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1 hour ago, maninblack said:

Everyone says this but when the tiniest virus comes along and knocks off a few the "overpopulation" crowd freak out like pussies.

I bet the venn diagram of over-population alarmists probably overlaps with the over-reacted to Covid group pretty strong.  You're right about that.  

But then again, overpopulation isn't really a problem anymore...and it sure as shit ain't contagious.  Covid-19 is still a problem and still highly contagious. 

But good news is this education trend bodes very well for my two daughters.  Both will have an abundance of higher education opportunities that I've already begun to rig.  Neither will have to settle for a mouth-breathing Clevon trying to repopulate some two-but rural shithole in Middle America to return to some era of awesomeness that never existed in the first place.  Covid-19 has also done some very heavy lifting on the overpopulation issue.  

It's like King Edward I/Longshanks said in "Braveheart".....If we can't get them out, we'll breed them out.

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Well, sarcasm and politics aside...I think this is an empirical and marked jumping off point in our nation's demographic future.  Things are at a clear pivot point and it will permeate throughout many parts of our society.  I look forward to this thread bringing in different data points and opinions. 

The election ramifications of this tidal shift are just astounding.  Educated urban and suburban women (you know, where the dames and broads with fancy degrees and jobs live and work) are causing a tectonic shift in electorates.  Those left behind in exurban and rural areas without degrees, particularly males, will be a footnote in elections going forward..but for now are a very influential demographic for campaigns.  I wonder if political affiliations will become more of a wedge issue in courting partners, or less of one.  I know it won't stay the same.  After financial security, thoughts on family, and probably religion...politics seems to have always run a distant fourth in finding a suitable mate.  But I think the math will eventually shake that out to a great extent.  

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9 hours ago, OneOfTheOutOfFocusGuys said:

it looks like the women "marrying down" thing is starting to happen now.  it intrigued me so i googled and here's an article on those trends.

 

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-gender-gap-in-marriages-between-college-educated-partners

 

 

I had to stare at this chart for a while to really grasp what its saying, but i think that information in hidden in the purple bars on the right

 

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In my mid 30s UT bachelor degree friend group most of the wives have higher level degrees than their husbands. Including my wife.   The only exception are husbands who became lawyers or MDs. 
 

of course the wives all recieved doctorates/ masters in art, architecture, generic “business” or communications so their husbands make 2-4x what the highly educated wife makes.   I wouldn’t really call that marrying “down”. 

Edited by Xian
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33 minutes ago, Xian said:

In my mid 30s UT bachelor degree friend group most of the wives have higher level degrees than their husbands. Including my wife.   The only exception are husbands who became lawyers or MDs. 
 

of course the wives all recieved doctorates/ masters in art, architecture, generic “business” or communications so their husbands make 2-4x what the highly educated wife makes.   I wouldn’t really call that marrying “down”. 

You’re mid-30s? Minimum age at surly is 42.

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But the husbands have at least bachelor degrees, yes?  My wife has more degrees than I do but we both were from very modest families who were very education focused (both first in our families to graduate college, and certainly first to attend grad school).  So you take the early childhood focus on education even by non-degree holding parents, then the experience of college itself, then the degree and its trimmings, then the money it makes you, then the constant socializing with other college graduates, then lifelong learning emphasized by your degree/career.  Even if the wife goes on to do a "masters in art or communications", as you say...they have 90% in common already.  A spouse having a terminal degree while you're sitting on a bachelor's or two plus some grad school or professional certification...that's about parallel IMO.  That'll always happen en masse in America.

What the division I posted about gives pause, is the guy who never went to college, or maybe did trade school, or did a semester and failed out, or quit on community college.  He can still go on to knock down $85k with a company F-150 and be tall dark and handsome, but it's such a different life experience from the woman he lusts after who set her sights on education early on in life at the risk of not being so popular with the boys.  Sure, she never went back for her Master's...but the circles she runs in and the things she does for fun and the travel she does for work have just given her such a different life experience that other than some fun dating, she's probably not gonna put down roots with that guy.  We all know stories like this, but it's about to start happening by the tens of millions next couple decades.  Not a judgement call, it's just a demographic shift that has never happened before in Western Society.  It's kind of a big deal.

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9 minutes ago, Lobo said:

We all know stories like this, but it's about to start happening by the tens of millions next couple decades.  Not a judgement call, it's just a demographic shift that has never happened before in Western Society.  It's kind of a big deal.

Agree. 

I think it stems from those (all genders) who have a engrained fear of the female planet. I welcome my future overlords.

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, Lobo said:

I don't know how to embed this:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/09/25/college-gender-cap-women-outnumber-men-60-40.cnn

So yeah, women getting to select from many potential partners is nothing new.  But his research (go to his written works, the interview is too short for him to really explain the extrapolated maths) suggests it's gonna be way different this time around.  We've gone from a roughly even split in college educated men versus women and we're heading for 2 female graduates for every 1 male graduate by the time my youngest is done with college.  

I think more men should pursue trade schools or professional certifications of some kind.  But again, unless you're the owner and not one of the 20 employees...your income will not be that alluring, nor will you be running in those social circles where attractive, educated women tend to gravitate.  We'll still be a 51/49 nation female:male, but there will huge swaths of educated women who will just never run into non-college men in the dating pool.  Maybe some app will solve for that, but by the third drunken hookup, education and job are gonna come up.  They always do, even after an orgy.  I don't quite have the alarmist view this NYU guy does that they're all gonna be radicalized.  

As stated above, this also will have massive, tectonic effects on procreation.  More and more women will wait longer and longer to have children with more career demands.  Meaning fewer children, that's just biology.  The fastest growing segment of those women taking over college campuses, are Hispanic/Latina.  Meaning white women's birth rates will have an even more accelerated decline and Hispanic female birth rates will probably curve down to where white's are now. 

So yeah, AI sex bots and we're gonna have to legalize prostitution which is gonna piss off a bunch of Texans but it'll also get their annoying sons outta the house for a few hours.  

Women who make their own money don’t give a shit how much a potential partner makes. If you know many young, attractive single female attorneys, physicians, etc. they are often with a meathead

 

eta they tend not to be all that interested in marriage either

Edited by Sawbonz
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3 hours ago, Lobo said:

But the husbands have at least bachelor degrees, yes?  My wife has more degrees than I do but we both were from very modest families who were very education focused (both first in our families to graduate college, and certainly first to attend grad school).  So you take the early childhood focus on education even by non-degree holding parents, then the experience of college itself, then the degree and its trimmings, then the money it makes you, then the constant socializing with other college graduates, then lifelong learning emphasized by your degree/career.  Even if the wife goes on to do a "masters in art or communications", as you say...they have 90% in common already.  A spouse having a terminal degree while you're sitting on a bachelor's or two plus some grad school or professional certification...that's about parallel IMO.  That'll always happen en masse in America.

What the division I posted about gives pause, is the guy who never went to college, or maybe did trade school, or did a semester and failed out, or quit on community college.  He can still go on to knock down $85k with a company F-150 and be tall dark and handsome, but it's such a different life experience from the woman he lusts after who set her sights on education early on in life at the risk of not being so popular with the boys.  Sure, she never went back for her Master's...but the circles she runs in and the things she does for fun and the travel she does for work have just given her such a different life experience that other than some fun dating, she's probably not gonna put down roots with that guy.  We all know stories like this, but it's about to start happening by the tens of millions next couple decades.  Not a judgement call, it's just a demographic shift that has never happened before in Western Society.  It's kind of a big deal.

So…death by snu snu?

 

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So those projections of populations of cities are bullshit. I’ve lived in Karachi. 50 million people or whatever can’t live in Karachi because 25 million can barely live there now. At some point you run up against the physical plant you’re working with. There’s not enough water for 50 million Karachiites and there’s no tech or solution on the horizon to make there be some.

Regardless of the accuracy I feel very comfortable saying that while we may eventually reach peak people, the places that are growing are growing fast. And they are places that can barely support the people they have now. And climate change will accelerate that. 

Places that can support people— that are fertile, well watered, and temperate— are shrinking in population. And so there will be massive population shifts, orders of magnitude bigger than successive waves of steppe people eventually overwhelming Rome and its successor states. We’re already starting to see what the beginning of that looks like and it will only be amplified. 

Historically something will work out but it will be painful and terrifying. It won’t be fun for the moving populations and it won’t be fun for the shrinking populations. It wasn’t fun for Romans when Goths and Ostrogoths began moving en masse across rivers and setting up their wagons outside the amphitheater. It wasn’t fun for the Native Americans when hordes of mercenary minor aristocrats and underfed former peasants burst out of Europe looking to improve their fortunes. it wasn’t fun for Siberians or Central Asians when waves of wild eyed Cossacks and then their camp followers flowed out of Muscovy looking for space and farmland. 
 

And it’s useless to cast this drama in terms of morality or civilizational superiority  or technical competence or anything but just the giant mill of history doing its thing, and large groups of people behaving like large groups of people.
 

We’re all still the same assholes we’ve always been just with neater tech, some better medicine, and bureaucracy. But all this will get a lot worse before it gets better. 

Edited by 956 Worldwide
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9 hours ago, Lobo said:

But the husbands have at least bachelor degrees, yes?  My wife has more degrees than I do but we both were from very modest families who were very education focused (both first in our families to graduate college, and certainly first to attend grad school).  So you take the early childhood focus on education even by non-degree holding parents, then the experience of college itself, then the degree and its trimmings, then the money it makes you, then the constant socializing with other college graduates, then lifelong learning emphasized by your degree/career.  Even if the wife goes on to do a "masters in art or communications", as you say...they have 90% in common already.  A spouse having a terminal degree while you're sitting on a bachelor's or two plus some grad school or professional certification...that's about parallel IMO.  That'll always happen en masse in America.

What the division I posted about gives pause, is the guy who never went to college, or maybe did trade school, or did a semester and failed out, or quit on community college.  He can still go on to knock down $85k with a company F-150 and be tall dark and handsome, but it's such a different life experience from the woman he lusts after who set her sights on education early on in life at the risk of not being so popular with the boys.  Sure, she never went back for her Master's...but the circles she runs in and the things she does for fun and the travel she does for work have just given her such a different life experience that other than some fun dating, she's probably not gonna put down roots with that guy.  We all know stories like this, but it's about to start happening by the tens of millions next couple decades.  Not a judgement call, it's just a demographic shift that has never happened before in Western Society.  It's kind of a big deal.

Well, most young men hate school. It’s entire structure and philosophy is the antithesis of what most young men want to be doing, aside from those at the top who actually are intellectually elite and can be really competitive in hard academic disciplines.  You can tolerate college if at the end you’re looking at stuff young men care about— money, prestige, and power. And you’ll attract men to fields like medicine and engineering and for a while yet the law. 
 

But college isn’t about that for most people now. College is a sorting mechanism (it always kind of was, but it’s changed in important ways). Just like flooding the market with money makes your dollar less valuable, flooding the job market with BA paper makes that credential less valuable.
 

At the top end, acceptance into an Ivy or Stanford is the most important thing. It demonstrates that you are the type of person who is accepted into Yale or Stanford. Nothing you actually do there is as important as the simple fact of getting in. You can be a complete mediocrity and as long as you’re not an active screw up, the institutions and the people around them will ensure you will be rewarded for being the type of person who is accepted into Stanford or Yale. 
 

At the lower end, college is an outsourced sorting mechanism for business interests to identify people who can fill the vast pool of bullshit jobs they have. Almost none of them actually require a degree in anything and you’ll use nothing you leaned to do HR or PR or almost anything else. But getting a degree shows you can be sort of (but not too much) autonomous, entrusted with not too important tasks, follow some directions, and arrive on time and showered.  And best of all, your employees pay for it all. You arrive trained to behave nicely and do a bunch of bullshit. 
 

And lots of men look at that and say— the boost in status and money by following that path really isn’t so great as opposed to watching porn, boozing, and partying while figuring out a way to do odd jobs or work the dole. The booze and partying was really the only thing college had going for it anyway. 
 

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2 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Well, most young men hate school. It’s entire structure and philosophy is the antithesis of what most young men want to be doing, aside from those at the top who actually are intellectually elite and can be really competitive in hard academic disciplines.  You can tolerate college if at the end you’re looking at stuff young men care about— money, prestige, and power. And you’ll attract men to fields like medicine and engineering and for a while yet the law. 
 

But college isn’t about that for most people now. College is a sorting mechanism (it always kind of was, but it’s changed in important ways). Just like flooding the market with money makes your dollar less valuable, flooding the job market with BA paper makes that credential less valuable.
 

At the top end, acceptance into an Ivy or Stanford is the most important thing. It demonstrates that you are the type of person who is accepted into Yale or Stanford. Nothing you actually do there is as important as the simple fact of getting in. You can be a complete mediocrity and as long as you’re not an active screw up, the institutions and the people around them will ensure you will be rewarded for being the type of person who is accepted into Stanford or Yale. 
 

At the lower end, college is an outsourced sorting mechanism for business interests to identify people who can fill the vast pool of bullshit jobs they have. Almost none of them actually require a degree in anything and you’ll use nothing you leaned to do HR or PR or almost anything else. But getting a degree shows you can be sort of (but not too much) autonomous, entrusted with not too important tasks, follow some directions, and arrive on time and showered.  And best of all, your employees pay for it all. You arrive trained to behave nicely and do a bunch of bullshit. 
 

And lots of men look at that and say— the boost in status and money by following that path really isn’t so great as opposed to watching porn, boozing, and partying while figuring out a way to do odd jobs or work the dole. The booze and partying was really the only thing college had going for it anyway. 
 

Holy shit, you are like the Michael Jordan of cynicism.

I like it.

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15 hours ago, Xian said:

In my mid 30s UT bachelor degree friend group most of the wives have higher level degrees than their husbands. Including my wife.   The only exception are husbands who became lawyers or MDs. 
 

of course the wives all recieved doctorates/ masters in art, architecture, generic “business” or communications so their husbands make 2-4x what the highly educated wife makes.   I wouldn’t really call that marrying “down”. 

I think Surly has well established that wives almost never go down.

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17 hours ago, Xian said:

In my mid 30s UT bachelor degree friend group most of the wives have higher level degrees than their husbands. Including my wife.   The only exception are husbands who became lawyers or MDs. 
 

of course the wives all recieved doctorates/ masters in art, architecture, generic “business” or communications so their husbands make 2-4x what the highly educated wife makes.   I wouldn’t really call that marrying “down”. 

guilty of both

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16 hours ago, Lobo said:

What the division I posted about gives pause, is the guy who never went to college, or maybe did trade school, or did a semester and failed out, or quit on community college.  He can still go on to knock down $85k with a company F-150 and be tall dark and handsome, but it's such a different life experience from the woman he lusts after who set her sights on education early on in life at the risk of not being so popular with the boys.  Sure, she never went back for her Master's...but the circles she runs in and the things she does for fun and the travel she does for work have just given her such a different life experience that other than some fun dating, she's probably not gonna put down roots with that guy.  We all know stories like this, but it's about to start happening by the tens of millions next couple decades.  Not a judgement call, it's just a demographic shift that has never happened before in Western Society.  It's kind of a big deal.

This is the most pedestrian Dear Penthouse letter i've ever read

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20 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

Women who make their own money don’t give a shit how much a potential partner makes. If you know many young, attractive single female attorneys, physicians, etc. they are often with a meathead

 

eta they tend not to be all that interested in marriage either

I saw this with some residents, but I think it also breaks down along ethnicity/racial lines. I know for sure Black women care. It's not a materialistic thing, but what people are now calling "trends" are realities that Black women have had to face for a long time. You will see the pairing, but in conversations, movies, other pop culture etc, you'd also hear about how difficult and unfair it was that sometimes if a professional Black woman wanted to be married to a Black man, best chance would be to expand the dating pool to include men of decidedly unequal educational/class attainment. How much of this is perception versus reality is unclear.

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On 10/1/2021 at 11:22 AM, Brisketexan said:

 

This is its own fascinating subject, and probably deserves its own thread.  As a parent of college-aged kids (and we're dear friends with a university president, and have lots of candid, beer-fueled conversations about such things), I'd call this issue a crisis.

I've posited before on this board that our biggest looming question, as tech and AI advances, is "what are we going to do with our morons?"  Maybe a corollary -- and perhaps overlapping -- question is "what are we going to do with our uneducated men?"

Lack of balance is a destabilizer.  Idle men, who aren't great at attracting mates, are a destabilizer.  This is a looming challenge, and maybe even a looming breaking point for many societies.  We need to start dealing with it (and it includes multiple issues -- such as improving our education system so that it doesn't just favor girls, who sit still with their bright and shiny faces, and perhaps also gear some of it to boys, who often learn more kinesthetically).  Lots of stuff to tease out here.

In the late 19th and early 20th century chemical fertilizers and mechanized agriculture rendered the great masses of field laborers obsolete, so we put some of those peasants to work in factories making new machines and chemicals in order to kill off a bunch of the rest with machine guns, bombs, tanks, and poison gases, and eventually, nuclear bombs. 

Fritz Haber is both the wrecker of Malthusian doomsday scenarios with his Nobel Prize-winning innovations in agricultural fertilizer and  also the father of chemical warfare.

Ironically he won his Nobel Prize in 1918, right about the time the number of lives he saved and those he killed was probably tilted more towards the latter. 

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10 hours ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

 

Fritz Haber is both the wrecker of Malthusian doomsday scenarios with his Nobel Prize-winning innovations in agricultural fertilizer and  also the father of chemical warfare.

Ironically he won his Nobel Prize in 1918, right about the time the number of lives he saved and those he killed was probably tilted more towards the latter. 

You should read this book.  Haber, a jewish man, deployed chemical weapons for the Germans in WW1 (to the horror of his own generals).  It was his idea to use the bug killer Zyclon B.  That decision had...negative...implications for jewish folks in later years.

41KUSRj3ABL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

 

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16 minutes ago, Parliament said:

You should read this book.  Haber, a jewish man, deployed chemical weapons for the Germans in WW1 (to the horror of his own generals).  It was his idea to use the bug killer Zyclon B.  That decision had...negative...implications for jewish folks in later years.

41KUSRj3ABL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

 

Haber was chlorine. The first gas attacks were chlorine. Hydrogen cyanide had been around for a while. 

was discovered in 1782 by a Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who prepared it from the pigment Prussian blue.

https://www.britannica.com/science/hydrogen-cyanide

This guy ended up giving us Sarin. He wasn't looking for it. 

Gerhard Schrader (25 February 1903 – 10 April 1990) was a German chemist specializing in the discovery of new insecticides, hoping to make progress in the fight against hunger in the world. Schrader is best known for his accidental discovery of nerve agents such as sarin and tabun, and for this he is sometimes called the "father of the nerve agents".[1]

 

Edit: the generals weren't horrified. They asked him to do it.

"Meanwhile, Haber’s career flourished, and around the start of World War I, the German Army requested his help in the development of replacing explosives in shells with poison gasses."

Smithsonian magazine

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Not that I am wishing for the plagues of the Middle Ages, but there isn't one problem the Earth currently faces that wouldn't exist if humans simply reproduced less.

Quote

Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea and air. In this context, isn't it obvious that "Chicken Little" represents the sane vision and that Homo Sapiens' motto, "Let's go shopping!" is the cry of the true lunatic?

 

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4 hours ago, cactusflinthead said:

Haber was chlorine. The first gas attacks were chlorine. Hydrogen cyanide had been around for a while. 

was discovered in 1782 by a Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who prepared it from the pigment Prussian blue.

https://www.britannica.com/science/hydrogen-cyanide

This guy ended up giving us Sarin. He wasn't looking for it. 

Gerhard Schrader (25 February 1903 – 10 April 1990) was a German chemist specializing in the discovery of new insecticides, hoping to make progress in the fight against hunger in the world. Schrader is best known for his accidental discovery of nerve agents such as sarin and tabun, and for this he is sometimes called the "father of the nerve agents".[1]

 

Edit: the generals weren't horrified. They asked him to do it.

"Meanwhile, Haber’s career flourished, and around the start of World War I, the German Army requested his help in the development of replacing explosives in shells with poison gasses."

Smithsonian magazine

I won't quibble, but the book describes how the generals at the front were nonplussed.  On the Zyklon B part, I stand corrected.

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On 10/1/2021 at 9:05 AM, Lobo said:

Yeah, these trends are fascinating.  As you said, the trend is already apparent in most developed nations.  But there are are big "throttling down" trends in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Central/East Asia as well.  I think we may see "peak people" by the end of my lifetime, certainly within my children's lifetime.  

There's another interesting, and possibly real dangerous, trend going on the United States right now.  Obviously, white birth rates are declining, and hispanic birth rates are no longer growing as fast as they used to.  And enrollment is colleges is therefore projected to decline in the very near future.  Colleges went from 60/40 male just 30 years ago to 60/40 female now and the gap is widening.  Every 4 years, 1.3 million more women enter college than men.  Men often partner/breed with women who are less educated than they are, but it's very rare to see the opposite (women marrying down in education terms since we're not terribly concerned with hearty breeding stock anymore as a species).  And if you acknowledge the strong correlation between education and earning potential, that means we're gonna have a lot more college educated women having their choice of partners, and a lot more undereducated men sitting at home with few prospects at getting rich or getting laid.  A similar trend is taking place in China and in several other industrialized nations.  That's a dangerous cocktail long-term because lonely men who can't afford hot ass tend to believe crazy shit and act out on it.   There's an Ivy League demographer that gamed this all out, it's fascinating.  

NYU Prof/talking head Scott Galloway has been on this a lot lately.

 

I am not worried and think it will be a good thing.

Wages will shift to marginalize education; trades wages will rise to be equivalent of bachelors degree wages and even masters wages in low demand fields.  So even tho dudes aren’t going to college as much, they will still make enough money to get laid.  Technology will fill in most of the other gaps. Continued migration to cities will mitigate other risks of depopulation.  Population may decrease but if the economic activity of each person becomes more efficient it will be offset or even be a net gain.

I think global population will peak sometime between 2050 and 2090.  I’m bummed I’m already too old to expect to live until it becomes reasonable to expect to benefit from the huge jumps in medical technology that will dramatically increase lifespan and quality of life in old age.  But my kids lives will be a golden age.

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8 minutes ago, Snake Diggity said:

I think global population will peak sometime between 2050 and 2090. 

How? Why?

unless theres severe externalities (1 child policy, nuclear war, total scorched earth, etc), Each couple will have more than 2 kids, and the compounding from a base of 7B is extreme

when has the global pop curve declined?

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10 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

How? Why?

unless theres severe externalities (1 child policy, nuclear war, total scorched earth, etc), Each couple will have more than 2 kids, and the compounding from a base of 7B is extreme

when has the global pop curve declined?

Past performance does not predict future returns?  I’m too lazy to go get better links but here’s an easy place to start:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth

Population is basically guaranteed to decline everywhere except Africa by 2100, so if anything happens to the downside in Africa, population will peak way sooner than most projections.

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2 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

While it’s true that colleges are 60/40 women, the assumption that women won’t marry down is wrong.  Yes, traditionally they haven’t but the ones who don’t snag one of those 40% of men will have to.

People are only as good as their options.

No, they have always, and will continue to marry down.  The new model suggests, and quite accurately, that it's about to start happening at large scale though.  That's the head scratcher.  Will it go from the regional anecdote to the prevailing model across the entire nation?  

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Riddle me this - The current world population growth since the beginning of the industrial revolution is really a function of cheap dense energy in the form of fossil fuels (and to a lesser extent nuclear). Are we able to supplant this in time to prevent serious decline in population?  

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1 hour ago, Lobo said:

No, they have always, and will continue to marry down.  The new model suggests, and quite accurately, that it's about to start happening at large scale though.  That's the head scratcher.  Will it go from the regional anecdote to the prevailing model across the entire nation?  

Same difference.  The top tier of the women (define that how you may) will have options.  They'll marry parallel or up.  Once the music stops and they all have to find a chair, they'll find the best chair available.  

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23 minutes ago, CycleTex87 said:

Riddle me this - The current world population growth since the beginning of the industrial revolution is really a function of cheap dense energy in the form of fossil fuels (and to a lesser extent nuclear). Are we able to supplant this in time to prevent serious decline in population?  

Well, I mean....it's also a function of lots and lots and lots of fuckin'.  Don't discount that element.  It's important.

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Well, I mean....it's also a function of lots and lots and lots of fuckin'.  Don't discount that element.  It's important.

Always been lots of fuckin.  Besides energy the advances in medicine make the products of fuckin less likely to die, infant mortality rates and life expectancy out front should have told ya.  

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On 10/1/2021 at 1:54 PM, maninblack said:

Everyone says this but when the tiniest virus comes along and knocks off a few the "overpopulation" crowd freak out like pussies.

Palabra, they forget that they're on the chopping block, then all of a sudden they don't like the thing that kills 1000 a day.

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On 10/1/2021 at 11:22 AM, Brisketexan said:

I've posited before on this board that our biggest looming question, as tech and AI advances, is "what are we going to do with our morons?"  Maybe a corollary -- and perhaps overlapping -- question is "what are we going to do with our uneducated men?"

We already are kind of doing this.

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18 hours ago, Snake Diggity said:

I’m bummed I’m already too old to expect to live until it becomes reasonable to expect to benefit from the huge jumps in medical technology that will dramatically increase lifespan and quality of life in old age.  But my kids lives will be a golden age.

Maybe not.  There has been a good amt. of research on this, and there are two strains:  the slightly more dominant strain thinks that the human body cannot live past 150 years in any anticipated "medical improvement" no matter what (though 150 is a good run).  They've said that cell physiology cannot be extended beyond this mark, ever.  The other strain says that through a number of separate process life could be extended "indefinitely", although the actual means are almost completely theoretical right now, and there are no (known, China holla!) programs to concentrate research on this particular field (most of regenerative science is funded towards replacing limbs/organs).  One central theory (right now) of this "immortality" idea is that at the very least, the "immortal" would need a series of hundreds of adjustments, and even artificial organs... eventually the "immortal" would be so reconstructed so as to arguably not be that "same person" but a new construct (Six Million Dollar Man meets. Robocop).  The idea that one lil' injection or pill (or any singular event) will produce unlimited life for humans right now is so remote, not to mention the ethical controversy, that I doubt any serious research would even begin over the next 50 years at least.

No doubt in the distant future though they'd figure something out.  The only question is "what is it" that's living ages and ages.

As for the more immediate future, again, there is some research about increasing lifespan to that "magical" 150 upper limit, but right now all the research is doing is prolonging the eldest years, when people are broken down so much so that living itself is difficult.  Who'd want more of that?  Whether they can extend the proportion of "prime of life" conditions has not yet occurred, and seems to be a long way off.

But it's a pretty interesting topic - Frankenstein got into it in the 30's, anyway.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/3/2021 at 5:44 PM, Lobo said:

No, they have always, and will continue to marry down.  The new model suggests, and quite accurately, that it's about to start happening at large scale though.  That's the head scratcher.  Will it go from the regional anecdote to the prevailing model across the entire nation?  

Anecdotally, the househusband/manny population has exploded in the past decade in the burbs.  There is an even larger number of men who "work" and have college degrees, but who are essentially diaper carriers/child taxi drivers.  From what I can tell, these guys have relatively stress-free lives (other than coming to grips with their wife being pounded over the desk by another partner in the firm) in no small part because the wife/mother continues to also perform an outsized share of the domestic responsibilities compared to men who are the breadwinners.  An emasculating existence without question, but it has its advantages.  

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