https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/12/14/americans-dont-understand-sta...

https://nypost.com/2022/07/23/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-are-trad...

So yeah, they do insider trading, but they are sometimes also the dupes in these deals. Look at their history. They make money, yes, but they lose a lot to stupid investments too, ones they obviously made because some Steve-Jobs-wannabe got a meeting with them and fired their reality distortion ray.

I think people basically know this, if they're allowed to be honest with themselves. Nobody who ever lived in a college dorm and then spent a "magical year" in NYC and then bought a house in a suburb thinks they were just as invested in those first two places as they are in the third.

How about that principle of one person, one vote.

Reality, in my view, is absolutely chock-full of contradictions. I believe in the principle of one person, one vote; and I believe that what I said above happens also to be true. The dialectic doesn't care that we might wish things were simpler or more straightforward.

I started voting when I was 16 (my birth country allows that) and voted on every single election until I immigrated to the US - and then voted on every US election since becoming a citizen.

1 - No national election day holiday, so wage-earners often have to forgo income to vote.

2 - Long lines, too few voting stations, exacerbate point 1

3 - Inconsistent voting laws as you cross municipal boundaries (mostly state to state).

3b - particularly WRT mail-in/absentee ballots.

4 - constant undermining of the voting system as a whole by the GOP. This has really ramped up in the last ~8 years, but it's been there much longer.

The first 3 are more likely to impact poorer citizens, who are also more likely to rent their homes.

We'd do well as a country to allow nationwide mail-in voting.

Mostly, I don't think we should be encouraging a ton of people to all show up at the same place at the same time. That's just asking for long lines and other issues.

I think it'd be much better to just drag voting out of the course of a month and actually encourage people to not show up on election day. Or to just vote by mail more, I haven't been a poll since I was a child (and back then we had levers!) but from what I hear now half the time you're just filling out a mail ballet in person now.

It's a country with 300 million people, there's plenty of people for anything. I'd wager that in percentual terms, the absolute majority would benefit from an election day holiday.

So, a national holiday really only makes sense for those presidential election years. Or, we could declare "first Tuesday after first Monday in Nov" as an annual holiday, and many states would likely line up their fall elections on that date. Primaries would still be a mess, but they always will, as they're not always open elections anyways (some states require party membership or declared party affiliation to vote in primaries).

Same process, just s/USPS/SMTP/. But if that's fine, why make the user jump through the email hoop? Hell, digital ballots would give you stronger guarantees for verifying your vote. Publish all the ballots publicly and base the final tally for digital votes on that public ledger. Every voter will have a code they can use to pull up their specific ballot and see that it's correct. And since the codes are public that's not actually enough to prove it was yours (yay non-repudiation).

No cryptography, no hashes, no zero trust proofs. The internet is only used to move a document from A->B and security model could be explained to the least technical person since it's a direct analogue of how you would do it IRL.

if you're worried about voting being a black box, it already kind of is. what proof did you get that your last vote was accounted for properly? who counted it?

if you're worried about "hacking" you're not paying quite enough attention. We have secure systems that exist. At least as secure as a fuckton of snail mail managed by tens of thousands of the worlds most insecure asset, people.

I like your system. Ping me if there's ever an open codebase and I'll contribute.

Nine of that applies to a Democratic-run state with mail-in-only voting.

This is visible in county-level voting rates. The counties east of the Cascade mountains tend to be more conservative than the counties west of the Cascades, or areas surrounding metros like Spokane, and they also tend to have lower voter participation rates.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/15/where-peo...

From what I see WA had a turnout of 75% compared to USA's 66%.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h_2pR1pq8s_I5buZ5agX...

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/which-wa-...

Arkansas had <26% (457,856 votes / 1,762,024 registered voters) [1].

38% is looking pretty good.

[1]: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/AR/112731/web.28556...

I disagree with your assertion. Even so, alistairSH's conclusion: "We'd do well as a country to allow nationwide mail-in voting." like it was solution to solving lack of voting from renters, when cherry-picking data gets us 12 points at best. It might be part of a solution, but it's demonstrably not a majority difference.

All this presumes every possible vote is equally valid.

PSA: You can register as a poll worker and work election day to guarantee you have time to vote. There's a high chance that your work will give you the time off to go work as a poll worker without it eating into your PTO (and you get paid to boot!).

As an ex-linecook, LOL, there are too many assumptions baked in here to be in the realm of reality for working class jobs

1st you are assuming people have one employer to worry about, not multiple.

2nd you are assuming people have a set schedule daily or weekly.

3rd you are assuming people have PTO.

4th you are assuming the employer will give any amount of shit about volunteerism.

5th you are assuming they won't be given a point or docked for missing a shift.

A national holiday might help some workers, but not all. Gas stations still need staffed, etc.

So, check mail box as normal. Receive ballot. Research candidates (or not) and fill out. Drop in the mailbox. Not much different than paying paper bills.

Who were you imagining would be alienated by mail-in voting?

We could do mandatory extended timeframe/hours in-person voting but that costs a lot more (paying to staff the sites, rent locations because you can't just borrow a school cafeteria for a day like we do now, etc).

I think mail-in ballots best serve voters in an environment where they are the norm, rather than the exception. For example, the campaign cycles, like debates, that target the large segment of undecided voters right before election day. The mail-in voter has to be more informed about candidates and policy than an average voter to come to an equivalent informed decision about their vote weeks before the average voter. Yes, if the goal is to simply increase voter turnout, universal mail-in ballots are probably great. I wonder if that best serves the voter, though - hence my question.

My familiarity is with the Indian electoral system, which is highly regarded (at least within the country). Mail-in ballots are an option for a subset of people, but they make up for it by making polling booths readily accessible - your booth is just a short walk away. Election days are holidays, but I'm sure it still impacts workers in similar ways. Still, voter turnout is usually not too bad. Expanding mail-in voting has been discussed as an option for the very large floating population of migrant workers, but we don't have a solution yet. The logistics of offering universal mail-in ballots for a country approaching 1.4 billion is daunting. Already, the General Elections need to be spaced out over several weeks to allow electoral officials and poll workers to cover the entire country.

Yes, universal. Oregon (USA) has used universal vote-by-mail for many years now. It's widely considered one of the best systems in the US. Voter rolls are updated by the DMV (or via state websites), everybody receives a ballot by mail prior to the election. Voters can return the ballot by mail, at a drop-box, or they can choose to vote in-person. Voters don't have to vote any earlier - as long as the ballot is post-marked by election day, it will be counted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Oregon https://states.aarp.org/oregon/election-voting-guide

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/561886-whos-not-voting-...

This is however contrasted by the confusing bit that not being registered was the biggest reason people didn’t vote, above apathy and political disengagement.

And it seems likely they didn't make the (often minimal) effort to get registered because of apathy or political disengagement.

What did it look like for you to get registered to vote?

Obviously registering (and voting) is harder for some people than others but registering to vote is not, in general, an arduous process.

What if your job wouldn't let you off during the town hall's regular hours? What if you don't have transportation? What if you don't have the necessary forms of identification?

> I assume I could call the town clerk, and they'd send me a form in the mail

What if you're not already registered and cannot just fill out a form to send in? What if you have to provide proof of residency in the form of a bill in your name and current address that matches your ID? What if you don't have an ID because you can't get to the DMV because you can't get time off work to go get it, or you don't have transportation, or you don't have internet access to set an online appointment with the DMV, or your credit is bad enough that the bills are only in your roommate's name to avoid headache with those companies?

I guess my point is, it's very flippant to just say, "well it's easy for me, so it's probably pretty easy for everyone else, so it must be apathy as the only solution."

Right but the data suggests that apathy is the primary reason. I think we should make it easier to vote, but it’s not empathy if the people you’re trying to empathize with don’t actually feel that way.

Yes, it is harder for renters, but it is designed to be harder. This is to prevent renters from having political power and making homeowner's houses more expensive. One more reason to fight, from my point of view.

https://www.vote.org/early-voting-calendar/

If people want to participate, they have many options.

I've found that if you need to argue edge cases (single parent, hourly schedule that almost completely overlaps poll hours, no absentee, no early voting or mail-in, and an employer that violates law) as you have in your post, you do not have a compelling argument.

States in the US have more atonomy than states in most of the rest of the world. So much so that it often doesn't make sense to compare national US figures to national figures in other nations - education being a good example - https://learn.uvm.edu/blog/blog-education/vermont-eighth-gra...

But the same applies to voting. The federalist system under which the US operates allows communities and localities the flexibility to operate in a manner consistent with local needs and values.

A change of address is informing the government you moved and happens millions of times a year. Automating it doesn't just save citizens 10’s of millions of hours per year it also saves all the effort by all these different agencies when people communicate the same information to multiple agencies.

You have oversimplified the details of this sort of integration and conflated local vs federal institutions. The best way to do this change would be through your state's BMV/DMV, and many states already update your registration (or offer to) when you submit an address change there.

Registration and voting are easy and well documented in every state in which I've lived or researched.

It’s not that it takes a lot of effort per person to update the DMV and voter records it’s dumb specifically because most government agencies are automatically updated. So essentially this is just wasting 330 million peoples time for absolutely zero benefit.

1) Some people are under more stress than others, and are less able to summon the effort to vote. Admittedly, this does also include people in rather different circumstances, such as elderly homeowners who become unwell at election time (especially after the postal vote deadline).

2) Voting arrangements aren't uniform between countries (or even within one country), and travelling some distance to a polling station and then queuing to vote is a burden some voters might experience much more than others.

Further, you won't ever come up with a system that is 100% inclusive, secure, reliable, and economical. That should never be the goal since it's not achievable or necessary. Covering 99% of cases is good enough.

The city collects its taxes, the school district collects its taxes, the library collects its taxes, fire district, road department, forest preserve, etc. None of them can tell the other to do anything - they are all independent with independent funding. The county has its own taxes, but also has the function of actually providing the payment, billing and distribution services. So you only have to make a single payment.

By the way, property taxes in Florida work nearly the same as California and they don't have any problem building lots of housing.

What if I vote, but people with interests aligned with mine tend not to? What if those people not voting are acting as rationally as the people who vote frequently?

Consider these two groups, who get the same number of votes, live under the government for the same amount of time, but rationally have different incentives to vote:

Home-owner:

* Bob moves in, lives there ten years.

Renters:

* John moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

* Phil moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

* Mike moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

* Jess moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

* Fred moves in, lives there two years, moves out.

If we assume these people are self-interested, Bob will, on average, vote more than the renters, because Bob values future-Bob's well-being more than John values Fred's. It's only through the altruism of John, Phil, Mike, and Jess that Fred will get to benefit from a government that accounts for his interests.

It's also true that each renter has an incentive to vote for things of short-term value and to discount long-term benefits, so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented. But "John isn't voting as much as Bob" isn't a case of John being less responsible than Bob. It's that they legitimately have different incentives.

In this example, I'd say it is very legitimate that the Bob has over time more influence how local things are run, since he's a long-time local that has to live with it. All the others are transients that come and go.

Sometimes I am considering running myself for a local government after getting my citizenship, with the only goal: drop housing price at my city for at least 70%. Once achieved - retire from politics :).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KzZ0YqLvo

Do you think there's a correlation between having more leisure time (living from rent) and having more ability to do politics?

Do you think blaming the renters for not voting is the most constructive way of going forward, or does it reinforce the status quo?

Q2: Yes, obviously there is a positive correlation. This is exactly why renters need to fight: stakes are against them. Current status quo is in favor of homeowners; it will not be possible to change it while being passive. Renters and homeowners have conflict of interests, there is inevitable fight.

Q3: I think blaming is the call for fight. If renters want better deal, they need to fight. Is it most constructive? I don't know, this is the best I can come up with. Does it reinforces the status quo? No, I think inactivity reinforces it.

The best thing you'll get is a campaign promise to do something about it, but not much action. The only way something will actually be done about it is if the effects of it become economically catastrophic or people start rioting en masse.

Can speak to New York politics. Tenants' associations have massive sway. I've canvassed elections where a single building's tenants' association could predictably swing the outcome.

They also ally with developers when advantageous, e.g. to continue building housing stock. (Their divergent interests explain much of our affordable housing policies' idiosyncrasies.) This combination of activism and pragmatism beats the well-funded candidate every time in local politics because their elections are decided by margins of hundreds or even tens of votes.

> latter group can lobby and make campaign donations, the former can't exactly

Donations, at the local level, are a threat to incumbents through enabling primary challengers. And tenants' associations absolutely lobby. The problem is renters in most cities are some combination of disorganized, disengaged and/or ideological to a dogmatic degree.

[1]: https://tenantsunion.org/ [2]: https://council.seattle.gov/2021/09/27/sawant-congratulates-...

I saw this recently in a fight over parking regulations - all the homeowners wanted strictly regulated street parking in neighborhoods, but none of the renters did. Both parties showed up to the council meeting discussing the regulation. Guess who won? Adding insult to injury, existing laws give owners a process for obtaining extra parking passes for guests, while renters get no such option and need to take a bunch of documents to city hall to get a pass when they move in. For street parking.

US politicians serve the rich only because they think that donations will help them win. Make the donations irrelevant - "rich" will loose the political power. How to make the donations irrelevant - go to vote, especially if you are poor and powerless. Convince your friends to vote. And not for a president, but for a local mayor, city council, judge etc.

At least where I live, the “bank of mom and dad” either use their home equity to help their kids buy OR the kids are banking on getting the family home when they die.

We’re in too deep now. We basically painted ourselves into a corner where the economic engine is so intertwined with rising home prices that nobody wants the gravy train to end.

My best guess is tenancy laws change to be more and more in favor of tenants (SF, NYC) securing near permanent housing for current renters and massively disincentivizing an increase in supply of new rental units., completely screwing over those that come later.

Basically kicking the can down the road another few decades.

We're never going to be less "too deep". Kicking the can down the road condemns future generations to dealing with a worse problem.

Banking on your family dying - this is like saying "I am a worthless loser". I want old generation to live eternally, and still afford housing.

Industrial and maintenance automation for needing less labor.

Relying on next generation to fund your retirement is ok if you live modestly; but not ok if you live luxuriously.

Working person should not be doing worse than a non-working person; otherwise you have an extractive economy and social instability.

Aspiring homeowners will never become homeowners if the price is exclusionary.

Take SF: with average salary of 75-79K, the apartment cost starts from 1.1M. Only 8% has salary > than 100K, that makes the remaining 92% the "aspiring" homeowners.

They will stay "aspiring" for the rest of their life. The only think they (or rather, "we") can do - make sure that post-zoomer generation don't have to be "aspiring" for their entire lives.

There is a gigantic country and world out there.

Still, fighting to make US cities more livable is a laudable goal.

It's a bit of a ratchet. Once the prices go high, it's very hard to turn back. The only way out is probably to inflate the currency until a loaf of bread is $15 but housing is reasonable again, or for the state or federal government to offer some kind of huge tax write-off for depreciating home values. The latter is unlikely given the financial crunch faced by governments.

Not really. The way out is higher density. What we care about isn't land price, it's housing price - in other words, how much does it cost for people to get as much housing as they need. Lowering housing costs and rising land costs are perfectly compatible if you don't artificially restrict lots to 1 unit as most of the country has done.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they managed to crumble their economy which brought the value of housing down with it? They had a massive housing boom before the "Lost Decades". Japan is no stranger to asset prices rising out of control.

That said, when I have looked at Tokyo pricing it has always been in line with high priced North American cities, only configured differently. The difference in configuration means that the sticker price is often lower, but you are getting less for that lower price. Apples to apples the prices have always shown to be in the same ballpark.

It just kills the discussion because it’s such an outlier.

I would not be a popular king, but it’s better to be feared than loved, I guess. I do understand what site I’m on.

> They will stay "aspiring" for the rest of their life.

They have a very viable option, which is to leave SF and go somewhere else where they can stop aspiring and afford to actually become homeowners if that's what they want.

I speak from first-hand experience, although in my case it was Manhattan not SF. I very badly wanted to live in Manhattan but no matter how I sliced the numbers, there was no way. Too expensive.

I didn't remain "aspiring" for the rest of my life though. I gave up on that dream and moved and bought a house elsewhere. It's worked just fine.

At a certain point, if landlords strangle renters it can make hiring hard (workers can’t afford Cost of living if rents are too high), thus making the business environment uncompetitive.

Will the business community have more power than landlords?

I think so, eventually.

Ultimately, people vote with their feet, or government intervenes on behalf of those who would lose money.

https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/19/17138290/peter-thiel-slumlor...

There are more politicians willing to admit they support gay people, I guess. But that's about it. Deep down where it counts - fiscal policy - nothing changes.

Homeowners and renters of course have the exact same politica power, one vote each.

If renters are for whatever reason choosing to not exercise that power, what can one do? They are free to vote, please do.

That said, I always vote and not once has there been anything on the ballot on whether to build more in my town, so it's not like it matters on that front.

That would be half of the 70-year average. 5 is the norm, and it never got below 4. And you opt for half of the lowest point ever?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584

You and anovikov reach different conclusions because you're looking at different time scales. You're citing returns from 1870-2015; he's citing returns for the last 40 years, 1980-2020. The comment and paper you linked itself explains why: housing and equity returns were very comparable from the period 1870-1945, but equities significantly outperformed from 1945-present. I would bet on suburbanization as the cause: the U.S. embarked on a massive homebuilding project from 1945-2000, which kept supply high and prices relatively low during that period. Returns to housing since 2009 (when the bottom fell out of the homebuilding market) have much more closely matched equities.

If housing had the same tax treatment as stocks it’d be a horrible investment.

Gradual rent control with a point system works just fine.

Personally I would like to see renting [gradually] changed into lease/buy. That I've paid the value of the house 3 times now (and the construction cost 7 times) could mean I own at least some of the house? Doesn't seem unreasonable.

We're in a weird place in the US where young people are unwilling to flex any political power to stop elder people from financially taking advantage of them.

Whenever I talk to my young friends about Social Security's trust running dry in a decade they just handwave it away with stuff like: the government will just print more money or blame jeff bezos

Young people have no power because we largely are in the renter and working classes; while the home and business owners fight against every mention of renter protections, increased housing, worker protections, etc.

Not to mention we see the world we are growing up into is quickly becoming more and more inhabitable while living with the truth that the fossil fuel industry has been lying about climate change for 50 years.

Who are the populists you’re talking about? I can only think of Bernie and Yang. Trump isn’t a populist.

We aren’t ignorant either. We are a product of the social media machine and a decreasing faith in educational institutions. I think a lot of people are too scared of the future so they don’t think about it. Blaming an abstract for political problems has been a thing for long as politics as been around.

It seems like a strange thing to have powerless concerns about as voting only selects a representative. In my experience, the most likely candidates are all reasonably suited to the job, leaving it to matter little who ultimately wins. Even if you are powerless it is not that big of a deal, being the most inconsequential part of the process.

The real work happens after the vote has taken place when you have to start engaging with the selected representative on the regular to make your perspective known. It is guaranteed that you didn't elect a mind reader. It is not clear if the younger generations are aware of that. This may be why they feel powerless.

It my youth the message was always "contact your local representative", but in recent times that message has changed to "how could <insert political figurehead> do this to us?" There is some apparent degree of learned helplessness at play; perhaps because greater media exposure gives us insights into places with strong dictatorships and we project their conditions upon ours.

Invariably, those with enough land ownership ties will ultimately run into municipal issues that will require approaching council, at very least forcing a deeper understanding of government upon them. This may also help explain why those who own things are apparently more engaged politically.

In all seriousness, no. The way you multiply housing count is by making buildings taller and closer together, not by spreading them further out. This is how we used to build cities before cars and roads ruined them.

I agree though that a lot of suburbs are just wastelands and I would consider them to be depressing places to live. But people seem to love them for some reason. A lot of these places don't even have sidewalks but I guess it makes sense as there isn't really anywhere to walk to.

I love how people seem to feel they can enforce their views of how a city should be build on others.

The fact of the matter is very clear.. we have so many detach houses because that is what people WANT.

For some odd reason there is a subset of the population who feel entitled to dictate how OTHERS should live. These people go on and on about "increasing density" while ignoring that some don't want to live like this.

The current state of affairs in the US is that, in most towns, detached single-family housing is the only thing you are legally allowed to build. When you buy land the local zoning board tells you what can be built on that land, and these zones are extremely fine-grained. Thus, the people who want detached houses are the ones who are dictating how others should live.

There is a huge demand for denser urban arrangements, because people would like to live closer to where they work and don't want to drive cars. This is why smaller houses in urban centers go for more money than larger houses in suburbs. This is an arbitrage opportunity for anyone with the capital to buy houses at the periphery of those urban centers and demolish or renovate them to house more people. Except that's illegal, so instead the market is stuck pricing by convenience, and you get a society that demands it's working class spend two or more unpaid hours of their lives each day driving from the suburbs into the city.

Historically, the transition to suburban home ownership as the default mode of living was also something dictated by elites rather than organically decided upon. To explain this we need to talk about cars, because suburbs and cars are basically a package deal. It is extremely inconvenient to live in the suburbs without owning a car, and cars do not work in cities where they have to compete for limited road space against pedestrians and public transit.

So the car companies demanded that the laws and cities change to make their business work. We invented the """crime""" of jaywalking[0] just to make cities more convenient to access in a large vehicle. Car companies even bought up and destroyed public transit, turning efficient streetcar and rail systems into buses that had to compete for road space with individual riders, and often lost. This meant more people having to buy back their freedom[1] by moving to the suburbs and buying cars to get to the job they used to walk to.

Had this decision not been made through top-down power and social engineering[2], the suburbanization of America would have been far more limited. We can see this in much of Europe and Asia, where attempts to level and rebuild cities in Henry Ford's divine image were resisted at every turn.

[0] "jay" is old-timey derogatory slang for rural farmers, roughly equivalent to today's "hick".

[1] I should point out that this freedom was an illusion because road capacity is far more limited for cars than it is for people. Suburbs will inevitably jam their streets and highways in ways that dense urban spaces cannot.

[2] As in, engineering society to work a certain way, not defrauding someone out of their login password

What it means to be projecting?

According to Karen R. Koenig, M. Ed, LCSW, projection refers to unconsciously taking unwanted emotions or traits you don't like about yourself and attributing them to someone else. A common example is a cheating spouse who suspects their partner is being unfaithful.

I've not taken any of my views and projected them anywhere.

you simply look around, and you can find TONS of so called "Social justice warriors" demanding more public transit, more density..

Usually under some "Stop urban sprawl" mantra - who gives them the right to enforce how others want to live?

Then their kids will have 4 kids, and you'll need 16x more units with respect to where you started.

Few generations after you have a much deeper problem that the one you started with. Now you live in a country with a population of over 1 billion, where protests cannot be controlled anymore and now you need a totalitarian regime with a massive surveillance and censorship apparatus to keep things under control.

The alternative is that everyone is stressed out and feels the pressure of a system that is over capacity.

Have you heard of Earth day? In 2022, it was April 22. It means that by April 22 we already consumed our environmental budget for the full year.

If we continue like this it's not going to be long until there's mandatory population control.

NOTE: this was edited

Not sure about the entire comment, but the above line is the clutch item. Once a renter turns into a homeowners, things change drastically. In the US you are typically highly leveraged once you buy a home. That means a 20% drop in home value wipes out all your equity. So once you buy into the system (esp with leverage) you have a huge incentive now to perpetuate the system that once enslaved you. Now you become the prison guard. Sadly, even the prison guard is in the prison of debt for many years, thus has to maintain the jail.

https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#&place=country/USA&st...

What makes you say that housing costs are the cause? I've not heard of that argument before.

Maybe, parents are having less kids because they can’t afford to move to a place with an extra bedroom.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32491901

People should struggle now to the point that they can't have kids so that 3 generations down the line we don't need more housing?

Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding. Because this seems like a pretty hot take if I'm understanding you correctly.

If you want to watch Netflix and forget about what's happening outside, that's your choice. But we are completely destroying this planet in every way.

There are lots of mouths to feed every day depending on systems that are not sustainable and may collapse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q

If you go camping and have limited amount of food rations, water, etc, you will make sensible decisions about how to consume the supplies you have. This is very similar.

For example, I agree people should ditch the dumb super hero movies and do something better. Maybe garden or learn to weld or something.

But I completely disagree with you that humans are destroying the planet in an unsustainable way.

Sure, there are huge challenge and excesses, but the human spirit should also bring solutions.

Particularly in the face of both energy and water shortages, we should be building coastal nuclear plants.

Not only do they provide clean energy, but they basically function as desalination plants.

That and it's pretty glib to make people "uncomfortable" so they don't procreate. Especially when here in the US we barely even have population growth.

As we humans advance, we destroy the habitat of other species. As industrial agriculture expands, we consume all the topsoil (soil with microorganisms, worms, etc. in it.), we extract dietary micronutrients from it, we pump all of the groundwater, kill all the pollinators and insects, then cause collateral damage to all migratory species that cross those territories.

We dump trash everywhere, we pollute the atmosphere, we pollute the oceans, we make the oceans more acidic, we are raising the temperature of the planet, our industrial plants dump toxic chemicals everywhere... and the list goes on and on and on.

You, on the other hand, are heavily influenced by an alternate reality which is a combination of television and Internet content, documentaries, and uplifting stories about how some experimental technology 50 years away from mass production that is prohibitively expensive and makes things 1% better for the environment, while things get 10% worse each year. You are completely out of touch with reality and the hunter gatherers from the future hunting contaminated vermin will hate you.

The millions of marine animals drowning in single use plastic bottles will concur with you.