Megacorp scaling is all about economies of scale. The connection between economies of scale, lower cost, and high production are all well understood. We can fix more nitrogen, for less money, and produce more food.
Without megacorp scaling, we'd need to spend more money on the same amount of food. Is that possible? Or would a different equilibrium point have been reached? Say, 7 billion instead of 8?
Re:The Last Mustard Maker in Dijon
by LarryMullins on Monday January 30, 2023 @02:42PM
(#34585307)
The contention presumably comes from the position of believing that all of these industrial processes and economies of scale could be implemented as well or better by a centralized command economy. You would think that the 20th century debunked such notions, but commies never learn... ...err I mean, true communism has never been tried!
this is the original statement referred to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34577458
Haber-Bosch is offered as an example of something needing megacorp scaling to that original statement, obviously from reading the foregoing I never said anything about a replacement for Haber-Bosch.
My admittedly vague statement just meant that hey you need to at least come with a theory as to why whatever allowed us to get to 8 billion could not happen without megacorp scaling. I don't think a linke to Haber-Bosch is an argument for that - the process was developed without megacorp financing as I understood it and then sold to a large corporation (not really megacorp either I think, by normal understanding)
quote: "The process was purchased by the German chemical company BASF, which assigned Carl Bosch the task of scaling up Haber's tabletop machine to industrial-level production"
I suppose the idea is that megacorp needed to run or develop scaling to industrial-level production.
I'm not that averse to the idea, just it seemed in the original form (linked above) quite a bold statement that should at least have some theoretical backing.