Political Memes

I’ll believe it when I see it. Someone has to maintain the buildings and people as they age. Without people you don’t have a society. Norms break down, culture breaks down and then some other group will come in to fill the void.

Sounds catchy, but I'm not sure this is really true. Capitalism is about owning things, not selling things.

Hence the agenda of the current American regime. Outlaw birth control. Eliminate public education. Health care will be too expensive for most workers. And over it all, evangelical Christianity keeps a poorly educated workforce in line. So you end up with a working class who breed fast, die young, and have no concept that life could be any other way.

It’s not just capitalism though, it’s innovation and the arts. Our development as a species is partly contingent on population, on more chances of finding that genius, more excess capacity that can be devoted to things not obviously profitable. I disagree with the open endedness of your statement, the rate of change.

Given

• we can’t keep growing
• we’re probably beyond sustainable capacity for this planet

I’ll agree with

• we need to slow and stop population growth
• shrinking population would be better

But disagree

• the rate of drop is important - we want to reduce harm, societal stress, conflict
• we want to plateau at some population well into the billions but less than today

Most importantly, fertility trends look like we’re heading for a fairly steep drop in population as the current generations age out and pass. We are heading toward disruption, societal stress, conflict.

It’s unclear how to stabilize the birth rate for that lower plateau, since we’re mature enough to not go back to oppressing women (I hope), but clearly we’re disincenting children and will quite likely regret that in a generation or two, for most developed countries. For the long term future of humanity and our society, we need to start making tweaks now, when they’re just tweaks. Start making it easier to have children. Start helping parents more. Start making it easier to grow up. Look after our future as a species rather than freeload off the personal choices of individuals.

I do compare it with our treatment of climate change. We failed to make small changes when small changes would have been sufficient. The longer we wait, the bigger, more disruptive, more expensive the changes will need to be. We’re bad at looking ahead and setting longe term priorities but need to get better fast

Support life extension, then both are happy.

Since our economic systems are built to be a pyramid scheme it’ll hurt back for a generation or two but the ecological benefits will quickly outweigh the economic issues.

My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.

My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.

The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.

They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.