Europeans now sail to Somalia to fish. They are doing terrific damage there, and the local human and animal populations there are suffering food shortages as a result.
There are fish dishes, traditional ones in coastal towns. But as the cooling chain is often none-existant, the parts of the country more far away from the coast only eat canned fish or salt-fish.
Its general either to expensive, or in danger of being rotten. So if you have a surplus of cattle/sheep/goat, anyone would prefer steak to the health hazard.
(Page 5)
>wealthy groups in all the areas opt for fresh fish with soft texture contrary to the poor such as those in Afgoye and Adale who consume fish with rough
texture and smell because they cost less than other types of fish. Common low quality fish mostly consumed by the poor are Gacoore (Alestes affinis) and Koronto or electric fish in Afgoye. Some respondents in Bardera and Shinile in Hiran
admitted dislike for fish due to associated smell therefore
do not consume it at all. The quality of fish consumed also
depends on preservation and storage methods employed.
Generally, the preservation and storage techniques are
poor thus most of the fish is consumed immediately after
buying. Poor preservation methods and facilities are very
often the cause of spoilage.
Why would Europeans go so South into the Gulf of Arden? Why would Norwegian fishers go South? What's going on? Where's the data? What are the incentives?
Does Somalia have fishing quotas? Is there any anti-overfishing agreement system for that region?
> Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia's last functional government in 1991, the country's 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline — the longest in continental Africa — has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country's at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international "free for all," with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country's own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen.
> High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and without licenses, for the better part of two decades, the U.N. says.
They do it because there were a lot of fish there and no functional government to stop them or enforce quotas.
Thanks! It's really fucked up. Especially that quite a few navies were making sure the trade route is secure, but they haven't bothered to stop or at least somewhat deter these illegal trawlers.
Select fish species. The cycle of bust/boom inevitably leaves many species behind. Ecosystems are often very finely balanced and the loss of biodiversity is an inevitable result of this. Who knows how much was lost in each cycle; we really don't know.
Can you explain the causal link between those rich people's greed and this fishing technique? Is it because rich people enabled dynamite to be produced cheaply enough for them?
Exactly. Rich people literally put the dynamite in these people’s hands. That is the only plausible and widely accepted explanation for inequality, and kudos to you for advancing it.
It's because "richness" creates a pathologically competitive social system that encourages this sort of destruction activity in order to get the token that conveys value.
You mean rich people are to blame for poor people destroying their environment because the rich people set an example for poor people to aspire to? Have you got a suggestion for a way to solve that problem other than what the Khmer Rouge did?
I have. Forbid poor people from becoming rich. By keeping them in fixed economic classes, they won't have the motivation to compete so hard and then the fish will be saved. There are obvious bad side effects of this. Can you improve on it?
Maybe not _those_ 8 rich people, but generally Western nations were made rich by exploiting the tragedy of the commons. Oil and other mining are the classic examples.
Why should we expect these poor, poor fishermen to prioritize our poor, poor planet over their poor, poor families when our own rich got that way through exploitation of natural resources and pollution?
Wasn't every nation? Europe and China have lost almost all their forests. Pre-European New Zealand natives exterminated the giant flightless moa. There was a powerful ancient African civilization that died out because they used up all the artesian water. I'd say nobody cared about conservation until rich people we comfortable enough to stop worrying about their next meal and look at broader issues.
I don't understand why you are being downvoted. You're 100% right.
I specifically mention the West because it is the West (the EU) who are pressuring the Philippines to better regulate their fishing industry, as per the fine article, and also because it is the West who are now comfortable enough to worry about the tragedy of the commons since they are done exploiting it.
BTW, elsewhere I just read that the amount of forests in England has now recovered above the levels recorded in Domesday Book (William Conqueror's land survey in 1086).
Same's happening in many countries in Europe. I have a picture of my birth home, taken in 1903 from a nearby hill. The landscape is mostly bare, almost everything except the actual fields is used for cattle. Now you can't take a picture like that. Almost everything is covered by a forest, but you can't see it from the trees growing on the hill.
England might have been lucky enough (blessed with rain and all). Southern France and Greece, not so much, and will probably never recover pre-roman empire forests.
If there's not enough rain to sustain a forest, then even should they have been left untouched in antiquity they wouldn't be there anymore now either right?
Where I live, you can't really destroy a forest. You can hack it down and lay concrete over the ground; if you then leave it there, in a matter of decades or centuries it'll be a forest again, if you don't regularly weed it out and hack it down again.
If climate changes - as it has changed in the Mediterranean, prior to industrialisation - that's then different.
Surprising! But now it sounds like rich people are regrowing the forests that the poor people of earlier centuries destroyed. Evidence that rich people help the environment and poor people harm it. Still no sign of the harm that the grandparent claimed rich people are doing to the environment.
As opposed to eating today? As per the fine article, legal fishing methods net 0-6 KG of fish per day. Explosive fishing nets 15-45 KG of fish per day.
> In the Philippines, stocks have declined precipitously. According to a report by the Philippine national statistics board, the average daily catch in 1970 was 45 pounds. By 2000, that had dropped to 4.5 pounds.
Many rich people are rich because they employ people and profit from it. Many rich people are rich because they own real wealth and not (just) money. Rich people are not the problem. Rich people are no excuse for doing bad things.
Poverty is no excuse for doing bad things.
Deficient morality leads to bad actions and bad constraints.
Change requires change. Understanding who and what to blame is an improvement.
Becoming vegan is an improvement. Voting for better politicians is an improvement.
IMO in a perfect world, there would be no tax and no debt but a moral government that distributes money as needed to private persons and not to banks by the central bank and by bailout programs.
Perfect worlds are, probably, the worst of all possible outcomes.
It is unfortunate that how the world is conducted at any point in time is largely a result of the choices of those with the most power to bring about their desires.
> It is unfortunate that how the world is conducted at any point in time is largely a result of the choices of those with the most power to bring about their desires.
This is scary but true. Why are human beings so primitive?
Could it at the same time be, that the less wealthy people are getting more influencial?
Certainly, democracy have made this happen... Certainly, media have made politicians more accountable... So while sure it might look bleak on a scale of 10-15 years, I would argue we are better off than in the 70ties :)
I’d argue: the problem with progressive taxes is ... ok, the problem with taxes as a means of wealth transfer is it puts the money in the hands of politicians, who are themselves already wealthy, to spend on behalf of their drinking buddies.
I don’t believe these problems are solvable in the strict sense, but they are fun to critique.
Become vegan and vote? Thats the whitest most privileged first world solution I've ever heard.
There's around 3 billion people in the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from. Should they also recycle?
They are not concerned with abstract concepts like morality when their fundamental survival is at stake.
You, me, anyone would kill someone to feed their kid without a second thought. Dyanamiting fish is NOTHING to these people.
>Many rich people are rich because they employ people and profit from it.
Correction: Without proper regulations, Rich people EXPLOIT people in subhuman wages/conditions to make insane profit.
>Many rich people are rich because they own real wealth and not (just) money. Rich people are not the problem. Rich people are no excuse for doing bad things.
You basically just said "rich people aren't the problem" with no evidence for that claim. You have not sufficiently made the case that rich people aren't the problem.
Vegan food is the cheapest food and the most efficient food with regard to natural resources in the Philippines. Eating meat is a tradition and a personal choice but not a requirement in the Philippines.
Maybe several millions but not billions of people are hunters or farmers living in barren locations were only grass and shrubs grow well and thus animal products are needed. Too often land is stolen for animal farming. Too often deserts are created by animal farming. Animal farming is maybe the most important activity promoting global warming.
Regarding rich people:
-)
Why not become rich yourself instead of working for rich people ? You can not do anything else than work for rich people ? Thus rich people are not the problem.
-)
Except for Swaziland and North Korea, all (AFAIK) poor states in the world are democratic states were people vote for those in power. Thus the rich minority or the 10% or the 1% is not the problem.
What? This has nothing to do with the rich. This is the tragedy of the commons - other fishers are allowed to use dynamite to fish extremely effectively, so the only way for you to make a living wage is to do the same.
I think its a general cultural disdain for the environment within some cultures.
Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.
This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed.
If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else will reign in the Asians and Africans who are busy destroying their environments?
The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level. This means hugely reducing fertility in some developing countries, mostly by making sure contraception is widely available and that women are educated enough to know how to use it.
The Philippines are catholic so birth control might actually be illegal, if the Catholic Church is concerned about the environment they need to promote birth control not present it as a cardinal sin. Countries like this the pope holds a heck of a lot of sway. He talks a good game about global warming but here is where the rubber meets the road. For the sake of the common good they need to shift the focus of sin from sex to wrecking the environment and causing overpopulation.
And what is the solution given that these people exist ? Because undoing that seems immoral now, even by non-catholic standards.
I mean the best interpretation of your comment is wishing for an alternate world (in which millions of people would never have been alive in the first place). In the middle the comment is assigning blame for that. At worst ...
I get that dozens of millions of people not being alive would solve your problem ... but I do hope you understand that nobody, especially not those few dozen millions, agree. And that does mean that you'll have to come with a different solution.
We'll have to figure that out, won't we? The Philippines birth rate is somewhere in the vicinity of 3 children per woman. What's a more sustainable number?
I would come to the number by calculating how people will support themselves and others, and yet have a reasonable load on them.
That number seems to be at least greater than 3. So 4. Probably it's more like 3.1 or so.
How did you get to the conclusion that the island of the Philippines can't support (from now, and for a VERY long time in the future, even if perhaps not indefinitely) 3 children per woman ?
It's not so much cultural disdain as weak governance and a current priority for jobs and economic growth over environmental protection. If 'enlightened' western countries really cared more about the environment perhaps they would impose more restrictions about the goods that they allow to be imported into their countries.
Britain or France in the 1800s was equally if not more egregious in terms of disdain for the environment, though they didn't have the size or technology to wreak as much impact as modern technologies allow us to do.
> Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.
Well I've been to a lot of places with plastic pollution problems and I picked up gobs of that shit off the world's beaches. I can tell you that despite their prevalence, plastic bottles, chip bags, straws, flippers, lids, cups, forks, and knives don't spring out of the ground. They don't grow on trees. Most aren't made in local factories. They are manufactured elsewhere, shipped there, and sold to the locals, each hand in that supply chain extracting a little bit of profit, a huge portion of which is sent overseas, stolen from the local economy.
You can blame locals for being trash monkeys if you want--and they absolutely are--but absent outside influx of these one-time plastic use goods, they'd be piling up paper and wood and banana peels since they have since the beginning of time, and nature would be taking care of it using age-old biodegradation.
Plastic is our mess and its global reach is absolutely due to Western greed.
It's possible - just perhaps barely possible - that you might get a better reception from a more friendly audience if you didn't describe trade as theft. In the eyes of many, it robs your truthful, necessary, utterly critical message of credibility to the people who most need to internalize it.
> The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level.
We need to stop making non-biodegradable garbage. Period. You can blame the last hand to touch it, but the whole pipeline should just not exist. Population will take the better part of a century to stabilize--we need to fix our waste problem no matter what population does, and we cannot wait for some mythical world with fewer people.
The first thing the world needs is to wrestle money from these billionaires and fund education for people.
Educated people will understand the impact of their kids, and also have a better chance at making a contribution to society, and taking care of their families they do have.
Huh? Isn't Bill Gates spending his money strategically to best help those people. He's spent over $15 Billion dollars on vaccines. I highly doubt a government will be able to spend that money more effectively.
Anytime some proposes a simple solution to a complex problem that nobody's been able to solve and calls it "simple", they're wrong. Who's going to give them money? Bill Gates? No, he's spending it curing malaria. Jeff Bezos? No, he's using his money for his rockets. You? No, you're using your money for whatever luxuries you indulge in. Once you find the people who're going to give away their money, how will you convince them to do so? Threaten violence? No, you'll get arrested. Steal it? No, you'll get arrested. Form a revolution and steal it? No, you don't have enough desperate people willing to give up their lives just so they'll be compelled to give their money to some strangers in another country.
Even if it succeeds, now you have a bunch of unskilled people who don't need to work. What will they do with their time? There's plenty of examples in the US and other countries of how that turns out.
Theres alot to unpack in what you just said. Not to mention your entire thesis is based on claims and assertions.
Who's going to give them money? Taxes?
Unskilled people who don't need to work? You missed my whole point about 'education' and 'training' so they can provide value to make money. I'm not giving anyone money. Just lower the ladder for them to climb up that the rich have pulled up behind them.
Generally, you exchange wealth for goods made from natural resources.
If half the wealth is tied up in 8 people who could not possibly spend it, what do you think would happen to the earth's natural resources if it were suddenly dumped on the bottom 3 billion? It would be a huge boon to the economy at first, until we burnt through every resource.
Are you trying to say that if you buy a fishing boat with money you borrowedfrom Warren Buffett, then dynamiting the fish is understandable, but if you borrow from the ABC Pension Fund it's not?
I'm trying to say that with less inequality and more resources available to them, these people could go to the grocery store to feed their family, or go to school to get a profession...
But it sounds as if you're trying to blame eight rich people, when you yourself have your henchmen, oops, your fund managers do the same thing. (I assume you're trying to get a maximum interest for your own pension savings?)
>He accepted an estimated 300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon
This is the exact difference between someone who works and someone who is handed money to do work. I don't know if Amazon would be alive without this transaction, but it sure helped that Bezos was given 300k by his parents.
Everytime I see this argument I shake my head at the naivety. People with high net worth are so because they have capital tied up in assets. Nobody is rich because they hoard liquid money.
Say you distribute a rich man's investments in risky instruments to a community living in a remote, impoverished land. Now each investment becomes infinitely less useful because they are not part of a portfolio, it may be difficult to find a buyer for them. Next, how does the community in the remote land trade them, seeing as they live so far from a market?
This is a structural issue of capitalism and not something that anyone can boil down to some greed of the rich. For as long as populations do not see the need to pass laws regulating wealth, capitalist countries will always develop high inequality.
This is a fairly big abstraction, but we live in a world system that's based on discounting unseen externalities; sweeping the hurt under the rug, so to speak. The world-system started with the theft of the American continent and perpetual genocide of the natives, continued with the mass industrialized kidnapping from Africa, and persists today in a cyberpunk, abstracted form that some call "capitalism." There isn't any real name for what we have, the name will come from the next world system, if there is one, a world system where the collective genius of humanity will be free from the constraints of nation, money, gender......
This is ridiculous. We live in a generally improving world with declining global poverty, declining child mortality, declining war etc etc.
There are still tons of problems but I don’t think such a pessimistic outlook is useful to solving them. We should look for concrete political and technological solutions.
I thin you're unknowingly validating OP thesis. All the improvements you mention are directly affecting mankind.
But at what costs did we get these immediate improvements? What are the externalities?
At some points, they will have direct, dire consequences on human life. You're probably aware of climate change already (we talk a lot about this, but it's getting worse), but our focus will switch to ecological collapse.
Here in Europe, we've already lost 30% of birds' populations, and 80% of insects in 30 years. The loss is accelerating fast.
Now, is it possible that the effects of climate change and loss of biodiversity can exceed the improvements you've mentioned initially? Can you discard this hypothesis?
The Arab slave trade took more slaves from Africa than the American slave trade. Maybe it's really the Muslims that are the cause of Philippine overfishing? Still doesn't make much sense!
Every single history I've read about slavery indicates that the middle passage was orders of magnitude larger and more intense than pre-modern slave systems.
To the first comment: our world is changing. We are leaving the world system that was created around 1500. That said, we're still inside of it, and so social practices as manifestly illogical and inane as concentration camps ("prisons"), national borders, and the burning of carbon continue.
Most of them didn't go to America but it looks like the order of magnitude was about the same for both ~10's of millions. The Arabs castrated their male slaves so they didn't leave a black population for us to notice like America and Sth America have.
Edit: looks like we've had to warn you about this repeatedly in the past. Eventually we ban accounts that won't stop doing it, so will you please stop?
Its by far time for we to leave the fishes of the hook. Dynamite fishing is bad but its just the tip of the iceberg in what concerns the global impact of fishing. What about:
- the widespread use of human slaves in southeast Asia still in 2018?
- Or the massive ocean dead zones that keep getting bigger?
- Or the 25% of by-catch (fish caught unintentionally and discarded)?
- or the estimates that certain oceans will be fishless before 2050?
- or catching fish like sardines, and instead of eating it directly, to feed it to farmed fish like salmon, at a huge cost and waste
All of that for a food that has the highest concentrations of toxins that humans consume, to the point that its no longer recommended to pregnant women.
The toxicity of fish is due to bioaccumulation (big fish eats small fish, eats smaller fish etc.), and fish has in many cases the same or even more cholesterol than meat.
Plus omega 3 have been shown to not be recommendable to the general population, I think its time we stop eating it its completely unsustainable.
Seriously, what kind of planet are we leaving to our kids?
You're right, here are some sources. Here is an article on the use of human slaves for fishing in Asia, they get kidnapped in villages in india and many other places, this is happening today, as we speak and at a large scale - http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/artic...
"Eating just a single serving of fish each week during pregnancy, for example, can lead to more mercury in their infant’s body than injecting them directly with about a dozen mercury-containing vaccines."
Your article about fish oil doesn't prove that fish oil isn't helpful. Supplements, in general, have often been shown not to have the protective effects expected, but that doesn't disprove the substance's effect when consumed in its natural host.
one key takeaway:
A British team recently found IQ score results falling by 2.5 to 4.3 points every decade since approximately the end of the second world war. And this past December, another group from the U.S. found that children who grew up eating a lot of fish tended to have higher IQs—and they slept better, too, which is another factor involved in adult intelligence levels. Notably, children in many countries in the modern era eat very little fish.
Also, "a dozen mercury-containing vaccines", how much mercury is that? Is this like telling me not to fly because I get 1000x more radiation from it than eating a banana? Comparing the miniscule to the infinitesimal makes neither large.
The truth is this (discontinuing consumption) applies to all animal products, not just fish, we should also stop consuming beef pork and chicken as well. There are better, healthier cheaper proteins that can be acquired through other safer means that don't require the same environmental taxing (using more food to feed the animals we eat, getting rid of their waste, etc).
I have the feeling that soon the fishermen will have nothing left to catch and will be forced to let nature recover. I see them just as out of balance predators, killing of their own supply and subsequently they shall die themselves (or be forced into other source of income). Will nature recover? I do think so.
It's nice to think the market would solve this but you're basically describing the Horn of Africa, where overfishing has led to piracy because no other viable options exist.
Meanwhile depletion continues by the last desperate fishermen who didn't turn pirate.
100 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadhttps://www.somalispot.com/threads/why-do-somalis-hate-fish-...
There are fish dishes, traditional ones in coastal towns. But as the cooling chain is often none-existant, the parts of the country more far away from the coast only eat canned fish or salt-fish.
Its general either to expensive, or in danger of being rotten. So if you have a surplus of cattle/sheep/goat, anyone would prefer steak to the health hazard.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
(Page 5) >wealthy groups in all the areas opt for fresh fish with soft texture contrary to the poor such as those in Afgoye and Adale who consume fish with rough texture and smell because they cost less than other types of fish. Common low quality fish mostly consumed by the poor are Gacoore (Alestes affinis) and Koronto or electric fish in Afgoye. Some respondents in Bardera and Shinile in Hiran admitted dislike for fish due to associated smell therefore do not consume it at all. The quality of fish consumed also depends on preservation and storage methods employed. Generally, the preservation and storage techniques are poor thus most of the fish is consumed immediately after buying. Poor preservation methods and facilities are very often the cause of spoilage.
(It’s more complicated than that, but so is everything)
OP said: Europeans now sail to Somalia to fish.
Why would Europeans go so South into the Gulf of Arden? Why would Norwegian fishers go South? What's going on? Where's the data? What are the incentives?
Does Somalia have fishing quotas? Is there any anti-overfishing agreement system for that region?
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1892376,00...
> Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia's last functional government in 1991, the country's 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline — the longest in continental Africa — has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country's at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international "free for all," with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country's own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen.
> High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and without licenses, for the better part of two decades, the U.N. says.
They do it because there were a lot of fish there and no functional government to stop them or enforce quotas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJL_oLG10dU
Do you have a solution ? Note: these people exist, so "don't have kids" is not an answer, obviously, in fact it would make things worse.
You can blame the poor for surviving...or blame the rich for the greed that forces people to do this to survive.
I have. Forbid poor people from becoming rich. By keeping them in fixed economic classes, they won't have the motivation to compete so hard and then the fish will be saved. There are obvious bad side effects of this. Can you improve on it?
Maybe not _those_ 8 rich people, but generally Western nations were made rich by exploiting the tragedy of the commons. Oil and other mining are the classic examples.
Why should we expect these poor, poor fishermen to prioritize our poor, poor planet over their poor, poor families when our own rich got that way through exploitation of natural resources and pollution?
I specifically mention the West because it is the West (the EU) who are pressuring the Philippines to better regulate their fishing industry, as per the fine article, and also because it is the West who are now comfortable enough to worry about the tragedy of the commons since they are done exploiting it.
Same's happening in many countries in Europe. I have a picture of my birth home, taken in 1903 from a nearby hill. The landscape is mostly bare, almost everything except the actual fields is used for cattle. Now you can't take a picture like that. Almost everything is covered by a forest, but you can't see it from the trees growing on the hill.
If climate changes - as it has changed in the Mediterranean, prior to industrialisation - that's then different.
> In the Philippines, stocks have declined precipitously. According to a report by the Philippine national statistics board, the average daily catch in 1970 was 45 pounds. By 2000, that had dropped to 4.5 pounds.
Poverty is no excuse for doing bad things.
Deficient morality leads to bad actions and bad constraints.
Change requires change. Understanding who and what to blame is an improvement. Becoming vegan is an improvement. Voting for better politicians is an improvement.
We should do more of that to fight poverty, as that will hopefully mitigate things like this.
Unfortunately no state in the world respects the Human Rights for its citizens.
http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/human-rights/
IMO not progressive taxes but progressive economics and progressive politics should be implemented.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2X_Ywepzm46_uGJDfRjYeQ/vid...
IMO in a perfect world, there would be no tax and no debt but a moral government that distributes money as needed to private persons and not to banks by the central bank and by bailout programs.
E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the...
It is unfortunate that how the world is conducted at any point in time is largely a result of the choices of those with the most power to bring about their desires.
So it has always been and so shall it always be.
This is scary but true. Why are human beings so primitive?
Certainly, democracy have made this happen... Certainly, media have made politicians more accountable... So while sure it might look bleak on a scale of 10-15 years, I would argue we are better off than in the 70ties :)
I don’t believe these problems are solvable in the strict sense, but they are fun to critique.
Edit: spelling.
As a stereotypically apathetic Australian: those who can be bothered fighting the good fight certainly have my supportive clicks!
Who am I kidding, I simply gave up on getting people to know the difference between "loose" and "lose".
There's around 3 billion people in the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from. Should they also recycle?
They are not concerned with abstract concepts like morality when their fundamental survival is at stake.
You, me, anyone would kill someone to feed their kid without a second thought. Dyanamiting fish is NOTHING to these people.
>Many rich people are rich because they employ people and profit from it.
Correction: Without proper regulations, Rich people EXPLOIT people in subhuman wages/conditions to make insane profit.
>Many rich people are rich because they own real wealth and not (just) money. Rich people are not the problem. Rich people are no excuse for doing bad things.
You basically just said "rich people aren't the problem" with no evidence for that claim. You have not sufficiently made the case that rich people aren't the problem.
Maybe several millions but not billions of people are hunters or farmers living in barren locations were only grass and shrubs grow well and thus animal products are needed. Too often land is stolen for animal farming. Too often deserts are created by animal farming. Animal farming is maybe the most important activity promoting global warming.
Regarding rich people:
-) Why not become rich yourself instead of working for rich people ? You can not do anything else than work for rich people ? Thus rich people are not the problem.
-) Except for Swaziland and North Korea, all (AFAIK) poor states in the world are democratic states were people vote for those in power. Thus the rich minority or the 10% or the 1% is not the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_monarchy#Contemporary...
Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.
This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed.
If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else will reign in the Asians and Africans who are busy destroying their environments?
The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level. This means hugely reducing fertility in some developing countries, mostly by making sure contraception is widely available and that women are educated enough to know how to use it.
I mean the best interpretation of your comment is wishing for an alternate world (in which millions of people would never have been alive in the first place). In the middle the comment is assigning blame for that. At worst ...
I get that dozens of millions of people not being alive would solve your problem ... but I do hope you understand that nobody, especially not those few dozen millions, agree. And that does mean that you'll have to come with a different solution.
When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging.
4
That number seems to be at least greater than 3. So 4. Probably it's more like 3.1 or so.
How did you get to the conclusion that the island of the Philippines can't support (from now, and for a VERY long time in the future, even if perhaps not indefinitely) 3 children per woman ?
Britain or France in the 1800s was equally if not more egregious in terms of disdain for the environment, though they didn't have the size or technology to wreak as much impact as modern technologies allow us to do.
Well I've been to a lot of places with plastic pollution problems and I picked up gobs of that shit off the world's beaches. I can tell you that despite their prevalence, plastic bottles, chip bags, straws, flippers, lids, cups, forks, and knives don't spring out of the ground. They don't grow on trees. Most aren't made in local factories. They are manufactured elsewhere, shipped there, and sold to the locals, each hand in that supply chain extracting a little bit of profit, a huge portion of which is sent overseas, stolen from the local economy.
You can blame locals for being trash monkeys if you want--and they absolutely are--but absent outside influx of these one-time plastic use goods, they'd be piling up paper and wood and banana peels since they have since the beginning of time, and nature would be taking care of it using age-old biodegradation.
Plastic is our mess and its global reach is absolutely due to Western greed.
We need to stop making non-biodegradable garbage. Period. You can blame the last hand to touch it, but the whole pipeline should just not exist. Population will take the better part of a century to stabilize--we need to fix our waste problem no matter what population does, and we cannot wait for some mythical world with fewer people.
Educated people will understand the impact of their kids, and also have a better chance at making a contribution to society, and taking care of their families they do have.
It's funny to me because you're bitching about effective govt spending on the internet..a technology developed by the govt.
Id argue government funding has developed more cures for diseases and more technological advances than any other sources of funding in all of history.
NASA put a man on the moon..
"Tragedy of the commons" is a total strawman.
You want to stop this from happening...give these people enough money to go to the grocery store or get trained for a job.
Its extremely simple.
Even if it succeeds, now you have a bunch of unskilled people who don't need to work. What will they do with their time? There's plenty of examples in the US and other countries of how that turns out.
Who's going to give them money? Taxes?
Unskilled people who don't need to work? You missed my whole point about 'education' and 'training' so they can provide value to make money. I'm not giving anyone money. Just lower the ladder for them to climb up that the rich have pulled up behind them.
If half the wealth is tied up in 8 people who could not possibly spend it, what do you think would happen to the earth's natural resources if it were suddenly dumped on the bottom 3 billion? It would be a huge boon to the economy at first, until we burnt through every resource.
Its not a complex idea at all.
But it sounds as if you're trying to blame eight rich people, when you yourself have your henchmen, oops, your fund managers do the same thing. (I assume you're trying to get a maximum interest for your own pension savings?)
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_life_and_educ...
>He accepted an estimated 300,000 from his parents and invested in Amazon
This is the exact difference between someone who works and someone who is handed money to do work. I don't know if Amazon would be alive without this transaction, but it sure helped that Bezos was given 300k by his parents.
Say you distribute a rich man's investments in risky instruments to a community living in a remote, impoverished land. Now each investment becomes infinitely less useful because they are not part of a portfolio, it may be difficult to find a buyer for them. Next, how does the community in the remote land trade them, seeing as they live so far from a market?
This is a structural issue of capitalism and not something that anyone can boil down to some greed of the rich. For as long as populations do not see the need to pass laws regulating wealth, capitalist countries will always develop high inequality.
There are still tons of problems but I don’t think such a pessimistic outlook is useful to solving them. We should look for concrete political and technological solutions.
I thin you're unknowingly validating OP thesis. All the improvements you mention are directly affecting mankind. But at what costs did we get these immediate improvements? What are the externalities?
At some points, they will have direct, dire consequences on human life. You're probably aware of climate change already (we talk a lot about this, but it's getting worse), but our focus will switch to ecological collapse.
"We will see mass extinctions that undermine human well-being". https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03891-1
Here in Europe, we've already lost 30% of birds' populations, and 80% of insects in 30 years. The loss is accelerating fast.
Now, is it possible that the effects of climate change and loss of biodiversity can exceed the improvements you've mentioned initially? Can you discard this hypothesis?
To the first comment: our world is changing. We are leaving the world system that was created around 1500. That said, we're still inside of it, and so social practices as manifestly illogical and inane as concentration camps ("prisons"), national borders, and the burning of carbon continue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: looks like we've had to warn you about this repeatedly in the past. Eventually we ban accounts that won't stop doing it, so will you please stop?
Since he brought attention to astics in the oceans there’s been a consensus to solve this issue.
Dynamite fishing is also very destructive, and if it were documented people would be focused on ways to stop it.
From the use of Coke bottles filled with explosive filler from WWII unexplored ordinance(UXO).
While that is pretty bad, the worst thing I saw was bleach used to scare out tropical fish from coral reefs.
Seeing the dead white reefs is heart breaking.
- the widespread use of human slaves in southeast Asia still in 2018? - Or the massive ocean dead zones that keep getting bigger? - Or the 25% of by-catch (fish caught unintentionally and discarded)? - or the estimates that certain oceans will be fishless before 2050? - or catching fish like sardines, and instead of eating it directly, to feed it to farmed fish like salmon, at a huge cost and waste
All of that for a food that has the highest concentrations of toxins that humans consume, to the point that its no longer recommended to pregnant women.
The toxicity of fish is due to bioaccumulation (big fish eats small fish, eats smaller fish etc.), and fish has in many cases the same or even more cholesterol than meat.
Plus omega 3 have been shown to not be recommendable to the general population, I think its time we stop eating it its completely unsustainable.
Seriously, what kind of planet are we leaving to our kids?
Here is an article on how ocean dead zones quadrupled since 1950 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/04/oceans-s...
The fishing industry now impacts 55% of the world oceans - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222162124.h...
For the health consequences of fish - https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/fish/
"Eating just a single serving of fish each week during pregnancy, for example, can lead to more mercury in their infant’s body than injecting them directly with about a dozen mercury-containing vaccines."
And from the American Heart Association "Fish oil supplements may help prevent death after a heart attack but lack evidence of cardiovascular benefit for the general population" - https://newsroom.heart.org/news/fish-oil-supplements-may-hel...
one key takeaway: A British team recently found IQ score results falling by 2.5 to 4.3 points every decade since approximately the end of the second world war. And this past December, another group from the U.S. found that children who grew up eating a lot of fish tended to have higher IQs—and they slept better, too, which is another factor involved in adult intelligence levels. Notably, children in many countries in the modern era eat very little fish.
Also, "a dozen mercury-containing vaccines", how much mercury is that? Is this like telling me not to fly because I get 1000x more radiation from it than eating a banana? Comparing the miniscule to the infinitesimal makes neither large.
Meanwhile depletion continues by the last desperate fishermen who didn't turn pirate.
Are the downsides really worth hamstringing the development of a potentially ocean-saving industry?