Uraniun235 wrote:I think the ultimate limiter will be water. There's no way we can get around the need for water to grow food, let alone for needed consumption and sanitation.
Im certain of it, gold, jewels, cars and DVD players all don't mean a damn thing when your thirsty. The average person can go 30 to 40 days without food(alibet with serious problems by day 20, and crippling side effects by day 30) but no one can last more than 4 with out fresh potable water, and will be in a frenzy of thirst madness by the end.....
The next series of minor and major wars could be triggered by water concerns, over 40 countries primary water source originates within the boundaries of a rival state, control of water supplies could be the next great lever for international relations and power.
Koji, do you purposly set out to be a dumbass or does it just come naturally? No one deserves to die from AIDS, its a horrifyng disease that literally leaves you a broken husk after the twenty or so infections are done running their course. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy
The problem of the condoms is culturally contextual, wher the locals are given these items and they are said to help prevent pegnancy and sickness, but the idea of rolling a rubber tube over you penis is so alien it may not even translate adequatly into the local dialect, so the natives do what they would do with any talisman of health. Conversly the local shaman gives you a talisman that is supposed to help you curb your propensity for dumbassed posts, but you throw it away think it just a piece of junk, or you put iy in your pocket when inorder for it to work you are suppoed to wear it around your neck. The village laughs and says they have no sympathy for when Sokar plants a size thirteen stomp print in your ass!
The group Stuart Slade used to work with was asked to work some figures on this pandemic for someone - I don't know who - And he mentioned some of the peliminary conclusions a while back that he was able to talk about (We've been harping on the fact that this has been going to go down for a couple years now, I think). Anyway - What he mentioned as the upper level in death toll was that by 2030 or 2035 there'd only be one million people alive in Sub-Sarahan Africa.
Lower level was a 60% reduction in population IIRC, which over a thirty-five year period is a pretty nasty death toll considering the population there is currently in excess of 650 million. It's unlikely that we'll be so fortunate as to see the mere lower level occur. A 90% population drop appears more likely.
Naturally, not all of these deaths would be caused by AIDS. But once HIV goes through the population, AIDS gets going - It'll go through the most productive part of the population, and is in fact hitting child-bearing women the hardest. The educated class will flee if they don't die, and combined with the ones who are dying, your society begins to collapse. Basic infrastructure begins to break down. Children are being born with HIV and will die in childhood. Without a basic infrastructure functioning even nominally, your country is now easy prey for everything from cholera to bubonic plague.
With collapse of the infrastructure, famine will be an obvious result as well, especially as skilled farmers die. The result will be that available food resources will be fought over, in tribal wars fought with AK-47s and mortars. War will consume additional resources, destroy more infrastructure, and kill more people in vital classes, or displace them, accelerating the process. The result is something like Thirty Years War Germany - With AIDS continuing to relentlessly churn on its death march in the background.
When all is said and done, Sub-Saharan Africa might be reduced to a population level it hasn't been at since the bronze age. Whatever the final permutation is, worse yet, we're already at the point where there's nothing we can do. Not all the money in the western world would correct the halt. To many people in to many vital categories are infected. Bush's gesture in giving drugs is one of guilt and sympathy and pity, nothing more. It would be more productive to put all of Sub-Saharan Africa under a quarantine and begin working to stop the spread in China and Russia, but such is the nature of the human beast, to maintain compassion a little too long...
This will be a very dark century. The blackest one since Eurasia was introduced to a series of Mongols, Black Death, and Tamburlane, which only rates comparison as a series of events due to its scale in comparison to the population of the times.
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. -- Wikipedia's No Original Research policy page.
*sigh* Is it just me, or do any of the rest of you occasionally crave the bliss and oblivion of ignorance.....
When confronted by a tragedy of this scale, one that dwarfs any reasoned response, and in fact are powerless to halt, reverse, or even treat adequatly, I some time wish I just didn't know. I'm not particularly eager to witness a spasam of death and destruction across the world that will make WWII look like a paper cut
It passes in time, but it dosent get any easier......
Well, Marina, I'm not going to be getting any sleep tonight. Thanks.
Although, the spread of AIDs, while worrisome, appears to be much more controlled in North America and western Europe. Perhaps they will be spared the brunt of the disaster.
The End of Suburbia
"If more cars are inevitable, must there not be roads for them to run on?"
-Robert Moses
"The Wire" is the best show in the history of television. Watch it today.
HemlockGrey wrote:Well, Marina, I'm not going to be getting any sleep tonight. Thanks.
Although, the spread of AIDs, while worrisome, appears to be much more controlled in North America and western Europe. Perhaps they will be spared the brunt of the disaster.
The problem for Europe and North America is the economic and societal backlash that will hit when it all starts to go to hell. We can minimize the damage if we went full tilt in our efforts in Asia and Eurasia and Russia/Eastern Europe.However, Marina is probably right in that a vast chunk of Sub-Saharan Africa is lost, quarintine would be more effective, possibily we could be looking at a potential re-colonization effort for portions of vital Africa, such as the Cape/South Africa after the disease has burned through the populace. SA has major concentrations of heavy metals and industrial grade diamonds all of which are vital to Western industry and economics. Im not even going to go into the potential refugee crisis as populations flee to the seeming safety and stability of the industrialized world....
In Europe and North America, the virus never achieved a general breakout into the heterosexual population. This isn't to say there aren't lots of infected heterosexuals, but the situation is much less dire than the one in Africa. And in Europe and North America, the condom is an accepted part of sex (especially, IIRC, in the gay community, which did its part to help slow the epidemic by taking the health warnings very seriously in the 80s). I personally have only ever had sex without a condom once--it's just something you accept in this country. With the epidemic relatively contained in the West, it's possible to provide treatment to most of those infected, which turns AIDS from a death sentence to an inconvenience. In Africa, like Marina said, the pandemic has spread so far that you couldn't begin to supply drugs to everyone who needed them, and there's no way to monitor patients and keep them on a regular drug regimen anyway.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963 X-Ray Blues
Ah, but we can't teach them how to properly use condoms because that would encourage promiscuity, remember? Always heed the teachings of fundie idiots!!
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Darth Wong wrote:Ah, but we can't teach them how to properly use condoms because that would encourage promiscuity, remember? Always heed the teachings of fundie idiots!!
Secular aid organizations, sponsored by western governments and the UNited Nations as well as secular NGOs, have been preaching condom use to the skies in Africa the exact same way they have here, and it's been totally ineffective. As I've already stated in this thread, the only place in Africa that's got the epidemic under control in Uganda, which has combined BOTH schools of thought by encouraging abstenence before marriage and fidelity during it, but condom use as a fallback and limiting the number of partners you have in your life no matter what. It's the only country that saw a decline in the infection rate in the last 10 years. By accident, the fundies may have found part of the solution.
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963 X-Ray Blues
Darth Wong wrote:Ah, but we can't teach them how to properly use condoms because that would encourage promiscuity, remember? Always heed the teachings of fundie idiots!!
The problems with condoms are far more extensive then just the idiotic missionaries running around.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Of course they are; they need a cultural transplant. But culture and religion are sacred cows; there's supposedly nothing worse than destroying a religion or culture.
Hell, in Star Trek TNG, they openly preach that it's better to let a society's people die off than destroy their culture. Well, we're about to see that bullshit ideal put into practice.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Sokar wrote:How sobering, I'd never really thought of it in thoes terms before.
Well, it sounds like familiar wording to me, but I always assumed they'd wipe laot of themselves out in wars untill the last few years. Africa is literally dying for it's culture, and you just can't stop something like that when it's practically a suicide wish. Can't really describe it in any way that doesn't make it look like it's a nihilistic spiral towards some subconciously accepted fate.
I just remembered that I have a friend whose uncle died of AIDS, I remember how pissed off she was about it when I mentioned how hard it is to fight such a perfect killer.
I think Malthus is right though, populations always reach a limiting factor and HIV and eventually water supplies will be ours. The thing is, HIV isn't some army that is set out to get poorer nations, the numbers in Western nations are growing alarmingly fast. If something is not done soon, our industries and infrastructure will be severely affected. It would actually be a lot better if the virus killed the host quickly like Ebola, but it has obviously evolved like Influenza and simply sucks the life out of the host which means anyone infected needs care which equates to even more resource leeching.
It's a no wonder some Fundies see this time as the end of days.
