I'm all for it, but it would seem that any attempt to do so would fly in the face of your stated beliefs so.....what about it?

Nice find EXC.

 

It is pretty close to what I have been saying for several years. The fact of the matter is that the population of the Earth has doubled in my life time. This cuts across all social and religious boundaries, so it is not just one group of people How is this single fact not really fucking creepy?

 

Now I don't really know if it is all that viable to say that on some certain date in the past, the environmental load of humans on the planet passed the capacity of the Earth to hold us. Realistically, each resource which we use probably has a different point in time when we started using too damned much of that specific item and they do not all line up. Even so, would we be having the same discussions on such matters as global warming and the spread of exciting diseases if there were half as many people in the world as there are today?

 

As an example, it might be somewhat useful to check some old dried out oil fields to see what has happened since we abandoned them like 75 years ago. Not to find out if we can suck them even drier with modern technology but to see what the geological structures have trapped since they were abandoned.

 

That would serve as at least a ball park indication of just how much oil we can actually take out of the ground at a really sustainable level. Without actually doing those tests, I am thinking that the actual amount is a drop in the bucket compared to what we are pulling out now.

 

Don't get me wrong here, I am all for people thinking of solutions to our current slate of problems. However, population is the one that has quite a bit of potential to address many of the others.

 

Just for point of discussion, let me run with the energy economy. Let's say that if we go all out to develop a new energy paradigm, then we can supply say 30% of our current needs. How does that shape up if we reduce our population by some arbitrary amount?

 

There is another concern here. We don't want to do this too fast though. Today, China is actively trying to reduce it's population quite rapidly. As much as they can enforce matters, they are trying to force a one child per couple solution. However, it will not be too many decades before the current crop of breeders are too old to support themselves anymore. Then they will become dependent on whatever passes for social security over there.

 

I would bet that if China is even modestly successful with the current plan, they will find that they have created a stinking huge problem with too few workers to support the throngs of old people.

Population. When I crammed for my recent exams from demography, I learned the population ratio for developed and undeveloped nations. Since 1900's, population in developed nations rounded itself from about 1 billion to 2 billions. But in developing countries the population went from one to more than 4 billions. We, europeans and americans aren't that overpopulated. Third world is.

The evil we do is wasting resources, we usurp almost all of them globally and then waste them on crap that we don't need and which we throw away and the waste is dumped in developing countries. In developing countries the only wealth they ever had or have, are children. This is a cultural tradition that persists even if the life standard goes up, that causes the population explosion.

The problem is, that the world cares only about market, not about the people. Market as we understand is making worthless money out of nothing and ransoming irreplaceable resources for it. It's an evil system that will drive this world to the edge of destruction.
The selfishness of this system is reflected in the fact, that universal education, shelter, food and healthcare is not provided by any government in the world, although it's the first and most important duty of any government. And so people make more and more children to secure them in old age instead.

The key to survival is in slowing down the economy, gradually and carefully, but strictly. It is nonsense to work all workdays, full time, or on shifts. The economy is fueled by consumption, and consumption is caused mainly by artificial demand, and artificial demand is caused by the marketing designers who need to earn money. And without money you're a second class citizen. (or tenth) That's bad, being forced to make money in the worst possible way by the necessity to survive and pay bills.

In the so called 'Western world', we still have problems with poverty, lack of resources, lack of natural habitats, bankrupt governments, etc... The only thing we have over the third world is a lower birth rate. But then this is negated by immigration. Mexico is able to maintain a high birth rate because the USA acts a pressure release for a society where children don't receive much of an education is science and the religion teaches people their duty to god is to reproduce, birth control is a sin and the invisible man will supposedly take care of their children.

I agree we are inefficient with natural resource usage. However, I don't think it makes a difference. The resources would just be used by someone else to increase the population even more. It's like if I run the treadmill faster, I still don't go anywhere because the treadmill just speeds up.

How do you stop people from being selfish? Guilt and shame? Those haven't worked too well.

Governments can't provide expensive healthcare and other benefits for population with uncontrolled growth, they just go bankrupt. Disease and hunger are methods of population control.

The problem is we don't admit that we are all selfish. People join a religion, become a human rights advocate, support welfare benefits without conditions. Then they believe they are morally superior, even though there is no evidence this helps.

How about dumping the whole concept of morality and then making the pursuit of happiness a cooperative goal? Then population control can be exchanged for benefits and access to resources.

But competition in the reproduction arena is going to lead competition in other areas such as economic and military. Because we don't control population through rational means, there is going to be intense competition in the world.

 

 

Adding to that nickel tetracarbonyl as one of the intermediates of nickel processing- aka "Liquid Death"

And yeah... where does that electricity powering most hybrid vehicles come from? (Specifically- how is it produced?) Hint: more likely than not, it isn't "green"

 

 

... inconsistently irrational? maybe?

OK, as you say, there's no escape from these problems, they're global. It's funny how people behave according to advice from bronze age, when global population was about, I don't know, 200 millions.

The resources are not used to increase population! We take 80% of Third world's resources and they  multiply like crazy. No, the resources are either thrown away, or used to satisfy artificial demand (which brings no quality of life whatsoever) and then thrown away. In USA, 50% of all food is wasted. In western Europe it's 30-50%, in other developed states 30%.
Yes, the resources would be used by someone else, by someone to whom they rightfully belong! You know the car from lending office effect? If something is not yours, you waste it like crazy, but if something is yours, you watch over it and spare it carefully. And I'm not pulling this knowledge out of my ass, I had marketing and economy classes. On big scale, this was called patriotism, before Americans misused that word.

Oh, people are so adaptable. They change their behavior all the time, this is why marketing and media works. If something is cheaper they buy like crazy, if it's expensive, they complain in pubs and tighten their belts.This is very bad when there are selfish people in government and media, but it also gives hope, because it's a redeeming quality. With proper marketing, if people can be manipulated into acting stupidly and selfishly, then they can be just as easily manipulated to do the right things and live correctly. There are powerful ideals that will help it.

Governments obviously can't provide expensive healthcare, because they provide it as much expensive as they can, and then share profits with pharmacologic corporations and everyone that knows dirt about them. In my country 20% of state budget goes to private hands.

No offense, but one thing really I don't like about you, is how immature your opinions are. (and I don't know your age) If you ever saw any statistics, you would know that disease and hunger don't decrease population effectively. Areas of the world with most disease and hunger are the most populated and most out of control. And these conditions produce extremism, and even poor people can get a makeshift nuke. This is not a world worthy of living in. I have a grandma who experienced WW2 right here, with Germans and Russians, hunger, bombs and machineguns. If you like hunger and diseases so much, go and try some, see how you will like it. That is what I mean by immature.

If selfishness is a common denominator, then we can just as well forget it. Black is white, up is down, unselfish is selfish, it's just playing with words. If there is a special kind of selfishness that is unselfish, (the charity and human rights stuff) then we can just call it unselfishness, FFS. Is it so selfish wanting to have a lovely global village?
Pursuit of happiness is a good thing, if you (or rather I) define what is happiness and how to get it. It must be done scientifically. It is proven that consumerism does not bring happiness, and yet our society is all based on it.

There ALREADY is competition in the world! Both economic and military. There is in fact global economic war. With invention of nuclear bomb, wars were restricted on lesser scale, but there is no such restriction on economic warfare. Which is very, very bad.

Fuck competition! Leave it up to beefy jocks on football field. Who wants competition? Only winners, and for each winner there is a plenty of losers. That's a lousy deal, because winners are always the same, it's the self-appointed elite that controls the competition and never loses. In economy there is no such thing as healthy competition or free market. That is how capitalism comes to end today, wealth gets accumulated in few selfish hands and never gets into circulation anymore. But there's an alternative. Cooperation! In cooperation everybody wins. Cooperation is fine, because we treat each other rationally and non-destructively. Cooperation is an art and there's a whole book about it.

 

Don't forget Islam.  I just finished reading Infidel,  If you can be ordered to have sex any where, any time by your husband and ordered to not use birth control........

And who decides what is right? Moralizing does no good. If many third world countries had more cheap oil, they'd use it to grow more food and move the food into crowded cities. If many men and women still have a large number of children, do the math, how does the population not increase again until a Malthusian disaster limits the growth.

 

Can you provide a historical example of anyone that was not selfish? Perhaps if we dumped the concept of morality and moral superiority, government could be designed to maximize our common good instead of the good of the politicians.

Human misery and high birthrates go hand in hand. Because if people don't limit the population growth by other means nature will. If there is high birtrates, what else but a Malthusian check will limit growth?

Because the Germans need more living space for their population. The Slavic people were in their way.

Am I arguing in favor of war, disease and poverty? I'm saying this is the alternative means of population control if we don't have rational controls which may involve limiting the birth rates of people that would otherwise have many children.

Talk about immature. You don't like the world as it is, so you invent a fantasy world where everyone can have all the welfare benefits for their survival and no restriction on how many children they can burden the welfare system with.

Competition is in our DNA, this is how life evolved. We have competition in the reproductive arena, this is going to leak over into competition for resources, economic competition and military. This is how the world is. I think it immature to invent a alternate fantasy world where everyone can have a free lunch.

OK then, can there be international cooperation to limit population growth by means other than poverty, war and disease? Can it be done with human reason and not letting nature take it's course to reduce population imbalances?

 

The evidence is very strong from both 'primitive' cultures and 'advanced' cultures that the effect persists - after all, carrying and giving birth to a child, is not usually a particular pleasant experience for the woman.

Add to that the cost of raising and educating a child, there are reasons why most women would not have any natural urge for more kids in such societies. Of course you are right that religious imperatives can counteract this, and are a real problem, as I implied with my reference to the Catholic Church. And of course they are not the only religion pushing against any effective form of fertility control.

There are now many countries where the birth rate is below replacement, and Western Europe has been getting concerned about it for quite a while. So the evidence is that high standards of living, security, education all combine to reduce the imperative to reproduce, so I think you are wrong in your analysis that it will inevitably rise again.

Of course, if other events lead to collapse of those societies, all bets are off in any analysis of long term trends. IOW, in the longest term, all kinds of good and bad things are possible.

Even in my country, Australia, there are concerns about low birth-rate, and some politicians are arguing we need to boost immigration to compensate, and also talking about 'baby bonuses' to encourage us to have more kids. We are around 1.8 per woman. We are one of the more secular societies, like many Western European nations, so that may be part of the reason.

In short, yes.

 

Maybe some, but certainly not enough to have a huge effect. You do know America hovers at 2?

Precisely. And also, your last possibility has the caveat that it would be regional. That is, overpopulation in some regions, not all. Wild swings in high birth/death rates eventually gives way to stable, low birth and death rates, spurned by... technology. Technology is what leads to raising the standard of living.

Would it be unfair to call you an "anti-humanist?" Lol. I don't know, there's not much to discuss with such clear rancor against your own species Unless you're trolling, in which case... /sarcastic clap.

really?  that was trolling?  i thought trolling generally showed much less emotion.  btw, i'm still waiting for concrete examples of my "idealism" and "irrationality," you blinkered, pinheaded monkey-fucker.  so far, "less-than-rational" seems for you to mean "not swallowing kapkao's bullshit."

Or perhaps it's the other way around, women start having fewer babies and then society can afford all the welfare benefits. I think there may be a cause and effect reversal, because countries with high birthrates could never finance welfare benefits anyways.

But what's happening is low birthrate and secularization is negated by immigration from Muslim societies. So Europe will again have the problems of overpopulation leading to war, poverty, racism, genocide, environmental damage that has plagued Europe for millenniums. The wars will just be Sunni vs. Shite instead of Chrisitan vs. Jew.

Get out your prayer rug, the Islamification of your country has begun.

 

   Wow, I never saw that coming !  

 

There are some people who should never become parents.  Or they should never have had children.  The problem is we would never agree on who those people are.  One of the theist posters here said it was terrible I raised my children as atheists and I was a bad parent.  So I would prefer random over some dope like that making the decisions.

As your title implies, regulating who can have children and how many is a touchy subject. As someone who routinely rails against government involvement in the economy I would think the state imposing standards on reproduction would be even more offensive.

I'm busy atm; take a number, get in line, and bug someone else.

Btw: I really don't give a flying fuck if you "swallow my bullshit" or not; I like torturing you with my words. You, of course, allow me to rent out room in your head- without me even trying. That's all, really.

my head?  not even close.  believe it or not, dipshit, i never fire so much as a single neuron on your behalf when i'm away from these boards.  i might grant you a packed timeshare in my fingertips.

and just how the fuck does "torture" work if the "victim" feels neither pain nor even mild distress?

  Children as life wreckers ?  Not hardly.  Mine are kept handcuffed to a pipe in the crawl space under my house.  When I turn up the volume really loud on the television set I can barely hear their screams.   

      Problem solved ! 

What I find offensive about the leftist point of view of who should be responsible. It seems people of your political persuasion put all responsibility to fix societies problems on the backs of tax payers. All problems can be solved by increasing the size of the welfare state and the taxes to pay for it.

My view is that all relationships are based on give and take. If their is an imbalance between givers and takers as would occur under a welfare state, this arrangement is unsustainable. You're asking people to work for free so others can have stuff for free.

The socialist arrangement is like having a wife that tell you that you must pay all bills but she can fuck other men any you must pay for them. You either have a 50/50 give and take marriage or you get a divorce.

So I think with society, you either tell everyone they are on their own or you have enforced contracts to give and get something. I don't see why you find this irrational, you don't work for free and you don't pay for merchandise you never receive. So fine, have a socialist coop where you all pay each others medical bills. Just don't force me to do anything and I won't force you.

But if people want to force me to pay for their children, why can't I have a say in who, when and how many? Otherwise, let's not have any government.