rustmachine

I switched to amplenote, which im very happy with. And i tried all the other notetaking apps, from jopling (hate the lack of wysiwyg editor) over obsidian and all the rest. Amplenote is the first note-app I decided to pay for. It does everything evernote did, without all the crap. And a lot of things it does better.

in what way did it turn out to refer to those things? Community-based health care seems to me like a way of saying that mental health is connected closely to the community you are a part of, and that this community therefore can play a big part of keeping your mind healthy.

Which, I think, sounds very reasonable. If your work environment is toxic, the way to get better is to improve the work community, or find another community to be part of.

100 years ago the west were in the middle of a very powerful industrial upswing which relied completely and explicitly on the exploitation of less developed countries. They maintained political and economic power through military force, which was ensured by their dominance of fossil fuels.

I dont think the people in power 100-150 years ago were thinking very much about how to ensure the living standard of the countries they were exploiting. Because they knew that their own wealth was directly dependent on the exploitation of these very same people, and spent considerable military and colonial power to ensure that modernity, development and industrialization was something happened in the colonial powers - not in the colonies.

Thank you for a very thorough reply. Interesting read. We very obviously read different things. Basically what I hear you saying is: we have the technology, we can do it. Please correct me if im reading you wrong. And sure, that is the hope, and I'm not saying that we wont be able to find solutions - simply that our current solutions wouldnt work if scaled to the world. My argument is simply that we're on a massive ecological clock, and I dont see our current political systems or power structures being able to support the necessary change.

What I think your calculations miss is two things: 1) producing a fridge is harmful to the climate not just because it takes ressources to produce and ship and maintain, but because it uses limited ressources and pollutes after it is thrown away [1] and prices doesnt currently reflect the real cost on the environment. And 2) Technology is worth very little if politics and infrastructure doesnt support it. We could avoid a large part of the pollution of fridges if we recycle, but we need recycling plants, a government that mandates it, a culture of recycling, not to mention we need to share technology across borders.

My argument is not that its physically impossible, but that it isnt realistic in any way to imagine we could scale our way of living to the entire world with our current political, tehcnological and cultural infrastructure. Right beside everything you describe, there is an on-going climate-crisis of extreme proportions going on. The way we live in the west is built historically on fossil-fuels and direct exploitation of other parts of the world, and it has led us to the brink of ecological ruin. Even if technology might be able to ensure that the rest of the world wont need to rely on fossil fuels in the same way we've done historically and still do, there is not the political will or the infrastructrure to do so. There will be, maybe, in 10 years - we'll see.

So yes, my standard of living rests explicitly on poorer countries not living like me. Because we dont have the technology or infrastructure in place to support such a massive increase in living standard without it impacting the climate. It doesnt matter if we have the technology in ten years if its impossible to implement at scale.

[1] The cooling industry play a huge part in glomal warming: "Part of the problem with refrigerants, however, is that much of the harm they cause is after we as consumers have finished using them. It occurs out of sight, and so largely out of mind." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201204-climate-change-h...

The natural ressources to maintain the cost of living in a rich country like mine (denmark) is so high, that it is impossible to imagine all the people in the world maintaining a similar living standard. Im talking not only the glass in my windows, but my energyconsumption, my use of fridges, phones, tvs and so on, all of which costs not only the ressources it costs to manufacture them, but also the entire system built up around it to maintain it. From shipping and transport to cheap labor in a 3rd world country.

If all the people of india and china were to maintain a similar way of life as mine, the eco system would collapse right away.

Santa fe university has some interesting papers on groupthink as a complexity problem, and their podcast 'complexity' deals with it in several episodes.

Mirta Galesic does research in social decisionmaking, and if you're interested i would recommend the Complexity podcast episode with her https://open.spotify.com/episode/7m3lEMqnkEDgZcKesiepcn?si=A...

I agree with this, well put. Are people evil, or are our structures and systems so complex that we are unable to find best solutions?

Honestly, I think evil is a byproduct of the complexity of our society. There are no quick fixes. Everything is complex and very difficult. Trying to do large-scale good might very easily turn out to have very bad consequences. Its much easier to just be a gear in the machine, but the its the logic of the machine that ends up dictating the outcome - and when the machine is societies with 300 million people, its very hard to predict what that logic will be. Most likely it wont be good.

I dont know. I think you underestimate how difficult it is to make big organisations work well. As soon as any organisation grows large enough (say, a large municipality), it becomes an incredibly difficult task to run it perfectly. Everyone trying their best, but still people from office A have no idea what people in office B does, bosses make the wrong decisions because they dont have access to correct knowlegde and are overworked, employees stop taking responsibility because their bosses are overworked and the decicions making structures are opaque and feel futile.

None of this is evil or bad faith. Its simply very hard problems that are hard to solve individually. We try to organize or build systems to fix these things, but its a very hard problem.

I'm not denying that there are powerful people doing evil things to benefit themselves, and that this is huge part of why everything is bad. Im just saying we shouldnt lose sight of the fact that a lot of our troubles come down to our problems being extremely complex and human nature doesnt interact that great with that kind of complexity. Our biggest problem i think is not nefariouss badguys, but the immense scale of our issues and our inability to tackle them at the proper level.

Cool project, and cool resultats. As an anthropologist who reads HN as a way to keep abreast of the tech community and tech insights, its interesting to see atlas shrugged as one of the most often recommended books. Interesting and maybe slightly disturbing. HN would make for quite interesting source material for someone who wanted to study tech culture.

Thanks so much for sharing. I've been fascinated by Bateson for a long time, but i didnt know much about the environment he did his thinking in, nor how/if his ideas had ever had any political influence. This article was very illuminating.

Im 30 and living in Denmark, and reading Bateson its always been baffling to me that his ideas (or ideas like them) have not had a larger impact. It seems like my generation is talking about many of the exact same issues that Bateson have written about so brilliantly. I cant tell whether his ideas are genius or just so outdated that they seem new to me.

Do you know of any more articles that put this ecological movement into historical perspective? I'd love to read more.