#rant day

Like, it annoys me off anyway when people make fun of lower class British accents, words, and food. Like we don't get it at home already, like it won't affect our wages for our entire life and if you "talk funny" you are expected to fix that before you can get out of minimum wage jobs (if you can get a job at all). But it really fucking pisses me off when Americans specifically do this cause they already want the world to bend over backwards to accommodate them and when confronted with something that is outside their experience the instinct is just to "hahaha look at the Other Person being Weird and Different. Let's make fun of the way they talk and the things they eat. It's ok cause You Need to get a sense of humour about it – NOOO YOU CANT MAKE FUN OF ME! THAT'S ILLEGAL! How dare you suggest that the place I live might give me some sort of power on the global stage!!! That works for YOU but not for ME!"

And they don't just do this to Brits, it just sets me off when I see it close to home. If they can't fetishise the culture then it's a joke. Europeans are indistinguishable from each other. Far east countries are uwu so pure. Egypt is the same as South Africa is the same as Rwanda.

We, the English speaking public of the internet, are expected to know American history, society, jokes, language, while we have our own history and society horrifically misinterpreted and lied about, our jokes shat on, and our language turned in to jokes and get told "it's ok for us to do that cause we're punching up! Cause I personally feel like I have no power in my system." Like America is the top of the global food chain pouring it's cultural crap in to every corner of the world because their way of life is default and not to be questioned.

JUGHEAD SHOULD BE ACE AND I'M STILL MAD THAT THEY WHITEWASHED IT

Ladies and gentlemen, the Fourth Rant Day. No one and no subject is safe as we hate on having fun wrong, KCI, one-word answers, everybody’s traffic, alarm clock tactics, and of course, TV remotes. 

You know what I dislike?  When someone writes that that some group of people have decided to limit their population size . . . and decide to show that by declaring that each person has a limit of two children.  Two adults to make a kid, each adult gets to make two kids, presto!  We have achieved the replacement minimum for the next generation.

Populations do not work that way.

Yes, you are replacing the couple who made the kid.  But a couple is not a population.  Within a population there will be:

A. People who due to genetics, disease or accident are sterile and unable to contribute to the next generation.

B. People due to inclination or other reasons, while able to reproduce, do not desire to reproduce or have kids.  Maybe they’re celibate.  Maybe they’re homosexual.  Maybe they just don’t like kids.  Without some mandatory law or threat of execution, for some reason these people are not going to contribute to the next generation either.

C. People who are able and willing to contribute to the next generation, but due to disease, accident or malice are killed off before they can reproduce.  This is especially an issue in a war time setting.  Unless a concentrated effort is being made, many of the soldiers sent out will not be coming home to have more kids.  That means the people who are left behind have to have even more children to make up for the loss.  (I’m looking at you Tolkien with your genetic dead end elves.  Elves don’t reproduce in war, THEN I HOPE THEY LIKE LOSING!)

(Obviously there are universes where magic or super-technology can defeat all these obstacles.  If your setting is in one of those, please disregard this entire post.)

In order to maintain a population, you have to have a general reproductive rate that is higher than 2.  How much higher depends on how long the species lives, what current conditions are like (War kills people.  What more, it generally kills a lot of people in the prime reproductive years of their lives.), what other alternatives to reproduction are there (immigration does wonders for a nation’s GDP, Drump).

But if you just declare that every couple has to have two kids then you don’t have a stable population, you have a declining one.