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One old idea from the 1970s keeps rearing it's ugly head. The idea of population growth on Earth. Total population of humans on planet Earth was 600 million in 1700, 1 billion in 1803, 2 billion in 1928, 2.5 billion in 1950, 5 billion in 1987, and 7.7 billion in 2019. Today total population in 7.9 billion. However, all developed countries of the world are not having enough babies.
You might think that to maintain population, each couple must have 2 children on average. But due to child death and other technical factors, the average must be 2.1 per couple. Due to alternate lifestyles, that is now represented as 2.1 babies per woman over her entire life. Again that is an average. Geographers study large populations of entire countries or the planet. The term geographers use is "fertility rate"; so the fertility rate for a country must be 2.1 to sustain its population. If fertility rate is below that, the country has a shrinking population. If above, population is growing. All developed countries have a fertility rate below 2.1. For the last several years, developed countries have supplemented their population with immigration. Because all developed countries have this problem, majority of immigration must come from developing countries. In the last couple years, developed countries have accepted enough immigrants to not only sustain the population, but to maintain net population growth. This has created problems: immigrants from 3rd world developing countries coming in so fast that they don't have time to assimilate into the country's culture. They bring a variety of problems from the 3rd world countries they come from.
We still see various people claim total population of our planet is a problem. Professional scientists, geographers, have projected population growth into the future based on current trends. As developing countries adopt culture and habits of developed countries, they are gaining the same problem with couples not having babies. Calculations show world population will peak in 2060 at 8.0 billion people. It's currently 7.9 billion, so that means only 0.1 billion more people, then total population of Earth will decline. The United Nations has a lot of bureaucrats, they have difficulty keeping up with latest data. The UN continues to use mathematical models from the 1970s that claim population will continue to grow to year 2100 and beyond. But all professional scientists who work in this field say that model is obsolete, inaccurate.
Bottom line: we don't have a problem with overpopulation of Earth. We have a problem of developed countries committing suicide by simply not having babies.
This relates to Mars because some people think that excess population can be shipped off to Mars. I'm writing this because the speaker at this year's (2022) Mars Society Convention spoke about Biosphere 2. One comment was about overpopulation of Earth, and he claimed humans are destroying our planet. He even claimed that the majority of the biomass of Earth is humans and the cattle to support humans. That is completely wrong! He doesn't know how much biomass exists on Earth. But most importantly, his comment demonstrates ignorance. We don't have an overpopulation problem on Earth. We have a problem that population of developed countries shrinking /diminishing.
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Fertility rate for 2022, these 7 countries have half the population of the world
United States of America: 1.782
China: 1.702 - rising: 1.699 in 2021, 1.696 in 2020, 1.693 in 2019
India: 2.159 - declining: 2.179 in 2021, 2.200 in 2020, 2.220 in 2019
Pakistan: 5.349 - declining: 3.363 in 2021, 3.425 in 2020, 3.488 in 2019
Brazil: 1.682
Nigeria: 5.144 - declining: 5.212 in 2021, 5.281 in 2020, 5.349 in 2019
Indonesia: 2.240 - declining: 2.260 in 2021, 2.280 in 2020, 2.300 in 2019
Fertility rate of some other countries
Russia: 1.824
Ukraine: 1.753
UK: 1.753
Germany: 1.607
France: 1.607
Italy: 1.303
Spain: 1.378
Poland: 1.458
Australia: 1.794
New Zealand: 1.858
Mexico: 2.050
Canada: 1.492 - declining: 1.500 in 2021, 1.509 in 2020, 1.517 in 2019
Above countries include 73.79% of the population of Europe. Highest fertility rate in Europe is Sweden at 1.844 for 2022.
Source: macrotrends.net
::Edit:: above statistics are from the website macrotrends.net which gets their numbers from the UN. Statistics Canada is the Canadian federal government agency responsible for collecting statistics, census etc in Canada. According to Statistics Canada, fertility rate in Canada is worse.
Statistics Canada: Crude birth rate, age-specific fertility rates and total fertility rate (live births)
Canada: 1.43 in 2021, 1.41 in 2020, 1.47 in 2019, 1.51 in 2018, 1.55 in 2017
Last edited by RobertDyck (2022-10-24 13:05:45)
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For RobertDyck ...
Is there an optimum population for the planet?
Why is it necessary to exceed 8 billion people?
If a woman has the choice, why would she bring a new person into the world we see around us?
There ** has ** to be a good reason!
Hopefully you can provide that reason.
(th)
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Canada's culture is being destroyed. Vast numbers of immigrants so quickly are not assimilating. Here in Winnipeg, I've seen a major change since our current government was elected in 2015. I'm not against immigration, but the shear numbers and speed of immigration is too quick. At this rate, Canada will not be Canada for much longer. Many European countries are seeing problems that immigrants from 3rd world countries are bringing.
The macrotend is for population to move to large cities, vacating the countryside. With population concentrated in a small number of very large cities, that leaves land for parks, wilderness, etc. I don't see over population being a problem. Of course, I live in Winnipeg. Population of the metropolitan area of Winnipeg (city plus communities surrounding) increased from 783,099 to 834,678 from the census of 2016 to the census of 2021. Total population of the province of Manitoba for 2021 was 1,342,153. The second largest city is Brandon, a 2½ hour drive away, with 54,268 people. Wilderness is accessible a half hour drive outside city limits. There are farms in southern Manitoba, but also provincial forests.
Innovation increases as total population increases. That's because people have more time to create new things, and more people working. Quality of life increases with population, because economies of scale make price of an individual item lower when a larger number of items are manufactured.
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As Robert Zubrin has said, the belief that we have only finite resources on the world results in wars competing for those resources. Expansion into space means we will have increasing resources. Innovation means more resources from raw materials. In the late 1860s the supply of ivory was limited due to war. Rich people needed ivory for billiard balls. So one chemist invented celluloid as a substitute for ivory. Celluloid was later used for photographic film, replacing glass plates. This lead to movie film. It was also used for knife handles, ballpoint pen bodies, collars, cuffs, toys, etc.
As Robert Zubrin said during closing remarks as I write this: People are not threatened by too many people. People are threatened by those who believe there are too many people.
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RobertDyck,
Radical third-wave feminism has taught women to behave like men or to want to be men, so by the time they've matured enough to figure out that being a man is not what most women truly want, they're no longer young / fertile / feminine / submissive / agreeable. Basically, they're no longer capable of being a good wife / dutiful mother, and therefore no longer a suitable life partner for a marriage to raise children. Over time, and they are on a biological clock, the traits that made them attractive partners gradually disappear. By the time they're 30 years old or so, their chances of marrying, staying married, and raising well-adjusted children are near-zero.
Women are typically not held accountable for their actions, either, and want all the benefits of being a man without all of the associated responsibilities. Since our boys are increasingly and now typically raised by single mothers who feminize them, most young women don't find most young men very attractive or believe them to be suitable lifelong partners to raise children with. Worse still, all the attributes of a successful man tend to make women more masculine in nature (for example, the personality traits that make someone successful in business or able to win wars or to discipline children), and therefore equally unattractive to most successful men. Being disagreeable, for example, is not something most men find attractive in a women, even though most women find this to be an attractive trait in their partner. This is because attraction is not symmetrical. Nearly all of these masculine women and feminized young men don't understand this.
Any woman who tells you to "get in touch with your feminine side" is literally sabotaging her own prospects of finding a suitable partner. No matter what women say to the contrary, women do not find overly-emotional or feminized men attractive, at all or ever. Women find dominant, successful, and disagreeable men the most attractive, in the same way that men find submissive and agreeable women attractive.
1 in 3 western men from Age 18 to about 35 or so, hasn't had sex in over a year. Women do not report any similar rates of celibacy. In point of fact, many women have slept with 10+ people before the age of 25. After about 4 to 6 partners, women lose their ability to pair-bond, which is why they initiate divorces the moment someone who "looks better" (not solely physical appearance, specifically, as it could be money / social status / appearance of success) comes along. At a higher level, what this means is that 80% of women are sleeping with the top 10% to 20% of men (physical traits / monetary success / social status). This has been the subject of numerous studies showing that women found 80% of men to be "below average" in terms of overall attractiveness as a potential partner. Since the majority of young men in western countries have now been raised in single parent households by their mothers, this is unsurprising. Women have created the very thing they said they found attractive, which was a fundamental L-I-E, and of course, where the rubber meets the road, they find these feminized man-boys (that they feminized by tearing them away from their fathers) to be completely unattractive.
Western women are also more educated and higher paid than they've ever been in the past, but their overall self-reported happiness rates have fallen off a cliff, and many of them are now on anti-depressant drugs as a result. So, yeah, "you go girl", get that Masters or PhD, and make partner at that law firm, but realize that most women don't date down when it comes to a partner they intend to marry, so the higher you move up the monetary and social status hierarchy, the fewer and fewer options you provide to yourself as a woman.
Kanye West can marry the next McDonald's drive-through Barbie Doll he runs across. Kim Kardashian won't find another Kanye West to marry her or have children with. She's been married and divorced 3 times now, so the next man who comes along can't claim he doesn't know what will ultimately happen if he tries to have a long-term relationship with her. Kim was a hair stylist for Paris Hilton, who later became "more famous" for her sex tape with her boyfriend. Kim is a "strong and empowered woman" who became famous not for her business success (famous hair stylist for other famous people, which seems like a good-paying and prestigious job in a business that's all about vanity), nor even for who her mommy and daddy were (rich people), but for publicizing her sexual activities (the very worst thing any woman who wants to be in a healthy long-term stable relationship with a man can possibly do, because it's an indicator of so many other personal problems). What a role model for young women, huh?
Although the divorce papers stated 'irreconcilable differences', Kim went on to further explain in a Vogue interview in February that she decided to put herself first. She said: “For so long, I did what made other people happy. And I think in the last two years I decided, I'm going to make myself happy.
Basically, Kim Kardashian is just another woman who thinks marriage is all about making herself happy (even though the day she was married was the "happiest day of her life", the first, second, and third time she did it). Ten years from now, she won't be able to tell you what that actually means, or if she's actually happier in 10 years by no longer being married to Kanye West.
There may be an endless supply of men who will have sex with Kim Kardashian, just to brag to everyone else that they did it (another exceptionally poor reason to have sex with someone), but almost none of those men would ever marry her (even if she hadn't gone and plastered nude photos and sex tapes of herself all over the internet), that she would also take seriously and find to be an attractive partner. In point of fact, we can say that no matter how successful you are, Kim Kardashian eventually leave you (she's unhappy, you weren't ambitious enough, you said something she didn't like, you're a Pisces and she's a Virgo, etc). In fairness to Kim, most of that is due to her whorish behavior, rather than her wealth and social status limiting her options in men. The ladies who think that the "grass is always greener in someone else's backyard" would do well to remember that. This is because there are no "Alpha Women" out there. Anyone who thinks they are, is merely a masculine woman who most members of the opposite sex won't find the least bit attractive, and for the few who do, you ladies won't be attracted to them.
70% to 90% of the divorces are now initiated by women, most frequently over money or in so-called "no-fault" divorce. Men typically lose at least 50% of what they've worked for during the divorce, even if the man never cheated on his wife and was never abusive towards her in any ways, and was a dutiful father. There are a good number of bad men out there who do abuse women, sometimes in horrific ways, but women also typically seek out these men and think that "they're going to make a bad boy a good boy". It's utter nonsense, but that's what they think and they state as much.
All of this means that marriage is a bad deal for most men, and men are increasingly walking away from being dutiful husbands and fathers, to the detriment of western society. I've used the word "dutiful" a couple of times here, because marriage is about duty, not happiness or love. You choose to be happy. You choose to love your partner. Duty is not about pleasing yourself, or others in many cases. Duty is about setting the most important priorities first, over all other considerations. For example, my son can hate my guts for forcing him to become a contributing member of society, but even at the cost of our relationship, which I cherish, this is more important for him, for his own children, and for the good of American society. My wife or daughter can throw a fit after being told she can't have something that she really wants to buy, but keeping a roof over our heads is more important than what she wants in that moment. In other words, duty often involves considerable pain and suffering, it means dealing with unreasonable people in a reasonable way, and it means foregoing what I want for something that benefits a broader range of people than just myself.
As a husband and a father, I have a duty to protect my wife and children, even if that means protecting them from themselves. I have a duty to defend my country, even at the cost of my own life if that is the only way. I have a duty to create the next generation of young Americans who will take my place, fight our battles, raise the following group of young Americans, and continue the traditions that made America our last and best hope for freedom, liberty, and prosperity. Whether I am "happy with" or "in love" with that duty (to my wife, my children, my country), at all times, is another matter entirely. Sometimes that duty seems like a thankless task, while at other times I'm quite pleased with the result. Simply "giving up" because it's hard to do, or because I'm not happy all the time, is not a realistic option.
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kbd512,
I just read your first 4 paragraphs. I'll read the rest later. I see you've been watching manosphere content. I have too. I recognize the stuff you're saying. Yes, you're right. I disagree that all women must be submissive. But it's been my experience that women want a strong man. A lot of women contradict themselves, and a lot of women behave like children. The "shit test" is nothing but a child testing her parent to see what she can get away with. But many so called "women" do that to her husband. That's not adult behaviour.
So what do we do about it? Government can pass laws to make spousal support illegal in all cases, no exception. This is the 21st century, women can get employment. Why the hell would a woman get support from a divorced husband!?! And we can pass laws that state in the case of adultery, the spouse who was faithful gets the house, gets custody of the children, gets all communal property. The spouse who was unfaithful gets nothing but what she had before she married. And I say "she" because my common-law wife and fiancée cheated on me the first night we spent apart. Besides, I've read scientific studies from the 1970s, '80s, and '90s that said an equal number of married women cheated as men. But this is 2022; there are so many resources to help women chat that now far more women cheat than men.
We need to do something about this. The "woke" movement must be crushed. Others have speculated that China is deliberately supporting the "woke" movement in Western countries to deliberately weaken us. This is making me sound like a right-wing social conservative; I'm not. But many feminist women from the 1960s and 1970s now hate the "new wave feminists". I thought it was called "fourth wave feminism", you called it "third wave". Whatever the count, other women have pointed out they aren't feminist at all, they're guilty of misandry. Misogyny is the hatred of all women, misandry is the hatred of all men. Misandry is just as bad as misogyny. Sexism is sexism. There is no such thing as reverse prejudice, it's just prejudice.
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We have to be very careful. Demanding all women act docile and submissive will get this initiative killed right off the bat. That won't work. So let's focus on the problem of not enough babies.
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RobertDyck,
The misandry started during the third wave, but most of those feminists later came to regret that feminism became not about equality before the law for women, but was instead perverted into attempting to establish superiority over men, which was clearly a mistake. At the same time, there was also a lot of misogyny, which was and is equally abhorrent. There are some truly awful men out there, but society has devised quite a few mechanisms to keep them in check. There are instances where those mechanisms don't work as they should, and we should fix that. Comparatively fewer mechanisms are now present to keep the bad behavior of women in check, but they do still exist.
That said, this hatred of the opposite sex is a steaming pile of crap that must be stopped at all costs. It's no different in practice than any other form of prejudice, such as racism and bigotry. We're partners, not adversaries, and certainly not enemies. Anyone who thinks otherwise has lost the plot. Everyone is well advised to steer clear of any ideology that foments hatred or derision or envy or worship of the opposite sex. I've been reading about this stuff during the past year or so, to merely try to figure out what the hell is going on with my step-son's generation. It's not normal. I don't even know what to call this supposed "fourth wave" of feminism, but it's definitely not supportive of girls and women. It seems almost purposefully designed to hurt or outright destroy women, which is disgusting and evil.
How about this for fireside chat honesty?
As a man, you need a woman. As a woman, you need a man. Anyone who believes otherwise, or believes that they're better than the opposite sex, needs to refrain from imbibing so heavily in the "Cult of the Imperial I".
All women who want a healthy relationship with men they love and respect will have to learn to subordinate their desire for 24/7/365 happiness, which is not realistically achievable, to the requirements for raising well-adjusted children in a committed relationship, which means a two parent home with a mother and a father who get along with each other well enough to make ends meet, and to not kill each other or their children. There will be fights, tears, things said that you wished you hadn't said, and a lot more you were never prepared for, but in the end if a basically good man and good woman come together and commit to each other, then humanity will continue after they're gone.
Most women need to adopt a ride-or-die mentality or strategy, if you will, and then they don't have to worry about their men leaving them, because good men won't do that. Some basic ability to judge character is required, and admittedly many women are not as good at this as they'd like to believe they are. Since so few of these girls and young women have good men in their lives to act as role models, it's easy to understand why this is the case. No experience, good or bad, can be a dangerous thing. Without fathers and brothers who care for them and will look after them, sorting out the good from the bad is more difficult, but no father or brother worthy of being called a man wants their daughter or sister left in the care of an incompetent or abusive man. The nuclear family is required to reduce the rate of this problem. It's pretty clear that only societal decay follows the breakup of the nuclear family. If all the current social policies hurt the nuclear family, then at some point stupidity alone is not an adequate explanation, so it must be malicious in nature.
The requirements for success in life in America or most of western society are relatively simple:
1. Graduate from High School with a B average or better. If you can actually afford to attend a vocational / trade school or college, then that's gravy on top of your steak. In most cases, there's a job for you somewhere, doing something, working for someone else or yourself, no matter what you want to do. That said, if you choose basket weaving, then you'd better be the best basket weaver in the west. Art is a hobby for most people, in the same way that flying is a hobby of mine. I don't love flying enough to be a professional pilot, so my day job is programming. If I completely upended my life, then yes, maybe I could "live my dreams" by becoming a commercial pilot, but I also know what I am, and that's a database application programmer with a fondness for airplanes.
2. Don't have children out of wedlock and stay with the person you choose to have children with (ride or die), in order to raise children in a 2 parent home that includes a mother and a father. If you're such a poor judge of character that you can't determine if a man will commit to you and raise children with you, then don't sleep with him, because whatever temporary pleasure you gain will come with a lifetime of regret attached to it, as it pertains to your ability to maintain a relationship with someone you do want to remain with. Women grant access to sex, but men grant access to relationships, and the two are not equivalent. A whore will sleep with almost any man for money, even one she despises, but she has no relationship with him and is unlikely to ever have a relationship with anyone else as a result. Any woman, regardless of personal appearance or social status, can get some or even most men to sleep with her, but the same cannot be said about her ability to keep a relationship with one or maybe any of those same men. Therefore, sex should be tied to real relationships that last longer than a month. It's hard to say you have a relationship with someone if you've only known them for a month. My wife and I have been together since 2005 and every so often I still learn something new about her that I didn't know. At this point, it's normally about personality or desires or beliefs- all things with deeper meaning that she didn't initially think she could confide in me, even after we were married. In other words, deep trust can take a lot of time to establish.
For example, my wife was absolutely certain that I would leave her after she was diagnosed with her first brain tumor, which I only found out about much later. Her own family apparently thought that I would leave her (another of these "Asian-ism" as I call them, related to people with medical problems being somewhat similar or equivalent to bad / defective / evil / other assorted nonsense "type people"; cultural, in other words), and were dumbfounded that I didn't. They were shocked that my own mother never left her side the entire time she was in the hospital. Three brain tumors later, we're still here and I haven't gone anywhere, because I'm not going anywhere.
What did she "learn from that"? What was "the takeaway"? Ride or die. There is no other option. After you remove all the artificial choices, you're left with the idea that men need women and women need men. A healthy long term relationship is not "optional" for about 99.99% of people. We're left with questioning why we should even allow most divorces to take place, given that most of the time one or both spouses ends up worse off than when they were married. There are a lot of mole hills that short-sighted people think are mountains, until they figure out that they're actually laying on the ground. After they get up and dust themselves off, their perspective about what they're looking at changes, and then they can walk right over that mole hill as if it wasn't there.
Men may be "visual creatures", as women frequently and correctly point out, but the woman who ends up with a ring on her finger and children is frequently not the absolute prettiest in the room, but the one who is most feminine, submissive, agreeable, and a dutiful mother. Furthermore, good men don't really care about how much education or money or social status a woman has, because they view that as belonging to their woman, not to them. This is because attraction is not symmetrical. The traits that women look for in a good man are not the traits that will make women good wives and mothers. In other words, all those "other things" only matter up to a certain point. I have to be able to talk to the woman I'm with, and we need some shared understanding and values, but that's about it. My wife's computer science degree and high-paying job doesn't make her more or less valuable to me, in my eyes. It's a similarity shared between us, but I never asked myself what her "earning potential" was before deciding to marry her. I think it's great that she has it, but that's not why I married her. If she had no degree / no money / no social status, she would still get the ring, my last name, and our children. She's a winner and a keeper on the metrics that matter to a man (or at least to the man who actually married her, versus all the infinite possibilities which never were and never will be)- loyalty / femininity / dutiful mother / agreeable / willing to submit or acquiesce on things I find important.
My wife is never going to be interested in guns or airplanes, in much the same way that I'm not interested in perfumes or clothes or shopping. That's F-I-N-E, because men and women are D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-T. Why should she care or need to know about taking care of engines or carpentry or fighting other men? In her own words to me, specifically about those things, "That's why I have you." I asked her to learn how to use a gun, whether she learned from me or someone else. She wasn't interested. She said she wasn't responsible enough to handle something like that. Knowing her as I do now, I have to agree. You can misplace your keys or cell phone a thousand times. You misplace a firearm one time and the result could be a disaster. She went to the gun range with me when we were dating, because she wanted to be with me, but the entire time she was terrified of the things and I was a little too dense to "get that". I eventually took her at her word and quit pressing the issue. Should women be expected to learn about engines or guns? Well, do you want women to be feminine and submissive, or do you want to try to turn women into men?
3. Don't do drugs or commit felonies. This is a serious problem for more people than I thought it was, but doping yourself up because you're unhappy is a poor substitute for actually being happy or learning how to constructively deal with life when you're unhappy. Ultimately, even recovering drug addicts find that duty and self-improvement provides actual happiness and peace-of-mind. Changing is also very hard, because life is hard in many different ways, but you learn how to fight back against it, rather than giving up.
For example, I drink with my friends and family because we're celebrating something, not to forget about life. Even during our funerals, we drink the favorite drink of the person we lost and tell stories about their life, which is a celebration of their life, rather than wallowing in our own misery and despair. After you accept that you will die, only then can you learn to savor life and all its challenges. If every day was exactly the same, which is what slavery brings, then yes, that would be a miserable existence. However, the end is unimportant, because nobody is getting out alive, and nobody is taking anything with them. After the Monopoly game is over, all of the pieces go back into the box. Everything in between, which you shared with someone else, is what truly matters.
That's pretty much it, though. You do those basic things and 99 times out of 100, you'll be able to raise a family, own a home, and society will continue to progress, with bigger and better things in store for your children and their children.
My wife threw a lot of fits when she was younger, some of which was undoubtedly connected to her three brain tumors, and at other times clearly her own personality quirks. I was frequently accused of treating her as if she was my child. I typically responded with, "Well, if you act like a child, then that's how I'll treat you." This was not because I look down upon her or that I thought any less of her, but when she behaves like a child, that's how other people in society will view her and treat her. It's far better for her that her husband corrected her bad behavior, than the rest of society, who undoubtedly would not have looked as kindly upon her as I do. I married her, after all.
Nowhere in my missive did I state that women should submit to any man, for any old reason. She first has to know that he is of basically good moral character (treats other people with kindness and respect), and that he's a competent leader (not prone to making rash decisions or extreme courses of action over petty issues). Trust without verification is a recipe for disaster. However, if you want to actually be treated as a woman, then you cannot do that while simultaneously behaving as if you were a man, whenever it suits your desires. Most women, maybe all of them, want to be treated as if they're special. Fair enough, and most men are actually willing to accommodate that desire, but you can't be special and equal at the same time. The reason men had near total / complete authority in the past, is that they also had near complete responsibility and the rest of society enforced accountability. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot be a leader who has no authority, or whose decisions are not respected by your subordinates. It doesn't work that way. Any good leader is going to place the welfare of his subordinates above nearly all other competing priorities. If he does not, then he's not a good leader.
So... What are some examples where I used my authority, as a man, to override what my wife wanted?
A. You can't spend more money than we make. The government can do this for awhile, but we cannot and ultimately they can't, either.
1. If you're going to buy something expensive or of questionable utility, especially repeatedly, then no, you don't have my approval. If you go behind my back and do it anyway, then you're in trouble.
2. If you want something out of our price range, then we either make more money or we live within our means.
3. Whether you feel deprived of something or not, you want for nothing.
B. If your safety is in serious danger, then I'm going to let you know about it.
1. No speeding or reckless driving or messing with your cellphone in the car. If I tell you to slow down when you're driving, then you need to slow down instead of talking back to me.
2. Don't mouth off to other people in public, whether I'm with you or not. Similarly, no engaging in gossiping about other wives / husbands / children. Women are going to talk because that's what they do when they get together, but that doesn't mean you can say anything you want. If you can't say something nice, then keep your mouth shut, regardless of what you think of the person. If I tell you to stay away from someone, then you stay away from them.
3. No promising things to other people, not even our family members, without my knowledge and consent- money, scheduling / availability, watching someone else's kids (I don't mind doing it every so often, but we're not a child care service), etc.
Yes, you're still an adult who can make her own decisions, but no you don't think rationally, you think emotionally, so if I tell you to stay away from someone toxic (especially men or women who like to gossip about others, people who are manipulative, start fights- because these have a way of escalating, or worst of all, engaging in criminal activity), then it's for your own good and you need to listen and obey if you want to stay married. We've encountered remarkably few such people, but encountered them we have, and after it's apparent that they're up to no good, regardless of how my wife feels about them, it's time to steer clear.
4. If your medical doctor says you need to take insulin and test your blood sugar every day, then that means you do those things to prevent more serious medical problems, not that I'm going to sign off on you not doing what he told you to do because you don't want to. I know it hurts a little and it's not fun, but this isn't about fun, it's about keeping you alive and healthy. In other words, stop asking me for my consent to cease doing what you know you're supposed to do, because my consent is not granted. Furthermore, don't lie to me about what your doctor told you to do, or pretend that you don't know. The whole "me no English" schtick is only cute when your life is not in danger. I know the shots and finger pricks are painful. I never want to see my wife or children in pain, but some pain is unavoidable in life. I'm sympathetic to your plight, but not understanding of your refusal to follow orders.
C. If you fail to grasp what is appropriate or acceptable, then you're going to hear from me.
1. The movies you like to watch may not be appropriate for children. You can still watch them, but only after our kids are asleep. I don't need our kids traumatized by watching horror or violent action movies, for example. Furthermore, an iPad is not a "Mommy in a box" or a "Daddy in a box". There are limits and rules, whether I'm present or not. If those rules are violated, then privileges will be lost. "Dad's not home", doesn't mean we get to do whatever we want. When I'm not present, which is entirely due to work, Mom is my agent, so she needs to act as such. I don't have a group of friends I hang out with. I go home to see my family the moment the job is done.
2. If Dad says "no", that doesn't mean you can go ask Mom to see if she says "yes". This is why my wife immediately asks our children, "Well, what did your father say?" (about whatever it is that they want at the moment)
If you're a woman, does any of that sound like something you truly want to fight with your husband over, or are you willing to accept that maybe your husband has your best interests at heart?
What would eventually happen to you or your children if none of that was taken into account?
When we were first married, my wife was fond of saying to me, "I'm not one of your sailors. You can't order me to do anything." My response to her was, "I didn't have children with any of them, yet they still listened to and obeyed me, or suffered the consequences if they did not. I may not be your father, but while you're married to me, you will obey me." She didn't like that, but I think she understood anyway.
Apart from that, if she wants something, then within reason I try to get if for her. She has access to all of our money, in case she needs it. She lives in a 6,000 square foot three story house with a pool, drives a Cadillac, has three kids and two dogs. Her material needs have been met, and then some. She doesn't have to wonder about where I am or what I'm up to. I'm either at work or at home. Right now I work from home.
If you're going to pick a hill to die on, then at least choose one with a commanding view of the terrain around it. If this is the sort of thing that you, as a woman, a wife, and a mother, think is worth splitting up over, then you're not a suitable wife and mother, from my viewpoint, as a man, a husband, and a father. None of that is intended to hurt women or take away their freedom or boss them around, but there is such a thing as foolish freedom. If you value your wife and children, as I do, then you take away their option to exercise foolish freedom.
Similarly, you would never allow a student driver to drive a NHRA Nitro-fueled car if you cared at all about their well-being, even if your student failed to recognize his or her limitations as a novice driver. One in a million students might be able to handle the power of a car like that, but the most probable outcome is a wreck. The same is true of relationships without boundaries and controls.
Complete explanations require a lot of ink and most people won't read enough to actually learn something. So what? Electrons are cheap these days. Read about what works and what doesn't, or stay ignorant. The information is out there now, so anyone can use it to their benefit or ignore it as they see fit.
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RobertDyck,
I don't want to "crush" anyone. I want to accurately point out the ways in which this "woke-ism" ideology is hurting people, especially those perpetuating it, especially our vulnerable women and children, and then to point out more positive courses of action for them to take that don't involve mutilating their bodies, taking hormone drugs, or other ill-advised and dangerous course of actions with serious and possibly fatal consequences. There are only so many courses of action that are merely survivable, and I'm sick of people with psychotic ideologies doing psychotic things to other people while pretending to care about them.
If you truly care about a person who thinks they're a bird, then you don't let them jump off a building, only for them to "discover", much too late at that point, that humans really cannot fly the way birds do. First, do no harm used to be a basic tenet of all legitimate medical practice, and you were duty bound as a medical doctor to uphold your oath of office, which is why medical doctors and nurses refuse to participate in executions, and why abortions were restricted to medical necessity to save the life of the mother.
This ideology is based on nothing. There is no such thing as "subjective truth". Gravity "just is", whether you like it or not. Similarly, gender is associated with sex. There are only two sexes, male and female. Since gender is tied to sex, there are no infinite numbers of made-up genders. Whether you think you're an eggplant or attack helicopter is irrelevant to reality, because you're neither of those things, which means you can only ever be male or female, which is determined by biology rather than society, long before birth. The notion that you were "born into the wrong body" is therefore false. You were born as you are, from basic human biology, and for no other reason. Whether you're a girl who plays with GI Joes or a boy who plays with Barbie Dolls, that doesn't change the circumstances of your birth, nor your gender. You can be as confused or as clear about it as you wish to be, but your play toy preference means nothing. Gender is not a "social construct", because human biology is not a "social construct". If gender was merely a social construct, then there's no need to mutilate your body to conform to something that was "made up" by society to begin with. If there's no connection between appearance and reality, either, then there's no reason to mutilate yourself or take dangerous hormone drugs.
See how easy this anti-logic / anti-science is to counter?
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If a woman has the choice, why would she bring a new person into the world we see around us?
The reason developed countries have below replacement fertility, or at least a major part of it, is that women *don't* feel they have the choice to have children. Desired fertility rates in most such countries are significantly above complete fertility -- women who wish to have three kids are instead having two, as my mother did (I *should* be a middle child, but alas, my parents didn't feel able to have another, so my mother didn't get the additional child she wanted). This isn't a simple case of women no longer being barefoot and pregnant and deciding they don't want kids.
I believe strong pro-natal policies have managed to shift the TFR by something like 0.1-0.2? Which is consistent with more women feeling more able to have the family sizes they desire. To get really big numbers significantly over replacement you do seem to need patriarchy (Israel is 3, but without the ultra-orthodox it drops to just above 2), but we probably don't need to go that far for certain developed countries to get close to replacement level, just affordable housing and support for flexible working...
"I'm gonna die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy." - If this forum was a Mars Colony
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Terraformer,
Is that feeling based upon fear of what might happen (economic crash, job loss, medical problems), or fear of something else?
Do women equate having children with living in poverty?
Affordable housing is relative to a country and region within the country. There are no "inexpensive" apartments or houses in Los Angeles, for example, or do you mean smaller houses that are cheaper to buy?
You can make structures smaller and therefore more affordable, but materials and land prices only go in one direction over time. I don't know how you'd make London or LA overall cheaper to live in, except by reducing tax burdens, which the people in charge there have no interest in doing. You can move to less expensive / affluent parts of the country, but that's about it.
As for flexible hours, I presume this applies to office-type jobs, because shifts at production plants or power stations won't as easily be able to accommodate such work schedules. So, more men working at the plant, and more women working in the office so they have more flexible work hours that way, or can work from home?
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Factory and power plant work is already heavily skewed by gender. And it's the middle classes -- who have a lot of the office work -- who are below replacement fertility.
James Damore made this point about how Google could better accommodate women. It made a lot of people mad.
There's no reason for materials to constantly get more and more expensive; discovering how to coke coal led to the price of steel dropping precipitously. Land prices can be dealt with by building mansion blocks (higher density). The big driver of house prices, at least in the UK, is regulation strangling supply, which a large fraction of the electorate support because they like ever increasing house prices (they're alright jack, they got theirs).
"I'm gonna die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy." - If this forum was a Mars Colony
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There are lots of reasons why this is happening.
The cost of raising a child in an urbanised, developed country is high.
https://cpag.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/cost-child
In the UK, most people live in cramped conditions as well. There isn't much space. That makes raising children more difficult. Outside of the wealthy classes, most people in the UK (and US) have gradually been getting poorer since the turn of the century. With the death of manufacturing, there is a shortage of well paid jobs.
Couple that with how selfish people have become and how easily available contraception is and you have a population crisis before long.
I am also of the opinion that decades of feminism has led to a shortage of marriage quality women. The average man simply does not want to marry the average woman. And without marriage, women lack the stability and support needed to produce children.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-10-25 03:20:59)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re #14 (and topic)
This post is NOT intended to dispute anything in #14, or even to call any part into question.
However, in the spirit of what (I understand to be) the topic, I would like to make the observation that sex and marriage are two entirely different things.
In a Venn diagram, with two circles, the intersection of the two would be a situation where sex coincides with marriage.
The size of the intersection would appear to have something to do with the future of the human population.
(th)
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Terraformer,
Materials continue to increase in price because raw resource quality continues to diminish while the energy to transform those materials continues to get more expensive, in real terms (harder to get at). We've become more efficient in energy usage, but if Iron ore concentration declines by just 5%, then it takes 10% more energy to obtain the same quantity of Iron, because you have to process 10% more material. We've improved the energy efficiency of the basic refinement processes over the decades, for producing pig Iron and steel, but the overall energy efficiency improvements of those newer or modified processes hasn't matched the rate of decline and the raw materials are now shipped half-way around the world most of the time. 85% of American-processed Iron ore is imported from overseas, mostly from countries on the other side of the planet.
Recycling energy efficiency is pretty good now, but again, even scrap steel and Iron recycling requires quite a bit of power. In America, we mostly use Electric Arc Furnaces (larger capacity, lower initial capex) but are also starting to use Induction Furnaces (smaller capacity, higher initial capex but lower lifetime operating costs since there are no consumable Carbon electrodes and less waste heat is lost during melting, but they also require cleaner / higher purity feedstock), which are a marked improvement over ye olde coal-fired blast furnaces, but most of the electricity still comes from burning natural gas or coal, so all processes remain incredibly energy-intensive. We mostly make higher grade steel and Iron products, though, so what about cheaper mass-produced products for construction?
The only way I can see costs being reduced is if there's more local production of things like Iron or Aluminum, lumber, and concrete, combined with high recycling rates.
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Biggest influence of man on mankind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_w … ted_States
has been the world war 1, II, Korean, Vietnam, just to name a few as they had many deaths, chemical poisoning plus, lots of injuries that left men not able to be present for the family, not able to help in the raasing as well as not being able to father them once home. During those time periods due to the lack of men for the work force woman were recruited to take their place. This did leave many families poor, working and even forcing children to do so as well in the factories to be able to survive.
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The Internet news feed served this item today, when I was looking for something else ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/busi … wtab-en-us
This is a fairly long article, with a great number of details and examples of why women are deciding not to have children in China. My impression is that it all comes down to the behavior of men. A key finding/observation is that the One Child Policy led to a great number of women who were raised as single children, and thus received attention they would normally have been denied.
(th)
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