The book that is commonly at the number one spot on "banned book" lists has what would always be called hardcore pornography in the middle of the book. It depicts fellatio literally (not just implying it). It has no educational value, and is meant, within its context, to be erotic/lewd. I can link directly to it on archive.org, I can link to that exact page even. I do that sometimes in these arguments, and I'm downvoted until my comment is hidden but not before a bunch of jackasses say "and what does it matter"...

Sorry, don't want my 10 yr old looking at it in the school library. No, take that back... I'm not sorry. And you're all awful people for wanting that in the school library. Or dumb for not realizing that it's in the book. What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.

AI could also be able to figure out how much to produce and how to limit waste in a way that leaves you to starve. And there won't be anything you can do about it. And this solution would, it turns out, suit the people who still have influence in how the system works just fine.

>ou and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.

But what would you even trade? Do you have anything that a starving unemployed man who bargain for? And does he have anything you want?

Ok. I suppose that I can play along and pretend (literal) human extinction isn't a "bad outcome". Is that the point of contention? You think it's ok or even preferable, while I dislike that outcome? Is that the source of our conflict? If so, this is the closest to honesty I've ever heard from someone like yourself.

But for me, this makes you my enemy. People who truly believe as you do are beyond redemption. No courtesy, kindness, or obligation is owed to you. You can be allowed no influence, no one should hear your voice.

>It's dishonest to claim that a temporarily shrinking population

It's never temporary. We've jumped out of the plane without a parachute, there's not much time left, but you're still arguing "sometimes things move upward".

Shrinking populations by their very nature cause more shrinking. There are dozens of well-understood and empirically confirmed mechanisms that make this so.

It's actually pretty deserving that the people like yourself should be wiped out. I would just rather you didn't take the rest of us with you.

We'll still be getting the cycle of "politicians are trying tax incentives" and "someone needs to fix the economy so people feel safe having children" headlines in North America, which is apparently enough to lull everyone into thinking it's not a problem.

Hoping he wasn't scammed.

Are they earning (collectively) $260 billion? Are they earning anything like a significant fraction of $260 billion? Is the amount they collectively earn, whatever the total, coming out of Jeff Bezos' wealth, subtracted from it, or are they paid out of several different funding streams such as the government contracts and commercial revenue?

And you think this is somehow some sort of gotcha question. "Look, I've proved that Jeff Bezos has $260 billion!" (or whatever the amount was supposed to be). You're unable to think clearly or correctly on the matter. It's scary how confused you are.

That's the playbook that got marijuana (more or less) legalized. So of course they're going to use the same exact strategy with each drug in turn.

This is plainly, factually wrong. A sub-replacement fertility level isn't "the growth has stopped". It's "rapid shrinking has started, shrinking of the sort that causes even more shrinking". That's the concern.

> It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids

If they have fewer than 2.1 on average, that's not better. It's literally "you should die out and become extinct". That's what you're telling them.

>The solution is to fix the economic system

What you're pushing doesn't fix the economy, it makes it worse. When there aren't enough workers to maintain infrastructure, there will be rolling brownouts. It's food rationing because there aren't enough workers to keep agriculture going. It's "there are no more consumer goods because the factories were hollowed out"... which leads to "there is no retail and no retail jobs".

A shrinking, aging population wrecks an economy.

>Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics.

"Robots will save us!" is juvenile fantasy. You're deluded.

>The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans

No one was talking about "increase the number of humans". Maybe you're just really bad at math. We're talking about "keep the number of humans steady, because shrinking locks us into a never-recovering vicious spiral of shrinking til we hit 0". Which is where we are now.

This won't save us. By the time civilization can't make birth control pills, it also means we've lost advanced medical care and now maternal/infant mortality kicks in. Nearly every baby born now survives into adulthood, barring rare misfortunes. But the idea that obstetrics will still be cruising along while we can't crank out simple pharmaceuticals is nonsense.

The trend is accelerating. We'll see 0.1 fertility rates in our lifetimes, you and me, and I'm old. We'll see central Africa hit sub-replacement fertility rates in 25 years. And even then we'll still have to listen to retarded jackasses tell us how it's no big deal, population will bounce back once things clear out. Buried deep in the human psyche is some truly superhuman level of obliviousness and denial of reality, and no logic or long term observation or plain facts are a match for it.

No. It's never happened in the history of the human species. It's unprecedented. When human population dropped, it recovered... but only because the fertility rate was still high. Fertility rate isn't population... a sub-replacement fertility rate is literally and exactly "this population no longer grows at all".

You're gibbering nonsense right now, and somehow it sounds intelligent to you.

>This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history

It's non-ideal. Awful? Dunno. But they can, it's documented fact, and a mere 20 years after that it becomes functionally impossible at scale. That's the window of reproduction, but I guess it's easy to try to change the subject because if people start thinking about icky teenage pregnancies then they can stop thinking about their looming extinction.

>a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again

I can promise that it will soon never happen again, because your entire species will become extinct in just a couple centuries. Your perfect utopia is coming, and more quickly than you might have hoped.

>And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s

No. They've become able to in exceptional circumstances. This isn't the same thing as "able to reproduce". For it to matter, it would have to be every woman capable of this, every time. This problem won't go away because 1 in 60 affluent women will have a geriatric pregnancy.

>This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.

It's not hyperbolic. Not even a little. One of us is, but it's not me. And it's bizarre that you think it is... I live among lunatics. Go back and read your horseshit... you're talking about how there's nothing wrong and everything's just fine because some women can carry babies to term at age 74.

Sure, but we also attach imaginary dollars to things that wouldn't and can't sell for those imaginary dollars, or even large fractions. And I expect older children to at least catch on to that fact, but a great many adults never seem to.

> and employees 1.5m+ people is l

So is that what the leftists hate? That he employs 1.5 million people? You want that to stop. That's the the part of the him being a billionaire that hurts the most?

>and putting a dollar figure on that is both straightforward and accurate.

If that were true, he could sell it for that valuation tomorrow. But as soon as he tried, the amount would drop, and the company might even be in peril. So it's neither accurate nor straightforward. It's convoluted and overestimated.

>In case you need a real example, Bezos personally funds Blue Origin

So that's the part of his wealth that you despise... that he employs people making spaceships? Those 11,000 people are the problem?

Jeff Bezos famously took an $80,000/yr salary. Bezos didn't make $260 billion, or anything within 1/1000th of that. He built a company, that through some inane estimations his share of which might be $260 billion.

For him to not have that imaginary $260 billion would be for the company to not be built at all. So, if that's what you want, you're at least consistent... but no one else would think that a particularly good idea. Quite a few people like being able to order things online and receive them quickly. They don't want to have to go back to stomping through Walmart, hoping that the store has what they need.

I think part of the problem is that if you can slap a label on someone of "Eleventy billion dollars", everyone's brain malfunctions and treats it as a literal fact, regardless of the truth of the label. When you don't want billionaires to have billions, what you're saying is that you don't want them in control of those billion dollar companies. But do you not want the companies to exist, or do you just want someone else in control of those companies? And who?

On top of that, it's lead me down the rabbit hole of a 1995 (limited) theatrical movie called Mr. Payback, which may have only ever existed on 50 sets of laserdiscs distributed to those theaters. I'm hoping to track down a copy of it... if anyone had any clues on that one, I'd love to hear them. I'd purchase a Domesday Dupe device and dump it. But it may be a genuine lost movie.

The opposite, actually. Your assumption is that the rates bounce up and down, mostly because you don't want to believe there's a problem.

The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen. You and everyone else on HN whines "the reason people aren't having kids is the economy is awful and we can't afford them"... but in a world with a shrinking, aging population the economy just gets worse.

You're the one making the very stupid assumption, and you can't even say why. I can, it's because you haven't thought about it. Perhaps it's uncomfortable to think that you're driving your species to extinction.

>Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years.

More nonsense. Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly. I already laid out the math... how long before 8 billion becomes 1000 when you're splitting it in half every generation (a generation is commonly held to be 20-25 years)? Can you do that math puzzle for us? There are only about 5 generations living on Earth at any given time. Just do the math already. None of this is pretty.

>There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now.

Yes, there is. People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years. Every moment you waste "not worrying about it now" is the problem compounding with interest. You've already waited too long to worry about it.

>In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom.

Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?

>I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging

It'd be because you and those like you forced the issue. Go ahead, stick your head in the sand some more. We all know that willful obliviousness to reality can change the rules of the universe themselves, right? Wish it all away!

The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.

Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.

And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.

The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.

>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.

At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.

Does this sound profound to you? When you see yourself type it out, does it seem like you've really came up with a zinger?

What entitles them to come in and police my hard drive platters with "you can't write that sequence of bits to storage, that's our sequence of bits"? It's sort of a weird idea, sounds kind of medieval. Like King Cnut has granted them license to "the birds in the forest, and the timber, and the water that runs through the meadows".

Yes. I have my nose in it constantly. It's a fallacy to ascribe more coordination to this than actually exists. What mechanism is it that you think exists that would sound the red alert when the last library (or even the second to last) is about to get rid of the very last copy?

What if you did? You don't think that would have any effect at all?