"Suffering builds character". anarcho-primitivists, probably

Trains are a technology. Walkable city planning is a technology.

It also ignores that everything has a cost and how much corporations like to pretend that "no study proving bad stuff means there's no bad stuff" for brand new things that haven't existed long enough for bad stuff to show up.

in an ideal world (heh) – our primary choice would be pedestrian, bicycle, electric micromobility, public transit – electric cars reserved for accessibility (personal ownership) – gas cars reserved for remote sites (rent or checkout only, no personal or private ownership)

Honestly it would not be better if everyone switched to electric cars. Yes, we should prioritize new cars being electric, but building an electric car is worse than using an existing car all the way to the end of its lifecycle. And yes obviously public transport and infrastructure to promote pedestrians/cyclists is also ideal.

Renewables are technology.

Nah, we don't do both. Carbon capture projects are bullshit for the most part, see https://time.com/6264772/study-most-carbon-credits-are-bogus/ for example. Some are actually generating more carbon, not less overall. Instead, companies have been using this as a way to "buy" their target metrics, except they are buying offsets that don't really exist. And they use this to market their products as green/net zero products, which incentivizes even more consumption.

So overall this whole thing is most likely a net negative, as in we would be better without them. And honestly is not surprising at all, technology is not magic. It's just people want perfect solutions so we don't have to do anything and the problem goes away, so they keep falling for this bullshit. Case in point, your comment lol.

Carbon capture isn’t so we can continue to use fossil fuels.

But that is literally how it is used in the official plans and projections by governments and the UN. They nearly all plan with an increase of fossil fuel use and later (unrealistic) draw-down to reach "net zero" by the 2050ties or so.

Carbon capture isn’t so we can continue to use fossil fuels. It’s because once we get to 0 emissions we still need to draw down the carbon in the atmosphere

'Carbon capture' technology is stupid. Planting trees and not cutting down any more, that is the way to go. They capture carbon, lots of it. That 'technology' has worked for millions of years.

That’s what quantum computers are for. We can use parallel universes to eliminate lag in our bitcoin calculations. It’s like we’re stealing their money.

We live much more efficiently than we ever have, there aren't enough trees and wild game for us to live like the Neolithic - the non tech solution is mass genocide or total ecological destruction of the planet. Not really solutions.

it's just short for living standards that reduce corporate profits.

As someone without a car but with a child let me tell you, cars significantly reduce our living standard.

Most places we go I need to constantly tell my toddler not to walk too much to the left or right or run or slow down, I have to control her like a slave, or suppress her emerging wish for independence by holding her by the hand all the time, or even worse, put her in a stroller. Hell there are so many cars parked here (even on corners) that I often cannot leave the sidewalk safely with a stroller or cross the street safely (so that I would see a coming car or a coming car would see me).

I'd happily be less of a "germophobe" and have my kid run around with dirty hands, pick up dirt, etc. But car dirt is definitely not the "healthy dirt" so no, no dirt for you. Don't touch, don't play.

I want my child to grow up in a city that embraces her existence. I want her to feel like a welcomed member of society. But instead I have to keep telling her so many negative things, this is dangerous, don't go there, don't do this. She still loves being downtown and prefers this often to the playground or nature (which we try to encourage). She loves the tram and trains. But there are so many restrictions of free movement it breaks my heart.

And I am in a privileged position living in a German city. I can't even begin to imagine how devastating it would be in an even more car centric society.

Hey, why is making everyone use public transit instead of wastefully having everyone have their own private vehicle treated as "lowering living standards," huh?

My last job was 1 hour away by bus and 15 minutes by car.

In my book, losing 1.5 hours per day, five days a week, is a drop in living standards.

And also maybe stop forcing workers who can work at a computer at home to drive into work to maintain the capital value of your commercial real estate as you bark orders from the luxury resort tour that is your life.

Maybe tell the government to stop zoning land as either commercial or residential, so the market can solve the housing crisis naturally with all that artificially-undervalued real estate.

I know for a fact that real estate is not lacking in demand. If people can’t sell their commercial real estate it’s because it’s been artificially categorized as such too strictly.

How are those 2 different?

If you go through life believing that people are never intentionally doing harm, you are setting yourself up for nefarious characters. Instead, we should behave as it people are not intentionally doing harm (until inculpatory evidence is demonstrated) while reserving judgement on intentions.

Hello, I'm shilling a technology to solve reduced living standards problems. Hear my pitch:

Has this ever happened to you: you want to reduce pollution from your car, but it's so hard to get everywhere without it. Well have I got the solution for you! Introducing the bicycle. This revolutionary transportation method is powered by your own legs, and uses a similar effort to walking while going several times as fast. You can ride a bicycle to work, to the local grocer, or even to the doctor's office. And with my second technology, mixed use zoning, the distances you ride to get where you're going will be even shorter! Interested? Of course you are! If you want to participate, push for mixed use zoning at your local council meetings and buy a bicycle from your nearest retailer.

Stay tuned for further innovations, like our new invention, the "tram"!

I’ve not seen this?

do you really think the population would be allowed to reduce? GDP growth would never be allowed to slow down (or heaven forbid GDP shrink) and right now countries with low birth rates use immigration to fill that gap.

look at Canada: small birth rate, but aiming for 100 million population by 2100.

capitalism demands unsustainable growth

Birth rates in less developed countries are considerably higher than in developed countries.

I would argue that reduced meat can be either the result of a lower living standard or a higher one. This is the issue a lot of people on each side refuse to see, a higher standard of life can be more efficient with systems either technological or social which make it possible.

Really we need a blend of each, yes the techphobes are right we don't want to live in battery farms where only efficiency matters but also we don't want to live in the drudgery of a Neolithic existence. We need to identify and adopt systems that allow a good quality of life and enables diversity of thought and lifestyle, tech can make this possible but is unlikely to do it alone.

Yes it's difficult but we need social growth, that means people tying new things and demonstrating them to the world. We should be using our absurd luxury and wealth here in the developed nations to help develop solutions everyone can use to live a good life, instead of flexing fast cars and designer clothes we should be spreading knowledge of healthy food, useful educational and organizational tools, community project structures which enable people to work on shared goals and mutually beneficial platforms...

We have a very privileged platform in the world, we should use it to show that even the richest most well educated, traveled and socialised people prefer a low or no meat diet.

The idea that eliminating meat reduces your standard of living is a preconceived bias. It is not an accident you believe that. You are being manipulated. If you investigate you will find that people who do it report improvements in their standard of living, not reduction. Meat is simply a way of refining cheap, sustainable, healthy plants into scarce, expensive, toxic and addictive processed food, by abusing the bodies and minds of sentient creatures. It is literally killing you and everyone you know. The more meat you eat, the younger you die and the more diseases you experience. Nearly all the top ten killers of humans on Earth today, and especially in the Western world, is caused by an animal-based diet: heart disease, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, and more. Heart disease, diabetes, AND RECENTLY ALZHEIMER'S have all been reversed in massive clinical trials, by doing little more than eliminating toxic animal products from the diet.

The thing is they have solved an endless litany of problems and improved life for everyone on a radical scale thousands of times, but then people get born into the world snd never see those problems - have you ever even had to worry about milk souring let alone storing produce to last the winter? Have you ever even been attacked by a predator? That was a way of life for our ancestors before technology, the concept of clean drinking water didn't even come close to meaning the same thing but their version of it was a daily struggle which often went unmet regardless.

Go back in time before the industrial revolution and ask.a serf what their problems are, I bet.you nor I have ever faced a single one of them. It'd be fun to listen to the conversation you explaining that politicians are corrupt and avocados are expensive, he doesn't know what they are but he says he's thy literal property of a baron that doesn't even pretend to care what he thinks and mice got into his grainstore so some of his kids will starve this winter.

Tech had made your life significantly better and the coming wave of ai tools is going to make it much better again and allow things you never even imagined possible like localized food networks and community based industry, you'll use it all snd move on to complaining asteroid mining is over hyped or whatever comes next

Yeah, nuclear is temporary, and yes, nothing stays in place longer than a temporary solution, but it’s a known and can be built now rather than yet another 5-15 years of waiting for untried tech solutions.

I guess you could say nuclear power can be built "now". From a certain point of view.

The last nuclear reactor to go online in the United States took 14 years to build - from breaking ground in 2009 to going online in 2023 - at a cost of thirty billion dollars.

And that wasn't even a new nuclear power site, it was a additional reactor added on as an existing site, so planning and permitting and so on were significantly faster then a new nuclear power plant would be.

So yes, we could start the process of building a new nuclear reactor in the United States and commit 30 billion in taxpayer money to it. And after 20 to 30 years that reactor might come online.

Or we could commit 30 billion dollars to subsidizing wind and solar power, and get that power generation online in the next few years, at a significantly lower cost per kilowatt.

Afaik, Americans use about 20% of the world’s resources with about 4% of the population. China and India both do use a lot of resources, but they’re also a third of the world’s population