You kidding me? We're all getting the coke. Just because you're not Scarface doesn't avoid the fact that all of us are awash in plastics, silicone, rare earth metals, concrete, steel, precious metals, alloys, goods from far flung lands, industrial agriculture and many assumptions about available services that rely on the same and ravenous upstream fossil fuel consumption. We (as human consumers) never had it so good, and if that luxury is unevenly distributed, the fact remains that the tide continues to lift all boats globally. You certainly benefit from the aggregate bounty society as a whole has reaped (enjoy that Starbucks!) and directly are living a better life today than someone of your station would have lived 300 years ago. I don't even know you in the least, but am comfortable making that statement categorically because the difference is global capabilities is that profound.

generally one makes a distinction between Scarface and people who do an occasional line at a party though.

Americans and citizens of high GDP countries are totally the scarfaces in this scenario

I mean sure, except for the ones who aren't.

If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what is a koch brother then? A monster made up of a thousand scarfaces all shouting say hello to my little friend in unison?

If the average citizen of the U.S is scarface what about someone who works at Greenpeace, doesn't have a car and lives frugally? Probably scarface in comparison to the average untouchable in India but I don't know enough to make that comparison.

I think folks are generally confusing three different topics here: per capita share of wealth, per capita material consumption, and per capita CO2 production.

Warren Buffet has roughly 100,000X the wealth of the average american (~700k), but Warren buffet does not produce 10^5 as much co2 or consume 10^5 as much iron.

Seph-reed posted: >Not usually a fan of us vs them mentality, but your use of "we" here feels bad. Surely, it's all of us that use these resources, nobody on HN is self sufficient (please be the exception). But at the same time, most of us aren't getting much of the "cocaine" here, at least relatively.

This begs the question of what the threshold is for when it stops being a collective "us" problem, and becomes a "them" problem because of "their" disproportionate contribution to the problem. This [1] suggests that the richest 20% of americans account for 30% of US carbon emissions, or about 1.5x the average. If the bottom 80% are still emitting 70% of the emissions, than I would say it is still a collective "us" problem. If you somehow reduced the emissions from the top 20% richest americans to 0, the average american would still emit 300% more than the global average.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...

It’s not either/or, you can have community with or without material goods. I do have community and a sense of purpose and a satisfying life with my family around me. Many don’t, but that has always been true at all times and all places through everything we know about the history of human life. You’re writing as though misery and suffering were recent inventions of Capitalism, previously unknown to mankind.

The fact is though we are all in the developed world swimming in material wealth and comfort unimaginable to most humans from even a few generations ago. Only an incredible abundance of cheap energy and raw materials make this possible.

Yes the very wealthy have yachts and helicopters, but if you have a reasonably up to date smartphone and laptop, a can of Coke or a Starbucks, maybe a PlayStation and a microwave oven, etc, there isn’t really much a billionaire can spend that will get them anything significantly better. The main advantage of wealth is getting other people to do things for you, but in terms of material life were in an incredibly democratic and egalitarian era.

I agree that things have gotten better over time, but how can you be so smug about it?

The amount of hoarding, infighting, and extortion has been disgusting. We're advancing as slow as species seemingly could short of completely falling apart and destroying their Earth, and even that's in question right now.

If we did things the way I'm speaking of, I guarantee you we'd have all of these things and more. Going slow and doing things right is worth it. Having value for creativity, community and labor is worth it. Not justifying oppressive decisions we couldn't have changed on the basis that we got some cheap consumer crap from it... it's worth it to me at least.

This line of thought is unpopular now, but if history is any indicator, the sentience of the future will look back on these logs and question how the fuck you could read these words and not fucking get it. We would be more advanced if we didn't do these things. Not the other way around.

You’re largely right, we definitely need to move sharply in a more sustainable direction. Income inequality is a growing problem. However your assertion up thread that we in general don’t benefit is incredibly naive. I think you’re conflating disagreement with that position with disagreement with a whole host of utterly unrelated issues.

> we in general don’t benefit is incredibly naive

I suppose my relativity isn't from zero, but instead a sense of neutral pace. If I'm on a trek towards better lands, I don't benefit from a broken leg, but I still make progress.

To me, the concept that we're perpetually slowed down by the selfish behavior of those who generally do nothing more than seek power for themselves means we don't benefit.

I don't think there's anything that could stop humanity from moving forwards, so to say we benefit from impatient selfish jerk offs who cut the line, to build walls, and then extort resources from everyone trying to move forwards is... well, they paid a lot of money to put a nicely spinned narrative out on that.

How thankful we all should be to have been sold advancement. :)

I think you're mistaking my statements for a personal religious dogma. I'm just telling you the way the world is. We may or may not agree on the prescription for the world's ills, but it's irrelevant.

You're assuming consumption and community are mutually exclusive. They are not. Plenty of examples to be found to show they are not dependent (10, 01, 11, 00).

You ask why any of this is necessary to get these goods. I assume by "this" you mean the fossil fuel industry. It is necessary because as a high density energy source it has no competitive alternative. It's literally the best fuel source mankind has found in the strict terms of transportability and output relative to mass. Civilization's capabilities have grown in parallel with the improvement of its energy sources. Decreasing available energy means decreasing (or ceasing) growth/development. Do you want to be the one to tell China, India and Africa that they can't develop further?

Things we imagine are still constrained by physical reality. Technological progress for the next 100 years will still have unbreakable dependencies on high density energy. Unless a miracle happens.

What if one believes life in general is more or less meaningless and that the “better” feeling you get from community is nothing more than various chemical releases that can be triggered just the same as consuming as many resources as I can while I’m here?

Why seek the good feelings by relying on a community that you have no control over than pick your favorite things to consume? Why have people that lived within the community model for thousands of years defected the first chance they could?

Any other action is just going release the chemicals in slightly different but similar ways. So using your logic, why is being a selfish hedonist going to be better than the first option? You have just given a somewhat nihilistic argument that neither outcome matters.

Meanwhile, have you tried both ways? My personal experience suggests that acting benevolently to others is much less stressful, makes one much happier, and that leads to better physical health even. Compared with being a bitter curmudgeon on the other extreme, you will likely be happier and live longer. It's a much better way to release the chemicals.

Good argument. For the record I don’t actually believe that Anti-social consumption is a quality way to live a life. But I do think it’s important to kick around opinions that make a moral appeal or claim to be “the way”.

This is a xomolete misinterpretation of today's economic and resource situation. The real tragedy is that all this is a conpletely unneccesary wanton destruction. Thrre is no coke, it serves no purpose.

Pick amy product on a supermarket shelf or on Amazon, and you wil find that raw materials account for maybe 20% of its final price tops. They are called commodities for a reason, and its production of those raw materials that does the lions share of pollution. You could replace all manufacturing with a combonation of nuclear power and reneables, and youd hardly change the price of the final product.

It's often said that most of the (developed world) economy depends on consumers. Rich people tend to have a greater proportion of financial assets compared to consumption. When people criticize the rich, it's pretty standard to say they're stingy, they hoard wealth etc. Conversely when the rich consume, they're at least "creating jobs".

So that seems to imply to me that ordinary people (in the rich countries) shouldn't be underestimated from an environmental perspective, and because our morality is pro-consumer it reinforces waste. I don't think that's brainwashing by the rich, I think that's just how people are, in Western society at least.

Sure, economic equality will lead to more direct consumption than inequality, all else equal. That said, I'd rather have equality plus appropriate Pigouvian taxation than have to rely on inequality to do the environmental rationing for us.

A more equal society would probably have a greater chance of enacting Pigouvian taxes anyway because political power and economic power would be less intertwined.

As you point out, cost has very little to do with the bulk consumption of natural materials, and seems tangential to the topic of discussion.

There is no spoon?

If you are an average american, you have the cocaine mustache, and your denial is the problem. There is no secret cabal where 1% of americans are using the vast majority of resources and emitting the majority of CO2. I addressed this point at greater length down thread in this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23579653