So phuck but use a condom.

Since our economic systems are built to be a pyramid scheme it’ll hurt back for a generation or two but the ecological benefits will quickly outweigh the economic issues.

Humans are the most overabundant resource on the planet...if capitalism actually functioned, the system wouldn't incentivize creating more.

But the current economic system isn't even true capitalism...it's optimized wage enslavement paired with a caste system. Keeping labor pools well stocked depresses the value of replacing individual units...all they're figuring out now is how best to trim maintenance costs.

Support life extension, then both are happy.

It’s not just capitalism though, it’s innovation and the arts. Our development as a species is partly contingent on population, on more chances of finding that genius, more excess capacity that can be devoted to things not obviously profitable. I disagree with the open endedness of your statement, the rate of change.

Given

• we can’t keep growing
• we’re probably beyond sustainable capacity for this planet

I’ll agree with

• we need to slow and stop population growth
• shrinking population would be better

But disagree

• the rate of drop is important - we want to reduce harm, societal stress, conflict
• we want to plateau at some population well into the billions but less than today

Most importantly, fertility trends look like we’re heading for a fairly steep drop in population as the current generations age out and pass. We are heading toward disruption, societal stress, conflict.

It’s unclear how to stabilize the birth rate for that lower plateau, since we’re mature enough to not go back to oppressing women (I hope), but clearly we’re disincenting children and will quite likely regret that in a generation or two, for most developed countries. For the long term future of humanity and our society, we need to start making tweaks now, when they’re just tweaks. Start making it easier to have children. Start helping parents more. Start making it easier to grow up. Look after our future as a species rather than freeload off the personal choices of individuals.

I do compare it with our treatment of climate change. We failed to make small changes when small changes would have been sufficient. The longer we wait, the bigger, more disruptive, more expensive the changes will need to be. We’re bad at looking ahead and setting longe term priorities but need to get better fast

The word "for" does a lot of heavy lifting in there.

My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.

My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.

The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.

They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.

What do we do about the coming unemployment crisis?

If AI replaces a lot of workers, we'll have too many people in the country. There is no healthy way to rapidly decrease the number of people in the country. A good leader thinks ahead and people stop having kids before the unemployment crisis fully hits.

The so-called birthrate crisis is manufactured by morons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who clearly didn't pay attention in science class and didn't learn about logistic population growth https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logistic-population-growth and those who see a line going down and assume it will keep going down at the same rate forever.