231–240 of 332 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accepting immigrants who desperately want to come is nothing like taking resources by force.
You are confusing two things. Accepting immigrants is the humane thing to do. Perpetuating economic inequality across the world is not. Millions have to choose between working for meager salaries in one place or move to be exploited elsewhere. They are getting the short stick both ways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once we build and make stuff truly not on earth it will decouple. The trade never reaches earth then, so overall human economy expands but not earth's (or only a little, ie high value trade, maybe even take some high waste energy processes off earth if energy from dropping product back is less). The human economy could be much larger but not all parts of the human sphere would necessarily trade with each other materi…
So then earth still has to degrow even for the short duration before the carrying capacity of the solar system gets exhausted. The presence or absence of a growing economy elsewhere is irrelevant. You ask why now? The answer is because we've already overshot the ability to do everything we do sustainably with the resources available. We need to get off the treadmill now and hope like hell technology and the available…
Also, for example, innovation from growing economies elsewhere can reach back to earth. Expensive stuff that relies on growth can continue to happen and the results shared.
Carrying capacity of the solar system is huge, so quite some growth to be captured there. Once it is exhausted, growth for earth and the solar system might slow down because information will have significant travel time. And we haven't even exhausted earth and earth will become uninhabitable ultimately anyway so terminal sustainability is not truly needed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but the parent post did not mention use of force. We cannot deny that there is a brain drain in many third world countries that desperately need well trained workers that is accelerated by acceptance of immigrants into developed nations like the US. Who’s going to lead these countries into better governance and economic improvement if all the talent is incentivized to leave their home countries for greener past…
Immigration was compared to "colonial appropriation" which doesn't exactly sound voluntary. In contrast, it would be a terrible thing to forcibly lock people into their birth countries to stop brain drain.
This isn't hypothetical, of course. This is how places like the Soviet Union and East Germany worked. It was policy to literally shoot people trying to leave the country without permission. On the other hand, while certainly not justifying this atrocity, there certainly has been a "brain drain" as engineers, physicians, and scientists from the former Eastern Bloc have moved West for better employment opportunities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You confuse "not committing human rights abuses" with "voluntary". Countries that are losing their best and brightest are not happy about it.
So clear up my confusion: what should we do about it? Are we supposed to commit their human rights abuses for them, by denying entry to their best and brightest?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not stuck. The billionaires are not hoarding all the dollars. They have stock in their companies, which is worth varying amounts of dollars. Them owning stock does not deprive you of any dollars.
Them owning real estate keeps the real estate off the market, thereby increasing the price for everyone else.
There's "rich people" buying houses, which are investment funds that buy property to rent - that is still availalbe on the market and isn't decreasing the supply of housing.
Rich people buying homes for personal use can't have an appreciable effect on pricing. You couldn't afford a billionaire's eighth home in whatever city even if it were available for sale anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious. Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn. What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security . They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things. Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized hea…
Free market health care is far cheaper than socialized health care.
> by slowly and reluctantly altering the traditional society, like the Chinese?’ No need to have some kind of "cultural revolution"? >Endless growth – green or not These arguments are all the same. They take the current rate of growth, plug in a time period longer than has elapsed since the death of vitalism as a theory of life (an idea which, today, is laughable to consider), and conclude that we need to stop growin…
Here's your answer: because if we continue on our current trajectory, in a mere 30-50 years, we will be experiencing significant effects of societal collapse due to climate change that make the current societal effects of ecological collapse we're experiencing (breakdown of supply chains, erosion of institutions, loss of biodiversity, record high global temperatures, etc. ) seem like "the good old days." I'm talking…
No, we won't. You have no evidence for this and nobody who studies the problem believes it. Furthermore, climate change doesn't work that way: the 50-year outlook is largely "baked in", and reforms made now are trying to change the 100-200-year outlook.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People seem to be willing to trade some level of security for some level of luxury. This is why people take out the largest mortgage they possibly can given their income, and spend money they don't have on cars (which they will take a long time to pay off). These revealed preferences are hard to deny, and it would be quite presumptuous to impose a different trade-off on a plurality/majority of the populace.
What choice do people have? It doesn't make sense to trade anything for security because that security is non-existent anyway. Losing your job & health benefits for much of the middle class would be a death sentence regardless if they bought a 35k car or a 10k beater.
"I could die tomorrow, so it doesn't matter what I do today." is not a healthy way of thinking.
Spending less, eating healthy, learning useful stuff, exercising more and building good social relations with your family, community and professional contacts are all factors that improve the likelihood of positive outcomes.
You could still die (or end up broke and sick) tomorrow. There could even be nuclear war, for all I know. Or you could rent a Ferrari, spend a week drinking, gambling and whoring in Las Vegas, and end up meeting a person at the poker table that will make you rich, but the probability is low. (Unless you're already rich or famous.)
If you live humbly and healthily from you're 20 to you're 50, you may already have saved up enough buffer that from then on, you work because you want to, not because you have to (even on a median salary). If you go on until you're 70, you probably have enough for one more generation to have a jump start on the same level of safety, if they follow your example.
Though in my experience, families who follow such values over multiple generations are already wealthy, and often quite rich. Living with dignity well within their means, and not flaunting wealth in public, are some of the main hallmarks of "old money".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we want to become the "dominant species in the universe" and not be statisfied with a good life within our means?
Life within the current means of humanity is not good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So clear up my confusion: what should we do about it? Are we supposed to commit their human rights abuses for them, by denying entry to their best and brightest?
It's possible to talk about a problem without having any solution for it. It's actually how engineers are taught to approach problems.
What portion of this is non-voluntary?