I appreciate your perspective, and it makes sense to a point. The problem is that suicide has little effect on consumption of resources because the people most likely to commit suicide are probably broke and not consuming. If we give everyone free money, those who exploit the poor will still come up with schemes to exploit some weakness of other people for profit. The price of oil is the only thing that slowed down growth enough for some people to realize we needed to control the poisons and pollutions (for a while). If energy had been free at the end of WWII, we would already be extinct.

Collapse is coming. There is no scenario where humans all of a sudden start to care more about the future of their children than they care about having a donut and a beer.

So the Profit-based System of systems wants a cull. I suspect it's going to be more like the French Revolution than a thinning of the herd. Meanwhile, the coming hyperinflation that peak oil and peak consumption have wrought will make for interesting times. Real value and real costs will become apparent in their time.

We have spent the last 100 years replacing people's labor with oil, and encouraging competitively growing populations doing bullshit jobs in bullshit cities while feeding them all corn syrup from fossil fuel powered farms.

I used to care. If the oligarchs don't kill me, the AMA surely will.