SophisticatedHillbilly
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User ID: 1964
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
We are nowhere near constraints on space right now
No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people. Kowloon Walled City is the constraint on space. I don't want that.
The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse.
Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.
If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen.
The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement. This is part of why labor value has declined so precipitously. A farmer today can produce many multiples of the amount of food of one 80 years ago, with fewer people working to make that happen. Most of our economy is either providing service tasks (the demand of which obviously falls proportionally to the population) or performing largely pointless clerical tasks. You could achieve the same real output with far fewer people, and likely much higher on a production-per-capita ratio (which is the measure that actually matters).
Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people
I expect this is likely true for some comparatively small amount of time. Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare. Sucks for those that didn't have kids, sure. They made bad choices and can pay for them.
Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe.
80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.
And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.
The disuse of things currently in existence would have an infinitesimally small impact on the amounts of garbage compared to that produced by an extra ~650 million Americans.
People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.
No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.
But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?
Absolutely not. I will continue to tell people I care about that they should raise a family, I just don't know why I would want to increase the birthrate among the population at large in the meantime. The ideal scenario as far as I'm concerned is "literally no one but me and my family and friends has kids," but that's obviously not realistic.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
My main issue with this line of thought is that we aren't running out of people, and reducing the population by 75% or more seems positively wonderful. The US was plenty capable of a very rich and successful society with far fewer people than today.
Why would we want more? Do you want 1.2 billion people in the US, with the accompanying congestion, resource usage, and garbage? Why is 330 million the magic number? Surely 75 million is sufficient?
Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Abortion bans are mostly worthless without contraception bans, as least as far as impact-on-tfr goes
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Banning women from the workforce makes such wages possible, because it more than doubles the labor bargaining power of men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Isn't this point basically just "yes you should be able to have contrarian views, but only when they're completely ignorable and useless." If the Opposition can't actually do anything, then there's really no point in having them. I understand if you just think the Anti-AI position is dumb, but your argument seems like a general argument against opposition.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
Yes, and it is the responsibility of the systems established by society to make sure nothing is done in response to such tantrums. It's fine if they sue, as long as they lose and have to pay the court costs.
SophisticatedHillbilly
7mo ago
I love this poem. Any more you'd like to share?
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
For additional evidence for the signature farming: the existence of companies like Fieldworks, or the fact that you can find the job "Political Canvasser" on job search engines and it pays $25/hour. Not a lot of places for that money to come from but PACs.
SophisticatedHillbilly
8mo ago
It seems like traits like the ones mentioned should be selected for within a mere couple of generations though. If the slightly-too-neurotic and slightly-unhorny women aren't having children, then the problem is self-solving. Seems like a waste of resources to gene-engineer away a problem that is on its way out.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
🙄 🤓.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
And Gold was slapped down pretty hard in the 60-70s, and God was dead by the 90's. That leaves conquest, which we've all decided is illegal for whatever reason. We need a new combo, and "Cash, Grass, and Ass" doesn't seem to be cutting it.
SophisticatedHillbilly
9mo ago
This is one of those "you don't hate journalists enough, you think you do but you don't" moments for me honestly. I sometimes forget that I have to retroactively apply my hate for journalism into the past, and this is a good reminder. Journalism as a whole really never was much better, it was just harder to see how bad they were. This is regarding the 1992 article of course.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
Yes, but only from my own personal exposure. No writings on it would have been convincing to me.
Me and groups of up to 6 people all experiencing the same things, both together and separately, convinced me.
I am content for such things to remain not well understood, however.
Not trans, but my own take on it from talking to trans and not-trans-but-considered-it people:
One of the most common precursors to people going trans is an inability to mesh with one's own gender in social settings, especially in group settings. The guy who can't handle male social dynamics and ends up bullied or simply alone. The girl who can't wrap her head around female social games and thus is effectively exiled from female social contact.
I think of one moderately autistic woman I know who struggles very hard with this. Her natural responses in social situations lead her to being pretty inevitably hated by groups of women after enough exposure. This bleeds over into work, and has major negative professional impacts.
When interacting with men, on the other hand, she gets along great. It's not a sexual thing either, just that when she gives direct, blunt responses it's appreciated instead of hated.
I suspect this is why it correlates so strongly with autism. They struggle to fulfill the convoluted and difficult rules of intra-gender social interaction and find the (much looser) rules of cross-gender interaction more welcoming. They then falsely think this means they'd be better at intra-gender interaction as the opposite gender, rather than that they're simply benefiting from easier rules
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
From my experience living in Miami: All other ethnic groups in that Latin American exclave of a city think of Cubans as corrupt, selfish, and insular. The same way /pol/ jokes about certain races every time there is violent crime, Miami jokes about Cubans whenever there is white collar crime or corruption in the city government. A native Miamian once put it as "dude they're our Jews."
Rs don't complain about them because they vote R and are staunchly anti-socialist.
As an aside, it was wild to experience the levels of racism in Miami first-hand. In no other major city in America can someone shout the N-word at an event full of white people and get laughs and applause. That doesn't even touch on the intense inter-hispanic racism
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
I remember most of my memories in the same way that I remember that I remember the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. My memories are simply facts that I know, same as any other information.
This has the benefit that my memories have little emotional impact. The primary drawback seems to be that my memories have little emotional impact.
I will say that while my memory is quite good, my voluntary recall is very bad. If anything comes up that is even a few steps removed from being related to a memory, then that memory will come to mind, but if it doesn't, I have no way of actively thinking of memories in general easily.
I have a small handful of memories that play as videos, but they certainly aren't historically accurate videos.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
That means that anywhere from 5% to 30% of children born to completely average parents are equal to a member of the upper class. Given the massive population difference, it won't take long in any system with significant upward mobility and low downward mobility for the upper class to be heavily comprised of underperforming children-of-statistical-anomolies.
Bloodlines are great ways to discriminate, but only after multiple generations succeeding in a row. High social downward mobility is a must.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
Exactly. It's bad any way you slice it.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
I flatly disagree with this, though I'm sure data is hard to find.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
This is one of those traits where there's really massive variance, and it's likely both genetic and cultural. I have been in groups where nearly everyone had an extremely low baseline level of horniness as a teen (this includes people I am close enough to that I know they are not lying for social reasons) and within groups where everyone admits they were psychotically horny as teens.
These two types of people tend to self-sort pretty strongly from a young age, and they tend to understand each other poorly.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
That's perfectly reasonable from an individual perspective. I suppose my concern is more with the "layabout poet son of a hedge fund manager" who ends up being handed a sinecure sort of job, or worse, one of actual importance. If that person gets paid $200,000 a year to be worthless, they have already had a worse impact on society than almost any petty criminal. The impact is double if their lineage somehow gets them into a position they're less-than-capable in.
I am much more okay with garbage humans living garbage lives than with mediocre ones rising above their deserved station unfairly, if only because I believe that "who sits at the top" has immense downstream effects on basically everything.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
I don't entirely disagree with your point, but:
Regression to the mean is a major issue here. The children of elites frequently do not have great genes, as the elites who spawned them was simply a statistical anomaly. They get to keep their elite status, however.
What we lack for the meritocracy you describe is downward social mobility. I want every high-class idiot out of their positions, but at the moment the upper class is far too secure.
If we had that then I'd be mostly fine with the system yes.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
Yeah that first definition seems about what I was thinking. Thanks for the more detailed info.
SophisticatedHillbilly
10mo ago
It couldn't have been more then one or two thousand
My intuition was honestly the exact opposite, and I figured there'd be at least 10-20k of them. Basically every non-major-city settlement was centered around 1 or more plantations. Where in the north the town was the basic unit of settlement, in the south this was the plantation. It wasn't just the owners and slaves that lived on the plantations, it was a majority of the population. Seems you'd end up with a lot of plantations and plantation owners.
For what it’s worth, the Njal’s Saga post got me to actually read the Saga. By the time I had done so, the post was gone, though.
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