>Many environmentalists say that even the current world population can't afford Western middle-class quality of life.
What makes you think we (we as in those of us who see reduction as a focus on environmentalism) disagree with this? We are, indeed, already too many, meaning that we should reduce further, and further, and not just be content with our current numbers, and certainly not allow those numbers to keep growing.
The city I was born in, Montpellier, grew from 100k inhabitants in 1960 to 270k in 2018. It turned from beautiful Haussmann style architecture surrounded by crops of vines and wild countryside land to a nightmare of concrete towers, oppressive modern architecture ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Pierres_... can you look at this and not feel overly disgusted?), overgrowth of suburbs around it to the point where we need to travel much further to see any wildland and a homeless problem ala san francisco that keeps getting worse and worse as we fail to build as much as necessary to fulfill the need of our constant growth and and rents and property costs keep growing beyond more and more out of reach of the average french man living there.
It is not just about CO2 emissions like what people on the left side focus on so much. It is about quality of life itself. Or lack thereof induced by letting things go on like this.
You are right, current numbers are horrendous and more than the earth could withstand if everyone had western middle class style economy, as even western countries have too much population. It isn't solely poor countries that should reduce their numbers. Encouraging people to sterilize in France would be a great thing too.
" more expensive almost everywhere outside the US."
It's (sms/texting) free (http://mobile.free.fr/) and unlimited on a 2 euros monthly phone subscription with 2 hours of voice communication in France. That makes it the cheapest way to communicate at all, here. Cheaper than voice and much cheaper than internet data. Even the absolute poorest of the country can use texting. It's more accessible than DATA driven apps and can run on dumb phones.
> I've had to fix friends' computers who had their user profiles corrupted by an update so they can't log in.
An extremely recurrent issue with windows 10 updates (in particular, the big ones that happen every six months and behave like a complete OS reinstall) that manifests in so many different forms.
I've seen it do stuff like only breaking UWP apps while leaving everything else intact. I've seen it break UWP apps + the start menu. And then I've seen it do the login breaking thing. The thing those symptoms have in common is that they were always solved by simply making a new user profile and logging into it then transferring the user data into the new profile, proving that the root of all horrors comes from bugs in the user profile migration that windows does during updates.
I'm always horrified by the process not just because of the bugs but also because of how inane UWP is. Every new profile created will also get its amazing share of UWP crapware downloads, because of course it wouldn't make sense for software to be installed system wide, nah let's do that every time a profile is created and let's pull the microtransaction ladden mobile games while we're at it.
Creating user profiles takes so much time on older acquaintance computers with spinning rust too.
What makes you think we (we as in those of us who see reduction as a focus on environmentalism) disagree with this? We are, indeed, already too many, meaning that we should reduce further, and further, and not just be content with our current numbers, and certainly not allow those numbers to keep growing.
The city I was born in, Montpellier, grew from 100k inhabitants in 1960 to 270k in 2018. It turned from beautiful Haussmann style architecture surrounded by crops of vines and wild countryside land to a nightmare of concrete towers, oppressive modern architecture ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Pierres_... can you look at this and not feel overly disgusted?), overgrowth of suburbs around it to the point where we need to travel much further to see any wildland and a homeless problem ala san francisco that keeps getting worse and worse as we fail to build as much as necessary to fulfill the need of our constant growth and and rents and property costs keep growing beyond more and more out of reach of the average french man living there.
It is not just about CO2 emissions like what people on the left side focus on so much. It is about quality of life itself. Or lack thereof induced by letting things go on like this.
You are right, current numbers are horrendous and more than the earth could withstand if everyone had western middle class style economy, as even western countries have too much population. It isn't solely poor countries that should reduce their numbers. Encouraging people to sterilize in France would be a great thing too.