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I mean, you picked like one of the handful of socialist market economies that does that.

Canada nominally provides you with money in the form of social assistance if you're unemployed. It's not enough to pay for rent on a studio apartment. Let alone food.

The point is that being alive is not a voluntary contract. We don't ask to be born, and we are continually told by society that suicide is unacceptable. This is fine, I think that it's generally a good idea to promote being alive. But capitalism has actually decided that being alive is only half of it. You can't kill yourself, but you can't exist if you're not useful to the capitalist system either.

So basically if you're mentally ill, if you're disabled in any way, if like me you have medical conditions that make routine employment significantly harder than it is for people without these conditions - you're just screwed. Here's your 600$ a month social assistance check. Rent is 1000$ on the absolute most basic apartment in your area. Bare minimum groceries for a single person are close to 300 a month. You might be able to afford to live in a multi bedroom dwelling with strangers without central heating and lead plumbing that often doesn't work. At that point, your best bet to eat is at food banks, which are overcrowded and underfunded. Every single person, company, and political group across the entire country will demonize you as being essentially worthless and openly talk about how you should be forced to output labor that you are unable to output.

All this while like 10% of apartments sit empty, we throw out like 30% of the food we produce, and most labor in society has become about capitalist maintenance (office job, desk job, working for companies that essentially do nothing to feed or house people, that produce unnecessary goods in mass quantities for profit motives). Like capitalism has openly determined that we are worthless. We're worth less than garbage. They'd rather throw food away than feed us. They'd rather leave perfectly functional working apartments empty than give us homes. Capitalism has no use for people who cannot produce capital. This isn't new, and it is a fundamental aspect of the system. They call it merit. How much merit do you have? How much do you deserve to be alive and be happy?

And I work 40 hours a week and have for years. I take medications that make that possible, and I'm very lucky that medications exist that can essentially make me compatible with the capitalist labor system. But I lived that life before, and have many friends who still do. Barely surviving because society has decided that it's not worth it for them to live.

Not everyone can output labor. The point of society should be to ensure that all members of society can live healthy safe and happy lives. There is no reason this cannot be the case. It has just been decided by those with majority power that it shouldn't be the case. Suffering is legally mandated.

Nothing you said changes the fact that only a small portion of humans need to work for the rest of humanity to survive. Or everyone could just work 10 hours a week and everything would still be fine. Problem is most people spend 40 hours a week doing bullshit number shifting jobs that just serve speculators to get richer. Nothing being produced. If we actually focused our productive forces into use-value instead of trade-value and completely removed financialization, we could all live lives of abundance while barely working at all. We are at that point, technologically and in the total productive forces of our species. It’s simply a matter of political will. But the ruling classes would never accept that.

Sounds nightmarish. I bet education doesn't even saddle you with unforgivable debt.

This is our only hope for climate change.

Things get better when solar out-competes coal and other fossil fuels. We're just missing the deployment rate right now I think to be able to just stop fossil fuel use from growing.

But we could have reduced consumption instead and done this much, much faster. The economy might have needed to shift to deal with this and a lot of old industries should have been shut down within only a few years, but it would have had a major impact. Instead we wait for new industries to grow alongside the old, while still growing the old!

Basically if billionaires can capture carbon, they will probably use it as a way to make governments pay to clean the air, which is essentially an ongoing tax from a private entity to a public one, which could conceivably go on forever (or until people try to nationalize it).

When was the last time you fixed any carbon, you lazy, entitled heterotroph?

They still do stuff, just a bit slower.

I, too, want to just sit here and photosynthesis all day.

They do stuff, but they’re playing a city building game instead of an rpg

It's not we shouldn't strive for a society that's caring. It's just that it isn't a given. We have to work to have that kind of society.

Entropy is a bitch. Nothing lasts forever without doing work to maintain it.

There's a certain balance we've yet to strike. Not necessarily having a living handed to you, but being in a situation where if a rough couple weeks knocks you out on your ass, you can meet your basic needs while you get back up on your feet.