The problems he describes all fit into three buckets
* Insurance industry rent-seeking
* Ennui (literal definition: not getting enough mental sustenance from things that previously gave enough)
* Symptoms of grossly rising population densities (most of the complaints raised there)
I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism but the laws of supply and demand do apply to the space we occupy and would like to roam around in as much as anything else. With food scarcity mostly abolished (until this year incidentally, the 2026/27 winter will be terribly bad for humanity) the Malthusian pressures all went away, leaving the human race to operate inside of the overshoot loop dynamical system instead:
But you do want to assert that it is true, without being aware of its meaning?
Malthusianism is the notion that some people must be poor / hungry because humans choose to reproduce until they reach the limits of the environment to provide for them (especially those Irish potato farmers, according to Malthus), and that increases in productivity will not change this - they will just be absorbed by a growing population (which ought to be 'swept away').
In reality, growing populations have led to more than adequate improvements in food production efficiency and people are choosing to reproduce less rather than more.
There is an excellent summary and rebuttal of Malthusianism in the book 'Progress and Poverty' by Henry George, which offers an alternative view of how supply and demand for finite land (your words) rather than reproductive instinct (Malthusianism) creates poverty.
How about point 4 - the litigiousness of American society leading to those high insurance costs, given that any accident on a playground can result in a multi million dollar payout?
I think a lot about the decline of wilderness and just want to mention that animal agriculture drives a huge amount of the land pressure driving conversion of intact ecosystems into degraded states. 3/4 of the world's ag land is devoted to grazing or growing livestock feed. If the world went vegan then biodiversity and ecosystem loss would probably reverse. I think even the marginal impact an individual choice is significant. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
The sentiment behind this post is, I fear, felt by too many normal people in the world today and not enough leaders. This is usually due to the network graph of leaders (above a certain scale threshold) being correlated with the most out of touch and wealthy - they are the last to hear about the insurance rates for campgrounds.
That said, the keyword used more than once in this post is "impotent". There is simply nothing the majority of us can do. And that worries me for obvious reasons.
This post wasn’t exactly what I came for (looking at the title) and a bit more stream of consciousness than expected, but nonetheless rings true. Enjoyed the bit on materialistic consumerism and Wall-E.
I grew up in Texas and lots of people who hear me talk about it assume I absolutely hate it there. In reality, I have a lot of the same complaints as this author and think it's citizens should demand better. The state seemingly has zero interest in investing in community resources, and what few of these exist are constantly at risk.
Fairfield Lake State Park is a perfect microcosm of this. The lake exists primarily to provide water for a power plant. The state park exists on land leased at very low cost from the power company. The power company closed the plant, and the state could have bought the land to secure the state park. It already had all of the infrastructure you need to run a state park, and had staff lined up to do so. Instead they let the land pass into private ownership and made a halfhearted effort to recover the land after the fact.
A lot of Texans that I talk to assume that the vast public land of the Rockies and Sierras is a geographic inevitability. In reality much of this public land exists because of specific, concerted efforts by communities and municipalities.
I remember growing up in Texas reading somewhere between 80-95 percent of all land in Texas is privately owned in various civics texts, my libertarian civics teacher was proud of this for some reason. It’s an exceptionally high percentage compared to the states to west of Texas. It’s a Texas issue dating back to Spanish rule and continued under successive governments. I don’t think this happened to other western states formerly under Spanish rule.
The amount of public land sort of follows when states were admitted to the union. At a certain point we saw what happened to the East and decided not to let it keep happening. Thanks in large part to early conservationists like Gifford Pinochet and Teddy Roosevelt
This learned helplessness is as much the problem as anything else. The author rants about how once nature is destroyed it can never be recovered, and resigns himself to the thought that nothing can be done about it. Bullshit. One man in Brazil planted 40,000 trees and singlehandedly created a park in a desolate urban strip. You are not impotent unless you choose to be.
The problems he describes all fit into three buckets
* Insurance industry rent-seeking
* Ennui (literal definition: not getting enough mental sustenance from things that previously gave enough)
* Symptoms of grossly rising population densities (most of the complaints raised there)
I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism but the laws of supply and demand do apply to the space we occupy and would like to roam around in as much as anything else. With food scarcity mostly abolished (until this year incidentally, the 2026/27 winter will be terribly bad for humanity) the Malthusian pressures all went away, leaving the human race to operate inside of the overshoot loop dynamical system instead:
https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/overshoot-loop-evolution-under-...
> I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism
But you do want to assert that it is true, without being aware of its meaning?
Malthusianism is the notion that some people must be poor / hungry because humans choose to reproduce until they reach the limits of the environment to provide for them (especially those Irish potato farmers, according to Malthus), and that increases in productivity will not change this - they will just be absorbed by a growing population (which ought to be 'swept away').
In reality, growing populations have led to more than adequate improvements in food production efficiency and people are choosing to reproduce less rather than more.
There is an excellent summary and rebuttal of Malthusianism in the book 'Progress and Poverty' by Henry George, which offers an alternative view of how supply and demand for finite land (your words) rather than reproductive instinct (Malthusianism) creates poverty.
How about point 4 - the litigiousness of American society leading to those high insurance costs, given that any accident on a playground can result in a multi million dollar payout?
I think litigiousness is a symptom of the lack of a social safety net so you are pressed to push for financial support from Wherever you can.
I think a lot about the decline of wilderness and just want to mention that animal agriculture drives a huge amount of the land pressure driving conversion of intact ecosystems into degraded states. 3/4 of the world's ag land is devoted to grazing or growing livestock feed. If the world went vegan then biodiversity and ecosystem loss would probably reverse. I think even the marginal impact an individual choice is significant. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
See also: https://www.nature.com/articles/536143a https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.abm9982
The sentiment behind this post is, I fear, felt by too many normal people in the world today and not enough leaders. This is usually due to the network graph of leaders (above a certain scale threshold) being correlated with the most out of touch and wealthy - they are the last to hear about the insurance rates for campgrounds.
That said, the keyword used more than once in this post is "impotent". There is simply nothing the majority of us can do. And that worries me for obvious reasons.
This post wasn’t exactly what I came for (looking at the title) and a bit more stream of consciousness than expected, but nonetheless rings true. Enjoyed the bit on materialistic consumerism and Wall-E.
I grew up in Texas and lots of people who hear me talk about it assume I absolutely hate it there. In reality, I have a lot of the same complaints as this author and think it's citizens should demand better. The state seemingly has zero interest in investing in community resources, and what few of these exist are constantly at risk.
Fairfield Lake State Park is a perfect microcosm of this. The lake exists primarily to provide water for a power plant. The state park exists on land leased at very low cost from the power company. The power company closed the plant, and the state could have bought the land to secure the state park. It already had all of the infrastructure you need to run a state park, and had staff lined up to do so. Instead they let the land pass into private ownership and made a halfhearted effort to recover the land after the fact.
A lot of Texans that I talk to assume that the vast public land of the Rockies and Sierras is a geographic inevitability. In reality much of this public land exists because of specific, concerted efforts by communities and municipalities.
I remember growing up in Texas reading somewhere between 80-95 percent of all land in Texas is privately owned in various civics texts, my libertarian civics teacher was proud of this for some reason. It’s an exceptionally high percentage compared to the states to west of Texas. It’s a Texas issue dating back to Spanish rule and continued under successive governments. I don’t think this happened to other western states formerly under Spanish rule.
The amount of public land sort of follows when states were admitted to the union. At a certain point we saw what happened to the East and decided not to let it keep happening. Thanks in large part to early conservationists like Gifford Pinochet and Teddy Roosevelt
This learned helplessness is as much the problem as anything else. The author rants about how once nature is destroyed it can never be recovered, and resigns himself to the thought that nothing can be done about it. Bullshit. One man in Brazil planted 40,000 trees and singlehandedly created a park in a desolate urban strip. You are not impotent unless you choose to be.
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