Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly had hasn't hurt Japan's stock market. The Nikkei is at an all time high, back to the lofty heights of the 80s. Retirement in Japan is also wonderful. You should check it out.
Is it really at an all-time high? Adjusted for inflation?
Selfish reasons to want more humans
391–400 of 480 posts
Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sincerely hope that in 50 years when the concern over population growth has been shown to be misguided, just as it has in the last 200 years since Malthus predicted the Earth could only support a few hundred million people, you won’t be sad and alone regretting a missed opportunity.
It seems to me that you guys inadvertently expose a kind of fundamental selfishness when you post like this. Like, it sounds as if a significant part of your reasoning on having children is the belief that you are creating a person who will be biologically obligated to like you and fulfil your emotional needs - thereby saving yourself from being sad and alone. I don't think it's common for child free people to share…
Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#393Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#394This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today. At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the…
There’s a Delta flight that is flying exclusively for the pleasure of a tiny group of people who want to watch the eclipse for multiple hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447603 The concept that we’re resource constrained to the extent that we’re beyond the carrying capacity of the world is beyond ridiculous We have a greed, fear and distribution problem, not a production problem Nobody needs a Ferrari when…
Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a Delta flight that is flying exclusively for the pleasure of a tiny group of people who want to watch the eclipse for multiple hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447603 The concept that we’re resource constrained to the extent that we’re beyond the carrying capacity of the world is beyond ridiculous We have a greed, fear and distribution problem, not a production problem Nobody needs a Ferrari when…
There is nothing wrong with that Delta eclipse viewing flight so long as they had mandated direct air carbon capture offsets to offset the flight. The fact that they haven't is the problem, not the flight itself. Take issue with the externalities dumped elsewhere, not on the activity. If you pay the fully loaded costs, by all means, partake in your CO2 emission activity (beef, air travel, etc). Current DAC cost is ~$…
Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything in those links could have been more concisely expressed in a single sentence, short enough even to make a pithy quote, drawn from one of them: "The question of severe externalities is interesting and difficult, but let’s set it aside for the moment."
That’s completely untrue. For, example, the first of them has a lot of interesting and relevant history about how the decline of one scarce resource motivates the search for others.
Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
The combined population of those countries is 2.8 billion. For your assertion to be true, 71% of those countries would have had to have been in poverty in the recent past and now are not.
You got about a billion in China, they were at the bottom end of the country gdp per capita rankings, now they are well into the upper half. The commenter probably assumed India did a similar journey, but India is still full of poverty and not even close to China, so yeah probably less than two billions combined but definitely more than a billion.
Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#398This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today. At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the…
What is your source for the planet only being able to support one billion people? That's a very bold statement, given that we are currently at eight billion and have fairly clear technological pathways to sustainability. Of course sustainability is not a guaranteed outcome, it will require making good decisions, but I'm sure that a "mere" one billion people would also be unsustainable with sufficiently poor decisions…
https://www.issuesofsustainability.org/helpndoc-content/Club...
https://theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-popula...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-ove...
Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like you didn’t finish your response… Why is depopulation terrifying? And why shouldn’t we be concerned about resource constraints? Malthus being wrong implies nothing about the future.
Depopolating is just another word for genocid, that's why it is terrifying. Or at least should br, but then some people are just too edgy to get that.
Re: Selfish reasons to want more humans
#400This is an absolutely terrifying perspective. The planet can realistically support about one billion human beings. It was only the Haber–Bosch process in the early 1900s that made it possible to grow enough food to maintain the 8 billion humans we have today. At the time, it seemed like an incredible humanitarian advance, feeding so many more people than before, and providing higher profits for farmers, boosting the…
This idea that we should depopulate is the terrifying perspective. People have been crying that the sky is falling since Malthus, and they've always been wrong. There is no "saving the planet as we know it now". The planet is ever-changing, and has never been static. There are certainly dangers to the path we're on that we have to mitigate, but depopulation is not one of the solutions.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/25/world-popu...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/ageing-planet-...