[walleeee]

The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless.

Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.

[api]

> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else"

This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere. The world in this view is a finite pie that can only be sliced up differently. Nothing is ever created. Wealth can only be redistributed.

This ignores the fact that the past 200 years have seen insane wealth creation that has enabled more people than have ever lived to live better than most people have ever lived. Look at how many have risen out of poverty globally in just the last 25 years.

Someone will inevitably bring up climate change, etc., and argue that it’s all bound to come crashing down. Maybe it will, but asserting that it must as some law of nature is a fatalistic ideology.

It’s a fatalistic ideology that some people seem to like and be emotionally attached to for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I tend to think it’s a big cop out. If everything is doomed, doomed, doomed, then there is no point in even trying. Eat, drink, and be merry while the ship sinks.

[walleeee]

> This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere

To some degree this is true, in the sense that human flourishing implies some degree of suffering for e.g. the ants we accidentally step on, animals we eat, bacteria in our guts, etc. But Jains do their best not to step on the ants, many people refuse to eat flesh, and so on. Plants and bacteria will have to fend for themselves for now. We can certainly do better with each other.

I am proposing no version of fatalism, besides the fact that, at least in our living substrate, organisms have not all learned to do each other no harm, if this is even possible, and even if it isn't, fatalistic hedonism is not the inevitable response to this fact.

[sifar]

>> The world in this view is a finite pie

But it is. The physical world is finite, with finite resources, human greed not so.

[xbar]

Finite, but sufficiently abundant for any human to be clothed, housed, fed, taught, married, and succeeded by offspring as well-protected as they.

[samdoesnothing]

It doesn't matter because the capacity to increase efficiency is virtually endless and we have a free source of power just 9 light-minutes away.

[rayiner]

> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south"

San Francisco is not rich because Bangladesh is poor. This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous. I’m stuck in America because my parents and grandparents in Bangladesh were infected by such stupid thinking. Other people in the “global south” that rejected such victimhood leapt ahead. When we came to America in 1989, China’s per-capita GDP was a little higher than Bangladesh, but a little lower than India. Since then, China has become a livable place, while Bangladesh and India remain impoverished. Your mindset is a roadmap for the global south to remain poor and backward.

[walleeee]

I'm not endorsing victimhood or saying that Bangladesh is poor because the US is rich. It was badly phrased if that is how it reads, for that I apologize.

I'm saying the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means. It is not unique in this. This is not the only reason the US is rich or the only reason any other is not.

I'm also saying that this is a really bad strategy if the goal is humankind flourishing on this planet. People already enrich one another in many ways. We have to stop warring on one another and nature, thoughtlessly dumping entropy where we can't see it, etc.

[nradov]

The US hasn't done anything to prevent Bangladesh from being as rich as, let's say, Singapore. Rather the opposite.

[rayiner]

With respect to Bangladesh specifically, the U.S. has helped much more than it has hurt.

[hollerith]

>the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means.

I don't believe that.

Like most countries, the US has a community of professionals in government dedicated to the country's national security and this class of professionals has often done harm around the world by trying to increase the US's national security when it is already more secure than most countries are. For example, the US's overreaction to 9/11. For example, the US's overthrowing of Communist governments in the third world during the Cold War.

[defrost]

And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

etc.

[hollerith]

It does: but the US did those things for national security goals, not to make the US richer.

Often those things made the US considerably poorer, e.g., the US intervention in Vietnam, e.g., when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.

During the Cold War, the US encouraged international trade to show the world the benefits of trade and of capitalism and as a bribe to try to get and to keep countries in our military coalition against the Soviets. Often the encouragement and the bribe included Washington's opening up the US consumer market to imports (i.e., without tariffs). But it did those thing for national security reasons (i.e., stopping the spread of communism) not because the US needs to import anything or to export anything or to steal anything from overseas to be the richest country.

Yes, international trade makes the US richer than it would be without the trade, but the US would still be the richest country even if it did zero international trade: its not like China or Germany whose economies are highly reliant on international trade.

[defrost]

The Iranian coup d'état was literally about allied control of oil to secure control of global flow of oil and energy related wealth.

Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.

> when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.

Or, alternatively, recirculated trillions of US taxpayer dollars into US weapons, US mercanaries, US personnel, and fed pork barrels where directed by US lobbyists.

[rayiner]

> And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.

We did that for ideological reasons. The U.S. was already one of the richest countries in the world per capita at the time of the founding. It was about as rich per capita in 1800 as India is today (in nominal dollars).