booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

Posts

2

Comments

490

Joined

2 yr. ago

I read it in Larry David's voice.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I'm not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

No, no, the bigots hate people who speak French too

SNL had a fun sketch about this 12 years ago.

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.

Haiti's gonna hate hate hate

why wouldn't I use my platform to share those beliefs?

I think it's perfectly valid to say "the system that gave me this platform is unfair and I shouldn't have benefited from it to the degree that I have, but I have the platform now so I'm going to use it for good."

I'm saying that you can reduce birthrates a lot and it won't make much of a difference, because you can't go below zero and the rich/high consumption countries are already low.

If your goal is to reduce net consumption, then reduce consumption (or replenish consumed resources through increased production or restoration/replenishment of what is consumed). Preventing births itself won't meaningfully move the needle.

I'd rather focus on raising up the lowest into a tier of stability

What you're describing, then, has nothing to do with birth rates. That's what I'm saying in this thread: reduced birth rates won't fix the problem of runaway consumption and emerging scarcity.

You're talking about the bottom 90% of the world and I'm saying that they don't consume as much as the top 10%, so I'm focusing mainly on the top 10%. If we're going to discuss resource consumption, the people we talk about should be weighted by the resources they consume. And by that metric, the global rich consume much more, and have fewer children, than the global poor. Therefore, it's easy to point out that reducing birth rates won't actually do much to reduce consumption, because the people who have kids aren't doing much of the consuming.

The jet fuel is just an example of that general correlation, and one of several mechanisms why the childless tend to consume much more. You can argue "oh but all else being equal more mouths equals more resources" but I'm saying that all else isn't even close to equal, so you should engage with the patterns as they actually exist in the world rather than a hypothetical where everyone is equal.

Who the fuck can afford that?

The fact that you struggle to imagine that these people exist in large quantities tells me that you haven't actually fully understood the power distribution of who is consuming how much.

On CO2 emissions, the top 10% emit about 48% of the CO2. The top 10% of Americans (where the cutoff is about $135k) produce about 55 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year, and they have low birth rates.

people with kids travel by plane too

Yes, but paradoxically having more children makes households consume fewer passenger miles at any given budget, because traveling with children is slow and less enjoyable, and their tickets are just as expensive. So the DINK couple with the $200k budget can fly for vacations and even weekend getaways once every few months (4-8 times per year), but after having kids might only fly on one trip per year. Even with two kids, doubling the number of people in their household, they might be looking at half the passenger miles by taking 1/4 as many trips.

And if eating all the meat in the world and throwing food in the trash and using disposable diapers doesn't compare at all to the consumption involved in traveling out of town by plane, then adding up all the day-to-day stuff the family is doing with kids won't compare to the jet setting couple with the same budget.

Throw in the fact that the people who have the $200k+ budgets are less likely to have kids, and you have the correlation where consumption is negatively correlated with fertility/household size.

Look at how fast those things go through diapers, and tell me the single couple is throwing that much trash away every week.

Are you counting the trash generated by the fact that the DINK couple can afford to go out to eat dinner at restaurants 5 times a week, and travel by plane 4-5 times per year?

You're thinking about human resource consumption as if it's a bell curve, where most are within an order of magnitude as everyone else.

But that's not the case. The wealthy consume literally thousands of times more than the poor, and income/wealth is negatively correlated with fertility, so it can be the case that a single childless millionaire consumes more resources than a dozen 4-person households.

So when comparing the countries where the birth rates have actually fallen below replacement, and where their populations are on the cusp of shrinking, you'll see that as they have fewer children their consumption still goes up exponentially even when their population doesn't.

Taking away scarcity by making fewer people compete for those resources doesn't actually change the aggregate amount of resources consumed. People are perfectly capable of increasing their demand several orders of magnitude if there's less competition snatching up those resources first.

That's my point. The correlation already runs the other way. As those countries start to see shrinking populations, they'll also continue to consume greater amounts per capita, offsetting the population decrease.

China and South Korea are starting to shrink. Do we really believe that their pollution and resource consumption are going to go down in the next 10 years?

And it doesn't really matter whether we're talking causation in one direction or another, or a spurious correlation with some other confounding factors. The fact is, the highest consumption populations tend to have the lowest birth rates, and vice versa, so why would we expect dwindling births to reduce consumption?

What if I told you that knowledge can be passed on to people who aren't your biological descendants?

Humans consume resources, with less humans around there will be more resources for each humans and they will collectively consume less resources in total.

This is where you get it wrong, because you haven't actually thought about how much more one human can consume compared to another, and the actual lived reality that households with children tend to consume less than childless households.

We're not living subsistence lifestyles. There are many of us who travel for leisure by airplane, waste more food than is necessary to keep a person fed, throw away or consume more physical goods or energy than we need, create way more pollution, etc.

Rich societies tend to have fewer kids and consume way more resources and emit more pollution. The billions of people in Asia contribute less to our pollution than the comparably smaller population of Western Europe and North America. The relationship between population and environmental impact is broken because one rich Westerner can consume more than literally ten thousand poor Asians.

I didn't know I was learning a life skill at the time.

The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.

There was. If you map that onto the growth in population you'll see that tickets per person has been dropping since about 2000.

Typing of the dead

Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.

For the U.S. at least:

With condos, there's a condo association that owns all the common areas. Then the association itself is owned by the owners of the units, and the management is elected by the owners.

With co-ops, the unit owners directly own the common areas in common, and the management is also elected by the owners.

Functionally speaking they're very similar, and co-ops tend to exist in places where this legal structure predates the invention of homeowner associations (basically New York).