Organicide

I respect the choice of Electric Blast, I just don't think it's for me. I've got my heart set on TM/Ice.

I'd agree that it has merit. It looks like Time Manipulation is heavy on the SLOWS, which if I'm not mistaken, serve Controllers moreso than our defender and corruptor cousins (due to higher base modifiers?). I was mulling over rolling a Grav/TM for similar Dominator envy reasons, overall theme and stacking uber slows and -recharge.

How is it you're forgetting Ice Blast!? I would think it would pair well with its 2 Holds, Various Slows and Rain Patches that mobs won't be moving away from very fast. Psi Blast is also looking like a winner here with stacking slows and - recharge.

I won't hate on Electric Blast (I have a retired TA/Elec and Elec/MM Blaster) but I don't recall seeing any -recovery in Time Manipulation. If I missed that, forgive me.

It's the Hitler/Stalin debate. Both were pretty bad. That fact is 1.2% of 7 Billion is huge. We're adding 250,000 people per day. It's a recipe for diaster. Why you all run to stick your heads in the sand is beyond me. If you want to live in make-believe land, go for it.

Every increase in food production our culture makes has been met by an increase in human population. It's a terribly simple concept. The two are linked absolutley. People don't subsist on pixie dust and magic beans. Even if growth in the industrailized world has slowed, it's booming else where on the planet. The issues you discuss at the start of your post don't' help matters but they're not the root cause. Solve food production and you solve over-population.

You might want to take a look at this. http://www.google.com/publicdata/exp...ue&hl=en&dl=en.

I must be crazy because it appears that despite birth control, industrialization and all those other population inhibators that have been mentioned here, the global population continues to rise. How can this be?!

If they aren't getting the food from the 1st world in the 3rd world, how is it population rates there continue to grow generation after generation? The fact of the matter is that we do ship our surplus food over seas. Does it all get parceled out in an egalitarian manner. I doubt it as well. None the less, it's artificially propping up a human population that couldn't be sustained there otherwise. So when a famine does take place in said 3rd world region (it's happening right now in Ethopia...surprise) the people there get hit hard. These aren't the rantings of some crank. This is how it works. My belief is we need to try another, less futile way that prevents this kind of prolonged suffering.

Edit: Please don't lose any sleep about my aspiraitons for public office. There aren't any. Why you'd be so fearful of such confuses me. I never said I wanted to see people starve.


Venture,

If you would've read prior to posting you would've seen that we've been over Industrialized birth rates ad nausem and it's been shown that the 1st worlds birth rate decline DOES NOT cancel out the robust 3rd world birth rate increase. The net result is an increase in the global population, not a decrease. This was my point the entire time. Please read through the posts before you start your crusade.

I don't agree this. We don't need more laws or prohibitions and even of this was inacted, I find it doubtful that it would be effective in limiting the population.

Calling me a troll does little to further this conversation. If you care to add something, please do so.

You've mentioned that it's wrong without any evidence of such as of yet. Prove me wrong sir, I beg.

Dark,

Calling Richard Dawkin's work a "navel gazing book" is a glaring misnomer. He's arguably one of the formost ethologists and evolutionary biologist of our time. I suppose if you have a beef with his work, that'll have be bewteen you two. Your mention that it makes us more destructive than other species when I pointed out that other species are prone to wasteful behavior as well makes me think you're not reading all I've posted. Again, I think you're mistaking our culture with our speices. Two distinct things. As for the NTY article, if proves Richard Dawkin's point. What you're seeing in that event is the letter of the law (of limited competition). What you failed to mention was human encroachment as a leading factor in the chimps motives for seeking new territory. I go on to say that I never mentioned that pre-agricultural tribes were complete angels. Only that they had in place a culture that was sustainable for the continuation of our species. Tribalism works well for human beings as a whole. Any anthropologist who studies these societies would echo this.

The meme that human beings are inherently evil or seperate from the rest of the natural world is absured. There is no evidence that I've seen, read or heard about that would place humans in this light.

I am familiar with cliff hunting and what it entails. That doesn't make human's any more destructive than other critters here. Elephants will eat, trample and destroy their favored food stuffs every where they go. Bears will catch a salmon and then only eat it's skin. Wolves catch them in the Pacific North West eating only the brains, leaving the rest to scavangers and, no joke, the trees (they find salmon DNA in the trees). Helping a wounded comrade by either setting their legs straight isn't unique to humans, either. Dolphins, Baboons, Chimps and Elephants have all been documented assisting wounded compatriots. This isn't going aganist the grain of nature, it's directly abiding by them. Cooperation is a wounderful result of evolution as far as I'm concerend. Give support: Get support is what makes tribal life so appealing to those who have it.

What does make OUR CULTURE (not all humans) destrutive is their refusal to to abide by the law of linited competition. Briefly, the law of limited competition is this: You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. Lions and hyenas will kill competitors opportunistically (as will other creatures, like baboons), but the law as stated holds true: they do not HUNT their competitors the way they hunt their prey. That is, they'll kill a competitor if they come across one (especially in conflict over food when food is scarce), but in the absence of a competitor, they won't go looking for one to kill. Such behavior would be evolutionarily unstable. (See THE SELFISH GENE by R. Dawkins.) As a strategy, it just doesn't pay off to use your time and energy hunting competitors that you DON'T eat (and that will fight back to the death) instead of using your time and energy to hunt prey that you DO eat. It's not a matter of ethics, it's a matter of calories.

Hey Dark,

I don't fully agree with the argument you put forward here. We can verify in the anthropoloigal record that every increase in food production has equaled an increase in the populaiton. This is beyond argument. It's been happening since the agricultural revolution and continues to this day forward. Birth Control is a bit of a white herring as well. We're told that it'll curb population growth and it never (not even once) has. This is also fact, not opinion. Even in the industrialized world, we see a growth in the population. Worse still, it's the industrialized world that is fueling the population explosion in the third world. We're sending food to regions of the world that cannot support the humans already there. Does this fact stink? Yeah, it really does. But so does the extinction of the human race. We, as a species (I think) have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that we need limits. It's a bitter pill, and I don't want to see people starve more than anyone else. I've come to the belief that it's better to stop supporting artifical population(s) and prolonging suffering in favor of a more reality based approach.

As for space colonization, it's an awesome dream. It really is. I'm a big sci-fi fan and on a personal level, I'd like to see us go to stars. To believe that it'll save us as a species, is in my opinion, a fantasy. There's an underlying problem that all the Class M planets in the universe won't solve. We're engaged in an orgy of food production as a culture. We're told unlimited food growth will solve our problems. If we just work a little harder and be a little more perfect and make a little more food, we'll be ok. But we won't. We haven't since this all started in Mesopotamia (sp?), and I think it's time we tried something different.

All species have an unfettered urge to reporduce, not just us humans. The difference is that we as a culture (not as a species) have refused to accept that turning all the food on earth to human food is a really bad idea. Every new acre that we put under the plow loses its bio-diversity. We're killing species off to the tune of 50-60 per DAY. Every link of the web that gets cut, makes the human species MORE vulnerable to extinction. It's all connected and we are part of the web wether we want to be or not.

Hunter gather societys (yes, some still exist even as we speak) understood this. Maybe not as I've typed it here, and not because they are "noble savages" but because they're content, happy and safe in their own culture. Which is more than a lot of people in this culture can say. It's a system that has worked for humans far longer than what you and I prctice today. It's unlikely that people such as myself could go back to this way of life. Plop me down with a tribe of hunter/gathers anywhere is the world and I'd likely meet my end quite soon. This doesn't mean that we have to go on living like gods of the earth, taking what we please without consequence either. We have options and we should explore them before it's too late.

I'll have to respectfully disagree with your assessment of my understanding as it concerns history, politics and many other "areas". I would be the first to admit that politics was never my strong suit if that helps any but I know enough to get by. What I find most puzzling about your comments though was your assessment as it concerns "humans never living in balance with nature". We've done so since our inception as a species. We're no more a cancer on this planet than gorillas, cheetahs or tuna are. I think you're mistaking what noted animist and cultural thinker Daniel Quinn has called, "The Culture of maximum Harm" for human beings as a whole. This is simply not true.

Did some species make way as humans moved forward on their path. Yes, they surely did. The giant ground sloth found in central and south america was thoguht to be a victim of human encroachment. This could be said of any food chain when a new top-teir predator is introduced. That doesn't make humans seperate from the rest of life on this planet. We're positivley part of it.

As for the fantasy of space colonization being our savior, I'll have to admit that I'm confused. If we continue to grow our population as we have been (which is to say exponetially, doubling our population in half the time every cycle) we'd still burn out. It's a non-sustainable behavior. It doesn't solve the underling problem. A band-aid.

If food doesn't cause population growth, I'd like to know where it is all these people are coming from? Are they being created from thin air? We are literally, in every sense of the word, what we eat. Every year we tell ourselves, If we just make a little more food we can feed the hungry. We then grow more food every year and...wait, there's even more starving people the next year. It's very easy to point at "politics" as a reason for hungry people but it's no-where near the main cause. We are artificially supporting masses of people living in regions that cannot sustain them. We've repeated this mistake for the last 10,000 (give or take a few thousand years).

I would propose trying something different next year. Let's pretend that I could keep food production for 2011 where it was for 2010. I'd be willing to bet we'd see the same amount of starving people we had in 2010. Not more, not less. Just about the same.

Oh, I feel better about the story now. Thanks.

The intellectual approach would actually be to reduce the amount food we human's are producing. Our unchecked totalitarian agriculture policy is what is fueling our exponential population growth and is the primary reason we're exceeding the human carrying capacity of planet earth. Like the war on drugs, the war on hunger cannot ever be "won". More food actually translates into a greater precentage of starving people and suffering. It also leads to the stripping of the planet's bio-diversity as we remove hundreds of native species (both plant and animal) to make room for a very narrow number of new ones to feed us.

I do believe that humans have a place here on earth (we're here, after all). We're not an inherently flawed creation that our culture and religions would have us believe. We've simply been living in a manner that isn't sustainable for the last 10,000 years or so. The goods news is that 10,000 is a small percentage of time. Not only for the earth but for **** sapiens sapien as well. We lived in sustainable ways as modern humans, no different than we are today, for some 200,000 to 300,000 years prior to our current culture that was derived in the fertile cresent a mere 10,000 years ago.

Is space flight and space travel stimulating and interesting? I would argue "yes" in a heartbeat. It is both those things and I'm not aganist the practice in any way. It isn't a true solution to our problems either. Even if we could colonize the Moon, Mars and all the places of the Solar System, it doesn't change the fact that we aren't living in a sustainable manner. It may alleivate our problems of over-population but would be little more than a band-aid. We'd still wind up in the same pickle as it were.

Drugs?

I used 5-slots and filled them with Posi's Blast.

*Edit* A total of 5 slots for the power, used 4.

Power Siphon is cute.