I’m in favor of guide cats. Not just for visual impairments, though; for everything. Search and rescue, contraband sniffing, supports. Talk about a population cull.
#MudStrongs
Switch Friend Code: SW-7842-2075-5515 | My Nintendo: HobbitGamr | Nintendo Network ID: HobbitGamr
@Ryu_Niiyama Thanks! I'll look forward to seeing that herd of cute, useful bunnehs! A friend of mine who loves rabbits would definitely love to see that!
@NEStalgia Ah, Milton? I'm familiar with some Office Space references, but unfortunately it's one of the movies I haven't seen yet. I'll make a note to look for it next time I'm out. From what I do know about it, the movie seems right up my alley. XD
In terms of my vision, I was to the point where I couldn't always safely wear contacts due to some allergens in the air at certain times of the year, plus I was starting to experience a couple of other issues related to long-term wear. I also absolutely HATE wearing glasses.
Basically, I was sick of messing with my eyes and decided to take the plunge. Before, I couldn't safely do much of anything without a visual aid. I could manage reading maybe, but only if my nose was a couple of inches from what I was reading. Things like driving? ...I like my no ticket record.
Currently playing: Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy (Switch)
@NorseGamerTommy Congrats on the first car. I’m assuming you don’t have a large commute? From what I understand, European nations have more charging stations, too.
I looked into converting one of my old vehicles into a hybrid, but it was too cost prohibitive. And I’ve never had a daily commute shorter than 20 miles each way. Rural America
#MudStrongs
Switch Friend Code: SW-7842-2075-5515 | My Nintendo: HobbitGamr | Nintendo Network ID: HobbitGamr
@NorseGamerTommy Congrats on the first car. I’m assuming you don’t have a large commute? From what I understand, European nations have more charging stations, too.
I looked into converting one of my old vehicles into a hybrid, but it was too cost prohibitive. And I’ve never had a daily commute shorter than 20 miles each way. Rural America
Thanks!
Yeah, I won't use it for long travels. If I need to go somewhere far away, I'll just borrow my dad's car as long as it's possible. There are charging stations all around, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Meanwhile, i still use my Polygon bike to go any place as long not too far from my house (10 - 20 km)
I cannot drive cars / motorcycle due to :
1. I still afraid with high speed riding. Riding with speed 40 kph is already pretty scary for me.
2. I still concern with gas pollutant from cars / motorcycles and i don't want to add another gas pollutant. Earth is already in crisis. Mountain bike all the way for me.
Man, 40kph is only less than 25 mph. That’s lower than the county road unposted for a neighborhood here (35mph/60kph). Our highest posted speed around town is 60m/100k on the bypass.
#MudStrongs
Switch Friend Code: SW-7842-2075-5515 | My Nintendo: HobbitGamr | Nintendo Network ID: HobbitGamr
I bet it’s dense in Surabaya, ideal for bike travel. We have a lot of bike lane in my city, but it’s mostly vehicle travel. Top speed is 70 on the interstate highway, but you better be at 80 in the left lane.
Whoa, just wrapped what became an all consuming online hunt for a bed frame and headboard. First platform bed, lots to consider. It’s still a bit weird to me to spend considerable money on something online only to hope it’s not a piece of junk when it arrives, but I’m getting pretty decent at finding reasonably well made items. I’m hoping this is one of them.
@NEStalgia Sorry about your slimy meat and nutrition-less vegetables, but over here, all of it is pretty good quality. I do think some of it might be regional, though. There MUST be good food in the States too. I'm not going to believe it's all bad, but I do remember the food transport discussion we had with @bimmy-lee and a couple of others, so I can understand that fresh food isn't available everywhere.
But aside from all of that, and for me, minding my own diet is solely for my own health and sustainability, and I'm certainly not of a mind to force people into anything. You wanna keep eating a five pound T-Bone steak every damn day of the week? Be my guest. I do hope that the person who does, will also suffer the consequences, though...
The old saying that variety is the spice of life, is true in so many, many ways, and it certainly also counts in regards to keeping yourself fit and healthy. No man can live a healthy life either on meat or on plants alone. We can all fool ourselves into believing we can, but there's just too much evidence in favor of a varied, well-balanced diet, to ignore that fact.
And besides myself, I'd also wish that upon all my family and friends. I also want for them to have long, healthy lives, also partially out of egotism, because I want to keep them with me for as long as possible, but who wouldn't want that, for the people that they love?
As for Anti: When he goes off on his weird ramblings, then I simply dial out, but I do appreciate his artistic skills, even though I hate chibi stuff, so that takes away from it to some extent, but I've already learned a long time ago to look behind or through stuff, to be able to appreciate something in a more objective way, and see the positives in them. That's both a part of my upbringing and my professional training. I can sell any kind of ice cream, even though I may not like a particular flavor.
To end on a more positive note: I do believe I already mentioned it, but I absolutely agree on bringing down the Earth's population. But not in the Western world, or at least not mostly, seeing as (on average) we're usually not the ones who raise families with more than two kids. Of course, there are outliers, but the (wordlwide) average family in Western civilization only has 1.6 children, and I think we can also add most Asian countries to that.
P.S.
Wouldn't figure you to be one to be squeamish about contact lenses. I've been using contacts for almost 35 years now, and never had any problems with them. Well, not with my eyes, at least. The only problem I ever ran into, is losing some of them, while swimming, or while being on a trip, and not having any immediate replacements around. That got fixed, though, once I got my monthly lenses and holiday care packages...
@ThanosReXXX - While fresh seafood can be a challenge, I personally have an abundance of options for red meat, pork products, and poultry; including local, organic meat farms large enough for the animals to live nearly how they would and eat what they would in the wild. Around here, organic meat and produce is widely available and fairly affordable. It’s all we eat as a family of four. The only times we pay exorbitant prices is for wild caught seafood, and we typically opt for Alaskan salmon. In my opinion, especially with young ones, you really can’t spend too much money on quality body fuel.
IMO the earth isn't really that overpopulated (we can grow plenty of food to feed everyone). It's more of a resource allocation problem.
But I would agree that there are certain areas that are overpopulated, like major city centers. Large families can be an issue, but that's more of a family planning problem.
@bimmy-lee Absolutely. If you've got the means, or are willing to provide for the means, then that's surely the only way to look at it.
@BougieBeetle Well, no offense, but you're wrong. You'd have to look at it from a worldwide view, not from a "where I'm living" view, or just from what you've seen on the news concerning foreign areas. The world still has some empty places left, but most if not all of them, are inhabitable, so people are concentrated in the areas that actually are inhabitable, obviously. Waste problems, smog alerts at least twice a year in certain areas, and even wars, to some extent, are all due to too many people living too close together, doing too many things that they shouldn't be doing.
At some point, a group of really smart people came to the conclusion, after careful considerations and calculations, that ideally, the world's population should be maintained at 6 billion people. Preferably even less. Currently, we've already crossed the 7 billion mark, rapidly going towards the 8 billion mark.
So yeah, I'd say that, as a species, we've definitely overcrowded the world...
Even in the wikipedia link you posted, most of the doomsayers (going back to Thomas Malthus) present overpopulation as a potential problem, not a given fact, because they are making predictions. And of course, the misuse of the earth's resources is a problem compounded by the amount of people who live on the planet. But as I said before, the issue is really one of resource allocation.
I dunno, I guess this is a debate that people have strong feelings about. I'm gonna stop posting about it, you're entitled to your point of view, I could be wrong, etc.
@BougieBeetle Yeah, I realized I posted the wrong link, after I read through all of it myself. And to moderate what I said before: you've every right to your own opinion and sentiment, so that's fine by me.
The thing though, is that I'm trying to look at it objectively, and would encourage others to do the same.
So ultimately, the problem remains, probably for quite some time to come. As for that resource allocation part: the fact that we need to destroy more and more natural habitats to accommodate for our own needs, already proves that we're with too many people. The Earth naturally provides for all it's inhabitants. That is the circle of life I mentioned a few pages back. It's how it's SUPPOSED to go, but we've set ourselves aside from that natural cycle, and created our own reality and own cycle, in which we only need more and more, and also luxury produce and foods that we don't really need, but which do exact quite a heavy toll on both the planet and even ourselves, comically enough. The instant karma is already here...
EDIT:
And then I even forgot to mention the constantly returning waves of famine in third world countries. That is perhaps the only instance where resource allocation could be relevant, but we all know how that goes, and why it keeps happening again and again...
Taiko is good for the soul, Hoisa!
Japanese NNID:RyuNiiyamajp
Team Cupcake! 11/15/14
Team Spree! 4/17/19
I'm a Dream Fighter. Perfume is Love, Perfume is Life.
3DS Friend Code: 3737-9849-8413 | Nintendo Network ID: RyuNiiyama
@ThanosReXXX I always find the "we've scientifically decided the best diet" and most other medical and scientific nonsense to be just that. Every time science decides they're oh so smart and figured out all the answers, they end up being discovered to have found nothing within a century. Simple science. Earth elements, basic chemistry, materials, etc are simple and repeatable. But every time science decides to claim they have answers in complex systems like the human body and the atmosphere it always ends up being "well we almost got it except this and this and this were anomalous and produced unexpected results." Of course there's a non stop stream of "anomalous" intervention in such complex systems. Wake me when they've cured cancer and invented immortality (then kill me because there's no way I want to live in a world THAT overpopulated. )
I don't smoke, I don't like smoking, never have, never will, but I'm always amazed at all the "smoke will kill you" stuff that I always believed, until I realized how prevalent smoking has been in Japan and they've been the longest lived people on earth for a long time (recently supplanted to #2 by Spain of all places.) Then you get the centenarians that ate the same bad food every day for their lives and that was the secret to long live. I mostly don't listen to all the "advice" In all likelihood the date of our deaths and method (unless strangled by a certain mad titan) are probably encoded in our DNA before we were even born. And no I don't eat a 5 pound t-bone daily....mostly just poultry Albeit in the US that's also of questionable nature. But the veggies I already know contain enough toxins to down an elephant, so it's a coin toss. I'd probably be better with a case of Doritos. Nope...pesticides in the cornmeal for that too....
And yes, we agree on world population reduction but not in the West. Though US population continuously grows, but not through native births which is a compound problem, and Europe is starting that process too. Importing overpopulation from elsewhere "because we can fit them" is a special kind of stupidity. "If we can't produce overpopulation on our own, we'll import it!" Which is all to service the entitlement Ponzi schemes that didn't make any more sense in 1949 than they do today, but somehow every Western country got stuck with them, ironically thanks to the low post-war population that had excess.
Contacts: Yeah, like I said to Ryu, I've always been squeamish about eyes in particular. No specific reason, just a natural sensitivity to the idea of anything involving eyes. Contacts are a complete no-go, as in "zero chance ever".
@bimmy-lee Wow, around here if you want "organic" you're prepared to shell out 4-6x the normal going rate. And the rich people around here gladly do so in abundance, guaranteeing no need for price competition. For everyone else there's Perdue chicken if you're lucky and "no name store brand, probably from China" meats otherwise. That sort of thing is premium luxury. Of course all the farms were bulldozed a decade or more ago. It's just residential trackts, corporate centers, and strip malls (with the same 10 services/stores in all of them) as far as you can go in any direction. It was rural not so long ago....the transformation happened over maybe 15 years
"Young ones" I dunno, in our day we were all raised on a diet of McDonalds and potato chips and we turned out just fine, right?
@BougieBeetle We can't provide enough food for all. The largest single population on earth is on the African continent, a large portion of which is arid desert incapable of much agriculture Traditionally it was inhabited by nomadic tribes, for that very reason. In "modern" society it needs to import most of its food. Meanwhile the solutions for producing enough food involve synthetic production of test tube meats, and solutions like I mentioned of the IMMENSE pesticides to ensure absolute minimum crop loss, and continued synthetic engineering of growing more food than is naturally possible.
Ultimately population has to consider quality of life. Humans are generally solitary creatures with small social circles. Dense crowding is unnatural. Violence, rapid spread of disease, etc are results of such. (It was, in fact, the extreme low population and vast distances between inhabited areas during the Great Pestilence that is the only reason the human race even exists today. That disease was so virulent, so efficient, it would jump from crowded town to nearby crowded town within a day or two and wipe out the population almost completely within another day or two. We don't have that kind of protection today. If a disease like that were to appear, we'd be at the mercy of the "miracle of science!" to stop it. And the miracle of science doesn't always get the answers, and doesn't always get them in time. If the Great Pestilance were to arrive again today in a different form (obviously the existing strain is known and thus more easily solvable), in all odds, there would be only a few thousand people left after a few weeks.
Densely packing as many people in, because you can, and forcing resource allocations by spreadsheet and dispensary, free will be darned, is without question going to lead to violence. And eventually war. The Wars of Muslim Expansion into Europe in the 11th century, while a religious expansion on the surface, were primarily a war necessitated by population pressure in the Middle East. Much of the current conflict in the same region can be attributed to the same, history always repeats. No matter the religious or ideological window dressing put on it, the ultimate conflict is too many people in too small an area to accommodate them needs to expand into new territory, and the group generally wants to preserve it's traditions and culture, including religion, thus it must push and replace another population.
A solution of "managing resources" better wears the problem right in the name: Managing. It requires a central control to "allocate" said resources. I thought the Soviets already taught us why central planning sounds a lot better on paper than in practice? The problem is "if only we could be totally efficient" removes the idea of free will, removes the ability to say "no", which means one is controlled by another. And of course once you get to a situation of one controlling another......you're back to violence.
Which goes back to the inevitability of depopulation. Like I said to thanos the other day. Every solution to try to prevent depopulation only accelerates it further. It's entirely inevitable. Similarly all the attempts at "world peace" since WWII will only serve to make the next big war even bigger than it would have been. You can't force people to like each other or tolerate each other if they don't like or tolerate each other, you can only force them to pretend which only works until there's an unavoidable conflict of interest between the two individuals/groups.
And yes, for clarification, both Thanos and I are talking more or less objectively and philosophically on the matter, not ideologically or politically, so there's no offense involved for your differing view.
Though I will take this moment after several disagreements with Thanos to whole heartedly agree with him. You're wrong.
@NEStalgia Well, it has been my experience that true objectivity is impossible, and it would be prudent for one to accept that at any given time, all of one's basic assumptions might be wrong, and one simply hasn't realized it yet.
Beyond that, I don't really want to get into this with you. I disagree fundamentally with many of your premises and assertions, but I do agree with some. Let's leave it at that!
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