Compare that to world population growth. Com'on people you're not trying

Sorry, but I disagree.

Touching a shoulder or hand can be enough to be accused of abuse.
Shit, just look at Shawn White, who was in a band with friends, and is now accused of sexual harassment for telling bandmates how he wants them to dress on stage, like most band leaders do, and for "making" her (and other friends) watch 2 girls 1 cup, like most teenagers/immature people did....publicly accused after settling with the band member who complained long after the fact and who accepted a settlement to drop it.
If that's sexual harassment, every man is guilty....as is every woman. Your parents are monsters, they actually forced you to wear what they said. Context is irrelevant.

Yes, today, asking a co-worker out and nothing more can and has led to harassment accusations and removal from their job....Jeffrey Tambor today, and he's never even heard what the accusations against him are or who made them, but he's already fired and his show, transparent, is certainly cancelled.

It's not that the whole world paints all men as rapists, it's that when any one person does paint any man (except Trump) as an abuser, the whole world seems to back them up without investigation or evidence. That's a problem, and is terrifying to many single men.

And women wonder why sexbots are becoming more popular daily, it's because to many men, their precious fairy vaginas aren't worth the risk of permanent scarlet lettering when there's a safe alternative. I just hope this has the positive effect of slowing population growth.

It's not about doing something that one thinks might lead to accusations, it's that any interactions can, and there's no recourse at all if you're accused, you're considered guilty off the bat.

I actually agree with you mostly, but you're not gonna like it.

One thing I will point out though - "I just don't connect gun regulations as an effective solution to mass murder."

We have data on this. Take Australia. In the 21 years leading up to Port Arthur and that massacre itself, which triggered the nation into heavily regulating guns, there were 16 mass murders of four or more people, totaling 137 murders. Since then, there have been 12, with a total of 76 murders. This despite there being population growth.

Violent crime rate has dropped from 1996 to now, mainly from reductions in robbery and a small drop in homicide rates.

There is very clear evidence that if most guns are removed from circulation, there are very real and likely benefits when it comes to reducing violent crime in general and murder.

I'm a political moderate and pragmatic. I go with what works. Don't care how liberal or conservative the solution is. I'm never in favor of regulation that is ineffective at solving problems.

And to that end, I'm against most gun control measures. I'm on board with banning assault weapons, fully automatic weapons, armor piercing bullets, but most gun control things like psychiatric evaluations, universal background checks? No.
Why? Because societal models we know that provided real progress on problems seemed to suggest one thing - it's the prevalence of guns that is the problem. If you make it marginally harder to buy guns by things like...

Three day waiting periods
Universal background checks
Psychiatric evaluations

They don't work. Banning guns works, though. It's worked time and time again. Australia, Britain, over and over and over, if guns lose prevalence, violence, murder, etc. decrease significantly.

At some point, society has to decide that giving up guns is worth it. But until that time, "common sense" gun control is a waste of time, and I quite frankly think it might do real effective gun control measures harm because when nothing gets better from these mild measures, they're going to point that out.

Unfortunately, everyone on this is wrong - I don't agree with transmorpher so much, but if we don't get population growth under control, all the green energy in the world won't be enough. Which is why the Pope pontificating on planetary stewardship is nothing short of obscene. When the Catholic Church starts making birth control a mandatory practice for good Catholics, then I'll start believing his advice on global stewardship is sincere.

Ah. And climate change and pollution have nothing to do with population growth. And property values will always go up. Idiots. This was so obviously funded by individuals with more money than God who have no understanding of the impact of a species overpopulation on a fixed environment. As long as Billie Gates can buy his way to live far, far away from the starving, stinking masses, he will continue to spew out this nonsense. Don't buy into it.

@newtboy
If the locals were already doing their utmost legally to halt the invasion in the 30's, it was clear the immigrants were not welcome...except by the 11%
Jews weren't the only ones relocating to Palestine you know, Arab population growth was being driven up as well. For some strange reason a lot of people were relocating en mass in between WW1 and WW2. Seems disproportionate to me to be the concerned exclusively with the Jewish ones. Doubly so given within that time frame they undoubtedly had better reasons for concern.

My Texas-California comparison stands...
Except for the holocaust part.

Here's the example you want. During the Rwandan genocide, let's pretend we saw a mass exodus of Africans seeking refuge in America. As the genocide in Rwanda was being sifted through, let's pretend that White America decided to ban all land sales to black people, and started refusing to conduct any business with black people. Let's pretend white folks even got up in arms and started committing a few massacres of Black towns and Black people did the same back in defense and retaliation. Now, while all this fighting takes place lets see it escalate to an all out war, and the black population declares independence and accepts a UN mandated solution where they keep Missippi, Alabama and Florida or something. The day after that however, America and NATO announce a joint declaration of war and the president of the USA declares that he's going to drive the Africans into the sea. Now you've got a made in America analogy.

The mean estimate of the number of ALL North American tribes was around 8 million (8.5 if you consider the small amount in Canada). Want to know the population of LA? If you guess around 4 million, you are correct.

The population of the state of California is close to 40 million. About 1/3 to 1/2 of that number lives in what should be desert. Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico have about 20 million people, most of whom live in desert like conditions. You can't support that number of people in a desert region on existing resources.

As far as food waste and obesity, you are talking about a small handful of developed, affluent nations. The rest of the world is starving. Even if we magically moved that food waste daily to people in need around the world, we would still have people who didn't get enough. We are at our limit on supplying food for the population, as it continues to grow, even the food waste issue will need to be solved if we plan to keep people just in those first world nations fed.

Trawling today is different. It used to be about doing as little work as you needed to for the most return. Now it is about getting your quota before the season ends, because we are desperately trying to keep the marine population sustainable. Even so, we are running out of some types of fish. Wild catch salmon is going to be gone in a few years, it will mostly be farm raised, which will also impact the environment. Cod is harder to come by as well because it is being over fished.

I have to admit, I don't know where you are going with the nuclear issue and weapons. The amount of nuclear waste from decommissioned weapons is minimal. The amount from power, medical, and research is far greater. All three are fueled by a need to either provide power to a large population, keeping people alive, or researching future power/medical uses.

Am I relieved when friends or family members die? No, but those people are already here. They are already factored into the system, so to speak. What we need to do to fix our current looming nightmare is to prevent or persuade people to stop having kids. Population is not a data-in only situation, it's data-out also. People die, if you don't replace them then there are more resources available. My wife and I chose not to have kids, not because we wouldn't love them, but because it was the responsible thing to do. As @newtboy mentioned, we won't necessarily fix all the issues by reducing population growth, but it would be a huge help. It might also give us time to work out other solutions, because we are looking down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Well, you do have a point....but I think 10 billion Nepali would still overburden the biosphere. It probably would only take <2 billion Americans (or far less, I'm just blind guessing) to overburden it. Given my druthers, we would have a total population under 1 billion, and make it so those wanting >3 children have to commit suicide to let their baby be born, essentially stopping population growth permanently.

Yes, solving food waste without massive expense could go a long way....but how? Most food waste is a factor of transportation cost. If it costs more to ship the food than it's 'worth', it will be allowed to rot. Figuring out a distribution method for getting excess food products to the needy for free is going to make someone billions of dollars if it's ever done. Unfortunately, without energy free teleportation, I don't see it happening on a large scale. Small scale local solutions (such as http://videosift.com/video/Fridge-Outside-Restaurant-Turns-Leftovers-Into-Free-Meals ) can have impact, but won't solve the problem completely.

@ChaosEngine

So yeah, there's a lot of common ground. Of course there is: values can overlap ideologies; something that, let's say, 'the kind of feminism I dislike' refuses to allow. Everything that says women should be treated reasonably is feminism, which gives us the credibility to declare that anyone who opposes any aspect of feminist doctrine hates women.

I think the concept you're talking about is a part of the makeup of any rational person's mind, and indeed advocacy on its behalf is still necessary. I don't think the particular movement that grew around that advocacy in the latter half of the 20th century is still useful, and I say that it was flawed from the first, even as those flaws were mitigated in the short term by what it accomplished.

It's important to maintain that distinction, and I would strongly prefer that this basic concept wasn't referred to as 'feminism'. Dictionaries describe usage rather than determining reality, and in this case as in so many others I think the majority have got it horribly wrong.

edit: Something of an academic and unnecessary addendum, but I've heard Hitchens say that a few times and I always winced when he did. It's a little trite. The kind of cure he's talking about, birth control, could just as easily be effected by forcibly sterilising women after their first or second child. What he might have said, somewhat less snappily, was, "The empowerment of women, an excellent goal in itself, also handily has the effect of countering explosive population growth and adding more skilled workers to the economy."

1-Rename this video plz...it has nothing to do with the content. 2-Birth control, yes. Just implement social birth control and boom, we stop having kids. This means improving lives, etc.
.
BUT. C-It is also about consumption. For example, you wouldn't argue that we need to reduce the tiger population because hundreds of humans are dying to them every year when just one tiger is kept in a village that causes 95% of human to tiger deaths.

What I mean by that is the "advanced" nations certainly need population control, far greater than the zero population growth numbers we have, and we need to go in to the negatives significantly before our resources run out. As far as the populated backwoods nations, they can afford to be populated.

Actually, it probably wont.. All the stats point in the same direction: reducing childhood/maternal mortality, eradicating poverty and educating people seems to have an interesting side effect: People have less kids. Typically a poor, uneducated population with 10-15% child mortality theres 5-6 kids per woman, whilst rich, educated populations CM less thand 0.2% or so, 1-2 kids per woman. So the population growth slow down or stops as countries move from developing to developed.

I was simply trying to point out that we all pay for stuff we don't use. I obviously didn't communicate that well.

I do think you might be missing the point of paid maternity leave, though. It is not (in the country at least) to encourage population growth. It is to improve the family situations of those who have kids.

While it's true that childbearing is usually a choice, and that people ought to save money or wait until they are financially secure, the fact is that this just doesn't always happen. There's a parallel argument for public pensions, which would not be necessary if people would just put aside 20% of their paychecks every year.

Given that people are going to have kids, and that they aren't always going to be financially secure, the question is: is there a material or moral benefit in giving those families more time to nurture their children and more time to bond without the stress of trying to navigate financial hardship? What is that worth to society in dollar term?

I don't claim to be smart enough to know the answer.

I'm surprised he glosses over Israel's supposed right to expand land through military conquest. That's what perpetuates this conflict, civilian settlement in West Bank land with evictions of current Palestians using dodgy means.

The argument that the occupation is about security concerns is clearly hollow, it's been a process of gradual civilian settlement with the intent of the West Bank becoming part of Israel de facto for decades.

The trouble is, Arab population growth in both Israel and the West Bank will continue to outpace that of Jews and instead it will soon become an apartheid regime increasingly at conflict with itself.

Ahhh yes, the Culture / Star Trek / super happy awesome future ending.

It's possible this may come to pass. I'd love to think that we may even see the beginnings of it in my lifetime.

The way I look at it, there are essentially two issues that need solving.

1: population growth needs to actually reverse. Ideally over the next few generations, the population would drop by a few billion. (note for the idiots in the crowd, I'm not talking about genocide or some draconian laws, I mean simply that people will choose to have less kids and the population will drop naturally).

2: energy. We need fusion. There are no two ways about it. We either develop fusion or we abandon our energy rich lives (cars, electronics, media, home appliances, etc)

Both of these are tough tasks, but with enough political will and some ingenuity, they are not insurmountable.

I am simply not that optimistic that we as a species can get our shit together enough to see this come to pass. Collectively, we can pretty terrible at adapting to change... just look at the media or transport industries for an example.

Any new economic model will meet with extreme resistance.

capitalism only really functions well (with regulation) in a world where resources are limited and a lot of manpower is needed to get things done. Thanks to technology, it's only a matter of time before resources are so easy to come by and manufacture into needed things that the supply and demand model will be obsolete.

I suspect that within 100 years, if not sooner, manual labor will be a thing of the past...unless you're an artist or something. Robots will be able to do virtually everything..and better than humans are capable of.

The only people who will still need to have jobs are engineers and maybe technicians, but even then, eventually robots will be able to repair themselves so maybe not even technicians will be needed. Hell, given enough time, nurses and many health care jobs won't be needed anymore because basic healthcare could be delegated to robots.

It's just a matter of time. We're already starting to see the effects of automation in the workforce, we just don't need as many people to get things done. Hell even technical jobs aren't safe because as computers get better and better, They'll be able to analyze certain things better than humans.

The question just becomes what do you do about it? A whole new economic model will be needed. Because we'll eventually be living in the world where unless you're in the academic top tier, you're just not going to be needed in the workforce. At the same time, again, because of technology, we're going to have the ability to feed and clothe AND shelter you for a minimal amount of effort so the prospect of being able to being born, living, and dying without ever NEEDING to work is a real possibility in the not so distant future.

Isn't that what you would call...a utopia? You want freedom? there it is. You'll be able to spend your time doing what you WANT to do instead of what you HAVE to do just to survive. I suspect at some point, there will have to be SOME procreation laws put into place to keep the population growth in check. But hell, even that won't be so bad once we have the ability to colonize other planets.

People will still work, they'll just do it because they want to do it, but they'll be jobs where they're not a necessity or anything. even in an age where a replicator can make all your food, people will still want to cook, or do other artisan style jobs.

But hey, we'll still need defense, gotta blow up or deflect any stray asteroid that comes near us. or just send a bunch of robots up to mine the rock to smitherines so we can use the resources to build our mighty space fleet and our other grand works That Dyson Sphere won't build itself after all

In other words, the human race....has won. isn't that a good thing?