In a world where 8 people have more money than the bottom 3 BILLION people combined.
You can blame the poor for surviving...or blame the rich for the greed that forces people to do this to survive.
You can blame the poor for surviving...or blame the rich for the greed that forces people to do this to survive.
Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.
This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed.
If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else will reign in the Asians and Africans who are busy destroying their environments?
The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level. This means hugely reducing fertility in some developing countries, mostly by making sure contraception is widely available and that women are educated enough to know how to use it.
I mean the best interpretation of your comment is wishing for an alternate world (in which millions of people would never have been alive in the first place). In the middle the comment is assigning blame for that. At worst ...
I get that dozens of millions of people not being alive would solve your problem ... but I do hope you understand that nobody, especially not those few dozen millions, agree. And that does mean that you'll have to come with a different solution.
When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging.
4
That number seems to be at least greater than 3. So 4. Probably it's more like 3.1 or so.
How did you get to the conclusion that the island of the Philippines can't support (from now, and for a VERY long time in the future, even if perhaps not indefinitely) 3 children per woman ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's funny to me because you're bitching about effective govt spending on the internet..a technology developed by the govt.
Id argue government funding has developed more cures for diseases and more technological advances than any other sources of funding in all of history.
NASA put a man on the moon..
"Tragedy of the commons" is a total strawman.
You want to stop this from happening...give these people enough money to go to the grocery store or get trained for a job.
Its extremely simple.
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.
Who's going to give them money? Taxes?
Unskilled people who don't need to work? You missed my whole point about 'education' and 'training' so they can provide value to make money. I'm not giving anyone money. Just lower the ladder for them to climb up that the rich have pulled up behind them.
Poverty is no excuse for doing bad things.
Deficient morality leads to bad actions and bad constraints.
Change requires change. Understanding who and what to blame is an improvement. Becoming vegan is an improvement. Voting for better politicians is an improvement.
We should do more of that to fight poverty, as that will hopefully mitigate things like this.
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...
It is unfortunate that how the world is conducted at any point in time is largely a result of the choices of those with the most power to bring about their desires.
So it has always been and so shall it always be.
This is scary but true. Why are human beings so primitive?
Certainly, democracy have made this happen... Certainly, media have made politicians more accountable... So while sure it might look bleak on a scale of 10-15 years, I would argue we are better off than in the 70ties :)
I don’t believe these problems are solvable in the strict sense, but they are fun to critique.
Edit: spelling.
As a stereotypically apathetic Australian: those who can be bothered fighting the good fight certainly have my supportive clicks!
Who am I kidding, I simply gave up on getting people to know the difference between "loose" and "lose".
There's around 3 billion people in the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from. Should they also recycle?
They are not concerned with abstract concepts like morality when their fundamental survival is at stake.
You, me, anyone would kill someone to feed their kid without a second thought. Dyanamiting fish is NOTHING to these people.
>Many rich people are rich because they employ people and profit from it.
Correction: Without proper regulations, Rich people EXPLOIT people in subhuman wages/conditions to make insane profit.
>Many rich people are rich because they own real wealth and not (just) money. Rich people are not the problem. Rich people are no excuse for doing bad things.
You basically just said "rich people aren't the problem" with no evidence for that claim. You have not sufficiently made the case that rich people aren't the problem.
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...
If half the wealth is tied up in 8 people who could not possibly spend it, what do you think would happen to the earth's natural resources if it were suddenly dumped on the bottom 3 billion? It would be a huge boon to the economy at first, until we burnt through every resource.
Its not a complex idea at all.
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?)
Say you distribute a rich man's investments in risky instruments to a community living in a remote, impoverished land. Now each investment becomes infinitely less useful because they are not part of a portfolio, it may be difficult to find a buyer for them. Next, how does the community in the remote land trade them, seeing as they live so far from a market?
This is a structural issue of capitalism and not something that anyone can boil down to some greed of the rich. For as long as populations do not see the need to pass laws regulating wealth, capitalist countries will always develop high inequality.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_life_and_educ...
>He accepted an estimated 300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon
This is the exact difference between someone who works and someone who is handed money to do work. I don't know if Amazon would be alive without this transaction, but it sure helped that Bezos was given 300k by his parents.
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?
Maybe not _those_ 8 rich people, but generally Western nations were made rich by exploiting the tragedy of the commons. Oil and other mining are the classic examples.
Why should we expect these poor, poor fishermen to prioritize our poor, poor planet over their poor, poor families when our own rich got that way through exploitation of natural resources and pollution?
I specifically mention the West because it is the West (the EU) who are pressuring the Philippines to better regulate their fishing industry, as per the fine article, and also because it is the West who are now comfortable enough to worry about the tragedy of the commons since they are done exploiting it.
Same's happening in many countries in Europe. I have a picture of my birth home, taken in 1903 from a nearby hill. The landscape is mostly bare, almost everything except the actual fields is used for cattle. Now you can't take a picture like that. Almost everything is covered by a forest, but you can't see it from the trees growing on the hill.
If climate changes - as it has changed in the Mediterranean, prior to industrialisation - that's then different.
> In the Philippines, stocks have declined precipitously. According to a report by the Philippine national statistics board, the average daily catch in 1970 was 45 pounds. By 2000, that had dropped to 4.5 pounds.