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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Who should we stop from reproducing?

10 races we should sterilize, number 6 will shock you, click here to learn more

That your heads immediately go for "races" when talking about overpopulation says a lot about the emotional weight and biases you have and that you are not making a good faith attempt to discuss.

Not defending OP. But whenever we talk about overpopulation the conversation will automatically shift to limiting some races to have offspring. (Even you commented on incentivizing poor communities to not have children. Guess who is going to be disproportionally affected by this).

I don't think that overpopulation is a problem today. Population collapse due to concentration of capital and power is.

...where do you think there are the highest suicide rates? In the rich neighborhoods? Which neighbors do you think the accumulation of capital and power is hurting the most and will continue to hurt? You are not damaging the comunities by paying them to have less children, unless you value life but not the lack of suffering by such lives.

Our carbon footprint would be an eight fraction of what it is if there was only 1 billion people in the world, current state of climate change would still be decades away giving us a bit more time to gradually change course, and consentration of wealth and power would be less dramatic as the workforce will be more limited (supply and demand for money itself).

Even something one might think would be an equal-opportunity population-reducer like COVID is confounded by socio-economic factors, so it ends up harming those with less access to healthcare more.

Another perspective is whether not doing anything (and by "doing" I mean simple public health measures like free condom distribution and family planning, education about the impact of human population, or, more succinctly, "no Hitler-y stuff") would ultimately yield more harm to minorities as they'd be the first to feel the impacts of population stress.

They always try to form the question in a way to make you sound like Hitler when you speak against overpopulation, it's a bit funny at this point; who should we stop? Nobody, we should just pay some fixed amount every decade or so to people who don't have children (by their own decision to do so of course), probably focused on low income neighborhoods as they are less likely to provide a suffering-free childhood, and that need the money the most. This is just an idea, the main gist is that is a matter of incentives and disincentives.

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