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World Population Expected To Hit 7 Billion In Late October
kkleiner writes "A new report documents the prodigious rate at which the world's population is growing. It was just 1999 when we reached 6 billion. And now within the next month or two we will have surpassed 7 billion. What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
Child #7,000,000,000 gets the prize of officially being recognized as "Not actually a bundle of joy" and, on average, a harsh subsistence existence. Congratulations!
More quarrelling, more hunger, more poverty, etc.
...in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?
It means we're all fucked.
"What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
It means war.
The system is out of equilibrium. There will be a correction.
Mostly, it means that we are ever the more closer to facing the facts that we can't all live consuming as much resources as the "developed" parts of the world are. Sooner or later the shit will hit the fan, one way or the other.
(Not that I claim to have a solution, or be any better myself...)
.: Max Romantschuk
And here's where they are http://www.indexmundi.com/map.aspx?v=Birth+rate%28births%2F1%2C000+population%29
It seems promising that PRC is not among the worst.
I was going to say "in before eugenics"but that's not possible anymore.
people are board and dont have a lot of money to spend, so they stay at home
I think having kids means you're planking wrong.
Psychologically, like most people, I stopped sensibly digesting the numbers when we crossed 4 billion. The best video on the subject remains Hans Rosling's http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes (BBC)
Gently reply
What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
War
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Turns out to be disingenuous then...
Nullius in verba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Paul Ehrlich, famous for writing the population bomb, entered a wager with Julian L. Simon that used the price of some indicator comodidy metals to gauge resource scarcity as a predicted result of overpopulation. Anyways, historically speaking, Simon came out the winner when the index prices fell between 1980 and 1990.
That being said, and my own personal admiration for the free market being laid out in the open, I do believe that there will be a decade where the proverbial Ehrlich's will come out on top. It is simple physics; the high concentration deposits of minerals will be depleted and we will all be left wondering what to do. It is certainly scary that in 13 years the population can rise by 1 billion.
Anyone that has ever seen a photo of the Earth from orbit knows resources and even space on the Earth are limited. This idea of constant growth is inherently insane. Space travel isn't the solution to the population problem since it would require moving nearly a billion people a decade just to keep up with the current growth rate. Space is about long term survival not growth. Most of the fisheries have already collapsed and much of the world is facing water shortages. Civilization existed for thousands of years without gasoline but it can't survive without water. Either we limit population or mother nature will do it for us. We can't high tech our way through the mess since we are already running short of things as basic as copper. The two biggest critical shortages are water and land suitable for growing crops. Extracting water is expensive and they aren't making more land. We change or change gets forced on us.
Contrary to what your cereal box would have you believe, there are forces of nature stronger than government policies.
The supply of oil is what it is, and governments who subsidize the costs will eventually run out of either money or will.
Business as usual then.
This enormous wave of young people -- kids born in the 80s, 90s, 00s -- are going to topple established trends in ways we cannot imagine. This population increase of one billion people in ten years means that one in every seven people on this planet is under the age of majority. In ten years you'll start seeing change on the scale of the Arab Spring like you wouldn't believe.
This is why all those sob-story TV ads imploring me to donate to help children in poor countries piss me off. Not because I'm a cold-hearted bastard who doesn't want to help, but knowing that such help will make the overall situation worse.
Add in religious-mandated foreign policies from the former Bush administration and the current Harper-led Canadian government, which in part required that any funding to humanitarian NGOs must not promote or even mention any birth control other than abstinence (never mind abortion), and you have a classic snowball effect where there will be even more impoverished children being born, with the same or fewer people back home able to donate their own money, and less tax dollars to fund the foreign aid.
3rd world population is increasing exponentially while developed countries' populations are steady or even declining except for immigration--this isn't rocket or climate science, it's simple, indisputable math.
Around 40% of the corn produced in the US goes to ethanol.
It's obviously not a question of whether we can support 7 billion people, since we basically are, but whether we can support the increasing growth rate. If you look at this graph, you can see the population is projected to level off around 10billion or so. And if you look even closer, you can see it's really a question for India (and to a lesser degree, Africa): can India handle its massive population growth? If so, then the world can handle it, too. If not, then they are going to suffer a lot.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm sure we can stick another billion people up there. If some die, well, more food and fuel for the survivors.
I don't think Canadians burn well. Agreed about the food though.
Unfortunately the areas that are experiencing the highest population growth are not first world countries. They are the countries which are unable to sustain their population, and depend on government (usually not available), or international hand-outs to survive.
If we want to solve this problem, we must cut aid to areas which cannot sustain itself. I realize that's harsh, but creating a life does not entitle it to live. There's a reason we fight to survive, and getting hand-outs (for the long term, not just some short-term disaster) due to unsustainable population areas means we're just making it worse.
Cut off the aid, and let the population re-balance itself on what can be sustained by these 3rd world areas. This will lower demand on resources as well, and allow the world to grow at a more moderate pace.
You know, those fossil fuels might be expensive because, well, we are bloody running out of them? Not like there is an endless amount, dig?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
> I did not know I was being graded
Now you do. Everybody who reads your post evaluates it, and in this case that evaluation doesn't take long.
> fuck off and die
If he does that, you'll still have to deal with his offspring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
Back in 1968, this book was published talking about how there was going to mass starvation across the globe and everyone would die because the globe couldn't handle the population of the 1970s. Obviously, there is always hunger around the globe and that shouldn't be discounted, but the UN report notes that the percentage of the world's population who qualify as "undernourished" has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. That was when the population was around 3.5 billion, or half of what we're about to hit.
So I'm skeptical of alarmism.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
More people means more capacity to produce. Love them or hate them Japan, russia and china are showing the world how to manage (or how to not manage) demographic shifts. Places with money are taking steps to reduce massive overpopulation, places without it are still growing.
For decades we all assumed chinas vast population was their great weakness, not enough resources for everyone etc etc etc. As it turns out the most valuable resource is people, with energy (not electrical energy, more personal ability to work energy) and education, because everything else can be created from those two things. Not enough coal, uranium, oil etc? No problem, we'll invent something else. Too many people? No problem, we'll figure out how to make birth control.
Yes, it means more people, especially in africa, will probably starve to death. That's another problem we can solve if we bother to.
The biggest problem we face isn't 7 billion people, it's politicians who are unwilling or unable to make tough choices about how to deal with whatever specific challenges that creates in the long ru. I don't think anyone is really fond of chinas 1 child policy (or moreover its implementation), but the alternative is the mess that is india, where children are legally obliged to support parents, and there's no incentive, to have less children. Education and food production can catch up, or keep up, with the people we have, if we create reasonable incentives to limit family sizes and solve problems. And if governments aren't willing or able to make choices like that the people in those states are beyond anyones ability to meaningfully help in the long run anyway, so we'll try, and fail.
What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?
For humanity it means that there are more humans, for the planet? FUCK THE PLANET !
Bloody Catholics having bloody children they can't bloody afford to bloody feed...
I wonder if the rule that a new aircraft is ready to fly when the weight of its documentation equals the weight of the aircraft applies to the weight of all humans compared to the weight of the earth?
- People are dying from eating organic foods because organic foods have much higher rates of e.coli
- Non-chlorinated pools are also bacteria farms.
- Most studies have shown life expectancy is higher in urban areas than rural areas, though I don't think we understand why currently
- Chiropractors have really come under fire in recent years as charlatans with little to no medical evidence of their claims
- Drug companies certainly have their faults, but avoiding medicine is a good way to die young.
Your five points of advice are absolutely fantastic.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Well, only the toughest, most self-sufficient babies survive without anybody taking care of them, so we probably won't have too...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I know you were kidding, but I got tired of people talking about 'unused land' back when the world population hit six billion, and I did the math to show how stupid an idea it is.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
Hope they're not right, not much else to say.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Some of us are still waiting :-)
But if gas casts more, more people will just stay at home where one of the biggest sources of entertainment is making more people.
Our industrialized society makes large families less important -- in fact kids are a monetary drain. But to non-mechanized farmers as are common in the third world, kids mean more hands working in the field, more likelihood of survival.
Then there's death. A family here with one kid will actually see an improvement in finances if that kid were to die. That farmer family's kid dying means they might not be able to tend the crops and produce enough to eat.
Then by old age if you and your kids haven't each produced lots of kids, there's nobody to take care of you.
Soylent Green
As far as the SPECIES is concerned, mass starvation really doesn't matter.
What's missing from the debate (it's taboo to discuss it) is we have no "collective" good and the ONLY limiting factors on human population are Famine, War, Pestilence and Death.
I benefit from the Third World consuming fewer resources, and approve when its denizens kill each other. I don't hear of any mass Slashdotter exodus to go sort out Africa etc, so I'll venture none of you give a shit either.
Nature (hey kids, we don't exist outside it!) is COMPETITIVE and the slow zebra should get eaten.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
though made mention of in the article; i think it would be generally instructive to visualize where on the planet are the populations rising significantly. it's overly optimistic, i'm sure, but it might help to drive some international efforts to promote basic birth control measures.
Humans are complex social creatures. When we over populate some people will not notice or care while others will suffer. Going even further, we will create methods by which more people can feel at ease and even some of the suffering people can create an incorrect context to feel better about it. We can lower statistical thresholds on just how bad poverty is... among other things.
We still have an influential amount of people who refuse to admit and another who refuse to adapt to the climate crisis we are in-- which is CAUSED by over population... sure, blame technology for it-- if there were fewer people wasting and polluting the climate could handle it better.
If you think a quality of life on par with the EU is a good goal, then you've already picked something impossible because the planet can only sustain about 2 billion people at those living standards; and possibly over the longer term the climate may not handle that either (but likely it would be slow enough we could adapt?)
JOBS: the big deal is jobs. there may be enough food to go around even today and we can ignore the fact it'll not keep up with population growth; because we don't have economically viable means to distribute the food / resources to WORKING peoples of the world who deserve equal right of access. We don't have enough gainful employment for the world; we have far far less meaningful jobs because we must create consumerism in order to prop up pointless jobs; this increases the resource consumption at a higher rate than population growth in order to maintain continual economic growth (which isn't sustainable either.) After we remove the cheap exploited labor and replace it with robotics there will be even more people unable to find work and we will have to invent even more meaningless jobs... something which seems unsustainable as well.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Interestingly, the article sticks with generalities and doesn't go into the specifics of where population growth is occurring and what impact it is having. What we don't want is for a less developed nation to be in a zero sum game for resources and have an expanding population. It's also not good if this growth occurs in poor nations, but is supported by highly developed nations, either directly through international aid or indirectly through immigration (e.g. the US's population growth).
Obviously every life is important, but is the increase in productive members of society or in impoverished people needing support? I.e. are they net producers or net consumers of the world's resources? If it's the former then it's cause to celebrate, but if it's the latter then conditions are going to deteriorate for most people, especially said poor.
With all the rules, interdictions, health care and all, we are directly tampering with "natural selection", so more people, who would otherwise die, continue to live after diseases or accidents that should have left them dead. Of course, we improve our life expectancy with the more and more sophitiscated health care that we provide, but we artificially increase our life expectancy, and our birthrate with the survival of more and more premature born babies. I am not saying this is bad, but this is certainly one of the reasons that makes the population grow faster and faster.
That Dominion 'igions and other religious shibboleths are alive, well and still spreading their dogmas.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
perhaps when God told us to go forth and populate the Earth.... he had made the (mistaken) assumption we'd know when to stop.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
> I benefit from the Third World consuming fewer
> resources,
Our consumption of their resources is *why* they consume less. You are the cause of their resource scarcity.
> [I] approve when its denizens kill each other.
America has been dependent on the rest of the world for its wealth. When the rest of the world tires of trading us their wealth for our Monopoly money, you'll see that America might not be first world forever. And I'm sure you'll have a blast if *your* neighbors start to kill each other.
> the slow zebra should get eaten.
Every zebra will slow down one day. Even you.
Current Population:
http://tinyurl.com/currentpopulation
6.9 billion people
World fertility rate for population replacement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
2.33 children per woman
From:
http://tinyurl.com/futurepopulation
According to the United Nations, the global population could be as high as 11 billion in 2050 or as low as 8 billion, if the right programs are put in place now.
Population growth stretches natural resources to their limits. Deforestation, food and water shortages, and climate change are all intensified by the addition of nearly 80 million people a year to the world's population.
Does the 7 billionth baby gets a free car?
Yeah, we should kill off like half of humanity. Not you though, your insights into ecology and economy are far too valuable.
(i wonder for how many centuries would be eradicated famine from the planet with the banks bailout money)
Zero. You can't eat money and if you could the warlords would steal and horde it before it reached many of the starving people.
We all know what the solution to the overpopulation problem is!
The newest product is Soylent Green, a small green wafer which is advertised as being produced from "high-energy plankton." It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties.
In most industrialized countries, the native growth rate has slowed substantially in recent years, and in some has even started to decline. Right now, for instance, the only thing that is keeping North America's population from actually dropping is immigration from other countries.
Ultimately, the finite resources available on this globe will catch up to the population growth rate and it will start to level off.
As there is no appreciable growth in industrialized nations already anyways, I do not think that most of them have much to worry about with regards to massive numbers of people starving to death or dying of some other cause related to overcrowding.
Don't worry, the ecosystem will balance back before we get to the non returning point. It's been proven that if a population isn't controlled anymore by any selective pressure, a new selective pressure will arise and reestablish the correct population/resources ratio. Don't you see what's going on? Population increase is going on in already over populated area which are usually poor and undeveloped. This create a the perfect environment for a new epidemic. The first world is also extremely reliant on petrol and electronics. A solar flare big enough to knock down completely our power grid could let most of our population to starve. The economy is going badly, there's unrest in developing nation, political tension all over the world. Don't you see what's coming? We're on the edge of the ravine and all it takes is a small tips for our civilization to collapse. Hell we'll surely give it to ourselves. Don't believe me? Look back at the roman empire.
National Geographic has been running a series of articles that try and answer the summary's question:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/7-billion
I thought in another article we already discussed how we might be reaching the peak population soon which will start to decline?
It took just 13 years to go from 6 to 7 Billion. I am assuming it also took 26 years to go from 5 to 6 Billion. However, I think it took far less than that.
I remember being a kid and reading that the world population was only 3 Billion in the early 70's. So, in the space of 4 decades, the world's population more than doubled.
Given our scale of population growth; it's fairly to easy to guess the following:
8 Billion in 6 more years == 2018 (assuming a start @ 2012)
9 Billion just 3 years later == 2021
10 Billion just 1 year later == 2022
War/population crash/food shortages/global catastrophes/plague somewhere by or before 2023. I'll be 58 by then, so I will probably live to see the great purging of mankind from this planet.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Dan Quinn has some very insteresting ideas you might want to check out:
http://www.ishmael.org/
Basically, it's all about food production. Once we freeze the yearly food production output at the current amount, population growth will stop. No extra famines or revolts (we're having those already, remember?).
His Book "The Story of B" contains a great analogy about the reproduction among mice.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Yes, Erlich jumped the gun, but that doesn't mean his thesis was wrong. He just didn't anticipate the mitigating factors that arose after he wrote his book. The bottom line is, our "standard" assumption of perpetual growth is simply incompatible with the constraints of a finite planet. And we can't keep relying on the "magic" of technology to continue pulling our collective ass out of the frying pan forever.
Spend an hour of your time on this video presentation by Dr. Bartlett. No doubt the early parts will seem "old hat" to a /.er, but stick with it and it may surprise you.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Hush, you fool!! Killing off all the people stupid enough to believe that hippie claptrap before they can reproduce is a great way to chlorinate the gene pool.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Repeat after me:
No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.
No one born with a hungry mouth is truly innocent.
For all those that like to include their religious beliefs in moral discussions with others, here's an alternate concept for Original Sin for you. Sure, it's unfair that babies and other children die of malnutrition, or that simple, inexpensive medications, vaccines, and treatments aren't available to the majority of the world even when they're commonplace in the first world, but as has been stated time and again, Life Isn't Fair. In the developed world it's easy to ignore the problems of those in abject poverty even when we benefit, exploiting that abject poverty to get shoes, clothes, and lately, cheap consumer goods and cheap electronics at prices that would be unheard of if we had to pay people living at our own level to make them.
Some can argue, and probably successfully in specific cases, that this economic imperialism that we engage in benefits workers in these countries, since they make a wage and can use money to buy some of what they need as opposed to living by subsistence farming or sharecropping, but I'd bet that in many cases, lots of people in these situations don't make living wages even for the economics of their region, despite doing a dirty, or dangerous, or unhealthy job.
Meanwhile, first-world families that play their economic cards right end up owning more and more of the pie. My parents' house is paid off. My brother will probably have his house paid off by the time he's 50. We own two houses, one almost paid off with a tenant paying more than the mortgage, and our residence will be paid off quickly once the rental is paid off. My wife's parents' house is paid off. As a family group not interested in lots and lots of children, we stand to benefit our descendants greatly, with advantages from birth in control of real property and, depending on how many children, real property that provides significant income. If we're intelligent stewards of what we own, and if children and further generations are intelligent stewards of what they inherit, our family stands to rise economically above our fellows quite dramatically.
A French author named Jean Raspail wrote a novel called, "Camp of the Saints", about a large scale invasion of the third world into the first world. I think some of his premises were flawed, in that many in the first world cooperated far, far too easily with the invaders compared to what would actually happen, but the concept of a population the size of Mexico City leaving third-world Asia and Africa and migrating to Europe and North America in such scale that it's impossible to stop them short of mass-murder is scary, and the further the first world gets ahead if the third world, with more and more breeding in the third world coupled with less and less in the first, the more plausible this scenario becomes.
If you want to help the third world, encourage those living in it to innovate. If you provide money via charity, you need to ensure that the money stays local, that the innovator stays local and doesn't just use the opportunity to escape, and that lots and lots of ideas, even if most fail, get seeded. Most companies that start up in the West end up failing, and most ideas or inventions prove unworkable, but those that do stick around often become revolutionary and profitable. The third world will evolve into something better only by engaging the people in it to do something about it, and it makes a lot more sense to empower locals than it does to try for foist our inexperienced ideas upon them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Given what we have today in terms of food and water that's no problem - unless people start to copy cities like Las Vegas and demand even more golf courses in deserts ... hopefully both will start to rot in their own decadence in the next decades.
We aren't going to run out of space either. There is room for at least another billion people in North America alone. Look at a map, compare it with China (pop. 1.3bn) and "South Asia" (India + Pakistan + Bangladesh; pop. 1.5bn) and you'll get the idea that the USA is just barely inhabited.
Resources won't pose much of a problem. We can live a long time on recycling what we have already dug out of the earth and stuff like iron or aluminum is practically unlimited on this planet. The only problem is energy resources like oil, gas and coal that are overused by industrialized countries - the USA in particular - and rising prices on world markets will lead to quite a lot of pain in those countries that are most dependent upon them. And yes, again the USA prefers not to endure any pain at all, so long as it can painlessly deal out a whole lot of pain to avoid it (be it through military, political or economic interference).
Developing countries, on the other hand will not care all that much. They lack the necessary infrastructure and investments to even use a lot of oil, gas or coal - which are their primary concern. The price of those resources is a secondary consideration - but the demand will still be high, because a whole lot of people using small amounts will still use a lot all told.
So the stagnating (aka developed) countries will face the problem of using less resources with their established infrastructure and resources, while developing countries can build it from the start to accommodate scarcer resources in some areas and will become much more affluent than some people tend to believe.
Perhaps because we have a lot of land, we keep building outwards instead of upwards, apartment complexes may be a couple of stories at best at least around here. This is why we need a lot of fuel, it's because just about everyone needs a car to get to work and do other errands, and the spouse needs a car, and eventually in high school the kid may have a car instead of using the bus. And people want huge ass gas guzzling SUVs, Hummer and trucks because a sedan apparently doesn't have enough hauling capacity to haul their own huge McAss.
Everyone gets on the road at the same time going to and leaving work, causing congestion issues and wasting even more fuel.
Attempts to retrofit cities with light rail are futile.. you still need to drive to a station.
I usually don't feed trolls but I would dare say, that the majority of the Earth's population would not agree with you. Let's take a look at the two countries that make up over a third of the world. China and India... Well there's not much to look at. The people there are doing okay but far from all the nice USA vices that you have listed, except maybe the coal fired power plants.
Your message seems to be targeted to 1st world nations and I hate to break it to you, but the first world nations aren't the biggest, except maybe the US (who is 3rd in population) and Russia (who is 10th in population). The biggest nations in the world have an organic diet, basically whatever food they find. Swim only in non-chlorinated pools, or discharge channels whichever comes first. Exercise...Well that's not exactly top on their list when they are starving. Have never even heard the word chiropractor. Do not even have an option to "Big Pharma". (sarcasm) In fact look at how wonderful the people in India are doing.(/sarcasm)
When it comes down to it, if I had to choose between "clean" water and actual clean water. I'd choose the latter over crapping myself to death. I don't know where this idea of, "we're making the Earth worst," came from but the underlying point is that the Earth came built with all kinds of stuff to make our lives horrible, very, very horrible. It is through burning fossils, radiating ourselves, hacking birds with forty foot grinders, and pumping our food supply full of wonderful artificial crap; that you actually have survived long enough to type your rant on the things that have kept you alive. (AKA, it's real hard to take that jog though the fresh country air when some animal is tracking you for food, or to swim in a non-chlorinated pool when you have Polio from swimming in non-chlorinated pools)
Everything in this world has a trade-off, nothing is perfect and that includes the ecosystem with or without us. Intelligence breeds destruction as you may see it. I, however, believe that we have within our grasp the ability to ensure our own survival either on or off of this lump of rock we call Earth. There will be things that we must give up and there will be things we must accept going forward. There will always be people who cannot stand change, who fight advancement; either because they fear it or poorly understand it. You, dear troll, have no idea, nor do you care to understand. It's just easier that way isn't it? By all means, move out to the *real* country of the African savannah or the the south-central regions of Utah. Let me know how you like it.
Our consumption of their resources is *why* they consume less. You are the cause of their resource scarcity.
No.
This is one of the most retrograde ways of thinking available to the third world. A good deal of the Left in Latin America adopt this thesis (read Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan author, for an example). But the third world is sucks because it's own failings. I'm a citizen of Brazil so I'll take the examples from here since I know it's history better.
Back when Brazil was a Portuguese colony it showed an amazing period of growth when gold as discovered in the current Minas Gerais state (indeed, Minas Gerais means General Mines). Since the gold industry created a small middle class, a small number of industries (textiles) and trade (food, from southern Brazil and leather from northeastern Brazil) was developed internally. This could be the seed for Brazil starting it's own industry early on it's history. By 1785 the Portuguese taxed us to hell (the "derrama", a full fifth of all gold profits besides normal taxes) and then prohibited the industry at all to be developed in the colony. Besides a few angry manifestos, the Brazilians did nothing. It should be noted that Brazilians had no representation in the Portuguese Cortes.
Ten years before the Americans fought their independence war. It was the time for Brazil to do the same. We didn't. We never did, actually. Brazil stopped being a colony after Portugal was invaded by Napoleon and the royal family fled to Rio de Janeiro. Brazil was then elevated to the status of United Kingdom of Brazil, Portugal and Algarves. By 1822 a royal prince "gave" the Brazilian independence and took the crown to himself. As part of "reparations" Brazil gave (a lot of) money to Portugal and promised not to conquest the other Portuguese colonies. Instead of kicking their asses back to Europe, like the Americans did to the English.
My country own history is similar to much of the history of Hispanic America and Africa. The third world is shitty because of it's own failing and nothing else. Of course, the first world did nothing to help but it's not it's responsibility. It's a dog eat dog world and countries should look for themselves.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
The problem is MORE in a world that has BILLIONAIRES, than in a world that has BILLIONS.
When your read the wistful apologies for the super-rich in bullshit, futurist/crypto-eugenics, trans-human nonsense like Kevin Kelly spouts in his first answer to this Slashdot piece?
http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/11/09/06/1458254/Kevin-Kelly-Answers-Your-Questions
You either see the FNORDs or you don't. He makes some argument that the qualitative lifestyle difference between the billionaire and the impoverished isn't that much - and uses it as an argument to discount money as a unit of value.
That is the position of a professional enabler.
Because those aren't status-tokens, when you can't eat.
Every motherfucker in a Hawker-Sidley executive jet destroys the ability of the planet to sustain thousands of people in comfortable existence, with their obscenity.
The world would be safer with another billion peasants, than another thousand like Kelley and Brand - and the masters, for whom they carry water.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Non-chlorinated pools are also bacteria farms
Not necessarily. Pools can also use UV or oxygen to kill bacteria. Being non-chlorinated doesn't mean not using anything to kill bacteria, it just means not using something that's also pretty hostile to humans. Chlorine isn't the best way of killing bacteria in pools, it's just the cheapest.
Note: This post in no way endorses the trolling of Dr Bob.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Where's mod points when I need them... very nicely put, sums up my feelings but I couldn't have written it nearly as good as that.
Nothing, because the human population will peak around 2050, and decline back to around current levels (or slightly below) after that, according to demographic trends.
The only way to keep the population growing is to keep it poor. The liberals of the world are doing a great job there, but the depression is likely to eat their political careers before they can have much effect.
Your five points of advice are absolutely fantastic.
Yes they are, especially when you consider that what he's saying is that Earth has too many people on it. What he wants is to lower life expectancy, so that the world's population will drop back to safe levels.
I'm sure we can stick another billion people up there. If some die, well, more food and fuel for the survivors.
Don't worry, the Chinese are moving there as fast as they can get visas. See the fourth and fifth charts here.
Prices are high because production is limited.
This is sheer and unadulterated genius. The maldistribution of wealth is the single largest crisis facing our world today. All of the biggest problem on the planet, including over population can be directly correlated back to the inequity of wealth spread among the worlds population and none of the issue from pollution to hunger will be solved in our current state.
I'm not advocating that everyone should have everything equal, but the fact is that the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" has grown to such an obscene proportion that our society is in true jeopardy for the first time ever and if the world economy does not work towards balancing the scale, it will tip once and for all.
I got here through a series of tubes
7 BILLION PEOPLE. That's an insane amount of people putting an extreme burden on our delicate ecosystem. Earth is already at the brink of death, it's been estimated that when we hit 10 billion, there's no turning back.
While Dr. Bob is clearly a troll, it's amazing to me the number of non-trolls that accept this part as absolutely true without need for proof. High population isn't killing the environment, inefficient consumption of resources is killing the environment. Per capita, US citizens use far more energy, and put out far more CO2 than the average for the world. We have 4.5% of the world's population, but contribute 18.5% of the CO2 emissions.
The only way more people = environmental destruction is if we refuse to tighten our belts and the rest of the world decides they want to live as wastefully as we do. We need to stop feeling entitled to use and abuse resources however we feel like at the moment simply because previous generations could get away with it.
This post really gave me a laugh. I don't think it was meant to be taken seriously, but I have been wrong.
Our economic system is built on growth. when growth slows to a crawl or stops, the entire basis of corporate economics will fail.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
A common tactic in these debates is to draw a false dichotomy: we either have to change nothing, or we have to go EXTREEEEEMELY far in the other direction.
Does anyone think the only way to fight climate change is raising gas prices so high that people will starve? Because if so, you haven't though a second about it and should leave decisions on the subject to someone else.
It's not a "pie". Innovation means more for less, to whit: with farm equipment and proper crop rotation and land stewardship, you can feed 10 times as many people from the same amount of land, AND with less labor.
While there are lots of people that gain wealth by exploiting the poor (the culture in India is an ideal example), it's a fallacy to claim that wealth is always generated that way, or even that it's a significant factor. What has changed that lately, in the global economy, is large and powerful governments using their power to protect large, multinational corporations through "intellectual property" laws, trade barriers or trade barrier restrictions, and other techniques. That's cheaper for the corporations that know how to navigate the political system, because they can exploit cheap labor instead of innovating their processes instead.
A French author named Jean Raspail wrote a novel called, "Camp of the Saints", about a large scale invasion of the third world into the first world. I think some of his premises were flawed, in that many in the first world cooperated far, far too easily with the invaders compared to what would actually happen
I don't think you've been paying attention. It was one political party's cooperation in Norway that led to Breivik's killing rampage, and while one crazy person's extremism is not indicative, the groups he associated with, frightened by the massive influx of third-world immigration, certainly is. The US has between 10 and 15 million illegal (undocumented) immigrants, with an administration working desperately to keep them all in-country. So I don't think Raspail's premises were flawed, at all.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
That's why the richest countries, that are well fed, healthy, and at peace, have uncontrollably booming populations. Wait... Italy isn't replacing it's population? The United States is growing only through immigrants?
Wealthy countries have stable or falling populations for several reasons. Being relatively free, they can make choices that amount to running their lives wisely. They can afford condoms and other forms of birth control. They aren't so miserable that their only form of pleasure is screwing; they have the electricity to run their TVs and Nintendos 24/7. There are numerous other minor reasons, but they're mostly similar to the preceding.
Poverty is largely caused by tyranny and secondarily by rotten religious beliefs. End those and the resulting problems (slowly) solve themselves.
That's a shallow belief, resulting from not bothering to consider the difference between all the effects of productive and unproductive countries. Taiwan and South Korea are productive countries, and by being productive they use resources. Do you really think we (the US) would be better off if Taiwan and South Korea were impoverished stinkholes? Do you think we'd be worse off if (for instance) Uganda be came a free and rational country, attracting investment and becoming productive, and in so doing using more resources?
Failing to consider all the results is the second greatest cause of "unintended consequences". (The first being failing to understand human nature.)
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Good is clearly an objective fact. What you find good must be good, and if someone disagrees, they're instantly wrong.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Japan and Europe haven't figured out some great secret of population control. It's simply that the more wealthy a nation becomes the less it's citizens reproduce. China is one of the few nations in the world that actually enforced population control. It helped keep population in check, but then so did starvation, war and inept government policies over the last century. The interesting thing in China is that increased affluence is also leading to a decline in childbirth. And coupled with the irrational value they place in boys over girls has lead to a situation where China has far more men than women. But beyond that, the Chinese government has already become concerned with the prospect of population decline, that future generations would be able to sustain the nation, it's social programs and public works projects.
And the real problem there has always been that everyone has been crammed into cities while the rest of the country is considerable more sparse. Even with the population they have there numerous apartment developments that sit vacant and cities built around factories that have become ghost towns when those factories closed.
Japan has already been suffering from the consequences of population decline for a long time and it's going to get worse. It's such a big concern that they're offering money to couples who have children. Every developed nation in Asia ranks near the bottom for birthrates. Most of Europe isn't far behind. If non-immigrant birthrates were counted in the US I'm quite certain they'd be pretty low too. Of course Europe, but especially the US still has a strong immigrant population that reproduces more readily. In the long run, that may prove to be a very good thing.
It's also been shown that the developed world produces more than enough food to feed the world's entire population. The problem isn't a lack of food, it's corruption in third world nations. It's no secret that much of what we donate to Africa never makes it into the hands of the people who need it.
As for other resources, well, fossil fuels are a concern. But there are numerous methods for generating electricity that are not dependent on fossil fuels and use largely renewable resources. And electricity is probably the most important resource we have.
I recently read Ringworld and found it quaint that the big concern was unchecked population growth. I think it's been sufficiently proven that population will never grow incessantly. There are far too many forces in play here influencing growth. I'm convinced that we're at a point where a blanket implementation birth control is unnecessary. What is important are things like the economy and the careful management of resources.
I piss in your non-chlorinated pool!
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So, we take all the billionaires in their Hawker-Sidley (Really? They still fly those things?) jets, their personal 767's and DC-9's and park them, along with their respective owners and bank accounts in deepest, most destitute Africa (or Asia or New Jersey or whatever wasteland you propose) and give them to the locals.
Wait 10 years and see what happens.
You have a new bunch of billionaires, this time flying something reasonable like Gulfstreams. You still have starvation, destitution and Trenton.
While I viscerally have problems with the super rich, they represent just a tiny fraction of the area under the curve that is Homo Industrialis that they can safely be ignored. Or burned, however your conscious dictates.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ah, well - you brought up the absolutes. Didn't see where I talked about that. Bask in the warming glow of your straw man.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
"I knew it. I'm surrounded by assholes" - D. Helmet
Dr. Bob, you always amaze me to no end!
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Your argument boils down to the assertion that an exploited person and/or people is responsible for its exploitation because it doesn't rebell against the exploiters. In other words you assign guilt to the victim. Fortunately, the civilized world doesn't work that way. There is an obvious cost to any rebellion: it can go wrong or sideways and many more people die or suffer than would have under the status quo.
BTW, the American colonies were split on the whole independence thing. In retrospect, it is easy to say that the revolutionaries did the right thing. But when the colonies rebelled many Americans fought on the British side.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Ever watched a bacterial colony grow in a petri-dish? At a certain size, it starts do die in the center. When it hits the walls, it starts to die off completely. That is where this is going.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The arab nations, even those with high financial wealth never stopped breeding. Some of them managed to finance a relatively high standard of living purely based on oil sales. Iraq? Taxes? Unheard off. Same with Libya, the regime wasn't nearly as brutal as the west currently wants you to believe. Oh, people were tortured and killed but these were on the whole not people the west would like in the first place. See how one of the new libyan leaders was sent over there by the west for questioning.
But there is only so much you can do even with virtually unlimited wealth, the Arab nations exploded because they got to many idle hands. Not exactly poor, they are not starving to death like further down but living an entire life on hand outs creates unrests. And when maintaining the benefits becomes more expensive because of food prices... well... we saw what happened.
That is why China did not explode, China has a high population density and social repression and unfair distribution of wealth BUT people are working. They got a way out, not an easy one and not one that everyone will make BUT there is hope.
China has strict population control and NOT just birth control. You can't just get into China. The west has population control through its culture but is letting in a lot of immigrants. That was fine when there was a lot of work westerners did not want to do and we thought we could afford a large percentage of natives being unemployed (It is a nice capitalist idea that everyone should work for a living but you want to be the boss of someone who only works because he has absolutely no choice?) consuming tax money.
But the economy took a nose dive and suddenly having high un-employment and importing workers seems a bit contradictory.
About the only alternative is to create more work but how? And how are you going to get generations raised on not working, working on boring jobs? It always sound so good, create jobs but even if your scheme has some nice jobs, those will be taken by those with skills. How do you get the average london rioter or paris suburb kid working for a minimum wage in a back breaking job?
See how many of the arab spring protestors are university students complaining they can't find a job? Same in Greece and Italy. What did they study? Islam... liberal arts!... what kinda job creation can you do that demands these skills? There is currently a shortage of all kinds of IT staff especially developers/coders in Holland. Haven't had a job in my entire career as a web developer were we didn't have more then one position open often to anyone in the world... switch a dutch company over to English for one immigrant? No problem. Have seen it multiple times BUT never African (I have worked with a few blacks but their recent roots lie in former dutch colonies and they speak excellent dutch invariably). East European is the main source of IT talent.
This is a huge problem, now the revolutions have happened, things got to change but how? Were are all those people in Libya that got an automatic weapon going to find work? Oil industry? Not with an Islamic education you are not. There is a reason most oil companies are western. That Libya had a HUGE immigrant population itself. Work is hard and a lot of it ain't fun. So when you can avoid it, you will.
Note that this post may sound racist but places like Liverpool and Manchester are much the same, colonies of unemployed white people sustained by a magic income from the rest of the country for so long the culture has changed from factory workers to gangland. And while entire regions have it as the norm not to work, those in power says the country desperately needs immigrants from all over the world to do the work...that is not sustainable. Something has to give... see the riots. And the recent ones in London were not the first and other countries have had them too.
We are living in a world in a which a US coca cola plant is so efficient that a crew of less then a dozen can do in a shift more then a million can's per perso
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What would you call the London riots? Norway? Paris riots?
War isn't always going to be army against army. War can happen right in your home town. It is called civil war. I don't know why, it doesn't seem very civil to me.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
what it really means is that there is now more women than ever before with whom you cannot have sex.
> This is one of the most retrograde ways of thinking
> available to the third world
I totally agree. If I were in the "third world", I'd be trying to elevate my standard of living by either using national resources within the country, or trading them for something of worth. I would not be whining about being a victim.
But I'm not in the third world, and I'm telling what I presume is a fellow American that he is more involved with the third world than he'd like to believe.
Bartlett ignores that solutions can grow exponentially, not just problems. See, for example:
http://unbridledspeculation.com/2011/03/17/the-exponential-gains-in-solar-power-per-dollar/
http://unbridledspeculation.com/2011/06/09/solar-cheaper-than-coal-in-3-5-years-ge-and-first-solar-think-so/
The Club of Rome made the same mistake in the 1970s.
See also:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
It's so sad how much despairing and conflict-promoting minisinformation is in this discussion.
Beyond that, there is room for quadrillions of humans in space habitats, and we've been able to build them (in theory) since the 1970s. You'd expect "nerds" might be more optimistic. Who is profiting from this despair?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Not if everyone wants to live in the style to which Americans have become accustomed. As I note in the link, for that to happen (given current tech), "We're going to need three or four New Earths."
To change that, you need to either (greatly) improve the tech, or (drastically) change the living standard and policies. Or a combination of both.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
> What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?
Isn't it obvious?
We can make synthetic fuels from solar energy:
http://unbridledspeculation.com/2011/06/09/solar-cheaper-than-coal-in-3-5-years-ge-and-first-solar-think-so/
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR11.txt
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Well, yeah, ultimately, energy utilization is the limiting factor, not resources. Or rather - entropy compensation. The question is, can we get the relevant techniques up and running fast and economical enough. And the "economical" factor hugely depends on how much me are willing to adapt our system....
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Yes, but those aren't subject to the same taxes the U.S. government institutes on fossil fuels. The OP was being a libertarian whiner.
Of course they burn well. You've got to dry them out first. Like jerky!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
....we have our gonad-driven destiny.
We will replicate ourselves until we exhaust the ability of our niche to sustain us (in which case we die off down to a sustainable level), or some sort of predation takes place (disease, vampires, zombies, aliens) to do the same thing.
Or, until Disney cameramen chase us off a cliff into the sea.
I'm not sure why we are so certain that we're "different" from every other animal. As far as I can tell, despite a very thin veneer of non-instinctual behavior that we call "civilization" we respond in large scales predictably like most other social animals. (shrug)
-Styopa
I think at some point, people will realize China's birth control is a great contribution to the world.
China's population went from 400 million to 1 billion in 30 years before they adopted birth control in 1978. If they had not done that, we'd probably have 9 billion already.
Ah, well - you brought up the absolutes.
"I am a spineless individual that never heard of anything like 'ethics', but rather stay happily at the developmental level of an amoeba, intellectually"
There's no absolutes there. And I was just making the point that I don't think that there's some universal set of ethics.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
> I benefit from the Third World consuming fewer
> resources,
Our consumption of their resources is *why* they consume less. You are the cause of their resource scarcity.
I doubt that, sure a factor but not the complete reason. And so what, you do know what competition means right?
> [I] approve when its denizens kill each other.
America has been dependent on the rest of the world for its wealth. When the rest of the world tires of trading us their wealth for our Monopoly money, you'll see that America might not be first world forever. And I'm sure you'll have a blast if *your* neighbors start to kill each other.
True enough, but again so what? That'll help the "problem" even more.
> the slow zebra should get eaten.
Every zebra will slow down one day. Even you.
Which is fine, you've had kids right? The genes have been passed on - your reason for existance is done and you are no longer needed.
Not that's a world view I agree with, but the "I have better weapons so I'll take that" is at least consistent.
We need a plauge.
The population is starting to wear this planet down. And I'm guilty too.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I was making the point that the OP didn't even WANT to think about ethics. No, certainly there is no universal set, but that can't stop us from optimizing as good as we can and not just call it quits with statements like "there is no common good". That is just intellectually and spiritually low.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I'm surprised no one's brought it up: solution (it's not a simple one) is colonization of space. Yeah, yeah it'd be cheaper to have a planet wide war, and many would die in the process. A lot of resources would be used up initially. It moves the population off of Earth though, doesn't it.
> you do know what competition means right?
You do know what exploitation means, right? The difference is in how free the market and population are. In the "third world," governments local and external control both so much that neither the market nor the people can be realistically considered "free."
> That'll help the "problem" even more.
Are you sincerely indifferent to whether your neighborhood becomes a war zone?
Commander Taco is being replaced by Chicken Little in slashdot.
Expect numerous announcements on how we "just" grew by a billion in twelve years, while the previous billion took ten years and the billion before took even less, starting from smaller bases. For a more balanced explanation of the situation see:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/multimedia/2010/11/world_population
Often people wonder whether we will be able to support a population of 7 or 10 or whatever billion people. I don't find that interesting, I'm sure we can have many billions more on just this planet alone. The real question is what will be left of nature with 10 billion western style living people? Will we as a species be able to preserve any significant amount of wildlife, ecosystems and natural beauty for our children?
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Eh, I've found that trying to interfere with other people's actions to convince or force them to make what I consider to be "good" choices tends to provoke a great deal of hatred.
Similarly, since I don't appreciate other people cramming their ethics down my throat. I assume other people feel I'm cramming my ethics down their throat when I try, even if I have good intentions.
The inevitable conclusion is that, aside from certain cases where people are dangerous to society, back off and let people make their own mistakes, live my own life as "good" as I possible can. A side-effect of this is that I advocate allowing people in third-world countries to live their lives as they well, even if that means eventual mass starvation.
At any given moment it is a pie though, as at any given moment thousands of children are being born to parents who can't feed them. And it also doesn't matter that farm techniques using heavy equipment, water management, and crop rotation exist when those farmers can't afford heavy equipment and still rely on ox or mule to plow a field. Unless you're willing to pay for their farming equipment and to help multiple groups of subsistence farmers organize to allow for the practical use of such equipment and techniques on their farms.
For production and wealth, any time that a company goes to use cheap labor at local rates to obtain or build a product that they then sell at first-world prices for orders-of-magnitude profit is exploitation, and it's extremely cut and dried when using children, or incredibly long shifts, or other techniques like Company Scrip instead of an open market for employees to buy their basic necessary goods, or when companies use other countries to engage in environment-harming practices that are patently illegal in the market that the good is targeted toward. That kind of exploitation goes on all over the place.
As for illegal immigration, fifteen million people did not appear in a single month. They drifted in over years and years, and in many instances were encouraged to come by businessmen who wanted cheaper labor than they would get by hiring normal domestic workers. Some came to work agriculture, picking fruit, cotton, cabbage, or other grunt work paid by the bushel or load rather than by the hour, some came to work textiles where they're paid by output, not by the hour, some came to work second and third shift jobs as cleaning and maintenance staff, essentially out of sight and out of mind to the normal Americans they served. They came because these shit jobs and shit living conditions are better than their home countries, so we import third-world workers, illegally and with a wink and a nudge, because if we don't, then we have to actually *gasp!* pay people more to do these terrible jobs. Instead, we increase the labor pool with desperate people and congratulate ourselves on our savings, despite what we do to our social systems in the process.
I don't believe that the Obama Administration wants to happily grant an amnesty to everyone undocumented in the US who have committed no other real crimes. I figure that since our immigration courts are backed up to hell and gone, partially because of the blocking of the appointment of Federal judges, and partly because it's not cut-and-dried throwing out an illegal immigrant in a situation like having American children or an American spouse, and because business really does love its cheap labor. I see it as a lesser of evils. I don't doubt that others think I'm wrong on this. Either way, ceasing to prosecute deportations on these people and instead focusing on criminals that actually generate real victims is probably a better approach anyway. Once the real criminals are gone, then look into those whose principal infraction is coming here without a visa.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And saying that the "first world" bore no responsibility for the faith of Brazil is to just simply ignore that even after we proclaimed independence (and we were not just "given" independence) we were still stuck in a deep hole of debt with most of the GDP flowing out of the country before any of it could even reach the federal reserves. Not to mention wars with neighboring countries.
Brazil first borrowed money after independence to pay "reparations" for Portugal. It could have started it's life without a single dime borrowed if it kicked the Portuguese ass all the way back to Europe. The Brazilian independence is nothing more than a coup d'etat from Dom Pedro I, which later let the Crown to his son since he wanted to meddle in Portuguese politics again. Paraguay War was a defensive war and justified. The bad state of finances of the Brazilian Empire at the time was hardly the cost of the war: the Empire was already hemorrhaging money sustaining a useless monarchy and bureaucracy.
We didn't fight for independence for a long time because it wasn't even remotely in the interests of the people who could make it happen.
The Inconfidentes were the Brazilian elite and the middle class at the time. They did nothing besides producing useless literature and manifestos. Their American counterparts grabbed weapons and fought for their soil.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
> our people pretty much always sucked
> in terms of moral behaviour
I lived in Brazil for a year and a half and got to know a lot of brasileiros from a lot of backgrounds. I spent time in predios de marmore and favelas. I didn't find individual morality tended any better or worse than in my own USA.
It was a time of hyper-inflation, crime, and change (1st Presidential election ending military rule) but people were still hospitable, generous and friendly. I mentioned crime, but I recall only two minor incidents that I witnessed. The greater crimes I heard about were not that different than what was happening in certain areas of my own home town.
1) We need more people so we'll have the necessary mental resources to solve the big questions like how to get off this singular rock and out into space before the meteor or comet with our name comes.
2) People need to consume less so that we can have more people to solve the big questions. People are living too high on the resources. And no, going vegan is not a solution, that's just a fantasy escape from reality.
who architected the debt
The English grabbed a gun and forced the Brazilian government to take the money? The government promptly accepted it. The deal benefited the English - who lent the money - and Portugal who received it. And remember that Pedro I was also the heir to the Portuguese Crown. The deal transferred money between Brazil and Portugal, it was all family business to him. The people who accepted a Portuguese King as the Brazilian government are at fault. It's not a fault of the English, who were just opportunistic, or the Portuguese who got a good deal without even trying.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
While I support your implication that New Jersey is a near incurable problem, I do not support the idea that there will always be billionaires. Billionaires are a fairly recent trend.
In a free market society where greed is king, there will always be destitution and opulence. The fact that there is opulence is not quite the issue. The issue is with the level at which it has been allowed to run unchecked and unfettered for so long. The purpose of the state is to help defend those who can't defend themselves and as of late the governments of the world have been bought and paid for by the super wealthy for the sole purpose of subverting this part of government duty.
Freedom is marginalized and near non-existent where there is famine and starvation. Freedom is also marginalized when education is undermined and there is an obvious move towards that in our society as well. When the starvation could so obviously be helped by a simple regulation that might help cap or collect some of the outrageous incomes that have ballooned to such obscene proportions in the last 30 years since the Reagan rape of the american public, there really is no excuse for this kind of starvation and poverty.
Am I suggesting that we steal from the wealthy and give to the poor? No, I'm merely suggesting that we stop allowing the robber barons from taking everything from the most needy in our society and perhaps ask them to pay their fair share, stop subverting our educational system, and maybe just maybe start caring about the welfare of their fellow human beings.
I got here through a series of tubes
"- Chiropractors have really come under fire in recent years as charlatans with little to no medical evidence of their claims" Naah. They've been coming under fire for decades, not just recent years. And rightly so. Want to live to 100? Well, tough. Longevity is mostly genetic.
At any given moment it is a pie though
That's pretty short-sighted, isn't it? What about the next one?
For production and wealth, any time that a company goes to use cheap labor at local rates to obtain or build a product that they then sell at first-world prices for orders-of-magnitude profit is exploitation
Because you say so? Doesn't sound like anyone being "exploited" has a gun to their head. They can choose not to participate. But if they are getting "local rates" (in fact in most cases they get much better than that), then why wouldn't they? Besides, as I mentioned, many of the companies that move operations to low-rate labor areas would find it much less profitable if not for the tax considerations, protection, and unfair trade agreements that they buy from their congresscritters.
As for illegal immigration...
Yep, illegal immigrants are the new slave labor. That's what I consider real exploitation, and the fact that the "wink and nudge" comes from the institution that's supposed to exist to protect the rights of people makes it unconscionably criminal.
I don't believe that the Obama Administration wants to happily grant an amnesty to everyone undocumented in the US who have committed no other real crimes.
Then you need to dig a little deeper. This is probably a good place to start.
Either way, ceasing to prosecute deportations on these people and instead focusing on criminals that actually generate real victims is probably a better approach anyway.
Agreed. Too bad that's not happening either.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If you use the term 'billionaires' to mean 'so incredibly wealthy that they can bend governments and most men to their wishes' I think you will see them throughout history. Perhaps they were 'Princes' or other nobility, perhaps they were members of the Church and sometimes they were simply merchants (17th, 18th Century Dutch merchants for example). But they existed.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
More sales for my medical devices company. Yeah, baby!
an ill wind that blows no good
Beyond that, there is room for quadrillions of humans in space habitats
We don't actually know this. We've never got anywhere close to scientifically testing that proposition.
and we've been able to build them (in theory) since the 1970s
No, we really haven't.
We've had space advocacy groups in the 1970s claiming that space habitats will solve all our problems, but so far the only attempt we've made at actually building closed ecological life support systems has failed miserably and there's apparently been little interest in replicating the experiment since 1995.
In theory we might be able to mine a bunch of barren rock from the Moon, form it into cylinders, and toss it into orbit. Will that come anywhere near close to providing a viable habitat for humans? Not unless we possess the means for instantaneously converting desert sand into a self-sustaining ecologically balanced garden, and if we had that we'd already be using it in Somalia.
In my opinion, we should be committing Apollo-level resources to doing Biospheres 3, 4, 5 and so on. The knowledge of sustainable ecology gained from this would be immense and practically valuable, and could be applied to save lives almost immediately. And once we've got the sealed-greenhouse thing working on earth, after a hundred years or so, then we could look at the huge extra challenges of attempting it in space, where gravity is wonky and there's radiation and vacuum and shipping resources like fresh water up the well is hugely expensive.
But to claim we could do this in the 1970s? No. We were able to dream it in the 1970s. But those dreams weren't necessarily realistic.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
In the modern age when we are supposedly above monarchy and such other forms of primitive governance, don't you find it kind of disturbing that we have Princes and Nobility at all?
Princes and nobility were the government at the time, as was the church in its day. Now, we have a semblance of government that holds only true loyalty to the hidden aristocracy and continually subverts all efforts to reign in their power why pretending to be of and for the people. To the point, I don't think that we have seen the scale of this at any point in history where so few controlled so much in terms of wealth. Even the church and kings of old seem to be paupers compared to some of today's modern oligarchy.
As I stated previously, there have and always will be haves and have-nots, but this scale is sickening. Plus we still have that whole New Jersey thing to deal with, King Henry never had to deal with that.
I got here through a series of tubes
If you did this and eventually rose to a position of power (where you could implement the program on a national scale) you would have been assassinated or had a coup carried out against you. The people who are sucking the wealth out of the Third World countries know that they're responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents, removing one more obstruction to their accumulation of ever-more-grotesque levels of wealth wouldn't cause them a moment's lost sleep.
This is not to excuse leaders like Alan Garcia from doing more, but I was told of a particularly intransigent highland Peruvian politician who received a cell phone call saying, "Look at your daughter's chest, and vote the right way" on a mining concession. He was appalled to see her playing with the red dot of a laser gun sight aimed at her. He retired early from politics.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Arrogant twat!
7 is special in the bible. Maybe the birth of the baby that caps off the 7 billion will start the rapture, which has been delayed from earlier estimates due to the unforeseen development of birth control (psychics and prognosticators can't nail EVERY detail).
If you did this and eventually rose to a position of power (where you could implement the program on a national scale) you would have been assassinated or had a coup carried out against you.
Explain South Korea. They rose from a very poor country after the war to a great country today. Or Brazil itself carrying a mildly successful import substitution program from late 40s to the 80s.
García is a good example of about what everything is wrong in Latin American politics. He was able to soar Peruvian inflation to 7,649% (yes, seven hundred six thousand nine per cent, annually), reduce Peruvian GDP by 20% and increase poverty by about 13% and people voted he back in the office again! Or the fascination people feel with Chavez, Lula and other current populist leaders.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Nope. Growth declines, stops, then goes negative. In 200 years, assuming no (major) societal shifts, there will be around half the amount of people that there are today. Again, assuming all goes well.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Are you sincerely indifferent to whether your neighborhood becomes a war zone?
Even if he isn't, he can never admit it because he's an Internet Sociopath (TM). It's like being an Internet Tough Guy, only even more pathetic. They're fairly common in Slashdot discussions, maybe because of the site's libertarian leanings. He doesn't actually have anything to contribute to the discussion, he just wants to make sure everyone knows how tough and coldly rational he supposedly is, unlike the rest of you sheeple with your "ethics" and "caring about others".
Back then I'm sure the prediction would have been that China would have continued to decline to the point where you have something like a famine in Somalia only with Billions suffering.
More quarrelling, more hunger, more poverty, etc.
Soylent green!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It is not bad, really !
When in 2100,
and with the global fertility rate at the usual population replacement rate (around 2.5),
the number stabilise to the projected 10 billions,
we would be JUST 50% more people.
Since ALREADY we have the technology AND THE RESOURCES (yes, we have them) to sustain this population,
we just need to better organise social-economical-political.
"Just" need to better organise [the] social-economic-political [systems in order to mitigate the problem]
Just.
I don't think that word means what you would hope it means.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
1350 - The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60 percent of Europe's population.
1918 - The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means 3% to 6% of the entire global population died.
Due to modern global movement patterns, it's only a matter of time before the population gets cut in half (or more) again. The next "big one" will spread through the community much faster. No worries.
Not necessarily. Given world wide modern communications and our understanding of infectious disease, when the next real pandemic comes up, we will quarantine the infected areas with gusto and certitude. Unless you are positing some horrid uber strain of infectious disease ala 12 Monkeys, that should keep the infection contained. It may cause significant economic disruption and a lot of angst, but it would not likely kill off a significant amount of the population.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I was living in Peru during Garcia's first term. One of his first actions as president was go to New York and tell the international banking cartels that the debt run up by the earlier military dictatorship was unmanageable and they were only going use X-percent of the country's export earnings on debt service and the rest on improving the lot of the majority. The program was working pretty well the first couple of years, and then from nowhere the Sendero Luminoso suddenly acquired a huge amount of funding and training and went on to destroy the country's economy. Want to destroy the economy of a modern country? Take out its electrical distribution system. Over and over and over. Power lines that run for hundreds of miles are very safe, easy targets (the Sendero weren't know for their bravery). In Cusco we had a trickle of potable water for a few hours every couple of days, my brother-in-law in Lima would have electricity perhaps three days a week. When speculators attacked the currency hyperinflation was inevitable. Since Garcia was extremely popular nationally the PTB resorted to an economic coup.
He was re-elected because people thought he would renew the popular programs of his first term, but apparently in the intervening two decades he's sold his soul. Chavez and Morales are extremely popular because the wealth of their countries are, for the first time, being directed towards the lowest-earning 90 percent of the population, rather than the highest-earning 3 percent.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"BTW, the American colonies were split on the whole independence thing. In retrospect, it is easy to say that the revolutionaries did the right thing. But when the colonies rebelled many Americans fought on the British side."
Also, it owed a lot of its success to support from France. Without it, chances are the revolution would have failed and I don't know enough about Brazilian history to know whether they could expect help from a friendly super power.
"I benefit from the Third World consuming fewer resources, and approve when its denizens kill each other."
Assuming you actually mean what you write, I tend to think that you, and people like you are the problem. I won't sink to your level and approve of someone killing you, but it wouldn't make me particularly sad either.
I don't know what it means for humanity, but its no good for the planet. It better sort this out before its too late.
India and China make up for 40% of that 7 billion population. Most of them are at the bottom of the pyramid/food-chain. There are fortunes to be made... at the bottom of the pyramid. Apple is doing it. Many Indians are starving to be able to afford an iPhone. It seems its a prestige issue in that country.
One of his first actions as president was go to New York and tell the international banking cartels that the debt run up by the earlier military dictatorship was unmanageable and they were only going use X-percent of the country's export earnings on debt service and the rest on improving the lot of the majority.
Or he could, like Fernando Henrique did in Brazil, implement structural reforms, lowering the country interest rate on it's debt, perform credit swaps, lowering the cost of debt. But the long and hard way, respecting contracts, is out of mind in Latin America. For the rest of your post with a conspiracy theory, I won't even bother to answer. It's akin to believing in the moon landing hoax, I'm sorry. If you're interested in the subject and would like to see more about my point of view I'll gladly point out references in the academic literature.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
"respecting contracts"
That's what Fujimori did, refinanced the debt in Japan rather than New York.
In an interview Garcia said something to the effect of, "Imagine people came and held guns on your family while one of them took you to the bank and made you take out a loan to buy their freedom. Now imagine that you learn the criminals worked for the loan department of the bank. Would you feel obligated to pay that loan? We don't." Since most of the military government spent the remainder of their lives disgustingly rich, living in Miami Beach and London, he had a point.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The problem is usually corrupt and oppressive governments.
People on their own don't generally live where there's no ability to make food -- they move.
The increasing population means nothing good to human and the earth but only causing more and more problems and it increase the pollution and enviromental problems. Ice are melting on the polar, animals are dying out...etc. http://www.visitourchina.com/
The neat thing about "libertarians" is that they can't even grasp the fact that if not for an organized society they would be unable to structure a thought since language comes from living in society, that, if disease don't killed them in their early life.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!