The world without complexity was only able to feed around 2 billion humans
Bold claim. Why do you think complexity itself can improve efficiency? I can easily tank efficiency by adding complexity. Complexity also necessarily destroys resilience. Every time we’ve tried adding complexity, all of those societies disappear, from ancient Egypt to Rome to the Incans.
Often it’s a bit difficult to make an abstract point out of examples. You seem to be countering those examples with today’s zeitgeist, the exact thing the article is looking to counter.
The person decided this was the normal they wanted and where they chose to live.
This would be true if all else were equal, but it isn’t. Society built roads. It had to tear down housing to build the roads. The house prices went up because corporations bought up the housing stock and are using it to manipulate rents. None of that was the “choice” of the farmer. One cannot just opt out. “oh no thanks. I’ll just take efficient public transport and we can just rip up the road network. Just give me one of the houses we build through more dense development.”
Things are going to increase in complexity unless civilization collapses
Why? Many folks today are talking about making society resilient over efficient, with respect to COVID and supply chains. This is a direct ask for reducing complexity. The 15 minute city is an ask to reduce complexity. Complex societies fail.
Ultimately, the issue is cultural.
The issue is hegemony. Every company claiming to benefit you are building a fiefdom and you are the bricks. You can work around it but you have to beat the products and services you buy into submission. This is true of phones, computers, cars, TVs, subscriptions, AI, and increasingly how it asks more and more of us. People say “the things we own end up owning us” but no one says that about a fridge, or a washing machine.
They’re green growth. Relevant Think that through video.
Voting isn’t going to do shit.
Convince the people around you to protest and vote.
Which is it?
The issue is, the “wisdom” isn’t “don’t worry about personal emissions”, it’s “take voting extremely seriously. Become a single issue voter, that issue should be climate”
But there’s a psychological thing where people take the discount today and the payment later.
Not a premium user but Youtube has poisoned its own waters with its algorithm. You can see the “top” content basically gaming that algorithm as well as it can. Literally every part of it from the title to the thumbnail to the content itself is hollow except for the skinner box.
He was fired
He owns the business. His ownership was liquidated by the other owner without paperwork, and most of the other owners dispute that the ownership was ever diluted. The decision over whether he should have been “fired” are really upto him and the other business owners.
It’s also unclear why the other employees, who may or may not have been coerced, were not siding with Kurvitz. I agree it’s a mess, but there’s a big gap between “feelings” and “actually grossly illegal stuff”.
There are other videos on the internet about this, but basically PMG have done a terrible job here. One person is accused of serious corporate misconduct, and the others have allegations of being hard to work with, and PMG effectively treats them as equal, not even realising that the reason maybe some people were hard to work with was because of forced labour from the guy also doing the corporate misconduct.
They’ve just not done a great job overall here.
It’s honestly silly. I have a minor interest in Olympics coverage but it’s so often difficult to be able to watch a sport or see more context from a meme that I just stop caring. Like imagine if you saw that shooting meme and thought “yeah I’ll watch the whole thing” but you can’t. The wheeling and dealing makes the whole thing harder to get excited about.
I joined it specifically for the solarpunk and I still think of it as Slurp Nik.
I know it’s a turn of phrase but you don’t know me. I realise the scope and scale of how the world works, thanks.
You’re assuming a lot given what I’ve said. It’s not an “in effect” thing either. You talk about actual systems in a way which invokes Gandalf magic when they work like Penn and Teller magic. You assume the article and any defense of it is naive, but you’re missing the simple reality that sometimes you can simply remove huge amounts of complexity and get a better result.
The internet, for example, is not magic. There were several competing communication protocols, from circuit switched systems to fax to pagers. The internet is able to do all of those jobs, and it is a simpler system than the ones which existed in the past. It moved some complexity around, and therefore removed a bunch of complexity which was unnecessary.
This increase in simplicity is also called the second industrial revolution.
Perhaps you prefer the term decomplecting? Complexity is an overloaded term, but you literally follow up “simplification as a regressive thing” with a bunch of simplification which is effective. Since we are sharing reading lists, perhaps a bit of Dr Fatima and Think that Through on Youtube might help you. It’s clear you do not understand the article nor my points.