Don't know why you got "Redundant" for that. It's true. Even archetypal parents (and there are plenty of tech-savvy ones) nowadays understand the principle of the Internet. They survived this long on the planet - they can grasp the idea of using a different browser even if you need to explain that Favourites are now called Bookmarks or whatever.
I volunteered for pain research at our University. I was just curious to see how they did it and what effect it would have on me. Pain can be nasty but if you know it's not harming you and it's not going to last, then why not do it?
That post is outrageously reasonable for Slashdot.;) I agree with you and know what you mean. I remember picking up a book by Arthur C. Clarke and (small letters) Gentry Lee. I was very disappointed, though it did make me appreciate the merits of libraries.;)
There's a fair point there and I agree with it. But I think people are smart enough to notice that the name on the book is different and to judge that the content is likely to be different. At least ways, anyone interested in reading the Foundation series ought to be.;) Extensions of series by other than the original author happens all the time. Sometimes it's dreadful (Dune), sometimes its a highly variable franchise (Dr. Who). Sooner or later, someone was bound to right further Foundation books - whether because they became public domain (and on a different note, that period seems too long these days) or because the inheritors of the estate grant the rights. I haven't read any of this authors work that I'm aware of, so I've no idea whether he will be good or bad. I suspect most other posters in this story are similarly ignorant. But on balance, I think it would probably be a worse situation if you had this estate sitting on the rights to the series and refusing to let anyone build on it and take it forward. If nothing else, new books might bring a modern audience to read and enjoy the originals. If there were some pretense that these new books were actually approved by the author, then that would be untrue and therefore wrong. But I think the notion that somehow the publishers are saying Aasimov's corpse pronounces them official is just Slashdot getting its knickers in a knot again.
Ah, but by reading, you create another copy of that work you read in your memory. Naughty, naughty, you haven't paid for that copy. That makes you a pirate.
Well I asked for the next stupid comment, and I got it. Is it your contention then that I am redistributing the work from my brain? I hadn't realised neuroscience had come on so far. Do we want to go for three stupid comments, or is two sufficient?
And the reason for that, is because the people making the series never know when somebody with a ratings sheet is going to either cut them off short or announce that they have to do an entire third series. Decent pacing is hard enough when you know how many episodes you're going to make. It's far harder when the number could double at any moment.
The writers for T:TSCC were desperately trying to avoid writing themselves into a corner. And they actually did a pretty good job, imo. Look at Battlestar Galactica for an example of where the creators do write themselves into a corner. One good series. Two good series. Third is what the Hell are we doing? Fourth (fifth) is how the Hell do we get out of this. They did an okay job all things considered, but it was apparent they didn't know what they were doing.
Your argument would also support protection for Mickey Mouse which is one of the examples frequently trotted out by Slashdot as arguments against copyright.
Unfortunately, both Neal Asher and Richard Morgan are of the "I want to live out a fantasy of being a super-tough badass" school of fiction. Although Richard Morgan is significantly ahead of Neal Asher in terms of writing and tone.
The best "modern" hard sci-fi has to be Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars triology. If you want far future "hard sci-fi" (the more advanced the technology in your setting, the less "hard" you can be), you could try Robert Reed or the mostly-hard Iain M. Banks.
There's also a book I started a while back about private residences beign established in orbit. Fairly hard sci-fi, but I can't remember the title. I'm sure someone here can, though. Central character is a woman who attempts to organise people against the encroaching influence of Earth-bound governments. Title was one word, very Scandinavian sounding, like Yggdrasil, but not that. Anyone? Definitely hard sci- fi.
They don't believe it does affect them. If they have money, then that money can be relocated, so they don't care whether the software company they own is in the USA or in India or wherever. And if some of the owning class still choose to live in the USA, then that's fine for them too because their wealth disparity will be all the greater.
I think you're both wrong. Zombie horror is just isolation horror - you lose the society that you depend on - along with an addition of physical fear horror.
I also find zombie movies incalculably boring and hope the real zombies in Hollywood finally get replaced by people willing to produce better movies.
You can go further than this. Not only is nature no longer something to be feared, it is now something longed for. And werewolves have become romanticised personifications of freedom from society and civilisation along with that.
Well no but I sometimes send a steak back when it isn't cooked correctly. It's the same sort of thing. If a company sells crap there should be some sort of recourse for the consumer to get a refund.
Sure. But you've got the sense to send it back when you realise it's no good. You don't eat the whole steak, refuse to pay, and then keep eating more steaks from the same restaurant whilst posting on the Internet about how it's your right because you don't really like the steaks that much anyway.;)
In principle, you're right. In practice, people aren't doing that.
This is where courts come in and use their judgement. It's pretty clear that the Pirate Bay are there to distribute material illegally. A different torrent tracker site might be treated differently. And that's not inconsistent, it's fair - they are different sites and each should be judged according to their statements and actions.
Trouble with getting your money back if you thought the movie was no good, is that you've already had the product. What's to stop you saying that you didn't like it even if you did? Do you go into restaurants, eat the food and then decline to pay because it wasn't very good? Movies are seldom things of great financial significance. You read reviews, ask friends and watch trailers. And you use common sense - the film Inglorious Bastards was by Tarantino. Of course it was crap.;)
You say "At long last the balance of power has tipped in favour of the working man" ? The balance of power was always there - if you didn't like something, you didn't buy it.
So if there's a hysterical OMGCancer panic amongst the scientific illiterate, is it ethical to take advantage of that to protect ourselves against the privacy abuses of these things at train stations and airports and on the street?
I agree with both your points. A purely vegtarian or vegan diet is mildly unnatural. But less unnatural for an omnivore than it would be for a carnivore. Vegetarian is a sub-set of omnivore, after all. Interestingly, veganism is less unnatural than vegetarianism. I'd never thought about it that way until your post just now, but cutting out meat is a minor change in evolutionary terms whilst eating milk and derived products post infancy is quite drastic. It results in far more health problems than anything else in a vegetarian diet. And it runs counter to the general scale of perceived extremism: meat eater -> vegetarian -> vegan. Maybe I should swap to being vegan.:o
Regarding the use of land unsuitable for crops for meat animals, agreed it makes sense from an environmental point of view. It's just that in practice, it never stops at that point, with a lot of crop-suitable land given over to feeding meat animals.
Wow! The point about eating the entire carcass is one I've never actually heard before. And it's a very good one. It's perfectly possible to have a healthy diet that includes meat. It's also perfectly possible to have a healthy diet without it. Statistically, vegetarians are much healthier than meat eaters, but this is in large part due to vegetarians correlating with the better educated and, especially, with the more health conscious. Allow for those factors and vegetarians are not as overwhelmingly healthier, but they are still statistically healthier by a worthwhile margin. Obviously all meats can be healthy in the right amounts, but meats that are "healthier", or perhaps just much harder to abuse, are chicken and fish. If you would make the argument that a truly omnivorous diet is healthier than a purely vegetarian one... it's tricky. I think in principle you could be right, but there are two ways we can mean "healthier". If we're comparing like for like - the perfect omnivorous diet eaten by an educated, health-conscious person with access to whatever they want to eat alongside a similarly educated, health-consciouse person with the same freedom to eat whatever they like... I don't know if you could call either healthier as they would both have access to all the nutrients they needed and wouldn't eat an excess of anything they shouldn't. So to distinguish in that case, you'd have to go to risk factors in which case I think the vegetarian would come out ahead. There are fewer food-poisoning risks for example. But it's pretty much the same on both sides. If we move into a more realistic example, perhaps talking statistically... then I believe that I could make a stronger case for the vegetarian diet being healthier. A healthy vegetarian diet is going to be very rich in complex carbohydrates, lots of fibre, etc. The slippery slope for a vegetarian is, I think, less steep than if you eat meat. But anyway, if we're talking about individuals, then all bets are off. Only statistically is vegetarianism provably better for your health.
Incidentally, the sources of protein... A lot of people simply don't know how to be vegetarian. Protein comes in two general groups. The advantage of meat is that it gives you both at once. The same is true of dairy sources, e.g. cheese and eggs. But if you're trying to source protein from vegetable sources, there are very few that give you both at once (though there are a few). As a general guideline, grains give you one group and pulses give you another. So you should always try to mix both in a meal. For example, lentils alone might feel a little lacking. Mix in rice and your stomach will feel as sated as it ever has. Beans on toast for example. If you look at the traditional combinations, you'll realise that a lot of them work on the principle of these combinations. Presumably people just worked it out for themselves based on what felt good. And regarding soy, I've been vegetarian for my entire life and aside from occasional soy source in Japanese cooking, I never touch the stuff. Don't even like tofu.:D
If you're in the UK (or if they sell it wherever you are), you might try Quorn. It's pretty nutritious, can be used in place of meat in dishes and really soaks up flavour if you marinade it. Seriously, if you want to go vegetarian (not saying you should but if you do) and you're struggling, email me and just remind me you're from that conversation on Slashdot.
I don't know how many vegetarian friends I have - plenty. I know that I certainly have at least five vegan friends. Three of them are obnoxiously healthy, the fourth slightly less so but pretty muscular. The fifth is less healthy-looking than the others but he's neither obese nor especially sickly. In fact, he's doing a half-marathon next year so he must be reasonably fit. If your contention is that it's very difficult to get all the necessary nutrients from a vegan diet, then presumably you would have to eat greater quantities to acquire the same nutrients but four of the five vegans are all pretty lean and the fifth is merely plump (and has the sort of body-type that suggests she's supposed to be).
As regards vitamin deficiencies resulting from a limited diet, they do. But all the vegans I've known have had a very varied diet and never seem to be wanting for vitamins. Most of them are some of the least "bottle of supplements" people I know.
And finally, regarding the environmental cost. I do hope you don't suppose that meat-eaters don't need fruits and vegetables as well? But if you think that non-meat eaters must compensate so much in eating more fruit and vegetables that it cancels out the environmental gain, that's not so.
100g beef gives: 1.9g fat, 23g protein, 0g carbohydrates, 109KCal total energy
50g lentils + 50g wholegrain rice gives: 2g fat, 16g protein, 70g carbohydrates, 365KCal total energy
As you can see, an equivalent weight of grains and pulses actually offers more energy than beef. Those are dry weights of course. So your cow would have to actually utilise less area per lb of consumable meat than the vegan option for the equivalent weight. And we know that's far from true. You can get 1,000lb per acre yield on lentils (or more). I'd like to hear some equivalent figures for cattle.
Of course you're arguing that the cattle can be raised on areas unsuitable for growing grains and pulses. That may be so, but we both know that what is actually happening is that vast tracts of forest in South America are being torn down to grow soy beans for the US cattle industry. It's woefully, horribly inefficient, even ignoring the long term environmental damage.
In the U.S., most states ban the sale of horse meat for human consumption.
I'm vegetarian so it's not like it troubles me, but I'd be fascinated to know the reason for this if true. What reasoning would support the eating of deer, cow, sheep, chicken, turkey and other things, but rule out horses?
Sorry, but there's much to disagree with in your post.
What do you think wars, and drugs are for?
I don't think wars are done for purposes of population control. They're done primarily for money and control of resources, with sometime side-benefits of political gain. You've had over four-thousand US and UK soldiers killed in that bloody war which is a horrible tragedy, but not going to have a demographic impact on a nation of millions. Not least because those killed are men. If you wanted to effect population reduction by means of violent death, you would need to kill women, for reasons of biology that I don't feel necessary to explain. If you're talking about the hundreds of thousands of native Iraqis killed, then that's a far larger number, but it's (a) in a foreign country with limited trade so the population there has a far less direct impact on the invading countries meaning it makes little sense as a means of population control. And (b), population after a war, even the two World Wars, climbs back up rapidly, just as it does after a lethal pandemic. War is simply not a means of population control, either intended or as a side-effect.
As regards drugs, the amount of deaths directly or indirectly due to "drugs" (I am assuming you mean the illegal kind) in the USA and the UK is again, horribly large for what it is, and a drop in the ocean compared to the populations of those countries. Even moreso than war, it's nonsensical to suppose it's a deliberate attempt to keep the population down.
War kills thousands to millions of men, women and even children. From both sides even people around war areas that aren't threats(victims).
And I am in no way diminishing that, but with a world population of billions and a capability of a single woman to comfortably have four children, it's not a big factor in population control.
The world's population shouldn't be any ones concern. Yes as people are born everyday by the seconds. Keep in mind that people will always die everyday by the seconds.
It seems to be bad logic day on Slashdot, today. You seem to imply that the birth and death rates of the human population is in balance. Demonstrably this need not be so or the population of the world would not have grown to the billions there are today. And if it need not be so, then why should it suddenly be so just now?
The World population is everyone's concern. It can only support so many at a given lifestyle. If the population grows large enough, things break down.
Anyways ideas like population control were probably the bases for The Final Solution.
It may have been used as one of the justifications, but I seriously doubt it was a reason. The Holocaust was a result of horrible prejudice in one portion of the population and disgusting passivity, unwillingness to see and complicity on the part of the greater portion. In any case, it made no sense as a means of total population control. It was about ethnic cleansing.
We have a safe, voluntary method of population control. It's called Education and sexual equality. The more educated a populace and the more opportunities women have for a life other than wifehood and childbirth, the more the birthrate drops. At least so far. I would imagine it reaches a drop-off point if it hasn't already. Happily education is cheaper than both wars and massive drug control programs. If the governments were as deliberate as you think they are in mercilessly culling the populations, then mass education and promotion of women's rights would be the logical strategy. Sadly, this doesn't appear to be happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know why you got "Redundant" for that. It's true. Even archetypal parents (and there are plenty of tech-savvy ones) nowadays understand the principle of the Internet. They survived this long on the planet - they can grasp the idea of using a different browser even if you need to explain that Favourites are now called Bookmarks or whatever.
I volunteered for pain research at our University. I was just curious to see how they did it and what effect it would have on me. Pain can be nasty but if you know it's not harming you and it's not going to last, then why not do it?
That post is outrageously reasonable for Slashdot.
Regards,
H.
There's a fair point there and I agree with it. But I think people are smart enough to notice that the name on the book is different and to judge that the content is likely to be different. At least ways, anyone interested in reading the Foundation series ought to be.
My thoughts, anyway.
H.
Well I asked for the next stupid comment, and I got it. Is it your contention then that I am redistributing the work from my brain? I hadn't realised neuroscience had come on so far. Do we want to go for three stupid comments, or is two sufficient?
Fourth sequel. It would be the fifth film.
And the reason for that, is because the people making the series never know when somebody with a ratings sheet is going to either cut them off short or announce that they have to do an entire third series. Decent pacing is hard enough when you know how many episodes you're going to make. It's far harder when the number could double at any moment.
The writers for T:TSCC were desperately trying to avoid writing themselves into a corner. And they actually did a pretty good job, imo. Look at Battlestar Galactica for an example of where the creators do write themselves into a corner. One good series. Two good series. Third is what the Hell are we doing? Fourth (fifth) is how the Hell do we get out of this. They did an okay job all things considered, but it was apparent they didn't know what they were doing.
You know, I read that as a joke at first. And then I looked at your username and thought to myself... what wouldArnold pick?
I'll look out for that. I'm okay with slow so long as it doesn't mean boring. Some people think that the Red Mars is slow! And it's a wonderful book.
I remembered the name of mine - Gradisil, by Adam Roberts. Now that is a slow book, but it's hard sci-fi.
Yes, yes we do. Next stupid comment.
Your argument would also support protection for Mickey Mouse which is one of the examples frequently trotted out by Slashdot as arguments against copyright.
Unfortunately, both Neal Asher and Richard Morgan are of the "I want to live out a fantasy of being a super-tough badass" school of fiction. Although Richard Morgan is significantly ahead of Neal Asher in terms of writing and tone.
The best "modern" hard sci-fi has to be Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars triology. If you want far future "hard sci-fi" (the more advanced the technology in your setting, the less "hard" you can be), you could try Robert Reed or the mostly-hard Iain M. Banks.
There's also a book I started a while back about private residences beign established in orbit. Fairly hard sci-fi, but I can't remember the title. I'm sure someone here can, though. Central character is a woman who attempts to organise people against the encroaching influence of Earth-bound governments. Title was one word, very Scandinavian sounding, like Yggdrasil, but not that. Anyone? Definitely hard sci- fi.
They don't believe it does affect them. If they have money, then that money can be relocated, so they don't care whether the software company they own is in the USA or in India or wherever. And if some of the owning class still choose to live in the USA, then that's fine for them too because their wealth disparity will be all the greater.
I think you're both wrong. Zombie horror is just isolation horror - you lose the society that you depend on - along with an addition of physical fear horror.
I also find zombie movies incalculably boring and hope the real zombies in Hollywood finally get replaced by people willing to produce better movies.
You can go further than this. Not only is nature no longer something to be feared, it is now something longed for. And werewolves have become romanticised personifications of freedom from society and civilisation along with that.
Sure. But you've got the sense to send it back when you realise it's no good. You don't eat the whole steak, refuse to pay, and then keep eating more steaks from the same restaurant whilst posting on the Internet about how it's your right because you don't really like the steaks that much anyway. ;)
:)
In principle, you're right. In practice, people aren't doing that.
My view, anyway.
H.
This is where courts come in and use their judgement. It's pretty clear that the Pirate Bay are there to distribute material illegally. A different torrent tracker site might be treated differently. And that's not inconsistent, it's fair - they are different sites and each should be judged according to their statements and actions.
Trouble with getting your money back if you thought the movie was no good, is that you've already had the product. What's to stop you saying that you didn't like it even if you did? Do you go into restaurants, eat the food and then decline to pay because it wasn't very good? Movies are seldom things of great financial significance. You read reviews, ask friends and watch trailers. And you use common sense - the film Inglorious Bastards was by Tarantino. Of course it was crap. ;)
You say "At long last the balance of power has tipped in favour of the working man" ? The balance of power was always there - if you didn't like something, you didn't buy it.
So if there's a hysterical OMGCancer panic amongst the scientific illiterate, is it ethical to take advantage of that to protect ourselves against the privacy abuses of these things at train stations and airports and on the street?
I agree with both your points. A purely vegtarian or vegan diet is mildly unnatural. But less unnatural for an omnivore than it would be for a carnivore. Vegetarian is a sub-set of omnivore, after all. Interestingly, veganism is less unnatural than vegetarianism. I'd never thought about it that way until your post just now, but cutting out meat is a minor change in evolutionary terms whilst eating milk and derived products post infancy is quite drastic. It results in far more health problems than anything else in a vegetarian diet. And it runs counter to the general scale of perceived extremism: meat eater -> vegetarian -> vegan. Maybe I should swap to being vegan.
Regarding the use of land unsuitable for crops for meat animals, agreed it makes sense from an environmental point of view. It's just that in practice, it never stops at that point, with a lot of crop-suitable land given over to feeding meat animals.
Anyway, thanks for a civilised discussion,
H.
Wow! The point about eating the entire carcass is one I've never actually heard before. And it's a very good one. It's perfectly possible to have a healthy diet that includes meat. It's also perfectly possible to have a healthy diet without it. Statistically, vegetarians are much healthier than meat eaters, but this is in large part due to vegetarians correlating with the better educated and, especially, with the more health conscious. Allow for those factors and vegetarians are not as overwhelmingly healthier, but they are still statistically healthier by a worthwhile margin. Obviously all meats can be healthy in the right amounts, but meats that are "healthier", or perhaps just much harder to abuse, are chicken and fish. If you would make the argument that a truly omnivorous diet is healthier than a purely vegetarian one... it's tricky. I think in principle you could be right, but there are two ways we can mean "healthier". If we're comparing like for like - the perfect omnivorous diet eaten by an educated, health-conscious person with access to whatever they want to eat alongside a similarly educated, health-consciouse person with the same freedom to eat whatever they like... I don't know if you could call either healthier as they would both have access to all the nutrients they needed and wouldn't eat an excess of anything they shouldn't. So to distinguish in that case, you'd have to go to risk factors in which case I think the vegetarian would come out ahead. There are fewer food-poisoning risks for example. But it's pretty much the same on both sides. If we move into a more realistic example, perhaps talking statistically... then I believe that I could make a stronger case for the vegetarian diet being healthier. A healthy vegetarian diet is going to be very rich in complex carbohydrates, lots of fibre, etc. The slippery slope for a vegetarian is, I think, less steep than if you eat meat. But anyway, if we're talking about individuals, then all bets are off. Only statistically is vegetarianism provably better for your health.
Incidentally, the sources of protein... A lot of people simply don't know how to be vegetarian. Protein comes in two general groups. The advantage of meat is that it gives you both at once. The same is true of dairy sources, e.g. cheese and eggs. But if you're trying to source protein from vegetable sources, there are very few that give you both at once (though there are a few). As a general guideline, grains give you one group and pulses give you another. So you should always try to mix both in a meal. For example, lentils alone might feel a little lacking. Mix in rice and your stomach will feel as sated as it ever has. Beans on toast for example. If you look at the traditional combinations, you'll realise that a lot of them work on the principle of these combinations. Presumably people just worked it out for themselves based on what felt good. And regarding soy, I've been vegetarian for my entire life and aside from occasional soy source in Japanese cooking, I never touch the stuff. Don't even like tofu.
If you're in the UK (or if they sell it wherever you are), you might try Quorn. It's pretty nutritious, can be used in place of meat in dishes and really soaks up flavour if you marinade it. Seriously, if you want to go vegetarian (not saying you should but if you do) and you're struggling, email me and just remind me you're from that conversation on Slashdot.
Regards,
H.
I don't know how many vegetarian friends I have - plenty. I know that I certainly have at least five vegan friends. Three of them are obnoxiously healthy, the fourth slightly less so but pretty muscular. The fifth is less healthy-looking than the others but he's neither obese nor especially sickly. In fact, he's doing a half-marathon next year so he must be reasonably fit. If your contention is that it's very difficult to get all the necessary nutrients from a vegan diet, then presumably you would have to eat greater quantities to acquire the same nutrients but four of the five vegans are all pretty lean and the fifth is merely plump (and has the sort of body-type that suggests she's supposed to be).
As regards vitamin deficiencies resulting from a limited diet, they do. But all the vegans I've known have had a very varied diet and never seem to be wanting for vitamins. Most of them are some of the least "bottle of supplements" people I know.
And finally, regarding the environmental cost. I do hope you don't suppose that meat-eaters don't need fruits and vegetables as well? But if you think that non-meat eaters must compensate so much in eating more fruit and vegetables that it cancels out the environmental gain, that's not so.
100g beef gives: 1.9g fat, 23g protein, 0g carbohydrates, 109KCal total energy
50g lentils + 50g wholegrain rice gives: 2g fat, 16g protein, 70g carbohydrates, 365KCal total energy
As you can see, an equivalent weight of grains and pulses actually offers more energy than beef. Those are dry weights of course. So your cow would have to actually utilise less area per lb of consumable meat than the vegan option for the equivalent weight. And we know that's far from true. You can get 1,000lb per acre yield on lentils (or more). I'd like to hear some equivalent figures for cattle.
Of course you're arguing that the cattle can be raised on areas unsuitable for growing grains and pulses. That may be so, but we both know that what is actually happening is that vast tracts of forest in South America are being torn down to grow soy beans for the US cattle industry. It's woefully, horribly inefficient, even ignoring the long term environmental damage.
I'm vegetarian so it's not like it troubles me, but I'd be fascinated to know the reason for this if true. What reasoning would support the eating of deer, cow, sheep, chicken, turkey and other things, but rule out horses?
I don't think wars are done for purposes of population control. They're done primarily for money and control of resources, with sometime side-benefits of political gain. You've had over four-thousand US and UK soldiers killed in that bloody war which is a horrible tragedy, but not going to have a demographic impact on a nation of millions. Not least because those killed are men. If you wanted to effect population reduction by means of violent death, you would need to kill women, for reasons of biology that I don't feel necessary to explain. If you're talking about the hundreds of thousands of native Iraqis killed, then that's a far larger number, but it's (a) in a foreign country with limited trade so the population there has a far less direct impact on the invading countries meaning it makes little sense as a means of population control. And (b), population after a war, even the two World Wars, climbs back up rapidly, just as it does after a lethal pandemic. War is simply not a means of population control, either intended or as a side-effect. As regards drugs, the amount of deaths directly or indirectly due to "drugs" (I am assuming you mean the illegal kind) in the USA and the UK is again, horribly large for what it is, and a drop in the ocean compared to the populations of those countries. Even moreso than war, it's nonsensical to suppose it's a deliberate attempt to keep the population down.
And I am in no way diminishing that, but with a world population of billions and a capability of a single woman to comfortably have four children, it's not a big factor in population control.
It seems to be bad logic day on Slashdot, today. You seem to imply that the birth and death rates of the human population is in balance. Demonstrably this need not be so or the population of the world would not have grown to the billions there are today. And if it need not be so, then why should it suddenly be so just now?
The World population is everyone's concern. It can only support so many at a given lifestyle. If the population grows large enough, things break down.
It may have been used as one of the justifications, but I seriously doubt it was a reason. The Holocaust was a result of horrible prejudice in one portion of the population and disgusting passivity, unwillingness to see and complicity on the part of the greater portion. In any case, it made no sense as a means of total population control. It was about ethnic cleansing.
We have a safe, voluntary method of population control. It's called Education and sexual equality. The more educated a populace and the more opportunities women have for a life other than wifehood and childbirth, the more the birthrate drops. At least so far. I would imagine it reaches a drop-off point if it hasn't already. Happily education is cheaper than both wars and massive drug control programs. If the governments were as deliberate as you think they are in mercilessly culling the populations, then mass education and promotion of women's rights would be the logical strategy. Sadly, this doesn't appear to be happening.
Walking a dog is a great way to meet girls (and other people too, if you like). You should try it. But I guess you'll always have parrots. :)