Image is captioned: “The dinosaurs didn’t “rule the Earth”, they were just alive. Stop giving them credit for administrative skills they almost certainly did not have.”
Image is an artist’s rendition of dinosaurs in a prehistoric scene
Image is captioned: “The dinosaurs didn’t “rule the Earth”, they were just alive. Stop giving them credit for administrative skills they almost certainly did not have.”
Image is an artist’s rendition of dinosaurs in a prehistoric scene
No, I’m talking about large scale planetary resource allocation too. Your own example proves my point:
The only thing that makes the first guy’s business model viable is if he isn’t made to pay for the externalized costs of taking away the island’s water. So don’t let him fucking get away with that, obviously!
What if the profits far outweigh those shipping costs in all cases?
I think I figured out the mismatch here. I believe you’re suggesting that the purpose of resources is to produce money, and the most efficient way to do that is to do as cheaply as possible. Not at all wrong.
I’m saying though that the least efficient purpose human beings can have for Earth’s limited resources is changing them into money. Instead it strikes me as more efficient (in terms of largest net benefit where leaving then in the ground provides little benefit, and is therefore less efficient), to use resources for the purpose of extending all human lives, and the quality of those lives, so that each resource enables the largest number of humans possible to be able to have the highest chance of producing yet more benefits for humanity and the world.
Put differently, generation of wealth to be mostly stored for only a handful of people is a poor use of resources. Instead, as much wealth as possible should be used to do the work of advancing all of human society. We just can’t seem to find a way to make that work, because greed overwhelms all efforts to do so.