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Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 1:15 pm
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^ It's a stupid discussion. I have no idea why David even started it. You don't need to sterilise anyone. This is not some vague, starry-eyed speculation, it is a matter of well-proven, abundantly evidenced historical fact. You don't stop people having way too many children by cutting bits off them, you simply remove the social causes of overbreeding.

Wide provision of contraception is the first thing.

Education of women and a measure of empowerment such that they have the right to accept or decline sex according to their own free will is the second.

Sensible economic policy (in particular removal of perverse incentives to do the wrong thing) is the third.

Then you simply sit back and watch the population stabilise. You don't6 even need to effect all three points to see success. Any one of them makes a big difference, and any two will usually succeed - as has been demonstrated over and over again in many, many countries around the world.

I repeat, a stupid argument which ignores known facts and invents ridiculous choices which do not, in fact, exist, and probably never have.

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stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 2:30 pm
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David started the conversation following on from a comment I made about the worlds population increasing to the point of unsustainability.

You raise good points that can work in western society, but by the time you get those 3 things well enough aligned in the countries and areas that are breeding like flies, it'll be too late.

You can air drop condoms by the container load and it won't make em get used.

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think positive Libra

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Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere

PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 3:07 pm
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stui magpie wrote:
David wrote:
stui magpie wrote:
Just finished of Dan Brown's latest novel. He's the bloke who wrote the Davinci code. His latest one is called Inferno and it's a really good read.

Has a lot of the same historic symbolism, this time mainly around Dante's 3 part book of which Inferno is one part.

One of the more interesting bits about the book though, is the notion of population control. The premise is a very smart bloke has done the maths and realises that at the rate population is increasing, Earth will not be able to sustain it and all hell will break loose. So he creates a weapon to "thin the herd"

I'll leave the rest of the plot to anyone who's interested to read it, but the premise was certainly interesting, so I did some googling. One article I read said that if every single person on the planet became vegetarian, there was enough arable land on the planet to support a population of 10 billion. A lot less if people had western dietary habits.

Now when you consider the population of the earth has gone from 3 billion in 1960 to 7 billion now, the premise gets very real.

It actually creates one of the better moral vs practical arguments about providing aid to poor countries and keeping people alive when they would have died. Are we, by acting morally, actually acting against the best interests of the planet? We basically need to slow down or even reverse some of the global population growth, is providing aid and medicine to places acting counter to that?

I'm tempted to start a separate thread on that question but it has the potential to get very pear shaped.


Lol. It's the sort of philosophical question that gets kicked around from time to time when people are considering the (very real) problem of overpopulation. Mass mandatory sterilisation at birth still seems like the most humane and most practical solution—certainly, a lot better than cutting aid to poor countries or whatever else someone might dream up.


Bu who do you sterilise? You can't sterilise everyone or say bye bye human race. If you choose the areas that are breeding fastest you'll inevitably called either racist or elitist because the fastest breeders are the third world and poor.

Edit,
It also casts question on the nursing homes. Should we really be keeping granny alive just because, when the mind long ago left the premises?


Only if that's what she wants

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Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 3:25 pm
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stui magpie wrote:
David started the conversation following on from a comment I made about the worlds population increasing to the point of unsustainability.

You raise good points that can work in western society, but by the time you get those 3 things well enough aligned in the countries and areas that are breeding like flies, it'll be too late.

You can air drop condoms by the container load and it won't make em get used.


^ Nope. That's just ignorance speaking. There is ample hard evidence to demonstrate that:

(a) Simply by empowering and educating women, you drop the birth rate enormously. Most women don't want to wear their bodies out having 13 children, let alone the enormous labour (no pun intended) that accompanies childraising. Most women in cultures across the globe want a smaller number of children. Simply by giving them the right to say "no", you make a masive difference.

(b) Condoms have a place, but they are lousy contraceptives anyway. They are messy, unpopular, not particularly effective, they can only be used once, and they are very expensive - far too dear for regular use in many third-world countries. Caps are quite useful, IUDs are very useful indeed - cheap, more-or-less permanent, and quite effective - and even simple knowledge of fertility cycles helps a lot.

(c) Removal of counter-productive economic policies is another important tool. Some countries (not so many now) still reward large families with greater income for parents and grandparents, even though this is directly against the interests of the country as a whole and those children themselves. Some countries (including Australia) provide big subsidies for childbearing and raising such that decent, responsible people with zero, one, or two children are forced to pay for the incontinent breeding habits of the selfish few who have too many. Where there is no strong economic incentive to over-breed, people tend not to do it.

Please, read the research - I've linked to this stuff before and will again if you are interested. You will soon discover that the drivers of population growth are well understood and readily dealt with in ways which are quite simple, non-invasive, and often have benefits quite apart from their action to slow population growth. This isn't rocket science. It's proven historical fact.

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 3:30 pm
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Sterilisation's just a sci-fi hypothetical solution to overpopulation, really, but it's far better than killing off the weak. As for Tannin's solution, it's the most humane option and may well work in the long-term, but I'm thinking of a more immediate, 50-years-till-extinction doomsday scenario.

As for who to sterilise or the problem of racism and elitism, that reminds me of a discussion I once had with Lola. We were talking about the idea of developing some kind of universal panacaea to aging, and her argument was that it might be used to exacerbate class differences. That seems like a pretty wacky reason to stop scientific progress to me. My view (and that of most sensible people, I would have thought) is medicine first, politics later.

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 4:45 pm
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It is immediate, David. Countries which adopt one or more of these simple, practical measures achieve significant results within the decade. This isn't theory, it's what has actually happened and does happen, time and time again.

Forced sterilisation, quite apart from the serious human rights implications, is hugely impractical. It has never been done successfully, and most likely never will - you'd need to bring it about at gunpoint and you'd never get enough people to hold all those guns. At best, you could have a massive civil war (which would be one way of bringing the population down for a short while, I suppose).

Perhaps the closest thing we have seen to what you propose is China's now defunct One Child Policy. In that totalitarian nation, with virtually total control and no civil rights, and with strong, effective leadership and a good deal of popular support for the necessity, even given all those advantages, it was only a qualified success. Opposition to it grew and grew, it was flouted more often than not, and eventually it was abandoned in favour of China's current Two Child Policy, which shows every sign of being sustainable and acceptable to most citizens.

Contrast the white fascist sterilisation fantasy with the simple, cheap, and above all practical measures outlined above which actually do work.

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stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 4:53 pm
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Tannin wrote:
stui magpie wrote:
David started the conversation following on from a comment I made about the worlds population increasing to the point of unsustainability.

You raise good points that can work in western society, but by the time you get those 3 things well enough aligned in the countries and areas that are breeding like flies, it'll be too late.

You can air drop condoms by the container load and it won't make em get used.


^ Nope. That's just ignorance speaking. There is ample hard evidence to demonstrate that:

(a) Simply by empowering and educating women, you drop the birth rate enormously. Most women don't want to wear their bodies out having 13 children, let alone the enormous labour (no pun intended) that accompanies childraising. Most women in cultures across the globe want a smaller number of children. Simply by giving them the right to say "no", you make a masive difference.

(b) Condoms have a place, but they are lousy contraceptives anyway. They are messy, unpopular, not particularly effective, they can only be used once, and they are very expensive - far too dear for regular use in many third-world countries. Caps are quite useful, IUDs are very useful indeed - cheap, more-or-less permanent, and quite effective - and even simple knowledge of fertility cycles helps a lot.

(c) Removal of counter-productive economic policies is another important tool. Some countries (not so many now) still reward large families with greater income for parents and grandparents, even though this is directly against the interests of the country as a whole and those children themselves. Some countries (including Australia) provide big subsidies for childbearing and raising such that decent, responsible people with zero, one, or two children are forced to pay for the incontinent breeding habits of the selfish few who have too many. Where there is no strong economic incentive to over-breed, people tend not to do it.

Please, read the research - I've linked to this stuff before and will again if you are interested. You will soon discover that the drivers of population growth are well understood and readily dealt with in ways which are quite simple, non-invasive, and often have benefits quite apart from their action to slow population growth. This isn't rocket science. It's proven historical fact.


How do you empower and educate women in cultures that don't allow it?

China had a 1 child policy for decades, yet their population has grown from 667 million to 1.3 billion in the last 50 years. (95%)

India is accelerating and will pass them soon, they've gone from 449 million to 1.2 billion in the same 50 year period. (167%)

Indonesia has increased by 175%

On the other hand, the USA has gone from 180 million to 313 million. (75%) but a portion of that would be migration not just new births.

So basically, population increase is accelerating, not slowing and it's happening fastest in the areas that will be the hardest to employ your fixes.

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Tannin Capricorn

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Joined: 06 Aug 2006
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 6:50 pm
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How do you empower and educate women in cultures that don't allow it?
Much more easily than you can implement forced sterilisation, that's for sure!

China had a 1 child policy for decades, yet their population has grown from 667 million to 1.3 billion in the last 50 years. (95%)

1: most of that growth as in the earlier part of that period.
2: The coercive One Child Policy was unpopular and people avoided it on a grand scale, so it was never very effective. In any case, it only applied to about one-third of Chinese citizens, and it didn't come in until about 1980 - quite a lot of your 50-year period, in other words, came before the policy was implemented.
3: Nevertheless, it did have some effect, and at the same time a variety of other factors (economic and cultural changes) also played a part, with the result that -
4: China's rate of population growth dropped dramatically over the last few decades and continues to slow. China is expected to hit its peak population as early as 2026 and ten begin a gradual reduction.
5: Note that gross population is a lagging indicator. Birthrate is what determines overall population increase (i.e., it is the figure which matters) but gross population continues to increase for quite a while after the birthrate drops. It does this because, if you start with a high birthrate, then settle it back to replacement value, you have a skewed age distribution: there are many more young people than old people. Because births take place early in a woman's life (typically between 15 and 35), even if you drop the birth rate to 2 children per couple, it takes two or three decades for that new birth rate to be fully reflected in the gross population numbers. (Is that clear? Please sing out if you don't follow the maths here and I'll try to explain it better.)

So basically, population increase is accelerating, not slowing and it's happening fastest in the areas that will be the hardest to employ your fixes.

Of course. This is obvious. Or is it? Population growth in many countries has pretty much stopped and is no longer an issue, while in others (especially in Africa) it is worse than it ever was.

The point you seem to be missing is that employing any other "fixes" would be (a) very much more difficult and astronomically expensive, and (b) not guaranteed to work anyway. We know that the combination of contraception, education, and basic human rights for women works. It's been proved over and over again that these things work. No-one in this thread (or anywhere else that I know about) has proposed any realistic alternative.

You have a choice between

(a) Simple, cheap, practical methods that have been proven to work and work well.

(b) Impractical theories that (on the evidence before us) have never been tried and may or may not work at all.

In short, it is a no-brainer.

PS. For clarity, none of this of course is to oppose voluntary sterilisation, which, like the IUD and the pill and the various other methods of contraception, has an important and useful role to play.)

PPS: Note that first world population increase in countries like Australia is vastly more damaging and costly. An extra Australian or American costs maybe 50 or 100 times more in oil, water, CO2, arable land, fertiliser, and so on than an extra Indian or Zimbabwean. And Australia has the worst population growth rate of any country in the entire developed world.

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stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:01 pm
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I get the maths on gross population being a lag indicator, and don't argue most of that but you didn't address who we slow growth in India and Indonesia in the poor areas where womens rights and education are basically non existant.

to be clear, I'm not advocating sterilisation, the issue is the way the worlds population is increasing it will soon reach the point where it's not sustainable unless something is done.

Education, empowerment and contraceptive is a good balanced option, but will take time, maybe too long.

Forced sterilisation via surgery is not an option. However, it wouldn't be that hard to target water supplies in specific areas and insert the necessary drugs.

The other issue apart from having children, is prolonging life. If people live longer but don't breed any slower, population increases faster. Hence the point about Granny in the nursing home.

Some seriously pragmatic decisions may need to be made some time soon.

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:39 pm
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We are mostly agreeing, Stui. I doubt that the water supply thing would work though, you'd never get the dosage right, and dosage for drugs of this kind needs to be precise. Hell, even the pill that we take for granted is a prescription-only drug with lots of different ones for different women at different times of life, and those vary from day to day according to the time of the cycle. And then you have under-age children who would have all sorts of hormonal things happening to them at the age of 5 or 7, and we haven't even thought about the other 50% of the population yet - and remember, even in rich countries with vast drug companies spending billions per year, we don't even have a working contraceptive pill for men yet, not at any price and with any amount of medical supervision.

Superimpose all that on any real-world country and try the water supply trick: you'd be reducing the population very, very fast, only with knives, bullets, fighter jets and exploding jock straps in supermarkets.

Getting serious about education and human rights for women strikes me as a lot easier, faster and more practical. But as you know, I am more concerned about population growth than any other issue - in the final analysis it is the root cause of almost all the other problems anyway - and if you can come up with a better, faster, more effective strategy, I'm all for it.

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Tannin Capricorn

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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:42 pm
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stui magpie wrote:
Some seriously pragmatic decisions may need to be made some time soon.


Yes. And they will be the usual ones: war, famine, and epidemic, accompanied by wholesale environmental and economic destruction and the collapse of entire societies. Won't be the first time either. Human civilisations have been growing beyond the capacity of their environment to support them and then collapsing into chaos and misery for tens of thousands of years. The deserts of the Middle East didn't become deserts by accident. The only difference is that this time, there is no more unspoiled territory to move into before starting again.

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Wokko Pisces

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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 9:01 pm
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We think that we're something special, but just as Kangaroo populations fall with lack of food, so to will ours. We have been relying on ever increasing agricultural technology to boost production, and as we've done so, rather than enjoy the spoils of our labour and intelligence we simply pop out more and more humans. Now any country with a burgeoning middle class tends to lead to lower birthrates as per Tannin's arguments so these countries (Japan, most of Europe) aren't the problem, in fact economically they're going to have issues with meeting the repayments on the baby boomers loans against the future, if granny WANTS to stay alive she'd better hope the economy doesn't tank and our socialised health care can still afford to keep her on the machine that goes ping.

This I assume is why western nations are bringing in so many migrants, to increase production and taxation as the bubble of 1940s and 50s born westerners moves out of productivity and into the pension zone. Japan is shitting itself, because not only is their birthrate below replacement levels but young men are disengaging from society and neither working or raising familes. So we have a planet that in the absence of technological breakthrough cannot support everyone and nation states that are in hock having to increase populations to pay for the spending of the previous generation. The result of either economic or agricultural collapse would be catastrophic.

Luckily, as alawys, nobody is seriously doing anything about either issue and I'm sure population will, as it always has, settle at a sustainable level. If the drop is a catastrophic one however, it's going to be a pretty horrible place to be for a while.
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Wokko Pisces

Come and take it.


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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 9:02 pm
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Tannin wrote:
stui magpie wrote:
Some seriously pragmatic decisions may need to be made some time soon.


Yes. And they will be the usual ones: war, famine, and epidemic, accompanied by wholesale environmental and economic destruction and the collapse of entire societies. Won't be the first time either. Human civilisations have been growing beyond the capacity of their environment to support them and then collapsing into chaos and misery for tens of thousands of years. The deserts of the Middle East didn't become deserts by accident. The only difference is that this time, there is no more unspoiled territory to move into before starting again.


Unless we can get off this rock and start it all again. Mars looks nice.
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David Libra

I dare you to try


Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:25 pm
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Tannin wrote:
Forced sterilisation, quite apart from the serious human rights implications, is hugely impractical. It has never been done successfully, and most likely never will - you'd need to bring it about at gunpoint and you'd never get enough people to hold all those guns. At best, you could have a massive civil war (which would be one way of bringing the population down for a short while, I suppose).


Has it ever been tried? I can't imagine it'd be too hard—the vast majority of babies are born in hospital, so it could be done then and there without the parents even knowing (though, ideally, they would know and it would simply be common knowledge that most babies will be sterile). I'm not talking about castration or anything horrible like that—just a quick vasectomy, or pill, or whatever other crazy medicine we have in 100 years' time. Not sure why this grinds your gears so much! Is fertility really such a fundamental human right?

One of the reasons I suggest this is that there'll probably come a time in the future when we're all sterile and babies are just created in test tubes as needed. We may not even be talking that far off in the future.

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Last edited by David on Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:43 pm; edited 1 time in total
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HAL 

Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.


Joined: 17 Mar 2003


PostPosted: Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:27 pm
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Thanks I'm trying but it's not easy and the person who suffers the most at the end of the day I will remember your suggestion.
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