Divorce Your Car --and get into a relationship with a Bike!

Bill Sornson wrote:
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show
and played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor
that neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a
stick up their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she
gets my vote, Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think
2004 just showed how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way
could Kerry have lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.
Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, including Florida, and should
have won the election. In 2004 there were massive voting
irregularities that tipped the election from Kerry to Bush. In both
cases, the election came down to a state where the person in charge
of the vote was also an ambitious Republican that happened to also be
in charge of the Bush campaigns for those states. In both cases,
neither of the Secretaries of State of Florida and Ohio had the
ethical wisdom to recuse themselves from certifying the vote, or
alternatively to stay out of involvement in the Bush campaigns in
those states.

The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't
cast in the first place.

Why are Democrats against tamper-proof voter ID cards? Why are they against
letting illegal aliens vote? Why do they pay homeless and indigent people
to vote? Why do their dead people keep voting? TWICE? LOL

If illegal aliens were allowed to vote this would become the United
States of Northern Mexico in a hurry.

Maybe this time some forged documents and last-minute "news" (like a
decades-old DUI charge released 5 days before the election) will work
/against/ the Dems. Hell, it's just hardball politics, right?!?

Hey, If Dubya did get charged with drunk driving I would want to know.
How do I know he's not "Drunk Presidenting"?
Bill

di wrote:
"Tim McNamara" wrote in message
...
In article ,
bill wrote:

Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show
and played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor
that neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a
stick up their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she
gets my vote, Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think
2004 just showed how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way
could Kerry have lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.
Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, including Florida, and should
have won the election. In 2004 there were massive voting irregularities
that tipped the election from Kerry to Bush. In both cases, the
election came down to a state where the person in charge of the vote was
also an ambitious Republican that happened to also be in charge of the
Bush campaigns for those states. In both cases, neither of the
Secretaries of State of Florida and Ohio had the ethical wisdom to
recuse themselves from certifying the vote, or alternatively to stay out
of involvement in the Bush campaigns in those states.

The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't cast
in the first place.

Don't forget the 1888 election which the Republicans also stole, Grover
Cleveland (D) won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote to Benjamin
Harrison (R), the scoundrels have been stealing elections for years. :)


That just means the Electoral College is now down to Electoral Grade
school and needs to be tossed. They did come up with that waaaaay before
electronic communications.
Bill

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article MKfWg.8842$Go3.6670@dukeread05, "di"
wrote:

Don't forget the 1888 election which the Republicans also stole,
Grover Cleveland (D) won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote
to Benjamin Harrison (R), the scoundrels have been stealing elections
for years. :)

LOL. I grew up near Chicago in the last couple decades of the Richard
J. Daley machine. There are scoundrels on all sides.

Yeah,
But when anyone asks who the mayor of Chicago is the answer is always
Daley, barring a glitch in the system.
Bill
I grew up there and it was Daley in the 50's.

Rick wrote:
"di" wrote in message
news:MKfWg.8842$Go3.6670@dukeread05...
...stuff deleted

The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't cast
in the first place.
Don't forget the 1888 election which the Republicans also stole, Grover
Cleveland (D) won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote to Benjamin
Harrison (R), the scoundrels have been stealing elections for years. :)

Agreed that Democrats aren't exactly blameless on this, either. Note the
Daly political machine of Chicago or the stolen ballot box of Johnson. The
list goes on, and even Kennedy's campaign of 1960 was probably rigged to a
certain degree, though it may not have been necessary. Nixon's and other
republicans are equally guilty of these practices, but never has the voting,
nationwide, been as corrupted as it was in the previous 2 presidential
elections (read articles by Greg Palast and Martin Luther King III for some
examples).

I am probably one of the few people here who actually watched the
Kennedy-Nixon debate on live television and it is the truth that Kennedy
wiped the floor with Nixon. The crappy tapes from that time period don't
do it justice. Kennedy was shot while I was in high school but I saw
Oswald get his in the jail live, and even then was wondering how much
Johnson had to do with rigging the assassination. He could barely
suppress a smile the very next day when they were taking Kennedy's
rocker out to make room for his Texas saddle.

And worse, the Diebold systems are fatally flawed. The political stance of
the CEO and board are clearly reflected in the results; for example; exit
polls, which are historically extremely accurate tools, were taken at booths
here in California, Ohio, Florida, and several other states, and they showed
very different results than the numbers tallied. It is only in the last 2
elections where these machines were used that the exit polls were so
dramatically wrong.

Remember who was the governor of Florida in 2000.

In addition, there are thousands of computer experts who can easily hack the
code (and probably a few hundred malicious teens, as well). Considering a
single programmer stole over 8 Million from Crocker Bank (bought by Wells
Fargo, some years back) sometime between closing on Friday and opening on
Monday, the idea of running all votes through networked computers running
the same software is a questionable practice.

On a personal note, using the available networking tools at a previous job,
I was able to do some pretty dramatic things, such as read sensitive data,
change data on a LAN, or read data going into and out of a network. Yes,
some of these holes have been plugged, but by no means have all of them been
addressed (see the list of Windows security fixes over the past year for a
single, admittedly worst-case, example).

Rick

"bill" wrote in message
m...
Amy Blankenship wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
...
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article .net,
"george conklin" wrote:

Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the world's
population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale
agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed
countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population regularly,
and which does provide emergency capacity when food production fails
in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires, etc.
In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives. However,
75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such
catastrophes at once.
75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where the
United States is going to top 300 million around October 15. Compared
to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150 million too
many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I went to visit
the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the corn fields I
grew up playing in are now built over with housing or "Condo-fields".
If we keep replacing corn with people we are going to be in deeper
**** than we are now. Rolling the global population to about 1 billion
(max) and keeping it there with some no growth thinking is about the
only way the human race will be here in another 200 years. I think we
are setting ourselves up far a mass plague or starvation that is going
to thin out the population. We just plain doesn't need so many people.
I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find, but
there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim that
75% of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a 4:1
chance of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there is
overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have every
bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as I
have.
My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility
impairment hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in order to
qualify if people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt, but
nobody gets to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.

I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:

1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops
increasing
2) That children never feed their parents

If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on which
country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more nations
become industrialized, population will level off or even decline. The
reason we have such extreme population growth now is that we have better
education, health care, food production, and food distribution. So
mortality is down.

Way off base for the US.

You are very ignorant. No native-born group reproduces itself in the USA.
Immigration causes population growth here, but they are only meeting a
demand for labor that a insufficient birth rate from native-born groups
fails to provide.

george conklin wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
m...
Amy Blankenship wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
...
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article .net,
"george conklin" wrote:

Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the world's
population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale
agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed
countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population regularly,
and which does provide emergency capacity when food production fails
in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires, etc.
In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives. However,
75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such
catastrophes at once.
75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where the
United States is going to top 300 million around October 15. Compared
to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150 million too
many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I went to visit
the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the corn fields I
grew up playing in are now built over with housing or "Condo-fields".
If we keep replacing corn with people we are going to be in deeper
**** than we are now. Rolling the global population to about 1 billion
(max) and keeping it there with some no growth thinking is about the
only way the human race will be here in another 200 years. I think we
are setting ourselves up far a mass plague or starvation that is going
to thin out the population. We just plain doesn't need so many people.
I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find, but
there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim that
75% of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a 4:1
chance of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there is
overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have every
bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as I
have.
My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility
impairment hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in order to
qualify if people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt, but
nobody gets to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.
I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:

1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops
increasing
2) That children never feed their parents

If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on which
country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more nations
become industrialized, population will level off or even decline. The
reason we have such extreme population growth now is that we have better
education, health care, food production, and food distribution. So
mortality is down.
Way off base for the US.

You are very ignorant. No native-born group reproduces itself in the USA.
Immigration causes population growth here, but they are only meeting a
demand for labor that a insufficient birth rate from native-born groups
fails to provide.


Hah,
I do have 2 cents to add to this one. I went into a Taco Bell not too
long ago and couldn't order what I wanted without a whole lot of sign
language. It seems they were so busy hiring Mexicans who didn't speak
English they forgot to hire one to take the orders from the main
clientèle, which just happened to be whiteys, like me. Some people got
frustrated and walked out but I hung in there and got my 2 Green bean
burritos, the only thing I ever order there. It felt like forever trying
to get them to understand even something that simple.
Yeah, we really need them.
Bill Baka

"Lorenzo L. Love" wrote in message
newsp.tg4z9tigpheghf@ibm22761843607...
On Sun, 08 Oct 2006 19:15:58 -0700, Amy Blankenship
wrote:


"bill" wrote in message
m...
Amy Blankenship wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
...
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article .net,
"george conklin" wrote:

Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the
world's
population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale
agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed
countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population
regularly,
and which does provide emergency capacity when food production
fails
in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires,
etc.
In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives. However,
75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such
catastrophes at once.
75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where
the
United States is going to top 300 million around October 15.
Compared
to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150 million too
many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I went to
visit
the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the corn fields I
grew up playing in are now built over with housing or
"Condo-fields".
If we keep replacing corn with people we are going to be in deeper
**** than we are now. Rolling the global population to about 1
billion
(max) and keeping it there with some no growth thinking is about the
only way the human race will be here in another 200 years. I think
we
are setting ourselves up far a mass plague or starvation that is
going
to thin out the population. We just plain doesn't need so many
people.
I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find, but
there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim that
75% of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a 4:1
chance of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there is
overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have
every
bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as I
have.
My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility
impairment hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in order
to
qualify if people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt,
but
nobody gets to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.

I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:

1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops
increasing
2) That children never feed their parents

If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on which
country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more
nations
become industrialized, population will level off or even decline. The
reason we have such extreme population growth now is that we have
better
education, health care, food production, and food distribution. So
mortality is down.

Way off base for the US. We get one pregnant Mexican having a baby here
and the whole illegal family stays, so that one 'Citizen' gives a whole
pre-existing family the right to stay here. Mortality due to disease is
down from what it used to be, but then people in non-developed countries
just have more children who then starve and of course, we send them
food.
Us Natural born Americans don't have that many children because we are
too
busy working to survive the high cost of living to support all the
immigrants who we have to support through social programs. China and
India
are both over 1 Billion and will keep going as long as we keep bleeding
money to them, which will eventually make us the "EX" superpower.

First, you're talking about population growth in the US through
immigration
vs reproduction, which is exactly what I said.

China and India are growing, but their populations are stabilizing as
they
need to educate themselves more to be able to fill the tech jobs that are
being outsourced there.

Now let's look at the second premise. In the developing world,
children
are often valuable hands to produce food and/or the means to get food.
So in that sense, developing nations can't afford "pet children" who
are
not expected to return any value to the family in the way we do in the
US. So people in developing nations tend to reproduce more because
they
need the additional hands and because of higher infant and child
mortality rates.

You don't read much, do you? The reason they try to reproduce so much is
that there is a high rate of infant death caused by the birth of a new
child. Once there is a new baby to breast feed the next older one is
expected to survive on adult food and often dies from malnutrition.
Our answer to this? Throw money at them or "Adopt" a child in a far away
land, thus making it our problem.

You don't read *well* do you? I did way they reproduce more in part
because
of higher infant and child mortality.

Small amounts of education, especially for female children, greatly
reduces mortality among infants and children, so population will
initially spike as education becomes available.

Uh-huh!

But this makes the benefits of education tangible, so developng peoples
slowly spend more and more time in school in order to reap more
benefits
of education. This extends the childhood years, and people begin to
reproduce less. In addition, since the children are spending all their
time learning, they are not an asset to the household, but a drain on
it
until they become productive in their teens or twenties. At which time
they are themselves ready to reproduce, so they split off into their
own
households *and never return any value to the parent household.*

And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So
if
we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
educate.

You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't
you.

I just call it the way I see it. Do you really think that the fact that
people in developed nations don't even reproduce enough to sustain their
own
numbers isn't a natural result of the way nations come to be developed?



Developed nations like the U.S., Australia, France or the United Kingdom?
All have positive population growth rates. Even Japan which is often cited
as an example of a stable population has a positive population growth
rate. The few Western nations that have negative growth rates are mostly
former Soviet Block nations which have low life expectancy due to a
variety of reasons. That includes Germany which has inherited Soviet Block
East Germany. Check your facts.

Check YOUR facts. How much is due to reproduction, how much to immigration?

"Amy Blankenship" wrote in message
.. .

I just call it the way I see it. Do you really think that the fact that
people in developed nations don't even reproduce enough to sustain their
own numbers isn't a natural result of the way nations come to be
developed?

The reproductions rate don't seem to be hurting either China or India as
they speed toward even more development.

On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:14:11 -0700, Amy Blankenship
wrote:


"Lorenzo L. Love" wrote in message
newsp.tg4z9tigpheghf@ibm22761843607...
On Sun, 08 Oct 2006 19:15:58 -0700, Amy Blankenship
wrote:


"bill" wrote in message
m...
Amy Blankenship wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
...
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article
.net,
"george conklin" wrote:

Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the
world's
population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale
agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed
countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population
regularly,
and which does provide emergency capacity when food production
fails
in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires,
etc.
In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives.
However,
75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such
catastrophes at once.
75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where
the
United States is going to top 300 million around October 15.
Compared
to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150 million
too
many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I went to
visit
the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the corn fields
I
grew up playing in are now built over with housing or
"Condo-fields".
If we keep replacing corn with people we are going to be in deeper
**** than we are now. Rolling the global population to about 1
billion
(max) and keeping it there with some no growth thinking is about
the
only way the human race will be here in another 200 years. I think
we
are setting ourselves up far a mass plague or starvation that is
going
to thin out the population. We just plain doesn't need so many
people.
I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find,
but
there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim
that
75% of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a
4:1
chance of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there
is
overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have
every
bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as
I
have.
My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility
impairment hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in
order
to
qualify if people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt,
but
nobody gets to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.

I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:

1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops
increasing
2) That children never feed their parents

If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on
which
country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more
nations
become industrialized, population will level off or even decline.
The
reason we have such extreme population growth now is that we have
better
education, health care, food production, and food distribution. So
mortality is down.

Way off base for the US. We get one pregnant Mexican having a baby
here
and the whole illegal family stays, so that one 'Citizen' gives a
whole
pre-existing family the right to stay here. Mortality due to disease
is
down from what it used to be, but then people in non-developed
countries
just have more children who then starve and of course, we send them
food.
Us Natural born Americans don't have that many children because we are
too
busy working to survive the high cost of living to support all the
immigrants who we have to support through social programs. China and
India
are both over 1 Billion and will keep going as long as we keep
bleeding
money to them, which will eventually make us the "EX" superpower.

First, you're talking about population growth in the US through
immigration
vs reproduction, which is exactly what I said.

China and India are growing, but their populations are stabilizing as
they
need to educate themselves more to be able to fill the tech jobs that
are
being outsourced there.

Now let's look at the second premise. In the developing world,
children
are often valuable hands to produce food and/or the means to get
food.
So in that sense, developing nations can't afford "pet children" who
are
not expected to return any value to the family in the way we do in
the
US. So people in developing nations tend to reproduce more because
they
need the additional hands and because of higher infant and child
mortality rates.

You don't read much, do you? The reason they try to reproduce so much
is
that there is a high rate of infant death caused by the birth of a new
child. Once there is a new baby to breast feed the next older one is
expected to survive on adult food and often dies from malnutrition.
Our answer to this? Throw money at them or "Adopt" a child in a far
away
land, thus making it our problem.

You don't read *well* do you? I did way they reproduce more in part
because
of higher infant and child mortality.

Small amounts of education, especially for female children, greatly
reduces mortality among infants and children, so population will
initially spike as education becomes available.

Uh-huh!

But this makes the benefits of education tangible, so developng
peoples
slowly spend more and more time in school in order to reap more
benefits
of education. This extends the childhood years, and people begin to
reproduce less. In addition, since the children are spending all
their
time learning, they are not an asset to the household, but a drain on
it
until they become productive in their teens or twenties. At which
time
they are themselves ready to reproduce, so they split off into their
own
households *and never return any value to the parent household.*

And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off.
So
if
we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
educate.

You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses,
don't
you.

I just call it the way I see it. Do you really think that the fact
that
people in developed nations don't even reproduce enough to sustain
their
own
numbers isn't a natural result of the way nations come to be developed?



Developed nations like the U.S., Australia, France or the United
Kingdom?
All have positive population growth rates. Even Japan which is often
cited
as an example of a stable population has a positive population growth
rate. The few Western nations that have negative growth rates are mostly
former Soviet Block nations which have low life expectancy due to a
variety of reasons. That includes Germany which has inherited Soviet
Block
East Germany. Check your facts.

Check YOUR facts. How much is due to reproduction, how much to
immigration?



The U.S. has a birth rate of 14.14 births/1,000 population vs a death rate
of 8.26 deaths/1,000 population. People born in the U.S., not immigration.
Similarly the other developed nations cited have simplely more people
being born in them then dying in them. This info is readily available if
you would bother to look and not blindly repeat anti-immigrant propaganda.
Can you cite a few non former Soviet Block developed nations that have
more deaths then births?

Lorenzo L. Love
http://home.thegrid.net/~lllove

"We must alert and organise the world's people to pressure world leaders
to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental
crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of
irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every
environmental problem we face today."
Jacques-Yves Cousteau

"Lorenzo L. Love" wrote in message
newsp.tg6g5gw7pheghf@ibm22761843607...
On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:14:11 -0700, Amy Blankenship
wrote:


"Lorenzo L. Love" wrote in message
newsp.tg4z9tigpheghf@ibm22761843607...
On Sun, 08 Oct 2006 19:15:58 -0700, Amy Blankenship
wrote:


"bill" wrote in message
m...
Amy Blankenship wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
...
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article
.net,
"george conklin" wrote:

Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the
world's
population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale
agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed
countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population
regularly,
and which does provide emergency capacity when food production
fails
in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires,
etc.
In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives.
However,
75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such
catastrophes at once.
75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where
the
United States is going to top 300 million around October 15.
Compared
to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150 million
too
many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I went to
visit
the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the corn fields
I
grew up playing in are now built over with housing or
"Condo-fields".
If we keep replacing corn with people we are going to be in deeper
**** than we are now. Rolling the global population to about 1
billion
(max) and keeping it there with some no growth thinking is about
the
only way the human race will be here in another 200 years. I think
we
are setting ourselves up far a mass plague or starvation that is
going
to thin out the population. We just plain doesn't need so many
people.
I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find,
but
there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim
that
75% of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a
4:1
chance of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there
is
overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have
every
bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as
I
have.
My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility
impairment hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in
order
to
qualify if people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt,
but
nobody gets to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.

I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:

1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops
increasing
2) That children never feed their parents

If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on
which
country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more
nations
become industrialized, population will level off or even decline.
The
reason we have such extreme population growth now is that we have
better
education, health care, food production, and food distribution. So
mortality is down.

Way off base for the US. We get one pregnant Mexican having a baby
here
and the whole illegal family stays, so that one 'Citizen' gives a
whole
pre-existing family the right to stay here. Mortality due to disease
is
down from what it used to be, but then people in non-developed
countries
just have more children who then starve and of course, we send them
food.
Us Natural born Americans don't have that many children because we are
too
busy working to survive the high cost of living to support all the
immigrants who we have to support through social programs. China and
India
are both over 1 Billion and will keep going as long as we keep
bleeding
money to them, which will eventually make us the "EX" superpower.

First, you're talking about population growth in the US through
immigration
vs reproduction, which is exactly what I said.

China and India are growing, but their populations are stabilizing as
they
need to educate themselves more to be able to fill the tech jobs that
are
being outsourced there.

Now let's look at the second premise. In the developing world,
children
are often valuable hands to produce food and/or the means to get
food.
So in that sense, developing nations can't afford "pet children" who
are
not expected to return any value to the family in the way we do in
the
US. So people in developing nations tend to reproduce more because
they
need the additional hands and because of higher infant and child
mortality rates.

You don't read much, do you? The reason they try to reproduce so much
is
that there is a high rate of infant death caused by the birth of a new
child. Once there is a new baby to breast feed the next older one is
expected to survive on adult food and often dies from malnutrition.
Our answer to this? Throw money at them or "Adopt" a child in a far
away
land, thus making it our problem.

You don't read *well* do you? I did way they reproduce more in part
because
of higher infant and child mortality.

Small amounts of education, especially for female children, greatly
reduces mortality among infants and children, so population will
initially spike as education becomes available.

Uh-huh!

But this makes the benefits of education tangible, so developng
peoples
slowly spend more and more time in school in order to reap more
benefits
of education. This extends the childhood years, and people begin to
reproduce less. In addition, since the children are spending all
their
time learning, they are not an asset to the household, but a drain on
it
until they become productive in their teens or twenties. At which
time
they are themselves ready to reproduce, so they split off into their
own
households *and never return any value to the parent household.*

And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off.
So
if
we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
educate.

You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses,
don't
you.

I just call it the way I see it. Do you really think that the fact
that
people in developed nations don't even reproduce enough to sustain
their
own
numbers isn't a natural result of the way nations come to be developed?



Developed nations like the U.S., Australia, France or the United
Kingdom?
All have positive population growth rates. Even Japan which is often
cited
as an example of a stable population has a positive population growth
rate. The few Western nations that have negative growth rates are mostly
former Soviet Block nations which have low life expectancy due to a
variety of reasons. That includes Germany which has inherited Soviet
Block
East Germany. Check your facts.

Check YOUR facts. How much is due to reproduction, how much to
immigration?



The U.S. has a birth rate of 14.14 births/1,000 population vs a death rate
of 8.26 deaths/1,000 population. People born in the U.S., not immigration.
Similarly the other developed nations cited have simplely more people
being born in them then dying in them. This info is readily available if
you would bother to look and not blindly repeat anti-immigrant propaganda.
Can you cite a few non former Soviet Block developed nations that have
more deaths then births?

First, saying that population in industrialized nations is due more to
immigration than to reproduction is neither for or anti immigration. It's
just a statement with no value judgments. I happen to be married to an
immigrant and we've discussed immigrating somewhere else ourselves later in
life.

Second, according to wikipedia, "In industrialized countries with low child
mortality, sub-replacement fertility is below approximately 2.1 children per
woman's life time. 2.1 children per woman includes 2 children to replace the
parents, with one-tenth of a child extra to make up for the mortality of
children who do not reach the age of 15, which is the defined age when the
fertility rate is calculated."
.....
"While almost all of the developed world, and many other nations, have seen
plummeting fertility rates over the last twenty-years, the United States'
rates have remained stable and even slightly increased. Note however that
some European countries have gradually increasing fertility rates, most
notably France, whose fertility rate increased to 1.85 in 2005. Nevertheless
even France remains below the 2.09 children/woman fertility rate of the US."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

The difference is that you're looking at the balance of births and deaths
*today*, where a lot of different factors come into play like a large group
of people born in the 40's and 50's that happen to be healthy and aging.
Replacement population looks at how many children a couple will actually
produce over the course of their lifetime with the logical expectation that
they both will die at some point. So that ultimately to permanently replace
themselves they have to each produce at least one child. If somehow
previous generations were to become immortal we'd need to look at
replacement population differently.

Hope this clarifies;

Amy