So, have YOU donated to the Japanese relief effort yet?

[Joelcool7]

Lafiel said:

dahuman said:

I don't really donate to these things since there are like, 7 billion people in the world atm, every person I save is going to potentially fuck me over in the long run when it comes to food resources in the future. Now's not really the right time to be saving lives, my own included. I'd totally donate if the world population is about 1/50th of the current size, though even that number is questionable tbh.

Well, I personally believe the world is very overpopulated as well, but in my opinion the context of a catastrophe isn't the right place to discuss that and my personal method of choice to decrease the population size would be a rigorous birth control and not letting people die, which frankly doesn't seem all that "humane" (to refer to your nick).

Onibaka said:

Our world is not overpopulated in any way...We have technologies and conditions to give water and food to more than 15billion EASILY, TODAY.

The problem is our society.

If USA invested 1/10 of what spends in war on technologies to increase food productivity, and if poor countries instead of exporting all their food, at least give their population a little, there would not be hungry.

with the development of technology, I believe that our world would support more than 50 billion people.

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back on topic:

One thing that i will never do in my life is donate to japan. No matter what country you are, if you want to find people to help that much, just walk to the corner on the street.

I can't believe how ignorant and naive this comment is..

Sure if the get rid of all those pesky wild animals and cultivate every landscape (i.e. make "use" of those "useless" forrests and swamps and so on), that may be possible as long as we are in a climate optimum.

But the climate _will_ change, there never was a point in earth history where climate was constant and right now we are in a short warm period (former warm periods were 10-15k years on average) within an ice house climate (ice ages on average were 70-100k y long within the last 2.6m years).

Now if the climate changes (to a new ice age or to a hot house climate) we will have far less agricultaral production, so if we had 15 or 50 (lol) billion people living on earth in that situation what do you think will happen? I can tell you.. unbelievable hunger, huge wars for water resources/fertile land, billions of people will die within some years/decades and the wars will destroy a lot of the enviroment.

It's absolutely not in humankinds best interest to use/populate earth to it's maximum capacity, we need to find a sensible max of human population, which I'm afraid already is exceeded.

 

By the way, "poor" countries don't produce enough food to feed their people (nearly all of them have to import food from the west, ofc especially during droughts and so on), they produce a lot of "cash crops", because in the rich countries we want chocolade, peanuts, caffee,... (and we want all that for very cheap prices). These plants don't qualify as "food", as they use a hell of lot of water for a minimal (consumable) energy output. But to clean/desalinate water we need to invest much (electric) energy as well.

Governments in poor countries don't even have the choice to tell their people to do otherwise, as there is a lot of pressure to go on doing so/produce even more export orientated agricultural products to pay off their depts (which we made sure they can't).

I complained about "dahuman" 's nick, but "baka" in yours might be justifiable.

My pastor referenced a study last year that if you took all the money North American's spend on their pets alone you could feed all of Africa, then the study included all of the make up industry and with that you could feed all of South America for a year. He then said if you took all of the G20's Make up and pet costs you could feed the entire world.

Now I don't know the study myself as he referenced it in church. He also referenced another study that all the food wasted in the G20 could feed the whole world twice over. Again I don't know the studies off by heart. Now I don't think that the money could feed the world, honestly if you started buying that much food demand would out pace supply thus driving the prices higher.

However the amount of food the G20 waste, looking at people just here in Canada we waste a ton of food. My cousin worked for a Little Cesars Pizza. He said they threw out over 20 pizza's a day. When I did security at my mall the resteraunts through whole garbage bins of food out every day. The produce stores threw out even more as the food went bad.

Now if the Governments of the world rashioned their food, then feeding 15-billion doesn't sound too far off. If every poor country stopped exporting food and the G20 countries with more then enough food started exporting to the poorer countries, then I have no doubt right now we could feed 15-billion people.

But thats when we run into problems. The G20 countries are not about to take a dive in their living standards. Were not about to start rashioning are food, we aren't about to give up our pets, women will not give up their make up. The G20 countries like the cushy lifestyle they live in and lets face it they aren't about to give that up.

Also water, I know a few years ago in the Province Newspaper they said that a facility could be built on the ocean and supply the whole province with clean drinking water for a couple billion dollars.

So if our countries all got together and pooled are wealth and resources to help the developing world. Yes we could sustain 15-billion. Now as you said weather may not permit that for long but right now today we could most definatly support the whole worlds population and much more.