Supply and demand though.. they only have so many water bottles on a plane. If they were $.50 cents each and someone bought all of them no one else could have any. $6 let's only the top 1 percent have a few.
Certainly there are roots to the harshness of reality. On all of earth there is only so much of everything. There is nothing so abundant and available that everyone could have as much as they may ever want or need without someone going without now or when it eventually runs out. It’s a hard concept to grasp on the scale of an entire planet but it makes intuitive sense we talk about an airplane or some smaller system like that that is more relatable. To those used to their always being “more,” who grew up in a world where if you miss a fuel stop or forget something at the market you can easily just take care of that, the concept that things aren’t so easy in nature isn’t truly relatable until we find ourselves in a situation where there aren’t options and there is no “oops, oh well..” you just die if you mess up or wreck your life.
So a system is needed to decide who gets what and how much- call it “triage” if you will- but in nature force is the fundamental currency.
How one squires something is generally not a concern so long as one squires what they want or need. When humans look at the mating behaviors or feeding behaviors or social orders of other animals we often judge them to be disgusting by human morality, but morality is an aspect of society. Our ancestors far enough back had no such morality, they followed that same natural law that getting is more important than how it is gotten. Complex society as we understand it requires a measure of consistency and stability and morality and rules and such provide the framework to allow that. Economics is thusly a form of mock combat- intended to stabilize and regulate things and avoid the potentially costly destruction to the ability to build and run a society that the constant threat of violence tends to have. People tend to be less able or apt to build and acquire and such when at any moment someone could kill you and take all you have. The Craigslist paradox. An item is $1000,
The buyer may be wary to bring $1000 in cash because the seller may simply keep their item (if they even have it) and then take the money by force. The seller is wary because they have an item worth $1000 and the buyer may simply take the item by force, or aware the seller has the item and likely others of value may simply be casing out the sellers location to come back and rob them later with no intent to buy. So people often meet at public and perceived “safe” locations and take steps to insulate their personal information from each other because where there is such threat, people are reluctant to gather for commerce because it creates attractive targets for those who would take.
This is why we see in history a general pattern by which some form of governing body formed military or police or militia forces, usually using strength in numbers, to enforce codes of conduct. Most laws boil down to commerce, the ability for people to be able to safely and confidently conduct commerce. Murder is bad because it takes away work units and causes disruption that is generally harmful to commerce. The tolerance of murder creates a foundation where consumer confidence is low, people worry about being killed. Laws like “you can’t kill people…” allow people to feel and perhaps be safe to focus on labor and commerce. Those who violate laws or refuse orders of a state of authority will, if they continue to pursue disobedience, eventually find themselves forced to comply or removed by violence.
GTA is not that unrealistic in the basis that no matter how petty the crime, eventually it will lead to the military. A petty crime will often require a fine or appearance in court. This is a substitute for force for convenience. The crime doesn’t warrant the time and resources of an enforcer and incarceration, death, etc. would harm your ability to continue to produce and consume in society. If you do not follow the order of that minor citation it will continue to escalate in severity as the authority tries to exert its power. If people do not follow the orders of an authority it loses legitimacy. Your compliance is required to allow the system to function. Usually you will get more fines or summons, they will begin to use sanctions against your freedoms and liberties to compel compliance. If you continue to resist and subvert or ignore those sanctions- the response will continue to escalate. Eventually they will look to arrest you. If you refuse to be arrested and succeed in that…
The force levied to make you comply will start to magnify exponentially until you are effectively forced out of society almost completely or are labeled to be stopped at all costs generally.
So in modern societies we generally use economics as the method of triage- in theory those with the most money generate the most progress and expansion for society and therefore are most valuable. Thusly the most valuable people are given a general preference in allocation of resources. Of course the system is primarily built and administered by a certain set of people. Generally the people with the most power are the ones who will do anything to get power and have the loosest self imposed constraints on what they will do to gain what they want. Thusly generally those with the most money are usually those who may or may not have corresponding social value but almost always have some proportional amount of suffering or social destruction attached. In simple terms- the wealthiest people tend to be the people most willing to hurt others or benefit from others being hurt.
You can make that a moral judgment if you wish- it’s a factual judgment. An Eagle which has lived a long healthy life and grown large and multiplied fruitfully and raised many strong healthy children and mated many times is an Eagle that will have directly or indirectly caused and benefitted from the suffering of more mice and fish and such than an Eagle which has not harmed or benefitted from harm of living creatures- which most certainly would die very early and with less reproductive success. If we observe the type of simple morality we try to instill in children and which “heroes” of fairytale tend to embody, that is not what you generally see in the most wealthy and successful. They “share” generally when it is of benefit or at least not of consequence. They generally do not “take their turns” or worry about making sure others get theirs before they take more. We can go on down the list. Pragmatism is what most people with measurable and enduring success tend to ascribe to.
Conditional loyalty, conditional honesty, conditional charity and so forth. So to get to be the person that makes the rules on who gets water and what water costs one has to generally become one that can afford the $6 water and then one whom can afford the plane and the airline, and the way one gets there and stays there is by charging $6 for water- so the world changes very little. Gated manners and communities replace castles and forts as rules of commerce and peasant morality, organized and numerous enforcers of authority and technology to make consequences more sure and swift mitigate the need for monolithic towers of stone and allow a monogrammed gate and 12 feet of bricks to generally suffice. We aren’t so far removed from feudalism and such. It just is a different flavor of the same, which is just an iteration of people naked in a jungle killing each other over resources.
Gotta say. I love reading your comments. I also love scrolling 3 pages down to your last few sentences.. perfect example here. You've ended off today with naked people killing each other in the jungle.. after talking about 50 cent bottles of water on an airplane.. hehe thank you guest_
"There is nothing so abundant and available that everyone could have as much as they may ever want or need without someone going without now or when it eventually runs out."
I feel like you would really have to stretch to explain how air isn't an exception to this.
Lol. In the most literally I would have to agree with you- it also might be said for something like “dirt” or such. That said, we don’t actually have to stretch it too far. I left the term “available” general- and it must be available to any number of people (by the statement) Available essentially meaning here that anyone can get it in a usable form for their desired needs. In the sense that having the corpse of a parent doesn’t mean the child has their parent available- the corpse cannot fulfill the child’s needs and desires. If we stretch the definition to the most literal or technical or narrow interpretations- then the idea we would run out of air becomes ridiculous as the sun might burn out before there was no possibility of air. We can make it. We can go to space and get air- though none of those seem practical. So keeping things grounded in reality…
We already have issues with availability of breathable air and its components. Many places in the world have air which is not suitable for human breathing, much the same that supplying rotten or diseased meat only technically meets the definition of having food available. There is caloric and nutritional value to meet short term survival needs, but one cannot survive and be healthy long term under those conditions. The quality of air and the limited access of quality air have been known and documented issues since at least the dawn of industry and urbanization - with the wealthy or able often seeking homes and rest away from the pollution of industrial centers. In the long term, it is possible that we could diminish the ozone to the point where we actually had no breathable air at all- but that is something that is a bit worst case and far off. What would be more likely, and what science and governments have put much attention to, is that the concentrations of certain gasses released…
.. by many forms of technology will create an air mixture that is not conducive to human habitation. So there have certainly been “air crises” and we are arguably facing one, certainly specific areas are. That then becomes a game of musical crises, solve one issue but create or exacerbate another, essentially choosing how we die or best case “juggling” balls delicately on the edge of destruction until a ball is missed at some point and the game ends perhaps. In the absolute most literal sense though- everything is finite on earth, a complex ecosystem has the capacity to convert resources into other resources but not create more. That “juggling game” is occurring constantly in nature, where any process or organisms that become too far removed from how they currently exist in the system could create an imbalance where some resource isn’t renewed enough to convert usable amounts of X into Y and Y runs scarce.
That is a bit of an extreme case but one we have witnessed on local scales in recent human history- especially where foreign species have shown us what can happen to an unbalanced ecosystem. Of course humans have drastically changed many ecosystems through our imbalances too. So the concept of running out of air is probably far fetched and even “dirty air” probably would allow many people to live long enough to reproduce and continue a society much like the one we have today for many generations at least even if we did nothing to mitigate the pollution. That said- it isn’t so much that running out of any one particular resource is the problem. It is how this all factors in to both the complex systems of nature and social machinery.
When you run scarce on readily available resource X, it has an impact on economics and politics and supply chains, production and more. People get upset, populations get sick. Conflicts over resources or- a very realistic one-conflicts over shared resources. Atmospheric nuclear testing was banned in large part because testing anywhere on earth was spreading consequences around the globe. With emissions we have tensions over controls as air isn’t something that stays in one place generally- in simple terms if your neighbor smokes, that smoke comes over your fence and into your home. So political tensions already exist on the issue of “clean air” and those seen as dirtying the air of others. That alone might not cause war but it could contribute and it certainly can cause economic and diplomatic sanctions and effects.
In that sense it doesn’t really matter what we would “run out of” because by the time we start running out of any particular thing people start dying in droves. “Air” in general is one of earths most abundant resources along with “dirt” and “water” we’ve seen millions of deaths over the last century related to inability to access water despite having oceans of and ice caps in reserve that make the idea we could have a “water shortage” laughable when they are warning vast dry areas may be under water before long. In all that “dirt” is an unfathomable amount of titanium and gold- but those things aren’t just abundantly available to anyone who wants or needs them exactly.
So I mean- yes. It is kinda funny and having no breathable gas or it’s components on earth or in our reach is probably not likely, but it is also literally the case that on a scale of enough time at present rates we totally could run out of air- it’s just a very long time and we’d likely avert the completely loss of air by the time that would be a pressing issue, but it is also the case that there are several ways in which the danger isn’t a complete lack but in the ability of millions or more to access and make use of clean air. In simple terms it doesn’t matter if it is there if we can’t get it or make proper use.
In the end we can say the issue solves itself- if your space ship has the ability to indefinitely provide air for 4 people and you have 10 people, if 6 become no longer alive one way or another- 4 can breath. If 7 die, 3 can run around all day if they like.
So yeah. That’s the “scale” thing I spoke of. It’s very hard for us to think in such huge scales of numbers and time and size and while doing that to consider every single variable and impact of something. To the point you raised though- indeed, if humanity were to go extinct from lack of resources it probably wouldn’t be from a lack of “air,” unless that lack of air was caused by the sun going nova some billions of years from now and humans had managed to survive that long and not gone off to colonize space. In which case lack of air probably wouldn’t be the most pressing concern. But in the literal sense even if caused by the dying of our star, the statement that eventually everything on earth has a limit is, as far as we know, true. So we probably don’t have to worry too much about how much air we use but we should probably put some thought into making sure that the air in our atmosphere is breathable by healthy humans with long lifespans.
So a system is needed to decide who gets what and how much- call it “triage” if you will- but in nature force is the fundamental currency.
I feel like you would really have to stretch to explain how air isn't an exception to this.
In the end we can say the issue solves itself- if your space ship has the ability to indefinitely provide air for 4 people and you have 10 people, if 6 become no longer alive one way or another- 4 can breath. If 7 die, 3 can run around all day if they like.