First in an 8 part series, which I suspect is somewhat misnamed. (h/t Manotick)
63 Replies to ““No one ever asked you if this was a good idea.””
Actually I’m not sure we’re having enough kids to sustain our social services to begin with so immigration is a kind of like Faustian deal isn’t it? Besides overpopulation is completely solvable, people just start killing and eating other people. I think it will be inevitable anyways since we’ll have to start to viciously compete for mineral and energy resources. I don’t see how some “one child” government enforced measure is a solution. Europe is doing that voluntarily anyways. Vae Victis I guess.
I understand, Knight 99.
It stuns me that Africa will need our help years down the road. Oil, gas, coffee, green produce, diamonds, people- all are resources Africa has. Unfortunately, the continent is plagued with problems. Dombisa Moyo has some great insight on Africa.
Cheers.
Paul @ 12:40. Careful who you call uneducated trash, I counted, at least 22 misspellings, in your diatribe. That’s not to say I necessarily disagree with your statements, but you must have had a lot of red ink on your last essay in school. Or else you attended one of those really liberal phonetics style schools. Please excuse any of my own spelling errors.
By the way Paul, I’m giving you a lot of slack here, pretending that some of the misspellings were actually typos, and not counting some very questionable punctuation etc., or the lack of capitals on proper nouns, etc.. Everyone may now critique me for being off-topic.
Typical BS. Just like in Canada, all the immigrants go to the three big cities. Australia is a vast empty-land, just like Canada, with ghettos in the three largest cities.
BTW Interesting news from Australia http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/
I think there are couple of different problems.
1) Australia is covered by sand dunes and 40% of interior is arid or semi-arid. A total of 18% of Australia mainland is desert. Therefore although it does have a lot of space, there is no water to sustain much increase in agriculture and/or animal husbandry. If there is no water then there is problem with cooling in factories and with building of new factories. From that follows that 2.1% birth rate is a replacement rate and that is OK for Australia. However large immigration rates, particularly from Asia would make life in Australia difficult in the long run, particularly because majority of immigrants would settle down in major Australian cities.
2) The second problem is birth rate difference between western countries and Middle East/African countries. Presently immigration goes from Africa/ME/part of Asia to highly developed western countries. That would not be a problem however the immigrants bring with them their own customs and do not want to follow customs of the countries they immigrate to. That makes it difficult for the countries they immigrate to sustain their own high level of productivity. Furthermore because the immigrants have stronger ties with their own countries (sustained by communication over internet, phone and frequent trip to their original country) then with country they immigrate to, they have difficulties with integration.
The low birth rate in western countries will be in time reversed, however there is no time for that because of pressure from high birth-rate countries.
3) Africa could feed itself. However one of the problem they have is the culture of corruption and kleptocracy which prevents the full usage of their resources. Furthermore this corruption is exploited by other countries (mainly emirates, KSA, China, South Korea and some businesses from USA and Europe/France+Germany) which buy/lease land for their future agricultural/farm use. Presently, China also cornered majority of mineral rights in Africa.
***8
btw. Paul is wrong. China is not overpopulated. Their population density is lower then population density in India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Netherlands, Japan or North Korea (to mention just a few).
In the days of old England,
Before safes were invented.
They placed a sock,
Over their c*&?.
And this way birth was prevented.
Well yes i went to a liberal school where feeling good about what you did meant more than weather or not it was right.lol
So yes i admit my spelling is atroshious but it does not mean i am a piece of trash as i can still articulate well enough to understand what people are talking about and also form an answer/opinion …no matter how misspelled,unpuctuated or grammorically retarded it may be. lol..i know no excuses.
but hey i love to work andi am a resposible tax payer i have been for 16 years and i am 31.
Paul in calgary
Paul, using Internet Explorer is like trying to cut wood with a dull tool. Download Firefox for free and the built in spell-checker will become your friend. The more you use it the better your spelling will become. What you want to communicate will be understood much better, rather than simply dismissed, if you take advantage of the tools available to easily improve your communication skills.
Paul >
Another good method is to write your comments on a Microsoft Word Document. It can either be set to auto spellcheck, or you can manually check.
Once happy with the result just cut and paste your comment from “Word” to comments window.
I know how you feel, I’ve been traveling the last several weeks and my laptop has a problem connecting to the Internet. It’s been a bummer with typo’s from my iPod, until I get home and have PC fixed……….
Overpopulation? Not enough of me, way too much of you!
What I’ve never understood is why immigrants choose to come to big cities. When my parents came to Canada, they ended up in the bush of northern Alberta because that’s where the opportunities were at the time. You can’t grow food in Northern Alberta aside from carrots and peas and my father finally gave up on gardening. There are trees and oil and those can be traded for food.
Vancouver used to be a nice city until someone decided to see how many people one could cram into a small place and I was glad to leave it. Haven’t been back there in over a year and absolutely no desire to even go and visit. The nice thing about living where I do now is that the people that do move out here tend to be a lot more motivated to work than those who just go to a large city because of the “social services” that the city provides.
Most of Australia could be made far more habitable with technology; towing icebergs from the Antarctic for fresh water, nuclear power plants and air conditioning. Pheonix is in the middle of the desert as is Las Vegas and they exist using 1950’s technology.
I have to admit, though, that the concept that Australia is overpopulated is the funniest thing that I’ve heard today.
Actually I’m not sure we’re having enough kids to sustain our social services to begin with so immigration is a kind of like Faustian deal isn’t it? Besides overpopulation is completely solvable, people just start killing and eating other people. I think it will be inevitable anyways since we’ll have to start to viciously compete for mineral and energy resources. I don’t see how some “one child” government enforced measure is a solution. Europe is doing that voluntarily anyways. Vae Victis I guess.
I understand, Knight 99.
It stuns me that Africa will need our help years down the road. Oil, gas, coffee, green produce, diamonds, people- all are resources Africa has. Unfortunately, the continent is plagued with problems. Dombisa Moyo has some great insight on Africa.
Cheers.
Paul @ 12:40. Careful who you call uneducated trash, I counted, at least 22 misspellings, in your diatribe. That’s not to say I necessarily disagree with your statements, but you must have had a lot of red ink on your last essay in school. Or else you attended one of those really liberal phonetics style schools. Please excuse any of my own spelling errors.
By the way Paul, I’m giving you a lot of slack here, pretending that some of the misspellings were actually typos, and not counting some very questionable punctuation etc., or the lack of capitals on proper nouns, etc.. Everyone may now critique me for being off-topic.
Typical BS. Just like in Canada, all the immigrants go to the three big cities. Australia is a vast empty-land, just like Canada, with ghettos in the three largest cities.
BTW Interesting news from Australia http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/
I think there are couple of different problems.
1) Australia is covered by sand dunes and 40% of interior is arid or semi-arid. A total of 18% of Australia mainland is desert. Therefore although it does have a lot of space, there is no water to sustain much increase in agriculture and/or animal husbandry. If there is no water then there is problem with cooling in factories and with building of new factories. From that follows that 2.1% birth rate is a replacement rate and that is OK for Australia. However large immigration rates, particularly from Asia would make life in Australia difficult in the long run, particularly because majority of immigrants would settle down in major Australian cities.
2) The second problem is birth rate difference between western countries and Middle East/African countries. Presently immigration goes from Africa/ME/part of Asia to highly developed western countries. That would not be a problem however the immigrants bring with them their own customs and do not want to follow customs of the countries they immigrate to. That makes it difficult for the countries they immigrate to sustain their own high level of productivity. Furthermore because the immigrants have stronger ties with their own countries (sustained by communication over internet, phone and frequent trip to their original country) then with country they immigrate to, they have difficulties with integration.
The low birth rate in western countries will be in time reversed, however there is no time for that because of pressure from high birth-rate countries.
3) Africa could feed itself. However one of the problem they have is the culture of corruption and kleptocracy which prevents the full usage of their resources. Furthermore this corruption is exploited by other countries (mainly emirates, KSA, China, South Korea and some businesses from USA and Europe/France+Germany) which buy/lease land for their future agricultural/farm use. Presently, China also cornered majority of mineral rights in Africa.
***8
btw. Paul is wrong. China is not overpopulated. Their population density is lower then population density in India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Netherlands, Japan or North Korea (to mention just a few).
In the days of old England,
Before safes were invented.
They placed a sock,
Over their c*&?.
And this way birth was prevented.
Well yes i went to a liberal school where feeling good about what you did meant more than weather or not it was right.lol
So yes i admit my spelling is atroshious but it does not mean i am a piece of trash as i can still articulate well enough to understand what people are talking about and also form an answer/opinion …no matter how misspelled,unpuctuated or grammorically retarded it may be. lol..i know no excuses.
but hey i love to work andi am a resposible tax payer i have been for 16 years and i am 31.
Paul in calgary
Paul, using Internet Explorer is like trying to cut wood with a dull tool. Download Firefox for free and the built in spell-checker will become your friend. The more you use it the better your spelling will become. What you want to communicate will be understood much better, rather than simply dismissed, if you take advantage of the tools available to easily improve your communication skills.
Paul >
Another good method is to write your comments on a Microsoft Word Document. It can either be set to auto spellcheck, or you can manually check.
Once happy with the result just cut and paste your comment from “Word” to comments window.
I know how you feel, I’ve been traveling the last several weeks and my laptop has a problem connecting to the Internet. It’s been a bummer with typo’s from my iPod, until I get home and have PC fixed……….
Overpopulation? Not enough of me, way too much of you!
What I’ve never understood is why immigrants choose to come to big cities. When my parents came to Canada, they ended up in the bush of northern Alberta because that’s where the opportunities were at the time. You can’t grow food in Northern Alberta aside from carrots and peas and my father finally gave up on gardening. There are trees and oil and those can be traded for food.
Vancouver used to be a nice city until someone decided to see how many people one could cram into a small place and I was glad to leave it. Haven’t been back there in over a year and absolutely no desire to even go and visit. The nice thing about living where I do now is that the people that do move out here tend to be a lot more motivated to work than those who just go to a large city because of the “social services” that the city provides.
Most of Australia could be made far more habitable with technology; towing icebergs from the Antarctic for fresh water, nuclear power plants and air conditioning. Pheonix is in the middle of the desert as is Las Vegas and they exist using 1950’s technology.
I have to admit, though, that the concept that Australia is overpopulated is the funniest thing that I’ve heard today.
overpopulationisamyth.com