Quote Originally Posted by MadAmster View Post
A lot to agree with there.

There are too many people on earth to be able to keep them all happy.

We probably grow/breed enough food to give everybody what they NEED. Unfortunately, not enough to give everybody what they WANT. Most definitely a lot of it is produced 100s of miles away from where it's NEEDED and getting it there is a logistics nightmare, or would be if the rest of us were willing to send what we don't need to the poorly accessible places that do need it before it rots.

We need to slow down population growth. Actually we need to change it to population decline. The problem with that is that it would deny "the 1%" of their greedy demand for constant growth in the "economy" that keeps them rich and increases the value of their shares and the level of dividend they receive. The greedy aren't interested in sustainable futures as they are only interested in themselves being at the top of the tree and, with them, their children. They seem to miss that doing so will see their families embroiled in vicious conflicts not too far down the road.

The daftest thing is that when somebody floats an idea that would either keep the population levels at their current ones and maybe even reduce them a little, they get called out as inciting murder/genocide by the "alternative thinkers".

Reduce child mortality through vaccinations said Gates. He went on to explain that reduced child mortality tends to morph into parents having less children as they don't need to have so many to guarantee that there will be enough of their kids left to look after the parents in their old age. Perfectly reasonable and accurate thing to say. What happens? The "alternates" accuse him of mass murder!

I'm actually shocked that the "alternates" haven't gone berserk online over the Malaria vaccine announced last week. Kids will get 4 doses and it is expected that it will save around half of the annual 400,000 deaths malaria causes. The silence from those quarters is deafening.

Another thing the "alternates" forget is that the Covid vaccine isn't 100% efficient in stopping you getting infected. It does protect most against infection and greatly reduces the chance of needing hospital/ICU treatment. I heard the Dutch head of ICU care yesterday say that a non-vaccinated person has 33 times more chance of needing ICU treatment than a vaccinated person once infected. Add in the fact that you are less likely to get infected in the first place following inoculation and you see the huge benefits of Covid vaccination. They also cite the side effects as a major issue...... I've said it before, there isn't a medicine or vaccine without side effects. Just read the leaflet inside any medicine package. The list is long but the vast majority of people don't have any issues.
Population growth really is a huge issue that defines mankind's future. I heard on the radio this morning that British birthrates continue to fall and are below 2, which mirrors experiences seen in many developed countries across the world. At the same time global population spirals upwards with births being double deaths. Another interesting observation was that 30% of UK births were to mothers not born in the UK: my flabber was really ghasted at that statistic, not that it really matters what the child's provenance is.

So populations in the "wealth creating" economies continues to fall, that in the economies needing growth continues to soar. So where is that economic growth going to come from? Multinationals can and do arbitrage this differential, but only for so long as it is to their financial advantage. As soon as they can make more money elsewhere, they move on, leaving the previous partner back in the ****, Thus the low population high wealth countries continue to advance, and the high population low wealth countries subside: and revert to high birthrates to secure the parent generations future.

This leaves the have nots dependent on the charity of the haves, and this is never going to be sufficient to support an ever growing cohort of have nots.

Mother nature had a way of dealing with this - disease and warfare, as Thomas Malthus recognised over 200 years ago. But "we" knew better and have eliminated the population moderation effects of these factors. Even lemmings understand the scenario better than we do