Thomas Malthus said that people will adjust to a higher material abundance by making a larger population. Instead of creating a utopia, tech breakthroughs would just increase population size, and the population will grow until the numbers create hardship. You raise the carrying capacity, humans will increase. (So the only answer would be constant growth, we can’t make people behave differently.)

Limts to Growth study modeled many scenarios without really making a specific forecast. Every scenario eventually reached a collapse. In the LTG, the major variable was (as the title suggests) that Growth rate changes the speed of collapse. The more you limit Growth, the longer it takes, the more Growth increases the faster. One of the scenarios had a near steady-state and collapse was pushed out centuries. The Business-As-Usual Growith Maximalist approach brings rapid collapse. However, in the run-up to rapid collapse, people do not have to adjust their lives. In the restricted growth scenario, austerity and limits to family size would have started immediately.

In Zero Sum Society, the argument is that most of the democratic systems have an asymmetrical /lopsided ability to give benefits versus give losses. We have some ability to hand out new money differentially (you can give new funds to some people and not others). If you take money away from some people and not others, they respond politically AND the mechanisms of the system (rights, laws) tend to protect the status quo. What he argues is that democratic system do not have any ability to deal with a “shrinking pie”. Editorial note is that deindustrialization leading to MAGA would be an example of people responding to economic loss democratically by lashing out at the whole rotten system.

The common thread is that we use growth to manage aspects of human behavior that we would not be able to manage at all, without growth.

The three sources all basically say that we use Growth as a quick fix to try to outrun short term problems that we struggle to solve. But that it’s a trap. Every source says that you deepen your longer term problems by trying to grow in the short term.

The article says this:

The logically inescapable point here is that in a zero-growth economy there could be no place whatsoever for this psychological motive (growth / progress / gain / profit) or economic process. People would have to be concerned to produce and acquire only that stable quantity of goods and services that is sufficient for a satisfactory quality of life, and to seek no increase whatsoever in savings, wealth, possessions etc. It would be difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of this cultural transition.  A zero-growth economy cannot exist unless there is enormous change from the mentality that is typical in consumer society and that has been the dominant driving force in Western culture for several hundred years

Jared Diamond has a book “Collapse” (2005). The book has a lot of criticisms. Anyhow, what he argues is that human cultures have tended to create collapses when the culture largely fails to respond to challenges from the bio-physical world. Example the Norse in Greenland starved out instead of adapting to the local food items that the natives relied on, because of their cultural traditions winning over 'reality '.

Threading it all together, we have a culture and institutions and psychological expectation for constant Growth.

Great article, thank you.

Recently i was thinking about Thomas Malthus, Limits to Growth and The Zero-Sum Society.

And what I was reflecting on was that one thing they all have in common was the observation that economic growth all by itself solves a lot of human-centric problems that we otherwise have never figured out how to solve.

When growth slows or goes away, our systems have major shortcomings and that becomes suddenly exposed.

A few years ago in Canada there was a climate protest in Ottawa and all these protesters advanced on the nation’s capital.

The reigning prime minister Justin Trudeau joined the marchers and got to the front and got his photo taken for the news cycle.

That’s right, he was protesting himself! Nobody is accountable or in charge of anything.

Sometimes the mask comes off and you realize we could not be in this situation if there was any real leadership…

The TKWide line are very nice! The lids for these go inside internal threads on the flask, they are a completely proprietary standard that cannot be swapped to other brands.

Klean Kanteen or Hydroflask. You’d be looking at a vacuum insulated double wall tumbler flask. They have multiple volume sizes that share features and lids. (Eg, 12/16/20/32/42 oz)

Their replacement parts are pretty spendy on their .com web store (shipping is brutal) but people sell them retail or used on eBay.

The 2-1/4" wide-mouth lids from Nalgene, MSR, Klean Kanteen, Hydro flask and Camelbak usually share the same thread pitch but don’t always seal.correctly on the top gasket in all combinations. However there is some brand interoperability but its something you need to test for leaks.

I recommend a silicone sleeve bumper on the bottom to prevent dents.

Another good brand is Yeti but they use all proprietary lids and standards. I think the wall thickness on Yeti is possibly the highest making them super durable. The straw lid is called the Rambler.

If you want it to last a long time, the best finish is always just the brushed polished bare stainless with no paint to scratch or chip. Otherwise start adding stickers over chips and scratches.

So, if you take a look at the departure that the 3rd movie 28yrs took moving away from the first two movies, the 4th movie felt like the same size step taken again from the 3rd. We are now untethered to anything that has ever happened in the real world or the lunatic world of #3. You just have to let the movie wash over you without trying to believe anything at all. Just surrender.

You cant even call it “unrealistic” or “unbelievable”, its just like dream logic nonsense.

Have you seen some of the other film adaptations? Or read the novels?

• All the Pretty Horses
• No Country for Old Men
• The Counselor
• Child of God

The movie is an adaptation of the book by Cormac McCarthy. The book won the Pulitzer and the James Tait Memorial Prize.

“Depression Porn without substance” is a funny way to characterize the movie.

I really enjoyed the first two movies. The story, the filming style, the music and everything came together in a kind of way that seemed real. I still think they are pretty good zombie apocalypse movies.

The third movie for me was less believable in every single element. Just slightly. But the whole movie took on a faint whiff of Wes Anderson’s eccentricity or some magic realism - from the island, to the the social structure, to the story, and on and on. Everything seemed unrealistic and uncanny. I guess none of that makes the movie a bad movie, but it was definitely an unequal sequel of the series.

A lot of people are still judging today’s leaders against the backdrop of an expired world: surplus energy, cheap materials, deep trust in institutions, and enough cooperation to negotiate trade-offs without everything turning existential. That period is over. The old playbook assumed there was slack in the system. Now there isn’t.

I’ve shared this same insight. A lot of people I speak to in person have not really been aware that growth is over globally, and are not considering what that *might mean * for the future.

People correctly see all these systems resetting and the way they assimilate the change is to layer a couple of cognitive biases on top of the analysis. For example, they believe the changes are reversible. Or they see the changes as bad but think some of the civilization goals from years ago are still possible. Or they think we can overcome a small bottleneck and get back to growth.

The old system has a mental inertia and there is a conservatism bias that kicks in when people are being confronted with new information that should challenge their beliefs. I think a lot of people are starting to build their lives on a foundation of sand.

I look back and think that there are a lot of problems we have right now that economic growth didn’t solve, prevent or reduce, and that even when we threw growth at those problems it was not the easy fix we wanted it to be…

Once you render a blender into powder, you have to start with a new one next time because of the laws of physics and entropy.

(Just kidding.)

deleted by creator

Netflix hasn’t had anything I’ve wanted to watch in years

If they start the first season of dozens of new shows and then cancel the run immediately, would that change your opinion?

I’ve fixed a bunch of things but not that specifically.

I’d try spraying the speed control knob with contact cleaner because it sounds like that might be the problem. (Available at any auto parts store in a spray can). Or use 99% isopropyl if you have that available.

If cleaning the connection doesn’t work, you can then replace the whole assembly, the new part runs about $20 incl shipping if you’re in the USA.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/326749491891

That’s a non genuine 3rd party Comparible part. The genuine one is on Amazon for about $60 but I am not sure if it’s 3X as good. Your call.

If I’m not mistaken it would be the 2-wire version but ou might want to look inside and confirm before ordering.

(I’m guessing here, but what I think is happening is that the potentiometer is so dirty it’s like a crackily speaker or volume knob that is sometimes cutting out completely. I suspect it’s wired so that it goes full speed and the knob steps down the speed. So when it cuts out at the knob the motor defaults to full blast.)

I used to buy about 800 pounds of salvage electronics a week which I would then resell. I’ve seen and evaluated many brands of used older electronics.

For a blender, I’d recommend a Vita-Mix (5200 / 5500), then KitchenAid. Third tier would include Breville or Ninja.

We use a Vitamix 5500 here. A few benefits of the simple design are that the lid has no moving pieces or hinges or locking mechanisms… It’s just a flexible rubber dome that doesn’t crack if you drop it. The blender jug has the blender blade and a very large sealed bearing. You can swap the entire item out as a future service. The motor bases are extremely high quality. I can’t recall seeing any that were ever broken. They seem to rely on solid state electronics and big mechanical switches nstead of fancy displays and microcontrollers and LEDs – most common points of failure on the competitor’s products.

The biggest issue with most blenders is that they are overcomplicated. For example, a ninja blender has detection switches to ensure that the jug is correctly locked to the base and the lid is locked to the jug. If a tab or pin breaks it disables the blender. They could have just designed the shape so that you can’t have the jug halfway installed instead of adding electronics that fail when they get wet or damaged… Bad design choices.

My only warning for Vitamix is to avoid the white color motor base. That color will take on UV damage and turn obviously yellow over the years.

I would not hesitate to buy a well used working Vitamix in the used market. I have seen many units from the mid 1990s and up that run like new.

I thought this was another interesting documentary on this channel.

The take away / nugget for me is that after exposing the schlock and cheese of all these jarhead sequels, the final chapter at 43m brings it all home and makes you really sit up and think about why he made this right now.

This study actually kind of shifts back and forth between a couple of ideas.

YIELD is the amount of crop per area of land. That’s the intensity/ efficiency / resources / technology getting the highest output on this amount of space.

PRODUCTION is the total output. That’s the YIELD times the AREA. Area can go up and down as a second major variable.

Farmers abandon land or change crops to grazing etc when the soil or water falls. So you can have great technology for getting the most corn yield per hectare, but the amount of viable hectares can be going down.

The facts and figures mingle these ideas together in the paper and make it hard to track what’s being said.

Original paper is here :

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w

Total food production is going down 4.4% per degree of warming (from today’s levels).

It’s confusing because they say corn will lose 40% of production but 6% of yields. Just to be clear, production is the net food coming out. So basically reading between the lines, we lose the crop land in that example.

You can get a Bluray for $1-2 at thrift stores.

They have so little value in the resale / used market that a local store sells 250lbs of unsorted discs for $75 (a 4’ cube grocery Gaylord).

This is my current attempt to contextualize the paper:

If this study is correct, the hypothesis that “less aerosol pollution” isn’t what caused an increase in the rate of temperature increase. (That is, increasing rate doesn’t come from a decrease in “dimming”). This hypothesis is that there was an unofficial geoengineering cooling going on from all the aerosols we put into the atmosphere from human economic activity, ships, fuel burning etc.

Instead, the main driver is that atmospheric air circulation patterns have already responded to climate change (albedo and temperature changes) and the new wind pattern makes more heat-trapping kinds of cloud patterns.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-global-cloud-patterns.html

So what is bad news is that humans don’t control that in any direct sense. We cant simply add sulphur back into ship fuel and get this to go into reverse. This is an accelerating positive feedback loop running by itself.

From a cause-effect standpoint, that’s a pretty big shift of understanding about what’s happening and what drives the system.

= = =

That said, its a bit difficult to know if this study is double-counting an effect that’s already accounted for in the global dimming hypothesis. The paper about global dimming has a " fingerprint " section that seems to say dimming is regional and not global, and that the global models have some flawed methods.

This current paper uses a global method and the same “flawed” models for the reanalysis. So it could be that this is a reaction already anticipated by the dimming paper. Would love to see some expert takes.

Not disagreeing, just adding some further context.

According to Joseph Tainter’s work on collapses of civilizations, each civilization is in a kind of race condition where problems from growth of the population is against the drive to get new technology that can support and amplify the problem solving needed.

He did a couple of papers looking at Patents and Research Publications and he was able to show that there was a severe drop off in results starting in 1970. This was coupled with increasingly large lists of authors. The basic idea here is that research and development are well into a senescent decline. It isnt the case that we aren’t developing new tech, its the return on investment isn’t there. It now costs so much to maintain staffs of scientists and researchers that it costs more than the benefit to society.

Once you reach that stage where the “answers” are not easy (and not cheap) to find, GROWTH is only possible in a zero-sum sense. In order to bolster R+D efforts, you need to REDUCE some other uses of resources. That could be maintaining schools and hospitals, food production, etc. You are only going to fund science at the expense of something else in the society.

This is a hidden tax on the society.

I mention this as someone who respects and values science: nothing about the “business as usual” for science research is sustainable for the civilization.

In many ways we are propping up a tradition of science that failed 50 years ago. Our civilization has a secular religion built around “progress”, but progress is so complicated that we gave over from a progressing civilization to a collapsing civilization that is a "cargo cult " of the facade of what gave us progress in the past.

We need a come to Jesus moment about a true way forward into the future.

As a thought experiment, consider what a HUGE new paradigm shifting technology would bring to the world. Let’s say that we get fusion power or something. Now imagine the costs to actually scale and deploy this, and consider the timeline needed to make this fundamental change to our world. Do we even have time and resources available at this stage? Like if you build a new fusion power plant every couple of days starting today, the world would STILL face a miserable energy shortage from declining fossil fuels even faster than you can replace the energy…

Our future decline became baked into the cake because we didn’t get the answers in 1970 and went into overshoot.

Fascists gain power if we attempt to gaslight people with fake hope.