this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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There are already way, way too many people on the planet.
nah. there are too many billionaires though.
Two things can be true at once
yes. but “there are too many people” is just a tired white supremacist trope; there are not too many people out there. (the “non-white” is usually silent in these statements. this is also how some people can be both pro- and antinatalist.)
I don't care what color people are, and you have no idea what you're talking about.
We're using resources way faster than the planet can provide them, we're running out of land, we're driving both global climate change and the fifth ever mass extinction of life in the billions of years of Earth's existence.
There are way too many people on the planet, we passed carrying capacity decades ago.
The world has enough for everyone's need, just not for everyone's greed.
On average we humans use too much, yes. I don't know if WWF (not the wrestling one) still does their yearly report, but anyway they used to and the only part of the world that in average was over carrying capacity was the West (the first world, the golden billion). And within countries there are also stark differences.
Placing the blame on the poor billions of the world is at best ignorant and at worst racist (not saying that you are, but placing the blame on poor people with more pigments has been very common). Placing it on the billionaires is more fitting, though really it's societal structure that upholds the growth obsession and produces billionaires. But at least the billionaires has power, and in general fights every attempt at making things slightly better, which makes it more fitting to blame them.
those are extraordinary claims and i'm sure you can give pointers to peer-reviewed materials that back them up.
when you will be doing that, please consider which parts of earth you feel are overpopulated, what quantum of global resources are they getting and what should be done with it; please convey the results of your considerations back to us.
nope, this is diet eugenics and we’re not having it
We are "running out of land" because instead of using that land for our food we use it to grow food for cattle which we then eat which is really shitty energy efficiency. We are "running out of land" because of our addiction for cheap meat. Which by the way is also a big driving factor for climate change.
Over 50% (!!) of the country I live in (hint: 6th biggest country by area in the world, so it's a big bit of land) is used for cattle grazing.
Sure, a fair amount of that land isn't ideal for cropping, but a large portion of it would be, and the rest is what we have left of native vegetation. It'd be great if we stopped letting cattle trample it, and who knows, maybe we'd even have some land available for serious land-back and treaty talks??
@fuckingkangaroos @sneerclub Not because the planet cannot carry 8 billion humans, but because no known humane socioeconomic system can provably do so. That problem is exacerbated by the fact that all evidence suggests that the best first step towards a solution would be to lose the richest billion, not the poorest, and absolutely not the folks actually doing the hard work involved in directly feeding and caring for their fellow humans.
@fuckingkangaroos @sneerclub The TESCREAL (I prefer “STREACLE” but that ship has sailed) worldview implies a future with far fewer actual humans on Earth, something also foreseen as necessary for a widespread sustainable high standard of living by people who don’t share their essentially fascist views. We should not get there by having any set of “elites” self-select their own survival. The inevitability of an outcome does not justify any arbitrary path to that end.
@fuckingkangaroos @sneerclub I’m just glad that I’m old enough that I likely won’t have to watch the process by which we get to a smaller and more sustainable human population. I fear that what we’ll actually get is the first movers towards a smaller (and on average better-off) human species are those who salivate at the prospect of slaughtering “undesirables” for the good of the race. Those of us who just want to tax the rich to build better lives for all will lose.
I suspect quite a few of them are going to be unalived in the next 30 years, given the way things are going politically in various countries.
Could be many millions, especially if Modi's India gets really bad and it overflows into Pakistan.
Still not enough to make much of a dent in the total world population though.
Nah, to do that you need widespread ecological collapse, famine, lack of clean drinking water, and ideally a really good infectious disease.
@gerikson I have some news…