rats on a sinking ship: the aging/overpopulation thred

[BurtReynolds]

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[BurtReynolds]

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[doug rr]

burt

[BurtReynolds]

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[Self]

Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down, man. So fuck off with your sofa units and Strine green stripe patterns.

[doug rr]

no

[BurtReynolds]

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[nyquillyn]

Do we have a shortage of workers, though? From what I've heard we have a glut of workers, and nothing for them to do because of robots. Seems like it might level out to a degree. I dunno how any of this works.

Sure. Right now.

But we essentially need the horses to keep going "status quo" or plan accordingly. And that's not really happening. China's entire strategy for this seems to be, "Just fuck some more and have more babies." But their women aren't really buying it. As I pointed out previously, China only had less than 500,000 "extra" births last year after drop the "one-baby" rule. That ain't gonna cut it.

[Rangi Guy]

Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic. It’s all going down, man. So fuck off with your sofa units and Strine green stripe patterns.

[nyquillyn]

My overall point with calling it the "overpopulation myth" is that it's an extremely short-sighted view. We may be straining resources in some areas right now, but every model has us leveling out at 9 to 11B people, then going off a fucking cliff. We really should be worried about the cliff, not the climb to it.

[BurtReynolds]

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[bada]

The US is actually in better shape then most rich countries because of all the immigration. No ones told the Republicans.

[BurtReynolds]

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[Kaius]

It sounds like there will be plenty of work for them in Asia.

[BurtReynolds]

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[nyquillyn]

Africa's population is expected to explode in the next century. i wonder how that will work out.

That and conflicting estimates of Asia's declining birth rates result in the discrepancies between the U.N.'s (11 to 11.5B peak) and most other models (9 to 9.5B peak). The U.N.'s model seems to paint a rosier picture of the next 50+ years in Africa. Like somehow the continent is gonna magically rid itself of war and disease. And increasingly violent religious sects.

[E.H. Ruddock]

Is there a good news source that anyone knows if for news out of Africa? Not so much north Africa but central/southern

[nyquillyn]

BBC has great coverage from Africa. They have been lauded for employing "local" reporters and their Africa "team" in London is staffed by actual Africans.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world/africa

[Green Habit]

The US is actually in better shape then most rich countries because of all the immigration. No ones told the Republicans.

Actually, establishment Republicans know this well. Dubya tried real hard to get a guest worker program passed when he was president. The problem arose when you had the predecessors to the xenophobic Donald Trumps of the world pushing back.

But to answer this thread in general, you're absolutely right that in the short term, immigration is the solution, and by "short term" that probably means within our entire lifetimes. But in the long term, I'm actually quite opposed to any government effort to either encourage or discourage births, and the reason why is that it necessarily places a disproportionate burden on women. Let them decide on their own terms how many children they want to bear.

[Bammer]

I've heard arguments that:

- Cancer is a sort of natural population control and we really shouldn't try to cure it. All that will leave us with are a bunch more people living to age 90 (as opposed to like 70), straining resources and not contributing anything.

- The villain in the latest Dan Brown novel (Inferno) who, as I recall, wanted to wipe out like 1/3 of the world's population as a way to preserve human kind in the long run, wasn't actually such a bad guy.