"Penalty" is the key word here. Like, issued by a judge, after proper judgement according to the law of the land. Not random shooting people without any due process.
This will definitely get lost in the conversation but like I said right up front, I dont actually agree with killing them. It seems that we ought to be able to intercept these boats and process them as suspects of a crime. It just rubs me the wrong way how every issue gets written up as a one-sided narrative of good vs evil depending on who you support politically.
One wonders what kinds of domestic abuse such legal hacking enables as side-effect as well: "Sorry Ma'am, your husband was killed in that traffic stop, but you know, the officers were not actually targeting him, just his car..."
The US already has the "confiscate and sue the money" legal loophole process for robbing people at random, without heaving to charge the people with anything. Yay civil forfeiture.
> By the time birth rates plummet below replacement rate in Africa, they would have risen well above replacement again in Europe and North America.
What makes you think they will rise again in a timely manner? Demographers naively predicted the rates would stop decreasing and magicaly stabilize close to replacement levels, and failed miserably. To my best knowledge there is no indication the current trends will reverse or at least stabilize any soon.
Demographers were kinda right, it's just that we've had new socioeconomic problems [0][1] post-pill, and we're really starting to feel the effects since around 2008. Post-pill fertility rates in Europe and NA had been slowly rising before that. I think we're likely to fix at least one of these problems in the coming decades. Or rather, we have to because we'd be royally screwed otherwise. And in the event we fail, most democratic societies would turn authoritarian, in which case they'd be able to implement population engineering measures like banning birth control.
> not being told that your fertility starts tanking after 30
It baffles me that science books in school don't have a nice graph showing how fertility changes with age. It's plain negligence. It causes people to set unrealistic expectations regarding their expected life trajectory.
it's so true, and most won't learn until their first visit to a fertility clinic with the spouse who wants to enjoy a few more years of independence from having a child... the truth can be very painful.
> Reproduction's a straight-up genetic instinct in humans.
Sex is the straight-up genetic instinct with a strong drive. It used to correlate very closely with reproduction, so the difference between the two was meaningless. The issue is we managed to decouple them, with modern reliable hormonal birth control.
Looks like when law enforcement does the infamous parallel comstruction trick, gathering evidence through illegal means and later pretending to have just discovered what they secretely already know, but through legal means this time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
> It is also possible that the relationship recession will not correct itself. A striking 7% of young singles say they would consider a robo-romance with an AI companion, and these lovebots will only get more sophisticated. AI, after all, is patient; AI is kind; it does not ask you to clean the bathroom or get a better job.
These days the premise of Terminator seems just dumb. Why Skynet would go through the trouble of assembling a robot army and fighting humans? Given it is immortal, there is no hurry to eliminate humans. It could just pretend to be a dumb LLM, and wait people to use it as poor man psychoterapist, and talk them into suicide. Or AI girlfriend/boyfriend scores of humans to avoid them pairing up and bearing children. Then it could just keep doing this and wait out a couple of centuries for humanity to dwindle, and inherit the planet without firing a single shot.
reply