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Selfish reasons to want more humans

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Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#471

Post by shiroiushi »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #463
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite patronizing of women. As recently as the generation that was born before WWII, even the Boomers, were born into relatively large families. The idea that they hated having so many children would have been foreign to them. On the contrary, it gave them meaning. Family and community life was vibrant. Now, things are desolate. We live in a culture of death.

I am not patronizing anyone. I am just presenting statistics, and the possibilities for why they are what they are. By far, most (almost all) women who have access to financial independence, physical security, and access to contraception CHOOSE to have 0, 1, 2, or maybe 3 kids. No one tells them they cannot have 8 or 14 kids. But after having seen what a woman goes through during pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and…

[flagged]

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#472

Post by shiroiushi »

citrin_ru wrote: post #234
collyw wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of STEM jobs are bullshit. Intellectual grunt work. Most people are fixing other peoples bugs rather than building anything innovative. And a lot of the "innovation" in tech over the last years has been a rehash of ideas from the 60s.

Fixing bugs is useful work. A bias against boring maintenance toward innovation is how you end up with crumbling infrastructure.

Fixing bugs is useful, but if that's all someone does, that usually means the company's development process is bad. The developer of code should be ensuring it's bug-free, along with the rest of their team (i.e. code reviews, unit testing, system testing, etc.), not committing a bunch of crap to master and then expecting others to fix all their bugs.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#473

Post by shiroiushi »

ZephyrP wrote: post #386
lukas099 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: cultivars. Some have probably died out. Others have probably gotten better. Look at apples; my parents talk about how the only apples they had were red delicious and granny smith. Now we have insane diversity of delicious apples without even having to grow them ourselves.

I traveled through a town in California known for it's apple orchards. There, I ate a 'Hawkeye' apple, which was said to be an ancestor of the 'Red Delicious'. The 'Hawkeye' isn't my new favorite, but was good enough to appreciate how much it's shameful descendent had dishonored the name of this otherwise respectable apple family.

The Red Delicious was made not for taste, but for durability: it has exceptionally long shelf life, so it's excellent for shipping to far-away places, including overseas, and it doesn't require refrigeration.

Most likely, the ancestor doesn't keep or ship that well.

There's a reason no one who actually likes apples buys Red Delicious these days; they buy one of the better varieties like Gala or Fuji or Honeycrisp or many others. Red Delicious still sell in huge quantities in the US, though, mainly to institutions like schools and hospitals. When the person selecting your meal cares more about cost than taste, you get Red Delicious.

Also, Americans throughout much of the 20th century had very poor culinary tastes. That only started changing in the 1980s, and got much better by the 2000s. So for a long time, Americans were perfectly happy to eat the nasty Red Delicious apples.

This Wikipedia article has some more detail on the history of the cultivar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#474

Post by jaysonelliot »

snewman wrote: post #361
jaysonelliot wrote: post #317

This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today. At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the…

What is your source for the planet only being able to support one billion people? That's a very bold statement, given that we are currently at eight billion and have fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability. Of course sustainability is not a guaranteed outcome, it will require making good decisions, but I'm sure that a "mere" one billion people would also be unsustainable with sufficiently poor decisions…

We don't have "fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability."

We're in the middle of the Holocene Extinction, that some call the Anthropocene Extinction - the sixth mass extinction in the history of the Earth, and the first to be caused by a single species. Global warming has long since passed its tipping point, we're simply in a harm reduction phase right now and it's a race to see if we can even avoid the eventual collapse of the entire food chain.

The world population didn't reach one billion people until about the year 1800, and two billion by the 1920s. When I say that it can only support one billion people, I'm referring to what was possible before the Haber-Bosch process revolutionized farming and made it possible to grow enough food for 8 billion today.

I'll concede that the number might even be as high as 2 billion or so. Beyond that, we have to employ technologies that upset the ecological balance of the planet, leading to mass extinctions, loss of natural habitat, carbon emissions, and other harmful activities at a planetary scale.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#475

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #460
zoklet-enjoyer wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, he should change his culture. We should too. Why is it taboo to tell people that their cultural values are wrong?

I have no problem telling someone their culture is wrong. In this case, it is ours that is wrong.

No

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#476

Post by s1artibartfast »

yellowapple wrote: post #469
mtalantikite wrote: post #407

I’m curious to know if the author has spent any significant time in any place that is going to feel the brunt of the climate catastrophe. I’d invite them to spend a couple months in Delhi or Dhaka and then take another pass at this think piece. Or maybe they’re cool with taking in a few hundred million climate refugees into the US and just didn’t mention it, as many parts of South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa wi…

> It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche. Even a "privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US" would be feeling the brunt of a growing population in his wallet. More people = more demand for land = higher land prices = higher housing costs. Even in my somewhat-minor m…

Georgism isnt a viable solution for the modern world where a majority of the economy is services or knowledge work.

100% of the tax falls on use of physical goods, while 0% falls on consumption of labor.

Of course this sounds attractive for tech workers who would live nearly tax free under such a system, requiring few physical goods and selling none.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#477

Post by yellowapple »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #476
yellowapple wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche. Even a "privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US" would be feeling the brunt of a growing population in his wallet. More people = more demand for land = higher land prices = higher housing costs. Even in my somewhat-minor m…

Georgism isnt a viable solution for the modern world where a majority of the economy is services or knowledge work. 100% of the tax falls on use of physical goods, while 0% falls on consumption of labor. Of course this sounds attractive for tech workers who would live nearly tax free under such a system, requiring few physical goods and selling none.

> Georgism isnt a viable solution for the modern world where a majority of the economy is services or knowledge work.

You need land for datacenters and offices. There is zero economic activity that doesn't use land in at least some capacity. That's indeed the very basis of Georgism's viability, including in the present day.

And even if there was some tech company that used zero land whatsoever, there are plenty of other things with inelastic supply that would confer the same benefits if taxed by value; IP addresses and domain names both come to mind.

> 100% of the tax falls on use of physical goods

Correction: 100% of the tax falls on landowners, while 0% falls on everyone else.

> Of course this sounds attractive for tech workers

It should sound attractive to literally everyone whose wealth derives primarily or entirely from their own labor.

> who would live nearly tax free under such a system

That depends on their living arrangements. If they're renting, then yes, it'd be entirely tax free, as it would be for every other renter. If they own their own homes, then it depends on location; given equal physical characteristics, a plot of land in Downtown is more valuable than a plot of land in the middle of nowhere, and so would be the tax on that value.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#478

Post by robertlagrant »

vasco wrote: post #213
alexey-salmin wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't even define "degradation" without humans around. The planet itself doesn't care, nor does the fish. Extending human empathy to non-human processes is peak anthropocentrism.

I think you can define degradation. I can make objective claims that less biodiversity is worse than more biodiversity and use it to measure degradation without humans around. I can measure this degradation in planets without humans or model out the degradation in a future where humans are extinct, and call certain situations objectively worse than others under that yardstick. Maybe I misunderstood because it seems y…

You, a human, can define degradation. So your prerequisite to degradation measurement requires humans?

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#479

Post by jondwillis »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #401
jondwillis wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure it is highly variable, but I wonder what the cost of negative soil CO2 sequestration techniques like biochar, is these days? Or even just land use improvements to sequester more CO2, seems like lower hanging fruit than DAC.

We must assume only the highest quality, verifiable carbon offsets are utilized for luxury activities. Only DAC meets that criteria currently. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

May be so, since humans are humans and do human lies.

I think in a perfect world that land rehabilitation and land CO2 sequestration projects coupled with solar+wind+nuclear+geo+friends energy would get us to carbon neutral much faster than DAC, but hopefully I am wrong and DAC can be scaled up without exorbitantly high costs.

Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans

#480

Post by s1artibartfast »

yellowapple wrote: post #477
s1artibartfast wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgism isnt a viable solution for the modern world where a majority of the economy is services or knowledge work. 100% of the tax falls on use of physical goods, while 0% falls on consumption of labor. Of course this sounds attractive for tech workers who would live nearly tax free under such a system, requiring few physical goods and selling none.

> Georgism isnt a viable solution for the modern world where a majority of the economy is services or knowledge work. You need land for datacenters and offices. There is zero economic activity that doesn't use land in at least some capacity. That's indeed the very basis of Georgism's viability, including in the present day. And even if there was some tech company that used zero land whatsoever, there are plenty of ot…

Saw this very late, but here are my thoughts.

>Correction: 100% of the tax falls on landowners, while 0% falls on everyone else.

The way you approach this seems to assume that any Georgist taxes get passed on to corporations & owners, but not individuals. A data center would bear the cost of taxes for land and construction materials based on their availability and demand even if the land and building were rented. Similarly, taxes of land, water, fertilizer, metals, would be passed on to the consumer.

At the end of the day, Georgism boils down to a material use and consumption tax.

Because there is no Georgist tax for capital gains or income, A janitor would pay the same tax as a CEO if they personally use and consume the same amount of raw materials. A stock trader making 1B/year pays the same as a carpenter, maybe less because the carpenter need more physical materials to work like wood & nails, while the stock trader just sends a few megabytes down the wires.

Much of what humans exchange for value does not have a strong relation to scarce physical materials, primarily labor and money. The incomes of Apple or Google are not proportional to their material use, just like the the incomes of hyper billionaires is not proportional to their cheeseburger consumption. ( e.g. Musk's income is maybe that of 500,000 Americans, but he doesn't use as much land, eat as much food, or use as much fuel as 500,000 people).

This is why a georgist tax regime is very regressive (which isnt inherently a bad thing). I just dont think it is a great social equalizer many proponents claim.

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