There are often situations that require someone to push through the bullcrap and make something happen.
Sociopaths only work to benefit themselves, by definition. Any advantage a group might gain from the sociopaths actions are either accidental or incidental.
These sociopaths are far more suited to this task because they care nothing for the consequences
No, they are not. Sociopaths are inherently destructive and when in a position of power tend to exercise that power in ways far in excess of anything that's required to achieve a particular goal. Both Stalin and Mao are excellent examples of sociopaths obsessed with power, and both are responsible for the needless murder of tens of millions of human beings.
They may not even care about who lives or dies.
It isn't a question of "may", it's that they don't. Period. That's one of the things that makes a person a sociopath. They have NO ability to empathize with other human beings. They have no more feeling for you than you do for a couch or carpet. You're just a thing to to them, sometimes useful, sometimes amusing, but just a thing. They do NOT give a shit whether you live or die, unless your life or death is of some personal value to them (e.g., they need you to fix their car, or they've decided that they want to find out what it's like to torture another human being to death and YOU'RE IT!).
The problem has always been that they are a tough fit for any society they create.
The problem is that they're fucking monsters in human disguise. Monsters that CANNOT be reformed.
Yet emergency situations requiring their brashness tend to be very rare.
Sociopaths are no more likely to respond appropriately in an emergency situation than any other human being. Assertions to the contrary are purest bullshit.
In the case of Mao and Castro, I don't see how you can make the distinction. Any zealot who uses murder and terror as a means to achieve an end is a sociopath, by definition.
"While Ms. Stewart was shopping her manuscript around, she also sent it to the Wachowski brothers in response to an ad looking for a science fiction manuscript to create a comic book.
During the FBI investigation, it was discovered that, in an effort to avoid liability, 30 minutes or more was edited from the original Matrix film. Further witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski brothers as they claimed.
The witnesses also added that the original work of Ms. Stewart had been seen, and often used during preparation of the motion pictures. During a Sept. 27 court proceeding, United States District Judge Margaret Morrow ruled against several motions made by the defendants in their attempt to get the suits against them dismissed."
The FBI report said that "there was no doubt" that the Wachowskis stole the idea nearly verbatim from Ms. Martin. Are you going to tell me that the FBI is lying about their conclusions?
At least this time they didn't steal the idea from someone else and try to pass it off as their own creation. Although it should've been painfully clear from the differences between the first movie and the second two that whoever wrote the first had nothing to do with the two that came after.
I don't believe you. Based upon the numbers I saw it is just barely possible, but given the percentage of the population made up by first generation families they would need excessively high marriage and birth rates.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, the birth rate of American women excluding all firt-generation immigrants is around 1.95, or slightly below replacement levels. When adding in first-generation immigrant families the birth rate rises to approximately 2.1. This doesn't seem like much, but only 22 million immigrants (legal and otherwise) came to the country between 1980 and 2000. For the TFR (Total Fertility Rate) of first-generation families to affect the national birth rate in this manner it has to be equal to about 2.7 children.
This may not seems significant to you (1.95 children for natives compared to 2.7 children for immigrants) but it has a rather significant impact on national growth over time. To give you an idea of how this works, if all immigration had been halted in 1980 there would be *40 million less* people in the United States today (22 million immigrants plus the children they had in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000).
Again, this isn't an argument to halt immigration, just a statement of fact. I have no problem whatsoever with legal immigration into the country.
Right now the U.S. imports a whole lot more food and manufactured goods than it exports
According to the latest FATUS report put out by the Department of Agriculture the country is still exporting more food than it imports. You're right about manufactured goods, wrong about food. Although -
but that is not a long-term sustainable situation.
- while this may true it has zip to do with how many people there are per square mile, which you seemed to think was "unsustainable". A trade deficit is unsustainable over the long-term, but this has no bearing on the population numbers or the square mileage of the country. I can't even begin to imagine how you make the connection between these two unrelated items.
Remember that talk about land that can sustain human life?
I did, and we have plenty of land. Europe is far more crowded than the U.S. ever will be and I don't hear about reports of mass die-offs in France or Hungary on CNN. Or in Japan for that matter, which is considerably more crowded than the U.S., has far fewer resources, and yet boasts the second most powerful economy in the world.
Besides this is a democracy of sorts.
No, it's a representative republic. Democracy is just dictatorship by the majority, which is why our founding fathers avoided it like the plague.
If the majority of the people feel that overpopulation is a problem and want to ameliorate that problem with tax incentives then who are you to tell them they can't?
The guy pointing out that the Constitution grants no such power to the government, that's who. Unless you manage to get a constitutional amendment passed any such measure would be struck down in record time by the courts. Even an incentive means that the folks who choose to have children are being penalized at the expense of their own tax dollars, and this wouldn't pass any sort of constitutional muster.
It doesn't matter worth a damn what a majority of the citizens want or don't want if it violates the Constitution. This is NOT a democracy, and for good reason.
Besides, my original point still stands. You will never be able to convince a majority of Americans to subscribe to your view. Most of the people in this country are adamantly against any form of population control, and there's no reason to believe they'll be changing their minds any time soon. And why should they? Even with no controls whatsoever and the highest immigration rate of any First-World country we still only have an aggregate birth rate of 2.1 children per family.
but if the majority of the country does not want overcrowding then it is
First you're wrong immigrants only account for about half of the population growth
No, YOU'RE wrong - and it appears your command of English is incomplete as well. Population growth due to immigration isn't what I was talking about, but population growth due to IMMIGRANTS. Immigrants tend to have much larger families than 2nd and 3rd-generation Americans do. That's a simple fact. Eliminate immigration, and within a generation the higher immigrant birth rate will decline to conform to that of any other American family. Eliminate immigration altogether and population growth will actually become negative.
That isn't a comment on the social value of immigration, just a statement of fact.
Immigrants bring different cultures and new ideas and ways of doing things. Remember the phrase "melting pot" for grade schools?
Which has fuck-all to do with the topic, or with anything I said. It certainly doesn't have shit to do with population growth.
That's more than 80 people per square mile, even assuming all of it was suitable for humans to live on.
So what? That's practically uninhabited compared to many places in the world, including just about all of Europe.
Do you really think 80 people and reasonable amount of animals can all be supported by a single square mile of land, including food production, waste disposal, manufacturing, workspace, and infrastructure?
I don't need to speculate *because it's being done right now*.
That's a lot more crowded than I want to live in and it's only getting worse.
Well, that's just too bad for you, then. You can always move to the Northern Territory if people oppress you so.
The solution is to stop having so many babies.
This is America. If you can convince others to stop having children of their own free will then more power to ya. If you try to get legislation passed forcing others to conform to your views of what the 'right' population of America should be, I'll be one of the members of the lynch mob who hangs you from the nearest flagpole.
The problem is trying to provide incentives to people to do this before the trend is so far along that we all suffer as a result.
Just don't do it with my tax dollars. I'll vote against any such notion. I'll also vote against any law which penalizes a person for having children. Not that I would have to, since the courts would strike it down as unconstitutional anyway.
Nature has a way of dealing with huge populations of species, I'd rather we deal with it first in an intelligent and managed fashion.
Here's the thing: YOU don't get to decide when the population of the U.S. is "too large". And it's rather clear that you belong to a tiny minority who thinks that the current population is something which can't be sustained, or isn't desirable.
However, how on earth do they plan to make any MONEY?
If Google was in any position to make tons of cash in comparison to current stock prices, you wouldn't see the enormous insider trading that's been going on. Many highly-ranked employees have already sold most of their stock, and that's a pretty clear indication that the stock is badly overvalued. In fact, if anything it means that the employees in question think that the stock price will drop precipitously when the current speculation craze comes to an end. If they had some great money-making idea they were about to spring on the public they wouldn't be dumping their stock as quickly as they could, but rather hanging on to it in anticipation of higher valuation after their neat new product announcement.
Combine this with Googles legal troubles over its primary cash cow (advertising) and it's pretty clear that investing in Google is a fuck-all bad idea for anyone with half a brain. But I'll be the first to admit that hardly matters, as most investors (and their brokers) seem to lose all traces of common sense when they see a get-rich-quick scheme in action.
This is partially true, but it is coupled with the fact that we are removing more and more habitat suitable for them
That certainly isn't true of deer. There are more than twice as many deer in the United States as there were prior to colonization precisely because the habitat we construct is habitat they do well in. Their numbers are expanding to the point of starvation because there aren't enough predators (hunters) to keep them in check.
Deer love the new American landscape. Quite a few other animals do as well (e.g., raccoons, possums, squirrels, etc.).
What we really need is some human population control.
If you eliminated immigration altogether American population growth would come to a halt. In fact, after ten or so years the population would start declining (since immigrants have more children than natives, on average).
Try to remember that in all of the United States there are only 285 million people. For the land area in question that isn't very many folks.
Maybe we should institute a population tax on any individual with more than two children. That is, more or less, what China does.
Thanks, but I have no desire whatsoever to emulate a brutal dictatorship, nor to infringe on personal liberty by forcing other people to conform to group X's idea of what the "right" population of the United States should be.
Too bad the poor are the most likely to breed
I would be far more concerned if people like you were to breed.
You might've had a point except that all Chricton movies tend to follow the exact same plot anyhow, - new technology goes bad, starts killing people. Whether it's dinosaur cloning, VR, or nanorobots, it's the same plot.
That's a Boomer thing. Boomers have reached the age where they've 'got theirs' and any change, anything which upsets the status quo, has the potential to dump them from the top of the heap to somewhere lower on the ladder. The best way to prevent this is to prevent change, and this expresses itself as a fear of anything new along with the automatic assumption that it's somehow evil, bad, and will turn the world into a shittier place.
Not exactly original, but for the Boomers it's expressed in movie and book form following the same basic plot over and over again. It isn't that SCIENCE or TECHNOLOGY is evil, it's that ANY CHANGE WHATSOEVER is evil. And Chrichton panders to this crowd because it sells, distilling the fear into something easily identifiable (new technology X).
Introducing large animals from Africa to North America for tourism isn't something that is needed for our survival.
Neither is pissing around on Slashdot, yet here you are.
One of the great thing about being the master of the planet is that we can choose to do whatever the hell we want, for any reason at all, and there isn't jackshit any other creature on the planet can do to stop us.
That means that if we choose to set up these parks in North America we can do exactly that. Fuck 'balance', 'natural order', or whatever the argument of the day is against the idea. If we want to do it we can, and nothing can stop us.
I think we have a duty to protect only ourselves (as we were intended to do)
We weren't "intended" to do anything. There is no Mother Gaia, and evolution isn't an intelligent process. The only intentions here are our own, and they're the only things that matter.
that *may* include protecting other species that we depend on for our survival.
That includes whatever we say it includes. WE decide. End of story.
In Oregon there are quite a few mountain lions whose ranges extend into urban areas, but attacks are extremely rare. People don't even know when they're around, except perhaps when a pet goes missing. This is especially true since our forests extend right into our cities and towns; even Portland is this way (and is large enough to have its own internal forests). A cougar can be hiding in a clump of bushes along your property line as you're walking from the house to your car in the morning and you'll never know it's there.
About a month ago I encountered a cougar that was crouched along the edge of a nearby forest (about forty feet from the nearest building). I see all sorts of other animals in that area, but the cougar was a real surprise; I was in the area, about twenty-five feet from the cougar, for about five minutes before I noticed that the forest line didn't look quite right. Stared at it for a bit and finally made out the head and ears. It was just watching me, apparently waiting for me to leave so it could continue on it's merry way. It noticed that I had seen it and froze with a wide-eyed "oh shit!" look and since I didn't want him to panic I backed out of the area and left. I wasn't concerned since mountain lion attacks are extremely rare, and when they do happen it's almost always when the animal has the element of surprise, which this one clearly didn't.
Haven't seen him since, but that doesn't mean he isn't around. There've been fewer deer coming by so I think he's still in the general area. In any event, it's common for cougars to be near and for people to walk right by them without noticing them because they're so good at remaining hidden. Nothing to be alarmed about.
Any real hunter will tell you that you should aim for the chest when hunting deer, not the head.
That was for effect, which you would've been able to discern for yourself if you'd thought about for a few seconds before posting. The "slice and dice" portion of the sentence should've given it away.
Assuming it's actual child porn involving real children, and not a bunch of photoshopped fabrications. For instance, I have a hilarious picture of Jessica Alba slurping down some guy's juices with a big ol' grin on her face, but I'm fairly certain that Ms. Alba never posed for such a picture. You wouldn't be able to tell it from the photo, though; it's very well done.
Most of these folks live in a Disney world. I doubt they've ever spent any real time working on a farm, much less gone hunting. They anthropomorphize animals because they don't know any better and don't want to know any better. Whatever illusions they harbor are more precious to them than actual facts.
As an example, I worked for a few years at a wildlife rehab center. We had a very high turnover rate for volunteers because many of these folks had never had any actual experience with an animal other than a pet. They seemed to think that they and the animals would somehow live in happy harmony, with the animals recognizing (in some mysterious, unexplained fashion) the generosity and kindness of their would-be benefactors, and rewarding them accordingly with warm fuzzies.
The reality of the situation was considerably different. Even after training, the idiots who thought this sort of thing would deliberately go and do something stupid, apparently on the assumption that since *they* were somehow different/more moral/of a purer intellect than the rest of us, the things we had told them about the behavior of the animals wouldn't apply to them. They racked up an impressive number of interesting injuries while trying to 'bond' with our furry and feathered patients.
Of course, this didn't change their opinion of their own exalted nature. They simply blamed us for the actions of the animals (I never did quite figure out *how* we were to blame) and quit. The idea that they were wrong, that the animals did indeed fear and hate them just like they feared and hated everyone else, was something they simply couldn't accept. To the animals they were nothing more than a predator who could eat them at any moment; how they could expect anything different was beyond me. Perhaps they thought their 'auras' would make the animals all friendly and happy? I don't know.
We used to take bets on who would last and who wouldn't. The people with realistic expectations (mainly folks who grew up on farms) lasted longest; the ones who had some sort of "environmental" agenda were often no-shows after two or three shifts, at most (as long as it took them to acquire their first injury from trying to be 'one' with nature). I thought it amusing that the people most vociferous about 'saving the Earth' and 'helping the animals' were the most miffed that the animals couldn't give a shit about their motivations, and treated them just like they did any other human being.
Can't say this experience endeared me to these people. I saw first-hand, repeatedly, that these folks didn't have the first fucking clue, and lived in a la-la land that didn't bear even a remote resemblance to actual reality. It certainly didn't do much to give them any credibility in my eyes.
If we were all to stop eating meat, we would save so much land we wouldn't have to turn to the cows to exploit other plant resources that we cannot digest on our own.
And if we stopped driving cars we'd cut down on a fair amount of atmospheric pollution as well. Both situations are doable but neither are desirable to most human beings.
I like meat and I don't intend to stop eating it. I don't intend to sell my car off, either. Or to stop buying computers because of all the nasty wastes that are produced during the manufacturing process.
There are only a few million of them, so doing that every year should be a piece of cake.
Actually, it's estimated there are about thirty million white-tailed deer in the United States. Just white-tails, although they're by far the most numerous. The amount of effort required to distribute birth control (and semi-continuously, at that) would be enormous.
Some fun deer facts:
- at the turn of the century there were only a half-million deer in the U.S. Limitations on hunting, the eradication of natural predators, and human land use patterns have made the United States much more deer-friendly.
- prior to European settlement of North America, there were around ten deer per square mile of land. In some places this number has more than tripled.
- hunters are unable to control deer populations. There simply aren't enough of them to do the job. In any event very few hunters will take multiple kills since they can't use all the meat (and selling it is a problem in the U.S. due to various federal and state laws).
- despite the fact that it's now legal in most places to shoot does (and actually encouraged) hunters usually won't do this. It's been ingrained into hunters since childhood that the females need to be left alone so they can breed the next generation, and Fish and Wildlife officials have been quite unsuccessful at changing this attitude. Many hunters will choose to bring home nothing at all rather than shoot a doe.
- deer overbrowsing has been destroying forests and disrupting ecologies all across the U.S. It's estimated they do about $750 million of damage to the timber industry, and at least $1.5 billion to agriculture.
- Deer are involved in about 1.5 million collisions with cars a year, for a total of about $1.1 billion in damages. Nearly 14,000 people are injured or sometimes killed in these collisions.
That's never going to happen. While the vegans might accept that as a decent outcome, a great many of us who live in the real world aren't going to accept a ban on eating animals no matter how capable 'meat vats' become.
Also, from the perspective of someone who's a vegetarian because he doesn't want to kill animals, I suppose I'd prefer somewhat creepily grown meat to meat from dead animals.
Ye gods! I'll take my once-a-year personal collection of Bambi Steaks and Meat Products over something grown in a vat any day. Yeah, I know it's messier to put a bullet in Bambi's brain, then gut, slice and dice, but the idea of eating muscle tissue grown in a nutrient tank makes my stomache roll.
We just have to start living that dream in isolated pockets (and the open source movement is one such pocket IMO) and hope that the influence spreads.
You're also going to have to figure out how to prevent sociopathy, which is entirely based on biology and aberrant brain development. Sociopaths account for around 2% of the population and they can't be counseled or therapied into "normalcy" any more than a diabetic can be talked into producing regular levels of insulin.
Until you find a way to prevent sociopathy in utero as well as eliminate the current crop of sociopaths living among us, you're never going to get anything like the utopia that you want. The wolves are real and they *will* prey upon the sheep any chance they get; it's what they do.
Sixty percent of all the people in the First World - people who're surrounded by the products of science and use them each and every day - believe that they're psychic. They don't believe that most of the *other* people who claim they're psychic actually are psychic, but they're certain that they themselves are the real deal.
Just think about that. Six out of ten of the people who live in the most technologically advanced societies in human history believe they can do magic ("psychic" just being the 20th century world for "magic"). When you take something like this into account I think it becomes clear that "common sense" isn't much of an antidote for gullibility, since so many people choose to deliberately ignore what common sense tells them.
when people gamble away their rent money, someone has to take care of them.
I don't see why. We don't allow life-long alcoholics to make the lists for liver transplants because we expect them to pay for their stupidity; why should be treat gamblers (or any addict) any differently?
or do you just plan on kicking them out of the way on your way to work?
Pretty much. If they destroyed their lives through their own bad behavior I see no reason to fork over my tax money to pay for their mistakes - and that includes the tax money that goes to pay for enforcing gambling laws.
If someone's intent on becoming a Darwin award, then let them.
Slashdot Mirror
There are often situations that require someone to push through the bullcrap and make something happen.
Sociopaths only work to benefit themselves, by definition. Any advantage a group might gain from the sociopaths actions are either accidental or incidental.
These sociopaths are far more suited to this task because they care nothing for the consequences
No, they are not. Sociopaths are inherently destructive and when in a position of power tend to exercise that power in ways far in excess of anything that's required to achieve a particular goal. Both Stalin and Mao are excellent examples of sociopaths obsessed with power, and both are responsible for the needless murder of tens of millions of human beings.
They may not even care about who lives or dies.
It isn't a question of "may", it's that they don't. Period. That's one of the things that makes a person a sociopath. They have NO ability to empathize with other human beings. They have no more feeling for you than you do for a couch or carpet. You're just a thing to to them, sometimes useful, sometimes amusing, but just a thing. They do NOT give a shit whether you live or die, unless your life or death is of some personal value to them (e.g., they need you to fix their car, or they've decided that they want to find out what it's like to torture another human being to death and YOU'RE IT!).
The problem has always been that they are a tough fit for any society they create.
The problem is that they're fucking monsters in human disguise. Monsters that CANNOT be reformed.
Yet emergency situations requiring their brashness tend to be very rare.
Sociopaths are no more likely to respond appropriately in an emergency situation than any other human being. Assertions to the contrary are purest bullshit.
Max
In the case of Mao and Castro, I don't see how you can make the distinction. Any zealot who uses murder and terror as a means to achieve an end is a sociopath, by definition.
Max
"While Ms. Stewart was shopping her manuscript around, she also sent it to the Wachowski brothers in response to an ad looking for a science fiction manuscript to create a comic book.
During the FBI investigation, it was discovered that, in an effort to avoid liability, 30 minutes or more was edited from the original Matrix film. Further witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski brothers as they claimed.
The witnesses also added that the original work of Ms. Stewart had been seen, and often used during preparation of the motion pictures. During a Sept. 27 court proceeding, United States District Judge Margaret Morrow ruled against several motions made by the defendants in their attempt to get the suits against them dismissed."
The FBI report said that "there was no doubt" that the Wachowskis stole the idea nearly verbatim from Ms. Martin. Are you going to tell me that the FBI is lying about their conclusions?
Max
try watching a film like Closer
I did, and damn was that painful.
Max
At least this time they didn't steal the idea from someone else and try to pass it off as their own creation. Although it should've been painfully clear from the differences between the first movie and the second two that whoever wrote the first had nothing to do with the two that came after.
Max
I don't believe you. Based upon the numbers I saw it is just barely possible, but given the percentage of the population made up by first generation families they would need excessively high marriage and birth rates.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, the birth rate of American women excluding all firt-generation immigrants is around 1.95, or slightly below replacement levels. When adding in first-generation immigrant families the birth rate rises to approximately 2.1. This doesn't seem like much, but only 22 million immigrants (legal and otherwise) came to the country between 1980 and 2000. For the TFR (Total Fertility Rate) of first-generation families to affect the national birth rate in this manner it has to be equal to about 2.7 children.
This may not seems significant to you (1.95 children for natives compared to 2.7 children for immigrants) but it has a rather significant impact on national growth over time. To give you an idea of how this works, if all immigration had been halted in 1980 there would be *40 million less* people in the United States today (22 million immigrants plus the children they had in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000).
Again, this isn't an argument to halt immigration, just a statement of fact. I have no problem whatsoever with legal immigration into the country.
Right now the U.S. imports a whole lot more food and manufactured goods than it exports
According to the latest FATUS report put out by the Department of Agriculture the country is still exporting more food than it imports. You're right about manufactured goods, wrong about food. Although -
but that is not a long-term sustainable situation.
- while this may true it has zip to do with how many people there are per square mile, which you seemed to think was "unsustainable". A trade deficit is unsustainable over the long-term, but this has no bearing on the population numbers or the square mileage of the country. I can't even begin to imagine how you make the connection between these two unrelated items.
Remember that talk about land that can sustain human life?
I did, and we have plenty of land. Europe is far more crowded than the U.S. ever will be and I don't hear about reports of mass die-offs in France or Hungary on CNN. Or in Japan for that matter, which is considerably more crowded than the U.S., has far fewer resources, and yet boasts the second most powerful economy in the world.
Besides this is a democracy of sorts.
No, it's a representative republic. Democracy is just dictatorship by the majority, which is why our founding fathers avoided it like the plague.
If the majority of the people feel that overpopulation is a problem and want to ameliorate that problem with tax incentives then who are you to tell them they can't?
The guy pointing out that the Constitution grants no such power to the government, that's who. Unless you manage to get a constitutional amendment passed any such measure would be struck down in record time by the courts. Even an incentive means that the folks who choose to have children are being penalized at the expense of their own tax dollars, and this wouldn't pass any sort of constitutional muster.
It doesn't matter worth a damn what a majority of the citizens want or don't want if it violates the Constitution. This is NOT a democracy, and for good reason.
Besides, my original point still stands. You will never be able to convince a majority of Americans to subscribe to your view. Most of the people in this country are adamantly against any form of population control, and there's no reason to believe they'll be changing their minds any time soon. And why should they? Even with no controls whatsoever and the highest immigration rate of any First-World country we still only have an aggregate birth rate of 2.1 children per family.
but if the majority of the country does not want overcrowding then it is
First you're wrong immigrants only account for about half of the population growth
No, YOU'RE wrong - and it appears your command of English is incomplete as well. Population growth due to immigration isn't what I was talking about, but population growth due to IMMIGRANTS. Immigrants tend to have much larger families than 2nd and 3rd-generation Americans do. That's a simple fact. Eliminate immigration, and within a generation the higher immigrant birth rate will decline to conform to that of any other American family. Eliminate immigration altogether and population growth will actually become negative.
That isn't a comment on the social value of immigration, just a statement of fact.
Immigrants bring different cultures and new ideas and ways of doing things. Remember the phrase "melting pot" for grade schools?
Which has fuck-all to do with the topic, or with anything I said. It certainly doesn't have shit to do with population growth.
That's more than 80 people per square mile, even assuming all of it was suitable for humans to live on.
So what? That's practically uninhabited compared to many places in the world, including just about all of Europe.
Do you really think 80 people and reasonable amount of animals can all be supported by a single square mile of land, including food production, waste disposal, manufacturing, workspace, and infrastructure?
I don't need to speculate *because it's being done right now*.
That's a lot more crowded than I want to live in and it's only getting worse.
Well, that's just too bad for you, then. You can always move to the Northern Territory if people oppress you so.
The solution is to stop having so many babies.
This is America. If you can convince others to stop having children of their own free will then more power to ya. If you try to get legislation passed forcing others to conform to your views of what the 'right' population of America should be, I'll be one of the members of the lynch mob who hangs you from the nearest flagpole.
The problem is trying to provide incentives to people to do this before the trend is so far along that we all suffer as a result.
Just don't do it with my tax dollars. I'll vote against any such notion. I'll also vote against any law which penalizes a person for having children. Not that I would have to, since the courts would strike it down as unconstitutional anyway.
Nature has a way of dealing with huge populations of species, I'd rather we deal with it first in an intelligent and managed fashion.
Here's the thing: YOU don't get to decide when the population of the U.S. is "too large". And it's rather clear that you belong to a tiny minority who thinks that the current population is something which can't be sustained, or isn't desirable.
Max
However, how on earth do they plan to make any MONEY?
If Google was in any position to make tons of cash in comparison to current stock prices, you wouldn't see the enormous insider trading that's been going on. Many highly-ranked employees have already sold most of their stock, and that's a pretty clear indication that the stock is badly overvalued. In fact, if anything it means that the employees in question think that the stock price will drop precipitously when the current speculation craze comes to an end. If they had some great money-making idea they were about to spring on the public they wouldn't be dumping their stock as quickly as they could, but rather hanging on to it in anticipation of higher valuation after their neat new product announcement.
Combine this with Googles legal troubles over its primary cash cow (advertising) and it's pretty clear that investing in Google is a fuck-all bad idea for anyone with half a brain. But I'll be the first to admit that hardly matters, as most investors (and their brokers) seem to lose all traces of common sense when they see a get-rich-quick scheme in action.
Max
And other websites put the date at which Humans came to North America to about 50,000 years ago.
Probably in two waves, not one as originally thought. The second wave of humans nearly wiped out the first.
Max
This is partially true, but it is coupled with the fact that we are removing more and more habitat suitable for them
That certainly isn't true of deer. There are more than twice as many deer in the United States as there were prior to colonization precisely because the habitat we construct is habitat they do well in. Their numbers are expanding to the point of starvation because there aren't enough predators (hunters) to keep them in check.
Deer love the new American landscape. Quite a few other animals do as well (e.g., raccoons, possums, squirrels, etc.).
What we really need is some human population control.
If you eliminated immigration altogether American population growth would come to a halt. In fact, after ten or so years the population would start declining (since immigrants have more children than natives, on average).
Try to remember that in all of the United States there are only 285 million people. For the land area in question that isn't very many folks.
Maybe we should institute a population tax on any individual with more than two children. That is, more or less, what China does.
Thanks, but I have no desire whatsoever to emulate a brutal dictatorship, nor to infringe on personal liberty by forcing other people to conform to group X's idea of what the "right" population of the United States should be.
Too bad the poor are the most likely to breed
I would be far more concerned if people like you were to breed.
Max
You might've had a point except that all Chricton movies tend to follow the exact same plot anyhow, - new technology goes bad, starts killing people. Whether it's dinosaur cloning, VR, or nanorobots, it's the same plot.
That's a Boomer thing. Boomers have reached the age where they've 'got theirs' and any change, anything which upsets the status quo, has the potential to dump them from the top of the heap to somewhere lower on the ladder. The best way to prevent this is to prevent change, and this expresses itself as a fear of anything new along with the automatic assumption that it's somehow evil, bad, and will turn the world into a shittier place.
Not exactly original, but for the Boomers it's expressed in movie and book form following the same basic plot over and over again. It isn't that SCIENCE or TECHNOLOGY is evil, it's that ANY CHANGE WHATSOEVER is evil. And Chrichton panders to this crowd because it sells, distilling the fear into something easily identifiable (new technology X).
Max
Introducing large animals from Africa to North America for tourism isn't something that is needed for our survival.
Neither is pissing around on Slashdot, yet here you are.
One of the great thing about being the master of the planet is that we can choose to do whatever the hell we want, for any reason at all, and there isn't jackshit any other creature on the planet can do to stop us.
That means that if we choose to set up these parks in North America we can do exactly that. Fuck 'balance', 'natural order', or whatever the argument of the day is against the idea. If we want to do it we can, and nothing can stop us.
I think we have a duty to protect only ourselves (as we were intended to do)
We weren't "intended" to do anything. There is no Mother Gaia, and evolution isn't an intelligent process. The only intentions here are our own, and they're the only things that matter.
that *may* include protecting other species that we depend on for our survival.
That includes whatever we say it includes. WE decide. End of story.
Max
In Oregon there are quite a few mountain lions whose ranges extend into urban areas, but attacks are extremely rare. People don't even know when they're around, except perhaps when a pet goes missing. This is especially true since our forests extend right into our cities and towns; even Portland is this way (and is large enough to have its own internal forests). A cougar can be hiding in a clump of bushes along your property line as you're walking from the house to your car in the morning and you'll never know it's there.
About a month ago I encountered a cougar that was crouched along the edge of a nearby forest (about forty feet from the nearest building). I see all sorts of other animals in that area, but the cougar was a real surprise; I was in the area, about twenty-five feet from the cougar, for about five minutes before I noticed that the forest line didn't look quite right. Stared at it for a bit and finally made out the head and ears. It was just watching me, apparently waiting for me to leave so it could continue on it's merry way. It noticed that I had seen it and froze with a wide-eyed "oh shit!" look and since I didn't want him to panic I backed out of the area and left. I wasn't concerned since mountain lion attacks are extremely rare, and when they do happen it's almost always when the animal has the element of surprise, which this one clearly didn't.
Haven't seen him since, but that doesn't mean he isn't around. There've been fewer deer coming by so I think he's still in the general area. In any event, it's common for cougars to be near and for people to walk right by them without noticing them because they're so good at remaining hidden. Nothing to be alarmed about.
Max
...does it change colors like a mood ring?
Max
Any real hunter will tell you that you should aim for the chest when hunting deer, not the head.
That was for effect, which you would've been able to discern for yourself if you'd thought about for a few seconds before posting. The "slice and dice" portion of the sentence should've given it away.
Max
The fact is, child porn is completely illegal.
Assuming it's actual child porn involving real children, and not a bunch of photoshopped fabrications. For instance, I have a hilarious picture of Jessica Alba slurping down some guy's juices with a big ol' grin on her face, but I'm fairly certain that Ms. Alba never posed for such a picture. You wouldn't be able to tell it from the photo, though; it's very well done.
Max
As others have pointed out, government powers are enumerated, not rights. Any power not granted to the government belongs to you.
Max
Most of these folks live in a Disney world. I doubt they've ever spent any real time working on a farm, much less gone hunting. They anthropomorphize animals because they don't know any better and don't want to know any better. Whatever illusions they harbor are more precious to them than actual facts.
As an example, I worked for a few years at a wildlife rehab center. We had a very high turnover rate for volunteers because many of these folks had never had any actual experience with an animal other than a pet. They seemed to think that they and the animals would somehow live in happy harmony, with the animals recognizing (in some mysterious, unexplained fashion) the generosity and kindness of their would-be benefactors, and rewarding them accordingly with warm fuzzies.
The reality of the situation was considerably different. Even after training, the idiots who thought this sort of thing would deliberately go and do something stupid, apparently on the assumption that since *they* were somehow different/more moral/of a purer intellect than the rest of us, the things we had told them about the behavior of the animals wouldn't apply to them. They racked up an impressive number of interesting injuries while trying to 'bond' with our furry and feathered patients.
Of course, this didn't change their opinion of their own exalted nature. They simply blamed us for the actions of the animals (I never did quite figure out *how* we were to blame) and quit. The idea that they were wrong, that the animals did indeed fear and hate them just like they feared and hated everyone else, was something they simply couldn't accept. To the animals they were nothing more than a predator who could eat them at any moment; how they could expect anything different was beyond me. Perhaps they thought their 'auras' would make the animals all friendly and happy? I don't know.
We used to take bets on who would last and who wouldn't. The people with realistic expectations (mainly folks who grew up on farms) lasted longest; the ones who had some sort of "environmental" agenda were often no-shows after two or three shifts, at most (as long as it took them to acquire their first injury from trying to be 'one' with nature). I thought it amusing that the people most vociferous about 'saving the Earth' and 'helping the animals' were the most miffed that the animals couldn't give a shit about their motivations, and treated them just like they did any other human being.
Can't say this experience endeared me to these people. I saw first-hand, repeatedly, that these folks didn't have the first fucking clue, and lived in a la-la land that didn't bear even a remote resemblance to actual reality. It certainly didn't do much to give them any credibility in my eyes.
Max
If we were all to stop eating meat, we would save so much land we wouldn't have to turn to the cows to exploit other plant resources that we cannot digest on our own.
And if we stopped driving cars we'd cut down on a fair amount of atmospheric pollution as well. Both situations are doable but neither are desirable to most human beings.
I like meat and I don't intend to stop eating it. I don't intend to sell my car off, either. Or to stop buying computers because of all the nasty wastes that are produced during the manufacturing process.
Max
There are only a few million of them, so doing that every year should be a piece of cake.
Actually, it's estimated there are about thirty million white-tailed deer in the United States. Just white-tails, although they're by far the most numerous. The amount of effort required to distribute birth control (and semi-continuously, at that) would be enormous.
Some fun deer facts:
- at the turn of the century there were only a half-million deer in the U.S. Limitations on hunting, the eradication of natural predators, and human land use patterns have made the United States much more deer-friendly.
- prior to European settlement of North America, there were around ten deer per square mile of land. In some places this number has more than tripled.
- hunters are unable to control deer populations. There simply aren't enough of them to do the job. In any event very few hunters will take multiple kills since they can't use all the meat (and selling it is a problem in the U.S. due to various federal and state laws).
- despite the fact that it's now legal in most places to shoot does (and actually encouraged) hunters usually won't do this. It's been ingrained into hunters since childhood that the females need to be left alone so they can breed the next generation, and Fish and Wildlife officials have been quite unsuccessful at changing this attitude. Many hunters will choose to bring home nothing at all rather than shoot a doe.
- deer overbrowsing has been destroying forests and disrupting ecologies all across the U.S. It's estimated they do about $750 million of damage to the timber industry, and at least $1.5 billion to agriculture.
- Deer are involved in about 1.5 million collisions with cars a year, for a total of about $1.1 billion in damages. Nearly 14,000 people are injured or sometimes killed in these collisions.
- Deer taste very, very good!
Max
and no animals would be eaten after that point
That's never going to happen. While the vegans might accept that as a decent outcome, a great many of us who live in the real world aren't going to accept a ban on eating animals no matter how capable 'meat vats' become.
Max
Also, from the perspective of someone who's a vegetarian because he doesn't want to kill animals, I suppose I'd prefer somewhat creepily grown meat to meat from dead animals.
Ye gods! I'll take my once-a-year personal collection of Bambi Steaks and Meat Products over something grown in a vat any day. Yeah, I know it's messier to put a bullet in Bambi's brain, then gut, slice and dice, but the idea of eating muscle tissue grown in a nutrient tank makes my stomache roll.
Max
We just have to start living that dream in isolated pockets (and the open source movement is one such pocket IMO) and hope that the influence spreads.
You're also going to have to figure out how to prevent sociopathy, which is entirely based on biology and aberrant brain development. Sociopaths account for around 2% of the population and they can't be counseled or therapied into "normalcy" any more than a diabetic can be talked into producing regular levels of insulin.
Until you find a way to prevent sociopathy in utero as well as eliminate the current crop of sociopaths living among us, you're never going to get anything like the utopia that you want. The wolves are real and they *will* prey upon the sheep any chance they get; it's what they do.
Max
Common sense should get you a long way.
Sixty percent of all the people in the First World - people who're surrounded by the products of science and use them each and every day - believe that they're psychic. They don't believe that most of the *other* people who claim they're psychic actually are psychic, but they're certain that they themselves are the real deal.
Just think about that. Six out of ten of the people who live in the most technologically advanced societies in human history believe they can do magic ("psychic" just being the 20th century world for "magic"). When you take something like this into account I think it becomes clear that "common sense" isn't much of an antidote for gullibility, since so many people choose to deliberately ignore what common sense tells them.
Max
when people gamble away their rent money, someone has to take care of them.
I don't see why. We don't allow life-long alcoholics to make the lists for liver transplants because we expect them to pay for their stupidity; why should be treat gamblers (or any addict) any differently?
or do you just plan on kicking them out of the way on your way to work?
Pretty much. If they destroyed their lives through their own bad behavior I see no reason to fork over my tax money to pay for their mistakes - and that includes the tax money that goes to pay for enforcing gambling laws.
If someone's intent on becoming a Darwin award, then let them.
Max