Global Population Issues

[Chad]

There is little or no downside to not having children.

Not entirely true. When you are old and feeble minded you won't have an advocate/crutch to lean on. This is a much bigger downside than most think. I should note, that I do not have kids and don't plan too.

[radamfi]

Not entirely true. When you are old and feeble minded you won't have an advocate/crutch to lean on. This is a much bigger downside than most think. I should note, that I do not have kids and don't plan too.

You only get that if your child bothers to visit or even talk to you. It is possible to be friends with people who you aren't related to.

[BRUTE]

You sound like someone who is more interested in being "right" than actually achieving any level of happiness or personal fulfillment and have adopted some kind of rigid philosophy to allow you to preserve your world-view at all costs, even at the expense of your own personal fulfillment.

So be it, but recognize that there are consequences to those choices, two of which are: (1) you will attract like-minded individuals and you will all sit around talking about how miserable everything is, and make yourselves feel more miserable in the process; (2) people who see more to life will decide that it is not worth wasting their time and energy dealing with you or debating your world-view.

Dragline is implying that it's a choice. also, people who are wrong will not want to hang out with radamfi? oh no.

[Chad]

Not entirely true. When you are old and feeble minded you won't have an advocate/crutch to lean on. This is a much bigger downside than most think. I should note, that I do not have kids and don't plan too.

You only get that if your child bothers to visit or even talk to you. It is possible to be friends with people who you aren't related to.

You are reaching, but I'm not going into it.

[enigmaT120]

no, it isn't ethical. this is why having children is unethical. life is pain, and creating life inevitably creates more pain.

Not if you renounce desire.

Edit: there, I added the quote to which I was responding. I didn't notice you guys were a page ahead of me already!

[vezkor]

http://www.mining.com/web/potash-price- ... -billions/

[jacob]

@vezkor - Somehow I think I read that piece some time ago. Note that marginal production prices for all companies are very low compared to potash prices. Previously prices have been supported by a cartel. No longer the case. So we're pretty much waiting either for them to buy up each other, shut down a ton of capacity or farmer's to get rich enough from rising food prices to pour some more fertilizer on their fields.

[cmonkey]

shut down a ton of capacity

Not sure if this is the start or just continuing, but seems I bought at the right time.

[mathiverse]

In Europe and Japan which are some of the most civilized areas in the world (by civilized I mean eusocial in that culture or institutions strongly regulate behavior), the solution is mass unemployment and economic stagnation. I'd put Russia in this category as well, although, also see the US. The solution here is not to be the dumbass left with lots of personal debt and to build strong family ties or other ties when the gov can no longer afford the support. Also, population densities are really really high here, but people are "civilized/informed" enough to deal with epidemics, hopefully.

Well... Now we know.

EDIT: For the record, I mean now we know that the US isn't "civilized/informed" to deal with the epidemic. (But I guess rereading what I quoted it was saying Europe and Japan were rather civilized/informed rather than the US, so my bad on the misinterpretation. )

[jacob]

Yeah, it does make a difference.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus- ... erSort=asc

[white belt]

I'm guessing the COVID19 pandemic will not cause sufficient death to affect any of the Global Population issues long term? According to the WHO, we are coming up on 1 million reported deaths globally. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 7.8 billion global population.

However, since the vast majority of COVID deaths seem to be with folks over the age of 40 who have already passed their reproduction window, I wouldn't think it would slow global population growth except perhaps in the very short term.

There are still the unknowns about treatments, vaccination, mutations, etc.

[fiby41]

14 pages of discussion and no mention of Hans Rosling? His argument is population growth stabilizes as a country goes from agricultural to industrial. This is due to mortality falling and it takes atleast one generation for the effect of lowered mortality to be reflected in population growth.

[unemployable]

I'm guessing the COVID19 pandemic will not cause sufficient death to affect any of the Global Population issues long term?

One additional person on earth dying every second wouldn't stop population growth.

That would be some 31 million people dying per year. The number of seconds in a year is roughly pi times (ten to the seventh).

So yeah, it's not doing a lot to make the planet less crowded. You're sure as hell not seeing, say, houses getting cheaper.