• TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca
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    2 hours ago

    I don’t think it’s fair to show the entire world burning because of several issues that are very unique to the US. This is highly US-centric.

    • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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      58 minutes ago

      I don’t think it’s unfair to include the whole world when the biggest ones are basically everywhere (climate change, viral swords of Damocles, rampant racism, sexism and other discrimination, corrupt leaders and the rise of the global far-right, etc.)

      And others, like affordable housing, are similarly out-of-reach throughout most of the world.

  • arcticx@lemmy.ml
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    2 hours ago

    Every generation has had its own set of crises that could “never be overcome”. Being a doomer is letting them win. A better future only happens if we make it happen.

    • Solumbran@lemmy.world
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      43 minutes ago

      Nah, people are way to stupid.

      Just look at all the comments already saying that “we need to have kids because are have smart genes and we need to fight against the evil stupid genes of the shit people”

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    2 hours ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire

    “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a song written by American musician Billy Joel.

    Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!”. Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful”. The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties”. Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.[4]

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

    🎵 We didn’t start the fire 🎵
    🎵 It was always burning since the world’s been turning 🎵
    🎵 We didn’t start the fire 🎵
    🎵 No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it 🎵

    • LEM 1689@lemmy.sdf.org
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      16 minutes ago

      We did start the fire, about 400k years ago, some Homo created magic; a prodigy, a firestarter.

  • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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    39 minutes ago

    Sure… could take that impression. Or… consider:

    Patent Office whistle blower Tom Valone revealed at energy conferences in the early 00’s that by the year 2000 there had already been over 3000 free energy device patents secreted. (… That’s abundant energy without pollution.)

    • “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller

    Follow the tech arc from Michael Faraday through to Nikola Tesla (passing by the Sonora Aero Club and Charles Dellschau’s drawings of what they had in 1850 (the early state of the art of what would become zero-inertia propulsion (like the foo-fighters and “the bell” (“die glocke”) in (and before) WW2))), you may find many more examples of technologies we’ve been denied.

    Consider even the lies they {Ed Bernays (who inspired Hitler), Harry J Anslinger and Randolf William Hearst} spread to convince us our most useful resource, Cannabis, was instead a demon called “Marijuana”, depriving us of the most nutritionally complete and balanced food source for humans and livestock, that can be even eaten without processing and cooking, can last for many years, can be grown in the same soil for 20 years without rotation before depleting nutrients, cleans the air over 7 times more than a pine forest, makes 7 times as much paper as trees and the paper is stronger and lasts for hundreds and even thousands of years, makes fabrics more versatile than cotton with none of the pollution and easier and without slaves, and it even can produce oil fuels like diesel, alcohol fuels like petrol, and even cheap abundant easy graphene to help make solid state capacitors and photovoltaics etc, as well as making super strong limecrete and bioplastics and on and on it goes. And I haven’t even mentioned medicine and spirituality and fun yet, which it’s the best at and non-lethal. All unsurprising since humanity have been in co-evolution with it, cultivating it the longest. The first writing we still have on paper, was on hemp paper, about cannabis, as a medicine. It’s the main ingredient in the holy anointing oil. Salvation’s return is the restoration of cannabis/hemp. No wonder competing industries sought to eliminate the competition, keeping us dependent on their inferior products, and wage slavery.

    Consider these two quotes together, and who said them:

    • “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity… anything you can imagine we already know how to do.” — Ben Rich, former Head of the Lockheed Skunk Works
    • “It is easier for us to pay a private contractor to re-invent something so it will come out at a lower classification level, than to try to declassify it.” – Bennett Hart, then Deputy Director of the National Reconnaissance Organization

    If we release all the emancipatory technologies the corporations have been sitting on to keep us hog-tied to their polluting and inferior technology for impoverishing rents, we’ll have dispelled the circular argument that we need a cull of the human population (like the top line of the Georgia Guidestones or some interpretations of Bill Gates’ reductive equation suggests).

    It’d even avail all space to us (space, that’s expanding, faster than we could fill it). And to populate Mars, Callisto, Ceres, etc. And to create vast spinning tube orbitals for 1G almost wherever we want. And it would let us build interconnected forest-arcologies, creating a vast forest arcology-scapes, allowing over 300 trillion humans to live here on earth, in abundant nature.

    Not saying we should.

    Just saying we have so much more headroom with proper resource management, without the crooks holding us down just so they have more than us. Egalitarian proliferation of the (currently suppressed) emancipatory technologies would have even the richest be better off.

    Or we could just keep sabotaging ourselves, sabotaging the survival of the species, held under duress to be complicitly committing ecocide, pretending things are harder than they are, just to help maintain the billionaires’ rigged game. :/

    It’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want:

    “The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, “Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” And we … kill those people. “Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.” – Bill Hicks

    • MotoAsh@piefed.social
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      2 hours ago

      Nah, the line of thinking is unnecessary under capitalism. Capitalism will ensure the greediest piece of shit wins. Modern healthcare means idiots survive. It’s a known near constant that intelligent people have fewer kids.

      It’s all but guaranteed when the norm is to not pay attention to quality. and if the constant push for shitty low quality “AI” slop in everything as of recent is any indication… yeaaaa we’re fucked.

      • kboos1@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        Then give up and don’t have kids and ensure that their similarly thinking offspring have a better chance of continuing the cycle.

      • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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        35 minutes ago

        The premise is bad, but the portrayal of the nonsensical aspects of modern society are spot on and in many ways prescient. It just missed that what would make us dimmer would not be mating, but technology.

        • Solumbran@lemmy.world
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          31 minutes ago

          The problem being that everyone uses it to say “dumb people reproduce more and that’s the problem with humanity”, which I’m sure the nazis would like but that I struggle seeing as an acceptable opinion.

    • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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      22 minutes ago

      I wouldn’t mind having 50 kids, I’m just too broke to even afford to date :D

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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    2 hours ago

    The statistics clearly show that poorer people have more children than richer people, so does having material comfort cause despair or are many people confused about their own motivations?

    • coyootje@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      I think that people with access to higher education who also have constant access to world news is bound to lead to people not wanting to put their kids through it. If you compare that to someone who barely has access to the internet and whose main focus is trying to feed their family and it’s a whole different situation. Humans need meaning in their lives and in western societies this has been waning for a while now.

    • dp@thebrainbin.org
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      2 hours ago

      I’d say both are involved, but of the two, far more the latter than the former.

      My observation is that generally speaking, poor countries tend to be conservative politically; and where the country is richer than the statistically poorer countries, the conservative group within tend to be poorer per capita.

      My guess (and that’s all it really is), is that procreation factors very heavily into the conservative religious ethos, and in that it appears that religion will be heavily rooted in poorer nations/socioeconmic areas, having(or making) (as many) children (as possible) is a god-given mandate.

      Doesn’t matter the conditions into which children are born because they will follow the will of god and live in eternal happiness after death. The misery they endure here on earth will be forever forgotten in the joys of their afterlives.

      This is, at least, how it seems to me, and is just my opinion.

  • BBB_1980@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    Actually, no. There was a great article about why the ruling class cared about people (to a certain degree): 1. Fear, because the masses can kill them, 2. The masses are needed as workforce.

    Both fear and workforce will be solved for them by AI and robotics soon. Military robots and AI can protect the ruling class, while working robots and AI will manufacture, repair, cure everything they need.

    According to the article, this will not lead to the killing of the masses, only to a steady population decline which will lead to a “society” of a few robot lords people that is protected and served by robots. Eventually, they will also clash and the technologically superior will win. If the winning robot lord and his/her court is not composed of enough people, that’s going to lead to inbreeding, genetical decline and eventually, the extinction of the human race.

    There was a very interesting part which explained that the rich will most likely also die and robot lords will emerge from those who know how to instruct robots, i.e. engineers, programmers, etc.

    The article gave a detailed analysis of the above outcome through economics. But my main issue is that I don’t find it anywhere, anymore.