Comment on Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world

• booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.

  Artificial demand creation isn’t necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.

  And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that’s a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.

  Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

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  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Ever since the crisis of over production, MAJOR, unceasing psycho-social campaign have been continuously been running not just to foster demand but to ensure it exceeds the planned supply and ensure the price margin always remains on the right side of the curve.

    This is the central reason why nearly everyone works ceaselessly to buy things they don’t need and dont have the time nor energy to use.

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    • booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      What does this have to do with how the world distributes useful copper? Nobody is buying up copper because of being tricked by advertising, so I’m not sure what the relevance of your comments are, to the topic at hand.

      I don’t think you’re wrong, I just don’t think this thread really raises the issues you want to talk about.

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      • cardfire@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.

        I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)

        But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I’m literally typing on the older phone now.

        I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.

        Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.

        I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.

        But if we don’t start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we’re going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.

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      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I think this kind of artificial demand creation is the main driver for all resource consumption

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  • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It’s pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.

    Markets == capitalism. You can have the efficiencies of free markets (worker owned co-ops which are market socialist) without the all consuming greed of capitalism.

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    • booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I don’t disagree, but I don’t see the relevance of these particular flaws of unrestrained capitalism to this specific stated problem: that there might not be enough copper to be able to continue to use it as we always have.

      There are lots of flaws to capitalism. Running out of useful copper, while copper is being used in wasteful ways, doesn’t really implicate the main weaknesses of capitalism systems.

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