Hacker News Reader

Comment by redleggedfrog | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say this, and this is in no way a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor.

Not directly, at least I don't think, but through lack of health care, lack of shelter, lack of education, poor diet, use in waging war, incarceration, and probably once they get desperate and try and get theirs, being labelled terrorists.

People who have money, and therefore power, in the United States are not going to give it up so someone down the economic scale can have a modicum of comfort and dignity and purpose. They will, carefully and covertly, and maybe even inadvertently, remove them.

View on HN

We're what, 7 billion people on this planet? The environment is getting trashed, the climate is changing, the resources are diminishing. Governments will struggle to provide services to the population.

It won't be pretty and the reality is that the rich can't isolate themselves from the calamities that are coming.

> this is in no way a troll

Really? Because this is this the basic premise behind one of the greatest examples of satire in history...

> Really? Because this is this the basic premise behind one of the greatest examples of satire in history...

This one?

A Modest Proposal

For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public

By Jonathan Swift (1729)

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

This is pretty fucked up.

>> inadvertently, remove them

I think this is the 'natural' progression and it is well understood by the key members of the major social improvement movements. The intent of these movements is to change this, to improve the human condition.

>I hate to say this, and this is in no way a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor.

Only works if they die before reproducing...

kids without parents have certainly a reduced success-expectancy in life

It's interesting, that poor people have "so many children", normal people "just 2" and the rich again many... seems like everyone has their reasons/strategy:

Rich people can just have as many kids as they like. Normal people as they can sustain and poor people are just pounding them out with good hope that some/any will make it

> Not directly, at least I don't think, but through lack of health care, lack of shelter, lack of education, poor diet, use in waging war, incarceration, and probably once they get desperate and try and get theirs, being labelled terrorists.

I sadly agree this is likely to happen. I really hope I'm proved wrong and we can all come together. To figure out a way to live in this world together, peacefully.

The conspiracy theory in me can't help but wonder though, if one day, some group will make a virus to wipe out a large chunk of the population. Kind of a forced cull if you will.

Well, the world is breeding new antibiotic-resistant bacteria at a terrific rate, and it's not clear that bioresearch will stay ahead in the race:

  https://phys.org/news/2017-05-strategy-ways-emerging-antibiotic-resistant.html

So your theory's prediction could also come about "naturally".

I think we are wired to evolutionally survive (and also put arsenals of mechanisms against others)

The strategies vary between rich, poor and average people (I'd consider you and me to be average)

Average people would always point to the rich or poor for making mistakes plus discrediting other "average" people to not take the right measures

Poor people have a lot of kids in hope that ~2 survive. Rich people drain the planet and average people accuse other average people to not have saved enough of the poor people's children

Killing the poor seems unlikely as it's against a long running trend of killing and abusing people becoming less acceptable and less done. See Steven Pinker's stuff for evidence.

I imagine it will go the other way with people having the right to food housing entertainment and the like. We'll quite likely end up like the landed gentry of the UK past - think Bertie Wooster - but with robot butlers and less land.

That was a big part of the deal that "solved" the Industrial Revolution. The other big part was training the ones that managed to survive.

The interesting part is that humans go through different phases (decades/centuries), where different skills are required: Native Indians in Middle America weren't strong enough to work on the plantations, so Africans were brought in. Today there are probably more Africans living in the Carrebian, since they once made the money to attract a female, make it a wife (marry here, very important for women) and then have a family (kids), which some/most Native Americans maybe didn't achive, since no job/money (and thus no true love ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com