Politicians are Birds.

[babe]

Dead species walking. About sums it up.


A lot in this article plays to discussions I have had over the years regarding finite resources, and things like the housing market. It was funny when I bought my first house, how people talked about it like a big investment that can only go up in value over time. I thought long and hard about that because something tells you that it cannot reach infinite value, so there has to be a cap somewhere, right? In fact the first house I bought cost us $106k (1.8k sq ft older home on the bench in North Ogden), and recently it sold again for $200k, and that was outrageous, but not increasing as so many had stated, to nearly infinite levels. And $200k is arguably not that far off in value from $106k considering the state of the economy when we bought it vs now. Same with everything else for us as humans, there are caps. We can get better at things like farming and energy production, but even now we have reached the point of diminishing returns in lots of areas, we are increasing at a decreasing rate, the reverse hockey stick. I think this guy's view is fairly pragmatic. And the decreasing population growth rates make a lot of sense. We are living in the most prosperous age humans have ever known, with unprecedented duration of peace, generally speaking. And medical care across the globe is the best it has ever been. So it make sense there is a decreased urge to procreate when there is not a huge risk of losing the child in infancy, and there is so much to engage us in a prosperous society. Interesting piece for sure.

I think you might be out of touch with the Utah housing market. 1800 ft2 on the Wasatch Front now runs about 400K. But your point is valid. We are getting CA refugees especially around Orem, "The Silicon Slopes" and strong job growth here.

But besides the artificial limits on real estate in the West due to the gov ownership of so much, there is little reason to believe housing pricing can be infinite when pay scates are being depressed by bad politicians with taxing wet dreams.

Our housing market is inflated by low interest rates, but nobody is going to make pay keep up with this or any other kind of inflation. That's what open borders does for our big corporations. You go to college, get into debt to do that, and they hire from India. people who will live ten persons in an apartment and work for peanuts programming the vast IT wonderball.

:Homes will never be worth more than people can pay, in large numbers.

 

[fishonjazz]

Sorry, I thought I was being clear.

It makes no difference to the planet if we survive or die off, or even if we never existed. Biomes change, populations adapt or perish, life continues. It happened long before we came along, and will keep happening.

If you limit your query in certain ways, then you could say amphibians are much worse off, while cows have flourished with us around.

Being clear would be providing a post with one word or with 3 words. Either the word humans or the words ants and termites since the question was who eradicated the most species.


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[Red]

I fundamentally disagree with the logic here.

Starting from a point of view that humans have always been an improbability, a fantastic aberration from the fundamental laws of physics, I assert that we could never have existed at all without an essentially Divine miracle. Or maybe the grinding hard work of generations of determined survivalists.

This is what underlies my disbelief in our mainstream political norms today.

I first encountered those views within my own sphere of friends after my mission. A friend in my Chemistry course at Dixie College tried to set me straight. That was 1973, and he grumbled about my naivite in saying we can improve production, manufacture, technology,all that and create a better life for more humans.

Don't get me wrong. I had seen poverty in the Philippines. I thought more stuff could certainly improve living conditions.

I willalways be a contrarian, I think, in any setting. Stupid is just too easy and the most likely element of any human decision making process.

Well, every human species other than our own no longer exists, and it was not all that long ago that several human varieties shared the planet with us. If it could happen to them……But I like being contrary too, though. Few things I enjoy more than thinking outside the box, and, as well, examining anomalies in several scientific disciplines. I’ll not object to your belief that we would not exist at all without a divine miracle. I simply don’t know. I will admit, when I think of these earlier human groups, whom we even mated with, sometimes I find myself asking “did they possess a soul? Did they survive bodily death?”. These are of course questions as silly and as pointless as it gets within the scope of scientific materialism, the guiding paradigm of modern science. But I wonder anyway, as I have always been interested in big questions. Like the title of the painting by Paul Gauguin, from his Tahiti phase: “who are we, where do we come from, where are we going”. My kind of questions…..

 

[LogGrad98]

I was trying to get at the idea that if we want to "save the world" then we should eradicate humans, since we are so destructive. No other species destroyed the very climate of the entire planet affecting every single other life form. So Bender was right...

 

[babe]

Well, every human species other than our own no longer exists, and it was not all that long ago that several human varieties shared the planet with us. If it could happen to them……But I like being contrary too, though. Few things I enjoy more than thinking outside the box, and, as well, examining anomalies in several scientific disciplines. I’ll not object to your belief that we would not exist at all without a divine miracle. I simply don’t know. I will admit, when I think of these earlier human groups, whom we even mated with, sometimes I find myself asking “did they possess a soul? Did they survive bodily death?”. These are of course questions as silly and as pointless as it gets within the scope of scientific materialism, the guiding paradigm of modern science. But I wonder anyway, as I have always been interested in big questions. Like the title of the painting by Paul Gauguin, from his Tahiti phase: “who are we, where do we come from, where are we going”. My kind of questions…..

we make up words and then use them however we want. The Webster idea was to catalog the uses in vogue.

"Scientific materialism" is one of those. Science I believe has some roots in language before we had any definition. Materialism is a belief in blinders. If you can't touch it, deny it exists. If it has reality, it must have weight somehow. Or energy, maybe.

My wild imagination does have a set of axioms that is pretty consistent. "God" to many people is the creator and proprietor of the world, per the Bible. I always assume "God" exists but may not be what I understand. I assume God is "good", and interested in us. Biblical views persistently accept "Management" under the sovereign Creator.

It was on the American Frontier, some say Campbellite preachers, college-educated theologians, backwoods characdters on the Hopewell mounds trying to imagine the b;uilders of the mounds, Sidney Rigdon, Solomon spaulding, "treasure diggers for hire" like Joseph Smith, a few scientific frontiersmen like Orson Pratt...... who knows. Mormonism.

Joseph Smith came up with a theory that "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. Spirit is matte"r, more fine.. Every living thing has "intelligence", on a wide distribution, even material things perhaps. So Mormonism had this notion of "Intelligence" that couldn't be created or made, that is eternal. Spirit can be somehow added to that, creatively. And material bodies added to souls, creatively. This is claimed to be God's "work", a kind of eternal progress. Development.

Of course every living thing has a spiritual existence. Mormons who read Joseph Smith belief the world was first created "spiritually", then physically.

Fundamentalist Mormons dodge the 7000 year timeline by saying we had some "false starts', some things just didn't continue. That "Adam" was not a single man, but a colony brought here. Imagine that.

I sorta don't expect religious or pious folks to have the facts. Their emphasis is on a simple story line to teach about their basic faith. Piety is always dogmatic, some more than others perhaps, but that's the point. Dogma solidifies faith. Well, maybe displaces faith. But it's the essence of asserting "I am right. Believe me."

So anyway, I think that whatever I think is no better than my reasons for thinking it. I don't know, I am always finding out something I didn't know before..

There might be some distinctions between modern humans and various predeceesors of bygone branches. I know essentially nothing about all that. Theoretically, I'd assume they have spirits, souls, maybe even be spiritual children of God like I imagine of us. I don't know.

The ability to ask questions, contrive tests to check ideas out, imagine new ideas or explanations, test them, create....


I'd imagine "God" and His Peers have been doing that as far back in time as I can conceive. And I thank them. So here I am, a product of all that. In part. But also an independent "intelligence" with rights even God respects. As I understand it, I've always been "free"/

This world is a short exercise in an eternity of development. The main results is the choice we make, whether to love God and others. Or just get distracted by stuff.