Economic Growth

“There’s room for economic growth”. I read this often.

There’s no room. We maxed out in so many ways, I don’t understand how folks don’t see the writing on the wall. A few examples:

Batteries

We’re using a 40 year old technology, invented by a man who’s so into battery tech and willing to find the successor to Lithium-ion, that he’s 100 years old, out of retirement, and still working on it. Still ain’t found shit! Innovation on batteries has halted for decades, we only have made improvements like them charging faster. It’s simply the limits of physics; we have combined every metal, tried every tuning, there’s a HUGE demand for better batteries and we still don’t have them. That’s a sign that we maxed out (and that’s fine; our battery-powered devices last for long enough in 90% of cases).

Digital storage

1TB on a SSD is under $100. One Terabyte is a huge amount of data. As the internet tells me, that’s 341 million 3-minute songs. Absurd. No one will need more than a few TB to store their entire life. Writers can write 8 hours a day for 80 years and that’s probably the equivalent of like, 500MB. One 1998 CD-ROM. That’s a sign that we maxed out.

Real life storage

People’s garages! They’re filled with unused stuff. Everyone. That means people buy shit they don’t need, all the time. How do you want to keep it this way? We cannot. It’s pure waste. We maxed out.

Convenience

How do you want to have more convenience than talking to a box and get delivered whatever? Or tap a screen to say “confirm” and boom, you have what you want? We created USB-C because USB-A is “so” annoying with its habit of making you try TWO ways of inserting a cable my goodness, can you even deal with this pressure? We maxed out. Our designed-to-move bodies don’t do shit.

Isolation

We can’t be more isolated than walking in public, eyes on phones at all times, in-ear buds with noise-cancelling tech, and act as if that’s going to help a society that has a lot of trouble to stay together now, can we? We maxed out here as well.

Stress

I don’t think we can go much further than having 3-4 jobs, notifications of doom on our devices 24/7, and the very real possibility to get killed by the very people supposed to protect us. I don’t think we can.

Etc.

And so yeah, that means the current capitalist economy (buying stuff and getting salaries) can’t sustain us/grow anymore. Which is fine. Which is why we need UBI. It’s not even a political thing, it simply makes sense. We literally print money for Ukraine and businesses? Just do that for people to heal at home. Vote this shit in, y’all.

We need to foster a better environment, period.