sigh

We wanted Star Trek, but we got Shadowrun.

It requires strict rationing. Everyone gets their fair share, and no one gets multiples of what other people get.

Thats the part that sucks. For super poor people this is great. For those of us already in a decent house, it would be a lot worse. I For one cant live in apartments, unless I was absolutely close to homeless.

Although, if we took the billionaires down a notch I bet a lot more people could also have houses.

The only problem is really consent and the propaganda against these goals. E.g. Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that. With Kite Power you already have unlimited energy.

And you could build a huge apartment block surrounded by nature, growing food directly around you and sharing infrastructure. Everyone could get a luxurious apartment with high ceilings and a killer view for everyone. If drastically less people need to commute to work, we wouldn't need to live in a city. You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.

The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time. To enjoy life, to study and learn for free, to raise your children in peace. Not consumerism. Let the masses produce VR games if they have too much free time.

I also disagree that it requires full on communism, a UBI or expanded bill of rights for the human necessities to reach a decent living standard (DLS) could work too. You'd just heavily regulate, ban industrial meat production, bad advertising to avoid consumerism etc.

or anything like a desktop PC

gulp

This a thousand times. The world is throwing away resources at an astounding rate while people are sick, homeless and starving because of numbers on digital ledgers. We need to drop the whole idea of money. It's served its purpose, run its course and has since turned into a life on this planet threatening perversion.

I bet you are basing your concept of the "usual" Westerner on your own experience, and you might be surprised at how the actual average person lives even in the "West".

But to answer your question, the article defines decent living standards as:

nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc.

Nutritious food is unavailable to an alarming number of Americans, transit is a mess and almost exclusively car-centered, healthcare and education are severely stratified along economic conditions, and almost everything on that list is a commodity. The USA has sanitation systems almost everywhere, but that's just because rich poop and poor poop all smells like poop. Wherever the wealthy can isolate their own sanitation, they do.

That's exactly what the article proposed:

'Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity, depending on our assumptions about distribution and technological deployment. "

So if you and everyone are willing to live on 30% less "money", worldwide poverty would be eliminated.

Jesus christ dude give it a rest.

Easterners have running water, they have cell phones, they make trash that goes to landfills, they also have A/C systems, they drive cars

This is a major flaw in science and basic economic comprehension. You could grow enough potatoes to feed the world enough calories with just the area of France. We could build huge apartment blocks surrounded by farmland and connected via tiny mono rails. We could build apartments and appliances and computers that last for a century. We could genetically engineer microalgae to taste like pancake butter. If we half the number of required workers, we'd save a mountain of resources on commute. We could design everything to be recyclable. Wind energy with Kites Power gives us near unlimited energy. Our footprint could be tiny but with the luxury of free time, learning, arts and living in a community and in nature.

We are nowhere near carrying capacity, we're just over because we waste so much on consumerism, planned obsolescence, unsustainable crops and artificial scarcity.

Our civilization is a fucking joke but science treats current conditions as if they were normal and immutable.

There's a source in the image. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

I saw this infographic posted a few days ago and it's a bit misleading. The percentages are based on biomass, not population. I also don't remember what the original source is, and it looks like it got cropped off the one you posted here. If you remember the source, could you link it?

Yes, and combined with the data presented by OP, we can readily see that this absolutely does not need to be the case.

Combine these again with food waste data and you will see that the majority of those animals will be slaughtered only for the products made from them to wind up being thrown away without ever having been used. We (capitalist owners of industry) demand the slaughter of these animals en masse knowing full well that most of what comes from the act won't sell simply because there is a slim chance that it might sell, and we (society as a whole which has the capability of governance) have failed to make it cost prohibitive to do so. It's fucking disgusting.

There is absolutely no justification, other than to chase the profit incentive which I do not consider valid, for our practices in animal husbandry that have led to the overpopulation of certain species.

So farm less cattle and get away from fossil fuels.

A replacement birthrate leads to a more stable society. The elderly who are unable to work and ill need to be cared for. If ever fewer young and able people have to take care of ever more elderly, it won’t have a good outcome. Not having children of your own is being a burden on society.

Not once have I cried for a dead fascist. But I'm sure there is one that will bring me to tears, gotta keep trying.

Providing people with high standard of living lowers birth rates. It's a well established effect, every single country with high standard of living has low birthrates. Providing people with sexual education and sexual health also lowers birth rates. Educated people that have easy access to birth control will have fewer children.

Provide people with education and things they need and overpopulation is an issue that fixes itself.

I think im the only one who agrees with you...we don't need this many people, and no one asks to be born. This doesn't mean we kill off people already here at all. Just stop feeling like kids are a requirement to live, or adopt.

Think about it. One person. Has 4 kids. Each kid wants their own house. Then each of those kids has kids that want their own house. None of that is sustainable. We wouldn't have to all live in 1 bedroom apartments if there were less people.

You can't just declare that there are too many people and then expect some other faceless masses to go do the dying somewhere else. If you actually want to lower birth rates, you need to invest in public education and healthcare, and you need to have a plan to care for the unbalanced number of elderly retirees.

It’s got most of the same issues as eugenics - yeah, it’d be nice if nobody had to suffer obvious and objective genetic diseases but it consistently immediately turns into “well but I think being a red head is a genetic disease”. You have to consider how a solution can be achieved to really weigh its benefit versus alternatives.

We can feed everybody by Luigi-ing a rounding error’s worth of billionaires. Or we can reduce global population by a factor of 10, which is almost certainly going to disproportionately favor rich white dudes, do nothing to that handful of sociopaths, and they’ll still burn the planet to the ground.

You need to read more anthropology studies on how society developed across hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that is "human nature" is that we will do what we view as best for our interests.

Those interests are entirely dependent upon the systems we live under. Change the overarching systems that dictate our lives and people's behavior will change with it.

If anything, the current society we live in has us far removed from our "natural" behavior and, instead, forces us to go against that nature in order to meet our needs under these oppressive and exploitative systems that have only existed for barely a fraction of humanity's existence.