lol funny thing about that is alot of them are from Cali here. I remember in highschool (when I moved here) there was like a cali vs texas thing going on.
im just waiting for a civil war between the 2, so I can sit back and watch the population go back down, they def wont be living to age 50 
nobody is absolving wallstreet (except the politicians). but the problem still remains that in america a culture of stupidity and ignorance is glorified. the bar has been set so low these days. Are you Smarter than a 5th grader? Ugh. the movie idiotocracy could very well be prophetic as the unwashed masses churn out kids they can not afford. this is the wrong direction for humanity. the republican party whose policies screw over their poor and stupid redneck constituency can only do so because the poor and stupid rednecks delight in being morons. GIT R DONE indeed.
Well, in a twisted and dark sense, over-population is being handled. First World nations are facing crippling population deficits as people are not having kids anymore. The USA is the only Western Nation with a growing population and its mostly due to Asians (Blacks and Whites aren’t having kids, Hispanics( Who are technically White) are starting to slow down) and we are only going to jump from 313 million to 440 million tops by 2050.
The rest of the First World has shrinking populations and most of the second world does as well, Russia is shrinking, Iran is shrinking, Brazil is kind of shrinking, even China. This is kind of good as the First World consumes much more resources than the 2nd or 3rd World. However, Africa is about to become a nightmare, the continent is having a population boom but it doesn’t have the ability to manage it. Nigeria has 152 Million people now, in 2050 it will have around 700 million people, thats FUCKING INSANE on a demographic level. But since Africa doesn’t have the economic or agricultural capacity to feed a significant portion of the population, Malthus will win and the population will go down.
china is shrinking because they wisely implemented a one child policy. however, india has no such policy and they are pumping out kids into poverty like nobody’s business. most poor countries tend to reproduce like rabbits. result? too many people, not enough resources is a recipe for massive internal wars and slaughter. wont be pretty.
I am aware that there are some poor people who continue to have kids in order to take advantage of welfare benefits. I am also aware that many more poor people have kids without putting much thought into it at all, which is its own problem, and I don’t see how this solution would do anything but make it worse.
(please quote if you have comments so the alert system can do it’s job. I only noticed your question because fishjie quoted you)
Well, the long story short is essentially: Everything runs on oil, we won’t have oil much longer, replacement energy is difficult because everything runs on oil and the replacement sources just don’t offer as much EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested). Bioethanol and tar sands oil, for example, have a miserable EROEI hovering near one, and being a net energy loss in some cases.
In the early days oil had an EROEI of something like 100 to 1, now it’s hovering near 10 because it’s more difficult to extract. Our civilization requires something like an EROEI of 7 to stay afloat, give or take. So we’re in very, very big trouble. Alternative solutions do help to an extent but they’re dependant on rare earths that come from a single mine in China, plus otherwise far more suited to easing individual lives than anything of industrial scale. The key idea here is that of the solar budget - how much energy can we realistically harness, and what kind of lifestyle is possible off that amount, because the way we’re currently living is essentially swiping the credit card without any way of paying back.
Stack on top of that the fact that our agriculture now runs on oil, and that agriculture itself, even low-tech agriculture, is ultimately destructive to the soil. It literally slowly turns healthy, vibrant, self-sustaining ecosystems into deserts and people (who then have no food). Irrigation makes things worse because it turns the desert into a salt desert, and then things get really funny. Not.
And I haven’t even gotten into transportation yet, or how our globalized society is heavily overnetworked.
An example of a lightly networked system would be some neighbouring small villages in the past, for example. Each could survive rather well on it’s own, but the connections and trade meant some benefits to each village. Also, the network helps dampen shocks, such as a village that had a poor year could probably get some help from it’s neighbours so it could survive instead of dying. Not the most efficient solution in the world, but surely a very stable one.
Our current society is a far cry from that. The nodes (whether they are individuals, families or companies) are heavily networked, and need the network to live. Thus, when one node fails, it causes failure in other nodes, which then bring trouble elsewhere… and this thing is worldwide. A heavy network is very efficient, but instead of helping to deal with shock, it spreads and amplifies it.
So, shocks all over the place, big bad structural shocks that big money is trying to make worse. Some advocate nuclear plants as a green source of energy, yet there’s precious few, if any, complete final storage shelters. Will those temporary storage pools stay operated if something goes wrong?
So, I think I’ve painted enough of a picture, and it sure isn’t very rosy. But what can be done?
The first one of potential solutions - the one favoured many people encouraging optimism and telling me and my ilk that we are grumpy - is a technological miracle happening and allowing us to turn into space locusts (a fancy way of saying go to Mars and the Moon and stuff) which would allow us more resources to build stuff and the like. It is just pretty unlikely, because social complexity (that is, organized specialization and order) has a net energy cost. What were we running out of again? Yep, net energy.
Furthermore, while complexity in some sense makes things possible and easier for the individual, it eventually starts suffering from diminishing returns. Where this is relevant is science. Bigger and bigger teams and better equipment for ever less useful applications. More and more cost for less and less usable return. Furthermore, even if we managed to solve some of the transportartion issues among other things, we still have the food production problem to think about. That’s not something easily solved by technology, and the known solution involves heavy decentralization which means more people living off the land, and thus more difficulty in manufacturing all that super fancy equipment needed to implement the high-tech solutions.
So forgive me for being skeptical of what the techno believer people say.
The solution I think is the best and at the very least most realistic is something called permaculture. It is something that is perhaps most succinctly defined as a design principle where you likely grow your own food, and do it by imitating what occurs naturally. In other words, you work with nature instead of against it. This makes a ton of sense - I mean, at the most simplistic level, a farm field requires astronomical amounts of work - human or machine - to sustain, and needs fertilizers to keep anything growing in there because you are constantly sucking all the nutrients off the land. Then you have problems like erosion because of a lack of perennical roots to hold the earth in place. The monocultures also attract pests which begets pesticides which kill the pollinating bees… You get the point. Lots of work, eventual destruction of the land giving you life, poor eating. Why do it?
In contrast, barring human intervention, a forest can stay up for hundreds and hundreds of years yes? All the while building good, fertile soil and avoiding a lot of those aforementioned pitfalls because there’s roots of many levels keeping the ground in place, what one plant sweats away, another catches. Single pest species don’t have enough food to survive, plus their predators are there. So, to drive the point home in the most simple way possible: What if we planted a forest? It has most all of the good sides of a normal forest, like eventually requiring rather little human input to stay functioning, and with many things growing at different rates, there’s no massive harvest season moment either. The joke here is that because we planted it, we can ensure it has lots of things that humans can eat. It’s a method thoroughly unsuited for industrial operation because it’s quite hostile to machines and produces just a little bit of everything, but pretty perfect for subsistence farming, requiring little work per day and providing better food. And it works within the solar budget.
So, a simpler, more local, but still humane life with a good bunch of free time? Doesn’t sound too bad to me. The more local nature of life also removes a lot of the need for heavy administration and would probably be much more free than the one we now live. Such gardens incidentally also take a lot of time to set up, so a gardening society likely isn’t one of conquerors, whereas a farming one is. The best part of this all is that it’s a highly individualist thing. You don’t need some events of cosmic scale to happen to do it, you don’t need high technology. Anyone can do it if they just have some land and are willing to work.
So, that’s the highlights, I guess. Recommended reading/videos by folks like Sepp Holzer, Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, Geoff Lawton, Masanobu Fukuoka and maaaany others. I know of a family who grow fish and veggies in their swimming pool, another who lived in a city, nuked their Amerikan Lawn and turned it into a veggie garden. They now grow themselves nearly all they eat during the summer. So, yeah. Watch the videos when you can. It takes long, but it’s Good For You ( ™ some Swedish nutcases who like destroying kitchens).
China will be shrinking mighty fast quite soon. Like Amerika, they’re hellbent on killing their own ground water resources. So, a China with no water, no food. Uh-oh…
Is a China bent on expansionism.
Not a good look, Earth.
Sent from my thumbs, using SRK technology.
China is much weaker than people believe. It imports a ton of food from the USA as most of their soil is garbage due to misuse and neglect.
Technology is the only thing that can really keep humanity going in the end, because permaculture has some serious flaws - namely that nature does not work how humanity wants it to without technology and that nature will kill us if we do not go against it eventually. Ultimately, terraforming is the best thing that can happen and solve nearly all of our problems, but it’s hard to imagine it happening in time due to total lack of care regarding space and the related technologies.
China is a very real threat to life as we know it, and it is because it is not that strong. It’s effectively a bomb that is going to go off randomly, and the chances of it happening increase as time goes on. You have an extremely small ruling party that tries to silence dissidence instead of addressing or acknowledging problems. Just about everything is run by this group of people. Oh, but people in the military like to exceed their authority randomly. China is massively intertwined with the world economy but they do not like the US, Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea. They are allied with North Korea, who pretty much hates anyone that doesn’t hate the US. Fun fact: China will invade Taiwan when they decide peaceful reunification is impossible, and the US is bound by law to protect Taiwan.
The world catches a cold when America sneezes. When China sneezes, America catches a cold and everyone else gets the flu.
Wut? Care to elaborate? Because what you said there amounts to “lol, nope” for the most part. And I am very much aware that nature doesn’t work the way the current crop of humanity wants it to work. Even then, it has operated in the same manner for millions of years, so why would adapting to our environment again instead of forcing our environment to adapt to us suddenly kill us as a species? How would it “eventually kill us”? You make it sound like the whole world is out for us.
So, china can sneeze, and start a war.
Wait, you’re saying that nature doesn’t want to work the way we want it to, so we’ll have to use technology to force it to do what we want? That doesn’t make sense. For ages we’ve pushed nature in a direction it doesn’t want to go, so the solution is to push it further?
Maybe it’s because you used the word so loosely, but I think it might be dangerous to put too much faith into technology. Technology can do amazing things nowadays, but how many of those things are actually useful?
There is a lot of development of clean energy generators and energy saving techniques coming up, and apparently it’s gonna be the next big thing to invest in, so there may be hope yet, but I just think it’s kinda dangerous to think we can just build something new to get us out of the mess we made by building things.
This has nothing to do with the state of the world -not directly anyway- but it reminds me of this teacher I used to have in art school. Big technology nut.
He kept bringing up this stupid story about some guy who had some advanced case of OCD. His compulsion was that he had to put on his socks 50 times each morning.
My teacher’s solution was, and I’m not fucking making this up, electronic socks that would say: “You’ve put your socks on”, when he put his socks on, and that would supposedly solve the problem.
I didn’t give much of a shit about what this guy had to say, but I really wish I thought of this earlier so I could have told him that the OCD guy could already SEE and FEEL that he put his fucking socks on. Talking socks solves absolutely nothing. This guy was really convinced his plan would work though. I hope nobody’s ever stupid enough to give him funding to develop those socks.
This guy had some interesting stuff to say. It’s a good thing he ends on a kind of positive note, because our future seems pretty damn bleak.
[media=youtube]m9wM-p8wTq4[/media]
There is a lot of stuff that can/will happen. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a million. Well, for sure after two billion.
Buying land in the US and Africa ring a bell?
So we should not embrace permaculture or the like because of the possibility of freak cosmic disaster we can’t do shit about? And instead hope for the technological miracle to happen to allow space locusthood and terraforming as a solution to a much more immediate and inevitable threat of complete disaster? You, sir, are not making sense right now. Also, please read the wall of text posted above, and perhaps watch the videos I posted on Page 2. Should make a convincing case as to why I call it a technological miracle and would never ever count on such a thing happening.
That was anninside joke for me becuase i usually say that so and so can sneeze and cause catastrophy.
Like “So yipes can put his hands in the controller, sneeze, and than ocv me with magneto”
lol
dont none of you niggas know what yall are talking about, trying to sound all smart and shit. just another srk poster who plays fighting games
That is not something I see as viably legal.
I know they “have done it”, but I cannot see the legality of it, under our Constitution, so, as a natural born U.S. citizen, I do not acknowledge their sovereignty over any part of my country, whatsoever.
When push comes to shove, see how many of us will bow to them, here.
Sent from my thumbs, using SRK technology.
I like the idea of requiring a license to reproduce as long as you meet the requirements that you are actually capable of raising a kid, but that probably wouldn’t work in the US because we would never have the balls to enforce. Unlike China.