I spent two weeks delivering for Uber Eats and made $4.40 per hour

"Once enough people have died, prices will reach a new equilibrium."

What a nasty way of looking at people and the world.

And there's the rub. How do we deal wiht this, or head it off? Most people and discourses have their headds in the sand about this

It'll happen whether you like it or not.

Acknowledging it doesn't make a person "nasty".

I think this argument is misleading because we're not guaranteed to find this "equilibrium" in a reasonable amount of time.

Think this of as a machine learning problem. The market is trying to get the global optimal point. I'm sure it exists, but the way we do this is pretty much by doing hill climbing, which may end up with a bad local maxima. And there are billions of parameters. You might sometimes want to try a different strategy even if it looks worse temporarily.

But... it doesn't just "happen" - our behaviours shape how this plays out. And if some of my behaviours can either hasten the death of these folks, or improve their lives in some way, I'd like to know about it, and potentially modify my behaviour.

I was referring to your opinion and not your person but I have to say that to a complete stranger, you don't come of as that likable when you casually suggest genocide on a global scale as a means to solve the planet's resource crisis. Frankly, I'm tired of constantly reading this line of selfish thinking on HN.

How about cruel and heartless? You are casually suggesting that we just let people die in the streets while companies exploit labor as much as possible.

As a reminder, if conditions get bad enough, that equilibrium you crave comes at the pointy end of pitchforks.

Fair points, but note I'm not suggesting genocide. I'm just suggesting there's nothing at all you can do to stop people from dying when there aren't enough resources to support the population. It's an inevitability, and denying that helps nobody.

That's fine. Donate to charities that help the poor and homeless. That's a noble cause.

You will not be able to keep everybody alive. The more people you keep alive, the more people there will be in the next generation who also need to be kept alive.

To be fair, they are not advocating genocide. Rather, they are advocating mass starvation which is blind to race, creed or color. Truly an enlightened view!

Just in case anyone was unsure, that's not the libertarian argument.

(It's maybe the Malthusian argument, and Malthus failed to account for technological development and declining birth rates.)

>Population will grow exponentially until something bounds it.

That "something" doesn't have to be market forces, and it doesn't have to limit growth by killing.

Birth control works just as well (if not better).

> Population will grow exponentially until something bounds it.

That's only true if fertility rates stay above the replacement fertility rates. As nations become more developed, fertility rates tend to fall. In the EU-28 the fertility rate was 1.58 children per woman in 2015, well below the replacement rate of 2 [1]. India's fell from 5.9 in 1960 to 2.4 in 2015 [2].

> There's going to have to be competition for resources, and those who lose out will die. We may as well get used to that now.

Your Malthusian view is outdated. We can easily feed and shelter the current population (and projected peak population) for the foreseeable future.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&l...

[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?

Why are you assuming there aren't enough resources?

As I believe humans are the #1 cause of climate change/ destruction and the eradication of other species, I think we could stand to lose about half the current human population until we can figure out a sustainable lifestyle.

Do you believe there is a link between resource consumption and climate change? I do.

We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14330520.

Setting aside the obvious moral problems with "losing" half the current human population, letting the market decide is exactly the wrong thing to do here. It's not the bottom 50% (the once that would starve) that are the problem in terms of climate change, it's the top 50% (or 10%). The average CO2 emissions per capita in the US are 16 metric tons per year, versus 1.6 in India [1]. You would end up with 50% of the population, but still have 95% of the CO2 emissions.

You could accomplish much more by cutting the fossil fuel subsidies ($5.3 trillion in 2015 if you count the externalities [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X16...