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Yeah, OK but this is clearly romanticizing away the fact that you are deeply dependent on these services. See how long you can just sit and enjoy the stars when your indoor plumbing and refrigeration goes away, and more importantly when your neighbors go away, not to mention the billions of little moving parts that must operate flawlessly for something like the global supply chain that brings you those shorts you wear and that tea you drink sitting in the grass and staring at the sky.

I'm not trying to single you out but I am intensely annoyed by the light and airy disregard of an intensely complex graph of interconnected services that make life possible at the density and quality that we enjoy.

We've lost a great deal less than we've gained, and anyone who doesn't think so has not had the joy of involuntarily going without them for a significant length of time.

by techblueberry58 minutes ago|

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Fair enough, but I do think there are diminishing returns beyond the basics, and there’s a hierarchy.

We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people.

Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe and kills hundreds of people. I do think beyond that you start to deal in a lot of tradeoffs. I hate they seemed to have systematically replaced wood burning fireplaces with gas. I moved out of a house with a wood burning fireplace and what a mistake,

Except automated bill pay. I swear I could go back and live in the 70’s if it wasn’t for automated bill pay.