Elon Musk’s Reported $10 Million Donation to Fertility Research Is Deeply Unsettling
Elon Musk’s Reported $10 Million Donation to Fertility Research Is Deeply Unsettling
Just another day of fearmongering about birth rates for the billionaire father of 10.
He is worried about a lack of (white) people on this planet.
Population collapse via infertility is by far the best thing that could happen for the planet. We need to dramatically reduce our consumption of natural resources back to the point where it is sustainable.
It would also be the best way for humanity to end. It will eventually meet its doom, and if that's because of infertility, we got off luckier than p much every dominant species the planet's ever seen.
He is so fucking creepy.
Specifically, rich white people. Pathetic to care about any of that crap.
So glad despite his best efforts he changes nothing
I think he deserves some credit for making Mastodon and Lemmy more popular at least.
The man just wants more warm bodies that he and his other rich crony friends’ companies can hire 14+ years down the road. It has nothing to do with race.
He's from South Africa, which experiences some of the most extreme violence across racial and religious boundaries and was apartheid up until recently. White South Africans are notoriously racist.
He's got a breeding fetish.
It’s because he and his ilk regard anyone who isn’t a billionaire as just a resource to be consumed and exploited. He’s just securing resources for the future. Excuse me while I puke.
I'd take his money to do it, and then fuck off and blow it on hookers and condoms to spite him.
Longtermism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism
Humanity should do everything now to achieve the greatest possible happiness in a very distant future. Climate change, fascism, war, displacement and hunger - from the point of view of longtermism, none of this is important. What is important, for example: humanity should prevent the emergence of a machine superintelligence, a power that could destroy everything. And: Humanity should learn to colonise other planets, because the Earth will not last forever. (translated from a Netzpolitik.org article)
This means "small" problems AI causes today do not count, spending money to get billionairs to space is progress. Caring for a doomed planet and keeping it from burning to a crisp isn't as isn't paying decent wages so people can afford children. They can focus on a far future and are bullet proof against criticism for not helping to solve current issues, because they are all in for humanity in 3000 years from now, living in space and we should thank them for that. Yeah. Take their money away, please.
It is not just Elon Musk it is also Sam Altman (OpenAI) or Guillermo Söhnlein (co-founder of the firm behind the doomed Titan submersible) - now leading a project to create a floating colony of 1,000 people on Venus - just weeks after the disaster which killed five people.
Nick Bostrom:
In 2002, he published an essay on "existential risks" and wrote: "At present, in some places, there seems to be a negative correlation between intellectual performance and fertility. Bostrom fantasises about making people mentally and physically "healthier" through genetic manipulation. Obviously, the philosopher is describing a misanthropic view of the world in which people are judged on the basis of physical or mental characteristics. Bostrom also argues that genes play a central role in determining such characteristics. This view, known as "eugenics", was used by the Nazis to justify genocide.
These people are a threat to human kind and whatever they do is not meant to help today. They use their money to do everything BUT to change our society and planet for the better, they have already written us off.
For a deeper dive (and plenty of musk shit talking) this video from some more news does a pretty good dive into billionaires fucked up moral compass. Hint: it's all racism and eugenics dressed up in shitty rhetoric
WTF with this man
Population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization,” accompanied by a list of countries where fertility rates are supposedly in decline
They are in decline everywhere, and it is a serious issue at the levels that it has hit in many countries. It's way, way below the ~2.1 TFR required to sustain a population, which means you wind up with an inverted population pyramid, and a lot of old people needing to be supported by a few young people.
Europe isn't actually the worst-off place -- South Korea, Japan, and East Asia plummeted down even sooner.
Take a look, at, say, South Korea:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2023/
And governments haven't generally had a lot of luck with pulling it up with policy changes.
No. The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.
What Musk, and hopefully not you, is worried about is the decline in white people being born.
The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.
It will, however, soon reach a peak and then enter decline. However, that's not the relevant factor -- people in Country A aren't going to cover pensions or education subsidies or the like in Country B. You need individual countries to have something on the order of a sustainable population. That means that the combination of fertility and immigration (if the country has positive immigration; some countries, like many of those in Eastern Europe, have serious net outflow) needs to be sufficient to sustain that country's population.
You can do some of it with immigration, and in the US, we've done quite a bit, but as can be seen by the political response to the European migrant crisis -- a swing to the far right -- populations get pissy when one pulls in more than a certain rate of immigration. So there's only so much you can do via immigration.
EDIT: Oh, if you were responding to my comment as to "decrease", I was responding to a comment about fertility rate decrease, which is what the article said -- that is decreasing everywhere. I'm not saying that population is decreasing everywhere, not yet.
where fertility rates are supposedly in decline
They are in decline everywhere
The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.
Global population will start to decrease as a result of that too. But that's a trailing factor.
“Population decline” as a political football right now is just a stalking horse for conservatives to push a homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, and racist agenda. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard about LGBT folks not having kids, thinking that the ability to birth children is what defines a woman, lamenting the effects of women’s lib, or worrying about “replacement” via immigration, I could find my own fertility clinic.
I will believe people believe that there is a serious danger in population decline when they start passing policies meant to address it. I will believe they’re concerned about the impact of an aging population when they open the borders to immigration. I’ll believe they’re worried about births when they increase taxes to the point we can sustainably provide pre- and post-birth medical care, pediatric care, day care, and education.
Or we could spend that money on increasing services for retirees and adjust to lower and more sustainable levels of population, rather than doubling down on the idea of infinite growth. We could use the explosion in productivity to benefit the people whose productivity increased, rather than sending all of the additional money gained to the top of the income strata. That seems like less of a population Ponzi scheme.
Let in immigrants so I can retire in comfort on the basis of paying another 40 million people $5/hour to pick my vegetables and cook my food, make having kids not an economic burden that women and families have to sacrifice their careers for, or just make it easier to retire and be taken care of by funneling part of the economic excess from hypergrowth to things that benefit the public.
Otherwise I’m going to continue to thing that the “concerns” about declining population growth aren’t really the concerns in play.