ameancow

You and people who raise this notion are all for rapid depopulation when you aren't imagining it's you dealing with the impact of billions of people not having enough resources. It sounds a bit entitled.

I think I'm going to trust the reporting from actual people in China over someone who's moderation comment I can fucking SEE so don't pretend shit around me. I will never see your stupid comments again.

How many humans should we aim to have, long term? 20 billion? 50 billion?

That's not what this issue is about, this isn't "pro-growth" this is about averting economic and logistical collapse across much of the developed world.

Sure, we could do with a reduced population, but it needs to be reduced slowly enough that we don't see mass casualties and so that our infrastructure, production and logistics aren't suddenly unmanned, or many, many people will suffer.

We have to understand that the argument for continued population upkeep is about stability not some desire to perpetually increase population. There's not a sharp, two-sided binary here, the problem is that many, many people in the developed world are having either no kids or not enough to keep up with expected decline and longer lifespans. When we run out of young people to run our cities, our roads, our offices and our shipyards and rail systems, we end up with collapse.

Look into South Korea for a vision of the worst case and think about what will happen broadly when the same syndrome hits other major world powers and logistical hubs.

no… they canceled that

This shit is so easy to check before you click "reply" I have no idea why we can't be asked to spend several seconds on a basic google search before spilling whatever is on our mind. You can hate China for whatever reasons, but let's not share factually incorrect information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy

edit: why am I not at all surprised your mod history is filled with hate towards Asian people.

The solution is to pay workers enough so that the government doesn’t need to shift the burden of paying for children to those who don’t even have any.

I know you're banned, and this comment tells me a lot about why that probably happened without me having to dig through the mod history.

This is some pro-capitalism slop even if you think it's so far left it has tank treads. This is a surefire tactic to put a nation's healthcare in the same situation the US is in now. Without a total reform of the entire economic foundation of a country, you are simply NOT fucking getting a government who will tax their wealthy to keep up with whatever the healthcare system is charging for their procedures.

This is why healthcare is more complicated than lopping off the heads of the elites and spreading that money. We have to make systems that ensure no single person or institution is left on the hook for figuring out what to charge or pay.

edit: the comment gets worse the more I reread it.

doesn’t need to shift the burden of paying for children to those who don’t even have any

This is the very fundamental principle of having healthcare, whether it's private or public, it's very expensive and resource-intensive to keep people broadly alive and healthy, you absolutely cannot start deciding who gets this funding and who doesn't deserve it if you want a fair system, and it feels like everyone (people like you) really get bent out of shape about this right up until YOU are the special case who needs society to pool our resources to help you with your stupid problem. Then suddenly the "social contract" that made you so mad previously seems like a pretty good idea. FFS I am so fed up with narrow-minded children weighing in on shit they have no understanding of.

You're right, falling birth rates are affecting people in rich and poor countries alike.

I think the answer is more complicated and has a lot to do with our collective psychology as a species, what we're consuming and what we're feeling about our futures.

That said, money and cost do play a huge role in this. People have complicated feelings on having families right now, and the barrier of cost is a great idea for the brain to seize onto as a validation for avoiding continuation of the species.

Sadly, when it comes down to it, children are necessary for society to function long-term.

It shouldn't be sad, this is basic reality. We should love kids and want kids and pressure our own countries to make it easier to have families.

I am really getting worried that the left broadly is turning soft anti-natalist and there is no faster way to end your movement than by not having more people. I feel like "birth rates" and "fertility" are terms that we feel have been co-opted by the right because figures like Elon Musk and the manosphere bros.

China is thinking long-term and practical. If they lose their young work-force it won't matter what those "other people" are doing or not.

Someone in China told me once that one of the biggest differences between China and Europe/USA is that in the west we think in terms of years or decades. In China they are making plans for the next several centuries.

This isn't a glowing endorsement of the heinous shit China has done, but it should at least make you understand that this isn't a social welfare program designed to help families as much as the first of many measures to fight the forces that are eroding the power and production capability of other countries. If you want to see how bad it can get, look into what the future holds for South Korea.

Once you define what’s actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why “observation” changes the results.

Yes and no.

The essence of what you're saying is correct, but there's still a "black box" area that we can't measure, because if it was just a matter of a billiard ball deflecting another billiard ball, we could theoretically build finer-scale devices that could cause less interference of find ways of inferring what's happening before waveform collapse.

This is what Heisenberg worked out that crushed physics a century ago, it's not just a matter of making a precise enough measuring device, the nature and behavior of the particle is fundamentally unpredictable, meaning that you can even manipulate it by using information you don't have.

Example: let's say you want to teleport some percentage of photons across a barrier. You simply measure their velocity with greater precision, thus making their position less defined, and BAM some of them start popping into existence across the barrier. And you can do the opposite. This is how many of our electronics and measuring devices work today.

Uncertainty is a fundamental property of all these waves as they propagate through space.

Since like, everyone gets all their understanding of the world from goddamn memes now, I think it's worth pushing back on or clarifying.

I'm not policing shit, but it paints an impression that you might not be aware of if you care about people's impressions.