And current levels of production are the very stressors that are eroding the planet’s carrying capacity. When you have so much land taken up for agriculture, which poisons with herbicides and kills anything that gets into the fields and pollutes the waters with fertilizers and eradicates any biodiversity with monocultures, where is the room for a healthy ecosystem?

Again - CONUS has less than 2% “untouched ecosystems”. This is largely to mostly thanks to agriculture. It should be 80% or more.

This. Truly sustainable practices require a considerably lower profit margin per acre, thereby forcing the parasitical middlemen to give farmers more without utterly hosing the consumer for all that they are worth.

And some overproduction is required to handle lean years. While you cannot keep fruit fresh for years, you can convert it into almost-analogous forms like flash-frozen in the field, within minutes of being picked, such that it can bridge the gap in lean years.

So there always will be some overproduction and some waste in the system, but not to the point where it needs to be intentionally made inedible so it cannot be given away, in order to create artificial scarcity to sustain market prices.

Biologist: “define what you mean by ‘fish’.”

ducksandruns sorrynotsorry

https://medium.com/illumination/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-fish-eca048dd6163

Except… the “eco-fascists” are also not wrong.

The healthy carrying capacity of a pre-modern civ Earth has been estimated at 2 Billion humans at a totally vegan diet. Bring a Western diet into the picture, and that drops to somewhere between 1B and 500M people.

I mean, yes, you can put every arable square meter of soil under agriculture and feed many more billions than exist. But this would utterly destroy the ecosystem within a few short years, causing a subsequent collapse of humanity to zero. A healthy ecological balance has 80+% wild areas - defined as anything more than 10km from any human access - and by comparison less than 2% of CONUS meets this definition.

And having overshot the planet’s carrying capacity by more than 4×, we have also caused a corresponding decline in that carrying capacity via ecosystem degradation, pollution, soil erosion and innumerable other stressors. If humanity is to see a significant collapse that includes tech collapse (fertilizer production, etc.), we will be exceedingly lucky to come out the far side with more than a few tens of millions of people planet-wide.

And for reference, before European colonization North America was likely to have had as many as 300M natives before Western diseases emptied the continent.

• No mention if it is EME-Free (no DRM playback possible)
• Settings and prefs and bookmarks sync is a strong want from me, I just want to do so self-hosted, and not via Mozilla’s servers.
• Lack of Windows releases means that the 78% cannot contribute/test, leaving only the 3% to do so. You can’t see significant adoption/testing/exposure by cutting off your legs just before a race.

Do we know that?

Ran across a paper years ago that did confirm this, but laid out various reasons why, including:

1. Many courses that employ debate/reports and the weight of proof, especially the humanities, requiring the student to even moderately master bullshit detection and critical thinking in order to pass those classes.
2. Higher education being much more of a “melting pot”, putting the student into direct, personal contact of people coming from a wide variety of other backgrounds that they would have normally never interacted with, forcing them to directly confront personal biases and assumptions.
3. STEM courses, in particular, being wholly dismissive of opinions and feelings in favour of facts and evidence, thereby setting up a way of interacting with, and evaluating reality, that tends to favour facts and evidence over feelings and emotions.

As the saying goes, your kid didn’t become a “dirty leftist/commie” because they were indoctrinated by their professors. They became one as a reaction to being exposed to the wider world and all of its variety.

To be liberal requires empathy. A deep understanding of others and their situations and the knowledge that your own personal needs dont always automatically outweigh others.

Not strictly necessarily. For me, it comes down to logic, reason, and evidence.

I’m neurodivergent. This means that among some mild cognitive superpowers, I also have some significant weaknesses, such as an inability to understand or even recognize the inner workings of others. Essentially, the first half of your second sentence, above. That simply isn’t in my wheelhouse, no matter how hard I try. It’s analogous to asking a blind person to pick out the colour red.

But I reach the same place - the second half of the second sentence - by using logic and reason and evidence (usually via science) to come to an understanding of what is correct and good and right and how the needs of others simply don’t restrict my own personal needs in any way, and so carry equally as much importance and have all the same ability to be fulfilled without conflict. And because some of these people are disadvantaged or oppressed, it is my duty as a fucking human being to have their back whenever I have a decent opportunity to do so.

This is because reality itself has a strong left-leaning bias, and intelligence makes you encounter that a lot more as you interact with reality.

Sure, there are highly intelligent right-wingers, but intelligence only gives you the cognitive tools to discover reality, it doesn’t force you to use them. Just because a person is intelligent doesn’t mean they can’t slide off into wharrderp fantasy land.

If you cut onions with a knife, sure. I use a Japanese mandolin called Benriner that is so sharp that I can get through several yellow onions before I start having issues.

Not in the least.

1. History speaks volumes about the successes of violent revolution in the face of a violent state. It has almost zero examples of successful peaceful revolution against a violent state. Peaceful change only occurs against those who have a conscience, who have empathy. The current American administration fails utterly at conscience and empathy.
2. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. Any member of ICE has willingly abrogated their right to be treated humanely. You don’t coddle a dog with rabies, you euthanize them. These people completely lack the mental faculties to exist cooperatively in polite society, and should be isolated in the same way we isolate serial killers and mass murderers.

At this point, there isn’t much left to use aside from political violence.

And if you look through the history of effective political change away from fascism and totalitarianism, it’s pretty much 0% peaceful protest and 100% violent revolution.

Let’s start with removing members of ICE from the gene pool. I advocate castration as a long-term option of eliminating any genetic influence of fascism on future generations (low IQ, genetic propensity for authoritarianism, genetic propensity for sociopathy, etc.), but others may be in favour of methods that can more permanently prevent these fascists from terrorizing existing citizens.

America stepped onto this path with Regan, this is just the inevitable swan song of a process that Democrats didn’t have the balls to stop.

I mean, pre-Regan America still had much that could have been improved, it wasn’t perfect. But it gave its citizens one of the most prosperous eras in human history for the working class.

Came here to say this. All three of the major desktop operating systems have built-in controls to ignore the closing of the lid. Being forced to keep the lid open to keep a laptop on is a rookie workaround.

And I see hierarchy as essential and required for anything beyond a small, isolated community of 50-200 people.

The difference being, through technology we can make despot-proof hierarchies that self-prune away those who hunger for power and influence.

For example, direct-participatory democracy is literally political communism, and totally eliminates all politicians. What remains is a network of functionaries and bureaucrats (invariably in meritocrally-elected boards of limited duration) whose sole employed purpose is to action the will of the populace in whatever ministry they occupy. There literally is no one single person in any position who can take any kind of control, and powerful checks and balances exist throughout the system to permit an effective and efficient but subservient state that can deal with issues at scales that small communities cannot.

The downside being that truly effective direct-participatory democracy requires three foundations to be in place:

1. A well-educated populace, that is drilled in bullshit detection and critical thinking from a very early age, so that it is very difficult to hoodwink any one significant part of the population. Likely under the Montessori style of education that has been shown to be wildly more effective than our current systems. Of course, such strong focus on effective education will also cause the extinction of conservatism, but oh well.
2. A strong social safety net (not even socialism, just close), such that pretty much all people are relieved from the immense stressors of poverty and economic inequality. This allows people to open up their headspace to focus on things other than their own daily struggles to survive. Such as the direction of society.
3. An actual separation of politics from capitalism, in that capitalism is no longer able to affect politics in any way. Powerful laws that outlaw the influence of money and other benefits to any bureaucrats in any position.

Once these three are solidly in place, direct participatory democracy can be implemented, and it is only after it has been, that communism has any chance of surviving.

Real communism has a massive flaw in that it is too idealistic and fails to account for human corruption and the pursuit of power. Especially since communism is all about equalizing power among the people. Which is also how it has always been co-opted and destroyed from within shortly after it has been implemented.

This is why I fight against calling any current country “communist”, because those countries so severely violate everything that makes a state communist. These are authoritarian kleptocracies, nothing more. They use “communism” as a thin veneer of legitimacy over a fetid, rotting carcass of dictatorship that violently oppresses the people.

Which is why these were never communist states, any more than North Korea is democratic, or the old East Germany was a republic.

Just because these states wore the word “communism” like a thin veneer of legitimacy, does not a communist state make.

Communism can very much be decentralized, and in fact a correct implementation tends to be exactly that.

Because that’s where “communism” the term comes from - community, communal, etc…

I could get behind that.

But wealth is power, and power does not corrupt so much as it attracts the corruptible. You would need to work with all manner of sociopaths and malignant narcissists. And these are people who have the least justification for existing in a polite society.

Plus, they would also continue to be parasites on civilization, and continue to pathologically hoard more wealth than they could possibly spend in a million lifetimes.

Honestly, a guillotine is a lot simpler and a lot faster. Take out the top 0.01% of civilization, and the remaining members of the Parasite Class will not fight when you implement 99% top-tier tax rates, close all of the high-wealth loopholes, and build proper social frameworks that benefit everyone.

And this starts with the political system, with a high-tech direct-participation democracy which eliminates all politicians in favour of letting everyone vote on all issues. This requires a foundation with a population that is well educated in critical thinking and bullshit detection (which would destroy all conservatism in the first place), and an economic system (even modified capitalism) that meets everyone’s needs so everyone would have the headspace to deal with societal questions without being forced to always focus on economic survival. Without this political framework, socialism/communism of any form would continue to be corrupted and co-opted by strongmen and tyrants.

Because when you look at any attempt to implement communism in the past, it never survived beyond a few months to maybe a year or so. Sure, Russia had its revolution in 1917, but by 1918 Russian communism was effectively dead; taken over by an authoritarian kleptocracy no different than a feudal system.

Eternally youthful but mortal life.

I don’t mind dying. Death is what makes life have meaning. Let me live long enough and at some point I would be eager to wrap up my concerns and shuffle off this mortal coil.

But I would prefer to die on my own terms, at a time of my own choosing, and in the meantime exist with all the physical and mental vigour of someone between the ages of 25 and 45.

And the key is not being immortal, as I would not want to always survive grievous injuries. I would want to be mortal on purpose – if an accident would kill a normal human despite immediate medical attention of the highest modern quality, I would want to die just the same. I would not want to continue existing as bloody paste paining the interior hull of an airliner that smacked into a mountain.

But barring accidents, I would love to loiter and observe the next few centuries in great health and youthful vigour. Doing what, I don’t know. That’s for the future to determine. But it would be interesting.

And that’s why we call them the Parasite Class.

Because no-one accumulates that much wealth without parasitizing off of the working class.