The Great Reset and The Man Behind the Curtain

[Bear Ribs]

No, don't shift it to silly rhetorical battles. It's not "they might have a sufficient mass and delta v budget". It's "if the technological-economical situation allows such colonies, then any government willing to pay for it *will* have sufficient mass and delta v budget". It will be just a matter of funding at that point.

I disagree. You have no way of knowing this, much less proving it. And it's not a silly rhetorical battle, you're shifting the goalposts like crazy.

Sure, you can argue that the defender's advantage in space will be considerable, much like in American Revolutionary War, but that won't help much when the colony in question is just few thousands of weirdos and the economic advantage of the founding country is measured in orders of magnitude.
In that analogy, just because the British Empire couldn't crush the rebellion of the 13 colonies, doesn't mean it couldn't crush a rebellion on the Pitcairn Islands.

The defender's advantage in space is immeasurable compared to a mere ocean. Given there's no stealth in space, they would literally know an invading force's exact makeup, size, and position weeks to months in advance. Merely throwing chunks of their mining tailings in the way could destroy an invading force or force it to waste so much Delta V dodging as to render any invasion a non-starter. Your presumption that a space colony could be dismissed as "a few thousands of weirdos" is also a heck of a presumption.

Yet. I'd like to inform you that the same applies to space resource extraction so far.
In fact sea colonization is often something that is used as a comparison for the engineering challenges and economics to space colonization, in which some factors are very similar, minus the launch costs\tyranny of rocket equation.

And similarly, sea colonization always seems to get struck down by The Powers That Be, not actual technical issues.

Republic of Minerva: Attacked and captured by Tonga military... twice.
Rose Island: Invaded by Italian government and blown up with explosives.
Principality of Sealand: Invaded by Germans and Dutch, the UK expanded its territorial waters around it.
MS Satoshi: Boarded and confiscated by Thai Navy
Project Atlantis: Okay this one actually had a mechanical failure, also a failure due to choosing to name their project after an island most famous for sinking.

The point being we haven't seen that it's a tech issue, we've seen that powerful monied interests don't want to allow it and maneuver against it.

How are those mutually exclusive?
When technology barely allows the endeavor to function at all (or as currently it is, technology isn't there, in which case no effort is needed at all), even tiny, token efforts from the powers of status quo are enough to derail it. When technology and economy allows colonies to get bigger and more economically powerful, then it takes a lot more effort from the founding powers to hold them, and the colonies may slip away if they are in crisis or have better things to do.

I didn't say mutually exclusive, I said you undermined your own position, and yes, you did so by pointing out how these projects keep failing to social manipulation, not actual technological barriers.

And the fact that colonies would take more effort if they get going is the point, that's why the founding powers don't want to form them or allow them a chance to slip away in a crisis and prefer robots.

No they aren't competitive, because the sufficient engineering isn't even there yet? If they were feasible, screw economics, world powers would absolutely want powersats because they are strategic scale weapons doubling as innocuous energy infrastructure, and they wouldn't hold back under the threat of competitors building their own first.

My dude, we literally just watched the US shut down their own critical oil pipeline and hose their own energy production right before a massive spike in gas prices purely to spite another political party. Countries are not remotely the highly logical Rationalist Engines you're imagining.

 

[Marduk]

I disagree. You have no way of knowing this, much less proving it. And it's not a silly rhetorical battle, you're shifting the goalposts like crazy.

Ditto for you. You are trying to convince me that space colonies will be able to settle somewhere out there, supply themselves and export resources with commercially viable spacelift and make a profit while doing so, declare independence, but somehow the technologies that allow all this to be made at such reasonable prices are not available to the Earth powers for military purposes. Is it so hard to understand why i find that scenario rather unlikely?

The defender's advantage in space is immeasurable compared to a mere ocean. Given there's no stealth in space, they would literally know an invading force's exact makeup, size, and position weeks to months in advance. Merely throwing chunks of their mining tailings in the way could destroy an invading force or force it to waste so much Delta V dodging as to render any invasion a non-starter. Your presumption that a space colony could be dismissed as "a few thousands of weirdos" is also a heck of a presumption.

And you assume the proverbial space gunboats will have neither point defense nor offensive weaponry to protect themselves and shoot back...

And similarly, sea colonization always seems to get struck down by The Powers That Be, not actual technical issues.

This is an economic issue, not technical one. Namely economic scale issue, as i said.

Republic of Minerva: Attacked and captured by Tonga military... twice.
Rose Island: Invaded by Italian government and blown up with explosives.
Principality of Sealand: Invaded by Germans and Dutch, the UK expanded its territorial waters around it.
MS Satoshi: Boarded and confiscated by Thai Navy
Project Atlantis: Okay this one actually had a mechanical failure, also a failure due to choosing to name their project after an island most famous for sinking.

Did any of them have the funding and personnel to establish a half serious coastal defense, nevermind spent the money to make it into reality? This is exactly what i was explaining to you. If you can't repel the military of fucking Tonga, you don't get to compare yourself to the 13 Colonies.
They didn't even try to fight a war, nevermind being prepared for it, all being taken down by what amounts to a coast guard action.
In some cases they are lucky it was a government and not pirates who took them down.

I didn't say mutually exclusive, I said you undermined your own position, and yes, you did so by pointing out how these projects keep failing to social manipulation, not actual technological barriers.

These reasons add up, so they can't undermine my position, they reinforce it.

And the fact that colonies would take more effort if they get going is the point, that's why the founding powers don't want to form them or allow them a chance to slip away in a crisis and prefer robots.

No, the advantage of drones is that as long as the economics of lift are shit, they are far cheaper than lugging around people with all their life support. Even if such colonies do exist, they will use drones extensively anyway.

My dude, we literally just watched the US shut down their own critical oil pipeline and hose their own energy production right before a massive spike in gas prices purely to spite another political party. Countries are not remotely the highly logical Rationalist Engines you're imagining.

Not to spite the other political party. To keep a small but loud minority of malicious cultists who helped vote the current government in happy, assuring their future help.

 

[Jormungandr]

In a weird way, I'm somewhat at peace with that. An extra century of life and sudden death in a car accident certainly beats Cancer or Alzheimer's, whilst your body is already falling apart.

Yeah: I'd take that.

Personally, I'd love to live long enough to go into the stars, even if it's just living on Mars for a few years.

Knowing my luck though, I'd die ten years before life-extension technology is developed.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

Personally, I'd love to live long enough to go into the stars, even if it's just living on Mars for a few years.

As for myself, a few steps on the Moon would suffice. The main privilege would be watching mankind spread throughout the inner solar system in my lifetime.

 

[Jormungandr]

As for myself, a few steps on the Moon would suffice. The main privilege would be watching mankind spread throughout the inner solar system in my lifetime.

Well, you might have a Futurama experience.

 

[Iconoclast]

Worse. Seen that Rifkin quote? This shit is why they also oppose nuclear power. Much like the socialists in government that they are natural allies with, they want the citizens/serfs to live in poverty, so that they are in desperate need of favors from the government and for corporate leaders, those may well be considered doing them a favor by allowing them to work at all, so they have a dog in the champagne socialist's fight too.
As the old political joke goes "Democrats love poor people, they love poor people so much that they want to make more of them".
Of course a world with artificially, politically escalated scarcity of energy, resources and real estate is very conductive to moving towards such a perfect society of desperate serfs of a socialist-crony capitalist alliance in power, and the green agenda is perfect for justifying such artificial restrictions on availability of such things (which, as basic market economics say, causes these things to get very expensive).

The essence of the Green claim is that additional growth beyond a certain point leads to a hidden cost to nature itself:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneconomic_growth

Basically, the way the argument goes, if you have really cheap energy or goods, it’s only because you’re plundering natural resources on the other end. Committed Greens want things to be expensive so people consume less. That’s what is meant by “degrowth”.

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

When you fully embrace the watermelon mindset, you see productivism as a form of monomania.

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

GDP growth as the telos of man seems like a form of insanity. You start to wonder if our purpose is to improve our quality of life, or simply to make stonks go up. For the productivist/cornucopian, stonks going up is the measure of quality of life. For the Green, there is a point where growth becomes decoupled from quality of life due to marginal costs to the environment. That is to say, if we were to pave the entire planet flat, cut down all the trees, and build gigantic factories in their place, we would be materially rich but environmentally poor.

Pushing a “metaverse” on people as an alternative to conventional consumption is an example of decoupling GDP from ecology. Basically, they want to still have growth but without using natural resources, by selling people fake, digital, “zero marginal cost” products.




I was trying to tell people this stuff a good eight to ten years ago, about how if you take climate change rhetoric to its logical conclusion, they’re going to stuff us all into Second Life because it’s better for the environment, but no one wanted to hear it.

Next step, they get rid of the VR goggles entirely and it’s like the intro to Syndicate Wars where a brain implant turns the dystopia around you into a utopia.




They’ll do this because it’s much cheaper than building an actual utopia, of course.

 

[Cherico]

heres the thing, people take care of the environment better when they are wealthier.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

That is to say, if we were to pave the entire planet flat, cut down all the trees, and build gigantic factories in their place, we would be materially rich but environmentally poor.

Worst part is, that is a genuinely good point to some extent. The problem is that their solutions are for want of a word insane.

That being said, if all that were green and good in this world were cut down for profit's own sake, the world would be a poorer place indeed.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

I see people talk about how achiving a state of "Transhumanism" would blow a hole in organized religion, especially Christianity but I think it should be noted that there is a difference between functionally immortal and ACTUALLY immortal. The Bible doesn't say what our hard limit is age-wise, and even if we do manage to make disease and aging a thing of the past (something I personally find unlikely as we have seen that as some conditions fade with tech advances other things pop up but I digress) there is still this little event in scripture called judgment day where everyone is whisked away into a heavenly courtroom and all of physical reality as we know it folds in on itself. At the end of the day whether we are 20 years old or 20,000 years old we'll still have to face it sooner or later so it doesn't really change anything in the long run at least for believers and I do mean the long run, after all, what is twenty thousand years or twenty trillion years in the span of eternity?

I mean you will have people who grow arrogant and say "I have no need for God for I want of nothing" but people have been doing that all throughout history anyway. Not aging or being a cyborg wouldn't make that much of a difference.

 

[Marduk]

The essence of the Green claim is that additional growth beyond a certain point leads to a hidden cost to nature itself:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneconomic_growth

Basically, the way the argument goes, if you have really cheap energy or goods, it’s only because you’re plundering natural resources on the other end. Committed Greens want things to be expensive so people consume less. That’s what is meant by “degrowth”.

And the correct answer to that is, so what?
Who made them the bankers of nature's secret account that no one else can see, so trust me bro it really exists and i'm the one with the numbers?
Is this a reaction to not enough people sending money to Nigerian princes anymore?
I thought shamans, druids and other weirdos who claim to speak for the spirit of the world belong in fantasy RPGs, and those don't even have cool magic spells, just lots of sanctimonious bullshit...

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

GDP growth as the telos of man seems like a form of insanity. You start to wonder if our purpose is to improve our quality of life, or simply to make stonks go up. For the productivist/cornucopian, stonks going up is the measure of quality of life. For the Green, there is a point where growth becomes decoupled from quality of life due to marginal costs to the environment. That is to say, if we were to pave the entire planet flat, cut down all the trees, and build gigantic factories in their place, we would be materially rich but environmentally poor.

The obvious counterargument is that the whole world used to be "environmentally rich", and some of it still is, yet they all wish to join the materially rich without much doubt, often working hard to do so. The people have spoken, including the culprits themselves, usually living quite the middle-upper class life of civilized western world rather than going to live a sustainable life somewhere low on productivity and high on environment.
Of course to watermelons the value of "environmental wealth" is whatever it needs to be at the moment, so they can use it to support whatever bullshit they feel like having at the moment.

Pushing a “metaverse” on people as an alternative to conventional consumption is an example of decoupling GDP from ecology. Basically, they want to still have growth but without using natural resources, by selling people fake, digital, “zero marginal cost” products.

But... they aren't zero cost? The development cost and infrastructure and devices needed to run them aren't cheap at all, nor particularly environmentally friendly to produce and dispose of, and people in most of the "sustainable" economies have neither time nor disposable income to use them even if they wanted to. Which they won't because...

I was trying to tell people this stuff a good eight to ten years ago, about how if you take climate change rhetoric to its logical conclusion, they’re going to stuff us all into Second Life because it’s better for the environment, but no one wanted to hear it.

Next step, they get rid of the VR goggles entirely and it’s like the intro to Syndicate Wars where a brain implant turns the dystopia around you into a utopia.

Ironically, the meme metaverse, despite all the hype and investment, simply sucks at what it's supposed to do. It sucks so bad that even the people who are making it don't want to use it to do the things they are supposed to get customers to use it for. Nevermind getting it to be preferred entertainment.

Besides, Second Life isn't the most popular videogame in the world, even if they would make a Second Live 2 VR with hookers and blow, they still aren't guaranteed even GTA level of popularity, and considering some of the journo reactions to such things, they certainly won't let it be GTA.

It's feeling like less of an conspiracy and more a bunch of grifters, scammers and bullshitters trying to ride on the backs of other grifters, scammers and bullshitters who in turn are riding on the backs of shady politicians and corruptocrats.

 

[Iconoclast]

And the correct answer to that is, so what?
Who made them the bankers of nature's secret account that no one else can see, so trust me bro it really exists and i'm the one with the numbers?
Is this a reaction to not enough people sending money to Nigerian princes anymore?
I thought shamans, druids and other weirdos who claim to speak for the spirit of the world belong in fantasy RPGs, and those don't even have cool magic spells, just lots of sanctimonious bullshit...

The obvious counterargument is that the whole world used to be "environmentally rich", and some of it still is, yet they all wish to join the materially rich without much doubt, often working hard to do so. The people have spoken, including the culprits themselves, usually living quite the middle-upper class life of civilized western world rather than going to live a sustainable life somewhere low on productivity and high on environment.
Of course to watermelons the value of "environmental wealth" is whatever it needs to be at the moment, so they can use it to support whatever bullshit they feel like having at the moment.

But... they aren't zero cost? The development cost and infrastructure and devices needed to run them aren't cheap at all, nor particularly environmentally friendly to produce and dispose of, and people in most of the "sustainable" economies have neither time nor disposable income to use them even if they wanted to. Which they won't because...

If you watch Jeremy Rifkin blather on for hours on end, you'd think he believed semiconductors grew on trees.

I suppose, to an extent, "techno-greens" assume that AI-based generative algorithms will cut down on development costs and allow for endless reiteration of "digital goods" without much in the way of human intervention.

They're applying generative algorithms to real-world product design, too, hoping to improve material efficiency and cut down on development costs:

Ironically, the meme metaverse, despite all the hype and investment, simply sucks at what it's supposed to do. It sucks so bad that even the people who are making it don't want to use it to do the things they are supposed to get customers to use it for. Nevermind getting it to be preferred entertainment.

Besides, Second Life isn't the most popular videogame in the world, even if they would make a Second Live 2 VR with hookers and blow, they still aren't guaranteed even GTA level of popularity, and considering some of the journo reactions to such things, they certainly won't let it be GTA.

It's feeling like less of an conspiracy and more a bunch of grifters, scammers and bullshitters trying to ride on the backs of other grifters, scammers and bullshitters who in turn are riding on the backs of shady politicians and corruptocrats.

Well, that's the thing. Greens today are ridiculously cringe and very obviously backed by wealthy aristocrats who want natural resources to be conserved for them and their children, and everyone else eating bugs and living in pods.

 

[Marduk]

If you watch Jeremy Rifkin blather on for hours on end, you'd think he believed semiconductors grew on trees.

I suppose, to an extent, "techno-greens" assume that AI-based generative algorithms will cut down on development costs and allow for endless reiteration of "digital goods" without much in the way of human intervention.

They're applying generative algorithms to real-world product design, too, hoping to improve material efficiency and cut down on development costs:

But it's not design itself that takes most of the resource and energy inputs. It's making the stuff in scale of millions, moving it, and operating it.
But then again, greens love their science fiction, think that somehow the world is obliged to follow it with all its ideological bends.
Digital goods, sure, may carve out a piece of the entertainment sector, perhaps even a big one, ironically including also part of the environmentalist hyped tourist sector (not only you can tour Amazonian jungle with 100% less insect bites, but you can fight the Predator, communists, or even a communist Predator while doing so if you find this kind of thing not interesting enough otherwise), but that's where it ends. A digital heater won't keep you warm and a digital washing machine won't clean your clothes, any more than your digital armies in HoI will let you conquer any countries and your digital spaceship won't get you to other planets (sorry Star Citizen).
In the grand scheme of things, does the non-digital entertainment sector really even take that much productivity at all to begin with?

Well, that's the thing. Greens today are ridiculously cringe and very obviously backed by wealthy aristocrats who want natural resources to be conserved for them and their children, and everyone else eating bugs and living in pods.

Or to simply get green government subsidies that governments get browbeaten into establishing by the greens. Not to mention that if everything is made artificially expensive, then their workforce will be motivated to work more by their empty wallets, and as we all know, basic supply\demand principles also apply to labor supply...

 

[Typhonis]

So how do the Elites plan to deal with Environmental disasters that could destroy their carefully built plans?

 

[Marduk]

So how do the Elites plan to deal with Environmental disasters that could destroy their carefully built plans?

Blame them on climate change and use them as fodder for green propaganda, obviously.

 

[Iconoclast]

So how do the Elites plan to deal with Environmental disasters that could destroy their carefully built plans?

You heard Jeremy Rifkin in that video, right? If we run out of fertilizer and arable land, then we can't have our "Zero Marginal Cost All-Renewable Steady-State Economy Third Industrial Revolution Fully Automated Luxury Communism Fourth Industrial Revolution", or whatever.








They want petroleum, coal, and natural gas usage gone, but they don't want a total collapse, just a partial collapse that they can manage and rebuild from. As I tried explaining once on SB (to quite stiff rebuke), the only way to achieve this in a short period of time is to kill off like 90% of the world's population.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

Well, you might have a Futurama experience.

I'm kinda surprised that random dude knew what Fry was referecing.

 

[Jormungandr]

I'm kinda surprised that random dude knew what Fry was referecing.

Out of universe, it's because the series' lore hadn't been fleshed out yet. In-universe? Yeah, given how much of a crapsack Earth's history was after Fry became a frysickle, it's surprising.

 

[Scottty]

All this bullshit about "carbon footprints" is just a red herring anyway. They push CO2 as some kind of external enemy, when really, it's ordinary wage laborers that they have in their crosshairs. Let's face it. The climate change myth is nothing more than rich eugenicists pushing for deindustrialization and depopulation to conserve Earth's resources for them and their spawn at the expense of everyone else. That's all it has ever been. Psychopathic, Neo-Malthusian Royals and Rockefellers strutting around like "there are too many people, I wish I could be reborn as a virus and kill some of them".

The real tell, to my mind, is the way they always oppose any practical solutions to the problems they complain of, other than the horrible ones they seek to impose. Because it's not really about those problems.

Further, people have tried to seastead. They always get strangled by red tape.

The Satoshi also offered a chance to marry two movements, of crypto-devotees and seasteaders, united by their desire for freedom – from convention, regulation, tax. Freedom from the state in all its forms. But converting a cruise ship into a new society proved more challenging than envisaged. The high seas, while appearing borderless and free, are, in fact, some of the most tightly regulated places on Earth. The cruise ship industry in particular is bound by intricate rules.

It's not a technological problem, they're prevented because the Powers That Be don't want the extra competition and have placed a bewildering array of legal barriers to anybody trying to make their own sea nation.

I think the take-home lesson there is that if you want to secede from the existing world order, you don't go public about it until you are in a position to effectively defend your new sovereign state and its people from being forcibly reconquered.

Or you do it under the patronage of an existing nation-state, preferably one with a nuclear deterrent.

 

[Iconoclast]

The powers-that-be and the people with World Economic Forum memberships have just one question on their minds. It’s very simple.

“How do we get Linkolapilled, with everyone riding bicycles and living in mixed-use zoning in walkable cities, but still make exactly as much money as we were making before?”

There is only one valid answer to the question of how to keep raking in loads of money during degrowth, and that’s abolishing private property and turning things that used to be products into services that corporations hold in trust for the rich. As in, rent-seeking on a massive scale.

Take Adobe’s pricing model for Creative Cloud and apply it to everything. Vacuum cleaners, bicycles, washing machines, refrigerators, everything. They want people leasing things instead of owning them outright so that they can collect rent indefinitely from the same unit of production (until it falls apart, of course). On the one hand, this could actually be great for the environment, since it would mean an end to planned obsolescence and an emphasis on constructing extremely durable goods that can withstand being leased for decades. On the other hand, this is basically robbery. If you rent a fridge for ten years for $20 a month, by the end, you will have paid $2400 for a fridge worth no more than about $700, and that’s what all these Davos fuckers are looking forward to: unending revenue streams from helpless consumer-serfs.

The other thing is that this is basically an ironclad method of totalitarian social control, since all you would need to do to make someone completely destitute is freeze them out of the financial system and repossess all their leased goods.

This is not hyperbole. They are straight-up pushing things in this direction.

Will We Someday Own Nothing? The Future of Products as Services

“Welcome To 2030,” the WEF essay was headlined. “I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, And Life Has Never Been Better.”...

strixus.com

Some members of the public labeled the 2030 prediction part of a harmful agenda. Some feared that it implied an underlying plan to take away their belongings by 2030. Others were chilled by the thought of a world where all of their belongings were de-facto owned by megacorporations and nation-states.

But what Auken had hoped to illustrate wasn’t a dystopian future but a potential outcome of implementing a so-called circular economy — a system where products and materials are reused and recycled instead of wasted. She posited that a future where everything is rented or leased, rather than owned outright, could have tremendous environmental benefits.

All they'd need to do, in order to limit people's consumption, at that point, is implement a programmable CBDC that locks you out of certain purchases if you go over a certain "CO2 footprint threshold", essentially assigning people monthly CO2 budgets.

That's something that they're pushing for, as well.



The message of the Neo-Malthusians is quite clear. Even if you can afford to purchase something, they don't want your purchases to exceed a certain quantity of "natural capital" consumption.



In other words, it's better for the environment for you to buy a 3D model of a couch for your avatar in Second Life than it is to buy a real couch.

I spent considerable time and energy a decade ago, trying to warn people on SB that shit was going in this direction. I withstood insult after insult, ban after ban, and now look. Everything I said is coming true.

So, what are we going to do to stop these sons of bitches?

 

[Marduk]

The powers-that-be and the people with World Economic Forum memberships have just one question on their minds. It’s very simple.

“How do we get Linkolapilled, with everyone riding bicycles and living in mixed-use zoning in walkable cities, but still make exactly as much money as we were making before?”

There is only one valid answer to the question of how to keep raking in loads of money during degrowth, and that’s abolishing private property and turning things that used to be products into services that corporations hold in trust for the rich. As in, rent-seeking on a massive scale.

So communism it is, except with the current rich instead of the revolutionaries and officers becoming the new elite.
After all "walkable cities with everyone riding bicycles" are something North Korea 90's PRC are most famous for. They do it on a scale even most progressive in these regards European cities who achieve it by more subtle pressures do.

Take Adobe’s pricing model for Creative Cloud and apply it to everything. Vacuum cleaners, bicycles, washing machines, refrigerators, everything. They want people leasing things instead of owning them outright so that they can collect rent indefinitely from the same unit of production (until it falls apart, of course). On the one hand, this could actually be great for the environment, since it would mean an end to planned obsolescence and an emphasis on constructing extremely durable goods that can withstand being leased for decades. On the other hand, this is basically robbery. If you rent a fridge for ten years for $20 a month, by the end, you will have paid $2400 for a fridge worth no more than about $700, and that’s what all these Davos fuckers are looking forward to: unending revenue streams from helpless consumer-serfs.

This however doesn't deal with the issue of technological advances that are one of major reasons for "planned obsolescence", at least in goods that are undergoing such advances.
Sure, washing machines, not really. But say, robot vacuum? Why spend extra to make it last 40 years when in 20 years there will be far better ones for quarter the price? And who's going to want to lease the old shitty one in 30 years?
Say bye to planned obsolescence, say hi to planned technological stagnation.

The other thing is that this is basically an ironclad method of totalitarian social control, since all you would need to do to make someone completely destitute is freeze them out of the financial system and repossess all their leased goods.

This is not hyperbole. They are straight-up pushing things in this direction.

Will We Someday Own Nothing? The Future of Products as Services

“Welcome To 2030,” the WEF essay was headlined. “I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, And Life Has Never Been Better.”...

strixus.com

We already have plenty of experiments with aggressively shitty business models being forced on users made out of certain microtransaction enabled videogames...

All they'd need to do, in order to limit people's consumption, at that point, is implement a programmable CBDC that locks you out of certain purchases if you go over a certain "CO2 footprint threshold", essentially assigning people monthly CO2 budgets.

That's something that they're pushing for, as well.



The message of the Neo-Malthusians is quite clear. Even if you can afford to purchase something, they don't want your purchases to exceed a certain quantity of "natural capital" consumption.

Again, communism, plain and simple. In commie countries, and in wartime in normal ones, one needed to have a ration card to buy certain things in addition to money.
At least in the former, the ration card was often harder to get and as such, more valuable than the money. Nothing new here, just a de facto new dual currency\ration card system, except with scarcity of it being based on watermelon feelings instead of commie economic fail levels.

In other words, it's better for the environment for you to buy a 3D model of a couch for your avatar in Second Life than it is to buy a real couch.

Which still doesn't and never will address 2 simple issues:
1. I can't sit on a Second Life couch.
2. If i'm gonna buy something i can't use outside of virtual world anyway, would i buy a couch in Second Life when i can buy a battleship in World of Warships?
Yet again people with more money than sense try to move into gaming which they have no idea about and are confused why their efforts don't go as they want.

I spent considerable time and energy a decade ago, trying to warn people on SB that shit was going in this direction. I withstood insult after insult, ban after ban, and now look. Everything I said is coming true.

So, what are we going to do to stop these sons of bitches?

Point out that it's all watermelons and grifts to distract rich investors with opportunities based on voodoo economics. Ecological capital? It's pure virtual asset. Who has how much is decided solely by the choice of virtual model one adopts, and it's not worth anything. You can't buy it, you can't sell it, can't move it, you can't get a dividend from it. It either exists and does its own thing, whether valuable to nearby people or not, or it's somehow disrupted and doesn't.
In one sentence, it's NFTs for victims of green brainwashing, except with no saving qualities at all.
Resource extraction? Oh boy, extend this scheme to that, and now you aren't stepping on the toes of sovereign countries, you know, the ones who control all the armies and nukes, you are stomping on them with a steel plated boot. Imagine going to China and telling the CCP that that they need to pay you a tax to mine lithium and coal from their very own sovereign territory. In most of the world resources are either owned by the state, or by whoever owns the land according to the state sovereign over it. For many it's a major revenue stream to get paid for licensing the resources for extraction by businesses. Try screwing with that status quo, and at least some of them will get very, very unpleasant real quick.