The article was about production, not wealth. While Bezos certainly uses 1000x the production compared to a regular person, he doesn’t use the 1Billion times that his wealth represents. He doesn’t eat 1B cheeseburgers every day. So while you’d get more out of the 30% of extremely wealthy, it wouldn’t be proportional to their wealth and there’s only .1% of the population that’s in that category.

But humans can clearly survive on a local diet pretty much everywhere

That’s subsistence living. No one wants to go back to that. Nor is anyone stopping you from living that way. Land is cheap in the middle of nowhere. Communes exist everywhere.

People already love to eat or order out. You could have a cafeteria

A communal cafeteria isn’t what people do when “going out”. If it was what people wanted, there would be more cafeterias and fewer restaurants.

A major driver of this is advertising or “brainwashing” people to buy garbage they don’t need.

It’s easy to think that everyone is sheep except for yourself. I’ve now come to believe that consumerism is fundamental to human nature, not advertising changing humans. The proof is thousands of years of pre capitalism artifacts from archeology sites. People have always liked unnecessary “stuff”. People have always liked fashion and trends. People are going to be rampant consumers even if advertising and marketing were stopped tomorrow. It’s their nature.

I find it funny that Seth had to pitch them, “You still want money?” Because the current executives don’t have any idea how to make money.

If ever fewer young and able people have to take care of ever more elderly, it won’t have a good outcome.

It takes fewer resources to care for elderly than raise children. Not raising a child means there’s a surplus to care for the elderly. Then the elderly die leaving more surplus behind. It’s not only a theoretical based on money but we have all of history that shows this truth. For example WW2 killed the most productive members of society leaving only the elderly to be cared for. The result was a global economic boom.

“Deserve” implies to me

That’s only semantics. You agree with the OP, you only don’t like the wording.

And I don’t think they deserve less than the rest of us.

So the Doctor that studied for 16 hours a day while I played video games and then worked 16 hour shifts at the hospital during residency for 5 years while I worked 7 hours shifts at Taco Bell should be paid the same as me?

Capitalism has perverse unjust rewards but that doesn’t make the opposite just either.

Air conditioning or cooking is rather nitpicking, those are not real issues, technological advances and passive house design would easily solve that.

The entire world doesn’t have the climate of Japan where it’s possible to live in an apartment without AC and heat. No amount of design can ameliorate 38C high humidity.

growing food directly around you

Only a subset of food can be grown locally and that local food is only available seasonally. It’s the system we already have.

You could also have communal kitchens or diners or cafeteria.

That’s not a technological solution to cooking. That’s social which is far harder if not impossible to overcome.

The greatest luxury of all would be to have free time.

That doesn’t follow. The same work needs to be done, if not more because reducing energy means reducing automation so people have to work to make up the difference.

It’s not taking 30% and spreading it. It’s we only ever needed to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed for everyone to reach those standards.

I don’t understand what you mean by those two sentences. They seem to be in conflict with each other.

You have 100 coins. To say we need to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed means you now have only 70 coins.

"leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.”

You had 100 coins and now you have 70. You can still buy luxuries but 30% less than what you had before it was redistributed.

That’s the same thing. The paper is arguing against the need to increase production vs redistribution of what is currently produced.

That isnt a 30% reduction, it’s only needing to make 30% of what we already are doing.

Where does that 30% come from? They are explicitly saying that their analysis isn’t about increasing production of anything. Redistribution means taking away from the rich developed population to give to the poor. They said take 30% and redistribute it. If you are on Lemmy, that includes you.

When I read “West”, I read “developed world”.

Japan, South Korea, Tawain, etc, are as developed as the West. Most of China is now too, but there are billions more that aren’t developed.

That’s exactly what the article proposed:

'Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity, depending on our assumptions about distribution and technological deployment. "

So if you and everyone are willing to live on 30% less “money”, worldwide poverty would be eliminated.

Apples and rice in the US were found to be contaminated with arsenic from the soil. Farms are moved, soil is treated, processing is changed.

Here what can be done for Chocolate:

https://www.asyousow.org/blog/2022/8/17/new-report-explains-simple-safe-and-low-cost-solutions-to-reduce-levels-of-lead-and-cadmium-in-chocolate

Some brands of chocolate do not have high lead. It’s not a necessary part of chocolate production.

It’s not as safe as other chocolates that have significantly less lead and cadmium. Furthermore, in some cases the contamination comes from the processing machinery, not the soil, so it completely under their control to immediately eliminate it. Yet they didn’t say they planned to address the problem. They could also begin the process of eliminating cadmium by replanting on uncontaminated soil.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-cadmium-in-dark-chocolate-a8480295550/

Annoyingly, instead of saying they were going to address the problem, Tony’s response was “it’s in the soil” and CR used “California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA)” standards. Which ignores that their chocolate is still higher in lead than some other brands.

https://tonyschocolonely.com/blogs/other/a-small-update-on-health-and-safety-and-heavy-metals

I was all about Tony’s until it came out it’s high in lead and cadmium. Ghirardelli is the only easy to buy brand for me that isn’t high in lead or cadmium.

I don’t understand the wild eyed hate for a spell checker on steroids. LLMs predict the next word like the phone keyboard you use every day.

Hate the hype, not the tool.

The sole purpose of all tools ever created is to lower the value of human skills.

LLM’s are hyped but have some value as a tool.

In a competitive market, there would be no reason to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into LLMs which are unprofitable, inaccurate, and have very limited use cases.

That’s not how capitalism works at all. Companies are spending money on AI because they need to compete against other companies. You might not like it for all the very good reasons you gave, but consumers are using AI so companies are trying to provide it. In the absence of competition, companies do not spend money chasing risky new revenue streams but milk their existing base.

If there was only Microsoft, and no other software company on the planet, Microsoft would not spend money on AI because they wouldn’t need to.

A big part of Marx’s criticism of capitalism is the waste it creates through duplication of effort.

If there were more Google/FB/Amazons there would be even more hardware purchases because there would be more companies competing to dominate AI.

Every country has immigration enforcement.