[vasco]

Efficiency I get, self sufficiency I don't get. Self sufficiency is net terrible as impact to the globe. It's obvious that specialization+trade gives us much more efficiency, be it in raw material usage, power usage, you name it, to create whatever product. Even space usage requirements balloon if everyone wants to be self sufficient.

If people want to optimize for self sufficiency they will need to hoard more stuff, they will need to produce and duplicate a lot, use more land and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room.

[Telemakhos]

Self sufficiency is usually a goal for those who want to avoid a systems collapse. When everyone is highly specialized and dependent on one another, failure in one part (especially if that part is logistical) cascades throughout the whole. For example, if the town’s petroleum distributor burns down, how long will residents be able to convey food home or products to market? If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon? If China destroyed the chip fabs in Taiwan by accident during an invasion, how long does it take the rest of the world to recover? During the pandemic we saw how vulnerable economic systems are to supply chain shocks, so it’s not unreasonable for people in the wake of that experience to seek a world with less exposure to that risk.

[labcomputer]

I would argue that mutual reliance actually makes the system as a whole more resilient.

If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?

Oops, but I forgot that even though I’m self sufficient in energy (maybe I have solar panels and batteries) it turns out I still need plastic! I guess I did need that distributor after all. Shame I didn’t realize that before it burned down.

> If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon?

I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.” There isn’t a plausible scenario where global shipping—and nothing else—fails. You might as well start making contingency plans for if the sun gets turned into green cheese.

To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.

It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia. American settlers on the Great Plains needed iron nails and barbed wire from back east. Native Americans traded furs for guns with Europeans because it was mutually beneficial. All over the world people lived in groups because specialization and trading (even if they didn’t call it that) enabled a higher quality of living than gathering berries all alone.

[throw10920]

Every line of argument in this comment is very bad.

> If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?

Your argument exclusively rests on the assertion that the converse is true - that if individuals and organizations will invest substantial amounts of effort into making sure that their upstream suppliers will continue to exist if they are dependent on them.

Not only is there no empirical evidence to support this claim, but there is ample evidence to support the fact that it's false - such as COVID, which you literally mention later in your comment, where despite the fact that we live in a highly interdependent global economy, there's very little effort invested into making sure that your suppliers continue to exist, and the devastating supply chain issues prove that conclusively.

In addition to the empirical evidence, this is just false based on human nature. If confronted with the fact that "oh, something might happen to an entity that supplies me with things", humans and organizations overwhelmingly choose to increase their internal resilience, not the system resilience. As a trivial example of this - in response to supply chain shocks that hit lean manufacturers like car manufacturers particularly hard, those manufacturers overwhelmingly chose to stock up on parts - internal resiliency - and not to invest in the upstream supply chain, which is what you're claiming they would do.

Your claim is just rooted in an false anthropology that has massive amounts of evidence refuting it.

> I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.”

That's an irrelevant strawman. Nothing in their comment was specifically predicated on exactly that scenario happening - they were arguing for general resiliency, which is effective even in more realistic and broad scenarios.

> To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.

First of all, that claim about the experiment is false. All labor in all sectors did not turn off at once.

Second, that's yet another strawman, because individuals overwhelmingly prefer to engage in tasks for the sake of self-preservation than the preservation of others. If the economy and individuals have resilient practices, they will invest substantially more effort in those practices that directly lead to their survival than if the system is not resilient and they're highly interdependent, because again, of human nature, which prioritizes the immediate.

> It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia.

Yet another strawman. Self-sufficiency is not binary. You can decrease your reliance on others without eliminating it entirely, and history's plentiful examples of system distruptions show that it is an extremely good idea to do so.

It's telling that you have to repeatedly make fallacies, false statements, and misunderstand human nature in an attempt to defend such an absurd point like "making individuals less resilient makes the system more resilient". Factually, it is exactly the opposite - systems with resilient components are objectively less fragile.

[vasco]

> and the devastating supply chain issues prove that conclusively.

Did we go through the same covid? No country on earth had food shortages while majority of people were stuck at home. COVID was a perfect demonstration of resiliency of trade and JIT systems. But you ate up the news the media put out that were basically china-boogeymen, to force government to create the huge CHIPs act.

[throw10920]

> No country on earth had food shortages while majority of people were stuck at home.

Nothing I said is specifically related to food, and there's ample documentation of numerous kinds of shortages during covid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID...

The bogeyman exists - there were factually shortages in hundreds of different kinds of goods. You're just stupid because you can't do a 5-second Google search.

[vasco]

So what was devastating then? Maybe you mean it was devastating that toilet paper was missing for 3 days or bread baking flour for hipsters that started sourdough. Devastating shortages in my book are what you see im the history books, people dying because of the shortages themselves.

[lukan]

"and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room."

Depends how big the project/village is.

Also the basic idea is to be as self sufficient as possible. Not as a dogma.

And the benefit once it runs is, you don't have to go make war around the globe, because your economy is threatened. You can just stay at home minding your own buisness.

[vasco]

Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history. Or if it works it needs some radically different ideas. The aspect about ignoring defense is also naive, what happens when your neighbours that do have a military decide your land and self sufficiency are something they want? The best thing to prevent that, and the first step, is to have established trade with them, which in your plan you don't want or need.

Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" (at whatever size this is applied to) after a few generations if nobody is involved in trade.

[lukan]

"Isolationism doesn’t work as a policy, that is proven by history."

Of course it does. Many remote mountain villages preserved their culture this way.

"Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" "

I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?

They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.

What you means are cults. They also exist, true. But those operating in the open are mostly .. open.

Also the basic idea is to establish a network of trading and sharing in general. Specialisation is useful after all. But for the basic needs, I like the idea to be independent here.

And yes, ideally also have a competent doctor you can just wake up from next door in the middle of the night in a case of emergency and not hope a ambulance is avaiable in time.

[tbrownaw]

> I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?

They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.

You're taking about who thinks it's cool to try to do this kind of thing. The post your replying to is trying to predict how things might evolve over a (very) long time in case of actual success.

[nradov]

Isolationism only works for remote mountain villages because they don't have any resources worth taking. That solution doesn't scale.

[vasco]

Did you intentionally cut off "after generations" to respond to a point I didn't make? I said nothing about the 0th or 1st generation.

[lukan]

It seems we are not talking about the same thing. You seem to be talking about strict isolationists. Those are usually of the cult type and no doubt they will all create their version of nationalism likely within the 1. Generation.

But all the other self sustainable projects that I know, are far from the idea of wanting to shut themself of the world.

The main idea is just to not be so dependent on the crazyness of this world. But still be connected to the world. Trade, travel, exchange, ..

[vasco]

How many of those projects have been going for more than 3 generations? Why do you think all the last times it was attempted it turns to that? Most of the undisturbed tribes kill intruders on sight. Most countries that ever turned to isolationism have their population suffer vs their neighbours when enough time passes. I said nothing about the intentions of who starts these communities, that barely matters, what matters is the system they put in place after a few generations. If the system is flawed good intentions go nowhere because after a few generations you don't have a group of idealists anymore, you have random people operating in an isolationist system and they'll act according to their incentives.

We should maximize cooperation between communities, not restrict it. It's the best way to avoid war long term.

[simgt]

Interestingly, it's the exact opposite view that laid the foundation of the EU [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuman_Declaration

[lukan]

I do enjoy the freedom of movement in the EU, but don't enjoy the regulation of cucumbers. (At least they relaxed those by now, but they still move the parliament every month, because they cannot agree on one place, I rather mind my own buisness than dealing with that)

[yourapostasy]

Maybe this maxim within our software world might help: "Be loosely coupled, tightly cohesive".

Decoupling (the kind of self-sufficiency you are envisioning) is only a distant goal for interplanetary colonization. Loose coupling is fine as baby steps. As long as within their community they are tightly cohesive, they will do fine.

The intent is sustainable resiliency baked into our systems.

[bckr]

I think any serious countries of the future will spend substantial resources planting self-sufficiency caches every so many kilo acres. Students should be taught the basics of booting and sustaining a self-sufficient pod.

It shouldn’t be about isolationism / anarchy, but about limiting the blast radius for any given disaster.

Finally it also serves as a center for rehab, starting from scratch, and community service. The ultimate social safety net.

[Cthulhu_]

> The ultimate social safety net.

For the few that live, I suppose. But this is like an almost-worst-case scenario where the people are some of the few (1%) to survive. Most disasters, even all-out war like in Ukraine or Gaza have relatively few casualties, but they all have needs. The program in Denmark where they start up emergency stores (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45216805) makes a lot more sense in that regard.

People should always have emergency supplies to last up to three days for the fairly common scenario of power outages, supply chain disruptions and extreme weather events. If you live in a disaster prone area, a week's worth of supplies should still be manageable. Anything worse than that and it's probably best to evacuate. Only the rich have the space, time and means to dig in for longer, think people with bomb shelters, storage basements, and a lifestyle of living on preserved foods (because you need to rotate things on a regular basis).

[bckr]

I’m thinking the vast majority of the value comes not from enabling survival but from de-alienation, which I believe is fundamental in reaching a better overall state.

[modo_mario]

>Self sufficiency is net terrible as impact to the globe. It's obvious that specialization+trade gives us much more efficiency, be it in raw material usage, power usage, you name it, to create whatever product. Even space usage requirements balloon if everyone wants to be self sufficient.

I think you forget that the alternative hides a ton of externalities. For example those massive agri corporations are vaaaastly more efficient than me or my grandpa working our own gardens. But we aren't spraying or the like to contribute to insect population collapse. We're being rather damn space efficient, yet we don't use any fertilisers from gas and mining. We don't compact the soil or lose topsoil. and what we do produce is less deficient in micronutrients.

And as someone else already said. It really just means more self-sufficient.

[labcomputer]

Big agri corps can afford large tractors that till, plant and harvest more efficiently. They can afford to buy remote sensing imagery to optimize planting. In other words, there exist scale effects in agriculture.

You lose those effects if every hundred acres needs to produce all of needs of a human family. Self sufficient is less efficient.

You can bring back some of those effects with co-ops, but now it starts looking like a single large business with many owners again.

[modo_mario]

That's indeed what I was saying.

You don't get those things when being a lot more sustainable. You're not being more efficient with resources like time, labour, etc.

But I'm not pumping up gas for it, making the insect populations go into freefall as much, etc Am I being more efficient in my use of those?