this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Idk if the paper addresses this, but supposedly the problem isn't the amount of stuff, but rather its distribution on the planet and the logistics of moving it.
in Korea it was difficult to get aid to the villages on the front for obvious reasons. so some smartass thought, "if we can't bring the aid to the people, let's bring the people to the aid".
we shouldn't allow a simple problem like logistics get in the way of saving lives.
"A simple problem like logistics," is a phrase only uttered by those who have never worked in large scale operations.
you have a great future in the field of logistics!
I guess you didn't understand the hidden meaning behind my words that human life is a far larger goal than meeting logistical requirements.
that’s like saying that human life is a far larger goal than physics
you can’t just hand wave it away because you deem human life to be “worth it”. it exists and it’s a real problem, and it’s a complex problem even with unlimited money
no, it's not. it's literally saying saving a human life is a larger goal than logistics.
I can, because it is. If we don't try everything to save a life and simply shrug the responsibility with the excuse of "sorry, but it's just not logistically possible to save this person", then what's the point saving anyone?
I think I see what happened here. you only read part of this chain. you clearly missed the part where I said,
logistics is a tool used to solve problems. stop using it as an excuse to let people die.
logistics isn’t a goal; it’s problem that you have to solve to achieve a goal
human life does have a value cap: would you plunge the world into borderline starvation in order to save a single life? no? well then a single human life is worth less than the happiness of the entire human race… the bar is somewhere above that
you’re trivialising a lot of complex things… public health has similar questions where the value of life and health is measured in aggregate
literally what happens every day in public health… resources are not unlimited, and so you have to make choices and trade offs
nope i read the whole thing, its just that
is still a logistics problem… public transport is a logistics problem, shipping is a logistics problem, air schedules are a tiny part of the air travel logistics problem
moving people and things to where they need to be at the time that they’re needed is logistics
logistics is a problem space that you need to solve before you achieve outcomes: it comes before, not after and you can’t start without solving logistics problems
in terms of distribution of medicine and aid, it’s basically the only problem that needs solving: we have plenty of food, we have plenty of medicine, and not for profits aren’t wanting for these things… they’re wanting for ways to get it where it’s needed
and also the necessity of surplus and accidental (necessary) waste:
you need spare parts, and some machines are critical… think of data centres: they often have many spare hard drives on hand to deal with failure, which means that there are more than 100% of the required drives in use… some of the workloads running in that data centre service very important workloads - for example because it’s fresh in everyone’s mind - handing SNAP payments… so what, you redistribute those drives so that we are using all that we have? no we certainly don’t… we eat the inefficiency in the case of redundancy (same argument could apply many more times over when you also think about things like mirrored drives, backups, etc: all of that is under-utilised capacity and “waste”)
the same is true for supermarkets: food that is perishable can’t just be allocated where it’s needed. it exists in a place for a period of time, and you either run out a lot or you have some amount of spoilage… there’s a very hard to hit middle ground with overlapping sell by dates, and overall these days were incredibly good at hitting that already!
… and that’s not to mention the stock on the shelves which is the same thing as spare disk drives!
i guess that’s all distribution on the planet
we could certainly do better, but it’s so much more complex than the fact that these things exist so it must be possible to utilise them 100% efficiently
so i guess we'd need 40%, maybe even 50% of the current global resources? what's the point even
yeah i tend to think today that food waste is actually a good thing because it creates buffers and prepares us for unexpected food shortages (such as during a volcano eruption)
That logic is flawed too. The only thing preventing people in most areas to have access to such goods is the lack of industrialization, which is enforced by capitalist western nations through corruption, coups, or other less obvious methods like IMF loans and neocolonialism.
Countries that escaped this subjugation and industrialized, such as China or the USSR, essentially eliminated extreme poverty and multiplied life expectancy 2- and 3-fold in a matter of decades. If India, for example, had followed the Soviet example of rapid industrialization or the Chinese one, hundreds of millions of lives would have been saved from poverty.
We don't need to produce things in the developed countries and distribute them, we need to allow them to industrialize themselves and to produce their own shit without being exploited
How would you propose India would have achieved this as a multi party democracy that requires consensus building that would not be necessary in either the USSR or China? Particularly as a nation with 123 languages, 30 of which have over a million speakers. Would you say democracy was a poor choice for India?
By not being a bourgeois democracy. It's exactly what I'm saying. Having a bourgeois democracy in which all partied represent capitalists (with the exception of Kerala, the province in India with a communist party in power and first to eliminate extreme poverty) is a hurdle to development. If India had had a communist revolution the way China or the USSR did, hundreds of millions of lives would have been spared from poverty.
Perhaps. Theres no way to know for certain but one wonders whether India would have remained India if that were how things played out. My suspicion is there would have been civil war and India would have broken up into 3 or 4 nations.
Kerala achieved remarkable progress in human development with land reform, workers protections, environmental protections and investments in public health and education. But the Kerala of today struggles with lagging industrial output and unemployment. A large amount of economic investment comes from remittances. The people are educated, and healthy, but can't find work in their home state so they leave to another state, the middle east or the West and send money home to their family from there. Reform is desperately needed for the state to become more business friendly.