Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Pattern-chaser]

Oops! Sorry for the misleading editing in my previous post. This is how it should have looked.

We have developed the means to consume many times more than we did then, and the appetite for such consumption too. When my parents bought their first house, they aspired to owning a refrigerator. And maybe living on a road where the bloke three doors down owned a car. That was in 1950 or so. You are surely aware of escalations (in consumption) that have occurred since.

And we have the capacity to produce far more from less.

We do? Interesting thought. But is it really so, I wonder?

Seriously though, it is just stupid to claim that 1 billion will consume "more" than eight billion.

Really? I refer you to empirical historical information, and that Axiom that says if it happened yesterday and today, we assume it will happen tomorrow too. Our consumption is constrained only by our lack of money. How many would choose to own a Ford if they could own a Bentley instead? How many would limit themselves to one home if they could actually have 3 or 4 holiday homes, especially if their friends and neighbours already had such things? We seem limited only by money, and money is a con-trick, an illusion, even though we can use it to buy things that are properly real. Once the Extinction Bonanza (I'm guessing how the media might label it) got under way, I think we could easily consume 10 times as much, or more. We await only the opportunity, I fear....

[Sculptor1]

And we have the capacity to produce far more from less.

We do? Interesting thought. But is it really so, I wonder?

I am surprised you question this.

Imagine you were to give the plans for a toothbrush, a woollen sweater, a bed sheet, a window, or a car to someone in the 19thC, how long would they take to make them, how many people would they have to employ and what would be there method?
You can buy a toothbrush made in the traditional way. It will set you back $10, because it takes so long to make. In a modern factory the unit cost is more like 1000 times less. and probably takes less than a second to make.
Bedsheets on a loom? from handpicked cotton?
You can forget about the car.
What does not change is the amount of basic resources that each item uses, but with economies of scale you probably use less to get the resources to manufacturing then to retail.

[Jklint]

Of course, there's too many of us, and of course we consume too much, and of course corrupt players are standing in the way of meaningful action on the environment. Hence decimated ecosystems the world over.

Call it the triumvirate of catastrophe with the Four Horseman following claiming the spoils. However, in order of priority I would have placed "corrupt players standing in the way of meaningful action on the environment" first and "there's too many of us" last. Corrupt players, to keep the economy going, demand sacrifice at the expense of ecosystems which kind of resembles the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice to insure the sun shows up every morning.

[Sy Borg]

I used to believe that humanity would find a way. I did not realise the extent of corruption.

Corruption, not greed? I suppose one might imply the other? 🤔

Sure. Corruption is essentially greed in high places.

[Sy Borg]

Of course, there's too many of us, and of course we consume too much, and of course corrupt players are standing in the way of meaningful action on the environment. Hence decimated ecosystems the world over.

Call it the triumvirate of catastrophe with the Four Horseman following claiming the spoils. However, in order of priority I would have placed "corrupt players standing in the way of meaningful action on the environment" first and "there's too many of us" last. Corrupt players, to keep the economy going, demand sacrifice at the expense of ecosystems which kind of resembles the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice to insure the sun shows up every morning.

The fact is that the corrupt players are us. They are who we become when we achieve power. If they die, they will be replaced, and their replacements, and their replacements ad infinitum. Look at how revolutions pretty well always turn out - with a new authoritarian regime. Human numbers are significant, allowing greater leverage and empowerment for corrupted people at the top.

Look at this chart of human population in the last 10,000 years - a modest period in evolutionary time scales: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/expo ... series.svg

In nature, when such exponential growth occurs in one spcies, it causes significant imbalances. So it's hardly surprising that humans have been wiping out animals at a record rate in the last century. Human consumption per capita has also increased exponentially https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress. ... s_line.png. So we are dealing with an amplifier effect, with numbers and consumption boosting each other.

More numbers with more power gave rise to the false notion of endless growth. Sure, we can grow forever - until nature gives out. Sure, we can introduce efficiencies - except that the power companies that literally powered the rise of industrial societies are, not surprisingly, some of the largest companies in the world. And these very big players refuse to lose value on their legacy infrastructure to make way for clean, efficient, sustainable and affordable energy sources.

While it's easy to be wise after the event, logically, this was inevitable. Whether overpopulation is a greater or lesser problem than that of multinational companies, it is certainly one of our many problems today.

[Pattern-chaser]

And we have the capacity to produce far more from less.

We do? Interesting thought. But is it really so, I wonder?

I am surprised you question this.
Imagine you were to give the plans for a toothbrush, a woollen sweater, a bed sheet, a window, or a car to someone in the 19thC, how long would they take to make them, how many people would they have to employ and what would be there method?
You can buy a toothbrush made in the traditional way. It will set you back $10, because it takes so long to make. In a modern factory the unit cost is more like 1000 times less. and probably takes less than a second to make.
Bedsheets on a loom? from handpicked cotton?
You can forget about the car.
What does not change is the amount of basic resources that each item uses, but with economies of scale you probably use less to get the resources to manufacturing then to retail.

You refer to the (monetary) cost of production, but I was responding to your suggestion that we can "produce far more from less". I don't think this is so. As you say, "What does not change is the amount of basic resources that each item uses". So we cannot make more with less, we can make the same from the same. As for cost, it is a sad feature of our Predatory Capitalist system that the monetary cost of our labour is so high, and the monetary cost of irreplaceable environmental resources (needed to make stuff like toothbrushes) is so low. This skews the discussion. But the fact remains that we cannot make more with less.

[Sculptor1]

And we have the capacity to produce far more from less.

We do? Interesting thought. But is it really so, I wonder?

I am surprised you question this.
Imagine you were to give the plans for a toothbrush, a woollen sweater, a bed sheet, a window, or a car to someone in the 19thC, how long would they take to make them, how many people would they have to employ and what would be there method?
You can buy a toothbrush made in the traditional way. It will set you back $10, because it takes so long to make. In a modern factory the unit cost is more like 1000 times less. and probably takes less than a second to make.
Bedsheets on a loom? from handpicked cotton?
You can forget about the car.
What does not change is the amount of basic resources that each item uses, but with economies of scale you probably use less to get the resources to manufacturing then to retail.

You refer to the (monetary) cost of production, but I was responding to your suggestion that we can "produce far more from less". I don't think this is so. As you say, "What does not change is the amount of basic resources that each item uses". So we cannot make more with less, we can make the same from the same. As for cost, it is a sad feature of our Predatory Capitalist system that the monetary cost of our labour is so high, and the monetary cost of irreplaceable environmental resources (needed to make stuff like toothbrushes) is so low. This skews the discussion. But the fact remains that we cannot make more with less.

I take your point but still I disagree.
Modern methods are also more efficient due to economy of scale.
This one is old as the hills:
Consider a donkey carrying a load of hay from Athens to Corinth. By the time it reaches Corinth the donkey has eaten all the hay. Add a cart and the donkey gets there with 60% of the load. Take the hay by ship and the journey is 10% in time and the load is ten times the size with no loss.
Add more tech and cash in the benefits.
Make a 100 jumpers with knitting needles - and you have to feed 100 people for a day. Use a machine and you make the same 100 jumpers per hour for the cost of a gallon of oil to feed the machine.
The food also requires transport cooking, ect, all more than the machine.

THis is pretty basic stuff.

[Jklint]

The fact is that the corrupt players are us. They are who we become when we achieve power. If they die, they will be replaced, and their replacements, and their replacements ad infinitum. Look at how revolutions pretty well always turn out - with a new authoritarian regime. Human numbers are significant, allowing greater leverage and empowerment for corrupted people at the top.

That’s how history has played out. But the power monopolists wouldn’t have achieved that power if the great unwashed of society hadn’t granted it to them stupidly believing the rhetoric and the lies. Power, once granted is protected by every means available including armies. Numbers are less important in that respect than the gullibility of those they lead. Humans are nothing if not gullible either through fear or wishful thinking that a would-be autocrat knows exactly how to exploit. He doesn’t even have to be particularly intelligent at it. Consider Trump; it’s unbelievable he could convince anyone who isn’t demented but there are many still believing every lie, every insanity he utters. If his nose grew an inch for every lie he told it would be over 20,000 inches long which still isn't long enough to jeopardize his standing among a huge section of the electorate.

Look at this chart of human population in the last 10,000 years - a modest period in evolutionary time scales: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/expo ... series.svg

Yes, but that’s no surprise since the most intelligent and malicious animal, whatever it is, has the power, will and means to increase beyond anything else on the planet and would probably do so on any other planet.

The “selfish gene”, in whatever species including insects, is a juggernaut and will literally cover the planet if left unchecked. It’s the checking aspect which drives evolution forward which is how nature feeds on itself. Humans have removed themselves from this cycle depending on intelligence to do the job which is barely happening. Instead, to get biblical, it has corrupted itself and the cause why the Medea hypothesis is becoming much less hypothetical.

In nature, when such exponential growth occurs in one spcies, it causes significant imbalances. So it's hardly surprising that humans have been wiping out animals at a record rate in the last century.

That correlation is not accurate! We’ve been a killing machine for sport unrelated to numbers going back to when writing wasn’t even invented.

Here’s a short summary of the Wild Beast Games of Rome:

Catastrophic Effects
The Romans imported exotic wild beasts from all over the empire and at times from well beyond their frontiers. In the first millennium BC, great cats such as lions, panthers, and tigers still roamed freely in Western Asia; in 51 BC, Cicero’s brother, who was governor of Cilicia, was asked to supply panthers from Asia. There were hippopotami and crocodiles on the banks of the Nile and elephants and ostriches could be found north of the Sahara. This rich fauna was devastated over the centuries as a highly efficient system of capturing and transporting them was established to satisfy audiences in Rome and in other great cities around the empire. By the 4th century AD it was becoming increasingly hard to find animals to satisfy the demands of the arena. Almost none of these great animals, with the exception of a few lions in the Rif mountains of Morocco, are to be found north of the Sahara or West of India today.

It took only a fraction of us to accomplish that.

Human consumption per capita has also increased exponentially https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress. ... s_line.png. So we are dealing with an amplifier effect, with numbers and consumption boosting each other.

...which is due to a political system always needing more tax-payers and for businesses a never ending array of consumers. Abortions are mostly discouraged politically for that reason while corporations resent any limits to consumerism by limiting numbers. It’s all contained in a defunct, worn-out economic system where adding more to bad makes it worse. No question that numbers are important but the conditions under which they operate are even more fundamental ...which is not to say that limits don’t apply.

[Sy Borg]

Look at this chart of human population in the last 10,000 years - a modest period in evolutionary time scales: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/expo ... series.svg

Yes, but that’s no surprise since the most intelligent and malicious animal, whatever it is, has the power, will and means to increase beyond anything else on the planet and would probably do so on any other planet.

The “selfish gene”, in whatever species including insects, is a juggernaut and will literally cover the planet if left unchecked. It’s the checking aspect which drives evolution forward which is how nature feeds on itself. Humans have removed themselves from this cycle depending on intelligence to do the job which is barely happening. Instead, to get biblical, it has corrupted itself and the cause why the Medea hypothesis is becoming much less hypothetical.

In nature, when such exponential growth occurs in one spcies, it causes significant imbalances. So it's hardly surprising that humans have been wiping out animals at a record rate in the last century.

That correlation is not accurate! We’ve been a killing machine for sport unrelated to numbers going back to when writing wasn’t even invented.

... the Wild Beast Games of Rome:

The correlation is not only accurate, it's well documented. Population and extinctions go hand in hand.

Throughout history some societies have been more cruel and destructive than others. They take turns. But all of history has seen human societies behaving appallingly towards nature, not just ancient Rome, and not just now. Try Russia and China's outrageous cruelties. Or factory farms for chicken and pigs around the industrialised world and much of the developing world. Poachers in Africa and South America. The list goes on.

Now there's so many of us that we can aim to conserve species and still wipe them out.

[Count Lucanor]

In nature, when such exponential growth occurs in one spcies, it causes significant imbalances. So it's hardly surprising that humans have been wiping out animals at a record rate in the last century.

That correlation is not accurate! We’ve been a killing machine for sport unrelated to numbers going back to when writing wasn’t even invented.

Here’s a short summary of the Wild Beast Games of Rome:

Catastrophic Effects
The Romans imported exotic wild beasts from all over the empire and at times from well beyond their frontiers. In the first millennium BC, great cats such as lions, panthers, and tigers still roamed freely in Western Asia; in 51 BC, Cicero’s brother, who was governor of Cilicia, was asked to supply panthers from Asia. There were hippopotami and crocodiles on the banks of the Nile and elephants and ostriches could be found north of the Sahara. This rich fauna was devastated over the centuries as a highly efficient system of capturing and transporting them was established to satisfy audiences in Rome and in other great cities around the empire. By the 4th century AD it was becoming increasingly hard to find animals to satisfy the demands of the arena. Almost none of these great animals, with the exception of a few lions in the Rif mountains of Morocco, are to be found north of the Sahara or West of India today.

It took only a fraction of us to accomplish that.

That's right. The biological analogy behind the overpopulation myth simply does not play well with the facts of history and culture. There's nothing remotely similar in the natural behavior of any species to the destructive possibilities of technology and ways of exploiting resources. Nothing to do with pure numbers.

[Jklint]

I said most of the things I wanted to say. No point going on. History makes clear the devastation humans have caused from the very beginning, whether in greater or lesser numbers, statistics or no statistics. The main difference between then and now, we're not killing animals directly anywhere near as much as we used to. Most times when some trophy hunter gets killed by his prey most people rejoice, including me. Instead what's happening is that our other compatriots having always existed side-by-side with us, being forced into extinction due to their habitats being destroyed by corrupt politicians with no conscience as to consequences - who truly deserve everything a camp like Auschwitz has to offer in return for their services - and by the less direct means of climate change, which we're all responsible for and been warned about for decades.

It's irony at its most egregious that with all this advanced technology getting evermore advanced, we're de-globalizing, progressing toward an apocalypse that was once considered only in religious terms; but if that ship goes down then everyone deserves to go down with it.

Nevertheless, though there can be no return of extinct flora or fauna, maybe there's a chance for some salvation to begin reversing the effects of climate change fast enough to save our stupid unscrupulous hides.

https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_flannery_ ... al_warming

[Pattern-chaser]

You refer to the (monetary) cost of production, but I was responding to your suggestion that we can "produce far more from less". I don't think this is so. As you say, "What does not change is the amount of basic resources that each item uses". So we cannot make more with less, we can make the same from the same. As for cost, it is a sad feature of our Predatory Capitalist system that the monetary cost of our labour is so high, and the monetary cost of irreplaceable environmental resources (needed to make stuff like toothbrushes) is so low. This skews the discussion. But the fact remains that we cannot make more with less.

I take your point but still I disagree.
Modern methods are also more efficient due to economy of scale.
This one is old as the hills:
Consider a donkey carrying a load of hay from Athens to Corinth. By the time it reaches Corinth the donkey has eaten all the hay. Add a cart and the donkey gets there with 60% of the load. Take the hay by ship and the journey is 10% in time and the load is ten times the size with no loss.
Add more tech and cash in the benefits.
Make a 100 jumpers with knitting needles - and you have to feed 100 people for a day. Use a machine and you make the same 100 jumpers per hour for the cost of a gallon of oil to feed the machine.
The food also requires transport cooking, ect, all more than the machine.

THis is pretty basic stuff.

Yes, it is pretty basic, but I think you're forgetting the global scale of this toipic and this discussion. Yes, a machine can make more jumpers, faster, but the 100 knitters still have to eat. If they can't make their money knitting, they need an alternative job. So the machine simply moves the money from the knitters to the owner of the machine. So the rich get richer and the workers must do what they can. Also, the cost to the environment of building, maintaining and finally disposing of the knitting machine must also be accounted for. The Luddites had some strong points in their favour.

[Sculptor1]

You refer to the (monetary) cost of production, but I was responding to your suggestion that we can "produce far more from less". I don't think this is so. As you say, "What does not change is the amount of basic resources that each item uses". So we cannot make more with less, we can make the same from the same. As for cost, it is a sad feature of our Predatory Capitalist system that the monetary cost of our labour is so high, and the monetary cost of irreplaceable environmental resources (needed to make stuff like toothbrushes) is so low. This skews the discussion. But the fact remains that we cannot make more with less.

I take your point but still I disagree.
Modern methods are also more efficient due to economy of scale.
This one is old as the hills:
Consider a donkey carrying a load of hay from Athens to Corinth. By the time it reaches Corinth the donkey has eaten all the hay. Add a cart and the donkey gets there with 60% of the load. Take the hay by ship and the journey is 10% in time and the load is ten times the size with no loss.
Add more tech and cash in the benefits.
Make a 100 jumpers with knitting needles - and you have to feed 100 people for a day. Use a machine and you make the same 100 jumpers per hour for the cost of a gallon of oil to feed the machine.
The food also requires transport cooking, ect, all more than the machine.

THis is pretty basic stuff.

Yes, it is pretty basic, but I think you're forgetting the global scale of this toipic and this discussion. Yes, a machine can make more jumpers, faster, but the 100 knitters still have to eat. If they can't make their money knitting, they need an alternative job. So the machine simply moves the money from the knitters to the owner of the machine. So the rich get richer and the workers must do what they can. Also, the cost to the environment of building, maintaining and finally disposing of the knitting machine must also be accounted for. The Luddites had some strong points in their favour.

During the time to Luddites were in fashion there had been wide-scale poverty. When people did work holidays and weekends were unknown, and the working day was all daylight hours.

Since machines have taken over some of the drudgery people have weeks of during the year, two days off a week and many live on only 40 hours or less per week.
If there was a serious attempt to reduce inequality there would be far less work to do by those that represent the workforce which is a massively smaller proportion that it was when the Luddites and Sabot maniacs were smashing machines.


With the right machines

[Newme]

So gad-fly just came over and said: "an hurricane is fast approaching." The audience replies: "really? did you get it from the news, the weather report, a witness? We didn't hear anything. How do you know?" Now imagine you replied: "well, that isn't necessary, I just feel it...I just don't like this wind. It is always windy before hurricanes come".

Would you think that makes sense and people should run and hide right away? Wouldn't that be suspicious of trying to manipulate people using fear?

1st off, Thanks for your reply. I appreciate getting your perspectives regarding better uses of resources. And it makes sense that the concern is not really about population as much as basically greed & irresponsible use of resources.

I plan to look up more about what you mentioned: “Spain, Portugal and South Korea that were used as comparison, given that they still consume a lot less than Hong Kong, the US and the UK, without being poor like India.”

Regarding your comment with the analogy of paranoia/fear - do you think that is happening regarding covid? Studies have suggested 94-99% of so-called “covid deaths” were actually due to other factors. I smell ulterior motives all over with this - do you? Curious what you think.

[Count Lucanor]

So gad-fly just came over and said: "an hurricane is fast approaching." The audience replies: "really? did you get it from the news, the weather report, a witness? We didn't hear anything. How do you know?" Now imagine you replied: "well, that isn't necessary, I just feel it...I just don't like this wind. It is always windy before hurricanes come".

Would you think that makes sense and people should run and hide right away? Wouldn't that be suspicious of trying to manipulate people using fear?

1st off, Thanks for your reply. I appreciate getting your perspectives regarding better uses of resources. And it makes sense that the concern is not really about population as much as basically greed & irresponsible use of resources.

I plan to look up more about what you mentioned: “Spain, Portugal and South Korea that were used as comparison, given that they still consume a lot less than Hong Kong, the US and the UK, without being poor like India.”

Regarding your comment with the analogy of paranoia/fear - do you think that is happening regarding covid? Studies have suggested 94-99% of so-called “covid deaths” were actually due to other factors. I smell ulterior motives all over with this - do you? Curious what you think.

It's too early to tell about what's going on exactly with COVID-19, but if you can provide references to such studies, it would be useful. I suspect people die from the effects of the virus in vital organs such as lungs and kidneys, which is why more deaths occur among the elderly and people with previous health conditions. If that's what is meant by "other factors" I don't see any major disagreement with what has been said so far.