Honestly I fully understand that it’s difficult for people to become invested in solving problems that will affect future generations. Most people are focused on issues that immediately affect them or their children, and are more than eager to push anything else onto the next batch of humans to fix.
I’m hopeful that we as a society can break away from this kind of short-term thinking, but realistically think a revolution may be unavoidable.
That’s certainly an interesting perspective.
If we look at our history, there have been numerous scenarios where industry was reduced, like disease or war. A society is fairly resilient against short-term fluctuations in the number of working age adults.
I’d not panic about it, especially as the human population continues to grow, and with every passing day there are still vastly more children being born than adults reaching retirement age.
I was primarily confused about your comment about resources. You clarified that this concern is about the production and distribution of food and other essentials. I’m not concerned about this; again, when we look back, we can see how technological breakthroughs have allowed us to produce and distribute more with fewer hands at an exponential pace that has kept up with our equally exponential population growth.
I’m sooner concerned about the depletion of non-renewable resources, like phosphorus, which is essential for life on earth. Reclaiming it from the sea bottom is not something we’ll be able to perform at scale within a generation and the clock on a food crisis had been ticking for some time already. This is just one of many examples.
I’m afraid that the answer to averting a global food crisis is not to increase our population growth, either. As a species, we will need to come up with a better long-term plan for sustainable life on earth.
I’m confused about your comment. Can you elaborate?
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. Continuing to fixate on short-term problems like bridging a generational gap—which incidentally we’ve survived many times in anthropological history—by continuing policies with long-term ramifications is not a good plan.
At some point we need to come to terms with the fact that continuous population growth is not tenable. Whether the population cap is 10 billion or 100 billion, the fact of the matter is that we will eventually hit it. We can’t keep procrastinating because we’re unwilling to resolve the challenges you’ve mentioned in a more effective manner.
Call me an optimist, but if we’re unable to change our habits as a species, perhaps a well-needed revolution will kick us into action.
How many humans should we aim to have, long term? 20 billion? 50 billion? We’re already on track to reach 10 billion in the next 25 years.
I believe that as a society, we should have a long-term plan and a goal for our species’s population count, because simply offering incentives for continued growth in order to continue funding generational gaps in our pyramid scheme of social welfare is untenable. Ultimately we will reach the logistical capacity of a functional welfare state, to say nothing of all the other problems.
That seems somewhat unfair towards people with other interests who aren’t being subsidized.
My personal favorite accusation is that “I write too perfectly.” Thanks, I guess? Maybe the models were trained on me?
It’s odd that this should need to be pointed out, but allow me help. The line was added to suggest it is a possible DUI. Driving under the influence of drugs is generally recognized as a contributing factor to accidents.
If this were true, then why are Rotten Tomato ratings displayed prominently across Google TV?
(I understand that nuance isn’t welcome on Lemmy, so please forgive me for contributing this.)
It’s an interesting ethical debate.
I have a hereditary condition which passes only by the X chromosome, so should I, as a man, abort a daughter? Because now the risk is too high and I’ve elected to simply not have children. It would be great if I could fix the single swapped base pair that would otherwise cause disfigurement and life-long health problems.
That’s a unique perspective. Thanks for sharing.
Ironically, in my attempts to find any kind of information about this, it only resulted in news articles reporting on the number of developer accounts banned and announcements from Google warning users about scams and providing recommendations to safeguard themselves.
I don’t agree that Google has taken a singular approach to this problem; there are numerous ways in which they are combating scams, of which this piece is just one.
I believe people in this thread are (deliberately or not) looking at this from a very narrow point of view and not seeing how (1) there is a risk that is mitigated by preventing gullible users from installing malware through sideloading, (2) Google has reconsidered this solution after hearing community feedback and (3) Google uses numerous mechanisms to eliminate bad actors from the Play store.
To touch on the last one, it seems many of those mechanisms are not done transparently as I’ve seen threads on /r/AndroidDev back before I left Reddit about individuals being lifetime banned even by association to a scammer.
At the risk of sounding insincere—such is the nature of an online discussion forum—I’d like to tap into the ways you see the safety and security of the Play store to be deficient. How are phishing attempts successful there? In the articles I’ve read about phishing through fake apps, they all went through the route of sideloading. One example was to get “special features” in WhatsApp by downloading an APK, and another was to enable developer mode to install an antivirus APK because “the device was infected.” While I found articles describing imposter apps, searching for those apps on Google Play didn’t surface any of them, so it seems from my spot checks that it’s working.
To me, this entire discussion is quite conflicting, because on one hand, we all recognize the risk of malware, but at the same time the community is furious about whatever Google attempts to do about it.
Call me naive, but my family and I are very content with our Android phones and have no qualms with the way Google Play functions today. I remain confused about why this comment section is so mad.
The fee is 15% below the first $1M of revenue and it should go without saying that app developers only pay that fee for paid apps, in-app purchases or digital subscriptions. It’s very unlikely that a scam app would be paid, or work off a subscription, and if those phishing ads are doing their conversions, you’ll never see the user again.
I doubt Google’s making more than a few cents off each of these scam apps.
I would understand the outrage if Google didn’t stick to their word, but unless I’ve missed something, they’ve not, have they? Are we now protesting that they reversed their decision? Wasn’t this what we wanted?
I genuinely believe that it was motivated by the desire to deter scammers. What leads you to believe it’s not? There are many gullible people out there who will follow, precisely as you pointed out, phishing links that encourage them to sideload an unverified app.
No system is perfect, and I also believe that Google Play does a fair job of removing malicious apps.
I’m sorry to try to bring some nuance into this thread as I know that discourse isn’t welcome on Lemmy, but I’m just trying to wrap my head around the outrage. Providing a way to let experienced users continue to sideload apps while safeguarding the more gullible seems like a good idea and I still genuinely don’t understand what your preferred solution would be.
Wait, so Google listened to our feedback, and we’re still mad? What would a positive outcome have looked like?
A jeweler who won’t ask questions will cut them into smaller stones. Nobody’s checking their origins.
The largest gang in Paris is French Maghrebis, which is predominantly Algerian.
Investments should be made into research grants for recovery of our finite resources like phosphorus and pooling a fund for rising welfare costs, NOW. Instead, these subsidies are achieving the exact opposite.
Good luck, humans of 2100!
Signed,
A human that elected to not have children from 2025