So - what do we do about economic growth?

[Ares Land]

No, it's a real problem -- even worse now with Slack and e-mail on the phone too.
My current job is good on boundaries, so I can't complain -- but it's not always the case. I have had to deal with work issues on vacation or late at night before.

Smartphones are neat, but kind of a mixed bag overall.

[Raphael]

Also, your work may require you to carry the damn thing with you all day, every day to be on call to come to work. And because you probably aren't part of a union, there's nothing you can do about this except quit... and get another job that'll probably require you to do the same damn thing. This sucks.

That reminds me of this passage:

I suppose the telephone is really a useful invention. My own wonder always is, how any human being with the ordinary passions of the race can conduct his business creditably within a hundred yards of the invention. I can imagine Job, or Griselda, or Socrates liking to have a telephone about them as exercise.... Myself, I am, perhaps, too sensitive. I once lived for a month in an office with a telephone, if one could call it life. ...I know friends of mine, men once fearless and high-spirited, who now stand in front of their own telephone for a quarter of an hour at a time, and never so much as answer it back. ...That is what happens: you either break the telephone, or the telephone breaks you."

Written in 1898.

Then again, that a problem has already been noted in the past doesn't necessarily mean that it's not a problem.

[Torco]

I also often get the feeling that real economic development stopped a while back, and that all the growth that's been happening since reaganomics is not an increase in the actual productive capacities of our civilization

Huh? I understand being down on the world, but do you just not notice what's happened since 1990?

Oh, absolutely. some things have gotten better for sure, but I'm not so much saying everything got worse. I agree on the medical and clean water fronts... in fact my father (a center-left neolib) has this idea that most of the economic development has gone to very poor countries, such as China and Nigeria, whereas the rest of the world has either stood still or gone back to being more poor (for most people, that is to say excluding CEO bonuses and the like). And the data as far as I know isn't opposed to that notion. But on other fronts, the trend of more people having access to gadgets (smartphones etcetera) is quite clear, but are smartphones etcetera actually good for people? like, sure, people "choose" to have them, but people also "chose" to become feudal servants back in the day: this isn't to say all technology is evil or whatever, but that something new exists and is widely adopted doesn't in itself entail the world is better for it, as others in the thread point out. do people have more access to things like housing? leisure? do people work more hours or fewer hours? do more or fewer people work two or three jobs? are people killing themselves less? having more friends?

Generally home owners think selling their house at twice the price is a basic human right. The housing market is basically a Ponzi scheme at this point.

So much this. and speculation on real estate is, itself, a kind of rent. I wonder how much of people's monthly spending goes to rent (for their house, for example, but also to such things as toll roads, intellectual property, uber eats comissions and that kind of thing).

[Nortaneous]

For any item in that list, I could list ways in which capitalism is making things more difficult: computer and cell phones are way less durable than they should, social media have been turned into Nazi enablement machines, the whole enshittification things, plus the damn things are spying on you. Renewable energy is efficient but the discussion is saturated by lobbyists; electric cars are sold at twice (at best) the price people can afford so they're basically status symbols. (And I'm leaving aside the more depressing examples!)

How much of this is capitalism making things more difficult, and how much is the market making unpopular discoveries?

Manufacturers like disposable devices not only because they can sell new ones, but also because it removes maintainability as a design constraint; consumers, for their part, prefer it not only because there will be better devices in a few years (a consequence of technological progress) but also because it obviates the maintenance burden. When a screw falls out of my $20 belt, am I going to spend an hour of my one and only life driving to Home Depot, looking for the right screw, looking for a screwdriver of the right size and shape for the screw, and then getting home and realizing I've bought the wrong damn screw and I'll have to take another hour to do it all over again? Obviously not; I'm going to order a new belt, because I don't make a hobby of belt repair and I can afford it. Most people do not make a hobby of computer literacy in any form, let alone hardware repair; they're choosing between the cost of throwing the thing out and buying a new one when it breaks and the cost of hiring skilled labor, about which see any complaint about car mechanics.

Ideally the spying would be regulated, but most people don't mind yet. People are willing to post a lot of things on TikTok under their real name with their face attached. It doesn't make sense to me either.

[jcb]

Manufacturers like disposable devices not only because they can sell new ones, but also because it removes maintainability as a design constraint; consumers, for their part, prefer it not only because there will be better devices in a few years (a consequence of technological progress) but also because it obviates the maintenance burden. When a screw falls out of my $20 belt, am I going to spend an hour of my one and only life driving to Home Depot, looking for the right screw, looking for a screwdriver of the right size and shape for the screw, and then getting home and realizing I've bought the wrong damn screw and I'll have to take another hour to do it all over again? Obviously not; I'm going to order a new belt, because I don't make a hobby of belt repair and I can afford it. Most people do not make a hobby of computer literacy in any form, let alone hardware repair; they're choosing between the cost of throwing the thing out and buying a new one when it breaks and the cost of hiring skilled labor, about which see any complaint about car mechanics.

(1) Also, keeping old tech running requires keeping other old systems running to support them. For example, 3G networks were shut down in 2022, so older phones that came out before 4G existed simply can't send texts/calls anymore.

Compare that with microchip design, where x86-64 chips are bloated with vestiges because they have to be backwards compatible to support design decisions that made sense in 1978. Designing and using a new chip would free one from having to support such vestiges.

(2) Indeed, I don't want to fix my broken belt or shovel either, but don't you think something as basic as a removable/replaceable battery should be required ? ( https://mashable.com/article/replaceabl ... hones-2027 ) I'm fine with having to get a new phone every decade because its Gs no longer work, but I'm not fine with having to get a new phone every other year because the battery died again.

[Ares Land]

Manufacturers like disposable devices not only because they can sell new ones, but also because it removes maintainability as a design constraint; consumers, for their part, prefer it not only because there will be better devices in a few years (a consequence of technological progress) [...]

Some consumers prefer it, and like to buy the latest generation when it comes out. Plenty of others are perfectly happy with their current devices. Things are changing somewhat with Fairphones but as of today, there isn't a choice between buying a new device or repairing the existing one; because repairing the existing one isn't an option.
Causes of death for my latest devices include:

• Can't keep up with current bloatware: not much you can do about it!
• Battery dead: the battery is not replaceable.
• Broken screen: you could fix in theory, but replacing it would either cost more than a new phone/computer, or take hours. That is a design choice; screen are purposedly installed in such a way that they're hard to replace.

[Arzena]

Growth is also productivity, and we need that too, even if we want a socialist rather than a capitalist world. Without continuing to develop renewable energy, "degrowth" either means continuing with fossil fuels and endangering the ecosphere, or letting billions of people die. And unless "degrowth" people really want to sow rice paddies for a living, we want machines and medicine and computers and transport.

Exactly. Degrow the single use plastics industry; grow the mycelium fabric industry that will provide a biodegradable product for short-term use bags.

[Travis B.]

One thing I love about being a Linux user is that I have far less impetus to "keep up with the latest tech"; for instance, my laptop dates to 2017, and I feel no need to throw it out and buy a new laptop, whereas if I were a Windows user and I had a computer that could not "upgrade" to TPM 2.0 I would be up a creek without a paddle once Windows 10 is EOLed. I do semi-regularly sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get upgrade my machine to get the latest software and the latest security fixes, but I feel no pressure to buy new hardware at this point.

[Raphael]

for instance, my laptop dates to 2017,

Hah! My desktop pc dates to 2013 (although with a newer hard drive and RAM).

[alice]

One thing I love about being a Linux user is that I have far less impetus to "keep up with the latest tech"; for instance, my laptop dates to 2017, and I feel no need to throw it out and buy a new laptop, whereas if I were a Windows user and I had a computer that could not "upgrade" to TPM 2.0 I would be up a creek without a paddle once Windows 10 is EOLed. I do semi-regularly sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get upgrade my machine to get the latest software and the latest security fixes, but I feel no pressure to buy new hardware at this point.

Haha, me too. I've only had to upgrade laptops when the physical hardware gives up the ghost, such as power sockets wobbling a bit too far and becoming too unreliable.

[Torco]

How much of this is capitalism making things more difficult, and how much is the market making unpopular discoveries?

I mean... in some respects yes. It would have been pointless to make commodore 64s all so good they would last for an average of 200 years for sure. almost no one wants one now, let alone in the year 2182. (though having a few in museums would be neato)

But of course, a lot of those "discoveries" the market makes are predicated on things such as the fact that throwing tons of garbage clothes away in the desert of atacama is free etcetera. In many cases it's not that it's more profitable, it's more profitable because you can unload many costs by just unloading unaccounted for externalities unto the future or unto poor people (such as the global warming caused by shipping peaches halfway around the planet to be labeled, but also the atacama being full of *clothes people spent hours of their finite lives making*). Like, sure, if someone made a business out of selling extremely cheap sausage because instead of paying for meat production they kidnap and turn people into sausage... is that really the market making an unpopular discovery, or is *someone else* paying for the cheap sausage in ways the market does not account for or care about? seems in this case the people kidnapped are paying a cost that the market ignores. Similar things happen with fast fashion, or with cheap cobalt mined by slave children, and so on and so on.

[Travis B.]

How much of this is capitalism making things more difficult, and how much is the market making unpopular discoveries?

I mean... in some respects yes. It would have been pointless to make commodore 64s all so good they would last for an average of 200 years for sure. almost no one wants one now, let alone in the year 2182. (though having a few in museums would be neato)

You have no idea about how big retrocomputing is now, seriously. My family got an Apple //e when I was a kid, and eventually threw it out when we moved, and I now wish they hadn't even though the Return key on it had stopped working (as I bet it could have been fixed).

[Ares Land]

I mean... in some respects yes. It would have been pointless to make commodore 64s all so good they would last for an average of 200 years for sure. almost no one wants one now, let alone in the year 2182. (though having a few in museums would be neato)

Precisely. I mean everyone's happy and it makes sense to change machines regularly when the field is advancing rapidly. The obsolescence looks a lot more obviously planned when technology is mature.
From, say, 1988 to 1998 there were several revolutions in the field. You could do orders of magnitude more with a 1998 PC with an internet connection than with a Commodore 64 -- most of it you wouldn't even have imagined in 1988.

However, you'll do exactly the same with 2024 laptop with a 2024 smartphone than you did with a 2014 smartphone and a 2024 laptop.

One thing I love about being a Linux user is that I have far less impetus to "keep up with the latest tech"

Free software does make things easier. Interestingly, free software isn't quite what we'd expect from a market/capitalist approach.

[Torco]

I'm not so sure though... much of it is software, but aren't really good graphics cards and multiple gigs of ram pretty cool?

[zompist]

From, say, 1988 to 1998 there were several revolutions in the field. You could do orders of magnitude more with a 1998 PC with an internet connection than with a Commodore 64 -- most of it you wouldn't even have imagined in 1988.

However, you'll do exactly the same with 2024 laptop with a 2024 smartphone than you did with a 2014 smartphone and a 2014 laptop.

Unless you're into games. There are games I'd like to play-- Starfield, the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion-- that I can't, because my PC is three years old. And that's before getting into things like VR or 4K monitors.

Graphics is a luxury, sure, but it does affect other things. My writing is impacted by the fact that Unicode is now widely available, plus the mere fact that I can include a whole, complex book with lots of diagrams in memory at once. (The latter, at least, is within the last 10 years.)

[jcb]

Precisely. I mean everyone's happy and it makes sense to change machines regularly when the field is advancing rapidly. The obsolescence looks a lot more obviously planned when technology is mature.
From, say, 1988 to 1998 there were several revolutions in the field. You could do orders of magnitude more with a 1998 PC with an internet connection than with a Commodore 64 -- most of it you wouldn't even have imagined in 1988.

However, you'll do exactly the same with 2024 laptop with a 2024 smartphone than you did with a 2014 smartphone and a 2024 laptop.

Comparing my desktop computer from 2022 and 2012, the 2022 one has more memory (32 GB vs 4 GB), faster drives (1 M.2 SSD and 1 SATA3 SSD vs 2 SATA3 HDDs), more cores (6 vs 1), and more monitors (3 vs 1). Although the improvement is not as big as from 1988 to 1998, it's still an improvement that lets me be more productive.

I will stick my head out and make some predictions for computers in 10 years:

• Monitors/TVs will be bigger.
• Videos/movies will have a larger resolution.
• Videos/movies will have at least 60 FPS, if not 120 FPS.
• Videos/movies will have wider and deeper color spaces, and monitors will support them.
• CPUs will use less energy. (And maybe the industry will finally switch away from x86-64 on desktops.)
• SSDs will hold more. (This is important because of how videos will grow in size because of the things above that I mentioned.)
• SATA3 connections will disappear from motherboards, replaced by more M.2 connections.
• RAM will be even more plentiful and numerous. (64 GB of RAM will be normal.)
• Crypto (and it's scams (and gambling in general)) will still be around, and bigger.
• The metaverse will (still) be dead. Sorry Zuck.

Indeed, I feel like computers are beginning to "top out" now, but there's still improvements to be had. (Is having 6 monitors going to be desirable for the typical workstation, even if it's affordable? At some point you don't gain any more productivity from it.)

[Nortaneous]

I don't know about monitors. They're already big. I have a 48" monitor. It's nice but probably less useful than multiple separate monitors - window tiling is still fairly primitive (especially on Windows) and if you have several monitors you can position them separately to avoid angle problems. There are TVs mounted on buildings in some of the DC-area fake downtowns. They're three stories up and play ads, sometimes with sound. Drop a Google Street View pin outside Ted's Bulletin in Fairfax and look at the stupidly immense TV mounted on that block. It's bigger than some of the storefronts.

Older cities are better in the US because they're from before we forgot how to make cities. Everything in Northern Virginia is post-1950 and rich. It's atrocious. How much of the appeal of degrowth is that economic growth has outstripped good taste?

Intelligent and motivated people could do something productive but poorly compensated with their lives, or they could make bank in the fields responsible for putting a TV the size of a storefront to blare ads for Wendy's and the US Navy at you when you walk from the thrift store to the Shake Shack in Fairfax, which is universally and without exception a godforsaken armpit by and for the sinecure nouveau-riche. A different DC suburb, Reston, was centrally planned by a Carnegie Hall heir who used the money to buy a suburb and fill it with luxury lawns. After several decades, they finally managed to complete his Stalinesque vision of a suburb for the Lockheed Martin golfer future, with... a fake downtown. If we're this rich - the DC area is the richest region of one of the richest countries in the world - shouldn't we be Venice? Was Venice ever this tasteless?

[jcb]

I don't know about monitors. They're already big. I have a 48" monitor.

I meant that they'll become more common for a typical workstation, because they'll be cheaper.

if you have several monitors you can position them separately to avoid angle problems

Or get a curved monitor.

Drop a Google Street View pin outside Ted's Bulletin in Fairfax and look at the stupidly immense TV mounted on that block. It's bigger than some of the storefronts.

It's huge.

Older cities are better in the US because they're from before we forgot how to make cities. Everything in Northern Virginia is post-1950 and rich. It's atrocious. How much of the appeal of degrowth is that economic growth has outstripped good taste?

(Note: I'm not a degrowther.) Personally, I don't care about the "good taste" of a neighborhood. What I care about is being able to walk to the grocery store (and if I had a kid, the school) in 5-10 minutes instead of 30-60 minutes. (At which point, you're basically forced to use a car.)

If we're this rich - the DC area is the richest region of one of the richest countries in the world - shouldn't we be Venice? Was Venice ever this tasteless?

Stop letting banks design/build suburbs full of mcmansions. They build them because it's the sweet spot where they make the most profit, not because they're functionally useful places for people to live.

[zompist]

If we're this rich - the DC area is the richest region of one of the richest countries in the world - shouldn't we be Venice? Was Venice ever this tasteless?

Probably. Was there some epoch before Sturgeon's Law was passed?

I do think some cities are prettier than others. But past glories weren't always appreciated at the time, because people thought real elegance had disappeared 300 years previous. Plus, the ugliest old buildings have been torn down and all the horse shit removed.

[Ares Land]

Older cities are better in the US because they're from before we forgot how to make cities. Everything in Northern Virginia is post-1950 and rich. It's atrocious. How much of the appeal of degrowth is that economic growth has outstripped good taste?

The degrowth movement is more of a left-wing, even far-left thing and that's more of a conservative sentiment. So not as such. But there is some interest in degrowth in some conservative circles.

Probably. Was there some epoch before Sturgeon's Law was passed?

I do think some cities are prettier than others. But past glories weren't always appreciated at the time, because people thought real elegance had disappeared 300 years previous. Plus, the ugliest old buildings have been torn down and all the horse shit removed.

Sentiments have evolved. Here in France everybody, and especially the tourists, loves the quaint renaissance/medieval neighborhoods, small towns and villages. But go back a century of so and almost everybody thought they were gloomy and unsanitary.