I found this article vastly entertaining.
Cole also treats us to an extra lesson in economics. Impossible.com is saving civilisation, if not the planet itself. Literally.
“[Earth] can’t accommodate us all if we all consume resources like the Americans or British of today. We would need three planet Earths to support us… Jointly using what we have, sharing, is one of our best chances for survival.”
This isn’t actually true. Technological advances mean we now use less stuff to make more. We no longer need to chop down trees or kill whales for their blubber (once a vital fuel in Victorian times). GDP has risen, while the amount of stuff needed to make it has remained static or even fallen as Diane Coyle explained here (£). You could try and argue we’ve exported dirty work to emerging economies … until you see the figures for manufacturing-heavy Germany, where as GDP grew, the amount of stuff consumed to make it fell too. Opening access to underutilised resources via platforms like Uber may well, Coyle writes, create greater efficiencies. But Cole’s objection appears to be that money changes hands, and money is the incentive that makes the platforms work.
Money and ownership both seem toxic to Lily Cole, but if our ancestors hadn’t invented credit, and property rights, then today we’d still be standing in fields pointing slack-jawed at aeroplanes. We’re the survivors of a “gift economy” that, fortunately, was abandoned centuries ago.
Money doesn’t change hands (much) at Impossible.com, which may account for its failure. The Mail on Sunday reported that Impossible.com despite your generous taxpayer’s contribution is now £400,000 in debt.
Debit? Pah, Champagne lefties require only hugs as payment and presumably offer the same in return if the hapless taxpayers wants their £200,000 back.
The left are stuck in the Club of Rome stuff from the 1960s – in spite of the fact that the price of raw materials keeps going DOWN (not up as their theory of threatened resources would suggest).
Indeed the Nazis were ranting on with this “Green” agenda before World War II.
It is stupid nonsense and they need a slap.
Perry is correct – technology (if it is allowed to develop freely) means that raw materials are less-and-less in short supply. Because of better ways of doing things. Indeed eventually (with nano technology and so on) raw materials (even gold) could possibly created from common materials – the dream of the alchemists. However, that wonder is still some way off.
Finis.
I read somewhere that the amount of oil, for instance, to produce a given amount of GDP in the West has fallen sharply in recent years.
The Economist points out that the oil share of overall output has been steadily falling as industry gets more efficient. Surely good news if anyone wants to see tighter use of resources.
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21627642-america-and-its-friends-benefit-falling-oil-prices-its-most-strident-critics
Even the prettiest zipperheads are still zipperheads.
How did a web site selling middle-class tat get a government grant?
Answering my own question: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/25/how_did_millionaire_supermodel_lily_cole_get_200000_of_taxpayers_cash/
The whole article is good, though.
Well, perhaps its unlikely to get investors who would like a return on their money?
My favourite comments:
Reminds me of a SQOTD I’ve been meaning to post…
“[Earth] can’t accommodate us all if we all consume resources like the Americans or British of today.”
Good one! Say, what part of American, or British consumers, are merely persons displaced from parts of the world too stupid to utilize/manage/distribute/market resources in their own sphere of influence?
There’s that “magic dirt” thing again.
And all those gub’mints that don’t need to spend very much on their own security, and natural disaster response, thanks to American and British tax dollar investment, better get USED to losing poster boy status as shining economics examples by Progressive Socialists in their “just keep repeating the lie” rhetoric.
Maybe a special little metal tag for their dog leash collars?
The extent to which capitalism and free markets give a society the wealth it needs to carry these kinds of magical thinkers.
Has the website had a stroke – all the “i”‘s in the comments have gone…
The letter between h and j has gone the way of Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.
“then today we’d still be standing in fields pointing slack-jawed at aeroplanes.”
Wrong, because there would be no aeroplanes. Without credit and property, humanity would never have developed technology beyond the Bronze Age.
…and RubIo’s too…
I read one report yesterday saying that Romney+Ryan are plannIng to enter the race.
That’s a slightly stronger statement than prevIously. TIll now, reports have been that Romney mIght run.
I can easIly belIeve that this plan wIll be the RNC’s way of assurIng that neIther The HaIr nor The Ineligible C wIll wIn the nomInation. But I don’t see how that would work unless there’s a “brokered” conventIon.
. . .
I wonder what happens if we italicize the i‘s.
Well, now I know. :>(
🙂
Beware the ‘i’s of March.
Oh, Mr Ed, there you go again. *Ee-e-ew-www!*
Refreshing to see a readable article in el Reg since the purge. Hurrah for Andrew Orlowski – he’s only decent writer still on the team.
Also excellent to see a new “irregular verb” at the top. 🙂
The main failure of Cole and bedfellows is they do not understand what a resource is.
A resource only becomes such when Mankind finds a use for something. Coal, oil and gas were in the ground for millions of years before they became resources, uranium was merely a colouring agent for glassware until it became a resource in the mid-20th Century.
We cannot say what future resources will be, but we do know that as resources become scarcer Mankind’s inventiveness and innovation find more efficient ways to use them, or find new resources.
In earlier times, about 60% of oil was spilled and wasted until drilling became more efficient, and gas from oil deposits was just flared off. Oil/gas shale only recently became a resource.
And all thanks to free market capitalism which turns scarcity into abundance.
Interestingly wind and sunlight have been resources for thousands of years – the big hope for the future and a ‘cleaner’ Planet – and despite their abundance (because of?) did little to advance the prodperity of Mankind as fossil fuels have. Just goes to show.
Credit and property rights would still have been developed by someone. Those airplanes just wouldn’t be made in the places they’re made today.
I takes real genius to be that stupid.
Survival ultimately depends on food and water availability; shelter and clothing also in most climates. Last time I checked we are all still members of the animal kingdom, and according to my ‘O’-level biology syllabus, animal populations rise and fall in response to the food and water sources available. We have the level of population we have because the resources sustain it.