In the Philippines, Dynamite Fishing Decimates Entire Ocean Food Chains

Your article about fish oil doesn't prove that fish oil isn't helpful. Supplements, in general, have often been shown not to have the protective effects expected, but that doesn't disprove the substance's effect when consumed in its natural host.

earlier this week, an article was posted to hn about IQ scores having fallen since the 70s, at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-iq-scores-1970s.html

one key takeaway: A British team recently found IQ score results falling by 2.5 to 4.3 points every decade since approximately the end of the second world war. And this past December, another group from the U.S. found that children who grew up eating a lot of fish tended to have higher IQs—and they slept better, too, which is another factor involved in adult intelligence levels. Notably, children in many countries in the modern era eat very little fish.

Also, "a dozen mercury-containing vaccines", how much mercury is that? Is this like telling me not to fly because I get 1000x more radiation from it than eating a banana? Comparing the miniscule to the infinitesimal makes neither large.

Somalis dont eat fish. So yes, here it is a tradition that prefers starvation to using "poor mans" food.

https://www.somalispot.com/threads/why-do-somalis-hate-fish-...

Could you elaborate on this please?

I’m going to argue pathologically competitive people are the causative factor rather than richness itself.

You mean rich people are to blame for poor people destroying their environment because the rich people set an example for poor people to aspire to? Have you got a suggestion for a way to solve that problem other than what the Khmer Rouge did?

I have. Forbid poor people from becoming rich. By keeping them in fixed economic classes, they won't have the motivation to compete so hard and then the fish will be saved. There are obvious bad side effects of this. Can you improve on it?

Wasn't every nation? Europe and China have lost almost all their forests. Pre-European New Zealand natives exterminated the giant flightless moa. There was a powerful ancient African civilization that died out because they used up all the artesian water. I'd say nobody cared about conservation until rich people we comfortable enough to stop worrying about their next meal and look at broader issues.

I don’t know, so their children and grandchildren will have fish to catch and live off of?

Thanks. I agree that we should have the morality to defend Human Rights and to not tolerate poverty.

Unfortunately no state in the world respects the Human Rights for its citizens.

http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/human-rights/

IMO not progressive taxes but progressive economics and progressive politics should be implemented.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2X_Ywepzm46_uGJDfRjYeQ/vid...

IMO in a perfect world, there would be no tax and no debt but a moral government that distributes money as needed to private persons and not to banks by the central bank and by bailout programs.

E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the...

I’d argue: the problem with progressive taxes is ... ok, the problem with taxes as a means of wealth transfer is it puts the money in the hands of politicians, who are themselves already wealthy, to spend on behalf of their drinking buddies.

I don’t believe these problems are solvable in the strict sense, but they are fun to critique.

Vegan food is the cheapest food and the most efficient food with regard to natural resources in the Philippines. Eating meat is a tradition and a personal choice but not a requirement in the Philippines.

Maybe several millions but not billions of people are hunters or farmers living in barren locations were only grass and shrubs grow well and thus animal products are needed. Too often land is stolen for animal farming. Too often deserts are created by animal farming. Animal farming is maybe the most important activity promoting global warming.

Regarding rich people:

-) Why not become rich yourself instead of working for rich people ? You can not do anything else than work for rich people ? Thus rich people are not the problem.

-) Except for Swaziland and North Korea, all (AFAIK) poor states in the world are democratic states were people vote for those in power. Thus the rich minority or the 10% or the 1% is not the problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_monarchy#Contemporary...

An average US citizen contributes far more to pollution than the average African or Asian.

The Philippines are catholic so birth control might actually be illegal, if the Catholic Church is concerned about the environment they need to promote birth control not present it as a cardinal sin. Countries like this the pope holds a heck of a lot of sway. He talks a good game about global warming but here is where the rubber meets the road. For the sake of the common good they need to shift the focus of sin from sex to wrecking the environment and causing overpopulation.

It's not so much cultural disdain as weak governance and a current priority for jobs and economic growth over environmental protection. If 'enlightened' western countries really cared more about the environment perhaps they would impose more restrictions about the goods that they allow to be imported into their countries.

Britain or France in the 1800s was equally if not more egregious in terms of disdain for the environment, though they didn't have the size or technology to wreak as much impact as modern technologies allow us to do.

> Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.

Well I've been to a lot of places with plastic pollution problems and I picked up gobs of that shit off the world's beaches. I can tell you that despite their prevalence, plastic bottles, chip bags, straws, flippers, lids, cups, forks, and knives don't spring out of the ground. They don't grow on trees. Most aren't made in local factories. They are manufactured elsewhere, shipped there, and sold to the locals, each hand in that supply chain extracting a little bit of profit, a huge portion of which is sent overseas, stolen from the local economy.

You can blame locals for being trash monkeys if you want--and they absolutely are--but absent outside influx of these one-time plastic use goods, they'd be piling up paper and wood and banana peels since they have since the beginning of time, and nature would be taking care of it using age-old biodegradation.

Plastic is our mess and its global reach is absolutely due to Western greed.

> The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level.

We need to stop making non-biodegradable garbage. Period. You can blame the last hand to touch it, but the whole pipeline should just not exist. Population will take the better part of a century to stabilize--we need to fix our waste problem no matter what population does, and we cannot wait for some mythical world with fewer people.

The first thing the world needs is to wrestle money from these billionaires and fund education for people.

Educated people will understand the impact of their kids, and also have a better chance at making a contribution to society, and taking care of their families they do have.

Anytime some proposes a simple solution to a complex problem that nobody's been able to solve and calls it "simple", they're wrong. Who's going to give them money? Bill Gates? No, he's spending it curing malaria. Jeff Bezos? No, he's using his money for his rockets. You? No, you're using your money for whatever luxuries you indulge in. Once you find the people who're going to give away their money, how will you convince them to do so? Threaten violence? No, you'll get arrested. Steal it? No, you'll get arrested. Form a revolution and steal it? No, you don't have enough desperate people willing to give up their lives just so they'll be compelled to give their money to some strangers in another country.

Even if it succeeds, now you have a bunch of unskilled people who don't need to work. What will they do with their time? There's plenty of examples in the US and other countries of how that turns out.

Not a complex idea.

But it sounds as if you're trying to blame eight rich people, when you yourself have your henchmen, oops, your fund managers do the same thing. (I assume you're trying to get a maximum interest for your own pension savings?)

You have very low margin for being called "rich" in that case. Some of the top richest people were born in quite average Westerners family.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_life_and_educ...

Most of them didn't go to America but it looks like the order of magnitude was about the same for both ~10's of millions. The Arabs castrated their male slaves so they didn't leave a black population for us to notice like America and Sth America have.