281–290 of 322 posts
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And make outdoor cats illegal. An unpopular opinion no doubt. But from nature photographers to veterinarians, the outdoor cat is not good for anyone, including the cat.
>including the cat But my cat likes going outside. He likes catching birds.
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Whose emissions? Western emissions (yes, including carbon embodied in imported goods) are falling for a decade both in Europe and in the US [1], both per capita and total. Sure, there are six more billion people on the planet that can't afford cutting edge grids and loads of renewables and nuclear just yet, but that's a temporary issue, the efficiencies of scale will take care of that. That "exponential growth" is mo…
> which means any "degrowth" rhetoric is just outright misanthropical Sorry, I will absolutely challenge "misanthropic" being used here. To suggest that we modern humans could not live as our ancestors did--that is, fulfilling, local, simpler lives with less technology and vastly less energy usage is a subtle assertion that the modern way of living is the only moral one. Which is just, anthropologically, vapid elitis…
That's a fallacy. What's more, you personally can have it right now (bar slaves, which I'll come back to in a sec), yet you somehow choose to have hot and/or potable water, electricity, AC, heating, Internet, vaccines, mass produced food and so on. There is nothing stopping you from emigrating to Albania and moving to a small village there, cutting your electricity supply.
> completely ignorant of human existence over millenia
> an ancient philosopher in ancient Greece's height
I can't believe you chose an example of 1% elite in a society built on slavery in the most hospitable place on this planet as an example of "how our ancestors lived". A tiny society that was constantly threatened by wars, diseases, and starvation, is morally repugnant for modern people, and had stable periods shorter than modern states'. If anything, you are making an argument for me with that comparison.
> the only thing that forces disease and poverty on people is exactly overpopulation and broken political and economic systems
Here, the real misanthropy of your views rears its head where you mention "overpopulation". There will be 10 billion people on this planet unless you kill literally billions of people and sterilise billions more. The natural barriers for population growth back in BC times were famine, war, and disease; why do you think there is "overpopulation" now if not for the lack of those three? And it seems that you'd prefer for those three to return, which is definitely misanthropical.
> Rampant consumerism and overconsumption
Again, you're focusing on your own little bubble of 1 person in 7. Go to Bangladesh or rural India and talk about "overconsumption" and "fulfilling simpler life" there. There are lots of reasons why people run into crowded cities and sweatshops from their "simple" rural lives. I imagine it can be quite hard to understand those reasons when you only see life in the US.
> Our entire modern system runs on unsustainable levels of energy consumption
And this is the main premise of this entire worldview. It's also objectively false, we already have countries on this planet taking most of their electricity from non-fossil sources, i.e. France or Norway. Besides, you seem to forget that those "simple" societies deforested most of Europe to burn the wood as an energy source, and we transitioned from that to fossils which is arguably an improvement. I don't see any fundamental, unsurmountable reason why we can't transition again, now from fossils to nuclear and renewables.
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> I frequently get people becoming wildly irrational and upset at me when I suggest that the current population is not supported by the earth sustainably Arguing about how many people the earth can sustain is pointless without defining what kind of life you expect people to be living. How many billions can capitalism + western rates of consumption sustain and for how long vs a simpler way of life. > aren't all sudden…
> Arguing about how many people the earth can sustain is pointless without defining what kind of life you expect people to be living. How many billions can capitalism + western rates of consumption sustain and for how long vs a simpler way of life. Not really, 10 billion "simpler way of life" people have huge catastrophic footprints as well. Farming being a major one. But the point was not to come to a precise figure…
It's not an ad hominem, and if you think that my reply is "wildly irrational and upset" then I question if you actually get that kind of reaction in general.
It's merely my interpretation of what you said, since you've given no concrete details and left nearly everything to the imagination of the reader. Given your 5% figure, you are arguing for reducing the population by ~7 billion people, but how? On what timeline? Just saying the world is overpopulated is uninteresting.
> The (baseless and unfounded) claims they make being that it's not a problem "because earth's carrying capacity is 50 billion people" or other absurd statements along those lines.
You've stated that the earth's carrying capacity is 5% of current population, which seems to be equally unfounded.
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Enough with the petty, denigrating attacks people helping mostly harmless animals, which is a generally good thing. These rescuers/helpers run 'neuter and release' programs and are keen on having population control, not increasing the number of rogue cats.
Mostly harmless to you... What a strange thing to call what is effectively an apex suburban predator that is known to kill for fun with no intention of eating.
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> You say "a free market does [calculation] fine," but it has obvious deficiencies that I have already remarked upon. And as I have already remarked, central planning does not fix those deficiencies, it makes them worse. > the optimization problem can be solved on modern computers without the problems of the market. I strongly disagree, for the reasons I've already stated, but it doesn't seem like we're going to reso…
> central planning does not fix those deficiencies, it makes them worse How would the system I'm describing make inequality and the resulting conflict worse? > you have to count the communication between the nodes as part of the computation. But surely the nodes themselves must be the ones to perform the physical computation in the end? If the computing power of distributed systems scales exponentially with the numbe…
Because your system has to be implemented with humans, and humans cannot be trusted with the power to tell other humans what to do. Your system requires that in order to work. (Existing governments also require this in order to work, which is why they're dysfunctional, but your system requires it much more.) A free market does not; in a free market, all transactions are voluntary and nobody is given the power to tell anyone else what to do.
I don't see the point of further discussion since we appear to have a fundamental disagreement about this vital point.
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Mostly harmless to you... What a strange thing to call what is effectively an apex suburban predator that is known to kill for fun with no intention of eating.
They are animals like any other, and this notion of 'apex suburban predator' is nonsense.
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Yes. However, using modern computing and communication technology, it would be possible to run a complex economy with calculations "in-kind". That is, most calculation could be done using the inputs and outputs of millions of processes. Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts.
>Such an economy could avoid the instability of our current economy with its cyclical booms and busts. From what I understand (not an economist, but quoting what I've heard from them), much of the boom-bust cycle can be dampened by limiting debt.
Until human society stops serving abstractions (like money) over things that are real, then real things will continually face consequence. These will still over into our lives in a multitude of ways until we no longer have real systems to support these abstractions. Loss of natural life is such a failure. Today we speak of stock markets, governments, businesses. Someday, our main concern will not be these shared drea…
But isn't the problem that these abstractions exist precisely to help coordinate real things? The economy (and by extension, to a limited degree, the stock market) directly influences a lot of real things and basic needs.
We need to figure out how to reconfigure them. For instance, instead of the gold standard, let's back our money on permanently sequestered carbon. And once that problem is solved, we'll reconfigure it for the next thing.
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Please be aware there is also the "The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement". https://www.vhemt.org/ It is led by Les Knight. Here is quick explanation, from their site: ''' VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It’s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We’re not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disas…
This group will go extinct just by following their own philosophy. Brilliant.