cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24230552
Just capitalism doing its thing
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
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But like... why babies? We already have way too many of those. We need fewer babies.
If we're going to delve into some seriously murky ethical water here, why not forcus on something there's an actual need for, like organ and blood harvesting? And that would double donor pool by including men as poss-- ...oh. Oh yeah. That's why. -_-
That's already a thing in many countries, an opt-out program for organ donating, so by default they will take my organs if I'm braindead
I mean a step or two beyond that- like keep a braindead body alive via feeding tube and ventilator so it's just constantly generating blood that drips into donor bags. Keep just enough in the body's circulation to keep it ticking, but bag the rest -- it would produce WAY beyond the output of a mind-intact donor.
Bone marrow transplant? Done. Skin grafts? Hit it. Fucking hair for wigs? Plasma? Hell, even fecal transplants are a thing (restores GI microbiome that got wiped out... it's gross as fuck, but it's a thing - and it requires the donor to follow a VERY specific diet, that can now be force-fed).
Basically anything the body passively generates that we have some use for; keep a braindead-human-cattle-donor on life support and milk it for all it's got.
...that sounded a bit bit like a sales pitch - gist is to illustrate just how far we could take this. Putting the focus on babies will just worsen the population problem, but also showcases an extreme lack of imagination!
Ok, repeat after me: "Warhammer 40k is not an instruction manual"
Silence, Heretic
I doubt the blood is more useful than all the organs required to produce it.
But if I lie braindead in a hospital, I would be happy if my body is divided up in the way a doctor determines to be the most useful for society.
Depends on the needs of the patient. If you're bleeding to death and the hospital you're actively dying in is out of your blood type, then absolutely blood is more useful than organs.
If you need a new lung, a huge stock of blood transfusion bags isn't going to do you much good.
The goal would be for supply to outpace demand for all of the above.
It really depends on your blood types.
That's on track. Children are too expensive now so birth rates everywhere are below replacement rates already or will be soon
We may find the real population problem is we will have fewer smart people to help us fix the climate problem
Oh no, there's no 'may' about it - we're 100% fucked on that front.
The "may" in that is that we really don't know which way population will go after we hit peak population.
It might stabilise, it might drop, it might drop precipitously
The prediction I recently saw was the latter, a fast population drop after a peak
Speaking of, I just watched the MST3K episode on The Clonus Horror. It didn't end well.
Tap for spoiler
It didn't start particularly good either. And the middle was a slog.Capitalism has a need for unlimited growth and also most national pension systems globally take the current working generation's money to pay for the retirement of the current retired generation - so the future working generation needs to be big enough to support the current working generation in turn.
My own country did a footgun thing here. We had a mandatory 2nd pillar system where you contribute to a fund, the gvt matches (well, doubles) your contribution, and that gets added to the normal 1st pillar national pension when you retire, either you take it out as a lump sum, or get paid a portion of it per month. You literally couldn't take money out of it prematurely. Except the right-wing populists decided to allow taking money out of it with the caveat that you can't rejoin it for 10 years. A large percentage of people took money out, something like 30%?
Now the next generation are going to have to shoulder the responsibility for the current generation again. This was supposed to reduce this dependence on future generations.
Cancer has a need for unlimited growth, that doesn't mean we should coddle a tumor: cut that shit out, then put it under the microscope so we know how to stop it from happening again.
Your county's findings that right-wing populists are trash are consistent with a myriad of similar 'studies' around the globe. Mine just elected an orange neonazi who loves making decisions that hurt the quality of human life, so we'll be adding plenty of data to that pile pretty soon here too.
But governments are not willing to do the one thing that would make for higher fertility - make the country a nice place to live, with enough support for parents so having a child isn't an economic disaster
I wonder what my country will be like with half the number of people. We're building so many houses, my town has two new suburbs opened in the last ten years as we head toward peak population, but our fertility rate is just over 1.6, replacement rate is 2.1. many countries are worse
I remember when we had a population in my town of 200,000 we are currently just short of half a million
We also let people take their money out of their retirement fund if they want it for buying a home (or rather put a deposit on a mortgage for a home).
I don't know who this "we" is. Circumstances vary heavily by household and neighborhood.
The inhabitants of planet Earth. Making a baby is one of the largest carbon footprint things anyone can do. The climate is actively writing humanity's (and plenty of other critters') eviction notice via the heat we're pumping into our planet.
The needs of the individual household include not being cooked to death, and I'd wager that supersedes whichever other circumstances you had in mind.
We need fewer babies.
The median Indian resident produces carbon under the threshold for a sustainable climate. And that country has some of the highest population growth in the world. Babies aren't the reason your carbon footprint is high. Coal fired power plants and ICE powered automobiles and AI data centers are what's driving up the emissions rate.
The emissions of a single household are minuscule relative to the emissions of international industry. Not having a child will do nothing to discourage Andressen Horowitz or Jack Ma from shoving another billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in pursuit of a larger ROI.
We need fewer billionaires.
The carbon footprint of having a child will depend on the family it's being born into, for sure. I don't know jack about the median Indian resident, but I'm fairly confident that their carbon footprint is higher than zero, so even looking at them as a best case scenario, reduction is still beneficial. And the emissions of industries will reduce alongside the population they target and workforce they deploy.
Yeah fuck that shit.
Yeah fuck those pieces of shit. Population reduction needs to happen in tandem with guillotine day, as you're 100% right that the damage they're doing is wildly beyond the scope of -any- decision you or I could make, good or bad.
Population reduction is already in force because guillotine day isn't coming. The whole peril of climate change is that is renders large developed regions and concentrations of people impossible to sustain. But our inability to curb emissions isn't a consequence of our sheer quantity of people. It is deliberately obstructed by profit-seeking actors in the highest reaches of authority.
You can kill every Gazan, bomb out every Ukrainian or Russian city, and massacre humanity along the length and breadth of the US-Mexico border. It won't curb emissions because these aren't the people burning all the fossil fuels.
I don't mean reduction by cherry picking a population out of existence (except for billionaires - their extinction would be a win for literally all other life), but that humanity in general needs to slow the fuck down.
We won't. We're too stupid to act on any consequences beyond the scope of the fiscal year; but we need to.