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Yeah but DLS would be a significant downgrade for many people, who already fight the suggestion to only eat meat six days a week tooth and nail.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6013539/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10537420/
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.est.3c03957/suppl_file/es3c03957_si_001.pdf
Things that count as DLS:
10 m² of personal living space + 20 m² for every 4 ppl as bathroom / kitchen
2100 kcal/day
1400 kWh/year, but this already includes public services (education/healthcare)
1 washing machine per 20 ppl
2.4 kg clothing / year
wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
1 laptop per 4 people with a yearly power consumption of 62 kWh. (bizzarely they talk about an 800 MHz computer and seem to confuse HDD and RAM). If your gaming computer used 400 W you could use it for 150 hr/year.
- I'm gonna need a lot more than 10 square meters of space if everyone is changing their shirts twice a week. Yuck.
  
  On top of that, sharing 1 washing machine for 20 fucking people?
  In what world do the people writing this live? Have they never lived in an apartment building with shared laundry? The machines are never kept clean because people are fucking animals.
  What a stupidly naive study lmao.
  
  They live in a world where 700 million people are currently starving. Do you think you care about the washing machines if your children have nothing to eat?
  
  That's the heart of the issue, though, isn't it? Most people do care about the state of their washing machines even as countless children have nothing to eat. People chastise their kids for not eating their vegetables by saying "kids are starving in Africa," without doing anything to help any kids in Africa. People want more for themselves even while acknowledging that others have so much less. Studies like this assume that human selfishness is negligible, while it's actually one of the largest variables that needs to be factored in. Most people don't actually care about human suffering unless it's happening to someone they personally know - they care much more about their washing machine.
  
  The state of my washing machine doesn't have to change if we just tax billionaires.
  
  You could double everything in this post too and that's only 60% consumption.
  20 m² of personal living space + 20 m² for every 2 ppl as bathroom / kitchen
  4200 kcal/day
  2800 kWh/year, but this already includes public services (education/healthcare)
  1 washing machine per 10 ppl
  2.4 kg clothing / 6 months
  wear tops for 1.5 days and bottoms for 7.5 days without washing
  1 laptop per 2 people with a yearly power consumption of 62 kWh. (bizzarely they talk about an 800 MHz computer and seem to confuse HDD and RAM). If your gaming computer used 400 W you could use it for 300 hr/year.
  That seems a lot more reasonable to me and we still come in under carrying capacity
  
  Apart from power, washing bottoms, and laptops that is pretty close to what many people I know have. That certainly doesn't seem outlandish.
  Now who's going to help with the wealth redistribution and logistics? I volunteer for helping with logistics. Anyone with pew pew experience want to try the wealth redistribution?
  
  You could probably chop 1000 calories and handwash your bottoms more often
  
  ITT: people who didn't even glance at the study.
  Quoting from the study:
  "It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension...we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world's population, are deprived of DLS."
  The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
- A simpler solution is to simply abolish wealth hoarding, impose sensible consumption limits (so, no cars or commercial plane travel, no meat, no 800 watt gaming rigs), and continue to encourage population decline. Boom, everyone is healthy, the air is clean, and you can keep your house.
  
  I always wonder what happens if commercial air travel is banned. Cruise ships are obviously worse for the environment than planes, but are there ships that are fast enough to be feasible for people traveling for less than a month while actually being sustainable or are the americas and Australia just going to be effectively isolated from Eurasia and Africa?
  It’s worth it if it’s the only way to survive, obviously, but I wonder what the effects would be. I’m a transatlantic immigrant, and I’d be willing to take a three month trip by ship to visit my family once a decade or so, but I can’t imagine most people wanting or being able to do that.
  
  that's how you start a civil war. lots of people will rebel against oppression
  
  And that's why our species will die in the muck after we drain this planet of everything it needs to support our lives
  
  Humanity won't develop altruistic tendencies at the last second, I mean ffs we haven't yet in all of recorded history, so why in the our final 50 years of climate apocalypse and resource wars, would we?
  We deserve to die off and we should, our species is terrible. All fantasies otherwise are illogical.
  
  our species isn't more or less terrible like any other species on this planet that was able to utilize ressources better. for example trees: when they came along the absolutely strangled the planet, until their waste product (oxygen) became so concentrated that todays humans would die of it. even their corpses littered the floor in meter thick layers! (that's what todays coal is). I'm pretty sure that during this change biodiversity took a hard crash until life was able to adapt.
  this continued until finally a bacterium developed the ability to degrade cellulose. i'm pretty sure the trees weren't too happy about that one, it must have been a massacre.
  the same story happens in every bottle of juice: bacteria grow inside, exhausting all available ressources, culminating in a mass dieoff with a few scavengers left over. It's just a question if our intelligence allows us to take a different path or not.
  
  And do you think humanity as a whole is intelligent, organised, and altruistic enough to willingly 'take a different path'?
  Most motherfuckers wouldn't even wear masks during covid and yet you think they're going to embrace this? Lmao.
  
  I didn't say how optimistic i am, just that we are not special in our interaction with the biosphere - not at all. The tragedy is that we are the first that have enough intellect to reflect about those facts, so we are the first that even have the possibility to escape the cycle. if not, we probably will be reduced to scavengers, just like the bacteria in the juice bottle.
  
  I wonder if they think the down votes make your statement less true.
  
  voting by emotion
  
  Any animal that would fight against sensible restrictions like these, which seek to make the earth livable for their children and grandchildren, is rabid and should be extirpated.
  
  we should kill people who use commercial airlines
  What a wild take.
  And leftists wonder why they have a hard time attracting others to their causes.
  What the fuck.
  
  Honest question, are you illiterate?
  
  Define "extirpated" since you like to use it.
  
  My problem isn’t with that half of your strawman. You seem to be having trouble pinpointing the target of my ire.
- I'd argue that's a downgrade for most people. I personally exceed all of those bullet points and the idea of coming close to most of them sounds like Hell to me. If it meant 8.5 billion people met those standards, I could make the sacrifice, but it would be awful.
  Can you imagine if everyone you met was wearing a 3 days dirty shirt? Do other not sweat? And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
  
  And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
  I’m a woman with a relatively large frame (~65kg/180cm) who used to do 14 hours of hard cardio a week. At that time, my recommendation was 2250, the first time in my life it had exceeded 2k. For smaller women, the recommendation is sometimes much lower. My stepsister is about 45kg and 155cm tall and her calculated daily calorie burn is like 1300. My ex boyfriend’s mom was told not to go over 1200, which I thought was the lower limit for humans generally- things are different when you’re a short, post-menopausal woman.
  All that is to say, it’s probably an average of 2100 calories, spread between people who need on average 1400-1800 calories and those who need 2000-2400
  
  That's fair. My take was shallow and I was thinking more from personal experience. I'm ~200lbs and burn over 100 kcal every mile I run, and am a distance athlete. If I jog 6 miles or bike 20+, I have to replace that for proper recovery.
  I shouldn't say most people, but a large amount of people need more than 2100 kcal if they are active.
  
  It’s honestly wild the difference in caloric requirements based on age and sex/gender (I don’t know how much is due to size/hormones, so I don’t know where trans people’s requirements would be) even before factoring in activity level, so it’s entirely reasonable not to realize the difference.
  
  For trans people it depends.
  If you're just starting estrogen-oriented HRT and you're at a weight considered ideal for your pre-HRT body, then it is helpful to actually gain a few kg of fat, together with weekly bursts of activity. Then fat redistribution will be more effectively towards a )( body shape, with breast growth improved.
  For testosterone-oriented HRT, I'm less certain, though I assume the same applies, though with the accent more on weight loss and exercise for muscle growth.
  That said, everyone has their own goals; important is that one remains healthy. A body fat percent healthy for all people (binary and nonbinary) would be around 14-25%. If you can get pregnant (and seek to do so), it's better to be a little higher in this range.
  
  I can attest that i definitely eat less than 2000 kcal per day on average. But:
  I read a study (done by the CIA, ironically) a while ago that said sth like the average caloric intake for americans is like 3500 kcal/day, while for USSR people it is 3200 kcal/day, and concluded that people in the USSR eat healthier.
  The study was done in the time of the USSR.
  I'm gonna look for it now.
  Edit: it's here
  
  Well that is more a report than a study, but that is pretty interesting, saving that.
  Though 3500 and 3200 seem absolutely fucking wild to me. I am a 184cm, 96kg (not fit anymore but used to work out 6 days a week for 2-3hrs) and if I eat more than 2200 per day not-active (I got used to weighing every gram of food during cuts) I gain weight. I find it hard to believe that 3500 and 3200 was average then as there were significantly less obese people then.
  
  Yeah i still can't really wrap my mind around it. I suspect it might be caused by the fact that there were a lot more manual blue-collar labour back then being done? But i'm not sure.
  
  Coming to that conclusion based purely on amount of calories is incredibly stupid
  
  actually if you read the paper it goes into more detail than just calories
  
  ITT: people who didn't even glance at the study.
  Quoting from the study:
  "It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension...we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world's population, are deprived of DLS."
  The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
  "Averages are reduced by the relatively lower requirements of infants and children."
- I am amazed by all the people that, when faced with having to give up some of the first-world luxury they are used to, flip completely in their head. It is the opposite of not-in-my-backyard: Don't take from my backyard, pls.
  Yes, I would rather have the current distribution continue, where hundreds of millions are literally starving, where there are people who would kill to live like this, where people are walking through the desert and taking dinghies over oceans for shit like this, just so I can have my amenities.
  Absolutely wild. We're so doomed.
  
  Why are you amazed? Have you lived your whole life under a rock? People have always been like this, it's never been hidden or even remotely pretended otherwise.
  
  where hundreds of millions are literally starving, [...] just so I can have my amenities.
  Note that other people's suffering is not always directly related to our lifestyle.
  Explain to me how the sudanese war is caused by our consumption of meat?
  
  Oh come on, that is a pretty flawed argument. "Tell me, how me doing this particular, isolated thing, is directly causing this complicated big thing, otherwise you are wrong".
  But we are not arguing that: We are arguing about, what if I had a magical button that would magically give everyone in the world access to the "decent living standards" and nothing more? Would it be ethical, would you push this button? Even if you are, right now, way above the line?
  And to that I say, yes, if it was possible to do this, I believe it would be the right thing to do. And I believe that anyone arguing we should not press the button, because pushing this button is hurting their lifestyle, is arguing that billions of people deserve to live a much worse life for being in the wrong place so that we can have our lifestyle.
  Of course I do not have such a button. That is not the point.
- 1400 kWh/year
  that seems awfully low, considering that germany uses 37 000 kWh /year per person. But that already factors in things such as energy needed to produce your soda bottle, so it's not "energy used inside your own house/apartment".
- The same paper addresses this directly. 86% of human beings live below this standard of living today.
- And kill all the pets I assume.
  
  Or at least feed the dogs plant based and phase out having cat as pets. IIRC it's 20% of all livestock in the US that's killed just for cats and dogs and about 70% of that 20% is for dogs on top of my head. Dog can live fine if not better on a well formulated plant based dog food. Just look at some of the reviews for Purina HA Vegetarian (it's vegan btw) dog food. A lot of dog owners cured the gastro intestinal and lot of other problems their dogs had with it. I'm not affiliated. There are other well formulated plant based foods like AMI successfully used by many dog owners. Just seen a video on "The Dodo" of a dog who was at the verge of being put down because of weight loss till the veterinary got the idea the dog could have a meat allergy and advised said Purina food. The dog is now healthy and thriving again. That diet change on a global scale would take a huge burden off of the environment.
  
  no livestock is slaughtered as cat food. pet food is a byproduct of human food production.
  
  The catastrophic aspect to cats is the absolutely incomprehensible amounts of birds stray and outdoor cats kill every year (outdoor cats don't even eat most of their kills often).
  I love cats, but cat owners must begin to find ways to let their beloved furry friends experience the outdoors that doesn't lead to ecocide. Cat leashes, large screened enclosures on a porch, whatever works.
- The other question is: where are we living? It takes a lot more resources to live in Canada than it does to live in a warm climate to the south. Does that mean we all have to abandon Canada and crowd ourselves into the hot equatorial regions?
  Otherwise those numbers seem like a huge downgrade for even working class Canadians. It goes to show you that Canada is a truly rich country and all but the least fortunate here have far more resources than someone living in the poorest countries in the world.
  
  Yeah, that list sounds like literal prison. That's a hard sell for a good chunk of people.
  
  Prison in a hot climate with no AC. No thanks!
  
  ITT: people who didn't even glance at the study.
  Quoting from the study:
  "It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension...we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world's population, are deprived of DLS."
  The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.
  
  They talk about it in the PDF. Basically its a weighted average. Some people live in colder climates and need more heating/clothes, others need less. It then averages out to those numbers.
  
  So it’s not really giving everyone in the world an exactly equal share of resources. Not to mention there’s a natural component to inequality that’s independent of resources: location. A 10 m^2 per person shack is a lot more bearable on a beach in Southern California than it is in a desert or an insect-infested swamp.
  
  Its not about giving people resources, merely estimating what it would take for everyone to meet DLS requirements if they live where they currently live.
- wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
  It is for the good of all people that this is not the case for me...
- I'm actually in favor of keeping a lifestyle that wastes a lot of resources simply for the point that it guarantees that in times of crises, of unexpected shortages of products, there will still be enough products going around to sustain us.
- Their idea of ‘decent’ is disgusting.
  
  Their idea of decent is a dream for a good chunk of the world population. We're the privileged ones. People kill to live like us.
  
  ITT: people who didn't even glance at the study.
  Quoting from the study:
  "It is important to understand that the DLS represents a minimum floor for decent living. It does not represent a an aspirational standard and certainly does not represent a ceiling. However, it is also a level of welfare not currently achieved by the vast majority of people. A new paper by Hoffman et al finds that 96.5 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries are deprived of at least one DLS dimension...we can conclude that 6.4 billion people, more than 80% of the world's population, are deprived of DLS."
  The authors are not suggesting that everyone be forced on DLS at gunpoint. They are suggesting an absolute bare minimum standard that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth do not yet even have. Quite obviously any excess production could and would be used to increase standard of living.

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