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OT: The News Thread

or have a forward thinking government that shares profits from the human genius for scientific automation of labor to provide a higher quality of life for all of its citizens.
 
or have a forward thinking government that shares profits from the human genius for scientific automation of labor to provide a higher quality of life for all of its citizens.

No, no. Grab your gun and stop having kids. It's so much more rational....

There will be new occupations. This is "creative destruction".
 
...I'm not advocating war as a way of culling the herd, I just believe the planet would be better off with less of us, and we'd be better off if people in countries rich in poverty weren't having so many kids.
 
What's wrong with less people on the planet?

From which angle though? Functionally, our biggest problem with our level of population is energy (energy = food and water, as long as you have access to sufficient energy, the other two are easier than you'd think to produce on massive scales). Yeah, if there is 7.5 Billion people living like a North American does with the current technological state of energy generation, then we have a big, big ****ing problem. Thankfully though, the developing world seems to be skipping that part of our development and going straight to renewables, which should significantly lessen future burden on the planet as their quality of life increases.

The next aspect of this discussion is connected to that....as quality of life increases, birth rate decreases. Tons and tons of data available on this. You want to see fewer people on the planet? Support women's education initiatives and the low hanging fruit on the disease tree (bed nets in malaria stricken regions, etc). Women's education is the single biggest indicator in future child births (smarter, more educated women want to have fewer children regardless of which region or religion they're in and enough of them fight for self determination that they tend to win it for the whole).

The elephant in the room though is simple age demographics. Short of some sort of incredible advance in medical science, large swaths of the population are set to start dying off over the next 50 years, stabilizing population growth rates overall, with most projections putting us somewhere in the 8.5 Billion range in the back half of this century. Even that, imo, doesn't account for the incredible potential of women's education and overall quality of life improvements in 3rd world regions.

Long story short though? As long as certain technological/social/economic trends continue, "over population" is a lark.
 
If we solve the energy crisis all bets are off, but right now we just need birth control.

I'm talking globally of course; if we could somehow get the poorer nations to understand that if, at least, each family had less mouths to feed there'd be less strain at that level...and the hope is we get our shit together, and eventually as an area begins to prosper it can then grow.


Meh, I have been thinking about this a long time, but I'm not big on writing essays here;
 
Good luck convincing the retirees that their health care is too expensive for the government to pay for.

The functioning of the system is based around having working people costing far less than they provide, subsidizing retired people who provide little and soak up a large chunk of resources. Unless we're willing to go full soylent green, we need immigration.
 
Good luck convincing the retirees that their health care is too expensive for the government to pay for.

The functioning of the system is based around having working people costing far less than they provide, subsidizing retired people who provide little and soak up a large chunk of resources. Unless we're willing to go full soylent green, we need immigration.

Or more babies.

Or raise the retirement age to 75.
 
Or more babies.

How do you intend on accomplishing that? We're not having more children largely because 1) we eduate our women & 2) that shit is expensive, and birth control is a thing

Or raise the retirement age to 75.

CPP and OAS are fine for the most part, I'm mostly referencing health care costs.
 
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Bah. Alarmist gibber.

Long-term benchmark growth rates are not exploding, fertility rates are dropping, even in Africa which will have by far the strongest population growth of any continent.

The womens are getting educated, and hundreds of million (maybe billions) of people in Asia will joining the middle class in the next few decades. This will increase the demand for a liveable planet. Decarbonization is already well underway.

That said, all the wild fish will likely be eaten. And some animals will go extinct coz people wanna make their d*cks hard by grinding up horn.
 
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