Sad thing is that when it was first published it was meant to be both a warning and a guide on how to limit resource consumption back to sustainable levels so as to not experience catastrophic collapse. However none of those warning where taken seriously and the researchers where made to look like crackpots in popular media. Which sucks because all they where trying to do was make sense of the problem and work collaboratively on solutions to safely and methodically transition society so things wouldn’t be so disruptive. We saw how well that went.

It’s not “rich” that people want to be its well off. Once most people reach a certain point of comfort and access to resources demand for things levels off. So the trick is to make access to the basic goods/services cheap or free and stop the excessive consumption like mansions and private jets. Equating Degrowth economics to returning to poverty is politically setting the idea up for failure. Degrowth should be about telling people that they will still have plentiful access to food, water, shelter and energy. They just won’t be having private jet packs or luxury cars anymore.

I don’t know. Definitely not crypto as the energy demands on it make it infeasible. But a currency comes after an economic system is formed, we haven’t even addressed changing that yet so 🤷🏽‍♂️.

The USD losing reserve status is in my opinion going to happen within the next decade. BRICKS is too much of an economic powerhouse that the US can’t compete with. China alone outperforms the US when it comes to GDP. However I think in the long run it will be good for the US and others. We have all been coasting on an economy based off cheap access to energy and cheap access to credit. This has caused a huge moral hazard as people have unrealistic expectations on the cost of things and enables a consumptive lifestyle that is causing the rapid death of our biosphere.

And for that one brief moment in time they will have maximized all value for their shareholders.

That’s always been the big lie, that the right doesn’t believe in climate change. They believe in it, and they plan on making a whole lot of money off of it.

I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn’t know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.

The problem is if you run as volunteer only you can only recruit from people who are socioeconomically privileged enough to volunteer. Having a revenue model isn’t always about making a single person rich, it can be about being able to properly compensate people for their time, knowledge and experience who otherwise would not be able to because other responsibilities prevent them from it.

I like degrowth. To me it’s framing it in the way you frame conditions like cancer or obesity. “Sure growing your body is fine but too much and it kills yah”, sure the global north used economic growth to lift millions out of poverty and be able to fund massive leaps in science, technology and culture. But now our economies have gotten too big and are causing multiple negative feedback loops. So depending on the analogy our economies need to either go on a diet/exercise plan or chemo/radiation treatment.

Dude’s got nukes, that doesn’t tend to end well.

I agree that the Biden administration’s policies where not good enough to address the real issues facing working people in the country. They were pulling from the same neoliberal economic playbook that both parties have used and has been shown over and over again to increase inequality instead of decreasing inequality. Biden and Democratic leadership think we are still in the world economic situation of the 1990’s and refuse to believe otherwise.

However Trump on the other hand doesn’t even have a plan. He was correct in saying “The Economy sucks”, but had no other plan to fix the system besides “Drill Baby Drill” and “Let the Oligarchs decide how the economic system works”. Harris might have been an out of touch elite, oblivious to economic reality. But Trump is pain and destruction incarnate and will only cause more pain and destruction during his tenure.

The reality is the US Empire is dying and it can either go gracefully or with pain and anger while it takes the rest of the world with it.

More then being pedantic.

GDP is a dumb metric but this paper is really good at throwing the William Nordhaus risk model out the window, which is what institutional investors have been using all this time when making investment decisions. IMO I think this is an avenue to Segway institutional investors into looking at things like degrowth, “you can keep investing in extraction but there is an extremely high likelihood you lose all society and wealth. Or you can invest in redistribution and there is a very high likelihood that the planet/society survives, you keep more wealth then you could really need and it will only cost a percentage of your total assets.”

The answer to what caused these fires is “D all of the above”.

Climate Change: Climate Change has caused our wet seasons to be less wet then usual as well as prolonging our dry seasons so that they overlap more with Santa Anna wind season which makes fires like this current one more likely.

Forest Management: Because we live in a capitalist system forests are managed via how much $$ they provide and not their true worth. Old growth forests where cut down in mass when Anglo settlers started moving into the area. Private logging companies have bought up land/lumber rights since then and have been treating lots of the forest as a private bank. Also when Anglo settlers started moving in they halted all native burning practices which has contributed to large amount of fuel build up.

Capitalism: The philosophy that humans can rape/pillage/plunder the land for profit without facing any of the consequences is the driving force behind these decisions. Until the system in which we manage our planetary household changes we will still continue to see the destabilization of the biosphere.

Californian here and fire lookout. So although no official cause has been made I will give my best educated guess based on my knowledge of the region and knowledge of wildfires.

So normally we get some small amount of moisture during the late fall/winter months but it has been bone dry since May 2024. Since the drought came on the heels of huge wet season you have a lot of shrubs, grasses and dead chaparral(fuel) all over the mountain regions. Now we are coming into the new year and a massive atmospheric pressure system has built up over the desert regions that then force air through the canyon areas and into the Los Angeles basin(oxygen). These are called Santa Ana winds and are usually very intense however because of the earth being at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels those intense winds became hurricane force winds very quickly, we are talking 80-100mph. With all of these elements at play all that was needed was an ignition. Now that can be anything from a car backfiring, rocks colliding with each other and sparking to mylar ballon’s from birthday parties reflecting enough direct sunlight to ignite a leaf. Once that ignition source was created the fire had everything it needed to quickly go from a small flame to a massive wildfire.

With all these factors at play it was only a matter of time before a wildfire started. 4 fires is extremely abnormal however so are 80-100 mph Santa Ana winds and these longer dry seasons. I was born and have grown up and lived in this region for 30+ years, only once did I see a Santa Ana wind event that was as intense as it was Tuesday night however it has been getting hotter and dryer in Los Angeles for as long as I have lived here and it was only a matter of time before something like this hit. We were as prepared as we could have been for this and it still was not enough.

Also it’s not over yet, high winds are expected to pick up Thursday night-Friday morning and the fires are still not contained.

Oh I think he is going to do it. However I think him and the US military are underestimating the resistance that they will face. Because it’s not just Panama he is looking at it’s all of Latin America. Him and his Oligarchs know Climate Change is real, and they are planning for it.

I am Californian and at least with my own friends, family and neighbors there has been an increase in interest in the idea of separation from the US. We are kinda getting tired of the rest of the country going against our principals and interests while still benefiting from our resources. We have a larger population then Canada yet we only get 2 votes in the national legislature. Why should we continue participating in the insane politics of a dying empire?

I would say its a yes and. Yes it costs a lot of money and it’s not as efficient as trees long term. But Trees + these machines + no longer burning and releasing CO2 at the current rate + land rewilding = a chance at survival.

China is not stupid, they have no issue with crashing the global economy by separating itself from fossil fuel consumption. They want to be the technology powerhouse of the world in the 21’st century, where/if fossil fuels play a role in that who knows.

It never works out.