The BBC reports that sperm quality continues to drop. Specifically, researchers "found a 52.4% decline in sperm concentration, and a 59.3% decline in total sperm count in men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand." While alarmist publications tout this as a 60% drop, the decline is accelerating and the researchers are concerned that inaction may lead to species extinction despite the effect not being observed in regions with high machismo, such as South America, Asia and Africa.
The study "aggregates 185 studies between 1973 and 2011, one of the largest ever undertaken." It supposedly overcomes selection bias occurring from patients attending fertility (virility?) clinics and selection bias of null results not being published in journals (churnals?). My intuition is that insights can be gained from studying transsexualism. Practitioners claim patients increase at the rate of 15% per year (doubling every five years), over many decades and with no end in sight. This is akin to Moore's law, Kryder's law, Butters' law, Hendy's law, Rider's law, Carlson's law or any other exponential halving or doubling. So, it doesn't take a genius to understand that it will become an increasingly widespread issue.
Regardless, masculine medical problems are vastly under-represented. By some estimates, spending on male medical problems is about 1/4 of spending on female medical problems. For example, when a man seeks help for a legitimate medical issue, such as declining testosterone, a patient at the lower end of the "normal" range may be denied treatment even if he is constantly exhausted.
Well, take care of yourself. Eat properly. Drink properly. Rest properly. Stay active. And if healthy food and exercise won't fix accumulated problems, consider hormone replacement. You may also want to watch two films which seem to be mentioned with increasing frequency and seem to predict our era with some accuracy: Children Of Men and Colossus: The Forbin Project. Children Of Men is the second bleakest film I've ever seen and the film I've seen most during its initial cinema release. It explores the scenario of global infertility leading to economic collapse. In addition to a nexus of cast and crew, the seamless plot and astounding compositing, the film is a fantastic example of mise-en-scène which is best explained by example.
Anyhow, enjoy the films and get your medical problems addressed.
Disclosure: People in my family are affected by virility and hormone problems. I have a professional interest in film, media encoding and art education.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 03 2017, @04:07AM
And 27 million Second, industrial farming of poultry and pork is already so revolting that large portions of the population that can afford to get non-factory-grown eggs, chicken and pork are electing to do so with their wallets. Same for slime-pond-grown fish. Sure, you _could_ scale that idea up and grow cattle underground, but, are you actually calling that positive progress? My favorite quote from a factory chicken farmer: "that's the smell of money." If you've never smelled a chicken factory in person you should, just for a little perspective of how that kind of money gets made.
A lot of jobs are revolting. We manage to get them done anyway.
I'll note a few things here. First, your last question is just a classic example of moving the goalposts. A similar thing goes on when people in the recent past claimed that one couldn't have a developed world lifestyle without the carbon footprint of a US resident (which I think we all can agree is on the high side for the developed world). It's one thing to note that high quality food is a sign of developed world status, and another to deliberately pick food with an unusually high ecological footprint as a sign of developed world status. You also did this with the "100 productive acres" thing a while back.
No, the primary technology that proves Malthus wrong is women's emancipation. When women had choices other than merely raising children, it turns out enough of them wanted to do those other things to end positive growth rate in modern societies from reproduction.