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Quite possibly the most amazing TED talk ever...
Rachellove9:
I will just agree that you and I will never agree on this issue.
Family matters should remain with the family.
My body is mine to make decisions with.
Why is it okay for a woman to have 12 abortions and you tell me it is not okay to have children that I could afford and build futures for?
It is being hypercritical in my view.
I am seeing it from a very personal view and the world will be a better place from any children I would be raising.
Ts Stormrage:
Population tends to control itself, though...
It's usual that you see high birthrates at places where there is also a high infant mortality rate... If one of your kids dies, you replace him with another, so to speak...
It is shown that, when you give women some decisionmaking powers in the family and an income of their own, the infant mortality rate goes down, and so does the birthrate... This has happened across the world wherever some extent of womens rights became available... This is why religion, notoriously and often violently opposed to any kind of equality to a dominant male subject, is the bane of human existance... Fortunately organizations such as Oxfam Novib do wonderful work here...
As for population numbers:
Right now, there are 2 billion children, roughly 2 billion people between 15 and 30 years old, 1 billion between 30 and 45, 1 billion between 45 and 60, and a billion between 60 and older...
What we're experiencing now as a population boom is what's known as a fill-up...
Fastfoward 15 years, and you'll have:
Roughly 2 billion people between 15 and 30 years old, 2 billion between 30 and 45, 1 billion between 45 and 60, and a billion between 60 and older AND 2 billion children still, as the rate of replenishment of that bottom bracket isn't projected to speed up any faster than its current pace...
Fastfoward another 30 years and all but the 60+ bracket will have 2 billion... And again and all brackets have 2 billion, making the total population 10 billion...
I did watch that Attenborough documentairy a while back, but I forgot what kind of people we have to emulate in order to live sustainably with 10billion...
I know that if we all lived as americans we'd need 5.5 earths to sustain all of us, Europe not doing much better with 3 earths...
Ts Stormrage:
Rachel: YOU might be able to afford it... Financially...
The earth cannot support everyone having 12 children... Not if you want to have the cool stuff, like, you know... drinking water that doesn't kill you... Or food...
Mojo: They didn't have to feed them anything, unless they were at an area that was completely strip-mined bare... They just paid someone 5 dollars to find them the nearest grassy patch, and moved em towards that... He began his lecture with sayig that nature tends to fill up the gaps if you let it :)
His Lordship:
--- Quote from: Ts Stormrage on April 15, 2013, 05:44:40 pm ---Rachel: YOU might be able to afford it... Financially...
The earth cannot support everyone having 12 children... Not if you want to have the cool stuff, like, you know... drinking water that doesn't kill you... Or food...
--- End quote ---
And Rachel, I'm not targetting you specifically. Adopting is a very respectable thing to do and I respect that greatly.
That's not contributing to population growth.
Also, 12 abortions are not OK!
What also concerns me is how the planet is getting more stupid.
Less educated people tend to have kids at an earlier age.
These kids are raised in an environment that keeps them uneducated (bad parenting, poverty and lack of schooling).
Then they feed the cycle of stupidity and have lots of kids at a young age too.
What scares me even more is thinking of the possibility that there is a genetic component to stupidity. If there is, the cycle is much harder to break.
On the other hand, people who are better educated wait until later in life to have kids, and they tend to have less.
In essence, there are more kids growing up in circumstances that encourage low intelligence than high intelligence.
I firmly believe that in the developed world at least, humans have been getting marginally dumber over the last few hundred years.
Ts Stormrage:
Gene, do not underestimate the curiosity of children, and above all the amount of information available to them these days... People teaching themselves in this way become more and more common... It's up to us, as the intelligent ones, to help them filter out the facts from all the bullshit...
Even the dumbest people of all, from the Westboro Baptist Church and other creatard families, plenty of kids have "escaped" their families once they reach adulthood... Louis Thereaux did a wonderful job documenting that...
This is the internet, where bad ideas come to die as they cannot stand up to world-wide scrutiny...
If the picture you painted was true, than average IQ's should've gone down over time... It hasn't...
What HAS stopped is human evolution by natural selection... If I lived back in the days of fires and spears, I would've been mauled by a bear before I had my first pube... Then somewhere along the line spectacles got invented, allowing people with poor eye-sight to see, participate in society and reproduce... Effectively allowing a defect to exist... This is but one example of such defects...