These fears over population collapse are the weirdest form of mass hysteria I’ve ever seen.
Most of the time, yes. When you’re throwing a large portion of your population into a blender, it makes more sense.
Population collapse for the human race isn’t so much a problem, we’ll weather through it as a species. For an economy, population decline is very not good though. You need working age people to support the young and old, as well as everything else your taxes go to.
The issue is that demographic collapse can and almost certainly will have devastating economic consequences for the countries facing it.
Here’s a crazy idea to make your population grow: how about not sending your people to die in a war?
nah, prison baby factories and lower the conscription age
also, not having babies is now illegal
Lol invade Ukraine after promising not to. Getting entire generations of sperm makers killed in illegal war. Force female prisoners to be baby factories. Ladies and gentlemen: the bad guys.
A member of the Russian State Duma has proposed releasing women convicted of minor charges from prisons so they can conceive
Literally nobody here has read the article and it shows
People who haven’t read the article aside: I do not believe the Russian State member has women’s best interest in mind with this proposal.
I’m not making any claim as to the rationality of the Russian State member. The Duma has some crazies, just like Congress does. They don’t speak for the entire country, though.
I’ll agree to that partially. Unless the proposal actually passes it’s just the shitty legislating of another shitty government official.
I just wanted to point out the Russian States’ history with women’s rights; because it’s not like these people gain power in a vacuum.
If article authors wanted people to understand the truth, they wouldn’t title articles misleadingly.
In journalism the writers don’t write the heds. That’s an editor’s job. It goes back to the days of print journalism when only the editor would know how many column-inches they would have for a given story on any given page. It’s still industry standard for digital publishing as well.
Ah. Coming to a ‘Murica near you soon.
Our species is totally on a brink of extinction.
No. It’d be very difficult to actually have humans go extinct. Bad things will happen, but extinction would require a Children of Men level situation.
True, but Its 100% possible for us to get knocked back into the iron age, and if that happens, there’s a very real chance we won’t be able to climb up again.
Easy to access sources of a lot of the resources needed to rebuild a modern civilization are gone, the only reason we can get to the remaining deposits is because we already have the advanced equipment to extract it. It’s entirely possible that if we get knocked back down the tech ladder, we may never climb back up again
I think that is an extremely unlikely scenario. Do you think modern technology is just going to disappear?
Dissappear? No, of course not
Fall out of repair, and be unable to be repaired effectively without tools, resources, or knowledge that are no longer accessible?
Abso-fucking-lutely
Take a deep sea oil rig. How long do you think it’ll be operational without maintenance with all that sea water? After not too long you won’t be able to repair the damage without serious industrial capabilities, and that’s assuming you even know how to fix it.
Really even as relatively little as a few decades of total chaos and disorganization would be enough to make crawling back really hard. A century and more and it really could be impossible, or at least improbable - especially given that the humanity that comes out of the other end of the crisis is the same one that got us into it. So the remaining pieces of major valuable infrastructure left will probably get wrecked as the survivors fight over them
ChatGPT:
As the fiery tendrils of the celestial catastrophe engulfed the world, humanity found itself cast back to the primordial embrace of the Stone Age. The once towering achievements of civilization crumbled into dust, leaving survivors to navigate a world stripped of its technological marvels. In this new epoch, where the remnants of mankind struggled to eke out an existence, a daring expedition was conceived in the sun-scorched lands of Argentina. A ragtag crew, armed with little more than salvaged tools and an unyielding spirit, prepared to embark on a perilous voyage across the treacherous seas to scour the mysterious ice-clad wilderness of Antarctica and the riches entombed on the base therein. Their mission: to uncover forgotten secrets, salvage survival, and reclaim a semblance of the ingenuity that once defined their species. On the timeworn deck of a makeshift sailing ship, the brave explorers cast off into the unknown, setting forth on a journey that would either revive the flame of human innovation or be swallowed by the icy abyss of a desolate world.
Guy I jam with in a band is a coder. He said that ChatGPT is fucking nuts. It’s getting to the point where it will be able to point out the flaws in his code and offer fixes. Only a matter of time when we can take a photo of something and our personal Jarvis will tell us: what it is. What it does. How to use it. How to fix it. Shit is wild man.
ChatGPT is mediocre in a silo. It has no context for distributed systems and will never compete with real developers. The benefit of ChatGPT is the time it will save a good developer from writing boilerplate. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who says otherwise is bitten by the bias bug.
I have consulted chatGPT on code for Ansible, which is garbage anyway. Then I sent it my ideas, which it spotted and suggested fixes for bugs within. Then I ran it and did 5 days of work in one.
For code I do enjoy, I’ll want to keep the experience in my brain. For ansible, I’ll let chatGPT suffer the PTSD instead. But we’re already there.
I don’t get this under estimation of humanity. If 99% of humans died, the planet became 3-5 degrees warmer, and all computers literally popped out of existence, we’d recover a ton of technology within a few centuries. We’d use a strange mish-mash of old and new tech, but people would write down a ton of information from the generations that remember the before times, and using previously learned principles, new generations would reverse engineer a ton of useful things.
Radio communications would be relatively easy to remake and will almost always exist in some form. A ton of useful developments like agricultural technologies and energy technologies would be too valuable to be lost for long. Gunpowder and firearms aren’t going anywhere. All of these bedrock technologies would never totally disappear as they’re too useful.
Even in a world constantly at war, these technologies would be essential to winning those fights. If you forget how to make guns, a group that didn’t will conquer you. If you rediscover an old technology, it could give you an upper hand. If there isn’t perpetual war, the risk of it and the benefits of trade will allow even more development and rediscovery.
The biggest reason for you underestimating humans is that you forget that most of our technology isn’t physical. A boat may decay and become inoperable within a few decades, but the engineering principles that allow for the boat to function are unlikely to decay and fall out of disuse. Engines are useful. Boats are useful. Construction of high quality versions of these things won’t happen overnight, but low quality and functional versions will get built.
People, even without writing, are exceptional at remembering useful ideas. With writing, we can store information outside of our minds and write out more complicated ideas than our working memory can handle. You think everyone is going to forget how to write mathematics? Hell no. We’ll never lose written language, and that will allow us to find knowledge that no one alive remembers. The necessity of learning unknown concepts alone will ensure people would remember how modern languages are written.
The most impressive technology humans have is language, ideas, forms. Without forms, we’d never have built the most impressive physical structures and technology we have. Every advanced building began as a blueprint, and even Stonehenge required planning and communication. If every physical technology we’ve ever made disappeared at once, we’d rebuild many of those things by writing down what we remember and sharing knowledge with eachother.
TLDR: Ideas can outlive physical technology, and we’ll never stop using useful tech in any apocalyptic situation. Only the Planet of the Apes neurological disease would stop humans permanently.
Appreciate it typing this out.
It would have to be a really wild scenario where humans get stuck permanently in the iron age again. While they are fun thought experiments, I just can’t see to many ways that humans survive but our technology and books disappear from existence.
It could. If enough smart people who make it and industrial plants are ruined, then it’s quite possible.
Plenty of people around who can build wood gas generators… and there’s going to be plenty of warlords who will happily employ them and provide resources.
See my other comment on ideas. The communication abilities and intelligence of humans would need to be crippled for us to die off. We’d never truely go back to the iron age, because we have non physical technology that’s difficult to destroy. We’re unlikely to forget how to make steel because it’s too useful, even if all steel is destroyed.
Pretty easy actually. Just watch the oxygen levels drop below 16%. Just kill the rest of the insects and trees. That’ll do us in.
This sounds much easier than creating a society where people feel happy and secure enough to have families. I wonder when 45 will add this to his campaign checklist.
The plans included funding for new mothers and not just “maternity capital” for families with two or more children, in addition to welfare benefits for low-income families and free school meals for a four-year period.
Hey regressives! You love Russia so much, why don’t we follow their example?
Please read the rest, not all measures (mentioned in the article) are that good.
I’m aware. I was being (somewhat) sardonic
That reminds me. Anyone here ever hear about the bureaucratized rape in West Virginia coal mining camps back in the day? If a man was injured and couldn’t work his wife could take “Esau scrip” which she would have to pay back with her body. Capitalism! The entire situation is a stark reminder that capitalists wil LITERALLY rape and murder you to protect their position.
Somehow that topic didn’t come up in 7th grade WV History class. Going to have to dig into that as it would make a great post.
Edit: JFC, I had no idea this happened. And I live here and have toured the Whipple Company Store (again, in 7th grade).
https://wvpublic.org/what-was-the-esau-scrip/
“We’ve had multitudes of women and tell us as little girls they remember their mothers coming to the company store and one of the things that a lot of more the lovely ladies had to do was come upstairs. Some of the young girls had the stories shared by their mothers stating that they would be escorted in the shoe room. There would be a selected guard that would be waiting for them and they would receive a brand new pair of shoes with no accountability other than to perform whatever the service the guard wished to have in lieu of pay. We had one woman in particular share with us that her mother was a young girl about 25 years old and bought her first pair of shoes here and the women’s entire life those shoes remained in the shoe box on her closet shelf never to be worn and she refused to wear another pair of shoes her entire life. She made her shoes out of cardboard, newspapers and twine.”
- Joy Lynn, owner and tour guide, Whipple Company Store
Thank you for sharing a source. I should have done that.
No. Wtf.
Yeah, they don’t teach a lot of things in school. I only know about it because of BtB. The whole episode on The Battle of Blair Mountain is nuts and shows how far the owner class will go to keep people in line.
Yeah, they don’t teach a lot of things in school
And current politicians are making it so many other important topics aren’t being taught.
I’m looking at you Florida and Texas…
BtB just did a separate story on the Hawk’s Nest disaster in West Virginia in which they killed thousands of men by knowingly giving them silicosis and covered the whole thing up.
No they won’t
Wonderful argument. In case you’re gonna say “I’m a capitalist” no. You’re capital.
☹️
Gilead 2: Russian boogaloo
Prisons in russia are starting to look like revolving doors. Women get out if they choose to give birth, men if they choose to throw themselves into the meat grinder.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A member of the Russian State Duma has proposed releasing women convicted of minor charges from prisons so they can conceive, part of an effort to boost the country’s low birthrate amid a period of high mortality.
Julia Davis, journalist and creator of the Russian Media Monitor, posted a photo Thursday on X (formerly Twitter) showing a billboard featuring a split image of a baby in the womb on one side and a young child wearing military fatigues and saluting.
In a piece published Thursday by The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Davis documented how Russia’s population dwindled by about 997,000 people between October 2020 and September 2021—its largest ever peacetime decline.
She also noted that the Kremlin has attempted to combat the population decrease by forcibly bringing in Ukrainian refugees, women and some 700,000 children—of which war crime warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation.
The foundation, which has allegedly received grants and funding directly from the Kremlin, also openly instructs its volunteers to employ “manipulation” and deceit when talking with pregnant women.
Dasha Yakovleva, co-founder of the Feminitive Community women’s group, told the Associated Press last month that a public protest involving 60 or so pro-choice advocates at a bookstore in Kaliningrad was meant to send a message to Putin and his ilk about attempts to ban abortions in private clinics.
The original article contains 1,008 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
‘Fall rather than decrease’ wtf? And it’s a good thing for there to be less people, there are too many in the world anyway.
The fantasy of infinite growth seems to include people as well to capitalists, and as I already mentioned, it’s a fantasy.
Nah there’s plenty of resources to go around. Rampant consumerism is the problem.
Infinite growth is inherently incompatible with life. It does not work. The biosphere is under immense pressure already. Humanity extinct 4 species every day and has killed off 90% of wild animals in the last 100 years. Nature is the greatest repository of knowledge that we have. It is invaluable to our science, though we treat it as expendable. It’s like burning all libraries. We are simply using too much land in an effort to support a shitty economical model that is based on population growth, forever. This is the kind of problem that humanity has proven to be ineffectual at solving. Long term and noone will take action unless it blows up in their faces, personally, right now. Let the next generation deal with it. That is what they said in the 50s and that is what they will say in 10 years too. The damage done to the biosphere is practically permanent. Once an animal or plant is extinct, it is gone. Once enough of them is gone, the planet no longer supports complex life.
We don’t need to be using resources the way we do. It’s again a result of consumerism.
We could easily support a way bigger population if we used resources better.
If we stopped worrying about money so much science would easily be able to fix many of these problems.
That’s lime saying lions don’t have to eat animals and chickens don’t have to eat shit.
We use a huge amount of resources shipping millions of tonnes of plastic toys around the world.
That is not a natural thing that we have to do to live. It’s a choice.
There’s not plenty of resources to go around.
I think they’re trying to say there would be if it wasn’t for consumerism.
Yes, but there wouldn’t.
We currently produce more than enough food and clothes for every person on this planet and could easily house them all.
The problem is that because of capitalism we can’t get what everyone needs to them because it might hurt someone’s profits.
We have also destroyed most of the wild ecosystems of the world to grow that food.
But we can grow much more environmentally friendly foods if we choose to.
The way we do things is not the only or even close to the best way.
this is the reality no one wants to admit because it points out a major flaw in the human psyche… that is, the ability to lack empathy by distance. the farther away people are, the less we care about them.
this is obvious is every facet of our daily existence, and is provable by the lack of dense conservative centers and how easily swayed those brought physically close to those remote entities (mentally or physically) become empathetic.
humans suck, and we are the cause of resources not going where they are needed.
Note to self: whenever some whacko in Congress says something, make sure to write an article saying that AMERICA said that same thing.
Russian rape factories.
A member of the Russian State Duma has proposed releasing women convicted of minor charges from prisons so they can conceive
Can you people at least read the article?
Seriously, this is one of the biggest things that we do not need to come over from Reddit.
