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Talk about hyperbole. But you sound pretty serious about your feelings, so let me address each of your points one at a time.

1) We've been evolving into omnivores for at least a million years.

Not quite. Homo sapiens has been evolving for about 250,000 years, give or take. And we evolved into omnivores mostly because gathering plants and fruits was easier, safer, more reliable, and a more dependable source of food. Meat from hunting was a high-risk-high-reward method of feeding oneself; while more caloric-dense, hunting took days, risks, and many people to do, and many times the hunters came back empty-handed. Evolving into omnivores allowed us to diversify our diets, giving us a greater chance of survival.

2) You can't just decide you're going to be strict vegetarian and not expect to have health problems related to that.

Says who? There's plenty of research supporting the benefits of vegan diets. As long as people watch what they eat to make sure they're consuming appropriate amounts of vitamins, proteins, and lipids, it really doesn't matter what diet they consume.

3) How about instead of screwing with people's diets, we create a timeline to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, and stick to it?

No complaints. Maybe eliminating fossil fuel use entirely is a bit of a stretch, especially given our dependence on plastics and petro-chemicals, but a significant reduction needs to start now. But when thirty-six percent of the food we grow is fed to livestock, you're fooling yourself if you think that you can do that while advocating for meat consumption.

4) Also how about we stop destroying existing forests and start re-planting them?

Great idea. But then, where will we get the farmland for animal feed?

5) And start controlling our population growth, seeing as how the planet can clearly and objectively only support so many humans at once?

Well, good luck convincing everyone on the planet to stop procreating. Though, in a pure sense of supply-and-demand economics, it's our ability to improve agriculture production that allows us to sustain our population. After all, humans can't live if we can't grow food to feed them. Probably the most important man that nobody's ever heard of is Fritz Haber. It's his invention of the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer that allowed the population of the planet to quadruple in one hundred years.

6) Why do we need 10 BILLION people alive at the same time? Can we get the nutjob 'quiverfull' religious types to knock it the hell off?

While -some- religious groups have population growth greater than average, most do not. The most influential variables in the United States are youth, fertility, and immigration. So, feel free to complain about the Mexicans, but the religious nutjobs, not so much.

Now that I've addressed your points, I'll take just a moment to make a few of my own. We eat far more than we need to. Given how many resources it consumes, as the parent article references, reducing our meat intake is not a bad t

Study suffers from a common mistake - failing to account for opportunity cost. It incorrectly compares the environmental impact of livestock versus no livestock.

A proper comparison takes into account opportunity cost - the next most likely alternative. In this case, if we reduced meat consumption, we wouldn't be raising huge amounts of cattle. But neither would we be hunting large grazing herbivores to extinction for meat. Meaning the reduction in cattle would be offset by an increase in buffalo, wild oxen, yak, deer (elk, moose), wild goats, etc. And aside from agricultural runoff and antibiotics, the net environmental impact of the change would be zero.

It also fails to realize that almost all population growth is in developing countries, whereas most meat consumption is in developed countries. In fact several developed nations are experiencing population declines . You cannot take characteristics of the population with nearly zero population growth (rate of meat consumption), and apply it to the totally different population experiencing large population growth. The countries with large population growth are mostly poor nations where people live off subsistence diets consisting of grains and starches. In fact if one were to apply the study's flawed reasoning here, one would conclude that eating meat correlates with reduced population growth. And therefore to prevent the problems caused by a growing population, we need to get more people to eat meat.

Here is national spending on R&D
How about nobel prize winners? Yeah, America wins.
How about scientific papers by nations? Now, the ONE thing that you got somewhat right is that 20% of America's tech is 'foreign-born'.That does not mean that they are all H1B or just student visa. Ppl like Elon musk who is foreign-born, but not American citizen, counts on that.
But to make wild claims that America has totally lost it with science is a joke. Hell, even the bulk of the papers coming from China/CHinese are considered HORRIBLE. The high quality remains with western science.
Oh, BTW, there are areas that America does not dominate. If you want leadership in Chemistry, that would be Germany. Even to this day, American BSChem require us to learn German to be able to read the tech.
Beyond that, America still remains tops.

So what you are saying is that houses are getting cheaper per area? "The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s; it now stands at 2,349 square feet".

Yep, bigger house built to a better standard with fewer kids. A lot of the perceived "needs" of children today like each having their own room or of the parents like having a separate master bathroom would be an extravagant luxury in the 1960s. People are better off but they're still struggling equally hard or harder to keep up with everyone else. If your kid is the one with no Playstation and no iPhone it doesn't really help to say that you didn't have a Playstation or an iPhone when you grew up either. Clothes that are patched and mended might not be unheard of in 1967 but today they'd look like bums. The goal posts are moving.

The times before the industrial revolution were worse. People moved to the cities because the jobs their beat starving as peasants in the country side. http://www.prb.org/Publication... Human population grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, not because the birth rate increased, but because the death rate began to fall. This mortality revolution began in the 1700s in Europe and spread to North America by the mid-1800s. Death rates fell as new farming and transportation technology expanded the food supply and lessened the danger of famine. New technologies and increasing industrialization improved public health and living standards. This reminds me of a book (can't recall the title) I read as a kid. It involves an immortal girls forever living as a 9 year old. Her present day teacher gave the same lecture, industrial revolution bad. He didn't like it when she said, yes, only not near as bad as what came before.

It is estimated that of these 100 billions or so, 40% did not live to see their first birthday.

Nope, that isn't even remotely in the right ball park. The number of people alive today is about 7% of the total number of people that have ever lived, according to some estimates.

God damn, you're a stupid motherfucker. Overall, poverty rates are higher for minorities. That's not racist. It's fucking statistics! You know what makes people capable, you prick? Money. Now look up statistics for who is more likely to have money in America and who isn't. Now shut the fuck up.

I agree with your sentiment, but the Population Reference Bureau says that number is about 107 billion people have ever lived so that's closer to 54 billion women than "trillions".

The 100 billion number was from memory from something I read a couple years ago; a quick google found http://www.prb.org/Publication... which estimated 108 billion (I did say approximately!) in 2011. As to everybody dying? Welllll... In the Many Universes interpretation of QT, there are an infinite number of universes, one of which exists solely for your survival. If that holds true, somehow (in that universe) you'll survive past the heat death of the universe; or you'll find a way to avoid it altogether.

One of the key transformations UBI is addressing is that increases in productivity mean that an ever smaller fraction of the population needs to work to grow food or manufacture goods. In 2000, only 1.9% of the US labor force was in agriculture, and in 2002 93% of US households in agriculture had non-farm income, meaning that a fair amount of the labor force is doing agriculture part time (source). The fraction of the non-farm labor force in manufacturing has also been decreasing steadily, and was down to 10% in 2007 (source). The US in a net importer of manufactured goods, so there are some foreign workers who would have to be counted, but that doesn't change that the trend has been relentlessly downward (figure 5 in the manufacturing report). US labor force participation is about 51% of the total population (table 1 in the manufacturing report), so even padding the manufacturing fraction to 18% and counting all the ~2% in agriculture, 10% of the US population is sufficient to make all the food and manufactured goods required.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the US plays a big part in carbon dioxide emissions. Of course, any one country can't make a difference alone but the US has A LOT of impact. And Kerry's quote may be technically correct but the developing world's population is 83% compared to the total [1]. That means that the developed countries still produce more emissions per capita. And that doesn't even take account for factories that are in developing nations that produce stuff for consumption in the US and EU.

The US has very high per capita carbon dioxide emissions. More than double than that of Chine and the EU. Its' country emissions are 2nd after China's but China has 4 times the population [2]. Kerry is full of BS here. Sure, if I stop using my 4000cc petrol car and my AC 24/7 it wont change much, since I'm only 0.000000000001% of the global emissions.

[1] http://www.prb.org/pdf13/2013-population-data-sheet_eng.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

Actually, when you look at after-tax compensation, average wages have risen. Not to mention that adjusting wages for inflation without taking into account how much better a lot of goods are than they used to be is silly. In addition, there are more women working now, and basic supply and demand says that when you have more people entering the workforce, wages go up more slowly than they would otherwise.

There are a lot of lies spouted during the Overall Abortion Debate. For example, it is a lie to claim that "intrinsic value" exists. It is a lie to claim that an unborn human is not alive. It is a lie to claim that human life matters, in the Grand Scheme of Things. It is a lie to claim that an unborn human is equal to a "baby" or "child" (both of which normally don't have an attached placenta as a vital organ). It is a lie to claim that an unborn human is more than just a mere-animal organism. It is a lie to claim that "human" is always equal to "person" (see all the human life, cuticle cells, getting killed during manicures and pedicures; cuticle cells have the full set of human DNA and modern cloning/stem-cell research shows that any such cell has the potential to act like a zygote --also see "hydatidiform moles" and "brain-dead adults on full life-support" as other examples where "human" does not equal "person"). It is a lie to equate "potential" with "actual" (do you, a potential corpse, want to be buried 6 feet under today?). It is a lie to claim that the finite Earth has endless food-resources for an ever-growing population. It is a lie to claim that fossil fuels will last indefinitely. It is a lie to claim the Earth is not currently overpopulated, when we have such problems as Global Warming, Deforestation, Overfishing, Aquifer Depletion, Farmland Encroachment by Cities, Topsoil Losses, Algae Blooms, and vast amounts of Toxic Waste being dumped into the environment as a side-effect of Mass Production. It is a lie to claim that humanity is immune to a "Malthusian Catastrophe". It is a lie to claim that unborn human animal organisms are "innocent", when they actually act worse than parasites (without actually being parasites). It is even a lie to claim God opposes abortion (see Exodus 20:21, in which causing a miscarriage can be associated with the arbitrary penalty of ZERO). When all the lies are finally extirpated from the Overall Abortion Debate, there will be no valid rationale for illegalizing abortion in this day-and-age.

In truth, these numbers of users are really quite small. The current upper bound seems to be about 108 billion, so there's still a ways to go.

Was parent modded down due to lack of citation? Maybe they were referring to this? http://www.prb.org/Publication...

Your parent post's point was almost meaningless. The US's per capita co2 production may be falling, but not fast enough. I live in a country where we would be near the top of the scale, if you look at co2 production per capita on a global scale. It it about half that of the US co2 per capita.

Was parent modded down due to lack of citation? Maybe they were referring to this?
http://www.prb.org/Publication...

> That said, my round-trip commute to work is 20 miles, so I'm really an ideal candidate.

The average american commute time is 26 minutes. That makes the average worker an ideal candidate for electric. Its just difficult for people to wrap their brains around using that 2nd vehicle, or renting, for those extended trips that happen a handful of times a year.

Ok, Let's focus on these answers that you have wider selection sets to make a mental image over than just people you know.

That would be 1-5, and 10.

1)
You say that you have never heard a female pilot over the intercom. How strongly does this paint the image that pilots are all male? (Or, how shocked would you be to hear a female pilot informing you of mid-air turbulence?) Would you say this would be encouraging for women to become pilots?

According to the Airline Pilots Association, only 5% of commercial aircraft pilots are female.
CNN has a story that tries to address some of the issues that might be involved in why there is a huge disparity there as well. Some of the reasons given are less likely to apply, given the statistical increase in women choosing careers over family in recent decades, so take some of the answers with a grain of salt.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL...

2)
Prior to the 1980s, only 19% of flight attendants were male. In 2007 that number had risen to 26%. Some attribute this to progressive social policies that encouraged males to take up "less manly" careers, as many stories in that time period discussed issues such as daycares operated by male caregivers, and other "controversial" subjects, which helped push back against the perception that flight attendant is a female job.

http://www.prb.org/Publication...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
(A german article from Speigel circa 2012 concerning efforts in Germany to recruit more male childcare workers.)

http://www.boston.com/communit...
(An Op-Ed concerning the "Controversial" practice of leaving children in a male care-giver's custody, circa 2009)

Exactly how much impact the "Softening" of social reactions to males entering "Traditionally Female" occupations has had on the uptick in males serving as flight attendants is not known, and probably cannot be well known, but I would expect that it is at least partially attributable, as the societal reaction towards a male entering such a career has relaxed somewhat in recent decades.

3)
According to the bureau of labor statistics, 51% of gas station employees are female. Granted, this value contains retail positions. The occupation of "Attendant" as it relates to gas stations typically involves this retail counter interaction these days, but the more historical view is of the guy outside who helped you at full service stations (a thing of the past, I know), which more parallels with automotive repair. The same statistics breakdown has 9.3% worksforce as female in automotive repair. Sadly, they don't give trend data, just snapshot data.

Depending on your perception of what "Gas station attendant" is, there is either a very slight lead for women in the industry, or a major lead by men in the industry.

4)
Labor statistics for "Retail Trade" have female participation (overall) listed at 48.3%. In various sub-categories, women dominate sales, while in others, men lead. Most hover in the 40-60%, with some leaning one way, and some to the other. Sales seems to be something that does not, intrinsically, have a gender bias, excepting in specailty products tailored or marketed to a specific gender.

5)
Labor statistics for "Administration of human resources" cites a 69% statistic for females. That's nearly 50% greater liklihood of your HR director being female over being male.

10)
Scientific research and development cites a 47% statistic.
Again, very close to 50% split.

There's other interesting data in there, concerning computer equipment manufacture-- 29% industry wide are female.

How comes male have an overall lower rates of higher education than women ? http://www.prb.org/Publication...

It is really a matter of personal belief and stance. If you are gay, in a gay area, you will want to put men at the front desk of your gym. Everything is really a matter of personal feelings. In the case of the coding event, the organizer only restricted it to girl as a matter of personal taste, and to some extend., personal agenda. The problem is really to try to justify this over "we want more women in tech". The business owner will not hide his motive, making money, over a political stance, this makes him noble. The petty social engineer, however, will be sneaky and will use excuses such as "women in tech" or "public safety" or "save the children" or "9/11" to get through his agenda.

The goal here is just the same which has been going on for ages, men and manhood are inherently bad. Men have the highest rate of dropout, and lowest rates of education (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-004-x/2005004/8984-eng.htm and http://www.prb.org/Publication...), but really nobody gives a crap about this...

We could have socialized medicine in the US if we could get this money.

USA doesn't need more taxes to have socialized medicine. USA has the 10th biggest public healthcare expenditure per capita of the world already, more than 20% higher than the UK and Canada for instance.

So, unlike what the majority of the Americans actually thinks, they are paying more for much much less, just out of they congenital spite over "paying stuff to poor people".

Source: PRB Per Capita Public Expenditure on Health (US$)

world wide recorded history is less than 500 yrs old.
there were hardly an cities in the world until about 100 yrs ago.
there were hardly any people in the world until about 10K yrs ago.
http://www.prb.org/Publication...

When you get right down to it, life is 100% fatal.

In the short run, that's not true. One estimate figures there have been approximately 108 billion humans born. There are 7.13 billion people alive, according to Wolfram Alpha. That means that only about 93% of all human lives have been shown to end in death. So, you've got a 7% chance. (It's better odds than winning the big jackpot in the lottery.)

Statistics are wonderful, but yours are most likely wrong. A better estimate of how many people born before computers and software existed have died would be 93%. I am using http://www.prb.org/Publication... as my main reference.

A deflationary currency helps the poor because the prices of goods go down over time.

The price of labor also goes down over time. Or, to put it another way, the amount of money you earn for the same amount of work goes down over time, since the money is worth that much more. Now, unless libertarians are also going to defend maintaining a constant minimum wage (ha!) this becomes an issue for people who rely on paychecks as their primary source of income--or, put another way, the vast majority of households out there.

Whatever you can save, no matter how little, becomes more valuable over time.

This is perfectly true, and perfectly useless to the poor. When you need to prioritize whether to feed your family, keep the electricity hooked up, heat the house, or be able to take the bus to work, saving $10 a month is a flat-out luxury. There are millions of working households in America living in this state[1]. MILLIONS.

Even when you can save $10--or even $50--a month, and even when your family manages to avoid savings-rending life events for several years, (like an illness or injury that knocks an earner out of commission for a couple of weeks, or the car breaking down, or needing to move for a new job, or needing to move because your landlord is converting to condos, or getting downsized, or you have another kid, or needing a prescription medication for a chronic condition, or wanting to send your kid to college, etc, etc) you'll have a stack of money that is worth...very little. Keep it up for a few decades, (with the number of dollars actually saved constantly shrinking, thanks to the fact that you're earning fewer of them,) and you'll have a stack of money that could maybe sustain you for a few years of retirement. That's winning.

[1] http://www.prb.org/Publication...

Like the U.S. which has the highest incarceration rate worldwide? Where's the shithole now?

According to this, only around 108 billion people have ever lived. Given that about 7 billion are still alive, the survival rate of life is roughly 6%.

From what I remember in the news, one of the reasons why so many of the young were unemployed was that because of the free education they all went to University for free and all got PhDs and all have a dream to get a government job that they can't get fired from. They won't take anything less.

No, the reason many of the young are unemployed in Greece is the same reason the young are unemployed in the US: When there's a recession, nobody is hiring. When nobody hires for years running, new graduates (at whatever level, including high school) can't get into the job market. Normally, new graduates compete with older more experienced workers by accepting a lower wage, but in bad times experienced workers will take the lower wage instead of being unemployed, and the new graduates can't compete effectively.

Some more grist for the mill- this seems to the the source of Alphas population data.

http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

I suspect that people with education and stable incomes continue to have children at the already low rate that they have historically.

That immigrants are also reducing the number of pregnancies hints that they understand the consequences and costs of raising children. Or maybe it hints that with access to free medical services (and yeah, lets not kid ourselves, for them it is free), they have managed to throw off the traditions of the third world of having many children even when living in squalor in the hopes that some of them will survive to take care of them in their old age.

(You would sort of expect this, since anyone willing to abandon their homeland and go on a long and dangerous journey risking arrest, and sometimes life, in the hopes of improving their conditions, would seem unlikely to fall back into the trap that they left).

Its been a long time since this country had a depression lasting 5 years, (with another 4 years on the horizon). Long enough for even the clueless to begin to understand the costs involved of feeding kids while out of work.

So who is still having those kids? I suspect the least able to support them. Unmarried teen age girls living in poverty. Despite nationally declining rates, teen birth rates in the United States remain persistently high, at 34.4 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19. And these rates are dramatically higher than in other developed countries. Twice as high as Canada.

Also those living on public assistance, of one form or another, where having another kid means another increase in their assistance check.
The birth rate for women 15 to 50 years old receiving public assistance income in the last 12 months was 155 births per 1,000 women, about three times the rate for women not receiving public assistance. See page 15.

With no skills, and no prospects, there seems to be an entire population of breeder-class individuals. And they are not necessarily the immigrants that we all thought they were.

Most importantly, humanity survived higher temperatures in the past.

according to these guys, humanity used to be 300M people. is that the collective adjustment needed to keep "business as usual" in what concerns CO emissions? I like driving a car, but not *that* much.

BS
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/People.html

All this does is push off the problems of over populating a little bit further all the while putting pressure new pressures on the environment. While kelp would capture CO from the atmosphere in equal parts to those exhausted when burnt, I'm sure we are not taking into account the other things it will be removing from the seas. What affect might that have? No one knows. While the Capitalist ethic of "Drive it hard and fix what breaks." is romantic, it is also dangerous and doesn't take into account the people they kill along the way. I think I'd prefer to have a substantive conversation on the population control instead of only looking for more resources to exploit.

Capitalism takes care of overpopulation. Look at a map of countries by population growth. All the high growth is happening in undeveloped countries. The predominantly capitalist developed countries are at or near zero population growth.

The solution to overpopulation is to encourage economic development in undeveloped regions. As the standard of living rises, it becomes more expensive to rear a child. Banking and investment services allow people to save money, time-shifting their productivity in their younger years into spending money in their older years, lessening the need to produce lots of offspring who will support you in your old age. A functional economy makes available contraceptives, while a pervasive legal system which enforces child support encourages the use of contraception.

Stopping capitalism and development, and trying revert society to some idealistic rural agrarian society is precisely the opposite of what you want to do if you want to slow down population growth. And why in the world do you want active population control, when capitalism is doing a fine job controlling population growth passively?

Why are there so many studies out there based on the premise that we need to promote female equality and seemingly none based on the premise that we need to promote equality regardless of gender?

When 57 percentage of the people enrolled in college are women(and just 43% are men) and when more women than men have been graduating from college for over 20 years now, wouldn't it be reasonable to have some studies that look at improving males' education instead of going on the decades-old assumption that women are being underserved?

Nope, that's a common misconception. The real number is something like 6% of all people who have ever been alive are alive right now.

Statistically richer developed countries have little to no population growth outside of immigration, and even in those countries the impoverished contribute much more to the birth rate. The statistics clearly show a connection between poverty and population growth.

Completely agreed on the dramatic difference in population growth between developed and developing countries. However, I think characterizing the problem as "poverty" tends to lead to the wrong solutions - solutions which try to address the symptoms rather than the problem. The symptoms are lack of food, lack of clean water, lack of medical care, and lack of/poor quality housing. Even poverty itself (lack of money) is just a symptom. If you simply provide developing nations with food, clean water, medicine, and housing, you're not solving the problem, you're just mitigating the symptoms.

The real problem is that developing nations lack a functional economy. We need to be providing assistance for economic development in those countries. Give those people an education and jobs, loans to help them start their own businesses, engineering assistance to help them build infrastructure. Even having foreign companies contract to build factories to give those people work will help (this is the flip side of the outsourcing that people in industrialized nations complain about). That way they can earn their own money, grow their own food, make their own water purification and distribution systems, build their own hospitals and higher quality houses.

Addressing only the symptoms (like giving them GMO seeds for hardier crops) may actually make the problem even worse. This may sound cold, but by mitigating the primary factors curbing their population growth (mortality), you're saddling the nation with an even larger impoverished population, making it that much harder to get their economy kick-started.

They will claim that people born at a certain time of year share some traits...

You really got to ask yourself, how you want to view yourself. Astrology says that the position of the stars at your time of birth does lay out your life and destiny. So lets presume you can pinpoint the time of your birth to the second (and that is an extreme for everyone that has ever experienced a birth, it is hard to say which second in that process you want to pin your birth moment on). That means in 100 years there are 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 100 = 3.1556926 × 109 possible destinies. Given a current population of ~7 billion, there is 6 928 198 253 / (3.1556926 × (10^9)) = 2.19546044 more than one other "YOU" living the same live right now on this planet. This number grows if you account for all people that ever lived to 106 456 367 669 / (3.1556926 × (10^9)) = 33.7347078

If that is the kind of individualism that you want to live with, then it is a good idea to believe in Astrology, if you think you are more unique than that, you should determine it is not worth to believe in.

More people are alive today than all humans who have ever died.

That's an urban myth (how you defend it with flawed math probably nicely demonstrates our propensity to attaching to ourselves undue importance). 100+ billion homo sapiens dead already:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-living-outnumber-dead
http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

More people are alive today than all humans who have ever died.

That's an urban myth (how you defend it with flawed math probably nicely demonstrates our propensity to attaching to ourselves undue importance). 100+ billion homo sapiens dead already:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-living-outnumber-dead
http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx

You know what I meant, don't be deliberately obtuse. Edmonton has a million people... most people would agree that that's a "city". The only place further north that comes close to being a major city would be Anchorage at 350k, but that's obviously much further north and off the beaten path, as it were.

Dont' be silly. According to your pseudo-definition of a city being least 1 million people, that would mean that in 1950, there were only 83 cities on the whole planet. And only 12 in 1900. and even today, only 411 in the whole world. http://www.prb.org/Educators/TeachersGuides/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx

Your definition would mean that the US currently has only 9 cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population.

I think most of the world would disagree with your definition of a city. Here's a definition for you http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzcitytown.htm

Here's the definition of an "urban area" http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa060997.htm. Notice how it varies depending on locale.

In Sweden and Denmark, a village of 200 people is counted as an "urban" population but it takes a city of 30,000 in Japan. Most other countries fall somewhere in between. Australia and Canada use 1000, Israel and France use 2000 and the United States and Mexico call a town of 2500 residents urban.

Or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City#The_difference_between_towns_and_cities - note that NO country uses 1,000,000 as the definition of a city. Many have no formal definition, others vary from as small as 5 people (US) up.

In New Zealand, according to Statistics New Zealand (the government statistics agency), "A city [...] must have a minimum population of 50,000

Brazilian law defines a "city" (cidade) as the urban seat of a municipality and establishes no difference between cities and towns; all it takes for an urban area to be legally called a "city" is to be the seat of a municipality, and some of them are semi-rural settlements with a very small population.

In Canada the granting of city status is handled by the individual provinces and territories, so that the definitions and criteria vary widely across the country. In British Columbia and Saskatchewan towns can become cities after they reach a population of 5,000 people, but in Alberta and Ontario the requirement is 10,000. Nova Scotia has abolished the title of city altogether, In Quebec, there is no legal distinction between a city and a town

There is a formal definition of city in China provided by the Chinese government. For an urban area that can be defined as a city, there should be at least 100,000 non-agricultural population.

Chile's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants

Venezuela's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants.

The German word for both "town" and "city" is Stadt, while a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a Großstadt (big city).

Italy: There is no population limit for a city

Norway: The status of "city" is granted by the local authorities if a request for city status has been made and the area has a population of at least 5000

There has traditionally been no formal distinction betw

"Statistically speaking, you will die. " Statistically speaking, no you won't: from Adam to-date, less than half of Humankind has ever died,

References please?

This is an oft-repeated line, sometimes expressed as "now that the living outnumber the dead". It's bollocks. OK - that's a bit harsh. It's wrong, significantly wrong.

Depending on your assumptions, the actual numbers are moderately variable. In 2002, a writer for the Population Reference Bureau published one set of assumptions at http://www.prb.org/pdf/PT_novdec02.pdf , and came up with around 106,456,367,669 people born since an initial pair in 50,000BCE, so that the 2002 population of 6,215,000,000 represented 5.8% of the total number of humans ever born.

It's actually an interesting exercise in programming and modelling to study - you can use any system you want, but it lends itself to spreadsheeting, because you can be quite subtle about how you modify your model. I could provide you with a sheet I did some years ago, but the process of developing your own is instructive, and worth putting a couple of hours into.

Urgh - I just found that spreadsheet. I did it in 2000, in a discussion prompted by a retard of a creationist (a retard by the pretty retarded standards of that group). It's not a new question.

Well, not really. The boomers seem to have been having negative population growth since the 1970s. The only reason we have any population growth is because our latin brothers cannot resist the lure of the American dream. Also, once here, hispanics are the only ethnic group that has over 2 children per female on average. One can find an interesting discussion here about the issue.

Viva America!

One of the only commercially successful consumer robots so far is made by an American company, iRobot Corp. The Roomba vacuum cleaner robot is self-propelled and can clean rooms without supervision. "We can pretty much make anything, but we have to ask, what are people actually going to buy?" said iRobot CEO Helen Greiner. The company has sold 2.5 million Roombas -- which retail for as little as $120 -- since the line was launched in 2002.

The Aizu Chuo Hospital spent about some $557,000 installing three of the robots in its waiting rooms to test patients' reactions. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, said spokesman Naoya Narita. "We feel this is a good division of labor. Robots won't ever become doctors, but they can be guides and receptionists," Narita said.

The question we have to ask ourselves as a nation, is do we want to return to a situation where production is centered on large urban areas or make the investment in infrastructure to make rural areas viable.

As much as I like option #2, it seems this question has already been decided.

Hell, the majority of the U.S. population was urbanized before WWI. We can't "return" to option #1, because we haven't been outside it in living memory (sorry, centenarians.)

> That's just in the last YEAR! Now, say what again?

You want worldwide? Okay - 1.2 million people are killed every year by traffic accidents, and 3 million as a result of air pollution.

As compared to under 15,000 from terrorism.

Congratulations! You've just helped demonstrate that, even worldwide, the threat from terrorism is minimal. It's about 1% the risk of traffic accidents, and less than 1% the risk of pollution.

Check out the statistics and use a teeny bit of rational thought; terrorism just isn't all that dangerous.

While there is a strong correlation between poverty and birthrate, there is an even stronger correlation between education level of women and birthrate. Statistically th more education a woman has (and thus presumably the more opportunity she has to pursue a fufilling life outside of childraising) the fewer children she will have. This cuts across socio-economic and religious lines, as you can see by the links below.

The most effective way to ensure low birth rates is to give educational opportunities to women.

http://www.uni-protokolle.de/nachrichten/id/39996/

http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educ ators/Human_Population/Women/The_Status_of_Women1. htm

Kuwait's largest oil field has peaked and is now in decline,

And...

there is serious speculation that Saudi Arabia's giant Ghawar oil field is either at peak or is very close,

And...

Global warming is clearly a fact,

And...

The antarctic is melting off at an uncomfortable clip not to mention Greenland

And...

Population growth continues unabated

And...

The freakin' idiots in TFA want to go merrily galumphing about the galaxy like a bunch of wide-eyed disease ridden nuclear weaponed kindergartners. All they need to do is SNEEZE on a foreign planet and they could wipe the whole place out and turn it into one giant slimy stromatolite. That's my idea of being a good will ambassador. As if we have enough stored solar power (petroleum) to fuel such silliness.

On a daily basis I battle the darkest nihilists - whether of the Olduvai Theory Peak Oil variety or the Eco-Catastrophe Variety. And when a clueless bunch of science geeks go prancing about like some fourth grade ninnies playing "Star Trek" and cheerfully yapping about the intricacies of hyperdrives, when most of the world can barely feed itself and the privileged fat few use Microsoft Windows... well... it makes the case of the doom-mongers that much stronger.

Hyperdrive, my ass. It's this same inane idiocy that cut jillions out of the NASA science budget so we can send some space cowboys somewhere they don't really belong.

RS

Of course I fully expect the clueless technological fan boys who all to often spend their sad empty lives begging for mod points will give me a -1 Flamebait, regardless of the fundamental merits of my argument.

The trend has usually been more wealth/education == fewer children (in the last century at least). Natural intelligence doesn't really factor in.

First link I found on the subject via google.

"These people kill themselves for a reason."

Well, if you ask the people who survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in the US, you'll find that most of them realize that their problems are entirely solvable about half way down. Then they hit the water at 80 MPH and cost their families tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills.

"It really disturbs me that, at the same time our population keeps rising on an exponential curve, we still cling to archaic notions of the "sacredness" of every life."

Our population isn't rising on an exponential curve. It's more like a logistic equation. Right now, we're at or just past 1/2 earth's carrying capacity, so population growth will decrease until it levels off around 10 billion.