Cheetahs Heading Towards Extinction as Population Crashes (bbc.com) 120
The sleek, speedy cheetah is rapidly heading towards extinction according to a new study into declining numbers. From a report on BBC: The report estimates that there are just 7,100 of the world's fastest mammals now left in the wild. Cheetahs are in trouble because they range far beyond protected areas and are coming increasingly into conflict with humans. The authors are calling for an urgent re-categorisation of the species from vulnerable to endangered. Cheetahs in Asia have been essentially wiped out. A group estimated to number fewer than 50 individuals clings on in Iran. [...] In Zimbabwe, the cheetah population has fallen from around 1,200 to just 170 animals in 16 years, with the main cause being major changes in land tenure.
So overpopulation is not an issue? (Score:3)
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I'd like to add euthanasia, universal abortion, one-child laws and forced age limits to that as well.
Everyone get on your high horse and mod me down into oblivion, but you know damn well you want to see the world population knocked down a few billion for the benefit of the planet.
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Start a 5 way religious war... (Score:1)
Between Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Communists.
You might have to start by burning a few religious monuments down in an opposing religion's name, but after it is all done, the population will be dramatically reduced.
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Well, no. The planet will be just fine, thank you. It will exist long after we're gone. It's for the benefit of people. Except, of course, for the 6+billion you have to eliminate to get down to a billion.
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I am not going to mod you won, but you are exactly the sort of sociopath that our world is now breeding.
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Re:So overpopulation is not an issue? (Score:5, Informative)
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You don't need that as much as you need a higher standard of living. There's great empirical evidence that family income as low as $4k/yr can get to replacement-rate fertility, whereas "awareness of birth control" and "chos(ing) quality of children over quantity of children" is paternalistic, makes broad assumptions about millions of individuals, and spends money that could otherwise contribute toward raising the standard of living.
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x is not dx/dt in the general case.
Re:So overpopulation is not an issue? (Score:4, Informative)
Start sending lots of birth control devices (condoms, IUDs, birth control shots, ect) to Africa...
To quote Christopher Hitchens: "[The cure to poverty is] colloquially called the empowerment of women" [youtube.com].
Re:So overpopulation is not an issue? (Score:4, Interesting)
A fair number of posters here despise women, and view anyone who advocates for female empowerment as an SJW who needs to be derided, trolled, threatened with rape, or any other mechanism possible to silence anyone with a vagina.
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A fair number of posters here despise women, and view anyone who advocates for female empowerment as an SJW who needs to be derided, trolled, threatened with rape, or any other mechanism possible to silence anyone with a vagina.
I have a hard time coming up with somebody less fitting the SJW stereotype than Hitchens. But I'm quite sure he would adopt the term with aplomb.
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So what is the solution?
You're gonna smack me, but again - nature.
Changes in Land Tenure (Score:1)
Sad that it is hard to breed cheetahs in captivity (Score:1)
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Pretty sure he's talking about domesticating the cheetah, not just grabbing a wild cheetah and keeping it on a leash.
But cheetahs need to run, not much room in the city for them.
Cheetahs have low genetic diversity (Score:5, Informative)
http://cheetah.org/about-the-c... [cheetah.org]
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As cool as cheetahs are, it would seem their geneti
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Interesting....did not know there once was a cheetah-like feline in NorthAm. Weak design or not, it'll be a damn shame if they do die out, especially if it's because of humans. Perhaps one day many years from now we can have cloned ones - or perhaps we'll eventually have to clone every damn creature except raccoons, squirrels, rats, pigeons & gulls.
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The cheetahs are likely very specialized in terms of pray. They are not social like lions and it maybe that if a certain sized prey animals disappear from the ecosystem, so do the cheetahs. The entering(s) of the interglacial periods significantly altered the whole ecosystem everywhere, killing off many other species. In that sense, it is not "fair" to put the cheetah into the failed experiment basket quite so readily based on those natural events.
trophy cucks (Score:3)
http://assets.nydailynews.com/... [nydailynews.com]
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Shh. The guide told them it was a cheetah.
"Cheetahs never prosper" (Score:5, Funny)
For all these years I thought this was just an expression.
Meh (Score:2)
A cheetah is genetically more than 99% identical to other cheetahs because they suffered not one, but TWO population bottlenecks where the population was wiped out but for a small number of breeding pairs - the first about 100k years ago, the second about 10k years ago. This leaves them all basically as related as identical twins.
Their doom isn't necessarily humans (at least, not any more than any other large predator) it's their lack of genetic diversity that means a local population can be devastated by
Re:Meh (Score:4, Funny)
Thank goodness! Now we can get back to destroying large areas of land populated by wild animals!
Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)
"and it's only peripherally due to humans"
Not quite, if humans were out of the equation, they'd probably be doing a lot better, and their limited genetic diversity would probably continue to grow. We've most certainly limited their potential and influenced their chances of survival negatively. Yes, the cards were stacked against them, and humans have burned most of the deck to boot.
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You missed the "...not any more than any other large predator..." part?
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No, their best chance of survival is influencing areas encroaching on cheetah habitat to recognize their needs and give them the space they need. *That* is their best chance. Breeding them in captivity keeps them 'around', but isn't a solution. Very few captive-bred facilities ever result in animals returning to the wild, any honest facility will admit as much. And too often they turn in the opposite direction to make a buck. Look at lions - very few in the wild, but many in roadside zoos in the US. Or ther
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They're definitely going to go extinct then, because either they're all male or all female.
Lost cause (Score:2)
Its about land (Score:2)
As the article hints, the issue here isn't really raw population, its land.
Mating for Cheetahs involves miles and miles of chasing. If they don't have that kind of grassland space available to them, there will be no more cheetahs.
This is also why they could not be domesticated (even though they are quite tamable), and cannot be bred in captivity. Zoos cannot save them. If they go in the wild, they are gone.
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Rig up a cheetah make-out pad with a treadmill/conveyor belt thing.
Do you know how tiring it is doing all the thinking?
Just goes to show... (Score:1)
Re:What does this have to do with tech? (Score:4, Insightful)
They may be being bred in zoos, but that's not a healthy situation for the species.
I recently reread Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" (I liked it as a teenager, but thought it was pretty crappy all these years later.) But I digress.
One notable thing though in the story is the idea of capping human population to one billion. I don't know if one billion is the right number, but it does make me wonder if there isn't some merit to the idea.
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Forced birth control.
As humanity continues its relentless reproduction, it will continue to strain the world's resources. Add in climate change, and humanity will pay the price and there's no technological miracle that will save it.
And if the predictions prove true that the World's population peaks at 10 billion or so, it will be a hellish overcrowded world indeed. And judging by the current economic path we're on, it's going to be a world of billions of people in poverty and a small minority of fabulously
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What entity is going to force birth control on the human population?
Nature?
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I don't think there is a natural mechanism to force birth control on humans. I am under the impression that these people want some other entity culling billions of people somehow. Perhaps a world government or something?
No, I think s/he meant that we can limit population ourselves or have a crash forced on us. There doesn't seem to be any plausible way that humans will take on limiting population themselves. Ergo, etc. Presumably, you reject the premise. So, population keeps growing until ...?
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If it's brown people abroad, the USA, if it's brown domestic people the Republicans cutting down social security and ensuring gangs have all the guns they need and for the rest, daytime TV should do.
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What entity is going to force birth control on the human population?
depends on if you are talking about the human population or just segments of it. There certainly are a great number of individuals that would love to do it to browner segments of the population.
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What entity is going to force birth control on the human population?
Oh, the perfect, uncorrupt, wonderful government that knows best.
From the "progressive" dreamland.
Hey, it beats the (un)"Free Market."
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What do you think a condom is?
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A condom is just a mechanism of birth control. You aren't going to "cap" the population unless you persuade (precise meaning varies) the whole world to start using them.
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Re:What does this have to do with tech? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to cull anyone. Just encourage people to have less kids.
And STOP SOCIALLY OSTRACIZING PEOPLE WHO DECIDE NOT TO HAVE KIDS. Especially women. They're doing the world a favor and you have people calling them "selfish" or treating them as second class citizens for not joining the parental cult.
My girlfriend and are voluntarily childfree and get bullshit like this from time to time.
And no offense to parents who don't behave this way. Ya'll are awesome. There's just way too many who do.
Re:What does this have to do with tech? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to have a large family, fine, but you don't get a tax advantage for doing it.
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If the goal is to discourage population growth, why would you subsidize reproduction at all?
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Because hopefully one of the kids will grow up to know what the excluded middle fallacy is.
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Why? The USA is already having children at a rate below replacement levels. The only reason its population hasn't been SHRINKING the last couple of decades is immigration.
If you're one of the people who thinks population growth is a problem, the USA is not the place to try to attack the problem. Its a model to be emulated.
Immigration problems (Score:1)
And in the USA, 1 in 8 individuals don't get enough food; there are millions more, many of them skilled in modern technologies and tasks, who cannot find employment. Seems to me that's a pretty damned good candidate for circumstances people might sanely decide they don't want to bring offspring into.
Well, insofar as maintaining our already
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This is an unfortunate catch-22. Tax exemptions are given to parents for the sake of their children, not as an encouragement or congratulatory gesture for the parents (at least not in this country). Helping to keep the family out of poverty through favorable tax treatment is the most effective (and cost-effective) way to help the children grow to be productive members of society.
At the same time, even if it might not be the intention of the program: giving money to people whenever they have children does te
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In the US, I don't think the reproduction rate is up to replacement level, but this is masked by immigration. If we want to hit replacement level, we have to make parenthood more attractive, not less.
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Oh yeah the looks they give you. ;-)
I suppose deep inside they feel like it devalues their life choices. Some can barely fathom it. "But WHY??" Yes why give up the most meaningful thing in YOUR life? Because it's mine, and I find meaning elsewhere.
(And I don't think a kid will save my marriage
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Aren't you special? I've never been asked if I'm going to have kids - from anyone.
Maybe everyone who knows you just shudders in horror at the thought of you having kids and decides it's not a good topic to bring up?
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Just encourage people to have less kids.
On the contrary, large families are a more efficient way to raise humans than small families. Large families reuse clothes, carpool, waste less food, and often produce people who are skilled at doing the same, even when they themselves don't choose to have large families.
And that's just the families angle. There's also the problem of different reproductive rates of different countries. How does it affect the cheetah population if a couple in Finland or in Costa Rica decides to have five kids instead of non
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And the rest of us thank you for removing your genes from the genepool.
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You were born, and you're stupid.
Can't really draw much from a sample of one.
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Reproduction and intelligence are inversely related. This is not good for us.
Not really, Idiocracy was a funny movie and all, but doesn't in any way match reality.
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Sadly, the females I know that have opted not to have kids happen to be the type of genetic stock we want to encourage. Smart, resourceful, able to look ahead and see this is not going to be a good place soon...
I find it odd that we require training and a license to operate a motor vehicle but anyone can raise a Jeffrey Dahmer as long as they avoid minor troubles that would cause a social worker to become involved. And if you want to teach your kid to hate a given group or type of people, well that is your
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The people we do have a problem with are those people with no kids that (a) tell us how we should raise our kids or (b) get irritated with something they perceive as annoying behavior from our kids.
It's a rare form of human that enjoys when someone calls them out for being a dimwitted fuckbag.
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You have an economic system that requires a constant increase in population - countries all over the place start panicking when fertility-rates start to approach the minimum required for sustaining the population (replacement birth rate), which is 2.1 in Western countries, 2.33 globally.
Yes, several are below that rate, and many specifically take steps to try and increase it, though some manage to offset the difference via immigration.
Re: What does this have to do with tech? (Score:1)
Trees are not better than humans either, but without trees, there are no humans.
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We should cull those who demand a culling.
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Of course you're serious, because your a malignant 4chan sociopath whose got bored of that big ol' psychopath and goes out on the Intertubes looking to shock people. Basically, you're incurable scum.
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