this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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The entire world doesn't have the climate of Japan where it's possible to live in an apartment without AC and heat. No amount of design can ameliorate 38C high humidity.
Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It's the system we already have.
That's not a technological solution to cooking. That's social which is far harder if not impossible to overcome.
That doesn't follow. The same work needs to be done, if not more because reducing energy means reducing automation so people have to work to make up the difference.
We're probably talking about different things, like "you can't grow almonds or citrus fruit locally". But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere, it's just a question of population density. Your food staple would simply be what kind of calorie crop grows locally, plus vegetables and greenhouses for exotic fruit.
And yeah, all of this is a social solution through and though. Like you'd want to encourage people to help plant and harvest. But this might differ from of community to community. Some might want to use more automation with robotics. You really don't want a uniform regime. One man's utopia is another man's gulag.
People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria for each apartment block and robots delivering inside the building like a hotel. This would still be drastic reduction, even compared to shopping by car. Going shopping by foot or bike in your local city neighborhood is probably still more, because you don't have to transport the harvested food using trucks but process it locally.
No it doesn't! We can drastically reduce the amount of work that needs to be done! That is the whole point! You can look at it as capitalism being incredibly inefficient. Or incredibly efficient at creating unequal conditions benefiting those with capital (and vastly inefficient conditions for those without).
A major driver of this is advertising or "brainwashing" people to buy garbage they don't need. Or the advertising industry itself - think of the stock value of all the social and TV media, it is completely financed by advertising, and all the downstream industry that is fed by it. All that is waste!
Or planned obsolescence, purposefully producing goods and appliances that break within one or two year.
Or things like a byzantine tax code, or complicated laws. Or regulations or land ownership preventing efficient reorganization of cities or infrastructure.
PS: And yeah the obvious impossibility is that those who own and profit from all these inefficiency would never allow this. But we shouldn't forget or deny it's possible.
That's subsistence living. No one wants to go back to that. Nor is anyone stopping you from living that way. Land is cheap in the middle of nowhere. Communes exist everywhere.
A communal cafeteria isn't what people do when "going out". If it was what people wanted, there would be more cafeterias and fewer restaurants.
It's easy to think that everyone is sheep except for yourself. I've now come to believe that consumerism is fundamental to human nature, not advertising changing humans. The proof is thousands of years of pre capitalism artifacts from archeology sites. People have always liked unnecessary "stuff". People have always liked fashion and trends. People are going to be rampant consumers even if advertising and marketing were stopped tomorrow. It's their nature.