Public goods? Like say our personal data or private medical records, etc?

This is what is now wrong with our world and humanity! We've degenerated to a dog eat dog civilisation with few if any redeeming features, just every sunday morning Christian for himself and the devil take the hindmost!

The obscenity of vast mindless corporations for who there is only the profit curve and maximised shareholder dividends! All while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer as the gap between widens!

As we approach an era where 1% own 90% of all available wealth and the remaining 99% share 10%?

A recipe for massive civil unrest, unprecedented crime waves and terrorist attacks as the value of life becomes so meaningless, few will struggle for a diminishing share?

But plenty blowing themselves up in crowded thoroughfares or transport hubs etc the only protest left to them?

Possibly to the point of all but freezing all trade/commerce?

With fewer and fewer willing to make the ultimate sacrifice defending the Status Quo?

The super rich can eat coal and drink oil!

As I look around at what we have created or treasure, I'm glad I am old! But still tremble in trepidation at the thought of the hell we have created for the common herd and what my grandkids will inherit!

We have really got our priorities right!

It's far more important that great soulless multinationals survive and prosper, than the millions threatened by increasingly severe droughts around the world but more so in a largely undeveloped neglected Africa, which only needs cheap energy and the desalinated water. To turn their and our prospects completely and utterly around.

With the very cheap clean energy, molten salt thorium technology that would underpin their prospects and the rest of the common herd, diligently suppressed, so as to support thousands of vastly more important, over inflated bottom lines?

To suggest there is a deep mind behind any of this, life in a technological goldfish bowl, or even a rational mind, is manifestly risible!?
Alan B.

Malthus was right in a way he did not foresee: while he mistakenly feared material poverty and hunger, he did not envisage the poverty of privacy and meaning. The more humans we squeeze on this planet, the more regimented their life has to be, thus the less meaningful. Yes, we can feed them all, but for what?

Dear Alan,

«I'm glad I am old! But still tremble in trepidation at the thought of the hell we have created for the common herd and what my grandkids will inherit!»

Me too am glad to be old and thus not as much carried away by the digital madness, which the new generations have to endure.

However, the fact that you have grandkids, makes you a part of the problem rather than a part of the solution. It's not a matter of private vs. public, or the poor vs. the rich - it's a fundamental scarcity in freedom and genuineness that is directly related to the population numbers and would manifest regardless of the particular social, environmental or material structure.

Malthus may yet have the last word. Time will tell.

David

Any government which is serious about making public goods needs to reform copyright legislation. This currently locks millions of books away from the public for decades, because they're uneconomic to republish, for the sake of private profits on the tiny proportion which is.