From - Sat May 11 14:43:30 2002 From: david_l_simpson@yahoo.com (Dave Simpson) Newsgroups: alt.org.sierra-club,alt.politics.immigration,alt.politics.greens Subject: Re: Sprawl insights Date: 10 May 2002 09:20:27 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Lines: 151 Message-ID: <23e7f86e.0205100820.477e9e46@posting.google.com> References: <3CD2BB3B.220172B2@earthlink.net> <23e7f86e.0205041156.2a0fe8a0@posting.google.com> <23e7f86e.0205080839.1f052789@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 199.181.178.86 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1021047628 23663 127.0.0.1 (10 May 2002 16:20:28 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 10 May 2002 16:20:28 GMT Path: vienna7.his.com!news.lightlink.com!skynet.be!skynet.be!news-hog.berkeley.edu!ucberkeley!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail Xref: vienna7.his.com alt.org.sierra-club:636 alt.politics.immigration:9587 alt.politics.greens:10963 Sal wrote: > > > [W]here can [I] confirm this "Big Fact?" [Simpson: "here" ...] > ok, so you've made me more aware of the peak levels predicted. thank you. > they still seem dismal however. Population momentum is best shown in a graph that I tried to find earlier (I've spotted it more than once) and failed. Let me see if I can find it again. The big problems aren't in the advanced nations but in the undeveloped nations, as the graph illustrates well. Aha! Got it this time! Here you are. Look at related pages as well. http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educators/Human_Population/Population_Growth/Population_Growth.htm > i don't think critical areas are approaching replacement birth rates fast > enough. it's almost tough to try rationalizing advancing them because > their consumption growth may negate any merits gained from slowing their > population growth down. Do you mean immigration and perhaps public-assistance ("welfare") populations? It's a legitimate concern; my main issue is with catastrophists who clearly are spreading bunk. Population momentum is another issue; the problems we will face eventually with aging are mainly yet to happen here in the States, as are any population leveling-off-to-absolute-decline problems, which the latter are still decades away. We may not live to see these, though we will experience aging related issues societally as well as individually, you can confidently assume. When I was living in LA (it's LA, not NYC, that's the normal "capital," the largest community, of any given immigrant group, and full of welfare case loads besides) I wondered what the welfare population would reach in another twenty years, one day in a restaurant (the waitress had moved into a motel room with her boyfriend, which got me thinking about related social issues in that part of the LA area...) The kind of immigrants we have also has changed from earlier years, obviously: http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educators/Human_Population/Migration2/Migration1.htm > having every indian or chinese at the standard of living of a european > would solve the problem because then population would start decreasing but > it may take billions and billions of indians and chinese to accomplish > this. Chinese and India essentially have the population; it's the culture that requires mods, it seems to me. Europe is much more densely populated than the USA overall, yet while it has some problems associated with culture and mainly left-wing politics (which cause, among other things, high unemployment and a too-high cost of living), it is as advanced as we are in the States, in general. Population densities look like this: World: http://www.ciesin.org/datasets/gpw/gppycpd-12in.gif http://www.ciesin.org/datasets/gpw/gppd-12in.gif USA and North America: http://txsdc.tamu.edu/download/pdf/txcensus/2k_night.jpg http://sedac.ciesin.org/plue/gpw/index.html?no_america.html&2 ftp://ftpserver.ciesin.org/pub/data/Grid_Pop_World/total_cov/gif/usdenssmoo.gif Webb's selection of the 98th meridian separating eastern and western North America north of Mexico is demonstrated to be a wise one by the foregoing US population density map. If you're familiar with the migration of the mean center of US population since World War II, you'll see also that Oklahoma City, near the 98th meridian, is also a suitable relocation site for the nation's federal capital if it ever were to be done, for around 2100 if trends continue the mean center of population might well would be around Oklahoma City according to some rough calculations I did. If we merged with Canada, Omaha would be an ideal site for a new capital. > that's like saying that we can increase the stopping power of a car by > putting larger breaks on it without accounting for the added mass > associated from the breaks themselves. will the car stop faster? sure, but > will it stop in the prescribed distance? no. If you have larger brakes it usually results in more stopping power, much more so than the relatively trivial increase in overall vehicle mass. > the trick is to minimize impact to our quality of life while at the same > time maintaining an environment which can sustain us into the future. my > answer is that a peak population level must be reached sooner rather than > later without regard for age distribution. Do you mean defining a desireable peak (above this is an undesireable level) and the lower (as well as earlier), the better? Note that a lot of population growth is due largely to migration within the USA; the post-World-War-II moves by many to California was probably the greatest migration in US history. Now post-1980s we see "spinoff" (as an early-1900s article called it that I read) of population from California throughout the rest of the West (it might also be a case of white flight as well as flight to lower housing-cost areas; back when the idiotic bubble was still going in Silicon Valley I spotted people leaving the Bay Area for DC metro where I was living at the time, which is expensive but constituted a big bargain compared to the Bay Area). The Northeast but for only one or two sites hasn't experienced the double-digit growth since the 1960s that the West (and now the South) has; it's a desireable place to live for many who apparently choose never to leave it (and I understand; I loved living there, despite the left-wing politics, and may return there when my time's up here in the Midwest, rather than go back to the West Coast where I grew up) and given the relatively dense population in the Northeast (and alien situations to nearly the rest of the country, such as desireable city living, and use of mass transit such as in New York and in DC, reflecting this density, with NYC and Manhattan especially a place apart from everything else) there is "momentum" there, and it is understandable why crowding compounded by anti-assimilationist tendencies is a social ill. 1990 demographic maps (Southeast and Southwest are most noteworthy) 2000 demographic data are available as text. http://txsdc.tamu.edu/download/pdf/txcensus/hispanic.jpg http://txsdc.tamu.edu/download/pdf/txcensus/black.jpg http://txsdc.tamu.edu/download/pdf/txcensus/asian.jpg http://txsdc.tamu.edu/download/pdf/txcensus/americanindian.jpg Aging is shown as an example in the following diagram on this page. http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educators/Human_Population/Change/Three_Patterns_of_Population_Change1.htm Dave Simpson