I disagree, only because people who drink and whack off do less damage to society than a lot of the people who do become successful. A lot of wealthy people make and use that wealth in a way that benefits everyone, but a lot of them make their money off the backs of everyone else, then get all butthurt at the suggestion that they didn’t do it all by their own bootstraps and that they should have to do something for society in return. I hope these people go Galt straight into a raging wildfire.
I was hoping this thread would be about something more exciting than the economy so it delivers so far.
Uh-oh. Old man DJ is ready to straighten up these whippersnappers.
Same here. I was with a girl last year who wanted to have 3 kids. Three kids! Why do you need fucking 3 kids?! We’re animators! What the hell do we contribute that we gotta bring 3 more of us into the world?!
Our conversations kinda went downhill from there.
The way I see it there are enough children in orphanages that need some damn attention. I’d much rather adopt a couple of kids and bring them up to be halfway decent people.
Don’t be surprised if your 3-times great grandkids come up to you talking about srk as if they were the only generation to know about it…then mention “some dude named Rhio” talking shit about tv ever since cartoons went away.
I always wondered about this: You get unwanted pets from the pound, but they are always fixed…why are the unwanted kids from adoption agencies intact? Both are a product of irresponsible breeding. (a question like this is probably why I should never have kids, in the eyes of CPS)
The way I see it, the only responsible way to have kids is one and done. MAYBE a chance at a second kid once you’ve proven you didn’t screw up the first one. No more than two. When you and your mate die, you don’t want to leave behind more people than you started with.
Broads talking of 3+ kids like they’re planning a floral arrangement are paying absolutely no attention to how much even one kid taxes the world’s resources. It’s irresponsible.
Sorry, not very likely to happen. Optimism itself is fine and in some ways needed, but “human ingenuity will fix it” not only belittles the problems of the future, it’s also flat out very unlikely to work in this case. Why? Allow men better than me to explain. Fair warning: Full length lectures on frightening things to come, so reserve time and hopefully an open mind.
First: 80 minutes of math lectures made of pure win by an old man. Math itself is very lightweight, but the issues are of great import:
a 30-minute distillation of the combined clusterfuck that will hit us in the near future:
[media=youtube]VOMWzjrRiBg[/media]
Some more on energy:
[media=youtube]BJKZT5TNjYw[/media]
And, apart from energy, why the high technology solution is not very likely:
[media=youtube]ddmQhIiVM48[/media]
That is to say, the high tech requires a complex society to be realized, if at all, and that complex society requires energy to exist. Energy that we don’t really have. (Interestingly, solar panels and the like tend to require rare minerals, most of which come from a single mine in China.
Furthermore, even if we had the energy, the complex society itself would probably be undermined by the lack of oil because it deals heavy blows to transportation of materials and thus building of equipment and prevents the kind of mad industrial agriculture we are practicing now. It’s not just the global transportation network that we are utterly dependent on that runs on oil, it is also our food production pretty much entirely.
In even more hilarious news, agriculture itself is kind of a bad thing. It has this bad habit of destroying ecosystems by turning forests and the like into monoculture grasslands, which decades of agriculture slowly destroys. Nutrients are drained away, the land itself whisked away by erosion because there’s no perennial roots to hold the earth in place. Heavy machinery compacts the ground so it can keep in less moisture and oxygen and is thus less able to support life. This means even if it rains, the land doesn’t recover. If you irrigate, it just turns into a salt desert, as has been the fate of just about every agricultural hub in the history of mankind, from the Dead Sea to Greece to increasingly America and China that are destroying their water tables with rampant overconsumption.
Toby Hemenway explains a bit more:
[media=youtube]8nLKHYHmPbo[/media]
Long story short: Gardening requires less work and gives better food and thus health than farming.
Lastly, some examples of this “permaculture” stuff:
Sepp Holzer, aka “most brilliant man in Europe” (if you ask me anyway). This guy manages to grow stuff like pumpkins and lemons 1.5km up the Alps without commercial fertilizer or a greenhouse:
[media=youtube]oF6-xh34ovA[/media]
Geoff Lawton near the Dead Sea in Jordania. Greening the Desert:
[media=youtube]sohI6vnWZmk[/media]
[media=youtube]LJ8pjOG4pXI[/media]
End conclusion of yours truly: Pray for the unlikely miracle from scientists, or do something that can not only provably be done with current levels of technology, but even less, and allows you to insulate yourself from certain problems to a surprisingly large extent? While regenerating the land and making it better instead of doing whatever atrocities they’re doing in Alberta among other places?
Speaking of atrocities, hello technology:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/11/fracking-chemical-appears-wyoming-aquifer/44915/#.Tr68sr9HCTg.reddit
Last funny tidbit: Remember all the unusually common natural disasters? Remember all the mass logging so we can inefficiently farm in the tropics (the rainforest is not very good land for farming) and then transport the crops here so we can burn even more oil and then throw half of the food into a landfill? Forests not only create rain by giving the air’s humidity something to condense around, but they also generally speaking stabilize the climate. For some strange reason, the less forests there are on this planet the more the weather gets out of whack. Not even talking global warming or anything, but the idea seems sensible enough.
What Pertho said.
Also, by then I’ll have hopefully saturated the globe with my nanomachines and turned the world into a utopia. A utopia where I get any bitches I want. And am the planet. Drink from my rivers for it [S]makes me cum[/S] soothes me.
I disagree, because the apathy of the general population results in the bad guys getting away with crap in the first place. Everyone is too concerned with celebrity X sleeping with celebrity Y after celebrity Z dumped celebrity Y for celebrity A. As kids, these are the same people who don’t give a crap about school and are disruptive in class and ruining it for kids trying to learn. When they grow up, they are the ones complaining about funding for science and national endowment for the arts, because they do not appreciate the value of these things. When its time for an election, they elect a bible thumping retard who can barely speak english who did coke and drove drunk all the time because hey, they can relate to him. In fact they love him so much they elect him TWICE. When having an ivy league education is considered a bad thing, that’s a strong indicator the general populace is causing a lot of damage to society as a whole.
As much as I hate to say this, this is something we can trust the USA in. China has WAY more people than us, but it is still pretty damn set in stone that we have THE weapons you want to have if you mean fucking business. Fuck Nagasaki, we’ve got much more impressive things that go boom than we did back then.
Still afraid of China though.
Well Im actually expecting the world market to crash since alot of them have followed the corrupted path that the banks in the U.S. have where they buy off their regulators to get less regulation so that they can pull off massive fraud and make super risky gambles on the market. Which would thrust the world into an environment where WW3 could pop off cause some crazy group or groups managed to amass power in some country or countries during the chaos and try to use it recklessly on surrounding nations. I figure that’s when most or all of us die off within 50 years. Though I’m thinking within 10 years.
Though that might not happen, (its likely to happen at this point) I guarantee there will be another U.S market crash that will worse that the last one since the Big banks and Wall Street got off scot free.
Why everyone thinks we’re all gonna be death by nuclear war?
I blame thrash metal.
Also, im with Pertho.
Cuz it could happen. Although I feel that some type of contagion would probably be more likely.
You shouldn’t worry about thing like this. And here is why
Super Volcano
Civil Unrest thanks in part to a small minority, leading to the justification of the dissolution of “democracies” and the murder of civilians
Civil Unrest due to radical groups
Factory Farms, they are a real threat
Evolution of bacteria which are resistant to drugs, another real and dangerous reality thanks in part to the overuse of medicine
Political Issues
Nuclear proliferation in countries that really don’t give a shit about how its going to be used
"Accidental" leakage of viruses and bacteria that’s engineered to be resistant to all drugs
Global Warming
Overpopulation
The lack of interest in making the ocean a real source of clean water
Nuclear Winter
Greed
There are more.
You are better of living day to day making sure you make the best out of you. and if you really care about the “end”, then you should steadily prepare yourself while making the best of the time “you” think you have left.
If somebody where to invent fusion, there would still be wars over energy and water in the future. Why bother freaking out if you know its bound to happen one way or the other. Just do what you can do.
would you still support eugenics if you ended up in the “shitty genepool” category?
what about a global population control committee?
Komatik: how about the highlights for those of us who can’t watch vids at work?
While it may be true that the average person ultimately doesn’t have a major positive impact on the forward progress of society (being in the middle of the bell curve and all), what you are essentially saying is that people who were taken in by a very crafty conman are to blame for his crimes. I don’t buy that. I think they made a big mistake, but there’s a big difference between that and arguing that people who picked Coke instead of Pepsi deserve what they get when it turns out that the Coke has piss in it.
Most of these people are not out to chisel and scam. They’re trying to make their way in the world as best they can, without stirring up too much shit along the way. Not especially smart, not especially ambitious, but living workaday lives and probably not getting back much even for what they put in. You can blame them for not being ambitious enough to do more than live their lives in peace–hardwired as most people are to take the path of least resistance–or you can blame the people who directly and unequivocally cause it to happen. It does not make sense to absolve greed because of the existence of apathy.
Then there will be nothing but a bunch of poor dumb people looking for leadership, and some asshole will fill that void…
I hope that this never happens… class eradication doesn’t help anything… most people from all classes contribute something to society…
How would a society go about “breeding out” undesirable traits? Noble ideas, good premise but the execution is shaky because the project is excessively massive in scale. What happens with the people that have “undesirable traits?” If they keep breeding, do you forcibly sterilize them to prevent their numbers from growing? Even trying to execute this plan would be a total nightmare. And depending on how you handle the “undesirable traits,” or you can say “undesirable people” since they are carrying those traits, it might lead right into authoritarianism and a God-complex/messiah complex.