There must have been a better example to use out there than this (KT):
Some Koreans think that South Korea needs lots of people to prevent invasion from China or North Korea, but is that true? Finland, with few people, sits next to mighty Russia. Finland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and a model for development for people everywhere.
That wouldn’t be the same Finland that lost over 10% of its territory, including its second largest city, to the Soviet Union in the 1939-40 Winter War and which gave us the term Finlandization.
I happen to agree with Ruffin that a less densely populated Korea would be a more pleasant place in which to live (even if the implication that the world would be better off if there were fewer Koreans in it is a little unsettling) but perhaps he could have chosen a country other than one that clearly could have used a bigger army supported by a larger population.
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Now, how the hell does one tell the difference between this Rick Ruffin guy writing for the Korea Times and the numerous other times in the past when more renowned authorities warned us of an upcoming disaster in the form of a “population bomb”?
I also wonder if the lower birthrate is an “automatic stabilizer” of sorts. More competition leading to less babies and less competition, less babies and less competition leading to more babies and more competition, and so on. If that’s the case, Mr. Ruffin has little the worry about unless the Korean government is interested in encouraging immigration en masse.
This is eerily similar to nativists here in America banging their xenophobic drums warning against immigrants and their risk of bringing with them “disease, poverty and crime”. Except that the natives in this case are the very parents of the unborn children they would otherwise be perfectly thrilled about having.
China is worse than Russia.
The Chinese are very backward. They live sometime in 1800s.
The Chinese will take over Korea and take everything. Afterwards, they will send Koreans to Tibet.
In the Chinese thinking, they deserve to live better than Koreans. They think it is their birthright as the people of mighty Center of the Earth Kingdom.
Ill-thought out; but then, living next to megalomaniacs with missile envy can do that to newspapermen…
Then again, that population-thinning think is straight out of Pyongyang… They and their protege in Zimbabwe have been practicing it for decades…
The population of the earth is already way past “sustainability” as far as current and projected usage of natural resources.
It’s never really talked about, because the only “solution” is the obvious “stop having babies”.
Unless there is some sort of science miracle or birthrates decline so that more die than are born, then many people are going to die, either by war or famine.
In fact, the only reason there are the amount of people that there is, is because we discovered how to industrially fix nitrogen.
But nitrogen makes up a lot of our air, whereas there are many other materials that are a lot more limited. Lithium for example. Everyone talks about cars with batteries, but there really isn’t enough lithium to do that in anything comparing to the scale we have now. Now, this problem will hopefully not come to pass, as advanced capacitors will surpass batteries in usefulness in my opinion, but there are many other things that are in just plain limited supply with more and more people grasping for them.
Nix: “The population of the earth is already way past “sustainability”…”
Baloney. The only people starving and/or not sustaining themselves are folks in excessively corrupt countries.
There are resources aplenty, and alternatives for them can be found by capitalist countries when those resources fail. Hopefully the control freaks such as Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe (et al) don’t kill our hope(s) of surviving.
What South Korea needs to survive an attack from the north is a population that’s serious about fighting the war.
But the south already lost the civil war… they just had someone else reset the clock to 1949 for them.
Just an idea but couldn’t making a very stong alliance with the U.S. solve the problem. Sounds a bit more pragmatic to me. Then again Roh didn’t help relations to much while in office with his balancer approach and all in all reckless attitude towards relations with the U.S.
Seems pretty obvious that the Norks could be benefiting economically from playing nice with all of their neighbors. They’ve chosen a different path. They prefer the murder of those unwilling to submit to their irrational views to living in peace with those who have independent thought.
I think their supporters are evil. I think all those who punish diversity are evil. And if you think the Norks are “liberal” about dissent, may I suggest you try to chat up a few folks other than your tour guide?
For a better example how about Cuba? Oh no, part of their territory is still occupied too.
In defense of the Finland analogy, one has to ask what it was that kept the Soviet Union/Russia at bay for 60 odd years after WWII. Surely not the fiendish packed lunches?
Free Diego Garcia!
In defense of the Finland analogy, one has to ask what it was that kept the Soviet Union/Russia at bay for 60 odd years after WWII
How did the Swiss maintain their sovereignty after the Germans took over most of Continental Europe during WW2? I suspect the answer has a lot to do with terrain. Having lots of impregnable mountain fortresses helps ward off invading mechanized and armored divisions.
Furthermore, Finland does not possess warm-water ports suitable as bases for strategic ballistic missile submarines. Hence, a reason why Latvia was taken over by the Soviets.
Having lots of impregnable mountain fortresses helps ward off invading mechanized and armored divisions.
Didn’t help Greece.
Them Alps (and Pyrenees too) certainly didn’t stop Hannibal.
If only Hitler had elephants, Operation Tannenbaum would have been launched and Switzerland would have been his.
Well, the difference is… control Greece and you have control of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean seas and supply lines to North Africa. Control of Switzerland? Nice view of the Alps, but the Germans already have that.
# 14,
Most of Hannibal’s elephants died trying to cross the Alps.
nix,
Ultra- or super- capacitors will definitely get better, but no one expects them to even approach the energy storage capacity of Li-ion batteries. They are considered to be a complementary technology to batteries in EV’s, not a replacement. Luckily, Li-ion isn’t the only battery chemistry. If I recall, the Prius uses Ni-metal-hydride or something less expensive than Li-ion batteries.
By completly surrounding Switzerland they would gain defacto control anyway. Since it was also no threat to any “power”, there was absolutely no need to take physical control.
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