The world population and other rantable topics....

There's a website if you click here, with a population clock ticking away toward our seven billion mark, which we apparently haven't quite reached yet.

There's also another little program, into which you can type your birth date and it will show you how many people were alive on earth the day you arrived here among us unwashed and unfriendly masses. To those of you who consider yourselves both washed and friendly, I just want to say "Don't get too smug about that, because you're vastly outnumbered by those who aren't washed, friendly, literate, or unarmed." And an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure.

But I digress again - sorry about that. Today's rant concerns itself with the idea that there's too much automation in a world which has too many people. Too few of those people are actually literate and gainfully employed in a role which allows them to be self-supporting, or supporting others as well.

I went to the hospital the other evening, to deliver a little card to a friend, and upon turning into their pay-parking lot, I got an unpleasant surprise. Ever since they did a major renovation to that hospital in the very early 1980s there has been a little booth at the mouth of the driveway separating the entrance and exit lanes, and containing a nice friendly East Indian chap collecting the parking fees and dispensing your change. He's now GONE! Automated right out of there, booth and all, to be replaced by individually numbered parking spaces and two robotic ticket-dispensing machines which take various coins, dispense parking tickets for your dashboard, and are said to be solar powered. They don't even use the grid's electricity, which I spent a semi-profitable career helping to produce. And all this at a time when we're rapidly approaching seven billions of humans on this overpopulated little planet designed for maybe half this many. So today's "Question Everything" is: "What the hell are we thinking?"

If science could save our asses or save us from ourselves, it would likely have already found a way to keep us from screwing ourselves out of a place at the table, a parking spot at the mall, and a place to stand in line. And Old Uncle Albert was absolutely right when he said, "The commonest element in the universe is not hydrogen, but rather stupidity, and the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits!"