"You can't have your cake and eat it too"
Have at you, oh jolly proverb. It just sits there looking smug, when all I want is some cake (and some more after I've had my fill)!
This 'cake' can act as a simple concept for resources, and as long as resources are limited, and the demand is high, I might as well look to a viable solution of balancing Supply Vs. Demand. Although cake is more of a luxury than an actual necessity, the need for more of the stuff translates wonderfully.
What bothers me with this quote is as long as humanity is willing to farm the resources needed to supply populations, there will be no way to have some resources spent and remain intact at the same time.
Cake is a renewable resource because I can easily go out and buy the ingredients and bake one, or buy a baked cake from a bakery if I ever run out of the tasty pastry.
Cake can become a non-renewable resource if I am in no way capable of receiving said cake (For example, this would hold true if I lived on an isolated region in the South Pole, with only fish to consume. Fish cake is not the pastry in demand folks! We need sweets!)
As all things are finite, a cycle of resource use can be formed:
-Either a renewable resource can be consumed and renewed at a steady and balanced pace, yet maintain itself through proper preservation of resource use, or run out if said 'cakes' are eaten faster than they can be baked.
-Non-renewable resources can easily be depleted if the cycle of resource use is not maintained properly. This fragile cycle shifts to another resource in this case, either to renewable or non-renewable resources, and becomes dependent on that supply. An analogy can made as the poorly stocked cupboard in a locked-up house in the middle of nowhere during a post-apocalyptic zombie universe ran out of its supply of cakes, and all the remaining survivors had left were three string beans and a jar of peanut butter.
In this case, since the three string beans and the jar of peanut butter are close to depletion by the rate of consumption needed to feed the survivors and there are no other resources around, all hell would break loose, and everyone would die.
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Now that I have the basics aside, I want to get to the sweet and stomach filling ideas.
If only there were a way to break the rules of physics, and harness the powers of science to be able to duplicate any quantity of objects from a single chunk of matter, or in this case: Cake. Supply would be a thing of the past and I would be able to have my cake, and eat it too.
Rather than contemplating on whether I should eat this cake, I can create a grand and glorious pile of the stuff and distribute it to every street corner of every community of every country on the planet. That way, I will never feel unsatisfied with not having cake.
Then again, the idea of infinite supply can draw out in the worst possible way from the Supply Vs. Demand concept.
A worst case scenario is if in the process of using the formula for cake creation I make a mistake by duplicating an innumerable amount of cakes enough to cover the planet, this can result in catastrophe where the demand cannot meet the supply!
Just imagine cakes sitting on every street corner, clogged in every gutter, and generally being the last thing you want to see as it is now everywhere you look. This scenario is known as an apocalypse, where humanity is doomed to eating a majority of meals at breakfast, lunch, and dinner serving cake as it is now the most abundant thing on the planet, second none to air.
A sweet and tasty apocalypse it is.
Moral of the Lecture: When you're this hungry for cake, it does crazy things to you. You foam at the mouth, and then decide to become a mad scientist hell bent on breaking the laws of physics and probably cause an apocalypse or a paradox just to get some of that sweet pastry, and contradict a phrase in the process. Wonderful.
