Do you feel sad for people born today?
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Not really. Time flies fast, they are newborn today, but in 60 years, they'll be the elderly every yougster wished do be (if there's no war) and we, will be the misunderstood great grandfathers who lived an unknown time.
Whatever the world would become, they would live an interesting but very harsh time of population shrinking, due to demographic transition (except african children), and even if we fear about their early ipad brainrotting process, they'll figure out how to make their way in life, because it'll be chaos if they don't.
They'll be the beta generation who were born with the ol' AI generative tools, knew a bit about life without mass surveillance, lived the VR revolution, and worked to make nuclear fusion possible. (some guesses about future, let's be optimists)
Fusion is just 50 years away, every year!
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
I feel like most people today have kids just because they feel that's what they should be doing or because they just want a kid. I feel having kids is almost, incredibly selfish? If that makes sense.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
No. I felt sorry for people born yesterday, but I think today's kids will be OK.
Not sure about tomorrow, though.
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I feel like most people today have kids just because they feel that's what they should be doing or because they just want a kid. I feel having kids is almost, incredibly selfish? If that makes sense.
What an odd take. Reproducing is arguably the #1 motivation, and purpose, of all life on this planet. Biologically anyway. You're taking issue with a fundamental trait of life that's baked into our DNA.
May as well deem people selfish for wanting food and shelter too.
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Every single generation talks about how good it was when they were young. This generation will ultimately be no different. And as a parent, I am doing whatever I can to ensure my kids are happy.
On top of that, you can't miss what you never had. Humans are adaptable and resilient, and kids' imaginations are unstoppable, and my own kids, despite the constant intrusion of digital dopamine, still love to build forts, and play with Lego, and dolls, and just run around being goofballs.
Just gotta hang on.
how good it was when they were young
Sorry did I miss a decade? My youth consisted of hanging chads -> 9/11 -> The War on Oil -> 2008 financial crisis -> the death of Hope via congressional fuckery -> Trump. When were things good...? I had hope for universal healthcare with Obama and hope for Bernie before Trump 1.0 but now I'm not sure what to look forward to. That said; can't stop won't stop.
I honestly and truly hope you and yours remain healthy and happy. I don't begrudge you that or wish you ill. But I haven't seen good times and at this point don't really expect to.
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Generators, batteries, just a better grid. If it happened tomorrow it would be scary, but it will be gradual. Really poor people in vulnerable areas might not have the option to adapt, which I mentioned, but the average Lemming does.
Is dying your retirement plan or something? I'm not the one contradicting the experts here.
if it happened tomorrow
it's happening NOW.
buildout all the grid you can, it won't be enough for everyone, and when it collapses, everyone's fucked.
Is dying your retirement plan
Did your parents have any children that lived? I bet they regret that.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/potentially-record-breaking-heat-wave-180834697.html
stick your head back in the sand and stop replying if you can't support your argument.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00239-4
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/european-heat-deaths_n_6798bfe6e4b0e3bbf46ca2ad
https://www.newsweek.com/extreme-heat-killing-more-americans-ever-1811274
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/report-extreme-heat-us-climate-crisis_n_61313a6ce4b0df9fe273debf
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What an odd take. Reproducing is arguably the #1 motivation, and purpose, of all life on this planet. Biologically anyway. You're taking issue with a fundamental trait of life that's baked into our DNA.
May as well deem people selfish for wanting food and shelter too.
Yeah, I don't get how people can think like this but not want nukes to take out everything. Like you're living this shit, too, if you are willing to keep living this shit, why do you assume it's a bad thing for anyone to bring someone else into it? Anti-natalism is pro-extinction from my pov.
Not that I have an issue with people taking themselves out of the gene pool or anything, I just find the position wildly inconsistent with anyone who wants to continue living themselves.
And to be clear, I mean specifically the "if you choose to have a kid, you are bad" position, I can understand "having kids is not for me, I don't want to do parenting".
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
I was born in the 90s and I feel sad about being born to this day, can't imagine the poor kids who are gonna grow up now
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Fusion is just 50 years away, every year!
People are bad at estimating how long it will take to develop something, but everything I've seen indicates that we are getting closer to it being a real thing.
Though I'm skeptical about the safety, as it does sound like it could get pretty explody if the containment fields fail. Or if they fail in just one direction, I wonder if they'd shoot out a plasma jet that fucks up everything in its path.
Even the sun shoots shit at us from time to time, which our own magnetic field generally protects us from.
Not that I'm against fusion power, just not holding my breath that it's going to be all sunshine and no flares.
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Of course it did.
If not for the courage and conviction of Vasily Arkhipov, civilization, and potentially humanity, may have ended in 1964. People had kids for 30 years under the very real threat of nuclear extermination. In the end it turned out pretty well.
People had kids during the black plague.
While a climate crisis is more than just a threat, we don't know what's going to happen. We have ideas, and models, and educated guesses... But not knowledge.
I wouldn't tell anyone to have kids if they don't want to. But no one should plan their life around sparing a hypothetical person from the hypothetical struggles of a slow moving crisis we don't fully understand.
How about sparing them from a life of working constantly to have job insecurity, no social safety net, and a bullet for a retirement plan? Birth is cruelty.
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You really shouldn't let the state of the world breed you out of the gene pool.
Also, consider how humans in the past lived. Most of them had way, way worse lives than what the average person experiences today.
It's not even close. Take a look at what life was like before we eradicated Smallpox, for example.
Right now is unironically the safest, most prosperous time in human history to have children.
Is this a sunken cost fallacy? We have come so far and paid so much that we should just continue suffering rather than make a better decision?
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
Why? They stand to inherit from up to 4 grandparents and there is a lot less competition for it these days.
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Yup, the fossil fuel foundation that enabled us to reach 10 billion is going away. Sunshine and puppies won't sustain 10 billion eaters.
The carrying capacity of a renewable energy system is not the same as a system that uses massive amounts of surplus energy coming from the ground.
It's lower. Far far lower. And getting there will be ugly, and your time frame is correct IMO.
Renewable energy production is increasing exponentially.
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But the point is it is not about the situation today, it is about the situation in 20 years, heck just 10 years, of which these people will live into and experience very soon.
but society at large is getting better at the world scale over the long term.
That used to be true, it is no longer true. And it is not a natural law that this will happen, it is just something a lot of people who have lived in the golden period of the 1950s to early 2000s inferred, without actually considering a larger swath of history than that.
Year of the Linux desktop will be worth it
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Abortions should be legal at any term
I have a few politicians I would like to nominate
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
If you were born 20 years earlier you'd get to destroy the planet and die before there was any consequences?
The kids will be fine, they are smarter and more capable than those that came before them, every time. The real problem is people living so long they aren't making room for the young people. Think turnover at a restaurant, and all the diners finished eating and paid but won't leave.
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how good it was when they were young
Sorry did I miss a decade? My youth consisted of hanging chads -> 9/11 -> The War on Oil -> 2008 financial crisis -> the death of Hope via congressional fuckery -> Trump. When were things good...? I had hope for universal healthcare with Obama and hope for Bernie before Trump 1.0 but now I'm not sure what to look forward to. That said; can't stop won't stop.
I honestly and truly hope you and yours remain healthy and happy. I don't begrudge you that or wish you ill. But I haven't seen good times and at this point don't really expect to.
Yeah I was 14 for 9/11, for frame of reference. I'm somehow able to look back at the last 25 years or so and glean some positivity from it, because I'm unwilling to burden myself with global problems. And that doesn't mean they're not issues I'm interested in and care about, but I try to comparmentalize my life. I don't bring work home and I sure as shit don't bring politics to bed with me. I spend time with my friends, and now I have a family of my own, and we make memories, and we create glour own good times.
I just feel like it's useless to base my life on these big problems. I am not 9/11, though I live in Jersey and know many who were affected. I'm not the wars in Iraq, though I served and know people who came home unwhole or not at all. Even though shit is bleak, I'm not going to allow it soil my life, because then I become bleak, and then what's the point.
So yeah, I can't stop trying to positivity in my life, and I won't stop, because then I'm fucked.
And so I've said it many times here and on Reddit, that my fights are local. In my town, and county, and State (not that big) are the things that I can personally get involved in and see the fruits of my labor.
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Renewable energy production is increasing exponentially.
Electrical, yes. Oil is a feedstock for pretty much anything you can see in your house.
Please fertilize modern agri-business with electricity.
I'll wait.
In the meantime, try the trick of flying across the Atlantic in 6 hours with batteries.
No doubt we'll have electricity for as long as we can, but... the underlying civilization that uses it will not look a thing like what we have now.
Do you not already see housing supply issues, inflation, war everywhere?
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
I mean, I made a conscious decision not to have children, so...
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
I think the next generation is going to start feeling it hard. Current generation will slip by but barely. I'm not pressuring my kids to have their own. Just do you fam.
