Slashdot Mirror

Nobody gives a shit. Despite the contention of many Slashdotters, very few people in the world live out in the countryside operating farms.

America isn't even the reason so much of the world population lives in rural areas. According to the UN, in 2014 "Today, 54 per cent of the worldâ(TM)s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050." It appears that the much of he rural population is in China and India. "The 2014 revision of the World Urbanization Prospects by UN DESAâ(TM)s Population Division notes that the largest urban growth will take place in India, China and Nigeria."

With the US's history of torture of POWs and journalists, I hope he can make a successful appeal to the UN human rights commission.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

You said "UN" and suggested that it might have some influence on the US government.

Hell, it doesn't even have any influence with the UK government.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2...

https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsE...

People are bad a math. They are so bad that the global birth rate is still much more than replacement less mortality. https://population.un.org/wpp/

Perhaps you are bad at math, are misinformed, or are full of sh:it (possibly all three).

As has been noted by others, the US does not provide UN peacekeepers. They do participate in UN sanctioned military action though. As for the UN peacekeeping budget, EU countries pay a larger share than the US, see http://www.un.org/en/ga/search... Again, obviously if the US is participating in actions but not under the UN banner, then they will be paying more on top of that, which would likely make them the top monetary contributer. In the end, the official UN statistics are not going to reflect true US conributions, but that is the choice of the US. America decided to distance themselves somewhat from UN peacekeeping because they are unwilling to allow their troops be tried for war crimes.

When the UN is fearmongering about Chernobyl, you know it's just politics. Unfortunately, a man-made disaster like this - and the horror story for "generations to come" - are used by anti-nuke nutters to halt progress towards truly unlimited, clean energy - nuclear.

The article isn't great, but it looks like they're arguing for a population max of 9 or 10 billion instead of 11. The UN makes all kinds of population projections under various scenarios. This is just one: https://population.un.org/wpp/... [un.org]
and includes what the article says the book claims.

This just sounds like more modern marketing. Hype, with a good dose of strawman maverick underdog fiction.

I call bullshit(PDF alert). Page 9 says that there is a 27% that the population could stabilise or begin to fall by 2100. In three decades it looks more like a 5% chance.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/en/universal...

Article 14.

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

The US, the UK, and Sweden signed the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and "Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners". Not any petty criminal can enter an embassy and demad an asylum. Actually, several articles of "Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners" are not followed in this case.

I do not argue if he is gulity or not. I do not have an access to files, I cannot question witnesses under oath. But a human cannot be kept like this for years.

I'd rather say that they tend to value human rights differently than they tend to be valued in the West.

Let's consider the universal declaration of human rights.

Surely, people in the West have for quite a while tended to consider the rights in articles 18 to 21 particularly important (though even in the west there is quite some difference - freedom of speech tends to be valued higher in the US than in Britain or Germany.

On the other hand, people in China tend to value the rights in Articles 22 and 23 more (and are thus more willing to accept restriction to other rights, if they perceive them to be useful in ensuring the rights in 22 and 23).

Of course some people would consider rights not explicitly contained in that declaration as human rights. An interesting example is the right to petition.It is known in many different cultures. It exists in most western cultures (e.g. first amendment in the US, similar provision in the EU and its members). It has a long history (at least medieval times in Europe, at least 500 BC in China). Still it seems this right is not considered that important in the West these days; I guess severly restricting or even taking away that right in a Western country would be possible. A Chinese government probably wouldn't survive making such an attempt.

In the end human rights are never absolute; they always have to be interpreted and valued against each other, as there tend to be conflicts (made explicit by Article 29b - it even allows restrictions for "morality", "public order" and "welfare"). Different societies at different times held different opinions. And Article 30 is quite a strong restriction on all the rights.

A long term pessimistic approach:

Practice terraforming Mars and Venus. It's a good way to gain experience that might help in fixing the mess we have here on Earth.

Direct manipulation of Earth's atmosphere to counter rising CO2 and global warming may seem absurdly expensive, but the migration of approximately 40% of humans who live in coastal areas might be far more expensive.

The current European Migrant Crisis may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The actual article tells me that the rights under discussion are things like the right to not have the government use biometric data (e.g., "face recognition"). I'm not sure that this is widely recognized as one of the fundamental human rights.

A few melting glaciers flooding a few beachfront homes on some far away coast is an "I don't give a shit" issue.

TFTFY.

(SPOILER: About 40% of the world's population lives within 100 km of a coastline. That's about 60 miles.)

The US never agreed to the Iran deal. And Iran never signed the deal anyway, so...

What's that in the top left corner then?

And voting for UN security council resolution 2231 was a strange way of showing that you never agreed with the deal. You can complain about the kindergarten you call congress refusing to support anything and everything Obama did all you like, at the UN, we expect you to send qualified adults that can make decisions befitting their position within your administration.

"extreme poverty" is defined as living on less than $1.90 per day. Or about $57 per month. Or $693.50 per year.

Yes, the amount of people living in that income bracket has been reduced dramatically, and that is one of the biggests successes in the history of mankind and an incredible progress made possible by all the things both left- and right-wing extremists hate so much.

Meanwhile, as the other comment shows in abundance, the majority of new wealth generated in most of the developed countries goes to the top, not the middle or the bottom. While extreme poverty is going down, "simple" povery is going up. Don't believe me? Here's a graph from my home country:

https://de.statista.com/statis...

Here are government graphs, in case you think the source is biased:

http://www.bpb.de/wissen/GCP6X...

How can both of these be true? Because prices differ as well, and a lot. The average yearly income in Congo (~$770) would put you among the poor in the most developed countries if you had it available per month.

Tesla autopilot seems to require the driver's constant attention to avoid running into stationary objects that are routinely encountered on roads (gore points, fire trucks, etc...).

Welcome back to hyperbole land.

The average US car goes 80 million miles between fatal accidents.
The average Tesla goes 320 million miles between fatal accidents.
1/3rd to 1/2 of all Tesla miles are on Autopilot.

Now let's say that all fatal Tesla accidents were on Autopilot. Let's ignore the fact most of the "The driver may have been on Autopilot!" crash reporting stories thusfar have ultimately turned out not to involve AP at all. Let's also ignore the fact that since AP driving is much more likely to involve highways and thus higher speeds, it would be expected to involve a higher share of the accidents. Let's just look at the numbers. Even with these assumptions, you would still be 33 to 100% safer driving a Tesla on AP than driving any other car. Acting like you take your attention off the road for a split second and it drives you into a post is just absurd.

What I'm wondering is how long this media hype train can last. I mean, no freaking duh the more vehicles Tesla makes the more people are going to die while driving one. Are they seriously going to keep breathlessly reporting on every last Tesla crash - always with the no-evidence-whatsoever speculation that AP might have been in use, and no retraction whatsoever in the cases where it wasn't? 40 thousand people die on US roads every year. 1.3 million die in them worldwide. Seeing a Tesla on the roads is no longer a 1-in-a-million event; Tesla is quickly approaching 0,1% of all US vehicles on the road (nearing 200k). Believe it or not, like all vehicles, there will sometimes be Tesla crashes. And things like it being front page news that someone rear-ended a fire truck at 60 miles an hour as if there's something horribly wrong with Tesla, when the real story should be that someone hit a fire truck at 60 miles an hour and walked away with only a broken ankle, when such an accident should normally be fatal... I'm sorry, but Musk has a serious point about unfair, lopsided media coverage.

You're talking about the last few words in Article 24, the rest of which is more than reasonable. What is more interesting is that these aren't recent sensibilities, the first law governing paid holidays was in 1871. It helps if you understand the reasoning behind why it was included, which is that low paid workers cannot otherwise afford to take time off, so would choose not to rather than take a holiday and miss out on the money they need to survive. In other words, it guarantees the ability of the working poor to take a break from work. From a small employers perspective, I understand why this is an onerous burden. (Information for readers, you can read the UDHR here, it is short and understandable, and not pages of legalese).

Like everything the situation is perhaps slightly more complicated than we would like it to be, and there are groups on both sides who are heavily invested (financially or ideologically), hence vocal and unwilling to give any ground at all.

For links, I found this document, which was presented to Human Rights Council of the UN, by their appointed 'Special Rapporteur', last year to be rather an eye opener.

I have previously seen documentaries about the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides and their effect on bees, by university biologists, which, while clearly stating that (some) pesticides are harmful to beneficial wildlife, did suggest that without pesticides we would see a roughly 30% reduction in crop yields. However the report I just linked to states (paragraph 96):

"Despite their widespread use, chemical pesticides have not achieved reduction in crop losses in the last 40 years. This has been attributed to their indiscriminate and nonselective use, killing not only pests but also their natural enemies and insect pollinators. Efficacy of chemical pesticides is also greatly reduced owing to pesticide resistance over time."

This nugget is apparently sourced from “Crop losses due to pests”, by E.C. Oerke, in the Journal of Agricultural Science, vol. 144, No. 1 (February 2006), so I took a quick browse, only to find the initial summary goes on to say (among other things):

"However, pesticide use has enabled farmers to modify production systems and to increase crop productivity without sustaining the higher losses likely to occur from an increased susceptibility to the damaging effect of pests"

The study itself strikes me as somewhat more balanced than the UN report, which clearly has an slant, but I don't know who funded the study and I'm not confident of my ability to concretely identify any possible bias within it.

Like I said ... complicated...

Article 19.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

In any case, freedom of speech is an idea and it does not cease to exist when it's not codified in law.

Healthcare is not a right, and I don't know why so many people feel it is.

Maybe because you people also are signatories of this small thing called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

You should give it a read, especially Article 25.

The rise of contract labor versus permanent employment has been an ongoing issue globally, ranging from Canada to France to Japan and even India. There are differences and nuances market by market, but a lot of it comes down to employers demanding workforce flexibility in the face of uncertainty, competition, and plenty of desperate underemployed people. France is a case where labor regulations are so tight, that contract labor is an easy loophole. Maybe the only place that this trend is beginning to reverse is in Japan, but that's simply because their labor force is rapidly shrinking.

That's a great comparison but anti personnel mines are illegal: https://www.un.org/disarmament...

It's still possible to take a picture of a forgery or a to-be-discarded ballot, but the potential for coercion is still there given that the benefit of voting your conscience for a victim of said coercion will in many cases not be worth risk, cost, or effort of creating a forgery.

Its the uncertainty that matters. The fact that you can not prove whether it is a forgery or not is key to deterring that sort of abuse.

I view voting coercion the same way that I view voter fraud. It's theoretically a problem that doesn't seem to be a significant problem to warrant implementing any policies that create any tangible downsides, until it becomes a significant problem.

Then you have not spent much time researching the topic. The secret ballot is probably the single most important characteristic of modern elections after universal suffrage. Seriously, it is a big deal. Its such a big deal that it is article 21.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I would like a system where everyone can remain anonymous if they want to

Sorry, but no. The wishes of the voter are secondary. Secret ballots are about the integrity of the vote. It is a logical contradiction to have a secret ballot that can be made unsecret by the choice of anyone whether they are the actual voter or someone else.

Look, A LOT of thought (and trial and error) went into the modern principles of fair and free elections. Your blaise willingness to toss out a fundamental principle is at best a sign that you have not studied the issue. Don't fall into the trap of believing that your ignorance of the issues means they are unimportant.

The UN disagrees http://www.un.org/apps/news/st...

The UN clearly thinks so : http://www.un.org/apps/news/st...

3 December 2003 â" Three former senior figures in the Rwandan media were convicted today by the United Nations war crimes tribunal and sentenced to lengthy jail terms for inciting their compatriots to kill ethnic Tutsis during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

  Three judges of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), sitting in Arusha, Tanzania, announced the convictions and sentences for Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze in what has been dubbed âoethe media case.â

The three men were convicted of genocide, incitement to genocide, conspiracy, crimes against humanity, extermination and persecution. According to media reports, about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in Rwanda between April and the middle of 1994.

The ICTR said the convictions were the first of their kind since the Allied Tribunal at Nuremberg at 1946 sentenced Nazi publisher Julius Streicher to death for his anti-semitic publication Der Stürmer.

Mr. Nahimana, founder and ideologist of the Radio Télévision does Mille Coulines (RTLM), and Mr. Ngeze, chief editor of Kangura newspaper, were sentenced to life in prison. Mr. Barayagwiza, a high-ranking board member at RTLM and the founder of the Coalition for the Defence of Republic (CDR), a political party, received a 35-year jail term. He boycotted his trial.

In a broadcast on RTLM â" which became known to some Rwandans as âoeRadio Macheteâ â" in April 1994, Mr. Nahimana described a âoewar of media, words, newspapers and radio stationsâ to complement a war with bullets, according to the ICTR.

The presiding judge in the media case, Judge Navanethem Pillay, told Mr. Nahimana that he was fully aware of the power of radio to âoedisseminate hatred and violenceâ¦Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians.â

The judges also said Kangura targeted Tutsis for persecution by regularly stereotyping them as liars, thieves or killers, and depicting Tutsi women as femme fatales who could not be trusted. One Kangura publication labelled any Hutu man who married a Tutsi woman as a traitor.

In a statement released by the ICTR, the judges said they found that the three men âoeused the institutions they controlled and coordinated their efforts towards the common goal: the destruction of the Tutsi population.â They said their broadcasts and publications did not fall under the protection of the right to freedom of expression.

To add, using a breakdown of only female to males age 15 and above the breakdown is pretty close to 50/50. So that sort invalidates your whole theory.

Data comes from: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Da...

The wikipedia article covers Agenda 21 generally and its opposition briefly, without including any text from the U.N. document. Wikipedia cites this massive mess https://www.un.org/esa/agenda21/natlinfo/countr/usa/natur.htm which is full of bureaucratese and obfuscation, but hints as to the intention to have government control over people. The devil is in the details, and the details would be in a myriad of state and local laws written to fall within Agenda 21 guidelines. This, of course, would be too detailed and diffuse to unravel.

http://www.un.org/

They're legally our allies.

They're factually our allies.

When WW III starts, they're more likely to be our allies than China, and far more likely to be more effective allies than any other other Euro-zone nation.

Read a fucking history book you shit.

While legal "pirating" exists in Iran

I thought that Sudan had the piracy problem. Perhaps msmash and vice.com do not know the difference between copyright infringement and piracy (hijacking, kidnapping, rape, robbery, murder, etc. at sea).

(a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed: ... A ship or aircraft may retain its nationality although it has become a pirate ship or aircraft.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
http://www.un.org/en/universal...
(US has signed this)
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

no amount of lies, oppression & methodical genocide will hide the fact that Israel stole Palestinian land and can never be considered its legitimate owner.

You are FULL OF SHIT. There's no nice way to say it, and you don't deserve any niceties for posting such BULLSHIT

Got the balls to actually dig through things like the Ottoman Empire census data for Jerusalem? I bet the answer is no.

Even United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 clearly states "Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

When are the Arabs going to stop calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map"?

Hell, when will idiots stop spewing bullshit lies such as "Israel stole Palestinian land and can never be considered its legitimate owner"?

What's wrong? Does your backwards religious faith get you all worked up because dar al-Islam reverted to dar al-Harb? Yeah, I know how that works, and how you're stuck in a medieval, barbaric mindset to believe in that. GFY, because there's a Reformation and recognition of basic human rights that occurred over the past MILLENIUM that you've utterly missed out on.

Don't you have some gays to stone, women to oppress, and kafirs to slice the throats of?

You're seriously arguing against freedom of speech as a right? People like you are why we can't have nice things.

As for documentation, is the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights good enough for you, or do you need a note from God?

Maybe you'd like to read the https://www.un.org/disarmament...
But don't let the facts get in the way of you're bashing of the U.S.

But that number is a double conversion again, they convert all energy usage in the UK to "oil equivalent units" and then he then converts that amount of oil to kWh instead of using actual electricity and oil consumption numbers. I'm not paying $500 to the UN to view their statistics, but if their methodology for the US is also to convert all energy usage to oil I don't think it's a valid comparison.

FWIW: in 1998, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation addressed a letter to the Secretary-General of the UN asking the UN to establish international rules to prohibit what has since DOD JP3-13 become known as Computer Network Attack. Here is that letter: https://disarmament-library.un...

You did not respond to the substance of the assertion that big cities run the nation. All you did was say "no" and then proceeded to view this as an expression of power for some reason.

As of May 27, 2017, the United States has a total resident population of 325,120,392, making it the third most populous country in the world.[1] It is very urbanized, with 81% residing in cities and suburbs as of 2014 (the worldwide urban rate is 54%).

And the wikipedia citation leads to this graph by the UN.

How is it possible that 81% of the population would not rule the nation? Supposing that "cities" is defined very loosely, the top 3 classes of city size compose 50-60% of the urban population. That's 40.5-48.6% of the population. How do you expect that the interests of the other people would be represented? How do you say "no" to this premise?

Geography is one of the most important factors in your views and the things that you think are important because most problems are localized. Big cities might have issues with terrorism or gang violence and farms in the middle of nowhere are likely to have big issues with weather or pollution. There's no jihad on the Nebraska farms. Precisely how is this not relevant to selecting politicians?

Additionally, there's no reason why a plurality can't be broad, nationwide support even if it's not a majority.

Also, a lot of people miss that the United States wasn't set up to allow direct selection for the President. The states themselves are supposed to cast votes for the President and the federal government is supposed to be lightweight, essentially handling the common defense and not a whole lot else. This is why the Electoral College was set up, to handle the selection of President by the states. The states actually have no requirement to take a popular vote, it's just that they all do by convention. This leads to secondary effects like the ability to go against the will of the people in that state, but those are secondary effects and not the reasons for it in the first place.

What you should really be arguing for if you're interested in expression of voting preferences as "power" is a removal of the first past the post system. Proportional representation and other systems allow more political choice than two crap ones. Not the removal of the Electoral College.

You're right that nuclear power can only exist due to generous subsidies, but the same is really true for fossil fuels too. If anybody had to pay the correct price for coal power, including the capture costs for the CO2 or the compensation to future generations for climate change damages, that form of energy wouldn't be competitive either. And quite possibly even more expensive than honest nuclear power pricing.

And importantly, that doesn't only count for electric power gained from fossil sources, but also other fossil fuels such as gasoline or oil/gas heating. So it's not enough to move your country to a place where you generate 100% of your electric power from renewable sources. If we want to get climate change under control, the other forms of energy usage will also have to be replaced in the near future.

This is why I personally would've liked to stay with nuclear power for another generation, even with the danger of meltdowns and spent fuel storage. Trying to replace enough fossil fuel usage through non-polluting sources of power fast enough to be able to dodge the incoming climate disaster, while restricting ourselves from the most available source, seems like too much of a risk to take.

Just something to think about: The Fukushima and Chernobyl exclusion zones have a size of about 3000 km2 and are actually pretty nice nature reserves. Meanwhile, about 120,000 km2 of land are being lost to desertification every year http://www.un.org/en/events/de...

Don't be an idiot. You need to brush up on peace keeping and peace enforcement missions. There have been quite a few, and many current ones. Information technology is a force multiplier and it is essential to allow field workers to communicate effectively.

The s indicates plural, that means more than one billion ... actually minimum two.

Who on earth is so stupid to believe that "a billion" people live in "deserts"?

Hmmm. I live in a desert in the SW US, the Sonoran desert. I share this land with about 8M of my fellow humans. It is probably the wettest desert on the planet, but it is still, by definition, a desert, with most areas receiving only about 150mm/yr in its bimodal precipitation regime. It is also the smallest desert biome on the planet, covering only about 260,000 square km.

The generally accepted definition of a desert is less than 250mm of annual precipitation. The UN breaks this down into desert, arid, grassland, and rangeland, and it covers a whopping 61M square km, or 41 percent of the land surface of the planet. According to the same UN report, 35 percent of the planet's population live in areas that meet this definition, which gets us to 2.6 billion people. There's your billions, with an "s," if you are one of those people on earth "stupid" enough to actually do a little research.

Who on earth is so stupid to believe that "a billion" people live in "deserts"?

How about the United Nations? Strictly speaking it isn't all desert but apparently well north of a billion people live in water stressed parts of the world or areas threatened by desertification.

Nevertheless a device like this might be useful in all warm/humid areas.

Maybe. The real question is how much does it cost per unit of water generated. To be useful it would have to generate a rather sizeable amount of water even to just cover drinking and basic cleaning needs.

But this isn't a new thing. Assad has a long history of using sarin and other chemical weapons such a chlorine gas against the rebels. If you put it into perspective its clearly Assad behind it, and the UN certainly believes it is, and has a moutning body of evidence to back it up from their on-site inspectors.

https://www.un.org/press/en/20...

http://time.com/4728155/nerve-...

You should also try to read the treaty. It's not a defence pact.

Sorry, it's not a treaty either. It's an agreement that doesn't obligate the parties to much of anything at all.

Let's see how well Ukraine fared by trading their nukes for a defense pact that Russia, the US and UK will come defend it from attacks.

We're talking about conventional warfare, not MAD. You should also try to read the treaty. It's not a defence pact.

You also deem diplomacy as a failure when a true diplomatic resolution has never even been sought in that conflict.

It's a bit funny how you obviously think Russia, China et al are the only ones engaging in fixing elections and playing chess with smaller countries.

Just FYI, the anti-abortion position is not about controlling the bodies of women. It is about stopping murder.

If that were the case, they wouldn't resort to lying to women, forcing ultrasounds upon them, and concocting deceitful videos, in other words behaving even more deplorably.

And the pro-abortion position is not about freedom for the bodies of women, it is about murder too.

See, for example, the pro-abortion camp's reaction to a proposal in Italy not long ago to replace third trimester abortions with surgical delivery, incubation, and when successful, adoption.

I can find zero documentation of this proposal, but you know what? Third Trimester abortions are so preposterously rare, because they are risky to both the mother and fetus, more so than caesarean section.

Seriously, your purported proposal does not square with the real state of abortions in Italy, so I must wonder if you are lying for some reason.

I'll give you a hint, the pro-abortion camp was absolutely fucking outraged that anyone would suggest that we try to end a pregnancy (freedom for the mother's body) without killing the baby.

Sure dude, go ahead and show this happening. The fact is, third trimester is 28 weeks, which is after viability. You know, when pretty much nobody has an abortion, except in cases of extremity.

If you don't believe me, find one of your pro-abortion friends and ask them what they think of the idea. If they haven't heard of it before, you'll get to enjoy several seconds of stunned silence while their brains reboot, followed by angry sputtering (from most of them; a few think it is a great idea).

Ok, everybody thinks you're making up a story for some reason. IOW, you're a liar.

Why do you lie?

Rapid changes in global temperatures can absolutely cause mass extinctions.

Rising sea levels are "easy" to adapt to for us - but not cheap. We have a lot of valuable property on low-lying coastal areas, and billion-dollar floods from storm surges will only get more common, until we either build massive levees (where possible) or start relocating vast amounts of city infrastructure. Who gets stuck with that bill, the taxpayers? Owners of private homes who can no longer insure them? And that's assuming it doesn't turn out to be a lot worse than we expected.

Rising sea levels are not so easy to adapt to for the hundreds of millions in less-developed countries, where e.g. tens of millions of people depend on river delta farmland that will get flooded with salt water. (BTW, claiming there's no evidence of that is simple denial).

As for food production, the research shows both positives and negatives up until about 3K warming - and then highly likely to be negative after 3 degrees. It also shows that again, developing countries are least able to adapt and will experience more of the negatives (in part due to lower latitudes).

it is going to happen no matter what policies we adopt

Citation certainly needed for that. Sure we're stuck at 400ppm and probably higher, but we can still avoid far larger increases by phasing out fossil carbon as soon as practical. We're locked in to significant warming and we'll have to deal with that, but it will certainly get far worse (and far more expensive) if we stick our heads in the sand. The business-as-usual case is likely to see 3.7 to 4.5 degrees this century - much higher than the 2.0-2.5 we're hoping we can keep it to.

He isn't in Ecuador, he's in a flat in London

Embassies on foreign soil are considered sovereign territories according to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Assange may be physically located on UK soil, but as long as Ecuador grants him asylum he is effectively in the domain of Ecuador while inside the Embassy and no arresting party can enter the compound without Ecuador's permission. Once Assange steps outside the embassy property then he is subject to UK authority and can be apprehended.

In the event of hostilities or soured diplomatic relations, it's a different story.

"Under the state of emergency, all expressions or communication that could incite violence have been banned... Authorities can search and detain citizens without prior approval."

They would just need to add a ban on public gatherings to have the same conditions as France's state of "emergency" that has been in place for a full year now and been condemned [repeatedly] by the UN human rights council. As disturbing as such a thing is in Ethiopia, it is even more shocking in a "western democracy."

https://news.vice.com/article/...
"France's state of emergency legislation allows the government and the police to search and detain people without a warrant, place suspects under house arrest without prior judicial clearance, block certain websites, and ban public gatherings."
"They criticized France for imposing 'excessive and disproportionate restrictions on fundamental freedoms.'"

http://www.un.org/apps/news/st...
"In a list of concerns... regarding several state of emergency and surveillance laws that relate to the legitimate rights of privacy and freedoms – of expression, peaceful assembly and association."
"The UN experts also expressed alarm that environmental activists in France have been under house arrest in connection with the state of emergency invoked following the November attacks."

That doesn't mean there isn't a clear definition of "human rights" to aim for, eg. this one:

http://www.un.org/en/universal...

Seriously, who cares?

Not you, apparently. But law abiding people do.

Most countries see the embargo as a violation of the UN charter and international law. So no, it's the people who are obeying the stupid embargo who are violating international law - which is why ALL other countries except Israel violate the illegal embargo. The ONLY countries voting in favor of the embargo 23 years running are the US and Israel.

The only people benefiting from the embargo are the politicians who are sucking up to the anti-Castro voters in Florida's Little Havana.

The current expectation is that the growth rate will continue to decrease and that the population will eventually reach a maximum around 9 billions

The last time that I checked the UN's demographic predictions, they were looking at a mean of more like 10 billion with a variation of about 2 billion.

So, checking the UN 2015 predictions (published April 2016), at 2100, the 80% confidence interval is between 10.1 billion (and just levelled off) and 12.5 billion (increasing at ~0.05 billion/year) ; the 95% confidence interval is 9.7 billion (and very slightly declining) and 13.8 billion (increasing at ~0.08 billion/year). That's the summary of 60-odd projections under different models (changes in birth rates and death rates with time, by region). Follow links from the cited page for more data than you ever really wanted.

It's a couple of years since I looked up the numbers. So I think they're still increasing the population estimates year on year - which probably reflects changing assumptions about death rates against age, and maybe increasing numbers of old-age mothers (~34+).

False.

I'm sorry, but of course it's true. Most people in the US, in the UK and in the world live in cities.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...

http://www.un.org/en/developme...

http://www.census.gov/newsroom...