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An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:44PM (3 children)
As for population growth rate reductions, I'd say there's a far more relevant item than widespread use of DDT.
Widespread use of effective birth control.
Pretty much everywhere women have access to cheap (in local terms) reliable birth control and family planning education(to introduce the frankly mind-boggling idea that you can choose how many children you have), birthrates rapidly fall to approximately replacement levels. With the notable exceptions of some regions where religion holds powerful cultural sway and a strong anti-birth-control stance (most notably Catholicism)
Beyond that, there seems to be some correlation between birth rates and economic opportunities. If kids can realistically be expected to attain a notably higher standard of living than their parents, then growth rates trend positive. If on the other hand they're likely to experience a lower standard of living, as is the case in most of the developed world thanks to wealth concentration exceeding wealth production, then growth rates trend negative.
Almost as though well-grounded pessimism over the life your children will lead reduces people's desire to have children, even if many/most people don't think of it in quite such clear terms.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:00PM (1 child)
With the notable exceptions of some regions where religion holds powerful cultural sway and a strong anti-birth-control stance (most notably Catholicism)
Some. In Italy, where 87.8% of the population identifies as Catholic, the birth rate is 1.41 (children per woman) (2008), and that's only because they've had massive immigration; it had fallen to a low of 1.18 back in 1995. In Spain, the rate is 1.47, which also has been climbing since the 1990s. 76.7% of Spaniards are Catholic; however, 55.3% say they almost never go to any religious service.
The Latin American countries seem to take their Catholicism a lot more seriously; at a glance, Brazil's TFR (total fertility rate, children/woman) is 1.8-something, and Mexico's is 2.13.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:28PM
Yes, there are certainly plenty of areas where people tell the Church to shove it when it comes to birth control. My point was only that when it comes to places where people can easily afford birth control, yet don't use it, you can usually find the Catholic influence close at hand.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:43PM
Birth control *is* important, and *has* had a strong effect. But the change happened out of sync with changes in birth control. (Actually, it was most strongly correlated with TV. Perhaps "Not tonight honey, 'I love Lucy' is coming on." Although not precisely that as it was originally noticed in India.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.