achieve total human fulfillment. I hope you can agree we’ve got a long long way to go till that.
That’s just another way of saying we should just keep on doing capitalism the way we are now.
Happiness, or human fulfillment, whatever you want to call it isn’t a state you just reach.
Exactly, that’s why you can always improve, which is usually reflected in increasing wealth.
You’re completely missing the point. Happiness, or whatever name you want to give it has very little to do with how much money you have.
But again, infinite growth is not a thing in a finite system. That is a fact, not an opinion.
You think money can’t buy happiness? Somehow some rich people manage to still be miserable, but most poor people would be free to be much more happy with more money.
Infinite growth of what? Is infinite growth of happiness possible?
People need to meet their most basic needs, doesn’t have to be through money. We’ve just set up society to work that way.
Capitalism in particular, is an incredibly stubborn idea that’s difficult to throw away. And we’ve rigged the system to make it difficult (almost impossible) to give up.
Hell, the U.S. is notorious for trying to overthrow governments around the world who don’t subscribe to capitalism, and the U.S. governments way of thinking.
Oh yeah, you could distribute resources differently. Money is just very effecent at matching supply to demand. Something like a UBI could retain that while decreasing inequality inherent to the increased efficiency.
Economic growth is an accounting measure, and so it can definitely be limitless.
That’s a hypothetical
If you have infinite supply of something, it ceases to be a scarce resource with any intrinsic value. Literally nothing in the universe is infinite.
There was an argument that marketing is the ultimate example of creating value without using raw resources by making an existing item more valuable.
Marketing takes human labor at the bare minimum.
It also consumes human labor when people absorb the marketing. This is an externality not accounted for in the cost of marketing, it is large, and it makes resources unavailable for more productive tasks.