Last edited Sun Mar 22, 2026, 07:37 AM - Edit history (2)
Never heard of it (though Orwell is one of my favorite authors). He is always someone to study.
Hmmm..it is not really available at that link though some of it is at this one:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/in-front-of-your-nose/
The Birthrate. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous. To this day, the majority of people argue — the argument is variously expressed, but always boils down to more or less the same thing — that large families are impossible for economic reasons. At the same time, it is widely known that the birthrate is highest among the low-standard nations, and, in our population, highest among the worst-paid groups. It is also argued that a smaller population would mean less unemployment and more comfort for everybody, while on the other hand it is well established that a dwindling and ageing population is faced with calamitous and perhaps insoluble economic problems. Necessarily the figures are uncertain, but it is quite possible that in only seventy years our population will amount to about eleven millions, over half of whom will be Old Age Pensioners. Since, for complex reasons, most people don’t want large families, the frightening facts can exist some where or other in their consciousness, simultaneously known and not known.
It certainly shows its age. Today’s economy is based in so much pointless fluff no one needs or wants while necessary jobs and infrastructure make up a small part of what constitute universal needs like access to sanitation, medicine, basic education, minimal transportation, clean food, disaster relief (of which more will be needed at this rate) at least.
But if you can get on the side that treats this using garbage like intelligent design or creationism as equal to what would better emulate the dynamics of human systems which show some form of evolution over attachment to Social Darwinism plus contempt for actual ecological sciences and evol bio. The dumbest takes on competition and cooperation cannot still entirely wipe out all of the human brain and mind.
Complex systems sciences or system sciences and other such areas might be able to restructure society throwing away mechanical worldviews from earlier times applied well after their context is long past, if they adapt politically and if we start evolving as a species shrugging off what was clearly some kind of stasis and inertia filled rut.
This is one of the very rare computer scientists I find cool (Prof Yan Lecun is the other and I have Stockholm Syndrome by now wrt Prof Hennessy -this rather bandit like professor associated with that nightmare of a giant Google). I look at him and vaguely feel he should do something. A professor like that has to be intelligent outside areas strictly in computer science, but he is clearly intelligent enough to stick with CS as far as what he talks about goes.
I wanted to be like that and one of those close-lipped experts who never talks about anything outside their field and is a strong silent woman 😤 . Oh well..
He is one of my candidates for a new Norbert Weiner..a cool scientist I read about in Yasha Levine’s book “Surveillance Valley” (he is a modern day Orwell - Yasha..he is cooler than Orwell because I once got two emails from him! I never got any emails from Orwell. And his wife is as cool and pretty much the only person I have followed who is an artist relevant to anything real):
https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorithms-a-little-memory-outweighs-a-lot-of-time-20250521/
Yeah Prof Williams and Yasha Levine should do something about the US along with Adam Becker and Chris Ketcham and probably Clayton Dalton for good measure. Something serious will be needed to restore homeostasis to this mess.
Who cares if they are all white and male? It is still better than the Indian piece of shit pushing this sort of parasitic shit. They yap about “freebies” for the poor in India (a lot of these Indian economist douches while sitting around farting in the US), while using the poor as an excuse to parasitically steal from the middleclass with worthless job growth and coercive criminal shit. The only thing any of these guys will grow is a tumor. That aging society stuff is such bullshit. Prof Steve Chu gets it because he is an actual scientist not a ponzi scheme peddler.
This is one of the worst articles ever written by anyone anywhere:
https://jacobin.com/2025/02/birth-rate-decline-capitalism-migration
This by contrast is cool:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-world-economy-is-a-pyramid-scheme-steven-chu-says/
Politics should not be stupid. Prof Chu is one of the very rare people at Stanford I respect. Whatever his views they aren’t the views of a person incapable of critical thinking about rubbish like GDP growth.
Those of us who love earth for her own sake are not fools anymore than these dimwits who can code and socially manipulate their way up top (which itself is the path of the stupid improvident social climber in such an unequal world some of form of brutal balance restoring is always in the offing and instead of systems driven by human logic for real, they probably would implement the dumbest models with these worthless clunkpiles sold as technology. I have no objection to good tech. This stuff is bloatware. Its utility only lies ever in its becoming more rare not bulk processing like these maniacal idiots would force if people didnt stand up for their rights in this din of infuriating parasitic fluff easily gamed by demagogues and polemicists- the latter being a trap and such..)
Most economists are a nightmare. They don’t have any understanding of biophysical limits and they would push a stream of collective pap that is the average human zeitgeist (ie equal opportunity to be moronically derivative, unimaginative and extractive with downstream consequences that keep getting worse) in the middle of this fucking Idiocracy so as to damage working things and streams of organized info while promoting garbage that constantly embattles the mind (like all the truly worthless and criminally parasitic “growth development” and “vikas” shilled by our brainless local industrialists and politicians).
Chris Ketcham gets it. Sam Miller MacDonald gets it. But these three shitty fields: Computer Science, Economics/bschool rubbish and a bloated fucking sports/gaming/entertainment complex that steadily churns out all sided dimwitted celebrities to further degrade every debate down to level of people who give a shit what celebrities think:
https://ketcham99.substack.com/p/population-toxification-part-i-6d0
https://populationconnection.org/article/there-are-many-threats-to-humanity-a-low-birth-rate-isnt-one-of-them/
(humanity is nowhere near going the way of the Dodo-not through inadequate levels of breeding anyway..though humans-I do not say “we” since I am not that kind of human - have driven the Dodo to extinction to erect more worthless shopping malls..well okay not quite that but a hyerbolic connection can and should be made:
https://www.popsci.com/science/dodo-myths/
At least it escaped the fate of the factory farmed chicken I suppose:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/08/forget-they-are-an-animal
Not surprised at how this same parasitic type views humans as well.
)
These fuckers all fucked with the wrong person damn them all..
That was unrelated to anything, but who cares these days. We are way past any pretense of sanity as a species. And they keep grabbing more and more of any advantages anyone else has left ignoring what is in front of everyone’s noses about effort, money, muscle etc. I mean yeah it is complicated but not this complicated.
That is how corrupt systems make things out to be way more complicated than they are:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=public_integrity
My last mentor was probably a systems scientist. He was cool. I didn’t always appreciate him. But I do again as I did when I first met him far away from his school, which is a place where he works. He was surrounded mostly by pis who..worked at the school he works at.
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