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[martinuzz]

In other news, the Pope teased Milania about Trump being an animated mass of lard and cheetoh crumbs under a wig.

Best.Pope.Ever.

Lolwut source?

[Starver]

Using as evidence that gay people are more prevalent in larger and more stable societies, presumably gay people don't emerge in societies where population decline due to hardship is a serious possibility.

I imagine that the freedom to be non-reproductive is increased in stable societies (painting this term, and by an extension the counterpart, with probably too broad a brush-stroke to go without comment - BYGTI) and thus the pressures to conform to heterosexual breeding do not overcome the same degree of homosexuality-swing as in a society that still has a cultural 'need' dragging 'reluctant' individuals into a reproductive partnership.

There is the "how many siblings" (and where in the hierarchy) guide to the likelihood that you will be gay, as revealed by some studies, but that might be a remnant of the sense of pressure to perpetuate the family line in the facemof the social conditions experienced, and not any actual explicit biological turning of the dial to start to create non-reproductive uncles and aunts now that assistant-parents are more valuable to the line than yet more actual parents also depleting resources for the benefits of more and more cousins...

But it's probably more complex (and an emergent behaviour that works, rather than a 'planned' feature of the human tribe) than anything so easy to describe.

[EnigmaticHat]

Currently I'm leaning towards the model for homosexuality where you have a gene but then it has to be activated.  Not to say that gayness is a choice because it isn't but rather if you had a time machine to go back to the moment someone was born and raise them differently you could probably raise a boy to be gay in one timeline and straight in another.  But if they don't have the genes for it they would always be straight.  Not a scientist, this is just my current understanding that I'll adjust if I find out its wrong.

Its definitely a thing that gay people have been forced into reproduction historically, I guess the question is are you less likely to be gay if you're born in a famine or into a small hunter-gatherer tribe?  If so the the hypothesis I heard is true, however I don't think it was ever convincingly proven.  Just a cute little idea.  The problem with surveys about gayness is that people in hostile societies might not even know for themselves they're gay, or they might be too paranoid to give honest answers.

Loosely related, but its really fascinating to me that the Wachowski sisters BOTH ended up being trans.  That would seem to indicate to me that there is some kind of strong genetic basis to being trans, but I suppose they were also raised in a similar way so... I dunno?

Uh, guys... gals... escaped AI avatars discovering what it means to shitpost... I'm not sure how old you all are, but you've maybe heard of the Club of Rome and their whole project of pushing a fear of overpopulation and such since the tail end of the 60's, right?

Know why they're big fans of getting people discussing global warming? If we stopped using oil for transportation, manufacturing, fertilizer, heating, and so forth right now, how would you expect the population to behave?

Global warming and overpopulation are not different topics, fear of one can be used to push for measures which can help with the other, but this time instead of falling into the Malthusian "oh god here they come talking about us being forced to eat babies again" trap and discrediting themselves instantly they were able to keep smashing an idea into the public view until you started getting entire generations growing up with this just being how things are, fuck, there are parents sending their kids off to school and they're younger than the IPCC FAR is.

That's weird.

Artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, trickling out minor improvements with marketing tricks to make it seem like the next big thing, work, earn, purchase, consume, be productive, greed is a good thing, but having more things is the best thing, do this or risk being left behind by people you have no reason to care about but should totally want to impress, then after a few decades go find a hole somewhere so we can get a new consumer in here!\

I have not heard of the Club of Rome, and wikipedia isn't super specific on what they stand for.  I lack the context to understand what you're saying here.

[wierd]

You know you are living in the cyperpunk future, when you can just look up strange thinktanks online, and get their about page.

https://www.clubofrome.org/about-us/

[MrRoboto75]

You know you are living in the cyperpunk future, when you can just look up strange thinktanks online, and get their about page.

https://www.clubofrome.org/about-us/

There are members of the Flat Earth Society all over the globe.

[Gizogin]

The Congressional Budget Office released its score on the revised AHCA. By 2026, it is projected that 23 million more Americans will be uninsured, compared to the current law. Premiums are expected to increase for the old and the poor, while higher-income Americans will see a reduction in premiums. The original version, the one that never made it to a vote, would have increased the uninsured population by 24 million people over the same period, so it's technically an improvement over their previous proposal.

Remember that the House passed this resolution nearly three weeks ago, without waiting for the CBO to score it.

[EnigmaticHat]

You know you are living in the cyperpunk future, when you can just look up strange thinktanks online, and get their about page.

https://www.clubofrome.org/about-us/

Yeah but their description of themselves is a bunch of vague bullshit and its also pretty clear that they wrote their own wikipedia article.  Its not clear from their website what they actually want to change in the world.  I'd trust a succinct summary from a forum user more than their own self-description.

[wierd]

Let's just say they are the kind of thing that Internet Conspiracy Theories (tm) are made of.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/a5q2k/the_club_of_romes_world_government_climatechange/

OR-- How I learned not to believe everything I read on the internet.

[Frumple]

The Congressional Budget Office released its score on the revised AHCA. By 2026, it is projected that 23 million more Americans will be uninsured, compared to the current law. Premiums are expected to increase for the old and the poor, while higher-income Americans will see a reduction in premiums. The original version, the one that never made it to a vote, would have increased the uninsured population by 24 million people over the same period, so it's technically an improvement over their previous proposal.

Remember that the House passed this resolution nearly three weeks ago, without waiting for the CBO to score it.

You missed the best part. The previous one was projected to save (for a certain sense of the word) the gov't 150 billion over a decade, along with that 24 million more uninsured (and who knows how many others less insured). This one has that 23 million uninsured over that period, but it also has a savings projection of, get this, 113 billion. They somehow managed to write up a healthcare proposal less efficient than the original train wreck, with barely any gain for it. It's almost impressive, in a pretty morbid way.

[Starver]

There are members of the Flat Earth Society all over the globe.

There are also devout Round Earthers to be found at all four corners of the world.



Apparently, there's a disputed two trillion dollars in the WH's budget.

[EnigmaticHat]

The Congressional Budget Office released its score on the revised AHCA. By 2026, it is projected that 23 million more Americans will be uninsured, compared to the current law. Premiums are expected to increase for the old and the poor, while higher-income Americans will see a reduction in premiums. The original version, the one that never made it to a vote, would have increased the uninsured population by 24 million people over the same period, so it's technically an improvement over their previous proposal.

Remember that the House passed this resolution nearly three weeks ago, without waiting for the CBO to score it.

You missed the best part. The previous one was projected to save (for a certain sense of the word) the gov't 150 billion over a decade, along with that 24 million more uninsured (and who knows how many others less insured). This one has that 23 million uninsured over that period, but it also has a savings projection of, get this, 113 billion. They somehow managed to write up a healthcare proposal less efficient than the original train wreck, with barely any gain for it. It's almost impressive, in a pretty morbid way.

So what you're saying is, the second proposal could have just been 100% subsidizing the insurance plans of 1/24th of at-risk Americans and it would have been a better proposal?

[Frumple]

Apparently! My head hurts enough I don't actually feel like digging to find out exactly how they managed it, but somehow they took an average savings of around 6k per insurance plan lost, found the million people that were costing about six times that, and decided to rewrite the thing to keep that specific million on government dosh. Like, even if you were completely uncaring about the number of uninsured and just trying to reduce it for PR purposes, you'd still be writing out the ones that saved you the least, first. For some ungodly reason the writers of Healthcare Trainwreck Mk 2 decided to do the reverse. They more or less took something approaching the worst possible outcome for the variables involved and decided to go with it.

Currently, I just don't understand how the blue hell you can be incompetent enough to manage this feat. You'd think a response would be, "By being a congressional republican", but they've literally topped themselves. In a handful of months, after years of potential planning, they managed to become worse at constructing a healthcare proposal, when the previous was something that looked more like a disaster than a policy outline.

[Cruxador]

I don't understand people for population control. There is plenty of resources for everybody, but corrupt people in power are usually the reason why it isn't given to those people.

I think you're underestimating just how many people 7 million is. It's true that there's inequality which leads to wealthy regions like Europe and the Americas using vastly disproportionate resources, but that doesn't change the fact that we've got a massive amount of people. The only reason we're even able to maintain current populations levels this long is because of techniques of the green revolution that are proving to be less sustainable than originally advertised. That's not to say nothing good came out there, but monocultures screw up the soil and there's only so much you can ramp up fertilization before it becomes less feasible, meanwhile the resultant eutrophication is destroying waterways that are already subject to massive overfishing, meanwhile coastline development is destroying forage fish spawning grounds, meaning that even if all oceanic fishing stopped right now, populations still couldn't return to their original levels. I mean, this is just food, to say nothing of the decadence of petroleum products, the loss of biodiversity, and the slow but inexhorable march of global warming. There are enough resources right at this specific instant in time, true, but we can't freeze time right now. Time is proceeding forward, and will continue to do so regardless of the actions of "people in power".

This isn't really correct though, and none of it has to do with population regardless. Lack of sustainability is due to capitalism focusing on tiny short term gains at massive long term expense, and its traditional denial of available-but-untapped resources having value.

So, you're saying that if the world was converted to a planned economy that doesn't have flaws for people to exploit, the earth would have more resources? I mean, I agree that people focus on shortsighted profit, but going "it's capitalism's fault!" is pretty disingenuous.

With proper incentives and techniques like vertical farming, Earth could probably support 50 billion humans or more. It would be incredibly energy intensive, but entirely doable by human civilization. If we globally decided that sustainably supporting as many humans as possible was what we wanted to attain, and put resources towards accordingly, we could support a very much larger population than even the most extreme forecasts for peak human population numbers.

I'd like to see your numbers on that. I'm having a hard time imagining a power source that's both fully sustainable and also able to produce on the scale you suggest.

Maybe I'm off here but didn't we largely un-desertify much of the sw US with the hoover dam?  We can just do that, build dams everywhere!  No need to relocate if there are no more deserts!

Being partially facetious here, but surely that isn't the only place in the world where that can work.

A desert with irrigation is still a desert, it's just one that's drawing resources away from more productive areas. The area had it nice for a while, but the writing appeared on the wall in the 90s. Maybe with well-orchestrated ecology, a different outcome is possible, but it would take longer than human lifespans to get the forests going that are needed, and the current global trend is towards far more desertification, not less.

That seems to be suggested frequently, but personally, I prefer my option:

Actually *ALLOW* me to leave modern life, and live a more 1800s ish lifestyle. I cant afford healthcare NOW anyway, about the only things modern society offers to me are roads (which I wont be using), running water (which I would not be using) and education (which I already have.)

The capitalist system cannot permit people to do that though. People that are not slavishly consuming more and more product, are worse than "untapped resources" are in their eyes. 

You can do that. It's not easy, necessarily, but there's nothing that necessitates you use running water or internet or even electricity.

Frumple:

Not as easy as you think.  Like becoming a doctor, there is a waiting list to enter the forestry educational system.

Once you become a forrester, you have to meet some absurd feild work requirements (usually in the decade or more range) before you can take a parks ranger position. After that, you need some time as a parks ranger before you can take an observation outpost position, and that is only seasonal work with a rotation schedule in most states.

So, no. The odds of getting that arrangement are not "fair."

You're right that that isn't a good way to go about achieving your aims, but you're mistaken about the assumption that there's no other way to do so. You see, the thing that the 1800 people did was they went places that other people hadn't claimed. These days, you can do that in two ways. One of those ways is to buy some land, and the other is squatting. Squatting means going someplace that whoever says they own doesn't actually go, so that probably means inland Cascadia, Alaska, northern Canada, or the more southern parts of South America. I imagine that there are other places that would be viable, but I don't know of them. For buying, you do need some initial capital. But then, it's just a matter of heading somewhere that doesn't have property tax (most of Latin America and Africa, much of rural Asia) and that is welcoming to foreigners (pretty much any poor country). Since you mentioned the BLM, I'm guessing you're American, so even if you're poor relative to your peers, you're actually quite rich by global standards and your USD will go far enough when you get there to cover the gaps as you learn to live in the local environment.

You can't just go off the grid instantly, it's a transition, and not an easy one, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

life is frankly kinda' shit.

That's subjective. People have lived in much simpler ways than we do now and been as happy – or more so, modern rates of depression are pretty high and highest in first world countries.

Though that said, the statement wasn't aimed at people in deserts, methinks, but people in tropical (and otherwise extreme) zones that takes artificial heating/cooling to be particularly comfortable in. Which is somewhat more than a few people. Approaching half the human species more, heh, though plenty of that is in the less intense parts of the regions. Can survive in those places without the stuff, but there ain't any degree of dress or lifestyle change that can match an AC in those kinds of environments... unless you go underground, I guess.

The assumption here is that "tropical" is the hottest, which isn't really true. Amazonas is, according to Google, in the upper twenties year-round. California can hit 40 in the summer. And the hottest place in the world is in Libya. Tropical areas are extreme for their biodiversity, but not necessarily for their heat.

Back on the issue, part of the problem is that the norm for these things is white people, and white people are designed for cooler climates. But if you look at folks actually native to the tropics, you see a lot less clothing and a lot more activity after dusk. Even if they might still like AC sometimes, they've gone without just fine for a very long time, and more emulation of these indigenous lifestyles would greatly mitigate the need for AC.

Bloody genetics screwed me over... Better to just gtfo and go somewhere less troublesome.

Yeah, if you're living somewhere that you by rights shouldn't ought to be, then you're going to have a harder time.

Could you imagine if Thomas Jefferson were still alive, how much trouble we would have had ending slavery?

Thomas Jefferson was against slavery in principle. He owned some because he felt he needed to for economic reasons, but he also felt that they deserved to be free.

The Congressional Budget Office released its score on the revised AHCA. By 2026, it is projected that 23 million more Americans will be uninsured, compared to the current law. Premiums are expected to increase for the old and the poor, while higher-income Americans will see a reduction in premiums. The original version, the one that never made it to a vote, would have increased the uninsured population by 24 million people over the same period, so it's technically an improvement over their previous proposal.

Remember that the House passed this resolution nearly three weeks ago, without waiting for the CBO to score it.

You missed the best part. The previous one was projected to save (for a certain sense of the word) the gov't 150 billion over a decade, along with that 24 million more uninsured (and who knows how many others less insured). This one has that 23 million uninsured over that period, but it also has a savings projection of, get this, 113 billion. They somehow managed to write up a healthcare proposal less efficient than the original train wreck, with barely any gain for it. It's almost impressive, in a pretty morbid way.

So what you're saying is, the second proposal could have just been 100% subsidizing the insurance plans of 1/24th of at-risk Americans and it would have been a better proposal?

You could jack off on a toad and it would be a better healthcare proposal.

[misko27]

life is frankly kinda' shit.

That's subjective. People have lived in much simpler ways than we do now and been as happy – or more so, modern rates of depression are pretty high and highest in first world countries.

I mean, my life is pretty objectively shit. I've actually stopped telling people how I'm doing, because I find it annoying to have to console other people through the process of learning about my upbringing and current situation.

Unfortunately, it seems US policy is not yet sufficiently enlightened to focus entirely on my needs, and until I acquire an impressive track record of political donations and investments in the Trump family businesses, it seems likely to remain so for the near future. Sad! #MakeMiskoGreatAgain

The Congressional Budget Office released its score on the revised AHCA. By 2026, it is projected that 23 million more Americans will be uninsured, compared to the current law. Premiums are expected to increase for the old and the poor, while higher-income Americans will see a reduction in premiums. The original version, the one that never made it to a vote, would have increased the uninsured population by 24 million people over the same period, so it's technically an improvement over their previous proposal.

Remember that the House passed this resolution nearly three weeks ago, without waiting for the CBO to score it.

You missed the best part. The previous one was projected to save (for a certain sense of the word) the gov't 150 billion over a decade, along with that 24 million more uninsured (and who knows how many others less insured). This one has that 23 million uninsured over that period, but it also has a savings projection of, get this, 113 billion. They somehow managed to write up a healthcare proposal less efficient than the original train wreck, with barely any gain for it. It's almost impressive, in a pretty morbid way.

So what you're saying is, the second proposal could have just been 100% subsidizing the insurance plans of 1/24th of at-risk Americans and it would have been a better proposal?

The problem is republicans really aren't seriously focused on the issues. They're focused on bandages; the "subsidizing 1 million people's health insurance" thing is also a bandage, but it's a very obvious and naked bandage (even though it is cost-effective). Republicans are insistent on pretending there isn't that much of a problem, that the bandages aren't so much bandages as improvements, and other nonsense; if they were honest about the bandages, they'd have to ask a question they don't want to ask: "If the bill requires such massive bandages, maybe it's just a bad bill to begin with?" Then if they'd have to go back to the drawing board, but there's no evidence that they even have anything on that drawing board. This is one promise that would benefit them politically to forget about.

[Frumple]

That's subjective. People have lived in much simpler ways than we do now and been as happy – or more so, modern rates of depression are pretty high and highest in first world countries.

See, people say that, but there's basically no heuristic you can actually use where it's not better closer to the present, on the net and usually for specific individuals, too. Un/under developed land or somethin' would be close to it, but on a personal level that's questionable -- even if more existed on the whole, the ability to experience it was less, by sheer dint of available transportation and safety measures. You'd be closer with low population density or whathaveyou, but it's still possible to live out in some empty non-place, and you're in a hell of a lot better position to survive it. Maybe pervasiveness of bigotry or xenophobia, or monoculturalism, racial homogeneity, whatever, but hell, you can still go find communities where that's ubiquitous and live there, too, and finding an alternative if you get tired of it is quite a lot less trouble.

Even the modern depression rate thing is a red herring; we're physically incapable of knowing what the historical rates were, so if it's actually worse, or if there was some other unusually prevalent mental disorder, is functionally a complete unknown. We can make guesses, and track changes since we've started collecting the applicable information to an extent it's worth a damn, but the infrastructure and capability for tracking pre-modern mental disorders literally didn't exist at the time, and we don't have time machines to apply ours to the past, just left overs of the time we give our best at figuring out. And the symptoms certainly existed, prevalent enough they can be seen in historical documents and whatnot.

Meanwhile, take your pick. Any pick. Everything verifiable loses out, every level of medicine, every level of infrastructure, transport, communication, material goods, capability to find and interact with immaterial ones, whatever you care to care about, you're better off in modern times.* Everything not -- stuff like the mentioned societal incidence of depression -- the best we can manage is either inconclusive, or pointing strongly to things being better in the present by one measure or another, if only in capability to actually measure the issue. We either still have it, whatever it is, got rid of it if negative, or we've improved on it. There is vanishingly few areas where that's not true, to the point I can't actually think of any off the top of my head that isn't functionally writing fiction when describing the state of things in the past, save maybe the state of environmental degradation (and hell, with that, we're still better able to actually do something about degrading environments, even if we don't particularly choose to). It was easier to die, be permanently crippled, or otherwise have your life ruined. That's about it.

If it's subjective, then it was worse on every subjective level anyway and the difference is pretty much irrelevant. You could live back then and be happy, sure. People can be happy in a lot of situations. That doesn't mean those times weren't shit, or at the absolute least shittier.

*Which isn't to say things can't get bad, or that individual nightmares in the present can't match those of the past, or some nonsense like that, but the chances are less, capability to avoid more, and so on into nausea, in almost every incidence under the sun, even in the worst parts of the present world. The closest to having it worse these days is we're actually more capable of noticing all the nasty crap that happens, rather than it happening and no one finding out until an archaeologist digs up your bones a few hundred years later.