Population level itself isn't a problem. It's the consumption per person of the west that is the real problem. And unfortunately we are going to see this at a scale never seen before as the middle class in China, India and some African countries develop. As far as I see it, technologically speaking, the only way this could possibly be averted is with fusion energy and near to 100% recycling. Without that, the latter particularly, we are truly fucked. If an AI singularity is an actual achievable thing, then it's possible we could actually see these things well before the end of the century. That's if the AI doesn't wipe us out as the blight that we are.
RE: What is Evil? (Bloody Fields)
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What is Evil? (Bloody Fields)
Recycling and reuse. Don't support unethical corporations engaged in slave labor and human rights violation (Nestle, Apple, Kellogs etc.) Anyway, I can't even afford these products.
I do believe these people should travel now and see the real thing.
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I'm actually not a believer to a great degree in consumer activism. To clarify that, I think it's a perfectly just and ethical tactic, I just think it's placing the emphasis in the wrong spot. It shouldn't be up to consumers to regulate immoral corporations. Governments should be doing this stuff. Unfortunately, governments are too much in the pocket of unethical corporations, so it often does fall to the consumer to attempt to regulate.
This is good, little mini-rants by me will get my rant gland in shape so I can unleash an almighty fucking spray at the 1%. It's been a while. In fact, I think I'm a bit out of practice. I might not even be able to deliver that rant I promised. I'm a bit scatter-brained these days. sigh
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First, fuck government. There is no just government.
Second, most of the reason for consumer crapitalism is that products are designed to be profitable, not sensible.
Trillions of people can be sustained at levels of affluence unimaginable today, but it will take sensible design.
I can appreciate ire at the 1%. Eat the rich!
However, suckups suckup, and this empowers leaders. People are like fucking dogs, pandering in the hope of tidbits from the master's table.
I don't have a bank account, because I refuse to contribute. In order to be here, I have to have the internet, so I pay for that, but it pisses me off that mesh networks aren't a thing.
I am not attacking you, as I am certain you are as offended as am I.
But involuntary government IS the enemy. Is there a voluntary government? Not one recognized by other governments! Therefore there is NO just government.
The worst is when government officials, as Ronald Reagan did, say 'government is the problem', and then receive the support of panderers while they use government to crush freedom.
Obama did the same.
I am dedicated to the proposition that I am free, and so are you.
Imma post on how Steemit can take over the world. Stop by in the next day or so and have a look.
Followed.
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There's nothing wrong with government, per se, it's just the implementation that's gone so horribly wrong. Have you ever read George Monbiot's "Manifesto For A New World Order" (had a different title in the US, I think)? He gives an anarchist perspective on the role that government can, and should, play. My views align a lot with his. The reality is that localism isn't a solution to world scale problems. You don't solve global warming by composting and running a fuel efficient car. It's not going to happen.
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Sorry, bro, you lost me at (paraphrase) 'conspiracy to steal money'. I'm a former scientist who has looked at some of the data and trust the peer review system on the rest. We are at over 400ppm at the moment.
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The size of the number isn't the problem. It's the rate of change that is the problem.
I'm not going to engage in a meta-debate on @diabolika's thread. But I will conclude by saying that global warming is the single largest threat to farmer livelihood there is.
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In my own way, I don't buy these products from unethical corps, I don't have an apple gadget. I don't eat kellogs, I don't munch nestle bars. I don't even buy new clothes. I couldn't even take to eat grains right now because it makes me cry knowing what it takes to make those. I want to be wealthy so I can go to those farms, and provide livelihood and not be killed by the corporations' cops or military - because I have money. I can't believe some people commenting here don't even understand the truth and they still worry about my use of 'evil' word. Or compare their own farms to bloody farms. I am so fuckin' angry.
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Don't agree with you on that point. The Earth is a closed system and we are rapidly converting everything in the environment into human flesh. Redistribution would only make everyone poor (from a Western perspective). The middle class is the worst consumptive beast ever to inhabit this planet.
Humanity does not need more energy. We have no teeth or claws because we are a very dangerous and deluded animal. Fusion would allow us even greater power to destroy the environment at an even faster rate.
I am not a climate change denier. I've lived long enough to know that it's a lot hotter and the growing season a lot longer that it was in the past. Climate will always fluctuate and humanity cannot do anything about it and, in truth, any efforts we undertake to mitigate it will only cause disastrous blowback. C02 is a ruse to inflict more taxes upon the herd and create another financial instrument for the elites.
Recycling is re-manufacturing: free resources to the corporations. Most people recycle beverage containers already. I have a friend who owns a bottled water company. He's probably the richest person I know. He confided in me that from the business standpoint, it isn't about the water, it's about selling bottles. Recycling is just another scam. Even if we built our consumer items to last for hundreds of years we would still be destroying our environment, just a bit slower.
The fisheries are depleted. Power dams interfere with salmon runs. The forests are disappearing at an alarming rate so people can live in climate controlled boxes and eat hooved locust burgers. Monocropping and chemical farming are sending topsoil that took hundreds of thousands of years to create into the rivers poisoning the fresh water creatures and creating thousands of square miles of anaerobic dead zone in the ocean at the river mouths. Blaming CO2 for all our ills and recycling are red herrings: rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
The only AI scenario I see as being successful would be if inorganic consciousness looks at humanity dispassionately and does what is necessary to restore balance in the environment, and that means reducing human consumption to subsistence levels and reducing human populations to environmentally sustainable levels. We aren't a blight. There are just too many of us consuming far more than we need.
We must get over the idea that humanity is somehow exceptional. We are just a small part of the much larger (and far more important) biosphere. Humans existed for millions of years living vibrant, abundant, joy-filled lives without the trappings of civilization. In truth, civilization is our downfall, our fall from grace.
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Ok after clearing my head I understand now what is going on. I used to live in a very polluted city so whether global warming is a hoax or not, I believe pollution and carbon emissions have disastrous effects on the environment and climate. Especially to the livelihood of farmers.
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Carbon itself is a necessary plant nutrient, and below 180ppm, about what it dropped to during the last Glacial Maximum, plants start starving.
If plants go, we're fucked.
When the Earth had 6000ppm of CO2, well, that was about the most verdant and lush period of life ever.
We're at 400ppm or so now. CO2 is just above what we need it to be to not go extinct.
There's a lot of other crap we emit, or make on purpose, like pesticides, metals, herbicides, etc., that is horrifying.
And farmers get the worst of it, because no one tells them how dangerous it is, or how to be safe around it. Usually they're told 'it's Fiiiiiiine... Back to work!'
Male fertility has dropped 60% since I was born, because of chemical pollution.
Shit like that has gotta stop!
Thanks!
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@ valued-customer beat me to it! Ditto
You haven't stated which nation you are in. I'm guessing Honduras, but unfortunately, it could be anywhere in the south. I know this is going on in Honduras. Amazon natives are also under siege by loggers and miners and anybody else who wants "development" and Africa is a quagmire of peasant death.
As far as I know, Honduras has been "friendly" with the US since the CIA helped overthrow the government at the behest of Untied Fruit in 2009. If you aren't in Honduras, just consider this another brick in the wall.
As long as governments are backed by NATO, the UN and the US and their ilk, the peasants will have a hard time gaining traction. These mega fascist hierarchies must fall first.
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Not a believer in the 'nasty, brutish, and short' meme?
I just want to point out that every single problem you mention is a result of poor management, rather than simply the inevitable result of population, technology, or society themselves.
I am pretty convinced that the Earth can support trillions of happy people, and do so while restoring natural ecosystems to full and robust viability.
I am NOT even close to persuaded we are on a path that will take us there.
Thanks!
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Not at all, but I don't idealize their existence either. I've spent time with very poor people and for the most part, they were much happier than my friends who were more affluent. I'm just extrapolating, comparing to what I see in the faces of the previously uncontacted of the Amazon and the faces of the average New Yorker.
Ever see Nanook of the North? This 1922 short film is supposed to be the very first documentary. Many of the scenes are obviously staged, but you cannot fake the smile lines etched into the faces of the Inuit being filmed.
Shorter lives, Yes. Brutish? And we're not? Nasty? I've been accused of that myself, thank you very much.
Trillions? A thousand billion +? Maybe off planet on some starship where people are raised by AI in a petri dish. Not exactly my idea of utopia.
Yes, we could feed everyone with better management. But better management means less freedom, it means giving up your garbage compactor, your motor home, that house with 16 foot ceilings, those silicone lip implants. It means redistribution of wealth and I can already hear them crying, "I'll give up my Mastercard when you pry it from my cold, dead hand."
And didn't Marx (Karl, not Groucho) already try that once?
As you've probably already surmised I'm not much of a humanist. I'm an environmentalist. I'd prefer to live in a world where the sight of another tribe of humans would be something to celebrate, a reason to have a feast, to throw a party, not a hand grenade.
I know if you crowd too many rats into a cage they eventually begin to kill and eat each other. I think we're getting close to that. At this point I can only ask, "Where are we going...and why are we in this hand basket?
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I disagree that better management means crowding people into petri dishes.
Most of the Earth is relatively empty of development, because we crowd our cities into the very finest cropland, coastal habitat, and the like.
That's what I mean by poor management.
Around 1989 I incorporated a nonprofit 'Lifehold', that was intended to:
lease fallow land in order to keep it fallow, raising funds by getting donors to pay $1/mth to secure a place for 1 species on 1 acre.
with funds beyond what was necessary to pay the landholders to keep the land fallow; wild, and free, inner city neighborhoods in disrepair were gonna be purchased and redeveloped with green roofs/parks.
I intended to provide cleverly situated units of ~5k ft (designed for privacy. Each was to have an unobstructed view of the park. One driveway per block, with internal underground secure parking for two rigs, yada yada yada...)for free to folks if they bought renewable utilities from me, composting toilets, etc....
Blocks at a time of urban hellholes would have been returned to natural habitat, and folks would have paid far less for their homes, and got a lot more homes.
I ran into problems, all involving lawyers scamming me out of earnest money, trying to sell me land they didn't have rights to, municipal and county codes regarding densities, and on and on..
Pretty discouraging. I thought about trying to make new real estate, floating/semi-submerged domes made of recycled plastic, tires, and such, but that entailed not just redevelopment, but much more, and I started having kids.
These things can be done right now, and it is government - management - that is making it not happen.
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I apologize to you in advance @diabolica for this bourgeois conversation in this post about murdered peasants, but this is the world as it is and I am doing my best to change it.
I once had a dream of building a sustainable underground subdivision above the valley floor on south facing hills. Each dome house would have passive and active solar windows on the south side but would be covered in dirt on the three other sides. The CC&Rs would mandate underground utilities, no fences and that all personal junk be kept in the underground structures. All houses would thus have an unobstructed view as if they lived in the only house around.
Not only did this violate every imaginable code and present an engineering nightmare, people laughed at the idea.
Human conditioning is such that everyone wants more than their neighbors and also want what they don't have. People in Arizona want Cape Cod houses. People in California, where water is scarce, expensive and environmentally destructive to procure, want lawns. People in British Columbia, where lawns grow naturally without, water want so-called low maintenance gravel and rock in their front lawns, a landscape that must be sprayed with Roundup twice a year to retain it's desert appearance.
I had a cousin who lived in a small house in the Berkley Hills of Oakland California. She had a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. She wanted to sell her house but was concerned because there was a new spec. mansion built on the hill above her that had sat unsold for a very long time. She asked the realtor what the story was and was told that nobody with that kind of money wanted that house because it was hidden: you couldn't see it from anywhere. It's all about ostentation.
I prune trees and shrubs for a living: a tree service in service to the trees. People want their hedges left tall so nobody can see in and their trees topped so they can see out. There are jobs that I simply turn down. Not only is the vast majority still asleep, it's REM sleep. They're in dreamland.
A very good start.
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I really have no time for these "it's all a plot to steal our money" conspiracy theory bollocks. I'm not even going to bother addressing this.
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Yes, facts always tend to end controversial conversations. This horse is officially dead.
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