"A company called Go Mega AI advertises that it can help you generate "hundreds of articles a month without doing anything" by analysing Reddit posts, YouTube videos, and a brand's own website. "24 hours later, I had a month of content already scheduled," the ad says. "

Late Stage Capitalism is taking your freely donated content and selling it back to you after a brief spell in a shredder.

@Cat

This is not just something that happens to the crops. It happens to us. As crops start failing, and they will, there will be spikes in prices and ultimately famines due to populations not served. When people aren't getting what they need, they don't sit passively by. There will be unrest. It will get ugly fast. We can plan for some shortfalls if they happen intermittently. But as they become more the norm, that's a big problem.

Our oligarchs imagine that they personally will always have the most money, so first access to things that run short. And they're comfortable with large numbers of others suffering and dying . So we shouldn't get too complacent and assume that things will somehow work out. That isn't the plan they have.

We need to restore democracy and federal institutions that operate in the best interest of the people. And we need to focus on stopping climate change, by seriously retooling the parts of our economy that are egging it on. The oligarchs see climate change as a business opportunity, a chance to sell to desperate people at jacked up prices. They're not interested in stopping it, just being in control of what people will cry out for and pay money for.

@climatebrad

It feels to me like "build more housing" can't be the answer. You almost might as well say "make more land". It's not a durable solution. And it doesn't address the many other aspects of society that need to be addressed. Jobs food commerce in general, schools, the nature and flow of community itself.

A favorite quote comes to mind.

"Better implies different."
--Amar Bose, at an MIT Enterprise Forum event

(He was trying to explain to sales people at stores that would sell Bose speakers why they had to make changes in how they set them up. "Couldn't they just do what they'd always done?" The people would ask. They were used to that and did not want to change. He was trying to explain succinctly why you can't just radically improve something and leave it the same at the same time. So he, explained, that slogan had emerged.)

Surely higher population density at some point means using existing resources differently. I'm not pushing an agenda here, but I am observing that higher density feels less compatible within every person for themselves and traditional-ownership / rent-taking-for-profit model. Surely that brings a 2-tiered citizenship and breeds discontent/danger as inequality simmers.

In computer science, we talk about building systems that scale, planning for higher traffic. This could really be done in a system that did not plan for scale without the architecting the system entirely, and I've even seen some of pine that every factor of 10 in scale requires a redesign.

Sometimes the architectural plan is indeed to just add servers, but that has to be planned in, and there has to be a source of servers, and the system architecture has to be structured such that in the new model, all the necessary flows will happen correctly and resources won't be cut off from each other or too hard to access or too expensive.

"Build more housing." does not sound like the kind of answer I could give in a job interview and expect to be hired, with the hiring manager saying "this person has clearly demonstrated their understanding of operating at scale". The answer is not of a shape that seems right to me, nor does it offer sufficient detail.

A lot of capitalism seems to operate on a theory that you just twist some knobs and everything will just happen right without coordination. I think this is less and less true as either populations grow larger or resources grow smaller or resources become more stressed.

I did not write the accompanying article specifically to address this issue, and yet I feel like it says some important additional things I might say here if I were to ramble on. It is not a complete discussion of scale, but more discussion of why I don't think the traditional ways of thinking about just turning a few knobs is likely to keep working.

Losing Ground in the Environment
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html

It also just not addressed the issue of urgency, and the way in which urgency materially changes the set of usable solutions. I did try to address that issue here:

The Politics of Delay
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-politics-of-delay.html