No but they should have access to basic things such as to be able to experience the natural world. It would be pretty fucking depressing if you were born into a shitty spaceship and told your job is to pro-create so the next generation can experience something fun?
The earth is a space ship, the best space ship we'll ever get, we just take it for granted.
Some have also commented that we're like already as far out in space as we're ever going to get. There is probably a lot of truth to that.
> No but they should have access to basic things such as to be able to experience the natural world. It would be pretty fucking depressing if you were born into a shitty spaceship and told your job is to pro-create so the next generation can experience something fun?
That's your assertion. Billions of people have been porn into abject poverty and disease and without hope for better, have learned (and in many ways seen and experienced) much less than these space travelers would. Unless we're going the forced sterilization and eugenics kind of route, I'm not sure how it's consistent to impose your own morals and standards onto others' procreation.
Billions of people have been porn into abject poverty and disease and without hope for better, have learned (and in many ways seen and experienced) much less than these space travelers would.
I don't think this is relevant or a good counter argument, we could easily say that both scenarios are less than ideal? Being born into poverty at least means you might have options in life like, you might actually meet enough people to find someone who you actually want to procreate with? What's that going to look like being stuck in what is esentially a small shopping mall your whole life?
I'm not sure how it's consistent to impose your own morals and standards onto others' procreation.
> Being born into poverty at least means you might have options in life like, you might actually meet enough people to find someone who you actually want to procreate with?
> I don't think this is relevant or a good counter argument,
I think it is. It's a pretty weak "argument" to begin with, more like just an assertion that it's wrong (because it's wrong).
> we could easily say that both scenarios are less than ideal? Being born into poverty at least means you might have options in life like, you might actually meet enough people to find someone who you actually want to procreate with? What's that going to look like being stuck in what is esentially a small shopping mall your whole life?
In terms of the number of people you would meet? Well it would look like almost everybody for the entire history of humanity.
> Imposing morals? Trolling?
I don't understand your question. Do you not believe that "they should have access to basic things such as to be able to experience the natural world" is imposing your own morals on the procreation of others?
I'd imagine America would be the last place China would invade, so I would be surprised if they'd bother. The closest (western) scenario I could see them training for is Australia.
I thought Australia would surely be in NATO and that would deter China from doing that but after looking it up, it looks like NATO and Australia merely have "deepened relationships" (according to an article from last year), whatever that means. Today I learned!
Reason: even in 2023, the logistics of invading a very large country of 350ish million across the Pacific are daunting, to put it mildly. “Impossible” is barely an overstatement.
I would also be surprised if they bother to train for an invasion of North America.
> Apple has been investing directly in mobile processors since they bought a stake in ARM for the Newton. Then later they heavily invested in PortalPlayer, the designer of the iPod SoCs.
Not this heavily. They bought an entire CPU design and implementation team (PA Semi).
I mean, they purchased 47% of ARM in the 90s. That's while defining the mobile space in the first place, and it being much more of a gamble than now. Heavy first line investment to create mobile niches has empirically been their strategy for decades.
Apple invested in them for a chip for Newton, not for the ARM architecture in particular. Apple was creating their own PowerPC architcture around this time, and they sold their share of ARM when they gave up on Newton.
The PA Semi purchase and redirection of their team from PowerPC to ARM was completely different and obviously signaled they were all in on ARM, like their earlier ARM/Newton stuff did not.
I'm not a sea dog (or air dog), but even absent electronic calculation and navigation devices of the last half century or so, is there any real advantage to using nm vs any other unit? Other than for the presumably niche case of traveling exactly directly along the equator, that is.
nm are great because charts and speeds are in units of nm and kt of course, but what does "real meaning" give you exactly?
Am sea dog, I think it's just a little bit of smugness. Because it doesn't generally help (besides quickly estimating latitudinal distance or near-equatorial distance), unless you are actually doing dead reckoning with a chart or similar, which is rare today.
The equivalency with knots is great and all but it too is just a convention
In practice, when navigating by pen and paper, what you do is you measure a distance on the chart with a divider, then you put the divider (with the previously measured distance set) to the north-south scale on the side of the chart to read out the distance in nautical miles.
Now, of course, in principle charts could have a separate scale for distances in km, and we could use km for navigation just fine. But, well, I've never seen a nautical chart with such a scale.
I think the only advantage is when using old navigation devices. You measure altitude of sun at noon and that is your latitude, time of noon is your longitude. It also only works when going east-west, it falls apart any other angle.
These days, everybody has plotter or phone to measure position and speed and calculate distances.
I find it wonderful that they are learning to live with a nice successful society that is not in a state of constant exponential growth, and they've resisted doomers and deranged neoliberal calls to keep massively expanding population. Truly a leader in sustainability, a shining beacon to the world for what is actually possible as opposed to what "experts" (aka shills for billionaires) claim to be the case.
I'm not "romanticizing" anything. I think you are just repeating talking points that have never really been challenged and made to stand up to scrutiny.
> They have a massively ageing population, which is the true problem.
The true problem is exponential growth resulting in exponential destruction of the environment, no matter how much you fiddle with the factors. People act like if we (by some unlikely miracle) get a handle on CO2 emissions that it will all be smooth sailing from then on. The sad reality is that pollution, destruction of species and habitat, and depletion of non-renewable resources, until now has been driven almost entirely by factors other than climate change.
> In 2060, over 40% of the population will be pensioners requiring payouts, according to the japanese health ministry.
That sounds good, good thing they have been transitioning to a sustainable society and economy rather than stacking the pyramid ever higher to delay the inevitable. You know global population is expected to level by that time then fall, right?
> And yes, they have low birth rates and no population growth (whether via immigration or otherwise). This is actually going to bite them at some point.
This is what the pyramid schemers (the "experts", the banks, the billionaires, the neolibs) have been crying wolf about for decades. Sure it isn't simple, but they are managing it. And it will bite everybody pretty soon. What would be nice is if, when it bites, we haven't driven societies and the environment to the absolute limit into a brick wall before that, but instead let populations in highly consuming countries naturally peak and decline, and manage that gracefully.
An ever shrinking population of productive people (percentage-wise) is going to have to provide goods and services for an ever growing population of people who can no longer work.
It’s a huge burden. Taxes will be higher - which will have all the associated consequences.
The assumed burden is higher because you are trying to let the young to the shoulder the burden of the old. In Japan(or any other country tbh) the return of the tax values to the young is vastly smaller than the old. Immigration is not gonna solve this problem, that's just delaying the ponzi scheme or push the burden to the other country anyway.
What if we tip the scale to young more and treat them fairer? What if we start moving some of the services to the young instead of the old?
The only way to tip the scales is to have a baby boom. When populations were youthful and there were very few elderly, democratic societies did not have pension programs. Was that because people were ignorant, selfish, etc? Or was it because the constituency for pensions was small?
Actually my rhetorical question is only half wrong. People, young and old, are selfish. They are however not at all ignorant about who butters their bread. If you want to increase spending on the young, then you need more young to vote for that.
If anything the growing ranks of the elderly guarantee a greater share of public spending will go towards them. From a growth perspective, that's a vicious cycle. From a fairness perspective... well it kinda makes sense that larger cohorts should get more spending in a democratic society. I get there's a lot of nuance, but this is the gist afaict.
> Older generations, who benefit most from fiscal redistribution (via taxes and transfers), are significantly wealthier than younger generations. Wealth poverty is significantly lower for older generations. Moreover, the wealth ratio of older to younger cohorts is relatively high in Japan compared with Germany and Italy, though lower than in the United States. The evidence thus points to significant wealth inequality across generations.
Where do wealthy young people come from? You mean the one who inherited the wealth from their parents? Or do you mean income tax? Well the income tax is usually far higher than capital gain isn't it?
Speaking for myself, the motivation for such thoughts mostly stems from treating wealth as a reward for work. Which is not crazy, it's similar to the labor theory of value. Or if you prefer, incentivizing work means more work will get done, and work always needs to get done. There are valid reasons from a number of perspectives to valorize and reward work.
And the elderly largely don't work, because they can't anymore.
Shifting services means the elderly will get poorer. Which given the high wealth level they have in developed countries relative to the young is not a catastrophe. However it would be a huge adjustment to expectations downward, since the elderly would have the rug pulled out from under them. Whereas the young haven't yet had a chance to adjust their expectations up since they haven't had money yet. Hence the political settlement.
For a prosaic example, in many US states funding for public universities has been cut to pay for public sector pensions in the past thirty years. This has shifted educational costs to the young in exchange for maintaining the benefits of retirees. This is an example of shifting services from young to old.
Frankly, shifting money around might not do anything.
The actual amount of goods and services produced will be lesser and/or be stretched thinner.
The only real way to combat it is to import young people from places with a mostly young population and getting them productive to make up for the productivity shortfall.
I thought I did the opposite of ignore it, which was to address it directly. I acknowledged it was a difficult thing to deal with but that almost all countries will have to soon anyway, and I also also rejected the assertion that it is the "true" problem.
Japan has PPP per capita income more than twice as high as China, 5x India. The idea it can't possibly pay more to take care of its elderly and infirm otherwise its society will collapse is up there with the most ludicrous wall street craziness I've ever heard. And they've already been ousted as shysters, mind you, because they've been repeating the same thing for a generation now. Because what they are really scared of as I said is people waking up to the fact that their pyramid scheme isn't the only way to do things.
Seems to me that by the time we reach a global crunch, countries like Japan that will already be a generation or two into addressing this problem and restructuring their societies and economies to cope without ever increasing population will be in a far better position than those continuing to push unsustainable growth to defer the inevitable.
> most ludicrous wall street craziness I've ever heard
I have heard many more ludicrous things. Japan is already heavily indebted and as relative per capita productivity will decrease significantly while while taxes increase there won’t be necessarily that many incentives for young people to stay in the country further exacerbating the problem.
> their pyramid scheme isn't the only way to do things.
Any suggestions?
> better position than those continuing to push unsustainable growth to defer the inevitable.
Or far worse.
> without ever increasing population
Who said anything about ever increasing population? Why are you even saying that?
The problem is a severe decrease in population accompanied by a similarly severe increase in average age.
I enjoyed your comments, but my biggest point of contention would be your declaration that “banks, billionaires, and neoliberals” have been crying wolf. I find that it’s mostly MAGA and similar who have been crying wolf or downplaying the threats from climate change, demographic changes, and other related elements. Banks for example hedge risk to make money. Billionaires - which ones? Maybe we should tax them, etc.
I'm not quite sure what MAGA and similar is, or really concerned about the power or influence the lunatic fringe might weild. High level "experts" and "officials" from neoliberal economic and political institutions like the the IMF have been saying these things for a long time.
And it seems to be often times very pro-climate action positions that take this contradictory position that population must continue to increase. I don't know what to make of that other than either they don't really care about climate change, or they want commoners to have a dwindling piece of the pie while the top end continues to get richer, but either way they don't seem to really care about environmental impact of humans.
I agree with much of what you say, but I think you overestimate the effect reducing population would have on the environment.
It's one of the slowest ways to reduce our carbon emissions. If by 2070 population (in some country) is 30% lower than today that's a dramatic change. But the effect on the environment (land use, carbon emissions etc) is likely not more than 30%, and that's not much!
By 2070 most developed countries in the world are supposed to have net zero carbon emissions. That target is not going to be significantly easier to reach with 30% lower population.
> I agree with much of what you say, but I think you overestimate the effect reducing population would have on the environment.
I don't think I estimated it anywhere, so I don't think I am. And in fact I was not just talking about CO2 emissions and climate change, to the contrary I explicitly said actually that climate change is one of a long, long, long list of massive environmental problems we're facing. That's the thing, even if we do "solve" climate change somehow, we're not remotely in the clear.
Reducing (or just not growing) population makes everything easier. CO2 emissions. Land required for food, lithium and other minerals and metals required for cars and computers and batteries and buildings, farming and housing footprint, clean water. Everything. No other measure is as staggeringly effective in reducing the human footprint on the environment as not increasing population.
> It's one of the slowest ways to reduce our carbon emissions. If by 2070 population (in some country) is 30% lower than today that's a dramatic change. But the effect on the environment (land use, carbon emissions etc) is likely not more than 30%, and that's not much!
It's compounding and it certainly is an issue. US CO2 emissions peaked 50 years ago if population was stable.
Our ancestors who evolved to hunt did not "play fair", they killed animals any way they possibly could. Running them off cliffs, into pits, setting fire to the forest to burn them alive. Might as well say guns and knives aren't hunting, that you have to use your bare feet and hands and that's it.
Our ancestors, although containing the equivalent or even greater intelligence as us, were unlikely to consider morality or ethics when it came to survival.
Both comments above sounding much like Victorian era post Darwinian drawing room expressions of "Nature red in tooth and claw" and other aphorisms not sourced to either Darwin or Wallace, all running contrary to the actual considerations of actual hunter and gathers (Pintupi Nine, San Bushmen, etc) who repeatedly stress the importance of not killing off your food supply by over taxing breeding and regrowth abilities.
I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to regarding my comment, which was effectively addressing the non-comparative examples of hunter-gatherers killing for pure survival versus modern humans killing out of annoyance or so-called sport, where food is just around the corner, except in extreme cases of poverty and such.
It's also not clear whether the last bit of your comment is entirely accurate. Is there not plenty of evidence of ancient humans overhunting fauna? That was my understanding and a quick search seems to verify that.
No to what? I didn't state that ancient humans only ever killed for pure survival, although it likely consisted of the vast majority, aside from warfare.
