Zardnaar
Deity
People tend to iver exaggerate it's effects
Modern Civilization Sustainable?
- Thread starter Zardnaar
- Start date
People tend to iver exaggerate it's effects
Senethro
Overlord
Yeah, everyone has that suspicion, sure, but I think someone might know the actual mechanism through which it is happening and to what degree - Just as ExxonMobil had a team build a reasonably accurate climate model predicting 0.2C global temperature increase per decade in the 1970s.
And no, I don't think a scientific/technological solution can save us. I think that if we had low temperature, low construction cost, scaleable fusion power tomorrow we'd still over emit greenhouse gases due to the social drive to do so.
What is that sudden jump at 61/62 years? The effects of the Great Leap Forward? Looks like a significant chunk is missing just above those ages.
Also it looks like you can make out the fall of the Soviet Union at 33 years
Senethro
Overlord
The Soviet Union was not big enough in world pop terms to make a dent.
Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
no
oh you aren't talking climate change?
yes
oh you aren't talking climate change?
yes
The Warsaw pact countries, which all had sharply declining birth rates after 1991, had a population of 400 million (out of 5 billion world population at that time). And the size of the effect seems to be roughly 5%. So this is at least a contribution. What else happened in 1991/92 that could have made the dent?
I don't think so. The peak of the AIDS pandemic was about a decade later.
The event would need to be fairly close to the birth of the children in question. Otherwise it would need to be oddly age-specific. Suddenly increased child mortality (like during a famine) might do it. But an event 10 years later would need to have a reason why the 12-year olds survived while the 10-year olds didn't
Narz
keeping it real
I think the opposite, we're only now beginning to understand the effects and sperm counts keep dropping each decade, not even plateuing at alarmingly low levels
Social drive is a powerful thing yeah but our social drives are also fed all the wrong kinds of fuel triggering our worst impulses.
If we're doomers the future is doom, if we hold onto utopian hopes perhaps the future is still doom but at least we'll try.
If you plant money on the ground and optimistic is more likely to notice than a pessimist, better to seek solutions that aren't there or won't help than do nothing.
Senethro
Overlord
The actual doomering is carrying on as we are though. I'm not saying the problem cannot be solved, I'm saying the social problem is the problem!
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Well if you aren’t reproducing enough to keep everyone but the democrat elite’s family trees from going extinct, for example, so large portions of humanity simply wither on the vine as they also ingest sugar and sodium-loaded industrial sludge “food product” and take pharmaceuticals of dubious providence and, of course, the microplastics, you might say industry is kind of sort of killing off most of humanity - for the sake of the best of us, of course.
It’s not just a depression issue, or at least it can’t even be solved by a pill. I say it’s no more than the normal human condition, augmented by the fact that a significant proportion of us in industrial society are objectively worthless, especially idle middle class parasites sponging off their remembrances and inheritances, and life has no meaning for those who live meaningless, unexamined lives. It is the same ennui that once endowed the violent thugs who defended their privileges to refer to themselves as knights or samurai, and it is now the ennui of a large culture of people who consider themselves masters of everything despite not even being able to show up work meetings before 9 AM.
At any rate, the adaptations are surely already with us, and can probably be mostly enjoyed at the individual resolution. As for communities, or religion, or whatever: it’s all the same, really. Show me your well-adapted community or religion, and I’ll see them sold an invisible bridge.
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2010
- Messages
- 28,269
It is not a secret, they are saying it out loud. Take for example the book chapter "Income, Wealth, and Their Distribution as Policy Tools in Fertility Control":
Spoiler Summary of method :
More seriously, this review kind of says they are, but puts it down to economic insecurity.
Narz
keeping it real
Objectively worthless... How do you measure a person's worth? What's your "objective" worth?
Voidwalkin
Emperor
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2024
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- 1,507
Nah. People could still go above replacement despite those things. They just choose not to.
Depression is the consequence of a lack of community, or insecure membership in a community, in most instances, I think. A sense of worthlessness also flows from that.
Peasants had family, God, and the village. Today people often have none of those. I think it's still presumed at least one will always be there for you. Increasingly, though, they're all gone. You still have economic value in those circumstances. You're a capable laborer. But your social value, without the things that link you to a community, is alarmingly low, maybe even effectively nil.
We have agricultural and pastoralist traditions and values in an industrial world. We would need to redefine those things to reforge community, I think. Until we do, it will continue to splinter. As it does, hopelessness arises.
Fertility then takes on ethical dimensions. Bringing somebody into what may well be perceived as an abyss might be avoided. Or, one to continue the lineage, then call it a day.
I really don't think we have the adaptations we need. I don't even think they could be readily identified. Tradition and culture move slowly. These communities and religions don't exist yet; they probably won't for several hundred years. But nature abhors a vacuum. Something will fill it, eventually.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Can’t produce economic value - value that consists of real human good delivered to real human people - that isn’t derived from imperial/gangster authority. Of course gangsters measure value in their own way, but then again a family whose motto is say “we do not sow” is absolutely one that the greater mass of eating people could do without. It’s just that usually the least useful people, and the most parasitic, have got a killer story about why they deserve to be in charge and why a senior vp of online advertising is fifty times as valuable as a nurse. It’s just a story though. Walk the earth on two feet and you swiftly realize the nurses and farmers do a whole lot more than the senior vp’s of online advertising.
Of course, the only thing that really matters is that you swing, baby.
I guess, but many things can become trivially if not even hypothetically true based on such criteria. Perhaps the dead could have chosen not to die, and so on. I think perhaps most people seldom make most of their choices consciously. Indeed, though, we all do make choices.
More people not dying in India, China and Africa could easily account for that bump.
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Well, there was also a conscious political strategy on the part of the local powers to multiply the population in many of those places, so…
It is indeed the eternal benefit of having “more” kids. Haven’t got wealth? Sovereignty? Industrial supply lines? Well, have more kids. They’ll pay off eventually - maybe. But the more you have, the better your chances.
It is indeed the eternal benefit of having “more” kids. Haven’t got wealth? Sovereignty? Industrial supply lines? Well, have more kids. They’ll pay off eventually - maybe. But the more you have, the better your chances.
