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[mainiac]

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-09-23

[Frumple]

I think that leaving poverty is not overly wonderful, as you put it, on its own.

Then you've never experienced poverty, apparently, or anything close to it. Either that or you're just bugfuck insane, and not in anything approaching a good way. There's not really a third option, tbh.

Leaving poverty is goddamn amazing, just on its own. If you really can't stop yourself from making the perfect an enemy of the good, you can think of all the human resources that sort of shit would free up to deal with basically bloody anything else. Hint: When you're not in poverty conditions or in threat of poverty conditions, you suddenly find significantly more free time to do things like figure out how to fix other problems, or think for further out than next week when you run out of food and/or money. Even if a lot of it doesn't got to whatever the hell you want things fixated on it's still going to mean more things are in an absolute sense.

Oddly enough desperation is not very conducive to things like long term planning or research. One would think that's something that would be bloody obvious, but, well, apparently here you are.

[Max™]

^Trufax, I've been hungry, I've scrounged and stole for food, and know goddamn well that there are many who were worse off than I have ever been.

myself a malthusian, you a cornucopian

Malthus is objectively wrong about industrial and post-industrial societies.  You currently have a computer in front of you.  That is a fantastical amount of wealth by Malthusian standards.  Which is not all that bad about Malthus, after all he was a historian and he was correct about the data he looked at.

Malthus was a douche who saw people as little more than animals, incapable of doing much besides eating and screwing. Producing usable resources isn't a problem, transporting them isn't a problem, we're just stuck with the idea that hoarding them is a good thing, we need to get people to stop looking at life as a competition to get the most money and screw anyone you gotta step on to do it.

I think "cows are emitting greenhouse gasses" is a much more relevant point.

Well if someone really wanted to cut population, just go with my scary extrapolation: taxing the ability to breathe, since apparently we emit pollution all day.

They cannot include environmental degradation in their forecasts in a meaningful way because they, like the rest of us, are in the dark as to how bad climate change is going to be whether it's arrested or not. Every investment banker in the world has been hedging on the "it's an overblown threat" square for the past 40 years now, in spite of increasingly grim forecasts from every climate org in the world as we gained more and more recorded data instead of predictive data.

1976? Really? Come on man, I know rewriting the past is cool these days, but some of us were alive back then. You're going back to the Club of Rome era and acting like they were taken seriously right away? Check your facts brah.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-09-23

We're getting some Maraschino-tier cherry tonight boys, rev up your capture nets.

I think that leaving poverty is not overly wonderful, as you put it, on its own.

Then you've never experienced poverty, apparently, or anything close to it. Either that or you're just bugfuck insane, and not in anything approaching a good way. There's not really a third option, tbh.

You know, I had a good feeling when I wrote those words that someone would come along, delete all the context of my post, and then use it to maliciously declare me an insane idiot, but I thought to myself "Hey, Bay 12 are often reasonable people, maybe what I wrote will be taken in the spirit of its context instead of isolated and dissected in the tradition of 24-hour news casts".

And here we are.

Look. If you can't recognize that blundering out of starvation poverty into a socially-numb politically dysfunctional surveillance state while the whole world is on the cusp of giving up the ghost environmentally is an improvement, but definitely not in the spirit of what anti-poverty measures are about, I can't help you to understand that any more than what I have said.

There is a wider picture going on than just endemic poverty, a state most of the world is already not in. There is no progress bar that goes from 0 to 100% on fixing poverty, and once it's filled we've nixed the root of our sick society and repaired the world in the humanistic ideal that things like that are founded on.

1976? Really? Come on man, I know rewriting the past is cool these days, but some of us were alive back then. You're going back to the Club of Rome era and acting like they were taken seriously right away? Check your facts brah.

Something, something, men believing what their jobs demand they believe.

Hey, it was good enough for the President of the United States at the time, who was then demonized forevermore for trying to do things to a higher standard and replaced with the second coming of Supply-Side Jesus.

[misko27]

You know, I was going to say that technically this current discussion is amazingly off-topic vis-a-vis the intended role of this thread as Ameripol: The German Edition, and thus could use its own thread, but then I realized that the actual current title of this thread is amazingly apropos to the current invective-filled dialogue about...

not the vice-presidential debate, that's for sure.

[Max™]

Oh god was the VP debate tonight? I was supposed to be there to trigger the cattle prods when they went off topic!

Shit, sorry folks!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

No, this is good, you've spared whatever shreds of innocence and hope still live in the depths of your soul.

Also, they were never on topic (not hyperbole), so you would have shocked them both to death and brought us one step closer to President Jill Stein.

[RedKing]

No, this is good, you've spared whatever shreds of innocence and hope still live in the depths of your soul.

Also, they were never on topic (not hyperbole), so you would have shocked them both to death and brought us one step closer to President Jill Stein.

Who would probably claim that cattle prods cause cancer.

[MrRoboto75]

mere existence causes cancer

[SalmonGod]

Do you really think that international development organizations aren't accounting for environmental degradation in their forecasts?

...

Well, either they or environmental science are wrong.

The way I see it, we can keep growing through getting better at resource extraction through increasing adversity.  But there's still going to be a hard limit on the amount of resources that can be extracted at some point.  There are literally only so many fish in the ocean.  Where do economic/international development predictions take this into account? 

Now, I don't doubt that we can continue to improve infrastructure for better dispersion of resources and efficient use.  I absolutely believe we have the capability to provide for everybody, and if we're determined to stay our path to the bitter end, we can probably take it pretty far through a lot of shit. 

But we're still doing this through an economic system that tells us if we're not making more money selling fish this year than we did last year, then the sky is falling.  Same for everything that can be commodified, and anything that can't should make room for what can.  There are limitations to how far that can go.  To avoid self-destruction will inevitably require some fundamental re-structuring of how the economy values and motivates.

And I'd be surprised if you can't admit on some level that our current problems are a result of choosing to deny and push against these limitations.  It's pointless to argue with you on how long we can push against them.  As MSH said, predictions about that stuff are all over the place.  My question is why should we continue to deny and push and risk running into those limitations (when we can't even tell for sure if we've crossed them yet into a point of no return), instead of taking the inevitability that we will have to change more seriously?

[Max™]

I am so glad I didn't almost usher in the Steinpocalypse, I love the feeling of wifi sizzling my brainmeats.

Agreed about needing to change from "THERE IS NO PURPOSE BUT PROFIT" btw, it is the reason why Malthusian nonsense is even remotely possible, artificial scarcity is thankfully not true scarcity.

[Rolepgeek]

Try anybody who had to read Peter Diamandis' Abundance and thought "this changes everything!", I'm sure we've got a few around here. Rolepgeek has said that the primary goal for the 21st century is literally inventing immortality, so, you know.

No no no

That's my primary goal this century

Next century is learning every language spoken by more than 200,000 people

[Rolan7]

Kaine was almost embarrassingly aggressive and honestly pretty rude, but maybe that was the right tack.  Like one of the spin-room people pointed out, Pence didn't really defend Trump from Kaine's attacks.  Something like...  "Kaine was fighting for Clinton 2016, Pence was fighting for himself 2020".

I did really appreciate Kaine's stance on religious freedom, though, something it turns out Pence is a major proponent against.  Lovely.  I probably should have recognized him...

[Frumple]

Look. If you can't recognize that blundering out of starvation poverty into a socially-numb politically dysfunctional surveillance state while the whole world is on the cusp of giving up the ghost environmentally is an improvement, but definitely not in the spirit of what anti-poverty measures are about, I can't help you to understand that any more than what I have said.

And if you can't recognize that that improvement is still a bloody tremendous one, please refer to statement you claimed was stripping context. Whatever "spirit" you're reading into the measures can get buggered, frankly. Gains are gains, and large ones are large ones. That's it, as you said. That is it, and "it" is not "not overly wonderful". It's not a silver bullet but it's a damn good volley of shots to add to the metaphorical bullets flying.

There is a wider picture going on than just endemic poverty, a state most of the world is already not in. There is no progress bar that goes from 0 to 100% on fixing poverty, and once it's filled we've nixed the root of our sick society and repaired the world in the humanistic ideal that things like that are founded on.

No shit, which is why I didn't note a single thing implying it. There's more than one wider picture, but the only ones that endemic poverty anywhere helps anyone are ones being sought by madmen. Getting poverty as out of the way as possible is, again, a bloody coup -- for any of us, for all of us. It won't save the world on its own by any means, but it's not improvement to be downplayed.

[penguinofhonor]

.