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Bill

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But Paul, you are the one trying to sell the idea. I'm the one you are trying to sell it to


Im not trying to sell you anything.
Im just not interested enough to spend several days of my time
finding the needed facts to show you what you want to see.

but getting back to the original thread.

go ahead Bill, sell your hypothesis / idea / theory / or illusion that we are not dumb?

show me some proof of why you think we are not dumb.
from reading your original post I cant find anything
that proves we are not dumb.

humans have been around alot longer than the last few hundred years , but it only took a few decades for the new technology to get us into our current negative situation.

you say technology will bring us out of this situation.

prove it!

meanwhile I will be inserting some of the new technology that you say will save us from ourselves.

heres a nice bit about meat glue.





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Ok, then how about the fact that we are pretty smart.

In 1798 Thomas Malthus wrote the first part of his ground breaking theory "An Essay on the Principle of Population". In this work he pointed out that all species are limited in the growth of their population by the availability of food. No species can outgrow its food supply. The idea makes a great deal of sense and every since then people have been looking at our food supply and figuring out how large our population can grow before it crashes because of out inability to grow enough food. So far we have managed to keep ahead of the curve, even though the apparent limit has been reached many times. What has made the difference is that technology has kept us ahead of the curve and we can now grow tremendously larger quantities of food than at any time in the past.

This has led to a massive increase in the world population, which leads to most of the problems we are facing today. We are still ahead of the game but we still have a long way to go.

The current population of the world is around 7 billion people right now. It is growing at a rate of 1.2% per year. But this is much better than it has been in the past. In 1970 the population growth rate was 2.1%, so we have almost cut the growth rate in half in just 40 years.

It will be quite a while before we actually start reducing the population, but with the aid of technology we will be able to support ourselves until the population gets down to a more manageable level.

So we are being pretty smart, just to keep ahead of Malthus, and we are smart enough to work around the problems we have coming up.

Bill Gill


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Bill

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This has led to a massive increase in the world population, which leads to most of the problems we are facing today


if you have a room with 1000 republicans and each of the republicans have a 1 ounce gold coin.
and each of the republicans have a pistol but no bullets.

would it be a wise thing to do if you were to put 1000 bullets into the room also?

how many living republicans would there be in the room after a few hours?

how many living republicans would there be if there were no gold coins to kill for?

how many living republicans would there be if there were no bullets to kill for?

how many living republicans would there be if there were no pistols to kill for?


Quote:
Technology has led to a massive increase in the world population, which has lead to most of the problems we are facing today


If you have a barn and you paint the barn red , would you accuse the paint on the barn of being red.

but not the paint on your paint brush or the paint in your
paint bucket.


in 1970 the worlds population was about 4 billion and asias population was about 1.6 billion.


then it started a upward swing -- almost straight up...

in 2005 asias population had increased to 4 billion...
by 2050 asias population is expected to be higher than the rest of the worlds population.




what could have supported this upward swing?
republicans , what significant change was there around 1970?

free trade?

north America , europe are the only continent's whos population growth hasnt increased significantly.

would anyone like to guess which continent has increased its population growth rate the most?

let me help ,which continent was given the ability to increase its population rate so dramatically?

how was it given that ability?

free trade!

our problems are not that we have too many people , its that we have too many greedy/dumb politicians.

we voted them in , that makes us dumb also.

and we will vote them in again to continue our dumbness.

free trade is not free by any means , it is bullets thrown into the room.


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Paul I could hardly understand what anything you said had to do with whether we are smart. It mostly seems to be a diatribe against republicans. That is politics, not even NQS.

Bill Gill


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Bill

you were trying to say that we are not dumb.
I am giving an example of how dumb we are.

voting for politicians who have a track record
of intentionally destroying the economy
is not very smart , free trade is a political subject
but the negative results of free trade are clearly seen in our
economy and most of the worlds economies.

this is an excellent example of how dumb we really are.









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Paul, if you have some statement to make you might try just making the statement and then offering a brief example of what you mean. Going off on a diatribe against one group of people doesn't really provide a very good explanation of what you are trying to say.

And then I will reply to what you say you were trying to say.

You have provided an example of what you consider a dumb thing to do. Ok, I agree that it might be somewhat irrational, but it is also just a single thing that is going on. I never said that humans never did anything irrational. In fact I am kind of glad that we do something irrational once in a while. It provides a process to maybe come up with some new ideas that may prove to be very useful.

Ok, that was mostly kind of an aside. But back to whether we are dumb. I gave an example of the fact that we have managed, so far, to bypass the population collapse that Malthus' theory predicted. And then I pointed out that we are actually starting to get population under control. The growth rate has been almost halved in the past 40 years. We have a long way to go, but we are getting there. That is not a dumb thing, actually it is 2 things that aren't very dumb. We have managed to bypass Malthus, and we are starting to get the population under control. These are the big things. You look at the world and see some big things that you think we aren't doing anything about. But in fact there are a lot of people out there who are who are working to develop processes to overcome the problems we have. And as those various processes become workable they will be implemented. But the whole thing is a very complex problem which is not going to be solved by some simplistic solution.

Bill Gill


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Quote:
The growth rate has been almost halved in the past 40 years.


world population 1970 = 3.6 billion +
here is the wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970#World_population

here is the CIA world factbook on world population broken down by country.
most of these are estimates from 2011.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html


and here is the estimate on current world population.
7 billion +

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html

It would be nice if the world factbook had a chart that
generated from a database that clearly showed the population amounts by year and by country.

as it stands almost all of the charts I find on the internet are different from each other.

back to the reply.

the growth rate may have decreased but the growth has not.

as far as I can tell the growth as a percentage of world population ( 1950-2010 ) has decreased in all continents except
asia , india , africa

so you cant say that the worlds population growth rate has decreased you can only say that most of the worlds population growth rate has decreased.

otherwise you will overlook the countries that are undergoing a growth rate that will eventually undermine all attempts at reducing the growth rate.

maybe there should be two terms or categories used.

participating growth rate countries
and
non participating growth rate countries

because there is a clear difference in participating and non participating countries where growth rate is concerned.

looking at most charts is very deceiving especially when looking at a chart that shows percentages of world population.

as in the below chart












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Paul, population growth will continue for quite some time. I forget the exact estimates and I don't have time to look them up, but if we cut the birthrate to exactly the replacement rate (1 person born for each person who dies) then the population would still be growing for a long time in the future, just because the average age at death is getting later.

And I'm not really worried about where the growth is happening. The world population is the big problem. The fact that the population is growing more in some countries than in others is not a real problem in regard to the total impact we are having on the earth. That is primarily based on the number of people who are drawing their sustenance from the earth. Distribution is a whole different problem.

Personally I want all the people of Earth to have good living.

Bill Gill


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Quote:
Personally I want all the people of Earth to have good living.


well, thats not happening Bill.

unless you consider working 15 hours a day, every day, every year, and sleeping in the factory you work in getting paid $0.30 an hour wages a good life.

that may be a good life for you because you can buy the products they make in those factories really cheap in the factory outlets in the U.S. , but for those slaves it is not
a good life.


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Originally Posted By: paul
Quote:
Personally I want all the people of Earth to have good living.


well, thats not happening Bill.

unless you consider working 15 hours a day, every day, every year, and sleeping in the factory you work in getting paid $0.30 an hour wages a good life.

that may be a good life for you because you can buy the products they make in those factories really cheap in the factory outlets in the U.S. , but for those slaves it is not
a good life.



While I really don't think that is strictly on topic for a science discussion I will make a sort of an answer. It is bad that they are being treated that way. But there is another side to that. They are earning a living. And they are developing greater expectations for the future. That is how we in the developed nations got to where we are. We started working in sweat shops, then started working to improve conditions. So while they are working under what we consider intolerable conditions they are also on the road to a modern way of life. This has happened in a number of places. After WWII Japan was disadvantaged. So they started making all kinds of cheap stuff. For years saying something was made in Japan was saying it was pretty much worthless. Then they started improving and their wages started going up. So the jobs moved on to Taiwan, and Korea, and Singapore, and the big one now China. This is a hard time for the Chinese workers but with the industrialization using cheap labor they are on the road to a highly improved lifestyle. That is how it has been working for at least a half a century now.

Bill Gill


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Quote:
While I really don't think that is strictly on topic for a science discussion


this isnt about science , it isnt a science topic , and it is
in the NQS (not quite science) forum.

Quote:
They are earning a living.


but the working conditions are so bad that many are committing
suicide! but on the bright side they will be replaced by robots.



so the rich demand lower and lower prices which results in
really bad labor conditions.
when they feel as if their appearance it getting tainted by
employees committing suicide they dont improve labor conditions they revert to robotics.

because robots dont commit suicide.

the good thing about this is that there will be less people
subjected to really bad labor practices and some people will
become robotics engineers and manufacturers etc...



so your right , technology has found a solution to this problem we have of greed.

perhaps boycott during their holidays to give them a chance to have a holiday would help the workers.

we would need to determine how long it takes after a sluggish buying period for the factories to begin shutting down and laying off their employees so that we can have a boycott period that will allow these workers to have a holiday.



if there is one thing a republican hates it is trade unions.
trade unions are the thing that put a stop to these kinds of working conditions in the U.S. perhaps either china needs to allow workers to form trade unions or the U.S. government and all governments of the world outside china need to make it illegal to import products made under these conditions.

but then again if the factories pay the employees to lie about the working conditions in china then you would never know what the conditions really are.

here is a in depth story of a worldwide distributor of slave made products.



Im sort of curious when walmart will start building their slave made product super centers with living facilities built into them so that their employees in
the U.S. will also be able to enjoy the benefits of living closer to work as their factory workers in china do.

this way walmart can charge the employees for living there
because the employees will not be able to afford the cost
of living off campus.



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Ok, Paul, if you want to talk about politics, and that is what you are talking about, not science.

I assume you want us to quite buying anything made in China. So then you want all those poor Chinese to lose their jobs. The Chinese economy will crash and they will be out on the streets. That will destabilize the Chinese government and make them rather poor neighbors. When a government is having major economic problems history tells us that one common solution is war.

But aside from the possibility of war you are advocating that we cause all those people to be thrown out on the streets where they can starve. In fact the Chinese economy is highly dependent on our continuing to buy from them, and I personally do not want to cause the mass starvation that might well occur if we do quit buying Chinese.

As it is history has shown us that the people working in those sweat shops will start working to force their employers to grant them better working conditions and wages. After all that is the way we did it here.

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There are some areas of China that are very poor indeed. The Eastern part is enjoying a huge lift in standards of living, especially Shanghai and Hong Kong, but Western China is economically and socially quite depressed. They are the areas that have the dirty heavy industries.

Also Chinese people cannot move easily between areas of their own country, and need permission to travel to the wealthy areas of Beijing for eg. Whilst things are improving throughout the country there's still a long way to go.

Of course if the economic situation improves for the huge number of people in the western half of China they will create a another huge dilemma as they will all want to have an easier life like the more fortunate people of THEIR OWN country.

If we stop buying things from China they could survive for a long time providing for the domestic market, as at the moment a great deal of their production is for export only. Here in Australia, where we are rapidly losing our manufacturers one by one, I doubt we'd last a month without the boats from China with their TV plasmas, cars, clothing and recently food!

I know this post is not about science--- but importing food especially shows just how dumb we can be--- so it is on topic!

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Originally Posted By: Ellis
There are some areas of China that are very poor indeed. The Eastern part is enjoying a huge lift in standards of living, especially Shanghai and Hong Kong.

For One thing. Hong Kong and China are not the same country, regardless of whether Hong Kong Island is owned by China. They speak different dialects, China (mandarin) and HK (Cantonese), they have a different currency and a different government. Speak to any HK resident and they will tell you HK and China are different countries. They even have different passports. Those in HK that are poor have, and are still finding it difficult to get jobs and afford a decent living. The typical apartment for most is about 400 square ft. and usually the whole family including grandparents will live in such an apt. Apt. style living is the most prevalent in HK. Only the wealthy can afford to own a house.
Those of course who have enjoyed wealth, enjoy their wealth.
I travel to HK about once a year. The difference in Mainland Chineses and HK residents is quite visible. Those raised in HK have manners and a sense of awareness of each other even tho their living conditions are extremely crowded. Mainland Chinese visitors don't believe in waiting their turn in line and they throw weight about like they own the country.

I remember an interesting comment made by Jackie Chan, a well known actor and Chinese Communist. "The people of China are not capable of thinking for themselves. The Chinese Government must act on their behalf."

Just thought I'd throw two cents worth of information in. Since I can. whistle


I was addicted to the Hokey Pokey, but then I turned myself around!!




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Quote:
"The people of China are not capable of thinking for themselves. The Chinese Government must act on their behalf."


As someone who travels to that part of the world; would you say that this statement is true; and if so, to what extent is the Chinese Government responsible for that situation?


There never was nothing.
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Originally Posted By: Bill S.
Quote:
"The people of China are not capable of thinking for themselves. The Chinese Government must act on their behalf."


As someone who travels to that part of the world; would you say that this statement is true; and if so, to what extent is the Chinese Government responsible for that situation?
I travel to HK not Mainland China. No human is without the capacity to think. Whether they use their mind constructively or intuitively may be questionable. Since you asked me, from what I have seen, those who come from Mainland China into HK are a bit disconnected from the world around them.
Government is not responsible for mindlessness. People who influence policy within government are responsible. All you need is to distract them from reality and keep them entertained.
I think it was a European who once said, "The United States is the most entertained country in the world."


I was addicted to the Hokey Pokey, but then I turned myself around!!




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Quote:
When a government is having major economic problems history tells us that one common solution is war.


that also applies to the world Bill.

how many countries are having economic problems?

and why?


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Quote:
you are advocating that we cause all those people to be thrown out on the streets where they can starve. In fact the Chinese economy is highly dependent on our continuing to buy from them,


it would be the best thing that could happen for the chinese people / workers.

suddenly the factories would increase the wages of the workers so that the workers could afford to buy the products that they make for the world that is no longer buying the products.

and buisnessmen throughout the world would begin to build factories in their own country to produce products to sell to their peoples
who work at those factories in their own country.

Im not sure why china hasnt figured that out yet , after all they have
the greatest potential for a stable economy because of the manpower
they now have and the industrial infrastructure they now have.

in fact china would most likely be better off than all other countries
who have chosen to use the low wages in asia and have caused the industrial infrastructure in their own country to decline or dissapear.

because china and asia already have the industrial infrastructure in place.

they could still export just like all countries could export only
there would have to be trade tarrifs placed on imported product prices to ensure that what is happening now does not happen again due to greeddy rich people demanding lower and lower prices so that they can make more and more money no matter what the working conditions are.

you cant have all the people in the world woking in a single
country and expect the world to remain stable.

our current path will lead to world war.

as you say , history shows us that.



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I just noticed something in the santas workshop video above.

the film says that the average worker who works slow
will earn 300 yuan a month --- I thought it was 300 yuan a week.

300 yuan a month = 11.75 dollars a week !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

11.75 dollars a freakin week.

working 18 hours a day , yes 18 , thats 7 days a week mind you.

126 hours a week.

their hourly wage is 9 frickin cents a hour.

if thats not legalized slavery then what is?

people should be ashamed of having a store in their community that sells products made by these factories.

and people should be ashamed every time they walk into one of those stores and purchase anything.


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"Mainland Chinese visitors don't believe in waiting their turn inand they throw weight about like they own the country." TT wrote.

Actually TT they do own it. The Brits leased it for 99 years and when that expired it reverted to its original owners-- The Chinese. It's like renting a house for a year. You have to give it back after the lease expires. No matter how much you like it or how much you may have improved it you do not own it. HK is actually very important to the Chinese government as it forms an acceptable face to the rest of the world who are wary of the original government, and also helps them to understand the methods of finance etc in the western world as much of the HK population are familiar with it.

Possibly the people of HK regret, even resent, this, and they certainly have different conditions (somewhat like Tibet), but they are now part of China.

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