Irrelevant... you asked for an option for those with the means and desire to raise more than one child. That's not even considering the benefits of being an only child as far as parental interaction goes.
That's why it's done for profit. it's labor intensive, but Americans grow an incredible amount of food. That drives the price DOWN. Enter the department of agriculture. I don't know if they still do it, but they pay the farmers to NOT produce to keep the prices high. Americans can afford the food and if not, then Food Stamps. Food stamps exist, not as a hand out, but as a way to keep mundane wages low, and as the salve to lessen the sting of insult to the injury. The third world can't afford it, and they have difficulty affording modern agriculture. Remember, farm prices must remain high. If the farmers can't make a profit, then they stop farming.
I agree it's unlikely in the absence of something truly catastrophic. And there's nothing we can do --- or ever could have done --- about a major bout of volcanism or an asteroid-hit. Obviously, an all-out nuclear exchange would pretty well do it. Maybe not if you live on Pitcairn Island. But maybe so, too. I'm thinking of some out-of-left-field virus --- something resembling this. When I was a kid we had an worldwide outbreak of "Honk Kong flu". The pig is genetically sort of a horizontal human. Pretty close. And factory-farming of pigs means the poor things spend their entire lives standing in their own shit, which is very acidic. The fumes permanently irritate the mucous lining of their lungs and, well, a virus is an incredibly opportunistic thing --- ju,ping back and forth, mutating until it's truly deadly is an easy process. Add to this that excellent thing called the high-bypass turbofan engine, which has made flying so cheap. The airlines fly the equivalent of the world's population once every two years. Take the "right" (airborne, highly infectious and invariably lethal) virus and it will be everywhere across the globe before anyone realizes it exists. Is say HK-flu because these things used to be associated with the pork-loving Chinese. But one recent scare came out of Mexico, where pork is industrially farmed for the US market. So: an already sky-high population and massive worldwide travel and trade. Nono: The problem is that even 7+ billion is already wayyyyyy too much. Paladin: Not really. The vast majority of those have adequate food, water, and shelter. It goes beyond those three things (which isn't to say that they aren't currently an increasingly fragile edifice). It's also a question of what those numbers are already doing to the biosphere on which they depend.
Well, for one thing whether or not those numbers bugger the biosphere. And don't tell me it ain't happenin.' Enough carbon in the atmosphere LOL? Christ, have you ever been to one of the growing number of megalopolises? You have a woefully two-dimensional world view, doc.
Isn't one of the problems with global pandemics is that diseases that are extremely lethal and fast spreading tend to burn themselves out by mowing down the hosts too quickly? Look at it this way, the last great Pandemic the Spanish Flu did not kill that great a percentage of the global population and only spread as quickly as it did thanks to World War One.
https://www.aol.com/article/lifesty...oning-you/21710871/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00001389 Here's one way we feed 7 billion people "no problem": massive use of pesticides that not only kill us slowly (or quickly) but bugger the web of species (e.g. bees that pollinate --- essential for plant reproduction, and therefore for feeding our billions of bellies) on which we depend for our survival. We are part of Nature. Unfortunately for some of the two-dimensional ideologues around here, the world is actually complicated. A pain in the brain, I understand.
President Carter's National Security Adviser Zibigniew Brezinski (widely considered an expert on the subject) said that if EVERY nuclear weapon in the American and Soviet arsenals was launched and detonated (and this was back when both arsenals were much larger than today) ....that about 10% of people on Earth would be killed. Quoted in the book "The Day After World War Three" (book in the early 1980s about Civil Defense planning in the United States and Soviet Union).
^Geez, that's interesting, an expert on extermination of species? Make you wonder how many species Brezinski had occasion to exterminate?
Don't know. But why would a nation waste nuclear warheads firing at nonnuclear powers? That is like a person who is attacked by two people with guns pulling out his own gun and deciding to use his limited bullets on unarmed bystanders!
It's not the number of people that's causing that, it's the power sources some of those people insist on using. Have you? Because plenty of people seem to enjoy living in large cities. You might not like it, but your approval isn't required. Is that something that has to be done, or is that something companies are choosing to do to inflate their profit margins?
Sorry but you're just wrong. Ever growing quantities of food have to be grown (petroleum-based fertilizers, extremely harmful pesticides, destruction of carbon-consuming forests to clear land, etc. etc. etc.) to feed the ever-growing number of mouths, and ever greater quantities of fossil fuels consumed to transport everything. Apart from the fact that pesticides poison us the consumers, there is the spectacularly grave problem of killing bees, on which plant life depends for pollination: (...) According to a study in the UK, pesticides damage the ability of bees to gather food and are also killing them. Since bees are the most important pollinators of crops, the use of pesticides can considerably reduce the yield of cross pollinated crops. (...) (laughs) You apparently have no freaking idea what it's like to live in Shanghai, Jakarta, Delhi, Lagos or freaking Calcutta. I'm sure you'd really "enjoy" it. I'm afraid it probably has to be done to sustain these numbers. (It would be damn nice to do without that shit.) What do you think brought about the "Green Revolution" in India? Got any proof to the contrary??? Or are you merely clinging to a preconceived idea?
You sure do seem obsessed with the idea that the brown people of the world need to be exterminated for "the greater good." Is that you, Dinner?
Got yourself quite a one-dimensional mantra there, Doc. Keep chanting it and you can pretend it's true. Yeah, I admit it, I'm Dinner. I'm also Zombie (somebody else's theory). Oh and Chuppy too --- that's Lube's or Facefuck's fantasy (I forget which). Anyone else you want me to be? Volpone perhaps? Anyway, keep up the good work!
India and China, which account for ⅓ of the population, are not nonnuclear powers. And certainly a few would have gone into Vietnam, both Koreas, both Germanys, and all the NATO and Warsaw pact countries.
Primarily that more than 10% of the world's population would have died in an all-out nuclear war, between the US and USSR. Secondarily that Dayton is uncritically thinking and wrong to think otherwise.
I'm just taking Brezinski's analysis at face value and I assume he knew what he was talking about. If there was anyone in a position to know it would be him.
Bees are only "essential" for some plant reproduction. We wouldn't starve if bees went away...we would only have less fruit and almonds. I have to wonder how bad the colony collapse problem really is given that apiaries are still selling nuks every year.
What are you, fourteen ? Senior cold war soldier decades ago says "only 10% of world pop. will die" and you confidently quote it as pertinent. Was it because all that tons of historical data of effect of atomics made him asmart? OR maybe he had a really good computer?
IIRC Brezinski was not a soldier. But he was in a position to know what American and Soviet nuclear arsenals could do and this was back when both nations arsenals were much bigger than they are now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski
When you get to be bit older mentally you'll understand that when older people talk, often times "cold war soldier" doesn't literally mean an army guy with a gun before 1986. And also you'll come to read proclamations by interested parties with attention to their motivations and credibility depending on historical context.
I know that. I still believe he was in position to have accurate and detailed knowledge regarding the capabilities of American and Soviet arsenals.
I interpret that as you attempting to make a personal insult directed at me. If so it says more about you than me.
