Is there an ideal population level for a country?
- Thread starter weltweit
- Start date
Where's all the waste going to go?
Where's all the extra food going to come from, after all, a lot of the food now comes from other countries?
What jobs are they going to do, considering most jobs these days are service-oriented? Or will a whole new army of administrators be created to administrate the current group of administrators who already do lots of administrating?
Waste can be recycled with increasing efficiency to the point where there will be none.
Food can be grown indoors, either underground or in high-rise buildings using artificial nutirition techniques. The only reason we import food is because of the lower labour costs abroad.
More people means more service jobs... enough work is not a problem.
Food can be grown indoors, either underground or in high-rise buildings using artificial nutirition techniques. The only reason we import food is because of the lower labour costs abroad.
More people means more service jobs... enough work is not a problem.
That will be a most interesting concept: turning energy into nothing, atomising it! Are you serious here?
Artificial nutrition techniques leading to artificial human beings...
The only reason you import food is because of the higher profit margins available for the big food companies. But, does such practice become necessary to a degree with large populations? Or can we not decentralise and get back to where we were before regarding food production? Big populations, big companies, big profits. It all sounds like it really needs the centralised organisational structure that is fast becoming the modern western world.
It ain't pretty, at least to me. Higer levels of population seem to lead to lower levels of freedom.
Wolveryeti
Detty Pig
Dude, you're on crack. How is growing food underground ever going to be economical?
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
What? I was laughing at your picking a figure - by your own admission pretty arbitrarily - and saying that was the ideal population for the UK.
But it is. The thread is about the ideal population level for a country. And that is very much about how that population can be supported. We could house far more people than we currently do: coast to coat highrise is possible. So long as we import all our food.
So the questions are - how much arable and do we have (not how much is under cultivation, but how much more could be), and how best to farm it. (As I previously suggested, small and labour intensive mixed farms producing food in the proportions needed for the optimum human diet - a little meat/protein, a lot of fruit and veg, and a fair amount of grain/starch).
You talked about turning waste into nothing. Well, unless i interpreted your statement wrongly.
I thought it would be very useful being able to convert energy into a vacuum or into a mass of zero. But i can't think of one situation where that has been known to happen, at least in popular living requirements.
It wasn't any figure i picked. I was agreeing with someone else that i thought the ideal population was less than what it is now (i think there are too many people for too few available resources), and agreed that that figure was a possible one. Such was my intended meaning in those exchanges.
I know we could become more resource efficient in our management and use of, but at what expense would that be in the realm of mental health?
And talking of ideal populations, for me the first criterion for discovering this ideal number is to measure quality of life, not economical quantity of life. You say it is about the numbers that can be supported. But is that a more important measure than ensuring a decent level of quality of life?
Ideal also represents theory rather than practice, at least that's what i thought. What happens if you discover we need 80 million in britain, or i find out we need 40 million? Who's gonna have the easier job in realising what has been declared the ideal population?!
Read my post again and have a think...its pretty clear.
Im talking about reducing waste to zero by recycling everything.
You are confusing the words waste and energy.
Of course it can be, it only requires human labour. Most marijuana is grown indoors in this country already.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
Mental health is improved with more people? That sounds strange to me.
I've no idea what measures any figures are based on. My thinking is limited at the present time to the ideal population in britain being less than the current figure, because i think there's too many people for the land available.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I love these closely argued threads.
Yes.
Internationalism is dead then? Vast agricultural areas haven't even seen 20th century farming yet.
Jesus wept.
How old are you Wolveryeti?
Wolveryeti
Detty Pig
I guess it works if you want to pay £20 an eighth for some cabbage.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
No, by better food production, better food, and so on.
Which is why I made the crack about science with a capital S.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Someone shoot me please if I ever respond to this idiot again.It is quite amusing how similar your style of argument is to your preferred choice of martial arts.
You kick the shit out of that straw man, son!
Wolveryeti
Detty Pig
How many imaginary people have you killed today?
Monster.
Monster.
As someone who most of all enjoys space -- fields, forests, wildlife, nature -- and hates urban urban sprawl, with its concrete and metal and grime and litter, I think that the idea population of the UK would be about... ooh... 10 million? Maybe less.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
You're also someone who enjoys the considerable income of an office job.
I know -- I'm a mass of contradictions alright.You're also someone who enjoys the considerable income of an office job.
The thing is, I feel trapped. The south-east is so horrendously expensive that in order to live an apparently simple life, you actually need to earn a fortune. A cottage that would have been occupied by a farm labourer in the 19th century will now cost you upwards of £400,000. And god help you if you want to live in the house the farmer himself owned. So despite my apparently affluant job, I'm essentially living at the level of the farm labourer 150 years ago. Square that circle.
My aim is simply to maximise my income for a enough years to become independently wealthy enough to go and live somewhere miles away from this benighted south-east without having to worry about what job to do when we get there.
Maurice Picarda
Actually, might as well flounce.
But you're cheating horribly by only looking at housing as the cost of your "simple life". The cost of a chicken, a bag of oranges, a sack of coal or most other commodities would have plummeted in real terms. Same for comparable manufactured items: a pair of trousers, a newspaper. The price of a day's domestic service is probably about the same, relative to the cottage owner's income. Nothing's inflated like housing.
Oh well, on food i can agree totally.
But try as i have, i still can't get your capital S and science. No meaning is reaching my brain... need some cranberries.
Yes, so the general level of "thing" ownership has gone up, but we're still living in ever smaller spaces with our precious things that we've managed to get. That doesn't seem like progress to me.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
It was sarcasm. As in, the figure you say is ideal for the UK isn't based on anything. Just a feeling you have. (See, for example, your reply on post number 43).
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
That's not really true. There are fewer people per household now than ever before. I don't know the numbers for kids with their own bedroom, but I'd guess that that's higher than ever before too. Certainly there are few children now who have to share a bed.
That's a fair point, although one more related to family size than to living space per se. But don't you think that the living space per household itself has shrunk? The actual floor space per dwelling? Let alone the total land available for the use of each household?
After all, in 1801 the population of Britain was 8 million. Now it's 60 million. All those extra people have to fit in somewhere.
Thats true as the population increases producing more goods/dwellings ...so living space will increase in size.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yep. More people + technological advance = greater ability to build per head of population.
I think you have a slightly unrealistic view of the past, kabbes. In 1801, a very large number of those 8 million were involved in near-subsistence farming, with families often all living in one room. At the same time, the families of workers in the burgeoning industrial towns often all slept in the same bed, space and resources were so scarce.
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