Tiresia

If your city has N homeless people, the N best places to sleep will be occupied by homeless people. Crazy how most cities will choose to make everyone uncomfortable because they would rather see a homeless person sleep in the gutter than seeing them sleep on a bench or not seeing them because they have the human right of indoor shelter.

Is that advice about how it would be ideal to have a professional eyewash station pumping tens of liters past your eyes? Or is actually specialized for street medicine where you're lucky if you have more than 3 litres available?

It's easy for medical professionals to speak about idealized circumstances that don't actually apply to you or to focus overly much on what little they do know, especially once you leave the narrow range of high-status medical problems.

If you look at the chemical safety data sheet of tear gas and compare it to the components of antacids (one and two), you'll find that it is more dangerous to have tear gas in your eyes than it is to have pure antacid powder in your eyes. Wikipedia lists the safe exposure for tear gas as 100 times lower than the safe exposure for antacid, with tear gas being able to cause scarring in the lungs while antacid merely causes irritation if inhaled.

Note that in those safety data sheets, the answer for eye exposure in all cases is several minutes of rinsing with fresh water. That means tens of liters of water per person, which is simply infeasible in practice. So our goal is not to remove irritants completely, but to reduce the concentration of dangerous chemicals in your eyes as much as you will likely be able to manage in the next hour.

Antacid chemically neutralizes tear gas. If applied in the right dose, that can reduce concentration of chemical irritants to far lower than an amount of water you can reasonably carry with you. If applied in excess, you need to apply a decent amount for it to be more dangerous than tear gas, and as long as the end result isn't as bad you can follow it up with a rinse with water and still end up ahead.

As long as that sophistication is geared towards reaching capitalist targets, all it does is enable them to ruin the land through "tragedies of the commons" faster.

Whether that's desertification because you're pumping up more groundwater than rain can replenish, nitrates continuing to exist after they leave your land, pesticides giving your customers cancer, insecticides causing a collapse of pollinator populations you rely on for crop yields, crop pandemics due to a lack of genetic diversity, or something else, modern capitalist farmers have a lot of fancy tools for destroying the planet and leaving society vulnerable to starvation.

Inheritance or gambling.

I wonder how many prehistoric humans would fail a survival test. Given they rarely lived in tribes smaller than 50 people, there's got to have been quite a few that just didn't bother to learn every survival skill.

To extend the cancer metaphor, a metastisized cancer can still be worth operating on to give the chemotherapy a better chance of success.

The DNC doesn't have an absolute stranglehold on politics, especially at the local level. Some good people, like Bernie Sanders, run on a Democratic ticket. Having Sanders or AOC lose their seats because you're unhappy with the DNC monopolizing "the left half" of the political spectrum is definitely counterproductive.

People can adapt, things just aren't bad enough yet to get them to. There's still the illusion many people convince themselves of that everything is fine. When that illusion is incompatible with survival, people will change.

If the weather isn't survivable for long periods, we can build underground shelters. If there are shortages of food and water and home gardens die, we can build storerooms and greenhouses (perhaps underground with artificial lighting) and wastewater recycling. Use wind power (or solar, if the panels can withstand the weather) for electricity to grow the food, recycle as much as you can, and spend any excess labor doing what you can to improve the chances for life on the surface to recover. It sounds terrible compared to our current luxury, but societies have lived (and had kids) through worse.

If you don't want to bring children into a world comparable in quality of life to a 13th century medieval European city, okay. But know that if there is a future, it will be because some people did have children. (Alongside lots of other important reasons).

Economic sustainability has almost nothing to do with population size. The vast amount of unsustainability comes from wasteful consumerism. Furniture that lasts years instead of centuries, clothes that last months instead of decades, holidays 10,000 km away instead of 1 km away, single-use plastics for every single thing, etc.

People that live within an ecosystem have net negative emissions if they care to put in the effort. Every person that exists can live and work to make things better, so how can it be a disadvantage to have more of them?

There is a point when every bit of nature has a steward tending to its development/survival/recovery closely enough that another person won't be a net ecological benefit, but with a global population density of one person per two hectares we're not there yet.

Ah, that's fair. I meant you were complaining about people that had kids in general.

You're right that we need to fight, but we will grow old and die before we've returned the world to a state our children deserve to live in. I don't mean to diminish our duty, but to say that creating the next generation of people to continue that fight is part of that duty. Not for our children's sake, but hopefully for our great grandchildren and every generation afterwards.

Despite what capitalism would have you believe, humans are part of nature. With the same effort that has allowed us to destroy nature faster than any other species, we can maintain or restore balance better than any other species. It makes as much sense to argue against the next generation of humans to "restore the ecosystem" as it makes sense to argue against the next generation of bees.

Let them call us, those born in the 20th century, the worst people to have ever existed. It's not far from the truth. But why let that stop us from doing the right thing: giving birth to them so they can fix this mess for future generations or die trying? Why let our shame deny the ecosystem the best chance at recovery?