In an ideal world we have ______

[rousseau]

• Many progressive social democracies
• Highly progressive tax systems that work for the poor
• An increasingly global regulatory system
• True equality for all people
• Solid environmental standards and investment in green technologies
• Progressive media standards
• A highly regulated, and supported, science and tech sector
• Quality education based on thorough research and factual information
• Increasingly less military encroachment
• Corporate regulations that work for people, not corporations
• Increasingly flexible political systems open to change
• More and more human rights based on secular ideology
• Laws that work for the bottom line of individual citizens

In practice not so easy. Did I miss anything?

 

[repoman]

Your list is pretty good. The last point is one of the most open ended. But take for example the issue of home ownership and mortgages. The way the system works now it is a prime motivation for people to work themselves to death and to live really damn far from work. This all or nothing issue with home ownership.

I will say that if your list was fully in effect now that what I am about to suggest would be possible to be implemented:

In THIS world in which the reality of constrained and depleting resources is an ever approaching Sword of Damocles. Because as a species we are power mad and this power will cause us to fall like Icarus. I am not gloating about this realization, I am complicit in it as well.

But given this, we need to

Stop all luxury foods trade immediately, like coffee and tea. Stop almost all food trade after that.

Slash meat consumption by 90%+.

Have a concerted orderly evacuation of cities like Phoenix that will be a death trap after fossil fuels dwindle and falter.

Stop all high-rise construction now.

Redesign all toilets to capture mostly just the urine and the feces and reuse on fields. Mining phosphate rocks and making nitrates from natural gas is unsustainable madness.

Find a way to reduce the population to 4 then 2 then 1 billion people within ~150 years. People complain about the population being unattainable, lets do something about it!

Relocalize all farming. that means that large cities will have to be mostly abandoned - or sections of them cleared out and made into farmland.

 

[Celldweller]

Have a concerted orderly evacuation of cities like Phoenix that will be a death trap after fossil fuels dwindle and falter.
.

Now wait just a damn minute here...

 

[Petrel]

Local autonomy of organization, priorities, food and energy production.

Cities
- retrofitted for efficiency
- rezoned so that all new construction is human-scale: low rise, with open spaces for pedestrian traffic
- energy-neutral, green
- earthquake and fire-proof
- grow much or all of their own food
(

that means that large cities will have to be mostly abandoned - or sections of them cleared out and made into farmland.

I don't think so. A whole lot of food can be produced in hydroponics - in all those goddam money-laundering high-rises that waste so much of our resources now. Also, vertical planting in urban landscape design, in apartment buildings, on roofs, in greenhouses, and of course, meat-cloning factories. With a little and ingenuity and the.....unattainable..... political will, most cities can become self-sustaining.)

All women
- have absolute freedom of reproductive choice
- education
- political and economic equality
(That will fix the population problem in one generation.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

• Highly progressive tax systems that work for the poor

• 
  
  So you admit you want to tear down the rich.
  
  

  [*]Progressive media standards

  
  What are progressive media standards? A slanted press?
  
  

  [*]An increasingly global regulatory system
  [*]A highly regulated, and supported, science and tech sector

  
  So you think the government knows best, people can't think for themselves?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Stop all luxury foods trade immediately, like coffee and tea. Stop almost all food trade after that.

So nobody can live away from farm areas? You realize that's most of the population of the first world?

Slash meat consumption by 90%+.

Have a concerted orderly evacuation of cities like Phoenix that will be a death trap after fossil fuels dwindle and falter.

Places like Phoenix will be far more inhabitable than most of Canada.

Stop all high-rise construction now.

In other words, spread people out even more--more farmland lost to buildings.

Find a way to reduce the population to 4 then 2 then 1 billion people within ~150 years. People complain about the population being unattainable, lets do something about it!

1 billion won't help.

Relocalize all farming. that means that large cities will have to be mostly abandoned - or sections of them cleared out and made into farmland.

You'll be lucky to support even one billion that way.


Furthermore, the world you envision can't do anything big. That means in time it dies. Slow suicide isn't ideal in my book.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Places like Phoenix will be far more inhabitable than most of Canada.

That's good because in an ideal world, people from Phoenix wouldn't come anywhere near Canada.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Local autonomy of organization, priorities, food and energy production.

Cities
- retrofitted for efficiency
- rezoned so that all new construction is human-scale: low rise, with open spaces for pedestrian traffic
- energy-neutral, green
- earthquake and fire-proof
- grow much or all of their own food

Cities grow their own food? Either you're using a *LOT* of energy or they're very spread out indeed.

I don't think so. A whole lot of food can be produced in hydroponics - in all those goddam money-laundering high-rises that waste so much of our resources now. Also, vertical planting in urban landscape design, in apartment buildings, on roofs, in greenhouses, and of course, meat-cloning factories. With a little and ingenuity and the.....unattainable..... political will, most cities can become self-sustaining.)

To do it in the cities means growing everything under lights. There simply isn't enough sunlight available.

All women
- have absolute freedom of reproductive choice
- education
- political and economic equality
(That will fix the population problem in one generation.)

One lifetime, not one generation.

 

[dystopian]

Stop all luxury foods trade immediately, like coffee and tea. Stop almost all food trade after that.

What? What would stopping the trade of food do other than to cause starvation in low agricultural production countries?

Slash meat consumption by 90%+.

Not going to happen.

Stop all high-rise construction now.

A ridiculous plan that will ultimately cause *more* waste of resources, not less. While current high-rise designs could and should be made far more efficient; that's not a credible against high-rise construction period. The alternative to high-rises is urban sprawl, which is worse for your purposes.

Find a way to reduce the population to 4 then 2 then 1 billion people within ~150 years. People complain about the population being unattainable, lets do something about it!

Let's not. The only way to reduce the population to 4 billion people (let alone 1) within 150 years is genocide; that's the only way you can realistically do it since you're never going to convince enough people to stop having kids. That is unacceptable. Not to mention that we have absolutely no reason even with our current wasteful technology to reduce the population by such an extreme; which is to say nothing of the vast improvements in sustainability and efficiency we'll see over the next 150 years.

Relocalize all farming. that means that large cities will have to be mostly abandoned - or sections of them cleared out and made into farmland.

Yeah good luck with telling hundreds of millions of people that they need to abandon their homes because you want to shave a few kilometers off the farm->mouth process.

 

[dystopian]

Cities
- retrofitted for efficiency

So are you going to be the one to bulldoze all of the UNESCO world heritage sites and monumental historical buildings dotting the urban landscape? Because that's unavoidable when 'retrofitting' a historic city. We've seen that plenty of times.

- rezoned so that all new construction is human-scale: low rise, with open spaces for pedestrian traffic

Low rise does NOT equate to 'human scale'; which is just an urban planning buzz term with no objective value. Just because you don't like high-rise living, doesn't mean others don't either. I'd rather have a Hong Kong than an LA; ultimately that's better for our resources and available land too as well if done correctly.

All women
- have absolute freedom of reproductive choice
- education
- political and economic equality
(That will fix the population problem in one generation.)

No, it won't fix the population 'problem'; at best it will result in a slight slowdown.

 

[rousseau]

So you admit you want to tear down the rich.

No, but I live off of around 1000 dollars/month as is and I'm pretty content. I'd imagine those who are making obscene amounts of money and living lives of luxury beyond 99% of the world's wildest dreams could do with a little less than they have now.

The biggest poison that's sprung from capitalism is rampant materialism. I don't give a fuck if you think you need a yacht, you don't, this guy on the corner needs lunch.

 

[Petrel]

Cities grow their own food? Either you're using a *LOT* of energy or they're very spread out indeed.

P: A whole lot of food can be produced in hydroponics - in all those goddam money-laundering high-rises that waste so much of our resources now. Also, vertical planting in urban landscape design, in apartment buildings, on roofs, in greenhouses, and of course, meat-cloning factories.

To do it in the cities means growing everything under lights. There simply isn't enough sunlight available.

The sun doesn't shine on cities? Since when? All you have to do is take down every second block of office towers in the downtown core and use the ones that produce nothing now for vertical salad bars You might have to replace some of the glass, and it might be a good idea to install passive solar elements while you're at it. The best part of this is that while fresh food grows in the windows, the rest of the floor-space is still available for kindergartens and libraries, dance studios and shoe repair shops.
Save a shitload of money and energy and manpower on the transporting, storing, loading and unloading, refrigerating, warehousing, packaging and retailing food.

In the residential areas, sunshine can get to every home and yard. Replace those wasteful lawns with edible crops. Put a few more sun-roofs on the shopping malls and plant fig trees in containers. Banks often have nice tall windows and high ceilings going fallow. There are so many buildings and other spaces in cities that are not serving the people at all, that could be converted to better functions. About the only clop not practical to grow in cities is grains, and those can be grown in the greenbelt around each city, which replaces those wastelands along the highways.

P: women- have absolute freedom of reproductive choice
... will fix the population problem in one generation.

One lifetime, not one generation.

How big is a lifetime, in what part of the world. One single generation free of religious and political pressure, and with access to birth control, is enough to reverse the trend.

 

[Petrel]

So are you going to be the one to bulldoze all of the UNESCO world heritage sites and monumental historical buildings dotting the urban landscape? Because that's unavoidable when 'retrofitting' a historic city. We've seen that plenty of times.

You don't need to start with heritage sites. Start with office buildings that contain people only 8 hours a day, who do nothing but move money around. Most of those building wouldn't be too difficult to make more efficient and cleaner. Then replace the tenements with decent housing - I guarantee, there are no heritage slums, so that'll keep us busy for a while. Then insulate the apartment buildings and homes, put in water reclamation plants and other energy-saving innovations. Then we'll see about the cathedrals and museums.

Low rise does NOT equate to 'human scale'

Yeah, it actually does. Nobody should have to work or live in a building that they can't leave quickly in case of fire, or can't reach all floors of during the increasingly frequent power outages, or can't open a window to get fresh air. Also, low-rise doesn't block the sun from inner cities, and doesn't fall on quite so many people in earthquakes and explosions. Bonus: the foundation is a lot cheaper and there aren't multiple basements in which people can be trapped. Or mugged.
Nobody should live so far from their work, services and necessities that they can't get there on foot, wheelchair, roller-skate, or bicycle. Rickshaws okay for emergency transport; carriages for the under-threes.

Just because you don't like high-rise living, doesn't mean others don't either. I'd rather have a Hong Kong than an LA; ultimately that's better for our resources and available land too as well if done correctly.

But that would be your ideal world. I only mentioned mine.

You are free to add something original to the thread, rather than just criticizing other's ideas.

 

[rousseau]

So you admit you want to tear down the rich.

No, but I live off of around 1000 dollars/month as is and I'm pretty content. I'd imagine those who are making obscene amounts of money and living lives of luxury beyond 99% of the world's wildest dreams could do with a little less than they have now.

The biggest poison that's sprung from capitalism is rampant materialism. I don't give a fuck if you think you need a yacht, you don't, this guy on the corner needs lunch.

We're faced with a situation where we know people are self-interested and only look out for themselves, therefore, unless we put regulations in place that make our energies work for the collective good everything goes to shit and we all die knifing each other over the last orange at the super market.

 

[Petrel]

we know people are self-interested and only look out for themselves,

We don't, actually. The capitalists have been spreading that gospel, but it's not true of the people I know. Is it, of the people you know?

 

[rousseau]

we know people are self-interested and only look out for themselves,

We don't, actually. The capitalists have been spreading that gospel, but it's not true of the people I know. Is it, of the people you know?

It is true. It's deeply true. It's one of the fundamental things that we do know about people. This isn't politics, this is biology.

Self-interest is often deeply shrouded, though.

 

[Unbeatable]

It's shorthand to say "for themselves", when it's probably more like "for members of their own ingroup" or "for people whose interests they intuit to be sufficiently aligned with their own". The criteria are actually more slippery than that, but they're ultimately grounded in the self. That's where everything begins. Of course life isn't a total free-for-all. People have allegiances and emotional connections to one another. But most of them are tentative. And it's physically impossible to actually escape one's own perspective. Even caring about other people is, indirectly, a manifestation of caring about oneself. We empathize with others via unconscious inference and projection, not by directly perceiving their minds. We empathize by a part of our mind confusing others for ourselves. In practice, self-interest is so shrouded that often we refer to it as altruism. It's an arguably useful distinction as far as everyday language goes, but it can lead to misconceptions, just as statements endorsing the trivial fact of psychological egoism can lead to misconceptions.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So you admit you want to tear down the rich.

No, but I live off of around 1000 dollars/month as is and I'm pretty content. I'd imagine those who are making obscene amounts of money and living lives of luxury beyond 99% of the world's wildest dreams could do with a little less than they have now.

The biggest poison that's sprung from capitalism is rampant materialism. I don't give a fuck if you think you need a yacht, you don't, this guy on the corner needs lunch.

What you fail to understand is that by removing success you remove the incentive to try to succeed.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

P: A whole lot of food can be produced in hydroponics - in all those goddam money-laundering high-rises that waste so much of our resources now. Also, vertical planting in urban landscape design, in apartment buildings, on roofs, in greenhouses, and of course, meat-cloning factories.

To do it in the cities means growing everything under lights. There simply isn't enough sunlight available.

The sun doesn't shine on cities? Since when? All you have to do is take down every second block of office towers in the downtown core and use the ones that produce nothing now for vertical salad bars You might have to replace some of the glass, and it might be a good idea to install passive solar elements while you're at it. The best part of this is that while fresh food grows in the windows, the rest of the floor-space is still available for kindergartens and libraries, dance studios and shoe repair shops.

Dream on. That's nowhere near enough light. Crop yields go down a little worse than linearly with light loss. The total yield will be no greater than you would get from flat ground no matter how you arrange it. In practice no arrangement can even match this. This comes out to no more than single family home suburban densities.

Note, also, that all that glass means horrendous climate control costs.

Save a shitload of money and energy and manpower on the transporting, storing, loading and unloading, refrigerating, warehousing, packaging and retailing food.

Yeah, because much of the year we would not be eating anything that needed refrigeration.

In the residential areas, sunshine can get to every home and yard. Replace those wasteful lawns with edible crops. Put a few more sun-roofs on the shopping malls and plant fig trees in containers. Banks often have nice tall windows and high ceilings going fallow. There are so many buildings and other spaces in cities that are not serving the people at all, that could be converted to better functions. About the only clop not practical to grow in cities is grains, and those can be grown in the greenbelt around each city, which replaces those wastelands along the highways.

If you live someplace where the lost water is a big deal you don't have enough water for agriculture, either.

P: women- have absolute freedom of reproductive choice
... will fix the population problem in one generation.

One lifetime, not one generation.

How big is a lifetime, in what part of the world. One single generation free of religious and political pressure, and with access to birth control, is enough to reverse the trend.

In practice it takes one lifetime (for the old attitudes to die out) from when having extra kids no longer is beneficial until the birth rate drops to western levels. Note that the population can still rise for another generation or so even then. (Witness China--their population is rising despite a one-child policy. My wife is from the last generation before the one child rule--and she's one of seven. Her parents generation is mostly gone by now but there are in some cases two more generations downstream.)

 

[TV and credit cards]

Privacy from corporations and government. Surveillance is an aggressive quiet cancer.