There’s not any scientific consensus on that, and most biologists believe that they are in fact not an essential part of any other organism’s diet.
There’s something to be argued in favor of their existence, however: they are the single most significant reason humans haven’t developed more of natural habitats like the rain forest.
We desperately need to find a way to exterminate these wretched creatures from the face of the planet. If there was ever a reason to deliberately make something go extinct, this has got to be the one.
My website has a dickbar, because I need to request consent for using Google Analytics. Am I doing it wrong? I’m honestly not sure how I’d be able to avoid showing the dickbar while still having some form of insight into how visitors are interacting with my website.
I understand that, but again, that’s not the point of my comments. We’re talking about different things and I’m fully aware of lowering fertility rates.
I don’t know a better way to explain the motivation of my comments than that it is deliberately separating relative population growth (yes it absolutely has to do with fertility rates!) from absolute population growth.
I’ve been trying to encourage the reader to not think about fertility rates and just be in awe of the sheer amount of humans adding to the total population. The purpose of that thought experiment is to factor in that the growth shouldn’t be solely compared to a number from a previous period, because the growth doesn’t occur in a vacuum: the necessary resources here on Earth don’t grow at the same rate. Simply looking at a growth rate and saying it’s declining draws an extremely misleading picture.
I, too, genuinely wish you the best in life. However, I have no inclination to be passively aggressive about it.
Fertility rates, while interesting and relevant, were not what my comments were about.
My first comment made an observation that last year alone, we added the equivalent of the current population of the United Kingdom to the planet, and we’ve been doing that every year, for the past 70 years. (As an aside, I argue that the net addition is “significantly more.”)
My second comment remarked on the skewed perspective of looking at relative growth rates, which is why I specifically called out the human population in absolute numbers.
I fail to see how anything I’ve said is incorrect but I’m open to the feedback.
What, exactly, is incorrect in my comment? There will be significantly more people in 2050 than there are today.
I’m sorry I didn’t comment on your unrelated source. I think we agree that the population is continuing to grow until 2100, as the UN projected.
It’s odd to bring percentages into it as the other factors of the equation aren’t growing at the same rate. In fact, they are decreasing.
The absolute number of people continues to increase steadily, consuming more and more and more of the finite resources we have.
There are more humans on this planet today than have ever been on this planet in the past, and the same will be true for as long as our projections can reliably predict, and we have no intention to reduce that number.
I don’t think the word “slow” has any place in describing this growth unless one wishes to deliberately obfuscate it by using an exponential scale.
slowly
Last year, just like every year prior to that since the 1950s, we’ve added the net population of the entire United Kingdom to this planet. All of those people consume, pollute and want a space to call their own. Just like the other 8.4 billion of us.
As a species, the environment hasn’t ever been our priority.
There’s only so much torture any person can endure.
It’s probably one of the few stock images available of the site.
A female colleague proclaims often loudly how disgusting she finds it to see a male colleague leave the unisex toilet at the office. I’ve asked her if those men are leaving a mess or what specifically was disgusting, and she says she just finds it gross that a man uses the same toilet.
I feel that the segregation is too engrained into our generation to move away from separated toilets. Honestly it’s a miracle we no longer have segregated toilets by skin color in the South.
NYT is a reliable source.
Zuckerberg, is that you?
It requires a personality trait of being a douche that you should be proud not to have.
“premium” 😂
The entire platform is nonstop triggered and posts negative reactions on any number of topics. Such is the nature of online communities and anonymity.
Robert Frost sure was ahead of his time
This is unfortunately the reality of journalism in the current age.
Investigative journalism is on the brink of extinction. What little is left of it is drowned out by lazy reporting that copy pastes from corporate press releases and of course bite sized social media posts that captivate the short attention span of the TikTok generation.