On population and breeding:
We do have more people than our present state of engineering, lifestyle and behavior can support. It's not that we don't have enough "world", it's that we haven't engineered ourselves to use that world well enough for the rate of growth we presently have. We're still obeying silly lines that long-dead ancestors drew in the dirt, we still pretend sovreignty has value in a connected global society, we still think that man can only get along when facing a common enemy (
uhh.. I'd call disease a common enemy, but you don't see mankind united harmoniously against cancer or influenza.. ) - we still sprawl cities right in the middle of the best agricultural property we can find, we still offer our disadvantaged,
able bodied citizens a humane subsistence without offering them (and demanding) work in exchange, we still follow Dewey's ridiculous
'education' system (in the US) which spins off unsociable and unimaginative graduates and promotes the disappointing trend of parents moving to favorable school districts while commuting hours each day to their place of business, wasting whole months per year of their lives and insane amounts of fuel, tires, and vehicle wear in the process...
Do you spend an hour each way in commute? I did for 5 years. 2 hours times 5 days per week times 50 weeks per year divided by 24 hours in a day means you spend more than 20 whole, round-the-clock days per year in your car commuting to and from work.
- I would bike during good weather, which took almost exactly the same time due to some shortcuts - finally I just moved closer to work
Best decision ever.
I think
we either need to learn to embrace far more change than we've been, so we can work out how a dense society can thrive - or we need to adjust our population to thrive comfortably without having to make other changes. The fact that we still quarrel and resources & energy are something whose price is a point of concern, pretty well illustrates the existence of a problem.
The simplest and most painless ways to adjust our population are education and patience - it seems fairly well established that
more educated people generally breed more slowly which can hardly be called a bad thing. If we can in some way encourage people to wait a couple extra years on average to begin their families, that will spread our population out across the so-called fourth dimension. Shifting a hypothetical generation length from 20 years to 25 years for example, would (over time) reduce the population by 20%
even if everyone still has the exact same number of children they would have had 5 years earlier.
- This also conveniently cushions the potential problem of an aging population without an upcoming population able to support it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PaleMelanesian
Back to the original topic of wasted time in traffic, that is a very real problem that needs to be addressed. It is getting worse, too. How do we fix the problem we already have?
My personal solution is to live where it's not a problem.
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Indeed - moving close to work is an exceptional answer where possible. You spend less time commuting and you're one less other car on the road for those extra minutes you otherwise would have been.
Moving "to a small town" isn't exactly a reasonable fix however... because when you move to a small town it becomes a big city. Sure, you didn't personally constitute the difference between a small town and a big city but once everyone else gets the same idea it's pretty obvious how that works.