Profit?

The thing is, we could do this if we wanted. There are plenty of great American engineers who can design reliable products that can be produced cheaply on assembly lines in China. The problem is that none of them work in American industry. They work designing electronics and toys.

And they will probably never work in American industry. American industry is not focused on creating lots of products cheaply. It is focused on creating giant products that are marginally more efficient. The culture is entirely different.

But why?

Why is industry so focused on creating giant, centralized, marginally-efficient products while electronics and computers, for instance, are built smaller and cheaper and in much larger quantites? What are the motives? What is the difference?

Well, whereas electronics and computers are complex systems with huge dependencies in the production chain, often requiring, besides exotic materials, robots and highly skilled labor, industries like metal refining and energy and food production sit at the base of the economic production pyramid. They are dependent upon nothing else. The economics of primary production is completely different from the economics of manufacturing consumer goods.

In primary production, competition destroys existing market leaders. For complex, cutting-edge products, however, competition creates new markets and expands the economic pie for all participants. In computers and electronics, new innovations are combined and shared and reused by all participants, often with no charge. In energy and agriculture and refining, the slightest innovations are trade secrets to be jealously guarded, even when they convey no real advantage or aren't even very innovative, such as patenting basic software functions or pre-existing plant and animal genes.

Therefore, basic industries like energy and refining and agriculture don't want massive innovation and expansion of production. It's not in their interests. It creates what's called demand destruction. When people can get the basics for much less, they don't tend to consume more enough and produce enough profits to make up for the lost sales or the extra effort involved in building thousands of widgets in a capital-intensive factory instead of just building a few giant widgets in a one-off fashion. Even if most everyone would be better off, it isn't "profitable".

And the dirty little secret, the big lie of "consumerism", that enables this, is the fact that what consumers are actually "consuming" is not just the goods and services provided by marginally more efficient producers. Consumers are actually consuming their own assets, and therefore their own wealth that supports them, by transferring it to others. And as long as their technology is marginally more efficient than yours, the producers will end up with all of your assets regardless of what you get in return. So they won't produce more than the bare minimum. And in basic industries, they don't have to. There is little or no competition to force them. Competition would require massive investment in centralized, marginally-more efficient production capital. It's been squeezed out long before you were born.

Basic, established industries only want innovation when population is growing and price pressure is creating scarcity that would justify investment in a brand new, giant, marginally more efficient production plant that obsoletes the old one. But this doesn't make anyone better off. It's just more giant (or more efficient) production in order to support more people at the same level of prosperity. Nothing changes besides the paper profits at the company producing whatever marginally more efficient technology capable of supporting these extra consumers. The same amount of assets will change hands regardless.

So ultimately the problem is that it is literally more profitable on paper to limit total energy production and to keep it constrained to centrally-managed and controlled sources rather than to invest in massively disruptive and de-centralized technologies that would clearly make 99% of everyone on Earth much better off by eliminating the monopolies of the few.

And so why is this, you might ask? Why has this been allowed to occur? That is even more subtle. You see, in every other form of production and consumption, we rely on government to regulate and prevent the imposition of involuntary costs upon third parties, known as "negative externalities". In industry, pollution is a negative externality that we expect government to regulate. In healthcare and nuclear waste, finance and agricultural run-off, negative externalities are regulated in order to protect others. But in the single largest destructive enterprise known to man, governments all over the world not only fail to account for externalized costs, but actively aid in imposing them on uninvolved third parties.

This enterprise is nothing more than your existence itself. You, like the vast majority of people, are a consumer. You consume natural resources. You destroy material wealth. And all you produce in return is profits for the few. And instead of regulating and limiting your self-reproducing existence for the benefit of the responsible few who are not destructive, wasteful consumers, you are subsidized by government. Instead of being taxed, those who brought you into existence are lauded and helped. Money is printed and distributed, wealth is confiscated, in order to maintain the illusion that you are an economic miracle, and a useful member of society, so that you can predictably, along with millions of others, take that money and that wealth and hand it over to the handful of industrial monopolies that long ago leveraged some banal innovation to build a larger, marginally-more efficient production system that you and millions of others are now totally dependent upon and completely powerless to deconstruct.

You will never change this. You will probably not even recognize it. It is so alien and so foreign a concept that it conflicts with every lie you have been told your entire life: You are "productive". You are a "worker". Consumption helps the "economy". Growth is good. Profit is good. Redundancy is bad. Efficiency is good. Centralization is good. The economy is very efficient. Lies all.

You've been lied to. And we have all been taken for a ride, over the cliff of resource exhaustion and down the Olduvai Gorge, smiling the entire way, because it made a tiny few better off for a short while. Men with guns and a little bit of political power and slightly more efficient means of production have engineered the most massive mal-investment of resources the world has ever seen. And those who survive it's realization and exposure will go through absolute hell in order to correct it. You will be so lucky as to get Windows-powered nuclear reactors. Reality will likely be much worse.

And if you dare to point this out or to question the status quo in any way, you will be labeled a terrorist and marginalized and stripped of your position and benefits by every one of the dependent drooling morons that comprise both ends of the US political spectrum in our comically broken "democracy".

"More people mean a greater ferment of ideas, more enthusiasm and more energy."
-Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung

http://markschinablog.blogspot.com/2010/06/more-population-means-more-power.html

What matters is CO2 emission per land area, not per capita. CO2 emission is almost entirely a function of fossil fuel usage. And CO2 sequestration is almost entirely a function of biomass. Any large country's ability to mitigate CO2 emissions will ultimately be proportional to their land area.

The US and China have nearly the same land area, yet China emits 28% more CO2.

The reason why is immaterial. But let's look at it regardless. Those people didn't just magically appear. China's government got the brilliant idea that overpopulation would be a great economic boon. Surprise, surprise, it wasn't. Taking this into account is like saying a country that purposely over-fishes it's waters should be given more of them. It's retarded, creates the wrong incentives, and will only lead to failure.

Marx didn't conceive of the labor theory of value, though he did expand it to ridiculous levels. It was a prominent feature of classical economics, and is even still espoused by modern Keynesian economists *cough*. It can probably be traced to Thomas Aquinas.

Exactly. And they measure your value that way as well. If you sit in the corner of the office with your office door closed, you're probably goofing off. If you work from home, you're completely worthless.

I have experience in lots of different jobs in several different industries, and this statement right here hits the nail squarely on the head.

The problem is, even though it is true, you will never be able to convince anyone of this. There are still far too many companies that simply don't want to hire any developers, period. They have absolutely zero clue how to deal with someone who applies software development to his daily work. Tell a recruiter that you are a quick learner and have worked in several different industries, and they will think you are an unspecialized flake. Tell an employer that you can easily write some custom code, and they will worry about maintainability and interoperability and tax implications. Tell your boss that you can automate a task, and they will wonder why they hired you, begin to fear for their own job and budget, steal your work, and find a way to get rid of you.

And I'm speaking from experience. I watched a start-up go down the tubes partly because their developers sat in their cubicles month after month producing code that consistently failed in the field, and they never knew it until the very end. But the investors ended up with exactly what they wanted: no business, no customers, no capital resources, just a few questionable pieces of "intellectual property". The most successful job I've had was one in which I quietly automated all of my work without telling anyone. When I asked for more work, they fired me. No shit. On the other hand, I've also seen a company built around perfectly bug-free, perfectly usable in-house software that was a total waste of time and resources because it relied on the most labor-intensive way to accomplish the task at hand. Try to point this out, though, and you will be attacked like the monkeys in the cage who beat any monkey that reaches for a banana.

Frankly, I don't see any of this changing any time soon. The entire structure of modern business, from education to finance, is completely hosed. There is a blind worship of specialization, even though most workers and managers are incapable of recognizing it without seeing degrees hanging on a wall. There is an implicit belief in the labor theory of value. There is almost total ignorance of the practicalities of software development, and it's potential benefits. And there are powerful forces with aircraft carriers and money-printing presses who want to keep it that way.

I kind of figured that was because they were mostly built by military contractors and airports had better air defenses in case of attack.

Something tells me you have no clue what the real hazard actually is.

Bullshit. If that were true, you would be working 12 hours a day, eating nothing but a subsistence diet, and donating all of your earnings to charity in order to save the hundreds of thousands of people who die (in this country alone) every year from something as simple as heart disease. Yet you don't. Why? You're not a saint. You're a liar.

In fact, instead of eating gruel, you probably eat things like cheeseburgers. I like to eat cheeseburgers. But they're bad for me. Therefore, by your twisted view of 'society', everyone else should be prevented by force from grilling cheeseburgers, lest I be tempted to eat one. And when I finally succumb to heart attack from my love of cheeseburgers, you should personally pay for the ambulance and the triple-bypass heart surgery to save my life. Doesn't that sound like the "civilized" thing to do? You wouldn't let me die out of your own greed, would you? In fact, why aren't you working right now to get laws passed banning cheeseburgers? Just think of all the emergency room visits that you're paying for right now due to cheeseburgers!!

Oh, that's right... you don't actually have any consistent views or an original thought. You just mindlessly parrot what you've been told.

But by all means, feel free to tell me more about what I believe, and to lecture me on "ad hominems"...

Just because it weakens your argument and you want to ignore it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Somehow I doubt Fuller meant 'utility' when he said "value", since he was an actual scientist, not an economist. CO2 is a resource that we are failing to collect, when viewed over a long enough timescale. You really want to measure absolute value over thousands of years in terms of some existing currency?

My first sentence said that I agreed with this point. But frankly it is too limited a view to be useful in understanding Fuller's quote.

Okay you seem kind of stupid, so I'll explain it to you, slowly.

You want to pay for free healthcare for others. That's your voluntary decision.

You want to force others to modify their behavior in order to avoid situations in which your charitable views impel you to pay for others' healthcare. That's involuntary.

Get it?

Frankly I'm mostly speaking hypothetically. The US federal government is a gang of criminals. They imprison as many people as possible because the insane economies of scale created by our unregulated banking system means supporting people in prison is cheaper than creating them jobs. I agree with you that we need less centralized government, not more.

And you believe that everyone else should be forced to modify their behavior in order to subsidize things you voluntarily choose to purchase.

No... your paying for things you shouldn't impacts your financial well being.