"Humanity grows exponentially, food production grows linearly" has not been debunked. People have starved in the last few decades, and we barely managed to avoid a widespread catastrophe through a big one-time upgrade to the best farming techniques known. How many other improvements are left before we reach biology's productivity limits? How long until we run low on natural gas to make fertilizer, having long since mined the pre-existing fertility from the soil?
Almost every case famine during last few decades had to do with some kind of local conflict (e.g. local gangs interfering with delivery of food aid) as opposed to resource shortage. Developed countries produce much more food than they need and then consume it in a very inefficient way. Growing grain and using it to feed livestock as opposed to consuming grain directly is one such example. Earth could comfortably support much large population than we have now.
Being both a carnivore and a big consumer electronics junkie I can relate to your argument. I was mostly answering to parent poster's comment about people starving. However I'm a big believer in technology being able to overcome that kinds of limits. Here's an excellent essay illustrating how 15 billion people could be supported at the level of American living standards:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html
(As a nice bonus, this is written by John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP).
But on the other hand, people want more and more wealth. For example, I cannot imagine myself living today without a washing machine. Yet 50 years ago it would have been considered a luxury.
Do this experiment: go to a newspaper stand and look for magazines about weddings. Look for books about marriage. I have never ever seen one addressed to men (there are ones which seem to be, but on a quick glance I actually think they were written to feed the women's ego), which means IMHO that men wouldn't spend money on subjects like these. Meanwhile you sholdn't be surprised to find at least half a dozen for women. So I really really doubt that men are more willing to marry EITHER.
I would actually dare to say that men were (and still are) the ones who don't really care about marriage.
If someone likes marriage as a concept and a form of art, doesn't mean they want to be married themselves, now and with all the implications.
By analogy: many women enjoy and write slash stories about male homosexuality, which they obviously can't participate in. Same for wedding stories, dresses and shots.
I don't think that marriage in USA is biased against anyone. But the divorce is HEAVILY biased agains men. For example, more than 70% of divorces are initiated by women, while they also get the custody of the children 90% of the time.
When it comes for child support, it's even worse. If in a family the husband begins to get a lower salary due to the state of the economy, then everybody should/will spend less. But if a divorced father gets a lower salary, "the child's standard of living must not change".
Did you earn $200,000 per year pre-divorce, and now you barely can find work for $50,000? Too bad for you, you'll have to get an extra job to be able to pay the same amount of child support. If you fail to pay, you get to jail, but the support payments accumulate, so when you get out you'll be in even more debt, which will land you back in jail, and so on. And of course, this whole time, you will be considered a "deadbeat dad".
BTW, I was shocked to find out that, in some states, men* have to pay lifetime alimony. With all due respect, guys who get married on these terms are insane.
Marriage itself can be quite biased against males in the states. I have a friend who's wife successfully divorced him because she was not being "sexually satisfied". If a male tried to do the same, people would scream "domestic rape". Expectations of each sex, viewed through the lense of the courts, are very uneven.
And of course after the divorce the situation only becomes more dire.
If only that was the worst of cases. My mind is continually blown by the cases in which husband catches wife cheating, husband sues for divorce, wife gets custody, half of assets and alimony.
This is one of those things teetering on the edge of "public knowledge". I have never met a single person who believes women receive the short end of the stick in divorce. In fact the only complaint from the women's end of things I've ever heard is '50% of his income is not enough'.
It is of course anecdotal, but as best I can tell, it is anecdotal evidence that is shared by every person in America- aka, 'public knowledge'.
I won't base too much too heavily on it. The idea that blacks were sub-human was once "public knowledge" because everyone had an anecdote about a black person doing something stupid.
It should be stated that:
* 'Common sense' is not necessarily common.
* 'Public knowledge' doesn't always match up to reality and can often be influenced by social biases (i.e. you may only remember the cases of a man getting the shaft in a divorce, but easily forget the ones where he makes out like a bandit).
1. I agree that most divorce proceedings do favor women.
2. As a friend of an attorney who tells me that most of his male clients never seek custody and don't even petition for visitation rights until the CS payments start coming due this is completely inline with our society. I'm sorry, but once the divorce is finished most guys just want to move on with their life, the family they had becomes an encumberment. Most would prefer to be free to start over than continue being reminded of a failed relationship. That's just the way it is.
3. The primary purpose of the act of having sex is reproduction. The courts have already decided that every time you have sex you implicitly agree that a baby might result. It doesn't matter if it's oral, anal, or vaginal if someone gets pregnant out of it you can't back out you've already given consent. Even before reading the article I already knew the outcome, skimming to the bottom confirmed 30-40 years of court cases on the same matter.
Point #3 is not entirely true. The article seemed to imply that the law was all about advocating for the child, instead of pandering to a disagreement between the biological parents at the (possible) expense of the child.
This implies that I may not even need to have sex to be forced into child support payments. For example, what if someone sneaks into my bedroom at night (or maybe we're sharing a hotel room while travelling) and is able to make off with some semen while I sleep? By the legal argument that we must advocate for the child, I would be forced into child support. Sure, I could attempt to seek some sort of relief from the mother for what she did, but that would be completely separate from whether or not I am legally obligated to pay child support for the next 18 years.
Maybe all men should be forced to wear locks on their genitalia lest some crazy woman somewhere decide that they want to force the man to create a child?
There was actually another case I don't have a link to at the moment where a guy passed out drunk at a party and a women he had never met essentially raped him in his sleep. Yup, he was forced to pay child support too.
Imprison the woman for rape and get full custody due to criminal ineligibility of the woman? (And being in prison at the time). Then when she get's out of jail you get child support payments. It sucks to have some stranger's child, but usually women who do this know the man in some way.
"London School of Economics sociologist Catherine Hakim's research shows that when both paid work and unpaid duties such as housework, care and voluntary work are taken into account, men do pull their own weight."
The "women do more housework" thing has been debunked over and over, at least in the west. You can only arrive at that conclusion by excluding traditional "man's work" jobs like yard work and car repair.
On the other hand, I have heard Japanese and Chinese men say they expect their wives to do all the housework, so maybe there really is a difference.
Now hold on there. Just because the employed member of the family puts in 60+ hours per week at the office doesn't mean they should do any less work around the house...
Whaaat? So are you basically saying that one shold do half of the house chores no matter how much he/she works at their job? If one spouse is unemployed, and the other spouse works 60 hrs you consider it fair only when each does 50% of the house work?
This could also mean that women avoid getting married to men who are prone to "higher death, suicide, crime, and disease rates". For example, how many women would really get married to a hobo?
Yeah, selection bias. Not just shiftless hobos, either. As a man you're going to have a harder time finding a wife if you're sick or have unhealthy habits (like obesity or heavy drinking).
Edit: I expect the same is true for single women, too. I doubt single women live as long as their married counterparts on a statistical basis.
It looks very very nice, but I find its features to be almost... useless. I feel like the desktop is trying to grab the spotlight, instead of focusing on the applications.
For example, how many people really do use desktop widgets on a PC? I'm willing to bet you that the majority of users spend most of their time in a web browser and some kind of a text editor (IDE/Office/...). IMHO the KDE project is going in a wrong direction by putting so much emphasis on the desktop. Just let me quickly start my favourite applications, then go away, until I call you back. I think that Ubuntu's Unity is much more closer to this goal.
PS: last time I tried KDE was with Kubuntu 11.04. I just played around adding and removing widgets, until I dragged the clock from the bottom bar to the desktop. Then I had an incredible frustrating experience when it took me almost half an hour to figure out how to add the clock back on the bottom bar. It just kept going under it.
PPS: The second issue was a show stopper: it didn't remember the settings for my dual-monitor setup. The only fix I could find was to edit configuration files... I mean, be serious, it's 2011, not 1999. So I returned to Ubuntu with Unity, which worked just fine.
Am I the only one who thinks that the new design colours are somewhat bleached? I would like more contrast.
I also find the "Reading List" from my Blogger account homepage to be useless. If I want to subscribe to a feed, Google Reader is a much better option.
