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SlowwHand
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of The Cooler
Sep 1999
time: 23:36
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Do It for Your Country
Tue May 11,10:57 AM ET
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australian couples owe it to their country to have more children and should get on with the job, the nation's treasurer said on Tuesday.
"You go home and do your patriotic duty tonight," Peter Costello said when asked by a journalist if he was "the family-friendly treasurer saying get out there and procreate."
In a federal budget handed down on Tuesday, Costello promised $2,083 for every baby born after June as part of a $13.3 billion "family package" to be distributed over five years.
Costello said two youngsters per couple in the nation of 20 million just wasn't adequate.
"If you can have children it's a good thing to do. You should have...one for your husband, one for your wife, and one for your country," Costello said.
"If you want to fix the aging demographic, you're just back to square after two. You make no net improvement," the former-lawyer and father-of-three said.
Some would have to go one step further by having extra children "for your country" to make up the gap left by friends who "aren't even replicating themselves," the Treasurer said.
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Whoha
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The TOC is supposed to be classified guys...
Dec 2001
time: 23:36
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quote:
Originally posted by General Ludd
6 billion is more than enough. What the hell would we want anymore for? It's not like it'll acomplish anything but overcrowding, resources depletion, famine and conflict. |
First off, right now Humans inhabit very little of the earth's surface. Second, we have a planet,a solar system, a galaxy, and finally a universe full of resources, third, with that many more customers, all of our agriculture wouldn't need props, subsidies, and tariffs to survive. Finally, the silicoids are expanding like mad(they started next to us and we aren't uni/tol so we are pretty much ****ed), and if we don't expand even faster, the Earth will be theirs.
The Malthus curve does not apply to Humans.
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General Ludd
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Minion of the Dominion
Aug 2001
time: 05:36
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quote:
Originally posted by Whoha
First off define damage. |
Damage to the environment, pollution.
quote:
Second, Right now we have obscene overcapacity in food and housing |
And despite that it still isn't enough. We're just amazingly efficient like that.
quote:
More people means more thinkers, more workers. |
And? so we need more workers to work in the more factories that we need for the more products for the more people. Pointless exponential growth.
I'm reminded of David Suzuki:
quote:
Now, let me give you an example of an exponentially growing system to show you why it is ludicrous to think that we can continue to have steady exponential growth. I am going to give you a test tube full of food for bacteria. I am going to introduce one bacterial cell into this test tube and that cell is going to go through exponential growth. It is going to double every minute. So, at the beginning there is one cell. In one minute there are two, at two minutes there are four, and at three minutes there are eight and so on. That's exponential growth. At 60 minutes the test tube is completely full of bacteria and there is no food left. The question is: when is the test tube half empty? The answer is, of course, 59 minutes. At 59 minutes you still have half a test tube of food but you are going to be one minute away from filling it with bacteria. So at 58 minutes, the test tube is 25 per cent full of bacteria, at 57 minutes, 12.5 per cent. At 55 minutes it is only about three per cent full of bacteria.
If at 55 minutes one of the bacteria said:
"Hey guys, I think we have a population problem, I think we're running out of food and space," any sensible bacteria would say: "What the hell are you talking about? 97 per cent of the test tube is food and we have been here 55 minutes." And they would be five minutes away from filling it.
Now let's suppose bacteria are not much different from us; that at 59 minutes, a few of them finally smarten up and say: "I think we've got a problem, we better put every bit of resource into our genetic engineers and all our high tech guys and they have got to get us out of trouble." You know what they do? These hot shot scientists come up in 30 seconds with three new test tubes full of food and nobody in it. So they have now quadrupled the amount of space and food. What have they got? At 60 minutes the first test tube is full of bacteria, 61 minutes the second is full and at 62 minutes all four are full. Quadruple the space but keep exponential growth you buy two extra minutes. Now I can tell you that no amount of science and technology is going to quadruple our space and resources and that we are long past 55 minutes. We have to be thinking not of continued growth, or sustainable growth, or even zero growth, we have to talk about negative growth. |
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12-05-2004 05:05
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