The leak itself is newsworthy, but not 10% as newsworthy as what they leaked, which is proof that every single Republican Supreme Court judge lied outright under oath in their confirmation hearings when they all said “roe v wade is settled law and established precedent and will not be overturned by me”. The first chance they got, they took off that paper thin mask and revealed their agenda to legislate from the bench based on personal opinion not science, fact, or established law. They should ALL be impeached tomorrow for perjury during their sworn hearings.

Time to add 5 more liberal judges to the bench by June 1 and rehear the cases. It’s legal, and the only way to negate the liars, rapists, and religious zealots that Trump improperly installed by stealing two seats with McConnells help and filling a third with a drunk rapist. Turnabout is fair play.

MAY!? This IS the decision, they may rewrite the explanation slightly, but without a few assassinations, “accidents”, or criminal charges, this is how the vote will be reported next month, they already voted in Feb as I understand it, it’s just not official until it’s published but rarely are votes changed, and soon abortion will likely be 100% illegal in any state led by Republicans. Anybody know Barrett’s address? What about Kevanaugh? They, and any state representative voting against personal autonomy, should be doxed at every abortion clinic entrance so the now choice less women, many rape or incest victims, can make themselves martyrs and not just suicide statistics. There will be no exceptions now that they can write the laws that way.

We know this is a real draft because they instantly started looking for the “leaker”. You can’t “leak” a fake decision.

I hope women will start a sex strike in every red state. No nookie until they can control their own womb and it’s contents. It’s the ONLY logical move unless they want to be incubators with no autonomy.

Pretty certain that, if you disagreed with their decision, “wait and see” would not only be a terrible idea to you, it would also be an insult to your intelligence.

I’m petitioning Newsom to boycott any state enacting new laws restricting abortion, “new” meaning in the last decade. California does a shitload of business, we shouldn’t be doing it with states that are removing rights from women.

I just can’t fathom, with overpopulation being the root of all major problems humanity and the planet face, why so many idiots still think they should “be fruitful and multiply”, and should force that on their neighbors too. It’s the height of stupidity, and their children will pay the price for the lack of thought their parents put into the decision. We need to abort 9/10 embryos (or get 10 times better at stopping fertilization in the first place), not increase birth rates by double.

(Before you try the “but it’s murder” nonsense, legally and scientifically those things inside wombs aren’t people, and even if they WERE, one person cannot enslave another even in life or death situations. If they could, we would force live organ donations, transfusions, etc with the donor having no right to refuse.)

You say that like those are bad things.

Taking money from the rich? Fuck yes. In case you missed it, they've been taking money from you for decades.

Killing babies? Well, most people would call it "allowing a woman to decide what happens to her body", but either way, there are too many damn people on the planet, so anything that lowers the birth rate is good.

Oppressing business owners? How exactly? Making them pay their employees a fair wage? Not allowing them to discriminate against people? Making sure they don't fuck up the environment? Zero problems with any of that.

Allowing illegal immigrants to enter? Leaving aside the fact that that is completely untrue, immigrants commit less crime, work harder and contribute to your economy. Get rid of the immigrants and watch your country fall apart in a week.

Get rid of capitalism? The fucking DEMOCRATS? Seriously, you think the democrats are socialist? You seriously need to see the rest of the world. In most other developed countries the democrats would be the right wing party.

But capitalism is ultimately on borrowed time anyway. Not in the short to medium term, but in 30-50 years, capitalism won't be sustainable. You can't have a capitalist system if the majority of the populace is unemployable (see automation, AI, etc).

I was watching this on another site and kept saying to myself "Oh please!" at the ridiculus numbers being cited and when they got to the French Muslims birth rate of 8.1 I shut it off and accepted that it was just some Trump supporter's wet dream.

In other good news, bicycling, wind power, and solar power continue to go up in the US and worldwide, while birth rates continue to go down.

@vil

The idea that quote unquote Europeans will ever be a minority in Europe is far-fetched. Certainly not from migration while higher birth rates for migrants tend to subside as they assimilate. People get this impression when migrants are overwhelmingly settled in small towns. By it's nature they form a larger portion of the population. In big cities, naturally they want to at least at first settle within their own ethnic communities. It gives people the impression there are more migrants than there actually are.

There's no doubt that many Muslims are culturally very different to Europeans. They come from poorer countries, with different cultural and historical backgorunds, different value systems etc. I don't have a good answer to how this can be improved but I think it's wrong to think they uniqely do not want to integrate. The incentive is always there to assimilate into working culture and earn what is surely much more than the basic social welfare net the governments provide. But it's unrealistic to expect ethnic neighbourhoods & communities not to develop. Here in Sydney we have separate suburbs known for Indian, Korean, Chinese immigrants respectively. I live in a suburb dominated by Lebanese immigrants (FYI I am a Russian immigrant).

Schengen or not, I still don't see a workable way to actually control the vastness of Europe/M-E borders. Kicking out a country like Greece for letting immigrants through would also have immediate costs. A realistic plan similar to that proposed by Merkel is to more equitably share immigrants so no individual country is overburdened. Kicking members out is hardly going to help that.

Again though, the main point is - you can't feasibly prevent migration or control borders without turning Europe into a police state. While I sympathize with the issues raised, as I said it's about finding the best solution of a difficult and unavoidable situation.

Right wing European politician who tell you otherwise are simply lying and misleading people into believing what they want to hear.

I take issue with the part about birth rates and the 35-year population forecast.

Firstly, the premise that we (Germany) need to stabilise our population level stems primarily from the depopulation of parts of the country, the north-east most of all. However, the cause is not low birth rates. It's urbanisation, which is part and parcel of capitalism. Everything gravitates towards the centres while the rest becomes hinterland to be exploited for resources.

Secondly, population forecasts turn into horseshit real fast. If we were to look at a 35-year forecast created in 1980, we'd miss the reunification, the breakup of Yugoslavia by NATO, about a dozen wars in the Middle East and the destabilisation/desolation in large parts of Southern Europe. Nevermind the EU with all its freedom of movement agreements that were recently suspended.

If we had made a 35-year forecast in 1910... well, you get my point.

Thirdly, Europe is not a singular unity. Our ongoing assault on the economies of Southern Europe (aka austerity) lead to a mass exodus already, Same for the Baltic countries. Unfortunatly, those countries who lost a significant portion of their young and educated over the last years are also the countries who are least equipped to deal with mass immigration in an orderly fashion.

Which brings me to my fourth point: many folks make the argument that we cannot possibly pay for the integration of 800k refugees, much less for 400k a year. Well, we payed for reunification in the most inefficient, corruption-inducing and anti-social way imaginable by piling the cost exclusively on our version of social security. And you know what? It still fucking worked. If Germany can shoulder the cost of reunification, the EU can pay for 2-3 million refugees. End of story.

Finally, we need immigration. Not to maintain population levels, not to even out low birth rates. We need it to not become too homogenous, especially Germany. Too much consensus, too much group think, not enough confrontation and cultural diversity. Shake things up before people start believing their own bullshit again about their own superiority. We've seen it already vis-a-vis Greece.

@eric3579

Does the Polish Six Flags guy look familiar? It's the very same racist imbecile who described the plan to create a unified driver's license across Europe as "Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Ticket" while doing the Nazi salute.

I'd rather have a thousand Syrian refugees than people like him.

It's a discussion we've been having in this country for as long as I can remember and was one of the prime arguments made for a vast set of reforms a decade ago. And I still don't buy it.

At the very basic level, the argument is that a declining percentage of working age people have to pay for an increasing number of pensions. But that's only half the story. The working age population has to generate enough output to sustain not just themselves and retirees, but also children, the unemployed, the sick, anyone not working. A shrinking population means less children, and most importantly less unemployed. Increases in productivity are more than enough to compensate for that, no need to increase birth rates or immigration.

Germany is regularly paraded around as a country in dire need of immigration, given our low birth rate. Even if we ignore for a minute that any 50 year population forecast of the past has been invalidated after maybe 5 years, the "worst" they could conjure up was a decline in working age population of 34% by the year 2060. So what? That's 0.8% a year. And since it's based on a population decline of 20% over the same time, it's an annual drop of 0.2%. That's their worst case scenario, and it's statistical noise.

We've had a massive increase in average age over the last century as well as two world wars and our system managed just fine. And an annual drop of 0.2% is supposed to bring it to its knees? Pah.

Now, I'm all in favour of immigration, primarily to spice things up and prevent our society from becoming too homogeneous. But our pension system needs neither mass immigration nor an increased birth rate. What it needs is for politicians to stop funneling funds from our "PAYGO" system towards their buddies in the private sector. Current income = current payments, public system. Everything else is too volatile and susceptible to the Vampire Squids on Wall Street.

Interesting. Since I've reached the age where my peers are having kids, of the 20 or so kids born to various friends in the last 3 or 4 years, there have been only 3 boys.

Obviously this is anecdotal, but I wonder if the stress of living in a post earthquake city has affected the birth rate?

Useless in the sense that they would no longer be required to advance society. It does mean less humans because, like in China now with the one child per family law, we'd be forced to not produce so many - maybe not by law, but the cost of raising a kid would be astronomical.

And no, there won't always be a need for human caring, empathy and love. Look at Japan now with non-human surrogacy on the rise and birth rates dropping. It's more efficient than dating and we have drugs to make us happy otherwise. I doubt it will ever completely go away of course, but there it is.

I'm advocating passivity because I don't recognise overpopulation as a threat, more an inconvenience, and one that we couldn't really prevent even if we wanted to.

I don't see what's preposterous or optimistic about taking widely accepted birth rate data and projecting based off that. Birth rates are predictable and stable sampled over a large population. The data consistently shows that as societies come out of poverty, their birth rates fall. The only assumption here is that there isn't another GFC event that hinders growth which at this point is not particularly likely.

All taken into account we already know it's plateauing, and have known for decades. This isn't a hypothesis, it's happening right now. Unless you can show me why this trend will suddenly and irrevocably reverse, despite population data being incredibly stable and predictable historically, it seems the onus is on you to explain why you're so pessimistic.

Again, I think you're still conflating (1) what I want / whether it's bad versus (2) whether it could plausibly be stopped. I would also rather live in a less populated world. At current rates of technology and resource utilisation, things would be cheaper, there'd be more to go around. Reality is not like that. But as I said before, every policy focus has an opportunity cost. I don't see a plateauing population as a threat and I would rather see that effort devoted to poverty which will help reduce it anyway.

We're nowhere near an economic bubble. Maybe a short term stock market valuation bubble right now, but there's plenty of economic under-utilisation in the US and Europe, and China and other developing countries have decades to grow.

The term technological bubble is a bit nonsensical. You can have a technology sector bubble but actual physical technology which works now, will not magically stop working tomorrow based on inflated expectations. If you're saying instead we'll reach some cusp of innovation, well people have predicting that for decades.

We're nowhere near a peak oil event. Every time people say current known reserves are dwindling, they either (1) discover a huge reserve in under developed countries that were previously not surveyed (Africa and parts of SE Asia at the moment), or (2) something like fraking comes along which unlocks new supply. The US is forecast to be the largest oil exporter by 2020 based on that second point.

Hell, I'll play devil's advocate with you. Suppose we do reach a glut. We'll know this at least a decade ahead based on dwindling new reserve discoveries. The price of energy will leap up far, far ahead of us running out. That will spur innovation in more efficient sources of energy and will incentivise both individuals and businesses to be more energy efficient. A gradual adjustment like I've talked about endlessly here. Why am I wrong?

Environmental damage is a different issue and something that I agree needs to actually be addressed. I'm sure if you search back through my posts you'll see me talking about the economic rationale of addressing this directly when corporations who pollute aren't subject to the negative externalities that they impose in our current capitalist system and that will inherently create issues. Hopefully countries will take note of the smog clouds in China's big cities.

You're conflating two different points.

1 - Is overpopulation a problem that needs to be addressed?
2 - If it is a problem, is it possible for us to address?

We've been competing for less and less resources ever since populations started growing. Nobody in this thread has offered any evidence for why suddenly at and above 7 billion it will really become a problem this time. My hypothesis is that the past shows that the change in living standards from increased populations will be gradual and not cause some kind of cataclysmic hunger or global food war. Where is your evidence to the contrary? I've shown examples recent and past where the world has dealt with respectively, (1) high commodity prices and (2) dealt with proportionately much higher population growth than what we are experiencing today.

Society has continually shown the ability to drastically grow agricultural yields, tap deeper and harder to access water and energy reserves and substitute different inputs when a commodity becomes scarce or expensive. With global birth rates barely above replacement and global population plateauing, where is your evidence that with the ingenuity of the many people that have come out of poverty since the end of the Cold War, that we won't be able to handle a historically relatively mild proportionate growth in population?

Every time I see someone channelling Malthusian scare mongering such as this video, I always see the same tropes -

(1) The word exponential bounded about with some kind of mystical reverence;
(2) An over-abundant use of analogies while being absent of any historical basis for their argument; and
(3) A complete lack of plausible solutions to the problem because their argument is grounded in emotion and intuition rather than practicality.

@gorillaman

The market dictates prices and the capacity to consume the current amount that we do. With more people affluent and more demand, the price of items will go up based on levels of scarcity. With less countries to outsource lower paid labour to, prices on the supply side will also rise.

Whatever we have will be shared based on wealth. It's the interests of fairly sharing resources that as many people as possible rise from poverty to match rich/middle income countries.

I don't know about his predictions, I was sourcing the data on the relation between birth rate and poverty.

Your range seems arbitrary and not supported by any data. Massively restricting population growth, if it were even possible in anything but a dictatorial state would create the same problems China will have in the coming years as I listed. If we let it plateau, as it's expected to, I don't see how the harm (of having to share more), outweighs the obvious problems of a large elderly/young imbalance.

The solution to overpopulation has always been poverty reduction:

http://videosift.com/video/TED-Hans-Rosling-on-Global-Population-Growth

What stabilises population growth is the birth rate being below the replacement rate (2.1). At 2009 it was 2.33, meaning the doom and gloom is almost completely unwarranted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replacement_rates

As far as the one child policy, it's unclear if it was necessary in light of China's growth and consequent poverty reduction which would have reduced it without any direct action. What's certain is that it's created a huge group of ageing workers currently approaching retirement with few children to take care of them.

By 2050, China will be roughly as bad as Japan, which has the largest elderly/young imbalance in the world currently. Which will weigh down pension systems, slow down policies towards growth and ironically keep population growth higher because of diverted spending.

>And Japanese government officials wonder
> why Japan continues to have a decreasing birth rate...

imagine how quick world overpopulation could be controlled by a worldwide group decision among women alone... only women hold the power to save the Earth just 60 years... would make an interesting movie where 1 in 20 women over the next 60 years was allowed to have a single kid

OK, well men could band together too but I don't trust our achieving the level of discipline required as much in some situations