NoelBWrites

Noel B

@NoelBWrites

I like writing and writing byproducts
🧉💜✨🌹

log inask
NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites
NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites
NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

hey how do you do school work when the material pisses you off so much you're getting twitter trenches flashbacks but also you have adhd and interest is a prerequisite to do anything

asking for me and this stupid environmental studies book that keeps going on at length about overpopulation. Yes, still going. I thought it was done, but it's back

NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

hey quick question

By 1804 the world's population had reached the 1 billion mark. A few decades later Louis Pasteur and others demonstrated that bacteria spread disease. Sanitation improved, vaccines were developed, and antibiotics were subsequently developed. Infant mortality dropped. By 1930 the population had doubled again, reaching 2 billion.

why are you making it sound like "less dead babies" is a bad thing

NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

look at this graph 🎶📉

Human population is growing approximately exponentially

mute me now I'll be rage-chosting this stupid book until I'm done with it, this is the only outlet I have

The book is "Sustainability Principles and Practice" by Margaret Robertson (my sworn enemy) btw

source for the graph is here because the UN page took too long to load

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:

jackie---hollow
@jackie---hollow

maybe start working in parallel on a sort of Ultimate Quote Tweet of it. whenever you get mad at it do some research on when these ideas popped up in history, how they never made accurate predictions and always served the existing power structures... and just post that 10000 word essay to every participant after the course ends

login to reply
NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

I truly think that's part of why this anger is so distracting: it's an online class, which means I have no outlet lmao I can't bring it up in class because... there is no class! Just the lectures and assignments, etc.

login to reply

in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:

locust-breakfast
@locust-breakfast

practical stuff that helped me, in roughly descending order of sustainability: waking up at 5am and doing my most hateful thing; studying with friends; posting up someplace where you can eat that isn't your house; listening to spiteful greasy teenager music, whatever that means for you; vyvanse; one or two beers; ice cream to excess. source: I have terrible adhd (and bipolar!) and graduated summa cum laude (wish it had been a 3.5 and a brain that wasn't shredded but here we are)

login to reply
NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

thank you, vyvanse is definitely a godsend lol

I think of all the coping mechanisms I've developed over the years I never thought I needed to find one to calm the fuck down when I'm too angry to focus :eggbug-sob:

login to reply
MrDrugs69
@MrDrugs69

Wow this pull quote is excitingly dumb if she's trying to make a point that there will be overpopulation. The quote literally argues against the material: This is not "exponential growth" it's "a specific special event happened that increased the population growth rate one time".

login to reply

in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:

NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

Yeah, but the graph in the book is just an example of what "exponential growth" would look like. No actual data so I had to source my own and what do you know... Turns out "approximately" is doing a lot of work in that sentence I quoted

login to reply
stu
@stu

if you're curious, this particular form of not at all exponential looks like a sigmoid (aka s-shaped) curve! it's what you get when a population grows exponentially until it hits some sort of limiting factor that pushes it to a new equilibrium.

it's always funny reading population bomb types a few decades later when it's clear that birth rates are falling off in a lot of places and the new problem is that people are too racist to allow immigration that would fix their aging workforce

login to reply
NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

Thank you! I looked it up and landed on "s-shaped" and it does look like every other graph of population growing until it reaches the carrying capacity of its environment and then stabilizing

Also you know, humans aren't like mice, we have a prefrontal cortex that allows us to make decisions beyond the biological impulse of reproduction. Turns out if you give humans more resources (in the form of economic stability, education, birth control and medical care), we start having less children. So maybe panicking about the population bomb instead of caring about economic and social equity shows some skewed priorities??

I wonder why the population bomb warnings always come from people in the Global North?

login to reply
Pinned Tags