Lord Monocle Von Banworthy said:
GeorgW said:
Lord Monocle Von Banworthy said:
GeorgW said:
....so why does only America have this teen pregnancy problem? (It doesn't btw, UK for example is a lot worse.
The second sentence removes the need for the first. If America doesn't HAVE a severe problem (stacked against other nations) there's no reason to ask the question.
But you know what? At least the US has a birthrate of over 2.0 however it got there, so in a few hundred years IT might still exist. What do all the free-living, latex-wrapped Europeans have to say about that?
Context is required for the first part. As I continued saying, this thread is about America, so I was trying not to get off topic. I still felt like pointing out that America is not alone.
As for the birthrate, the world is overpopulated as it is. And most European countries have over 2.0 as far as I know. The countries in Scandinavia do at least, and that's where I'm from. We have the perfect population for our size according to me.
I hate that "the world is overpopulated" crap. "Overpopulated" means about as much as "overweight." It implies that somebody somewhere has the authority to declare what a proper population is. It sounds all clever to be so misanthropic until you're the one living through a population crash. Ever been in one of those Japanese villages where nobody's under 60? I have. I don't want to live in a nation or a world like that.
And you're quite wrong about the numbers. Scandinavian countries are all ranked in the 150s out of 195. VERY marginally above the EU as a whole, which would be ranked 158th if it were a country. Your population is graying and crashing, I'm sorry to say. Not as badly as Hong Kong maybe, but you're not reproducing enough to maintain your numbers.
Your right and your wrong. Your right in that being oveweight and the ovepopulation problem are similar, largely because both are problems with no easy solution.
As nice as it might be to try and pretend otherwise, the world only has so many resources on it, and the more people there are, the more strain there is to divide those resources to provide a decent standard of living, never mind advance society. Contrary to what many might want to think, there is a lot of legitimacy to issues like the rate at which trees are being cut down, oil consumed, and other things. Not to mention the disposal of waste. To use wood as an example, the more people there are, the more houses you need to build, the more paper people require, and so on. Even if we could get recycling to 100% of what we use being re-used efficiently (which is impossible since there is depreciation and burn off from recycling) it's not enough when the population keeps increasing in multiples requiring more and more wood (and other resources) to be used.
A lot of the conflict we see going on today is about resources. All the conflicts about oil come down to the simple fact that all arguements about "alternative power sources" aside, the world runs on an oil infrastructure. With increasing populations, and developing nations, there is increased demand for oil. The thing is that it's not limitless, you can't just lower the price and give everyone oil or else it's going to run out. This is one of the whole issues with "The Middle East", their production (not meeting demand to hold onto their resource as long as possible), and of course stockpiling and concerns about what happens when they are tapped out. Not to mention other conflicts based around things like how the US is one of the major customers for international oil, yet we have our own oil production, and arguably purchuse foreign oil so as to hold onto our domestic products as long as possible. To countries with no domestic oil access at all this is hardly "fair". After all imagine what happens if The Middle East runs dry (and it will) and only the US and a few other people have any oil deposits of note.
At any rate, I'm getting increasingly off subject. The bottom line is that we have trouble sustaining the current population level, and it's constantly increasing. We were warned decades ago to embrace ZPG (Zero Population Growth) and did not listen, so now we're dealing with the results of that folly.
In the long term the solution is to get off planet to obtain more resources, but in order to do that we need to unify the planet (explaining why is another whole discussion), and that's unlikely to happen with the current resource conflicts.
You are quite correct that nobody wants to live in a world full of dying old people with very few children, and a focus on reducing the population. That is however the price of not having listened when we had the chance... and yeah, the people who are going to be paying the piper are not the same ones who made the bad desicians to begin with. People who are not only going to get to experience "death world" but deprived of central human experiences like having children for the sake of the species.
Think of that cost (and many others that go along with it) as being similar to obesity. Being fat causes tons of health problems, the bottom line is that hauling around dozens of extra pounds puts stress on your system, leading to all kinds of health issues. For all the screaming of exercise maniacs out there, it's really not a "simple matter" of changing one's diet and lifestyle, since people wind up living the way that they do for a reason. What's more exercising is not easy when your carrying those extra pounds, people who haven't done it do not realize what a hard thing it is to bounce back from.
The thing is though that a lot of people who are obese are kind of blameless for the position they are in. The rude stereotype of the fatty being fat because he does three boxes of little debbies a day in place of meals or whatever is not exactly true. Fat people in the first world tend to get that way due to sedimentary lifestyles, which come from the realities of living in modern nations. We live in a world where people increasingly get paid for mental exercises as much as anything, and will spend most of their work day in one place. This however does not make things any less draining or stressful. Finding time to exercise and eat right, is nearly impossible, and making the nessicary lifestyle changes could very well cost people their jobs.
I'm not going to go into a blow by blow, but the point is that obesity is also a problem, and not an easy one to address. It's an issue the first world is only going to address through concerted societal effort, effort which very few people, especially the movers and shakers who set the policies leading to a lot of this kind of thing, are going to want to go through. It's similar with overpopulation, sure it sucks for you being the guy who the changes fall on to benefit everyone else, but but that doesn't change the reality.