Cav's Place

Excuse me but I need to vent every way I can or I’ll strangle somebody! That’s because last evening dad sent me a recording of a guy’s speech to translate and transcribe, which speech lasted for 29 minutes and was basically nothing but a string of utterly infuriating platitudes about economic growth. Which would have been bad enough in itself, as the entire concept of economics and especially this drive for growth is a terribly infuriating subject, being an useless and ultimately harmful human invention which got us in the crapper we’re now in; and I’m not talking about the economic crisis but about the environmental and social crisis. Still, the real problem was the quality of the recording, which was really poor, with the added issues of a faint trace of the translation and the crowd’s murmur that could also be heard alongside the speaker.
So I kept trying to play with the sound settings in an attempt to make out as much as I possibly could, then trudged along for nearly five hours of actual work, not counting breaks, split between last night and today, and the result can be best described as Swiss cheese, as it was full of question marks where I completely failed to understand words or even entire sentences, plus possibly more assumptions and guesses than words that I’m sure I understood correctly… I’ll call it completely unusable, but it was the best I could do so he, the speaker, whoever requested this piece of work and anyone else involved are very much invited to choke on it!
Of course, when the best I can do is of such poor quality it also makes me feel even more inadequate than I usually do, which at the moment only adds to the anger because I’m set on being angry and find it quite easy to fuel it with these feelings as well. Better than taking it all out on myself as I usually do, I’ll say…

On that issue… Why do people organize such things? Why do they insist on having speeches? Do they like hearing themselves talk so much or do they simply enjoy putting all those who will then be required to transcribe their words, either on paper or on-line, to this crazy amount of pointless work? Because it would seem so much nicer and easier for everyone involved if they’d just post what they have to say on-line and let everyone who’s interested read at their leisure, and perhaps organize conferences through instant messaging, which, if properly done, would also result in much more orderly proceedings.

I seem to be drifting back to writing a lot of personal posts and negating anything I may have accomplished lately regarding the goal of writing significantly more serious non-personal posts than personal ones this year. But that’s how it always is I guess. If I’m not forced to write non-personal posts I often won’t, though at least I am quite a bit less embarrassed by those I do end up writing under such circumstances than by those I write because I have to, in order to stick to the rules I set for this blog, so there’s one positive aspect at least.

My old rule remains valid even when among supposedly like-minded people. If one of my ideas gathers any noticeable support from others I really need to review it, because no truly effective idea is going to gather any significant support from people. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that if everybody opposes an idea it must be good, just that it’s obviously bad if they don’t vehemently oppose it.
Humans will be humans; even the large majority of the small minority who appear intelligent and interested in what’s really going on only appear so. Or at least they’re only interested in feeling good about themselves by having nice little chats about the “pretty” potential solutions, ignoring anything that’d actually be effective if it wouldn’t look particularly nice and especially if it’d require them to no longer look like the dazzling knights in shining armor who save the day and make sure that every single person will live happily ever after.
So I take what I can from these discussions, improve my ideas as much as I can while overestimating my opponents and patching up loopholes they never seem to notice anyway, and get back to work on my own. I may be just an armchair activist, but at least I’m one who wants to get things done efficiently, not look like a hero. So I’ll let them praise each other over the beautiful but ineffective solutions they come up with and get back to coming up with the efficient, albeit harsh and ugly, solutions that’ll get humankind from the current point A to the necessary point B within a reasonable estimate of the amount of time we still have available to make the trip.

In this particular case, I’m certain my solution will achieve the necessary results within the relatively little amount of time we have left while theirs won’t even come close and have numbers to prove this claim. I’m obviously not saying there couldn’t be another, better, solution that’d achieve the same results as mine, and in fact I kept asking for one, but none was provided. They were content to just argue against my efficient proposals because they’d violate their sense of ethics, morality and personal freedom. Which means history will be left to judge which viewpoint was the correct one… If anyone will be left in order to make this judgment, that is.
Sure, it’d be lovely if my diagnosis of the situation would be wrong, but I don’t see how that’d be possible. In fact, those who are interested in the issue generally agree with the diagnosis itself, but then their brains appear to refuse to accept the resulting numbers in order to allow them to keep on believing that harsh and ugly measures aren’t necessary in order to solve the problem. So I can say I tried to work with others and the results only served to once again prove me right when I say there’s absolutely no point in doing so, especially since even the two who initially agreed with me went completely quiet after that first message, running away the moment the challengers rushed forward and leaving me to hold the line all by myself through days of debate. Not that I mind arguing a point alone, quite the contrary, but there’s little point in joining groups if you won’t get any support!

Who knows, maybe these things will eventually get me to seriously start working on something else that’s been on my mind for quite some time. Perhaps I could even finish it… Some 30 years from now… If I’ll somehow live that long and human society wouldn’t be completely turned into a battlefield for every individual’s survival. And since both of these conditions are unlikely to be true… Still, it’s not like I have anything else to do. Just that I lack the skills to accomplish something of such magnitude properly, or even passably…

Despite the potentially confusing name, Care2‘s Population Growth group was meant to bring together those who are worried about overpopulation, and recently it has enjoyed some amount of activity. During one of these conversations, somebody mentioned advocating measures to control population despite not endorsing eugenics, which prompted me to say that I do support eugenics and in fact can’t see any other way to solve the problem without starting mass slaughters and preferably while also getting evolution back into the game. A couple of people came out to say they agreed with me, but then the others firmly rejected the idea.
After those first messages, I was left alone to debate the issue with only one of those who wrote to say they reject the notion of eugenics, so I can assume that the rest aren’t willing to discuss it further. Still, this little resulting debate has been going on for the past couple of days and it did help me build a stronger case in favor of eugenics and realize even more than I did before just how desperately we need such measures. And that’s because I looked up some numbers and realized that my assumptions were way too optimistic, as hard as that is to believe in my case, meaning that even the numbers I’ve been putting forward would be completely inadequate if we’re to have any chance of reducing the human population to sustainable numbers by the end of the century.

I never actually searched for the number of people that die in the world each year, assuming that the result obtained by dividing the population of around 6.8 billion by the average lifespan of about 67 years would be close enough to the truth, which is why I even used 100 million as an example in my “Suffocating the World” post. However, much to my surprise, I now noticed that in fact only about 56 or 57 million people die each year! And that certainly prompts some changes to the plan, because it’s very easy to see the kind of drastic measures we’ll need to take if we’re to have any hope of reducing the population to, say, two billion by the end of the century: We need to get the population to drop by 4.8 billion in 90 years, which means that it needs to drop by 53.33 million each year. When only 56 or 57 million die per year, that means no more than 2.67 or 3.67 million may be born. However, close to 140 million are currently being born each year, which means birth rates must be reduced by just about 98%.
But going more thoroughly through the numbers, including the low death count, is a topic for another time. The point here was just to show that the current number of annual deaths barely allows for any births. That means that anything other than eugenics, anything other than requiring “breeding licenses” in order to have a baby and offering them only to the very best, only to those who have genes that are truly worthy of being passed on according to completely objective criteria, is doomed to utter and complete failure. Anything may help and everything potentially useful should be tried, but nothing except eugenics could possibly do enough.
Education is being pushed forward left and right as a method to solve this problem, but there is no more time for education, and in fact education regarding overpopulation only works on those who are intelligent and at least somewhat altruistic, which are unfortunately the attributes of only a small portion of humanity. Far from me to deny that even a small amount of education could easily halve the number of children certain women have, but that’d be very far from enough in itself.
Improving the standard of living of the poor is another method supported by many, but that likely requires even more time and, in fact, no resources are left to sufficiently improve the standard of living of the current number of poor. Not that this method could achieve more than a fraction of the required reduction in the number of births anyway, but I also have to say that raising the standard of living requires lowering the population, so claiming to do it the other way around on a planetary scale would be funny if it wouldn’t be so sad for us all.
As for financial means, such as reversing the current trend and offering benefits to the childfree and raising taxes for those who have children, those would also be completely insufficient. This approach would stop those who breed just for the benefits, making a living out of the income generated by the very existence of their children, and also deter many who are uncertain about having children, but once again the effects would be very far from sufficient.
You simply can’t obtain an immediate 98% reduction in the number of births and maintain those results for nearly an entire century by hoping that people will see that only very few of them should have children anymore and voluntarily comply. And you can’t obtain those results by nudging or pressuring them in that direction either. Those methods all help, certainly, but they can’t generate the necessary results, they can’t have the required impact! The number of children that may still be born at the current moment is so low that the only way to achieve it is to say exactly what it is, so everyone will know the number of spots they’re competing for, and then call all who want to have a baby to go through the required tests, handing the permits only to those who qualify for the available spots. And eugenics is the only method that could possibly be used in order to come up with objective criteria to base those tests on, as it deals with the traits that could be passed on by the potential parents to their children, if they’d be allowed to have any.

But, of course, that’s an uphill struggle. Limiting births is an uphill struggle in itself, as the vast majority of people think with their gonads when it comes to that, but advocating the notion of eugenics is even worse as it has been terribly tarnished by the Nazis, who claimed to base their atrocities on it despite using subjective criteria such as ethnicity or hair or eye color instead of objective ones and torturing and killing people for the sole “crime” of being alive instead of simply not allowing the unfit ones to have children. But nothing worthwhile’s ever easy, so perhaps we’ll manage to clear away all the mess the Nazis have created before it will completely destroy our civilization, such as it is, by scaring us away from the only effective solution to the world’s greatest problem.

Good enough for a short SF book. Shows that it was meant to be an even shorter story, as it says at the beginning, because it basically only follows a character, with a second added in a couple of places, and gives little detail about the world, but it does its job and sends some messages to those willing to listen. Also, all the little poems supposedly written by Mustapha placed at the beginning of each chapter can fall under “words of wisdom” anytime.

Rating: 3/5

I was initially planning to write yesterday’s post on Monday and a second one on Thursday or Friday, so I could do this month’s computer “maintenance” work right away afterwards. That didn’t quite work out, but it’s pretty much the only thing that failed to work out this week, while a few others went quite significantly better than expected.

I meant to write a post on Monday because I knew I was going to be alone between Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, so it was unlikely that I’d feel like sitting down to write a serious post while having full freedom of movement around the house. And that was completely true, but instead I ended up going shopping on Tuesday, which was one of the things that turned out much better than expected.
I knew for the past few months that I was going to need some things and initially meant to try to buy them myself at the start of April, but I noticed I wasn’t going to completely run out before May, so I delayed the attempt. And right now, since I was alone, I thought I could try to get a little food as well, despite the breakdown that followed when I last bought something that counted as food. But I not only managed to buy everything I meant to, but also two items I had been needing for years and never saw when I went shopping before. And I also recharged my cell phone card, which required actual interaction with someone and I’m still unsure how I managed that. I mean, I toyed with the idea and tried to prepare for it for weeks, but certainly didn’t think I’d manage.

Otherwise, the time spent alone was nice, especially since there was quite a lot of it lately. It also helped me regain just a tiny shred of confidence that I could perhaps just manage to survive by myself at some point. Not that it seems possible to end up no longer living with my parents, no matter how much I’d wish it, or that I’d have anyone in mind that I could live with, as living alone for an extended amount of time is something I certainly have no desire to try at any point… But it’s been quite some time since I was alone for over a day and an even longer time since I did much of anything while alone, so I was even more insecure than usual. But these days went really well, which once again made me confident that I’d manage quite all right as long as no problems would arise that’d require contacting another person in order to solve.
The very surprising part, even for me, was that I ended up waiting for dad with food on the table when he got back on Thursday. I certainly meant to sit quietly in my room once he sent me a message saying he’ll be back soon, but found myself trying to quickly fix myself something more to eat, which quickly turned into me fixing a lunch like all the others I fixed myself while alone… And then, when it became obvious that I wasn’t going to finish before he got back, I decided to also make some eggs like I usually make them and give him a taste as well, just to prove to him that you don’t need to fry everything in lots of cooking oil. The resulting time spent together was pretty awkward, at least for me, so I’m sure it was a bad choice, but I guess I was feeling good enough after the time spent alone to “afford” something like this. Not intending to “interact” again anytime soon, however, so now I really wish they’d act as if I’m not here and stop greeting me whenever I need to get out of my room to go to the bathroom!

About the health concerns… Monday night I was thinking that something must be seriously wrong with me and just making it far worse by worrying about the worst possible scenarios, as I always do whenever I think there is a health problem, but by the time I got back after Tuesday’s “adventure” I was too shocked to notice any such problems anymore, which resulted in me feeling a whole lot better as well. It’s still obvious that something’s likely wrong, and probably not something very minor, but for the moment I’m once again relatively able to ignore it most of the time. Still, I should at least get that tooth filling replaced, as I still haven’t done that and it’s something I could do, as I highly doubt any potential treatment for any of the other problems would be even partially acceptable for me, even if I knew exactly what they were.

As for the gaming front, I somehow finally managed to get the story moving on Gothic II Gold, despite how difficult the game is with the expansion installed. At least I already got much further than I did on any of my previous attempts at playing it, so there may even be some hope of finishing it someday. But I still don’t have the slightest clue how could I possibly make a character that won’t be insanely weak at every point of the game, considering how extremely restrictive the character development becomes with the expansion installed… The atmosphere of this game is so great that it’d really benefit from being very easy, so you could just enjoy it instead of struggling to beat it every single moment, but apparently the developers didn’t agree with that idea at all…

I dread to even read this post now, as my mind was all over the place and I’m sure it ended up even worse that my posts, even most personal ones, usually end up… But at least it’s written and I now can move on to that “maintenance” I mentioned at the beginning. Though the plan is most likely to start late tonight, not right now, and finish tomorrow. Until then, maybe I’ll manage to play a little more…