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Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

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Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#71

Post by rufus_foreman »

prng2021 wrote: post #70
rufus_foreman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> a person in North Korea would say they get to decide how brainwashed they are. Nope. If a person in North Korea said they were brainwashed they would be executed at dawn. Sounds like you've been brainwashed. That's OK, they don't kill you for it here. >> As a nation, the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies It most certainly does not, if you don't want to work, don't work. Just don't make it my fuck…

It sounds like you might not be a native English speaker so let me explain it more clearly. You said that others can't tell you that you work too hard. You decide if you work too hard. If you lived in North Korea and I told you that you're brainwashed, you would probably tell me that you decide if you're brainwashed. You would certainly also tell me that you are not brainwashed. No one in North Korea would say they'r…

If you work a shit job in America, you get shit wages and shit benefits.

Don't do that.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#72

Post by imtringued »

bheadmaster wrote: post #59
rufus_foreman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> we generally work too much I decide if I work too much. You don't get to decide if I work too much. >> have too little social engagement I get to decide my level of social engagement. You don't get to decide my level of social engagement. >> spend lots of money and resources on things that don't really improve our lives I get to decide how to spend my money. You don't get to decide how to spend my money.

Hard agree. Anyone claiming that "we are X and Y" is just an authoritarian in disguise, trying to dictate how everyone else should live. At some point they should really ask themselves whether "saving the planet" is actually worth it if everyone is locked up in a cage for the sake of controlling consumation. Might as well just kill us all.

You may think that you are maximizing freedom by maximizing immediately visible freedoms but the reality is that you are cutting the freedom of others short and they do the same to you until you end up with much less freedom than if you took the direct hit to freedom. Enjoy living in the actual cage with an open door and never even considering to step out of it.

The word personal responsibility is just an empty post rationalization to say "Haha I won you didn, suck it up"

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#73

Post by syockit »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #66
rank0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is preventing any group from forming that exact governance structure. The cold hard truth is that nobody wants to do that. You’ll always lose to your competitors. Nobody actually wants to manage the entity that employs them.

You misunderstand. Anarcho-syndacalists like Chomsky demand, that by law, all companies must follow this worker-owned structure. It's a complete restructuring of the economic system. In the new system there won't be any capitalist-owned enterprises that will burn capital in the short-term, and exploit their own workers to to kill their more ethical competitors. Also, all workers don't have to manage their company, on…

> Workers at large just need to be able to kick out any management that decides to exploit their labor.

Corporate politics are already bad as it is, and this is going to make it worse.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#74

Post by imtringued »

yucky wrote: post #36
ps901 wrote: post #12

[flagged]

>The only thing left is to ditch capitalism entirely How exactly does that work?

You introduce land value taxes and demurrage currency with a citizen's dividend and enjoy your higher standard of living.

But people are so obsessed with capitalism and the socialists so obsessed with a non functioning solution that nothing gets done.

Before you ask why these two policies end capitalism, you must understand that in capitalism there is a profit expectation that is completely independent of market conditions, if you "believe" in markets this permanent profit expectation is irrational but because money and land are effectively monopolies they allow coercive extraction of economic rents and any real business must compete and pay even higher returns just to be allowed to function. As capitalism progresses and growth stops people put more money into extractive monopolies which then paradoxically despite all the wealth makes people poorer rather than richer. This is why capitalism requires the axiom of permanent scarcity as it means people have unfilled needs and would rather spend their money on consumption than monopolies, something that is only true for the poorest in the economy, middle class citizens spend most of their income on a mortgage aka on land which is a monopoly.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#75

Post by imtringued »

rank0 wrote: post #63
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen to the anarcho-syndacalists like Chomsky, which demand that companies be owned by workers in that company. There are many proposals for this, but here is an off the cuff one I just came up with: Every company with more than 100 workers, must have 80% of its ownership by those same workers. The difference between the ownership stake of the top worker and the bottom worker must be no more than a 5x.

Nothing is preventing any group from forming that exact governance structure. The cold hard truth is that nobody wants to do that. You’ll always lose to your competitors. Nobody actually wants to manage the entity that employs them.

Last time I checked one of the market based approaches requires me to start my own bank. In Germany that means you would need 7 million € and hope you get the license at all. Once you add the costs of buying land we are easily in the tens of millions to get started to end capitalism through market competition.

The people with 10 million € would rather keep the system as it is. After all, what if it fails and you become a "peasant"?

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#76

Post by syockit »

Gigachad wrote: post #57
prng2021 wrote: post #56

I see many comments here, in various media, and hear in real world conversations blaming corporations and billionaires. They're not faultless but we should be way more critical of ourselves as average citizens. Every year we want bigger and bigger cars, particularly in the West, but it's a global long term trend. If you compare pretty much any 2022 vs 2002 model vehicle, say the Honda Accord, you're going to be shock…

Bill calls for greater innovation, but as soon as we get more efficient things, we just consume more. We have constantly gotten better and better tech, and yet our consumption of resources only goes up. It seems that resource usage has nothing to do with how efficient or advanced our tech is, but simply the maximum amount of human labor we can allocate to resource extracting. So climate change can only really be solv…

> but as soon as we get more efficient things, we just consume more.

A phenomenon known as Jevons paradox.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#77

Post by t0bia_s »

prng2021 wrote: post #56

I see many comments here, in various media, and hear in real world conversations blaming corporations and billionaires. They're not faultless but we should be way more critical of ourselves as average citizens. Every year we want bigger and bigger cars, particularly in the West, but it's a global long term trend. If you compare pretty much any 2022 vs 2002 model vehicle, say the Honda Accord, you're going to be shock…

It is pure consumerism. You can add smartphones, clothes... Many things that we don't actually need to buy every year but yet, companies produce more and more for higher profit.

Blaming billionaires and corporations from brand new iPhone on networks made by big-tech sounds ironical indeed.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#78

Post by bheadmaster »

imtringued wrote: post #72
bheadmaster wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard agree. Anyone claiming that "we are X and Y" is just an authoritarian in disguise, trying to dictate how everyone else should live. At some point they should really ask themselves whether "saving the planet" is actually worth it if everyone is locked up in a cage for the sake of controlling consumation. Might as well just kill us all.

You may think that you are maximizing freedom by maximizing immediately visible freedoms but the reality is that you are cutting the freedom of others short and they do the same to you until you end up with much less freedom than if you took the direct hit to freedom. Enjoy living in the actual cage with an open door and never even considering to step out of it. The word personal responsibility is just an empty post…

> You may think that you are maximizing freedom by maximizing immediately visible freedoms but the reality is that you are cutting the freedom of others short and they do the same to you until you end up with much less freedom than if you took the direct hit to freedom.

You're equating the inherent renunciations of living in society (such as respecting others' right to live and personal property) with arbitrary restrictions such as "consume less". Consuming more doesn't lead to direct harm to anyone - it is your hypothesis that everyone consuming more leads to a global issue.

If the problem is human consumption, which grows linearly with the amount of people on this planet, perhaps the problem is that there are too many people. Why does nobody suggest population control in some form? Why is the answer always "let's make everyone's lives miserable so the population can keep growing"? And what happens when population grows so much that even the "lesser" consumption presents a problem? What happens when we reach the lower limit of human consumption requirement, and the number of people is so high that the total consumption still presents a problem?

Or to go even deeper - why even focus on restricting consumption in the first place? Is there any data to suggest that human consumption is actually a problem, compared to the massive amount of energy spent for industrial and military purposes? Without such data, the argument seems like a red herring, shifting the blame to people, while keeping the real culprits in the shadow.

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#79

Post by t0bia_s »

belfalas wrote: post #61

100% bullshit and such a typically American way of looking at it (I am an American). Look how fast the world changed when Covid hit. Achieve a change in values and the whole world will turn on its axis.

During covid, climate wasn't issue. People, like Gates, promotes mask, vaccines, antibacterial gels, tests... Which produces millions of tons of plastic waste. And also great income for his business. But who cares, now we need innovations because he loves our planet a people, right?

Re: Bill Gates: You’ll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

#80

Post by epakai »

yucky wrote: post #34
yongjik wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always feel the talks of private jets are missing the point. (Besides, it's always the private jets of Al Gore and Bill Gates that are in question. People never ask about the private jets of BP execs.) To simplify, let's assume that Bill Gates has a Boeing 747, which burns about 38 pounds of fuel per mile [1]. Distance between New York (JFK) and London (LHR) is 3,440 mile. For a round trip, double that, so we have…

>Besides, it's always the private jets of Al Gore and Bill Gates that are in question. People never ask about the private jets of BP execs. Because the BP execs aren't being hypocrites and telling all the commoners to lower their living standards..

https://twitter.com/bp_plc/status/1186645440621531136

Maybe not directly, but neither is Bill Gates.

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