/sci/ - Science & Math

The UFO situation is an enormous teachable moment wasted on basically everyone because it demonstrates where a lot of conspiracy theorists live and breath:
They didn't stop believing in UFOs because they were presented with a set of compelling facts or logical arguments. They stopped believing in UFOs EXCLUSIVELY because the government said they were real'ish, and without skipping a beat; that must mean UFOs aren't real because the government is always lying. You need to REALLY think about how some of these people had completely immersed themselves in all things UFO for DECADES: grainy footage, interviews, Bob Lazarr, coded Crop Circles, and the exact moment the government said some of it was "kind of real" the speed in which they abandoned a fundamental life-long held belief was unreal.

I'm convinced these people don't possess free will. They're insects: the correct negative input was correctly initiated and now they're completely different.
The UFO drama convinced me NPCs are not only very real, but that brain washing someone is a process of understanding bias and careful management of narrative.

>>15696963
>Is overpopulation a serious threat to humanity?

No, but overconsumption, resource mismanagement/allocation, and poor population distribution is and is probably going to become a threat in the coming decades. If I'm allowed to be pessimistic we've probably already been impacted by this starting in 2015.

To get into specifics: Poverty isn't free.
Poverty costs resources. People in poverty unironically consume and waste more resources than people living a lower-to-middle-class lifestyle. Maybe this will be somebodies "lightbulb" moment, but somebody living in poverty ironically does not possess the resources to neither be a productive citizen, nor efficiently consume resources. I think the average homeless person in America costs the public 40,000 USD a year just in vagrant shenanigans. (Meanwhile, most 1st world nations that stopped drafting citizens did so because the average citizen was producing potentially 8 million dollars worth of labor/value in their working lifetime, so sending them off to die was considered a waste.) Now, with that in mind apply that same phenomena to the literal billions of people in China, Africa, and India who're in even worse poverty. This isn't even remotely sustainable.

Furthermore, it's often just one thing after another: poverty leads to resource mismanagement, resource mismanagement often leads to corruption, corruption leads to poverty, repeat until the environment is destroyed and people are eating each other. Likewise, solutions can often be deceptive. For example; you want people to stop having so many kids? Get them a television: more effective than condoms and more consistently available than birth control.

>>15676028
>>15676046

Quack who's been on both ends of this argument.

People who have trauma often lack the environment, circumstance, self-awareness, or experience, to actually commit to the life changes necessary to meaningfully cure their depression. Pills obviously won't stop abuse, won't stop your partner from cheating, won't increase your pay, nor will they unrape you, but it'll alleviate the psychological symptoms of it. Which in many peoples case is the best they can hope for.

This is also me being mask off, but people with depression, people with mental issues in general, are the fucking worst to deal with. It's not like somebody with a broken leg or a UTI: their brain is who they are and their brain is their worst enemy. Nobody can protect insane people from themselves. If they don't like my advice they'll just go to another doctor, or a podcast, or an internet forum that tells them they need to drink piss. So, yeah: they also get pills because I can't lock them in a cage and monitor their entire fucking life.

Also, we're just at a point where the patients are as bad as anybody else; they want pills, they demand pills, they fucking love pills. You try to tell a patient they don't need pills and they get fucking obstinate. Which is insane because in my personal anecdotal experience it feels like patient demand/desire for pills has dramatically INCREASED after the pandemic.

>>15656086
>If global warming is real, why isn't sea level rising?

Because it unironically happens extremely slowly and is thus effectively unnoticeable by our own standards. According to NASA the sea has risen like 98 millimeters in the past 30 years which is basically fucking nothing. The rising sea level is very much a "frog in boiling water" situation.

>>15656109
>>15656138
>>15656860

Maldives specific problem is it's a victim of sand theft. Which is essentially the single stupidest/goofiest sounding act of actual dangerous environmental terrorism.
Maldives is maybe a little wetter than it should be, but the main problem they face in the destruction of the 124 something islands that make up their country is the illegal mining of white beach sand. People come and they haul away literal tons of it and the island drifts further into the sea. Simple as.

To segway this back onto rising sea levels and into a country we actually know: America has a similar problem. Many of the "tourist attracting white sand beaches" and prime retirement real estate across the United States is made up of fake beaches that must be constantly refurbished with sand because they're not naturally reconstituted by the tide. Florida alone spends, every year, 30 to 50 million USD maintaining beaches that wouldn't normally exist in nature- this is called "Beach Nourishment".

New York is another example of something 'similar', but different, in the regard that they *originally* had extensive oyster reefs/beds that acted as a tidal wall protecting them from the worst the Atlantic had to offer. Over generations of boat traffic, pollution, and eating them, all the oysters are basically gone and now New York must spend something between 50 to 110 BILLION dollars on a man-made wall that the oysters had built for free.