This study is dangerously stupid.
We are rapidly running out of resources for survival.
Global fresh water demand will exceed supply by 40% by 2030 and 90% of topsoil is at risk of depletion by 2050.
We are already over capacity on fresh water demand for the amount of humans alive on this planet.
Top soil is what food grows in. Without top soil we can’t grow food.
Billions of people will die this century. The planet cannot support any more people. Don’t have kids.
It is true there are too many billionaires. We can provide everyone, if some of them also need 10 private jets.
what about food and place to live? seems to me we are stealing too much land from nature.
Build upwards instead of outwards
Replacing all forms of power generation with nuclear would protect a lot of land but war exists and blowing up a nuclear plant causes longer lasting damage than a solar farm
And where do we put all that radioactive waste?
In my backyard
Under
Uh huh, the glorious Urban Monad…
This is one of the things that pisses me off about the Star Trek “fans” who point to the Replicator tech (which wasn’t introduced until the Next Generation series) as the reason humanity was able to end scarcity. No, it absolutely was not what ended scarcity in the Star Trek universe. What ended scarcity was the absolute end of capitalism. We have now and have had for over a century, the capability to end world hunger and provide housing for every man woman and child on the planet. We don’t do it because it would remove the overinflated value of those things as well as the obscene wealth of the rich.
Capitalism requires scarcity as its engine.
When scarcity is threatened, it is called the capitalist dirty word “commodity”.
It means there is no more profit in that.Even if that wasn’t true, do you know how much energy it takes to turn energy into mass (unless I don’t understand the tech and it works like a 3D printer or something). If a society has this much (free or at least affordable) energy, even without a replicator there is so much abundance.
I know the world has more than enough resources and productivity for everyone on it to live comfortably without overworking, but 30% is the lowest figure I’ve ever seen. Would like to know where that came from. I’ve seen so many widely varying estimates of everything.
Someone else posted what it means. It means 10m² living space per person, 4 people share 20m² for bathroom and kitchen, you don’t eat meat, you wash tops every ~3 days and bottoms every ~14 days(laundry is shared with ~20 people). Something like 4 people are expected to share a laptop with specs that were cutting edge 15 years ago(a “gaming pc” would only be able to be used for ~150 hours per year).
It is a MAJOR downgrade from how most people live, even those in poverty, and is just not appealing to all but the most minimalist of people. It’s more akin to living in an RV or “van life”(except you’re not supposed to have a car in this situation either - public transportation only).
It’s also ignoring the fact that we have already surpassed the limitations of what the nitrogen cycle could normally provide. So we would still be relying on fertilizers produced with fossil fuels.
Absolutely.
Also, whenever I see “humans only really need X” I always think of Bill Gates saying no one will ever need more than 640kb of RAM. Sure, today no one will, but tomorrow someone who was held back by that previous number will see the new number and be able to complete a new task and suddenly that will be the new “baseline”. A 1.4mb floppy used to store dozens/hundreds of text files. Now a .jpeg takes up more space. You can’t just settle on some number without commiting to becoming left behind as things progress.
Well, thanks for sharing misinformation.
Meanwhile, in the actual study (provided free via any search engine of your choice):
Also directly from the study you didn’t read:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension.”
So no, nobody is coming to take your gaming rig, and no, the majority of people on Earth would get an UPGRADE in living conditions, not a downgrade.
Here is a link if you cannot access a search engine.
So you’re a condescending asshole. That’s all. I’m not gonna engage with you further. Have a day as wonderful as yourself. I will note that everything is said was in your picture. Douche.
I recommend reading the image to find the source
There is a source where the text was taken from at the bottom.
Thank you, dumb me missed it. Their paper talks a lot about measuring poverty. Earlier research showed poverty in China being high in the 80s under socialism and decreasing in the 90s when they became more capitalist. But the formulas for calculating that involved the prices of all consumer goods, including things like airline tickets, cars, big TVs, etc. But If you take these authors’ approach and ignore the prices of things poor people never buy, the math shows poverty being very low in the 80s and rising dramatically in the 90s, because introducing more capitalism brought down the cost of middle-class and luxury goods but increased the cost of the basics.
Decent living conditions… meaning what, exactly? 250 square feet with no windows, shared shower and bathroom with 11 other people?
The depressed goth gamer in that cartoon would have to wear the same unwashed clothes for a week between hand washings, and in any case, that’s all the clothes they have.
It’s sad, but without the tremendous fossil inputs we’ve been gobbling for over a century, poof, we’re back to an agrarian 19th century life style. At best. With the concomitant 1-2 billion world population. And hand made clothes from natural fibers. Bye bye synthetics, bye bye engineered detergents, bye bye dyes, bye bye individual front loading washing machines.
You really can go on the internet and say anything without sources
“You really think someone would do that? Go on the internet… and tell lies?”
Citation?
Reading the study I get the following remarks:
Living space, not great. 60m2 for a 4 person family. That’s tight. I live alone in a 90m2 house and I could use more space, do they want me to live in a 15m2 house or do they want to force to share living space? Sorry but I won’t compromise there. I prefer people having less children that me having to live as ants in a colony.
That is just a personal pick with the DLS minimum requirements chosen.
But still forgetting that. The reasoning is extremely faulty. Most of their argumentation heavy lifting is just relied to Millward-Hopkins (2022) paper establishing that 14.7 GJ per person anually is enough. That paper is just a work of fantasy. For reference, and taking the same paper numbers. Current energy usage (with all the exiting poverty) is 80 GJ/cap. Paleolitic use of energy was 5 GJ. Author is proposing that we could live ok with just triple paleolitic energy. That paper just oversees a lot of what people need to live in a function society to get completely irrational numbers on what energy cap we could assume to produce a good life.
Then on materials used. The paper assumes all the world shifting to vegetarian diet, everyone living on multiresidential buildings, somehow wood as the main building material (I don’t know how they even reconcile that with multiresidential buildings…). And half of cars usage shifting to public transport How to achieve this in rural areas it’s not mentioned at all).
A big notice needs to be done that both papers what are actually doing is basically taking China economy (greatly praised in the introduction) and assuming that all the world should live like that. And yes, probably the world could have 30 billion inhabitants if we accept to be all like China, who would we export to achieve that economic model if we all have a export based economy? who knows, probably the martians. And even then, while a lot of “ticks” on what a decent level of life quality apparently seems to be ticked, many people in western countries would not consider that quality life, but a very restrictive and deprived life standard.
I’m still on the boat the people having less children is a better approach to great lives without destroying the planet. At some point a cap on world population need to be made, it really add that much that the cap is 30 billion instead of maybe 5 billion? It’s certainly not a cap in the number of social iterations a person can have, but numbers give for plenty of friends. And at the end it’s not even a cap on “how many children” can people have, as once the cap is reach the number of children will be needed to cap the same to achieve stability. It’s just a cap on “when people can still be having lots of kids”. Boomer approach to “let’s have children now” and expect that my kids won’t want to have as many children as I have now.
Also another big pick I have with the article is that it blames the current level of inefficiency to private jets, suvs, and industrial meat. But instead of making the rational approach of taking thise appart from the current economy and calculate what the results will be. Parts from zero building the requirements out of their list. Making the previous complaint about those luxury items out of place completely. On a personal note I would reduce or completely eliminate many of those listed “super luxury” items. But I have the feel (just a feel because neither me not the author have studied this) that the results of global energy and material usage won’t drop that much, certainly not at the levels proposed by the authors with their approach.
The paper assumes all the world shifting to vegetarian diet, everyone living on multiresidential buildings, somehow wood as the main building material (I don’t know how they even reconcile that with multiresidential buildings…). And half of cars usage shifting to public transport How to achieve this in rural areas it’s not mentioned at all).
Yeah, that’s totally unrealistic. We could get rid of 99% of cars and only keep ambulances and fire trucks, and most people would be happier. Also we should get everyone on a vegan diet. Vegetarian is okay, but still enslaves animals. We can do much better.
What about people not living in cities?
Public transport for low density areas is terrible. So or you are forcing people to live in cities (where public transport can be good) or you are forcing people to endure terrible public transport.
Also forcing dietary changes on people, something as big as preventing people to eat or use animal products…
I just don’t think forcing that on people would be clever. I know how I would react if anyone were to impose that way of living to me, and I can only assume that many people would react the same way. Specially if I would have to endure all that only to accommodate a growing population when we could just try to aim for a lower stable number of total human population (a number that will need to be reached regardless at some point. Infinite growth is unfeasible).
Yeah, there’s a bit of a conflict here: People want to live in rural areas with large plots of land and nature everywhere but want to have the comforts and amenities of living in a city center.
Before the car this was a choice that people had to make: move to the city where everything is available or to the countryside where countryside is available and hardly anything else.
The car allowed to bridge this gap to the detriment of the climate and the sustainability of life on this planet.
And now we have another conflict: luxurity for people in rural areas vs survival of the human race.
Surely there’s a way of having people living rural, a totally valid life choice and also must needed for agriculture, having a good life, and not having a planet wide global extinction.
I get that in the US and some other countries one of the biggest divisions in voting is rural/urban, thus some people really feel vindicated on hating people that live rural and wanting to impose some penalties on them.
But if we cannot find an economic system that would lead to every person having a good life, regardless on where they live… Do we really want to have a future as a species?
Whether ‘a good life’ is possible in rural areas depends on your definition.
Is it living like the Amish? In that case, yes.
No. I think humanity should aim for absolutely every single human in every country in every single region, urban or rural could have a level of life quality comparable to what’s consider middle-high income level in USA/Europe.
If we cannot achieve that we’d better give up as an intelligent species and leave room for que squids to try.
You can give up all you want.
The biggest issue with your argumentation is that it takes one extreme (“farmers need to live in rural areas”) and use that as a justification for everyone who is not covered by that rule.
For example, all of suburbia can go. Close to nobody living there is a farmer and people only live in the suburbs because they can use a car to get to city center quickly.
But also in more rural areas there are a lot of people who commute to their office job in the next city.
That is not a totally valid life choice by far. If you want to work in the city, move to the city.
I have some information that’s gonna blow your mind: people lived in rural areas for many thousands of years and cars were only invented a hundred years ago.
They lived self sufficient lives and walked to town once a month for essentials. If they were lucky, they had a mule and a wagon.
I’m guessing you live in a rural area and you think you need your car, because you’ve gotten used to driving into town every few days for fresh groceries and haircuts? Yeah, so that’s arrogant decadence. You live a cosmopolitan lifestyle with inner city conveniences, despite being out in a rural area with plenty of space and low land values, and this is made possible by your poison death machine.
The poison death machines are not sustainable. Go back to living how your ancestors did. Take the mule into town once a month for soap and molasses, or move to the city. You don’t get to have it both ways
I don’t want to live like people lived two thousands years ago, thanks.
Tough shit. Your poison death machine is killing people on the other side of the world, and the only way to have a clean conscience is to get rid of it
You lack imagination. Plenty of ways to not kill people without having to recede to Palaeolithic levels of life quality.
Yeah, I’m actually subtly manipulating you. See, you were acting like there’s no way to live rurally but to use cars, so I explained that people can live in rural areas without cars in a way you can’t argue with. But the trick is, I lowballed you to set your expectations low. Now I can explain that the United States was basically built by railroads, and that trains are faster than donkeys. Furthermore, rail technology has advanced massively in the last 100 years, to the point that you genuinely could live rurally without a car and still enjoy those urban conveniences you love, like out of season fruit. It won’t be as convenient as the car, but I’m sure now you’ve realised it would still be a far better quality of life than has ever been possible for your ancestors. And now it’ll look really selfish if you say you’re still not satisfied with that and you want to poison the sky and kill people for even more convenience.
How do you need more than 90m² when living alone?? I live in a 60m² apartment and literally only use like 30-40m² and idk what I’d use the rest for.
I have a kitchen, a living room and two bedrooms. I do remote work so one of the bedrooms have a double purpose as guess room and office.
I would love to have at least, another room dedicated to storage. And second room so I could have a hobby/office room and a guess room separately.
Also I would love to have a garden.
I spent a lot of time at home, between remote work and hobbies, so I would like to have a more spacious living space. The more time you spent on a place the bigger it probably needs to be.
I’m basically living as a hermit but I guess we just have different needs.
Well they need a garage for their car, and since they’re driving to work and don’t get enough exercise they need a home gym
Gonna quote the study again:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension.”
Firstly- Are you so selfish that you refuse to change anything about your lifestyle in order to provide people with an absolute minimum standard of life - a standard that you have identified as abhorently poor by your standards?
Secondly- Change on your part may not even be required. Tax on production (i.e. corporations) would cover the majority of it, and the rerouting of production from useless things like casinos and yachts would cover the rest.
Finally- additional taxes and such would not even be required for many changes, just spending more efficiently. As an example- Very rural places all over the world have train and bus service. It’s a matter of choice that the US doesn’t, not a matter of practicality. We spend all of our money on highways instead, which are far more expensive per person per mile. Investing in rail, like Europe and China have done, provides far more use for far more people.
I said in other comment. I’m not in the US, I’m in europe we have one of the best train networks of the world. Public transport is funded by the government so is cheaper, even completely free in some cases.
People living in rural areas still chose cars while they have the free will to do so.
If as a species we cannot find the way to make that work there’s no incentive for us to keep trying. Luckily I’m sure it’s possible, that people say it’s not just because propaganda (as I said mostly because the voting split rural/urban). We have achieve harder things as a species. Surely we can have people in rural areas still using cars (electric cars for instance) without dooming humankind to extinction.
could you link us the dls standards and the study itself?
It’s a minimum to bring the impoverished up to. The paper makes no suggestion that the rest are to be brought down to that standard except by changing production practices.
You mad?
Yes, to support everyone on what our economy outputs today will involve the quality of life decreasing for a lot of people. And the economy will have to change, to build the things that people need but are currently unable to pay for. This is unsurprising.
Probably the living space is more to show this is feasible over it being the expected/desired solution. It would be very counterproductive to tear down good houses, but small apartments work well for “house single unhoused people”.
Rural transport is a rounding error compared to the number of private cars that could be converted with minimal fuss in cities.
Why would an export economy be a bad model? They literally have a surplus; all you need to do to fix it is… Make less?
I’m not mad. I will just not allow anyone to reduce my living standards because they don’t want to use a rubber.
A export model is not bad. I just said that’s unreasonable to think that all the world could follow that model. Because then “who would we export to?”. It’s like liberals thinking that the tax rate in a tax heaven are proof that every country could have those tax haven rates. Good for them, that the model worked, but for some country to export other country needs to import, that’s all. Chinese economic growth have been very linked to being the world factory. That’s great, but it could not be assumed that all the world could just do the same.
Who said anything about using a rubber? Or not? Let’s properly support the people that exist now.
And do you think that’s likely to happen any time soon in the real world?
It’s all well and good coming up with theories on paper but if your theories only work on paper, then don’t count them as solved.
Well a good first step for helping the people who exist now live decent lives would be to scrap your car and ban your meat.
Cool cool. So how have people taken this lifestyle advice so far? Have they been receptive to it? How many vegans who don’t drive, do you know? Because I only know one, me.
Forcing this behavioral change in people might be the only way… but I think that’s called fascism, no?
Hey ho, anything to save our awful species though. So, who do you have in mind as dictator in your region? I bet cars being confiscated and forced veganism is going to go down a treat with your neighbours.
No, fascism is an ideology based in the myth of palingenetic ultranationalism, characterised by 14 traits including such concepts as “machismo”, “the cult of action”, and “the enemy is strong and weak”.
Forming a vigilante mob to smash rich people’s stuff is perfectly compatible with anarchism. Voting to ban the sale of cars at the federal level is a more moderate option palatable to capitalist liberals, and also not fascism.
They’re not mad, they’re just a bad person. Don’t use empathy in argument with someone who has none.
Also, those numbers are like averages. Some places would have high rises to accommodate the sheer numbers of people, working or non-working.
But yeah, I’d tear down my own fucking home right meow if it was for equality on a massive scale.
Definitely use empathy on someone who has none. That’s how they practice.
Even seeing somebody else do it neurologically strengthens those circuits in the brain. This is the actual front line, the human brain, and saying not to USE EMPATHY ON PEOPLE WHO HAVE NONE is a command to retreat in the very moment it is your turn to act.
Fair and good points.
A bad person? For what? For not wanting to live in a tiny bedsit just so the world can accommodate more theoretical people that don’t exist and need not exist?
I agree that we can support everyone on earth if we change our social, economic, and political systems.
I also think it is good that voluntary population decline is already happening and seems likely to continue in many industrialized nations.
The design choices of people who make memes out of their political opinions are so random and funny to me sometimes. Like why is one of them a Russian gopnik? Why is the other one a blushing gamer femboy who paints his nails??
Engagement.
There was 3.7 billion people when I was born. Since I’m still alive we can guess that’s within a human lifetime.
Since I was born, 73% of the animals on Earth are gone. Our ecosystems are already crashed, and no one notices.
Remember COVID? When everyone stayed home and quit buying shit, laid low? Remember Venice seeing dolphins in the streets and Asians seeing mountains you couldn’t see before? Remember how quiet it was?
SOCIETY can provide, EARTH cannot. Y’all gonna have to die. But hey, between global warming and tanking birth rates fucking our economies in both holes, win, win! The contraction will be of Biblical proportions. I won’t live it, my kids will. Good luck kids!
I won’t live it, my kids will. Good luck kids!
One of the many reasons I didn’t have kids.
I don’t think really that a majority of the population is going to die. I do think significant numbers of deaths will happen around the equator at some point in the near future and spark a functionally unstoppable wave of immigration towards the earth’s poles. This will result in its own strife but again will only cause a small percentage of more of the population to die.
Thing’s will eventually stabilize as human civilization adapts and green energy and carbon capture take off. Most of the population will survive but almost everyone’s QoL will be NOTABLY worse by various conventional metrics. Though likely better in specific ways due to certain medical and automation advancements.
Expect birthrates to continue to drop globally however and the earth’s eco system will drastically change and become much less healthy. Most of existing humanity will cling to life though.
And what makes you think society is suddenly going to change (any moment now?) and your kids would have a better life, would just everyone keep having kids?🤔
I think the thing you have to ask yourself is “would i want to be born today” that will tell you whether you should have kids.
I mean i honestly am quite fine and i think there were always stupid people, but that doesn’t make me wanna have kids? I was also just curious about the argument for kids to save the economy?
Yeah but DLS would be a significant downgrade for many people, who already fight the suggestion to only eat meat six days a week tooth and nail.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6013539/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10537420/
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.est.3c03957/suppl_file/es3c03957_si_001.pdf
Things that count as DLS:
- 10 m² of personal living space + 20 m² for every 4 ppl as bathroom / kitchen
- 2100 kcal/day
- 1400 kWh/year, but this already includes public services (education/healthcare)
- 1 washing machine per 20 ppl
- 2.4 kg clothing / year
- wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
- 1 laptop per 4 people with a yearly power consumption of 62 kWh. (bizzarely they talk about an 800 MHz computer and seem to confuse HDD and RAM). If your gaming computer used 400 W you could use it for 150 hr/year.
- wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
It is for the good of all people that this is not the case for me…
The same paper addresses this directly. 86% of human beings live below this standard of living today.
I’m gonna need a lot more than 10 square meters of space if everyone is changing their shirts twice a week. Yuck.
On top of that, sharing 1 washing machine for 20 fucking people?
In what world do the people writing this live? Have they never lived in an apartment building with shared laundry? The machines are never kept clean because people are fucking animals.
What a stupidly naive study lmao.
deleted by creator
ITT: people who didn’t even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
You could double everything in this post too and that’s only 60% consumption.
- 20 m² of personal living space + 20 m² for every 2 ppl as bathroom / kitchen
- 4200 kcal/day
- 2800 kWh/year, but this already includes public services (education/healthcare)
- 1 washing machine per 10 ppl
- 2.4 kg clothing / 6 months
- wear tops for 1.5 days and bottoms for 7.5 days without washing
- 1 laptop per 2 people with a yearly power consumption of 62 kWh. (bizzarely they talk about an 800 MHz computer and seem to confuse HDD and RAM). If your gaming computer used 400 W you could use it for 300 hr/year.
That seems a lot more reasonable to me and we still come in under carrying capacity
Apart from power, washing bottoms, and laptops that is pretty close to what many people I know have. That certainly doesn’t seem outlandish.
Now who’s going to help with the wealth redistribution and logistics? I volunteer for helping with logistics. Anyone with pew pew experience want to try the wealth redistribution?
You could probably chop 1000 calories and handwash your bottoms more often
They live in a world where 700 million people are currently starving. Do you think you care about the washing machines if your children have nothing to eat?
That’s the heart of the issue, though, isn’t it? Most people do care about the state of their washing machines even as countless children have nothing to eat. People chastise their kids for not eating their vegetables by saying “kids are starving in Africa,” without doing anything to help any kids in Africa. People want more for themselves even while acknowledging that others have so much less. Studies like this assume that human selfishness is negligible, while it’s actually one of the largest variables that needs to be factored in. Most people don’t actually care about human suffering unless it’s happening to someone they personally know - they care much more about their washing machine.
The state of my washing machine doesn’t have to change if we just tax billionaires.
I am amazed by all the people that, when faced with having to give up some of the first-world luxury they are used to, flip completely in their head. It is the opposite of not-in-my-backyard: Don’t take from my backyard, pls.
Yes, I would rather have the current distribution continue, where hundreds of millions are literally starving, where there are people who would kill to live like this, where people are walking through the desert and taking dinghies over oceans for shit like this, just so I can have my amenities.
Absolutely wild. We’re so doomed.
Why are you amazed? Have you lived your whole life under a rock? People have always been like this, it’s never been hidden or even remotely pretended otherwise.
where hundreds of millions are literally starving, […] just so I can have my amenities.
Note that other people’s suffering is not always directly related to our lifestyle.
Explain to me how the sudanese war is caused by our consumption of meat?
Oh come on, that is a pretty flawed argument. “Tell me, how me doing this particular, isolated thing, is directly causing this complicated big thing, otherwise you are wrong”.
But we are not arguing that: We are arguing about, what if I had a magical button that would magically give everyone in the world access to the “decent living standards” and nothing more? Would it be ethical, would you push this button? Even if you are, right now, way above the line?
And to that I say, yes, if it was possible to do this, I believe it would be the right thing to do. And I believe that anyone arguing we should not press the button, because pushing this button is hurting their lifestyle, is arguing that billions of people deserve to live a much worse life for being in the wrong place so that we can have our lifestyle.
Of course I do not have such a button. That is not the point.
A simpler solution is to simply abolish wealth hoarding, impose sensible consumption limits (so, no cars or commercial plane travel, no meat, no 800 watt gaming rigs), and continue to encourage population decline. Boom, everyone is healthy, the air is clean, and you can keep your house.
I always wonder what happens if commercial air travel is banned. Cruise ships are obviously worse for the environment than planes, but are there ships that are fast enough to be feasible for people traveling for less than a month while actually being sustainable or are the americas and Australia just going to be effectively isolated from Eurasia and Africa?
It’s worth it if it’s the only way to survive, obviously, but I wonder what the effects would be. I’m a transatlantic immigrant, and I’d be willing to take a three month trip by ship to visit my family once a decade or so, but I can’t imagine most people wanting or being able to do that.
that’s how you start a civil war. lots of people will rebel against oppression
I wonder if they think the down votes make your statement less true.
voting by emotion
And that’s why our species will die in the muck after we drain this planet of everything it needs to support our lives
Humanity won’t develop altruistic tendencies at the last second, I mean ffs we haven’t yet in all of recorded history, so why in the our final 50 years of climate apocalypse and resource wars, would we?
We deserve to die off and we should, our species is terrible. All fantasies otherwise are illogical.
our species isn’t more or less terrible like any other species on this planet that was able to utilize ressources better. for example trees: when they came along the absolutely strangled the planet, until their waste product (oxygen) became so concentrated that todays humans would die of it. even their corpses littered the floor in meter thick layers! (that’s what todays coal is). I’m pretty sure that during this change biodiversity took a hard crash until life was able to adapt.
this continued until finally a bacterium developed the ability to degrade cellulose. i’m pretty sure the trees weren’t too happy about that one, it must have been a massacre.
the same story happens in every bottle of juice: bacteria grow inside, exhausting all available ressources, culminating in a mass dieoff with a few scavengers left over. It’s just a question if our intelligence allows us to take a different path or not.
And do you think humanity as a whole is intelligent, organised, and altruistic enough to willingly ‘take a different path’?
Most motherfuckers wouldn’t even wear masks during covid and yet you think they’re going to embrace this? Lmao.
I didn’t say how optimistic i am, just that we are not special in our interaction with the biosphere - not at all. The tragedy is that we are the first that have enough intellect to reflect about those facts, so we are the first that even have the possibility to escape the cycle. if not, we probably will be reduced to scavengers, just like the bacteria in the juice bottle.
Any animal that would fight against sensible restrictions like these, which seek to make the earth livable for their children and grandchildren, is rabid and should be extirpated.
we should kill people who use commercial airlines
What a wild take.
And leftists wonder why they have a hard time attracting others to their causes.
What the fuck.
Honest question, are you illiterate?
Define “extirpated” since you like to use it.
My problem isn’t with that half of your strawman. You seem to be having trouble pinpointing the target of my ire.
I’d argue that’s a downgrade for most people. I personally exceed all of those bullet points and the idea of coming close to most of them sounds like Hell to me. If it meant 8.5 billion people met those standards, I could make the sacrifice, but it would be awful.
Can you imagine if everyone you met was wearing a 3 days dirty shirt? Do other not sweat? And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
ITT: people who didn’t even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
“Averages are reduced by the relatively lower requirements of infants and children.”
And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
I’m a woman with a relatively large frame (~65kg/180cm) who used to do 14 hours of hard cardio a week. At that time, my recommendation was 2250, the first time in my life it had exceeded 2k. For smaller women, the recommendation is sometimes much lower. My stepsister is about 45kg and 155cm tall and her calculated daily calorie burn is like 1300. My ex boyfriend’s mom was told not to go over 1200, which I thought was the lower limit for humans generally- things are different when you’re a short, post-menopausal woman.
All that is to say, it’s probably an average of 2100 calories, spread between people who need on average 1400-1800 calories and those who need 2000-2400
That’s fair. My take was shallow and I was thinking more from personal experience. I’m ~200lbs and burn over 100 kcal every mile I run, and am a distance athlete. If I jog 6 miles or bike 20+, I have to replace that for proper recovery.
I shouldn’t say most people, but a large amount of people need more than 2100 kcal if they are active.
It’s honestly wild the difference in caloric requirements based on age and sex/gender (I don’t know how much is due to size/hormones, so I don’t know where trans people’s requirements would be) even before factoring in activity level, so it’s entirely reasonable not to realize the difference.
For trans people it depends.
If you’re just starting estrogen-oriented HRT and you’re at a weight considered ideal for your pre-HRT body, then it is helpful to actually gain a few kg of fat, together with weekly hours of intense activity (like running, bicycling, squatting and planks, hip thrusts) coupled with moderate activity (like walking half an hour everyday) Then fat redistribution will be more effectively towards a )( body shape, with breast growth improved during the first year(?). Progesterone may aid in the last as well. This guide may help.
For testosterone-oriented HRT, I’m less certain, though I assume the fat redistribution’s accent is more strongly on fat loss, and exercise for muscle growth. Lifting, bench presses, planking, and the like for \/ bodies. Don’t forget leg day! Here’s a good training scheme.
That said, everyone has their own goals; important imo is that one remains healthy. A good diet is balanced and lowly processed, containing plenty vegetables and some proteins and water. And have a rest day. A nice fist rule is 4 days of exercise anywhere in the week and a day or two of relative rest.
A body fat percent healthy for all people (binary and nonbinary) would be around 14-25%. If you can get pregnant (and seek to do so), it’s better to be a little higher in this range, because during pregnancy, your body will prioritise the embryonic/fetal needs more than yours.
I can attest that i definitely eat less than 2000 kcal per day on average. But:
I read a study (done by the CIA, ironically) a while ago that said sth like the average caloric intake for americans is like 3500 kcal/day, while for USSR people it is 3200 kcal/day, and concluded that people in the USSR eat healthier.
The study was done in the time of the USSR.
I’m gonna look for it now.
Edit: it’s here
Coming to that conclusion based purely on amount of calories is incredibly stupid
actually if you read the paper it goes into more detail than just calories
Well that is more a report than a study, but that is pretty interesting, saving that.
Though 3500 and 3200 seem absolutely fucking wild to me. I am a 184cm, 96kg (not fit anymore but used to work out 6 days a week for 2-3hrs) and if I eat more than 2200 per day not-active (I got used to weighing every gram of food during cuts) I gain weight. I find it hard to believe that 3500 and 3200 was average then as there were significantly less obese people then.
Yeah i still can’t really wrap my mind around it. I suspect it might be caused by the fact that there were a lot more manual blue-collar labour back then being done? But i’m not sure.
1400 kWh/year
that seems awfully low, considering that germany uses 37 000 kWh /year per person. But that already factors in things such as energy needed to produce your soda bottle, so it’s not “energy used inside your own house/apartment”.
And kill all the pets I assume.
Or at least feed the dogs plant based and phase out having cat as pets. IIRC it’s 20% of all livestock in the US that’s killed just for cats and dogs and about 70% of that 20% is for dogs on top of my head. Dog can live fine if not better on a well formulated plant based dog food. Just look at some of the reviews for Purina HA Vegetarian (it’s vegan btw) dog food. A lot of dog owners cured the gastro intestinal and lot of other problems their dogs had with it. I’m not affiliated. There are other well formulated plant based foods like AMI successfully used by many dog owners. Just seen a video on “The Dodo” of a dog who was at the verge of being put down because of weight loss till the veterinary got the idea the dog could have a meat allergy and advised said Purina food. The dog is now healthy and thriving again. That diet change on a global scale would take a huge burden off of the environment.
no livestock is slaughtered as cat food. pet food is a byproduct of human food production.
The catastrophic aspect to cats is the absolutely incomprehensible amounts of birds stray and outdoor cats kill every year (outdoor cats don’t even eat most of their kills often).
I love cats, but cat owners must begin to find ways to let their beloved furry friends experience the outdoors that doesn’t lead to ecocide. Cat leashes, large screened enclosures on a porch, whatever works.
The other question is: where are we living? It takes a lot more resources to live in Canada than it does to live in a warm climate to the south. Does that mean we all have to abandon Canada and crowd ourselves into the hot equatorial regions?
Otherwise those numbers seem like a huge downgrade for even working class Canadians. It goes to show you that Canada is a truly rich country and all but the least fortunate here have far more resources than someone living in the poorest countries in the world.
Yeah, that list sounds like literal prison. That’s a hard sell for a good chunk of people.
ITT: people who didn’t even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
Prison in a hot climate with no AC. No thanks!
They talk about it in the PDF. Basically its a weighted average. Some people live in colder climates and need more heating/clothes, others need less. It then averages out to those numbers.
So it’s not really giving everyone in the world an exactly equal share of resources. Not to mention there’s a natural component to inequality that’s independent of resources: location. A 10 m^2 per person shack is a lot more bearable on a beach in Southern California than it is in a desert or an insect-infested swamp.
Its not about giving people resources, merely estimating what it would take for everyone to meet DLS requirements if they live where they currently live.
I’m actually in favor of keeping a lifestyle that wastes a lot of resources simply for the point that it guarantees that in times of crises, of unexpected shortages of products, there will still be enough products going around to sustain us.
Their idea of ‘decent’ is disgusting.
ITT: people who didn’t even glance at the study.
Quoting from the study:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension…we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world’s population, are deprived of DLS.”
The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
Their idea of decent is a dream for a good chunk of the world population. We’re the privileged ones. People kill to live like us.
Define ‘decent living standards’.
The study does, in fact. Or actually, bare minimum living standards:
Quoting from the article:
“It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension.”
I think Maslow’s pyramid of needs would be a good starter. But let’s be more concrete.
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House (60 m2, +20 m2 per extra person in household), with electrification, and which can withstand severe weather events (heatwaves, blizzards, heavy rain and wind, etc.).
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Clean air and environment without fine dust, microplastics, PFAS, asbestos, etc.
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Clean, potable and heatable water available anytime
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Healthy and clean food free from animal suffering made available for all
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Everyday and affordable clothes available for all
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Bodily integrity: only the person themselves can decide over their own body, with the exception of vaccination (because everyone ought to be vaccinated!)
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Labour rights, such as automatic unionisation, workplace democracy and self-governance, no vertical hierarchy (so no CEO, overreaching holdings, trusts, etc). And ideally, a wageless gift economy system based on needs. If not that, then this: any company lacking one of the above/being too big, may never get bailed out.
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Protection of personal property, with private property becoming communal property instead.
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Encouragement of meeting people at sport, hobbies, reading (helps finding friendship)
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Bicycle and public transit infrastructure being widely available.
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Free and high-quality public education available for all
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Same with healthcare. No artificial limit mandating that there be max x amount of doctors or teachers.
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I’m sure they define that in the study if you read it
Well would you look at that, it sure does.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493
Recent empirical studies have established the minimum set of specific goods and services that are necessary for people to achieve decent-living standards (DLS), including nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc. This basket of goods and services has been developed through an extensive literature (e.g., Rao and Min, 2017, Rao et al., 2019) and is summarized in Table 1, following Millward-Hopkins (2022).
Looking at Table 1 that’s definitely acceptable. It skips a lot of things but that’s why they say 30% with spare room for luxuries.
Why can’t we just have fewer people too? Instead of finding ways to support 50 billion people, how about we have good birth control facilities, education, and economies not based on constant never ending growth? The reality is unending growth WILL end whether people like it or not- wouldn’t it be better to do it on our own terms rather than in a global catastrophe?
The best way to control population growth is to actually give them a high standard of living and education. One of the most consistent trends in a developing nation is it’s birth rate slowing down as people become more prosperous
Why can’t we just have fewer people too?
Won’t somebody think of the ECONOMY?
A lot of countries around the world are living a so called “underpopulation crisis” even though the population is still growing frighteningly fast. Population going down is only a problem for capitalism, and it’s going to doom us all
wouldn’t it be better to do it on our own terms rather than in a global catastrophe?
The catastrophy is inevitable, it’s just a question of whether any humans will survive.
For example CO2 has a delayed effect of ~40years (if I remember correctly). The effects of global warming are very much obvious now, but the yearly output hasn’t at any point dropped to those levels since.
Most of the world is far from replacement levels of population and the global trend is a decrease in fertility. Overall, we are at 2.4 kids per woman, the replacement level being estimated between 2.1 and 2.3 (depending how likely you think it is to die from wars). This data has been (mostly) decreasing since the 60s.
Why can’t we just have fewer people too? Instead of finding ways to support 50 billion people
line must go up (/s)
Does this assume instant, frictionless transportation of goods?
Transportation of goods is mostly a capitalist issue. You don’t need to cover a cucumber with plastic and ship it half way across the world, while selling the local ones to richer countries. The same goes for the vast majority of “goods”. Remove all of that greedy, superfluous shit, and you’re left with minimal shipping needs.
Not everyone has equally arable land.
Edit: Beyond that, have you talked to anyone performative driving one of those child-killing tall pickups? We are a people that lost their shit about straws, and the kind of changes being talked about here are just… [waves arms at all of this]
It’s wild that many people on Lemmy dont understand that many things, while completely and absolutely unnecessary, also bring a lot of joy to people.
Cracking a bottle of beaujolais alongside a dish made from Chinese and Korean ingredients while listening to South American vinyl on my Japanese speakers is part of the spice of life.
I get that I could live like a 12th century peasant, only consume things I grow myself and use clothing I can make by hand, but Jesus christ, that’s fucking insane.
Living isnt just about living, its about knowing and enjoying other cultures and the world itself. This study sound like they’d have you live in a cave with no ac while only eating flavorless locally sourced paste.
How boring and repulsive.
It’s wild how you went from shipping plastic wrapped cucumbers across the world while exporting local ones, to your bougie bs…
We get it, you’re a spoiled first worlder
Most of what the study is proposing would be a modest decrease in living standards in developed countries, for a drastic increase in living standards everywhere else. It’s not asking you to give up luxury, only for the rate of new luxury to decrease slightly as surplus is more evenly distributed.
I mean, I get that you don’t like how they talk on Lemmy about it, but the quote from the study even talks about how the surplus could be used for additional consumption and everything. Study is here
I think we all have different things we want in life and with such a big surplus there is room for most of us to regularly enjoy that. I do not believe that they argue that we will NEVER be able to enjoy different food. That is as you have mentioned not functional or good for people to work together and live together. Disregarding the many people with different cultures that have moved somewhere else.
I think the study more clearly argues that we can afford to take care of everyone on the world if we wanted to. That there is a viable way and that that way is not as you are implying necessarily a deprived space with tight margins. Because living is about more than slaving away like a 12th century peasant to accumulate more wealth for a king somewhere far off.
You know global trade would still exist, a lot of treats would be much more expensive though.
People have an unrealstic expectation of what that would imply. Although most of the typical suburban american lifestyle would be gone and no more labubu dubai chocolate macha crumble cookies.
Maybe you should read the paper and find out.
Why? I’m not the one using it to justify an argument.
Because it would be a more efficient way to understand their actual methodology than posting random guesses on a comment thread?
It’s not my job to make your point. You don’t get free labor.
It’s not my job to read papers for you. You don’t get free labor
So you didn’t read it either? Interesting.
Nope, guess you’re going to have to read it yourself to find out if they’re assuming instant, frictionless transport of goods.
And bunch of other sacrifices. One of the points was also about everyone living in a city close by. The study is not applicable to real life, it’s utopia scenario. One of the biggest problems isn’t even resources, but co2 production.
I dunno, I think it would be perfectly doable with good public transit.
Don’t have many big cities, but have mid-sized cities near-ish, and smaller towns near the mid-sized ones. A sort of ‘web’ of cities, if you will.
what you’re describing is called “multigrid” system.
you have grids of varying size, all overlapping each other.
examples:
notice the streets make some kind of “grid” on the landscape
Yes, exactly this was what I was thinking about.
now you also know the name :)
It’s awesome, thanks!
And honestly, I could see this sort of systems being handy - having raillines between the big and mid-sized cities, and bus services for the aforementioned + small cities and towns, and (electric) bicycles for the rest.
Technically, earth’s land area is big enough to sustain around 24 billion people. Consider this diagram:
It shows that we’re using around 50% of all habitable land for agriculture. Most of the land that we aren’t using is either high up in the mountains (where terrain isn’t flat and you can’t use heavy machinery) or in the tropical regions on Earth close to the equator (south america, central africa, indonesia), or in areas where it’s too cold for agriculture (sibiria, canada). so you can’t really use more agricultural land than we’re already using without cutting down the rainforest.
In the diagram it also says that we’re using only 23% of agricultural land for crops which produce 83% of all calories. If we used close to 100% of agricultural land for crops, it would produce approximately 320% of calories currently being produced, so yes, we could feed 3x the population this way.
However, it must be noted that there’s significant fluctuation in food production per km², for example due to volcanic eruptions. So it’s better to leave a certain buffer to the maximum amount of people you could feed in one year, because food shortages in another year would otherwise lead to bad famines.
Did you know 90% of Earth’s topsoil is at risk of depletion by 2050? It might throw a wrench into this perfect utopia being planned here.
what is soil erosion and why is it relevant? i’ve never heard of it
Top soil is what food grows in. Without top soil, we can’t grow food.
