The redneck strike again.

[bennyboy]

Plenty of options, but I don't know if I'd advocate for the luddite option. You wouldn't tell a doctor to take a step beck, right?

The doctor's job isn't one of efficiency, and reducing technology is unlikely to provide an actual benefit.

I am a smaller machinery guy myself, smaller and better, more advanced - more efficient. Hand harvest is unlikely to save much wildlife, but there's something to be said for putting hungry people to work in a garden.

Well, hand harvesting won't turn voles, birds and snakes into mulch. That's something. And I think it's fundamentally good for people to get away from the Oprah re-runs and out into the world of things they can touch with their own hands, nuture, grow, and eat. Part of the "useless" comment I'm taking flak for is that people are completely disconnected from the real world, living in a media-fantasy which dehumnanizes them. People need to be re-humanized.

Ultimately though, it won't work. Human labor is the highest cost of production, even though most fieldworkers get paid dick as is, and an army of them (larger than the current army) would only serve to make food even more expensive and less efficient.

That's the point. Our society is too efficient, and there are too many people who are not needed to make any important contribution. This leads to a hedonistic consumerism and all the environmental consequences that we can see today. There's nothing wrong with feeling good. There is, however, something wrong with good feelings that serve no useful purpose and involve large scale waste and disruption of ecosystems for no good reason.

Well, either we self-limit, or we continue to grow until there are no real viable solutions. Right now, changes in food production could improve our quality of life and minimize the environmental effects of so many people. But if we get more efficient, and end up supporting 20 billion people, we'll hit a point where only efficiency matters, and quality of life is no longer an option to consider.

That's one of those bridges we'd have to cross when we got there, and wouldn't it be fantastic to have such a problem? 20 billion people, all of them adequately fed, wondering not so much how to stop them from starving, but how to increase their quality of life.

No, I don't think that's a wonderful vision at all. I see that as a vision of over-brained amoeba sucking up every last resource till they're choking on their own shit.