Property costs money to maintain. And it can only earn as much as someone is willing to pay for it, so if everyone’s poor they won’t pay enough rent to make up for the holding cost.

But they might be able to hope for the selling price in the future to be worth a lot, right? Unless it looks like they have to lock up their money in that investment, doing nothing, for a decade or more while other investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) do much better.

Investing in real estate is tricky, especially at scale. A mistake can cost a huge percentage of the investment, if not wiping out the investment on specific properties.

Or the economy crashes to the point where prices drop and the fed lowers interest rates to try to stimulate the economy, but the economy is so bad that you don’t have a job to be able to qualify for a loan.

In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the “therm,” which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.

Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied “per hour” when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.

Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.

By cherry picking a few Republican priorities designed to spite big tech and totally ignoring the big enforcement efforts that the Biden administration has pursued through the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division, in both tech and non-tech industries.

The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.

It’s not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It’s actively saying “this party is better than that party.” And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.

And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.

These fuckers act like they’ve never heard of Lina Khan. Let’s see if Republicans try to replace her with someone with a stronger track record. Or, if they’re so serious about tech competition maybe they’ll get on board with net neutrality.

And look, I actually like Gail Slater (the Trump nominee that kicked off this thread). She’s got some bona fides, and I welcome Republicans taking antitrust more seriously, and rolling back the damage done by Robert Bork and his adherents (including and probably most significantly Ronald Reagan).

But to pretend that Democrats are less serious about antitrust than Republicans ignores the huge moves that the Biden administration have made in this area, including outside of big tech.

when he emigrated to New York

New York City?!?

Way too many birds.

But also I need to know about the maids a milking, the ladies dancing, the lords a leaping, pipers piping, and the drummers drumming. Like, this is a performance where the humans get paid and get to go home afterward, and not like a slave trade situation, right?

I’m saying that you can reduce birthrates a lot and it won’t make much of a difference, because you can’t go below zero and the rich/high consumption countries are already low.

If your goal is to reduce net consumption, then reduce consumption (or replenish consumed resources through increased production or restoration/replenishment of what is consumed). Preventing births itself won’t meaningfully move the needle.

I’d rather focus on raising up the lowest into a tier of stability

What you’re describing, then, has nothing to do with birth rates. That’s what I’m saying in this thread: reduced birth rates won’t fix the problem of runaway consumption and emerging scarcity.

You’re talking about the bottom 90% of the world and I’m saying that they don’t consume as much as the top 10%, so I’m focusing mainly on the top 10%. If we’re going to discuss resource consumption, the people we talk about should be weighted by the resources they consume. And by that metric, the global rich consume much more, and have fewer children, than the global poor. Therefore, it’s easy to point out that reducing birth rates won’t actually do much to reduce consumption, because the people who have kids aren’t doing much of the consuming.

The jet fuel is just an example of that general correlation, and one of several mechanisms why the childless tend to consume much more. You can argue “oh but all else being equal more mouths equals more resources” but I’m saying that all else isn’t even close to equal, so you should engage with the patterns as they actually exist in the world rather than a hypothetical where everyone is equal.

Who the fuck can afford that?

The fact that you struggle to imagine that these people exist in large quantities tells me that you haven’t actually fully understood the power distribution of who is consuming how much.

On CO2 emissions, the top 10% emit about 48% of the CO2. The top 10% of Americans (where the cutoff is about $135k) produce about 55 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year, and they have low birth rates.

people with kids travel by plane too

Yes, but paradoxically having more children makes households consume fewer passenger miles at any given budget, because traveling with children is slow and less enjoyable, and their tickets are just as expensive. So the DINK couple with the $200k budget can fly for vacations and even weekend getaways once every few months (4-8 times per year), but after having kids might only fly on one trip per year. Even with two kids, doubling the number of people in their household, they might be looking at half the passenger miles by taking 1/4 as many trips.

And if eating all the meat in the world and throwing food in the trash and using disposable diapers doesn’t compare at all to the consumption involved in traveling out of town by plane, then adding up all the day-to-day stuff the family is doing with kids won’t compare to the jet setting couple with the same budget.

Throw in the fact that the people who have the $200k+ budgets are less likely to have kids, and you have the correlation where consumption is negatively correlated with fertility/household size.

Look at how fast those things go through diapers, and tell me the single couple is throwing that much trash away every week.

Are you counting the trash generated by the fact that the DINK couple can afford to go out to eat dinner at restaurants 5 times a week, and travel by plane 4-5 times per year?

You’re thinking about human resource consumption as if it’s a bell curve, where most are within an order of magnitude as everyone else.

But that’s not the case. The wealthy consume literally thousands of times more than the poor, and income/wealth is negatively correlated with fertility, so it can be the case that a single childless millionaire consumes more resources than a dozen 4-person households.

So when comparing the countries where the birth rates have actually fallen below replacement, and where their populations are on the cusp of shrinking, you’ll see that as they have fewer children their consumption still goes up exponentially even when their population doesn’t.

Taking away scarcity by making fewer people compete for those resources doesn’t actually change the aggregate amount of resources consumed. People are perfectly capable of increasing their demand several orders of magnitude if there’s less competition snatching up those resources first.

That’s my point. The correlation already runs the other way. As those countries start to see shrinking populations, they’ll also continue to consume greater amounts per capita, offsetting the population decrease.

China and South Korea are starting to shrink. Do we really believe that their pollution and resource consumption are going to go down in the next 10 years?

And it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking causation in one direction or another, or a spurious correlation with some other confounding factors. The fact is, the highest consumption populations tend to have the lowest birth rates, and vice versa, so why would we expect dwindling births to reduce consumption?

What if I told you that knowledge can be passed on to people who aren’t your biological descendants?

Humans consume resources, with less humans around there will be more resources for each humans and they will collectively consume less resources in total.

This is where you get it wrong, because you haven’t actually thought about how much more one human can consume compared to another, and the actual lived reality that households with children tend to consume less than childless households.

We’re not living subsistence lifestyles. There are many of us who travel for leisure by airplane, waste more food than is necessary to keep a person fed, throw away or consume more physical goods or energy than we need, create way more pollution, etc.

Rich societies tend to have fewer kids and consume way more resources and emit more pollution. The billions of people in Asia contribute less to our pollution than the comparably smaller population of Western Europe and North America. The relationship between population and environmental impact is broken because one rich Westerner can consume more than literally ten thousand poor Asians.

Michael Scott : I am a victim of a hate crime. Stanley knows what I’m talking about.

Stanley : That’s not what a hate crime is.

Michael Scott : Well, I hated it, a lot, okay.

The whole conversation from the vegan side has been that those proteins and other substances essential to cats are already commonly synthesized for things like animal feed or even human energy drinks. Your own source says it’s impossible without synthetic supplementation, but the deleted comments from that dumpster fire were specifically about synthetic supplementation.

I’m not an expert in this stuff but I can see when comments aren’t actually engaging with arguments from the other side, which is why I think that the vegans have the better argument in this whole saga.

Are you under the impression that the water is recycled back in, like in a closed loop?

I get how it works with wifi connections, and Bluetooth scanning (since that’s a peer to peer protocol that needs to broadcast its availability), and obviously the OS-level location services, but I’m still not seeing how seeing wifi beacons would reveal anything. For one, pretty much every mobile device OS now uses MAC randomization so that your wifi activity on one network can’t be correlated with another. And for another, I think the BSSID scanning protocol is listen only for client devices.

Happy to be proven wrong, and to learn more, but the article linked doesn’t seem to explain anything on this particular supposed threat.