Tag Archives: overpopulation - Page 2

A Small Light Bulb Moment

Add to the list of soon-to-be-obsolete things: automotive high-beams.

A little over-dramatic, sure, but give it some consideration.  When is the last time you got to use your high beams?  Ok, that’s a loaded question.  Some people would say “all the time!” and some would say “never!”  It depends on how populated your area is.

I was driving home one evening and I was able to use my car’s high beams for the entirety of one span of roadway.  I never saw another car.  And that made me think back to my previous living location where you’d never get a chance to use your high beams because there were cars on every road at every hour of day.

As we become more overcrowded in this world, our high beam usage is going to become diminished, possibly to the point of being irrelevant.  Then again, we’ll probably have self-driving cars by then and we’ll all be shuttled around in cars having nothing more than marker lights on them.

YOLO

Just a little behind the times on this one.  I’ve heard a lot of this “YOLO” thing going on, and after some consideration, I’ve chosen to redefine it.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Theosophy, the main point of it is that, as souls, we are constantly evolving through the process of reincarnation.  With each life, we are put here to learn lessons and pay back Karmic debt built up over previous lives.  As you go through these lives, you build inherent skills, which are displayed as natural talent; wisdom, which is shown as common sense; and other intangible skills like spirituality and tolerance.  “You can’t take it with you” is only for material goods.  Your soul’s qualities persist.

So, accepting the teachings of Theosophy,  you can imagine there have been souls who have been through many different lifetimes.  Some have learned their lessons well and gained all the skill, wisdom, and wholesomeness from each lifetime.  Others haven’t learned and still continue to be cruel, greedy, and intolerant.  The world is full of both types of people, you can’t doubt this.

But the world is also full of many more people.  More people on this Earth than ever before.  More bodies, more souls.  These bodies must be filled with young souls, those who have not had the experience of many lifetimes to learn how to be good.  Many that have to pay back Karmic debt through lack and suffering.  Some that are learning from their current situation, and a lot that are not.  It takes a long time to learn some lessons.

You can see this in the attitude of the younger generations.  You can see it every day in so many people.  It’s a sense of desperation.  Even driving in the city, you can sense the desperation in how people drive.  They must pull out in front of you, because they feel if they don’t, they will never get in.  Never.  That’s how the world is behaving.  Now or never.

These people don’t understand that this life is nothing.  There will be so many more lives to enjoy if you live this life right.  If you don’t, you’ll make up for it next time.  And hopefully, you’ll learn it that time.

So, for all the desperate people and their rally cry: “You Only Live Once!” I respond knowingly, “No, You’ve Only Lived Once.”

Why, Baby, Why?

The other day, while working around the house, I heard children screaming in the neighborhood.  I idly thought to myself, “Why do people have children?”  Then I thought a little more and got more serious about it.  Why do people have children?  They say that the people who decide not to have and raise children in their lifetime are being selfish, but when I got thinking about it, it seems the opposite is true.  With a little brainstorming, these are some reasons I came up with:

  • To continue the human race
  • For the experience of raising a child
  • Because your parents want grandchildren
  • Because you need help working your farm/business
  • You need a male child to continue your family name
  • You grew up in a big household and want to have the same experience
  • Babies are beautiful
  • It’s the thing to do/all your friends have babies
  • You’re getting old and having babies when you’re older is risky
  • Your spouse wants a baby
  • You don’t have a spouse and don’t want to be alone
  • Your spouse is going to war and you want something to remember him by
  • It just kinda happened

Of this entire list, the only reason that is not selfish is the first one, and I haven’t heard anyone use that one before.  The last reason is irresponsible, but that’s a different post.

The typical rationalization of parents is “You’ll never understand the feeling of unconditional love,” which is false if you’ve ever owned a pet.  Another common statement is regarding the wonder of watching a child grow and learn.  Yeah, anyone can get that anywhere from any child.  “But it’s different when it’s your own.”  Hear that?  “…your own.”  When coming from a parent, it’s a statement of “Look what I made.”

Obviously, parenting is filled with pride – selfish, dangerous pride.  When you have a child, you give up your own identity and start projecting through your children.  To be fair, this isn’t always the case, but the parents who don’t do this are classified as poor parents or uninvolved parents.  Then, it is recommended you live through your child.

But, isn’t that the proof that child-raising isn’t selfish?  Despite the initial reason for having the child, you have to be selfless and sacrifice everything to raise the child?  Quite the opposite, because by doing just that, you are burdening the child with creating your happiness as well as their own happiness, your success with their success.  Their problems are amplified because they become yours, too.  This is why so many parents (mothers, usually) have extreme separation anxiety at college-time, because suddenly they’re alone with no life.

If people would ask “why?” before having kids, and really look at the reasons and be honest with themselves, maybe we could manage this population crisis.  After all, the first listed reason is well taken care of.

Ayn I Rand. I Rand So Far Away.

For a while, I’ve been watching “patriots” circle-jerk over Ayn Rand and I never understood why.  So, I took a short amount of time and read a short book of hers called Anthem, which I assumed would be typical of the Rand philosophy.  I can say I have no further desire to read a Rand book.  For as much as conservatives scream about the evils of socialism and communism, the world that Rand wants is just as evil, just in the other direction.

To me, Anthem is a tribute to selfishness and hubris.  The final chapters are filled with an excess of “I”, “me”, and "my”, which is meant to contrast with the whole rest of the book, where the primary character refers to himself in the plural, “we”.   This book’s story is set in an absurd world, because it’s the only world that you could even begin to justify the main character’s actions and beliefs.  Some future world where humanity has regressed to the dark ages and is controlled by a collection of councils, who have mapped out everything so there is no personal choice.  And somehow, people today think we are moving in that direction?

As I neared the end of the book, knowing what was going to happen, I thought I would write a blog post as an epilogue to the story, describing what would happen when this extreme individualistic philosophy grew.  Turns out I didn’t need to.  The book already had it covered.  The primary character took over an old house, claimed all its possessions as his, planned to convert it into a fortress, planned to build an army and wage war on the existing community, make his house the capital of a new world and be the absolute leader.  This is a good thing? 

At the turning point in the story, where the character begins to learn at a hyper-accelerated pace and surpasses the entirety of humanity in knowledge, it is not dwelled upon that he stole items from various councils to accomplish his learning.  While it sounds understandable to break the laws of an absurdly oppressive future world, the general message, reinforced in the closing of the story, comes across as “Do whatever it takes for your own benefit.”  This is something to strive towards?

The problem with this book and the current flavor of individualism is the inherent exclusiveness.  Coming along with that is the despise and near hatred for fellow humans.  In this mindset, everyone is out to get something from you and you’re not going to share anything with anyone you don’t deem worthy.  In this mindset, you have no need for anyone else – unless you need something from them, of course.  The viewpoint that a person has no value whatsoever and contributes nothing to society is the default instead of the exception.  Trusting no one but yourself is the overriding belief.

So what becomes of a society of individuals?  How does anything move forward?  How can there be any progress without shared resources?  Consider a bunch of individuals living by a stream, each using the water for daily life.  A new person comes along and dams the river upstream so he can do whatever he wants to with the large pool.  That’s his right; he’s doing whatever his individual desires want.  The others downstream suffer.  Without any governing body, I suppose the dam owner would simply be run out or killed and the dam destroyed.  Sounds like an incredible world to live in, where whatever you make is yours and only yours.

The concept of radical individualism like portrayed in Anthem and in the equally absurd previous example are possible when there is no overpopulation crisis.  If someone cramps your individual freedoms, simply move farther away.  This, accurately, is how America got started and is how and why it grew so powerful.  but with as crowded as America is now, we have no choice but to be socialistic.  We do not have the space nor the independence (as in lack of dependence on others) to make this happen.  Maybe being a farmer in the rural Midwest would be suitable for such people, but not everyone can attain this.

There’s always such a big cry from the people who feel they’re being repressed.  “Why can’t I?”  “The government won’t let me (insert anything here).”  The answer is that what you want is not good for society.  Not everyone can go and start building a nuclear power plant, because not everyone will get it right, then we all have to pay for the mistakes.  The answer this book purports is that it doesn’t matter.  The only thing that matters is that it is good for me.  Although in the closing chapters the book came very, very close to using this phase, it didn’t.  The phrase, usually reserved for unmentionable acts, is “The end justifies the means.”  And to have a society built on that belief would be a terrible one to live in.

Meeting Goals

This morning on the drive in to work, I saw a billboard for a hospital touting their ER wait time, which was 13 minutes.  It got me thinking cynically about how that number is derived and enforced.  And I know if I’m thinking about it from a cynical point of view, someone else has thought about it from a serious point of view, and someone else yet has actually done it.

Side-stepping my soapbox about too many people in the world today, I’m going to look at the managerial method to problem-solving: meet the goals.  “Meet the goals” is not the same as “fix the problem”.  Just yesterday, I came across a poorly-written specification document as part of an issue I was assigned to fix.  Following the “Success Criteria” of the document would allow you to skip a major section of the specification, which is what was done.  So, now I have to go above and beyond the success criteria to meet the full requirements of the document.

Anyway, back at the hospital, the executives at this hospital see that their ER wait times are too long, or they want to be competitive with other hospitals (because that’s what healthcare has become nowadays), and they figure a wait time metric is a good barometer of their performance.  So they task the manager of the ER will lowering the wait time.

It’s probably safe to say that the “wait time” is defined as the time it takes between the time you check in and the time you get called back to see a nurse or doctor.  So you would walk in and say “I need to see a doctor.”  Your name would be put on a list, then you’d wait for your name to be called.  The time between is dependent on how fast the doctors and nurses can turn over cases.  The ER Manager could add additional staff to make that turnover quicker, but that increases labor costs, lowering profit, which is bad.

But, if you’ve ever been to an ER, there’s plenty of paperwork and such to process before you get started.  The hospital could save some time by giving you the paperwork to fill out while you wait.  That will save some time when you get through the door.  But if you’re a crafty manager, you can take it a step further and not start the check-in process until the paperwork is completed.  So if it takes a patient 20 minutes to fill out the forms and collect the information, that’s not considered “wait time”.  That’s pre-check-in time.  Ka-ching! Problem solved.  No wait, I mean, Goals met!

Oh, There You Are.

Driving home late last night, I caught a glimpse of a billboard.  As tired as I was, I didn’t get a chance to read what was on the sign, but billboards being what they are, I noticed the image on it.  The image showed a standing pregnant woman, holding her package, and Michelangelo’s “hand of god” reaching out to her, complete with E.T. glowing fingertip.

Now, I live in Florida, which has a fair amount of religiousness, and I’m pretty much used to to the fetus billboards that say “Your baby’s heart is already beating!!!!!!!!”  However, this billboard got me pretty riled up.  It was broadcasting the message that now that you are pregnant, God is right there with you.

So where was God a few months ago when you were getting boned by some guy you met at a party?  Where was God when you were grinding on that guy a few hours earlier?  Who was there when you were downing shots like water that night?  Who was watching over you when you were picking out the hottest, sexiest outfit for the party?

If certain people are going to imply that being pregnant is a religious experience, then they have to accept that God either approved, condoned, or encouraged the manner in which the pregnancy occurred.

An Internet Crawl

I started by reading a news article about how airplanes are more densely packed than ever before.  Why is this?  There was a time when air travel was luxurious.  When did it become so lowbrow and pedestrian?  Low fares, obviously.  Everyone can afford to fly now and there are more people now than ever.

Let’s find out about the first point in that statement.  The news article makes mention of a deregulation act passed in 1978. Coincidently, that’s about the time air travel started declining in quality.  Reading an article on the act claims it introduced competition and reduced regulation.  Thanks to the lower fares, airline passengers increased from 207.5 million in 1974 to 721.1 million in 2010.  Although more people are being served, the quality has suffered and the infrastructure can’t support the load.

Now look at the second part of the equation.  More surfing to an article with a US Census chart shows that there are over 100 million more people in the US than when I was born.  Going back to 1950. the US population is half what it is now.  Can you even imagine it?  Half the people everywhere?  No wonder we were so prosperous at that time and now there’s not enough resources to go around.

There’s a saying that is used by people who deliver services: it’s the Tradeoff Triangle (it also goes by other names).  The concept is “Good, Fast, Cheap; choose two”, which means you have to sacrifice something to get more of something else.  In the case of the airline industry, everything has been sacrificed for Cheap.  They’ve held on to Fast for a little while, but with the extreme increase in passenger load, it can’t be efficient anymore.  Flights sell out and you have to choose a less-desirable flight time.  You can get sacrifice Cheap and get a little more Good by buying business-class, but that is a limited experience.

Unstandard Deviation

I am generally a private person.  That means generally, I don’t like crowds.  You could mathematically calculate my dislike of crowds easily: my dislike of a crowd is directly proportional to the size of the crowd.  If you wanted to put on the slightly-larger glasses, you could work the actual formula of people per square meter into it for higher accuracy.  But for the most part, I figured the result was pretty linear.

Today, I stopped at BK for dinner.  There was no one there.  The parking lot was empty and the dining area was void of customers.  I got my meal and sat down to eat.  Even the counter person took off and went outside.  I should have been the happiest person in the world, but I got uncomfortable pretty quickly.

It’s kind of like the feeling of driving in an unfamiliar area and taking a turn onto a road where no one else is going.  The fact that no one’s there kind of makes it seem like you shouldn’t be there either.  But for the time being, I’m still alive and the food hasn’t killed me yet, so that must not be the reason that particular BK was completely empty.

So now it appears my graph is looking a bit more like a parabola now.  And that’s probably more accurate anyway.  I would guess the antapex would be somewhere around 2 or 3 people present.  Approaching zero, the discomfort increases.  And as that number goes into the negatives – you know I’m talking about zombies here – it really starts to climb.

Brave New World, Indeed

This gay student suicide is a pretty hot topic.  Given the trend for social networking and over-sharing,  this seems like growing pains to me.  It seems to be a social progression to share more and more of your private moments.  Some people – probably along generational lines (including mine) – aren’t able to handle that.  This student addressed his inability to handle it in an extreme fashion.

Eventually,  through elimination or extinction, the only ones left will not have any shame about sharing their most private moments.  Maybe at that time, prejudices will be eliminated.  It’s going to be a painful transition with more incidents like this, but, is it a cost to pay for a more positive future?  Everyone sharing everything?  Maybe bad.  People not getting stigmatized for their unique beliefs, hobbies, preferences?  Pretty good.

Obviously each of us has pretty narrow vision of how things are since we don’t live too long, relatively speaking.  Give it a few more generations and you won’t even recognize us.

Indirectly related, I wonder what’s going to happen when the current generation of over-sharers starts running for public politics.

Too Many, Too Many, Too Many

I’ve been thinking about things that have changed since I was growing up and what made them change.  And I’m beginning to point the finger at people.  Not specific people, just people.  There’s too goddamn many of them.  And they suck.  But, oh, don’t worry about me.  I’m doing my part.  I’m not incrementing that population counter at all and I’m not living past my prime.  I’m just a passing fad.

So what have we lost as we’ve gained people?  I haven’t done much thought on this topic, just some casual thinking.  So I don’t have a multi-page rant, but I came up with a few items.

Travel:  Whether by air or car, there are too many damn people travelling.  Air travel used to be luxurious.  My parents dressed me in a suit to go to the airport.  It was like going to church.  Now, it’s just a big cattle train.  With the apparent loss of manners and couth of the average American, it’s a terrible experience.

Education:  All the time, I’m hearing about how schools need to be built or expanded.  Where the hell are all these children coming from?  When I was growing up, there was no school shortage.  And with all this overcrowding, there’s no way anyone’s getting a good education and no teacher is getting paid for the effort they have to put in.

Beaches:  I haven’t always lived near a beach, but when I was growing up, there were regular vacations to a beach.  And I remember it was a lot different then.  For one, you could drive your car on the beach.  Not now.  And can you imagine if you could?  It would be a big-ass parking lot with no room for people.  Traffic jams on beaches; beach rage; idiot drivers.  Again, something that used to be a pleasant experience ruined by the masses.

Does it sound like I’m being elitist?  I don’t think so.  If the stupid humans of the world had enough damn sense that they don’t need to have more than two kids, much less 4, 6, or – holy shit – 8, then there’d be enough resources for everyone.  There’d be enough seats on a flight.  There’d be enough roadway for everyone.  There’d be enough beach for everyone to lie out and for some to bring their car.

As humans, we’ve lost any concept of humans as a race.  And we’ve stopped thinking about the big picture, and we’ve certainly stopped thinking of anyone but ourselves.  2012 can not get here soon enough.