Current Events > The capitalists are not okay

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://twitter.com/BW/status/1399538145201426442?s=19

Won't someone think of the capitalist ideal of infinite expansion?
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How did an Onion article end up on business week?

or

Someone confused May 31st with April 1st.

Good, there are too many damn people here already.

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Lonestar2000 posted...

Good, there are too many damn people here already.

This
The "but there's so much open space still!" argument is ass clown territory, everyone who pays attention knows damn well we're consuming resources at a rate that can't possibly be sustained indefinitely

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The idea that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet is the unifying faith of industrial civilization. That it is nonsensical in the extreme, a deluded fantasy, doesn't appear to bother us.

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Shablagoo posted...

The idea that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet is the unifying faith of industrial civilization. That it is nonsensical in the extreme, a deluded fantasy, doesn't appear to bother us.

Is this what communist tell themselves when they come to power and the economy inevitably stops growing

Broseph_Stalin posted...

Is this what communist tell themselves when they come to power and the economy inevitably stops growing

And capitalists tell themselves that in the future we will eat and drink money and also use it to fuel our vehicles.

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Lonestar2000 posted...

Good, there are too many damn people here already.

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Capitalism is the worst system that isnt all the other ones: Winston Churchill.
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Man I dont know what I expected, but it definitely wasn't that article lmao

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what a stupid article

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Duncanwii posted...

Capitalism is the worst system that isnt all the other ones: Winston Churchill.

A guy who happens to have died long before the climate crisis, the plastic crisis, the water crisis, etc.

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Duncanwii posted...

Capitalism is the worst system that isnt all the other ones: Winston Churchill.

Why are you making up quotes

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Should have thought about that before you made rasing a family too expensive.

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That article has nothing to do with capitalism
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Giblet_Enjoyer posted...

A guy who happens to have died long before the climate crisis, the plastic crisis, the water crisis, etc.

things were literally worse when he was alive lmao

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London

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Giblet_Enjoyer posted...

A guy who happens to have died long before the climate crisis, the plastic crisis, the water crisis, etc.

I will never go Communist. You'll pry my games out of my cold dead hands.
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The article isn't as stupid as the tweet and beginning would lead you to believe.

"Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist
As world population growth slows, the never-conceived are the ultimate forgotten ones.

A couple decides to have one child instead of two, or none instead of one. This happens all over the world. Billions of children are never conceived. How real is the loss of a life that never began? Is there a right to exist? Is there an ideal size of the world population?

These related questions become more pressing as population growth slows. Chinas population is on track to peak before 2025. Population growth in the U.S. this year is likely to be the lowest in history except for one year, 1918.

The late University of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit wrestled with the question of the worlds ideal population in an influential 1984 book, Reasons and Persons. He didnt delve into the carrying capacity of the planet, and he stayed away from the issue of abortion, which occurs after conception and thus raises a different set of concerns.

In an abstract, theoretical way, the British thinker presented what he called the Repugnant Conclusion. Heres how he stated it: For any possible population of at least 10 billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.

Parfits utilitarian logic was that if each person on the planet is happier alive than deadeven if just barelythen the total amount of happiness in an extremely large population, lets say hundreds of billions, would be greater than the total happiness of a smaller population whose average happiness is greater. Its simple arithmetic. But its also kind of awful, which is why Parfit called it repugnant (i.e., extremely distasteful; unacceptable).

One way to escape the Repugnant Conclusion is to maximize average happiness instead of total happiness. But that turns out to lead to a different kind of awfulness, as explained in an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Gustaf Arrhenius, Jesper Ryberg, and Torbjorn Tannsjo. Maximizing average happiness would favor a world with one happy person over one with several billion slightly less happy people. It would also favor a world with several billion miserable people over a world with a single even more miserable person.

Another possible escape from the dilemma is to assert that some irreplaceable things are lost in the transition from a smallish, well-off population to a huge population of people just getting by. As Parfit put it, first Mozart goes away, then Haydn, etc., until all thats left is muzak and potatoes, no amount of which can compensate for the loss of Mozart. (He should have capitalized Muzak.) That seems convincing, but Parfit and others found holes in that concept, too.

The Repugnant Conclusion is a problem for all moral theories which hold that welfare at least matters when all other things are equal, not just utilitarians, Arrhenius et al. write. They say it has been surprisingly difficult to find a theory that avoids the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other equally counterintuitive conclusions.

Oxford philosopher Hilary Greaves wrote in 2017 in an article titled Population Axiology in the online journal Philosophy Compass that theres no way out of Parfits conundrum without surrendering one or another moral intuition, so ones solution to it appears to be a choice of which intuition one is least unwilling to give up.

The question of the ideal world population size may never be resolved by philosophers. But you dont have to be a philosopher to think about the lives that never happened."

Duncanwii posted...

I will never go Communist. You'll pry my games out of my cold dead hands.

You probably don't know what Communism actually is. Especially if your biggest fear is "muh games".

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RIP to all the Non-existent homies, sorry you never went through it

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Broseph_Stalin posted...

things were literally worse when he was alive lmao

You're funny.

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ButteryMales posted...

The article isn't as stupid as the tweet and beginning would lead you to believe.

yeah I was gonna say this too

still not a big fan of the articl but the tweet text, headline, and tagline are all very dumb and misleading while the article is mostly just sort of pointless. it feels like some random rambling that should be on a personal blog no one realizes exists, not a bloomberg article lol

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kirbymuncher posted...

still not a big fan of the articl but the tweet text, headline, and tagline are all very dumb and misleading while the article is mostly just sort of pointless. it feels like some random rambling that should be on a personal blog no one realizes exists, not a bloomberg article lol

I mean, it's still stupid, just a different kind of stupid
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