Poll: Would you agree to this new law - saving humanity from certain disaster

[BonsaiK]

Be warned: may be seriously lacking in cool, trendy Internet nihilism /mocking

SNIP real interesting material

Interesting stuff My main issue is the term "easily support" for 9 billion people. We have about 6 billion now right? A great deal are starving to death. A great deal more live in poor conditions. You seem to assume we can pull these "better conditions" from our asses. Whats going to suddenly stop these third world countries from starving in 40 years? Whats going to stop these extra 3 billion people from starving while this is happening?

Also im not a nihilist. Im talking about predictions and ways to counter act a theory. Do refrain from mockery please im trying to have a sensible discussion.

I wasn't referring to you in particular as a "trendy Internet nihilist", just that unresearched nihilism seems to be very popular on Internet forums in general, and that's why theories about "let's cull the humans" and "we're all headed for dooooom" are popular, but nonsense.

There's more than enough food being produced right now to feed everyone on the planet, and then some. If you look at any famine that happens at any point in human history, whether it be Ethiopia in the 1980s, Ireland in the 19th Century etc, the problem was never, ever a lack of food. The problem was lack of access to the plentiful food that existed. People weren't starving, they were being starved.


During the height of the Ethiopian Famine, countries from all over the world sent food to Ethiopia. But still many died. Almost all the food just sat in the harbour and rotted, because the Ethiopian government didn't want to feed those people. What little was transported was stopped at checkpoints by armed guards and not allowed to proceed to the famine zone. The very few scraps of food that actually got to their destinations was smuggled in by journalists, aghast at what was going on. Same situation in Somalia recently, military intervention ended up stopping starvation where flower-waving aid packages alone could not. Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704288204575363400690371326.html

Yeah, there are people starving to death these days - but not many, and the ones that are, there's always reasons behind it that have very little to do with "not enough food" and a lot more to do with "some **** is holding all the food for himself". Better governmental oversight is the answer to starvation, not lower population.

 

[MadeinHell]

Actually the calculated "maximal human population" at this point with current agricultural expertise, technology and the amount of fields itself is said to be capable of sustaining about 50 billion people. That's around 7 times as many people as we have on the planet right now.

So no. I would not agree to such "regulations".

PS. And what BonsaiK said ;P

 

[cgaWolf]

Vasectomies for 3rd World countries. Job done.

Until they have economies sustained by something else than kids supporting their parents 40 years down the road, this is going to lead to catastrophies. Sidenote: if you think we (as rich western nations) won't have to bear some of that cost, you're mistaken.

FDRs "when your neighbours house is on fire, you don't haggle over the price of the garden hose" is a noble humanitarian sentiment... at first glance. The underlying reality of it is that's in our own best interest to help avoid catastrophies abroad... rich fat comfortable people don't fly planes into buildings, we don't need to send tax dollars over to country X if they can feed themselves, and unless they have money (=finctioning economies) they can't buy what we're trying to sell them.

 

[Yopaz]

You all probably know that human population is increasing exponentially, as discussed in a "culling" thread a litte further down

Well, that person got it wrong too.

WARNING: Actual researched, proven facts about world population are in this post. Be warned: may be seriously lacking in cool, trendy Internet nihilism.

According to the people who actually study this stuff, the world population is currently predicted to level out at around 9 billion people by 2050. That's hardly "exponential growth", and a number the planet can easily support. Source: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf

Furthermore birthrate has been shown to be the only proven way to keep population down. And the main thing that controls birthrate is not telling people not to breed, but standard of living. People in poverty tend to have lots of children, because your children, when they grow older, are effectively your social security - they can earn incomes of their own, provide for the family unit, help out with mundane tasks such as farm work (which is the reason why the Chinese "One Child Policy" only worked in urban areas - rural Chinese still have shitloads of kids) or looking after the ageing parents. It's a survival strategy. On the other hand, richer people tend to want fewer (or no) children because the necessities of survival are already taken care of, they want their free time for leisure and money-making, as we all know having children is a big time-sink as well as economically draining. Therefore, countries in poverty tend to have exploding populations. Source: http://www.scalloway.org.uk/popu7.htm

Factors like war, genocides etc tend to have little to no downward influence on population growth. The reason for this is obvious - people tend to make babies before they actually go (often as a patriotic duty), and also war lowers the standard of living for the countries the war is taking place in, thus the above factors in the previous paragraph come into play, and the population start booming. Although the world as a whole is currently not in a population crisis, certain countries in the world certainly are heading in that direction. One of them is Afghanistan. Source: http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/populationgrow.htm

Therefore, the best thing we can do to stop the world's population from getting out of hand is increase standards of living globally and make sure everybody is as happy and peaceful as possible.

You make several good points here, but exponential growth doesn't mean that the population will double in a time span, it means that we will grow faster the more we are. If we look at the history we can clearly see that humans increase in number at an increasing pace. The world population needed more than 100 years to go from 1 billion, to 2 billions and only 12 to go from 5 to 6.
The rest of your post is correct, but yet, your solution is impossible. In Norway immigration is the only thing that keeps us from decreasing in population. That is the same thing as with other rich countries. However if we were to divide all the resources and make everyone just as wealthy we would all live with the standards of India. Which would defeat the purpose and make the western world reproduce at a much higher rate than they are currently.
Also you said that the one-child policy only works in urban areas. Well, where do yuo find the most people? If there are 1000 located in the country where all of them get 5 kids each and 5000000 in the city getting only 1 each that makes a huge difference.

 

[Altorin]

No, actually. The government can't decide effectively how much a teacher should be payed, what children should have for lunch and what's the best way to fix the holes in the road, so NO. NO way are they deciding on how many children should someone have. Also, I'm not sure here, but my Biology teacher said that the world has much greater potential to feed, than it's currently achieved. He theorized that 36 billion people can be fed by our planet. The way I see it, even if half the food that gets thrown away everyday makes it to someone starving, almost no one will die of hunger. Think about all the kilograms of meat, vegetables, baked goods that get thrown away at the end of the work day since no one has bought them. There is no need for a regulation of population, regulation of resources is needed. This brings me to my original point, since governments can't spread existing resources to fix current problems, then they should be handed no extra responsibility.

yeah, it doesn't help that people are telling developing countries that genetically engineered food (which is basically just a streamlined and quicker version of what farmers have been doing for 7000 years) are poisonous. Your biology teacher is probably right. What we need to do, if we want to feed more people, is stop subsidizing corn so much (it's a little counter intuitive, but if you do your research, corn is basically the worst thing farmers can grow, and it's pretty much the only thing they're allowed to grow), stop turning perfectly edible food into other things like plastics and diesel, stop eating so much meat (you can feed MANY MANY MANY more people with a field of wheat then a field of cows, especially if you're feeding the cows edible food humans could eat), and keep paying people to test and genetically alter crops and pesticides to give better yields.

We HAVE enough food on this earth right now to suport many more people, but it's all stockpiled in the west because we're gluttons.

 

[Zakariaz]

Most Western countries have decreasing birthrate to the point where it is becoming a problem. I believe that as especially China and Indias inhabitants economic situation changes for the better (as they are in these years) It will even out quite abit. We will experience famines infact we already are just not in our part of the world.
And so far the western countryies produce more food than they need. We arent experiencing the drawbacks of an ever increasing population and I do not believe that we will see it in any extreme version.

 

[jamesworkshop]

I have vast struggles with this, the global population is growing however almost all modernised nation have or near too or negative birth rates, only the US is just hanging on by a thread to having an increasing population.

Starvation is another non-issue when I can think of many people that eat atleast 3 times more food than they concivably need to live on, if a billion did eat for 3 and then stop 3 billion could be supported on the same total sum of food.

The idea that a law needs to be in place that could result in the killing of humans under practical consideration brought about by people unable to stop from shoveling food into their gob to be a grotesque and laughable idea.

Over population is a non issue you are no more going to control the breeding habits of just under 7 billion people anymore than americas phony political possition on gun control 200 million plus guns are not going anywhere

 

[F'Angus]

Yeah the Chinese government tried to cut the amount of children people were having... it wasn't always done Humanely

 

[OldRat]

Not in this country, and not in European countries in general. Most of the countries here are already slowly diminishing, with an average number of children somewhat below two per family. This means that our populations are growing older on the average since there are less children born to balance it out. So no, one child policy would only screw everything up badly. We're hurting for more as it is.
(Yeah, I know Finland is somewhat above average and actually has a birth rate slightly higher than two, before anyone nitpicks.)

Much of the earth's incredibly unsustainable new population boom is coming from third world countries and developing nations. And I really can't see the point of us handling their shit by making our situation worse. Especially since most of the problems of overpopulation will also be seen there, and not here.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

SNIP
The idea that a law needs to be in place that could result in the killing of humans under practical consideration brought about by people unable to stop from shoveling food into their gob to be a grotesque and laughable idea.

And the idea of an orange flying octopus is laughable too alas, like the killing idea, its not in my OP at all. At least read it please. Then come back. I said the children outside this law WILL NOT BE PAID FOR BY THE STATE. And nothing else. Did you just read the title and post? Its apparent you did.


EDIT: Its even under the too long didnt read section, the last line CLEARLY shown by an edit. You didnt even read the TLDR section... Sorry it annoys me when people come in to a thread ive made, make up some shiz ive said and then laugh at me. Read carefully or you look like an idiot.

I don't think they're talking about the government killing, but rather children slipping through the cracks and dying because either their parents don't want to claim them and face the consequences. Not grown people, but babies dying. That's what happens in China apparently (I mean, I've never witnessed a baby killing so perhaps its not true)

Unless you meant this. In which case im sorry i mis understood. Ah that is an issue. But at no point would the law condone or even allow the killing of children. People have kids a lot they cant afford. The possibility of killing a child due to financial situation is still as likely as it is under this scheme. Abortion and birth control are still as available to these people as they are people under my scheme.

 

[Adam28]

That is a terrible idea, at least for the developed world. Maybe for developing countries who are in need of population control, but there shouldn't be laws on the amount of children we can have for every country. We should be focusing on the development of sustainable economies in the third world if we are to ever get rid of things like starvation and over population.

 

[Altorin]

I have vast struggles with this, the global population is growing however almost all modernised nation have or near too or negative birth rates, only the US is just hanging on by a thread to having an increasing population.

Starvation is another non-issue when I can think of many people that eat atleast 3 times more food than they concivably need to live on

pretty much everyone in the west, although I think "need to live on" is not the ideal situation to be in. If we were only eating that (and honestly, I'd say almost everyone in the west eats much more then 3 times the amount of food they'd need to "live on"), the quality of our life would suffer and hence we'd fall back into a developing country state and end up back in this cycle. When I say "enough to live on", I mean, man can technically live on a handful of rice and a few beans a day, maybe with some greens for vitamins (and if we took vitamins, we'd only really need the handful of rice to keep our engines running. We don't want to be in that situation. Noone does. Noone should have to, and if we'd just use our space wisely, noone would have to.

*shrug* anyway, I really gotta go to bed now, so I'll bid you all adieu

SNIP
The idea that a law needs to be in place that could result in the killing of humans under practical consideration brought about by people unable to stop from shoveling food into their gob to be a grotesque and laughable idea.

And the idea of an orange flying octopus is laughable too, alas like the killing idea, its not in my OP at all. At least read it please. Then come back. I said the children outside this law WILL NOT BE PAID FOR BY THE STATE. And nothing else. Did you just read the title and post? Its apparent you did.

I don't think they're talking about the government killing, but rather children slipping through the cracks and dying because either their parents don't want to claim them and face the consequences. Not grown people, but babies dying. That's what happens in China apparently (I mean, I've never witnessed a baby killing so perhaps its not true)

 

[Merkavar]

we should be limited to 2 children. maybe 3 at most. there are 2 many people at the moment.

and its probably not the best sort of people that are the ones having 4-7 children. like in idiocracy.

 

[Kraj]

My answer is simple. Education.
Studies show directly that the higher the educational level in a marriage/coupling, the less children are conceived and brought up. Due to basic knowledge that a lot of people don't have or don't think about, such as a single "perfectly healthy no dental work/psychologist/psychiatrist/inexpensive sports" child costs over 150000 to raise from 1-18 not including college.

yeah. think about that. 1 kid max for me thanks, if I have twins I'll let it slide, but post-first-kid no more. not happening.

 

[badgersprite]

No. Fuck this law. There's more than enough resources to go around. It's just greedy first world capitalists hogging it all for themselves and consuming more than they need to at the expense of everyone else.

Overpopulation is a myth spread by greedy racists who don't want to give up a luxury yacht so a child in Ethiopia doesn't have to starve to death.

 

[jamesworkshop]

SNIP
The idea that a law needs to be in place that could result in the killing of humans under practical consideration brought about by people unable to stop from shoveling food into their gob to be a grotesque and laughable idea.

And the idea of an orange flying octopus is laughable too alas, like the killing idea, its not in my OP at all. At least read it please. Then come back. I said the children outside this law WILL NOT BE PAID FOR BY THE STATE. And nothing else. Did you just read the title and post? Its apparent you did.

"could result" it's the law of unintended consequences which already has a working example in China which at a population of 1.3 billion really doesn't seem to have an amazing effect along with the incredibly poor even recent history in human rights convince me that this is either, moral, practical or even achievable, you might as well try to drain the pacific ocean with a teaspoon.

 

[ultimateownage]

You forgot to label the x axis on the first graph.

 

[havass]

No way in hell the human population will drop to < 1000 after one war. But on topic, yes, I wouldn't mind the government limiting me. The world is way overpopulated anyway. Mass homicide would seem the best way to solve things eh.

 

[jamesworkshop]

I have vast struggles with this, the global population is growing however almost all modernised nation have or near too or negative birth rates, only the US is just hanging on by a thread to having an increasing population.

Starvation is another non-issue when I can think of many people that eat atleast 3 times more food than they concivably need to live on

pretty much everyone in the west, although I think "need to live on" is not the ideal situation to be in. If we were only eating that (and honestly, I'd say almost everyone in the west eats much more then 3 times the amount of food they'd need to "live on"), the quality of our life would suffer and hence we'd fall back into a developing country state and end up back in this cycle. When I say "enough to live on", I mean, man can technically live on a handful of rice and a few beans a day, maybe with some greens for vitamins (and if we took vitamins, we'd only really need the handful of rice to keep our engines running. We don't want to be in that situation. Noone does. Noone should have to, and if we'd just use our space wisely, noone would have to.

*shrug* anyway, I really gotta go to bed now, so I'll bid you all adieu

SNIP
The idea that a law needs to be in place that could result in the killing of humans under practical consideration brought about by people unable to stop from shoveling food into their gob to be a grotesque and laughable idea.

And the idea of an orange flying octopus is laughable too, alas like the killing idea, its not in my OP at all. At least read it please. Then come back. I said the children outside this law WILL NOT BE PAID FOR BY THE STATE. And nothing else. Did you just read the title and post? Its apparent you did.

I don't think they're talking about the government killing, but rather children slipping through the cracks and dying because either their parents don't want to claim them and face the consequences. Not grown people, but babies dying. That's what happens in China apparently (I mean, I've never witnessed a baby killing so perhaps its not true)

As for a numbers game I would be hard pressed to find many adults really impovrished to be only eating 2000 calories a day, not to mention all the money saved in no longer having to treat people for medical conditions resulting from the ability to eat more food than the human body really is capable of managing.
It's lucky for some people than unlike water which will kill you quite easily if you drink too much of it over too short a period of time, that food doesn't have that effect.


You are right about the children part which is not even a postulation of the result of the idea but an actual working example, I didn't even mention the other issue of a poor social structure from the selection of which babies to keep by gender (although it does seem more of a localised point)

 

[radioactive lemur]

Thank you for an excellent example of why I hate environmentalists. Population control IS a euphamism for genocide, it always has been and always will be. Just like "controlling the pet population" is a euphamism for ripping your dog's balls off and having the "humane" murder patrols killing any strays. Do you really even want to consider population control? Why can't we just let the chips fall where they may rather than let the government go on a murderous rampage.