Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn’t have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can’t.
Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn’t be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying “how do we prevent population contraction” - that’s insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.
If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we’re all fucked.
Get in, make as much as possible (with little to no regard for others), get out, retire early.
Arguably, this is what the American dream has become. It used to be we wanted middle class wealth, 2.1 kids, and a nice suburban house. But now all we want to do is sell out, retire, and never have to work again. I can relate, even if I lack the skills to play the game.
That’s where we got antiwork, FIRE, etc. It’s true: nobody wants to work anymore. I sure don’t. Maybe we never did.
Quite literally, same here. There’s nothing wrong with bikes, but used cars became unreasonably expensive and younger people never tasted the freedom. Planes are like that with even smaller percentages of pilots and even more unreasonable prices (last affordable in the 1960s, while cars were affordable until the early 2000s or so). People hate what they don’t have or understand. Personal vehicles are incredibly liberating for those of us who get it. We’re being shamed for appreciating an independence everyone should experience, but can’t because there are too many people, too much demand, and all the ecological problems that come with it. Yes, human impact could be reduced if everyone lived in abject poverty, but guess what, poor people in developing countries want Western amenities too. Everyone should.
I suppose it could be opt in for the end users - say they host the communities they participate in only (i.e somebody likes 3D Printing and coffee, but maybe not porn or politics).
I’ve been arguing that Lemmy needs to become distributed a la BitTorrent to be sustainable. If regular users are participating in small pieces of hosting so that it’s completely decentralized and load is taken off the instance servers, it would be sustainable.
To be honest I don’t have a clue but my lay understanding is that it’s a tool for establishing trust or authenticity in a distributed system. It was a half-serious suggestion because I’ve always heard those who are much more knowledgeable than me say that it has essentially no worthwhile applications.
I just typed out a whole reply and it got eaten after I clicked reply - no surprise there are still going to be bugs in this implementation, nevermind getting more complex with it.
I’m not technical enough to make anything happen if it involves code, but I’m way psyched you’re working on something along these lines. The way I see the problem there are some distinct issues
Yeah, trust and federation is a concept that would have to be worked out in this model. I think it would require some critical-mass of federation amongst instances to establish trust. I wonder if this is an actual application for [dodges beer can] blockchain technology…
It’s worth noting that Americans also must spend that income in a similarly-inflated market, so it doesn’t much matter what their salary would be worth in, say, Uganda. I think any such comparison of global wealth runs into these sorts of issues.
Someone earning in the global top 10% may not be able to afford a house locally. Someone earning in the top 30% may not be able to afford rent and food at the same time in their locale. It makes the percentile meaningless.