[silicon2401]

> This is one of the reasons we need to be expanding the space for collective resources - it's not likely we can sustain a world where everyone on earth lives in a single family detached home in the suburbs with a car, private heated pool, private air conditioning etc that the author advocates for.

I'd rather push for population control. I don't want to live in a world where humans have to live like insects, crammed into giant hive cities.

> However, if we're a little more clever with how we allocate and share our resources, we can scale up standards of living in a sustainable way - urban transit and a fleet of automated electric taxis, community pools, zero energy building techniques and mixed developments, and so on. This just requires that we head back in the direction of sharing things (social democracy) and away from economic individualism (neoliberalism).

I'd rather use cleverness to sustain our quality of life with smaller populations. If we had your sci fi utopia, we could have a population of 1 million total humans, each living like a king. I don't understand why you want to use sci fi magic just to have everyone live like an ant in a box

[beaconstudios]

wow, an unironic Malthusian in the wild. Nobody wants you to eat the bugs and live in the pod, friend - the point is to give everybody the best possible standard of living with the resources we have at our disposal. We can attain a pretty great standard for everybody.

Not only is population control completely unnecessary, but it requires either mass murder or forced sterilisation. I would prefer that we not do either of those things.

As standards of living increase, population growth also naturally shrinks to even or below-even maintenance rates; so if you're worried about a future with 100 billion humans crammed into Hong Kong style bed cages, your best bet is to try to improve living standards around the world.

[silicon2401]

> We can attain a pretty great standard for everybody.

By whose definition? Living in a city is not a great quality of life for me. I've done it and hated it compared to living in a suburb.

> Not only is population control completely unnecessary, but it requires either mass murder or forced sterilisation. I would prefer that we not do either of those things.

Educated people have way fewer children than poor and uneducated people. Not to mention placing a cap on immigration, etc. Your argument is reductivist and leaves out a lot of valid ways to reduce populations.

[beaconstudios]

I don't live in a city either, but American suburbs are terrible. I can't imagine living somewhere where I can't nip to the shops 2 minutes down the road (walkable or drivable), where I have to drive long distances to get to the nearest economic hub because it was plonked down in the middle of nowhere, where the main road is basically a small highway. I want walkable human-friendly environments with a mix of high- and low-density accomodation to suit people's preferences.

Number of children is tied to economic status, not education - "poor and uneducated" should just be "poor". That's exactly what I said. A cap on immigration doesn't change the population - but with all your arguments put together, it certainly gives me a vibe of what you actually want.

[silicon2401]

> I can't imagine living somewhere where I can't nip to the shops 2 minutes down the road (walkable or drivable)

have you lived in the US? there are lots of different kinds of suburbs. my suburbs have shops

> I have to drive long distances to get to the nearest economic hub because it was plonked down in the middle of nowhere

long distances is relative so I can't comment here.

> I want walkable human-friendly environments with a mix of high- and low-density accomodation to suit people's preferences.

I want low-density accommodations. I want everybody to have acres of land and I want to go days without seeing other people.

> A cap on immigration doesn't change the population

Take Japan, or any other country with negative rate of change in population. Without immigrants, how do you imagine their population will change?

> it certainly gives me a vibe of what you actually want.

Why so cryptic? I'll tell you what I want so you don't make some weird assumptions. I want to live in a world where people have the option to live with acres and acres of land. I want to be a hermit so I never have to see other human beings unless I have to go into town to buy groceries. People who enjoy cities should go ahead and live there if they want, but in your hive world, there are no countrysides or suburbs left, just sprawling concrete scars on the landscape where people go to rooftop mini-parks and think they're experiencing nature

[beaconstudios]

> have you lived in the US? there are lots of different kinds of suburbs. my suburbs have shops

Well, good - that's not the type of suburb I was taking issue with, as I would hope was apparent.

> I want low-density accommodations. I want everybody to have acres of land and I want to go days without seeing other people.

That's not possible. If everybody were to live in that kind of isolation, nothing would get done.

> Take Japan, or any other country with negative rate of change in population. Without immigrants, how do you imagine their population will change?

That doesn't change the population level globally. It's just shifting people between borders.

> Why so cryptic?

Because its just an impression and people tend to take suggestions that they have eco-fascist inclinations pretty badly. Talking about population control and low-education immigrants isn't definitive but it certainly smells bad.

> I want to be a hermit so I never have to see other human beings unless I have to go into town to buy groceries

I'm not against that, if it can be done in such a way where everybody gets what they want. I'm only really against hording of resources to the detriment of others.

> but in your hive world, there are no countrysides or suburbs left, just sprawling concrete scars on the landscape where people go to rooftop mini-parks and think they're experiencing nature

Nice 40k reference, but you have a strange impression of what I've said. I want a world where people's personal preferences are maximised, which includes living arrangements; we just have to do it sustainably so the biosphere doesn't collapse. I love nature too, see - I live just on the edge of the countryside myself.

[silicon2401]

> Talking about population control and low-education immigrants isn't definitive but it certainly smells bad.

If you want unbounded human population growth and unbounded immigration, that smells pretty bad, just not to you.

> I'm not against that, if it can be done in such a way where everybody gets what they want. I'm only really against hording of resources to the detriment of others

Then this is the closest point we have to common ground. I don't want to force anyone to live in the countryside, and in fact I would rather nobody did so I could live there alone, but I want people to have the option to, just like you want people to have the option to live in cities. However there's a limit to how much livable space we have and that means we can't just keep expanding cities forever. We do differ though on our view of property, it seems. Where you seem to view resources as inherently collective, I see property as a human right and reject the premise that we should take from those with plenty just because others have little. I'm all for taxes though,

> we just have to do it sustainably so the biosphere doesn't collapse.

IMO, that inherently means keeping urban development and population growth contained. I think the evidence speaks for itself: just look at how many animal species have died, how many biospheres have already collapsed, how much pollution and other climate damage has been done, just in the past century, when many countries were still developing and the population was much smaller. Now you're suggesting that with the current population continuing to grow freely, and urban development continuing freely, we'll somehow manage to both ensure everyone can live according to their preferred lifestyle and preserve nature? Sorry, but I think that's fantastically utopian. At the end of the day there's nothing I can do about it, but I do wish we were heading a different direction.