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Not as long as they are part of a market where they "have to" make more profit.

But that's never going to change. People are greedy and those that make more profit can afford more nice things.

This isn't likely to end well. First thing is, we need to understand the goal of waves of automation.

As an example, the industrial revolution wasn't designed to eliminate people doing work. Even though it ran concurrently with a lesser need for farmers, the goal was an increase in productivity. A displaced farmer might just slide over into a factory job.

The specific goal of this automation effort is to replace "expensive" labor with a less expensive way to accomplish the same work.

So if more human jobs are created, the automation revolution has failed.

My own concerns are that with perhaps 90 percent of humanity rendered unemployable because they are humans, that society is going to have to adjust two things:

Goods and services produced will have some disruption because there will be an ever dwindling market for those goods and services.

That 90 percent of zero value humanity will need addressed. With humans in the loop, that suggests to me that the excess humanity will be eliminated. Probably not in a peaceful manner either.

Fact is, in an automated economy, we simply do not need heading toward 8 billion people http://www.worldometers.info/w...

There are peaceful ways to achieve this depopulation, but humans seldom do things in a peaceful manner. We're going to be damn lucky if we don't bring about our own extinction in the depop wars.

Well, there's just 44 years of oil left, 160 years of natural gas and 400 years of coal. . After that, the human contribution to CO2 emissions drops pretty much to 0 anyway.

When the product that the psychologist designed is available... on expensive hardware that is required to play and easily monitored/controlled by parents...

vs. a product that requires only $5 and a sketchy friend with a lot of ziplock bags.

I know which choice I'm putting MY money on...

Fortnite brought in $2.4 billion

Aww, what a cute little revere stream you have built up! How cute!!

Compared that is to the $400 BILLION dollars in global drug trade. That figure is from 1998. Do you think that number to be higher, or lower now?

Climate scientists tell us that the world must drastically cut its fossil fuel use in the next 30 years to stave off a potentially catastrophic tipping point for the planet

If you actually plan on replacing most or all of the electrical production facilities and vehicles world wide without a large military taking over the world and dictating policy to every nation , I'm afraid you will be disappointed.

Not that I oppose the idea of getting rid of dependence on fossil fuels, but if you plan on producing approx 1 billion passenger cars ( and somehow forcing people to scrap the existing ones). http://www.worldometers.info/c...
Replacing nearly 900,000 power plants https://www.carbonbrief.org/ma...

Replacing 2 to 3% of the global economy https://www.investopedia.com/a...

My guess would be you are already way behind, regardless of what method you choose because you first have to convince those in control to take action on a massive scale and most of them are no where near doing that.

So IF the first preposition is correct ( and I hope it's not), there isn't much hope of going beyond that tipping point. If the chaos and wars it generates doesn't lower our carbon output , we will probably fix the problem over the coarse of 100 years or so.

This fucking cunt could end world hunger with his pocket change today, but wont.

World hunger ended. We didn't have a single declared famine from 2011 to 2017 and the problem areas are all semi-active war zones. Of course the UN will continue to talk of undernourished and malnourished people but the mortality has dropped by over 90%. With the advances in farming we have no problem keeping up with the 1.1% growth/year, there's lots of other limited resources but growing a few percent more food is not a problem. Of course exponential growth can't go on forever but the long term solution is to invest in education and prosperity to reduce birth rates, apart from Africa we're very close to replacement rates already.

Because the US is not the world.

http://www.worldometers.info/p...

Because the European market is more often bigger than the US, depending on what/how you measure it and what you're looking it.

More people than the US, more money than the US, more trade than the US, more production than the US.

You keep forgetting that the US is only a *country*, the EU is a *continent*. You just lost access to an entire *continent* of potential customers. Suppliers. Importers. Financial Services. All because they don't appear on your Google.

Think of it like this... if the US was to disappear off the radar for all of Europe and not show on Google, would we be affected? Answer: Yes. The other way round is not only the same - it's actually WORSE.

You might like to think that the US stands alone, needs no-one else, and you don't need to care about EU law, trade, visitor eyeballs, etc. but they likely form a much larger percentage of the visitors and income than you might think.

If it happened on Slashdot, you'd lose at least half the articles, half the commentors and half the advertising revenue.

You think that happening on Google wouldn't affect you just because you don't personally go to a www. .co.uk site very often?

Again, you run a red herring and lie.

Where is the lie?

America is 1/5 of the population of CHina.

Clear and obvious lie by you.

You clearly didn't read or understand my links. maybe basic logic was too hard for you?
The only reason America buys more EV cars is simply because they buy many many more cars in total.
As a percentage of new cars bought, China buys more electric cars that America. As shown in my post and link. Almost twice the level.
2017
2.1% of new cars in China were EV.
1.13% of new cars in America were EV
in 2016 they beat you 1.31% vs 0.9%
in 2015 they beat you 0.84% vs 0.68%
in 2014 they had less 0.23% vs 0.72%
China is higher and growing faster.
Exactly like I already said.

Someone could just as easily jump up and down screaming Americans per capita buy twice as many ICE cars as China. CO2 ! CO2 !
We wont stop global warming until ALL countries stop buying ICE cars Grrr *waves fist*

Remind me again why you are entitled to twice as many cars? Is it related to the reason you have and are entitled to twice the level of pollution?

And with ICE sales PER CAPITA and IN TOTAL, give me a BREAK. You nation China is the winner on that amongst ALL NATIONs.

That was your next lie. My link clearly showed per capita America buys over twice the number of cars.

Basically, your nation is getting worse. Hell, your gov allowed the manufacturing of CFCs even though you agreed to stop it. Now, you are dumping HUGE quantities in the air.

And your last lie, China's % is clearly growing ie getting better. Growing faster than yours even.
(lie #4 that hardly even counts compared to the others. China is not my nation.)
How the fuck CFC's are related to electric cars is something you may need to explain...
I'd better tell you that I think it's a discrace bla bla. Just to stop you coming up with lie #5 next time claiming I support it, like you claim I support coal.

Birth rates shrink everywhere, also in so called Third World countries. The only places that see high birthrates right now are country with very long civil wars going on, like Afghanistan or Congo, both which have civil wars which date back to the 1970ies.

Not only those places, birth rates are also very much a cultural thing and countries like Nigeria still have a birth rate of 5.5 kids/woman even though the GDP/capita has been growing quite a bit because that must become the new normal. I also think you forgot a 3) Women have their own education, career and life rather than be child-bearing/raising housewives married away at 15. Obviously if you dedicate 50% of your economic/leisure potential to raising kids you can have your own soccer team. While in the western world most consider popping out a couple when they're 30. The funny part is that certain people go crazy over immigrants with like crazy high birth numbers while at the same same time wailing that the natives aren't producing enough children. Like, they want more children but not those children. Otherwise we could trivially fix this by simply giving more benefits to those who'll take on the "job" of having kids until supply meets demand.

According to this one random web site I chose from a Google search, Forrester Research estimated that there were in excess of two billion active PCs in the world by the end of 2015. That's more than 2 years ago.

This is probably an unfair calculation [though no less fair than the BSA's rubbish] but if you estimated that, on average, each person in the 22,500 survey pool had, say, 5 PCs [it was stated that this sample pool was a mix of personal and business users], then the number of people surveyed for this report amount to 0.005625% of the entire global population of PC users.

Five thousands of one percent.

Extrapolated up and used as the basis for a report from the BSA? If you were a scientist of any field that included the use of statistical analysis and you published a report based on a sample size of five thousands of one percent of the likely total pool, would you expect your analysis to be taken seriously?

Is there anyone who thinks that is sustainable? http://www.worldometers.info/w...

There is a whole planet full of people who are not thinking this way. Otherwise why would we fill up the earth like this?

Pakistan has gone from 40 million people in 1955 to 200 million in 2018. That is a 5 times increase in less than 65 years. Is there anyone who thinks that is sustainable? http://www.worldometers.info/w...

Last time I looked it up it was 270

Well there's the reason why you're always wrong about everything; you're confusing "looked it up" with "made it up".

http://www.worldometers.info/g...

People in the state of mind or enough pain, to want to kill themselves, should be allowed to do so - it's their life. Also given the state of over-population in some countries, suicide should even be encouraged and assisted. Don't act offended or point your finger at me - you are thinking it too.

No, we're not thinking of it because it will make no difference to the population trajectory. 16 million people died in world war 1 and shortly after over 50 million died in world war 2. Those numbers don't even register on the population curve There are only about 50,000 suicides per year. That's a rounding error on the scale of world population.

Sweden can't afford to let the entire population of Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea in. Their population is only about 10 million. And most of the increase in the last 20 years is due to immigration.

If Sweden has a majority of people coming from countries where you get 'killed or end up with an AK in their hand', isn't Sweden going to be like that too? Not to mention that no is going to give the original Swedes asylum and a load of benefits to leave like Sweden did for the third worlders. They'll be stuck there.

"200 million Russians unemployed"

I think you better check your math. It appears there is only 144m people in Russia. I'm curious how their unemployment is higher than the population?

http://www.worldometers.info/w...

There are over 300 million people in the US. http://www.worldometers.info/w...

There is a nominal point of unemployment that is healthy. If it were 0% then there can be no economic growth. The inflationary pressures happen when it approaches 0% and employers are forced to increase wages to hire from the available pool. http://www.economicshelp.org/b...

No. I mean that US manufacturing output is at the highest level its ever been. Its up like 70% since NAFTA passed, and yet manufacturing employment is down 30% for the same time period.

That's:

1) Moving the goalposts from jobs to output
2) Misleading as the population has grown 25% since NAFTA passed
3) Bad logic

The addition of ~60 million people to the workforce makes your 70% number more impressive while downplaying the number of jobs lost. As for the logic....the population of Chicago is also higher now than it was in '94. Therefore, no one has been killed in Chicago since '94.

Sure there are some decent jobs in mexico and some mostly shitty jobs in china. But, if they were forced to relocate to the US, that would be just the opportunity needed to build brand new factories with state of the art automation. So most of those jobs would just disappear into the machines. Mexico wouldn't have them anymore, but neither would the USA. Lose, lose.

Hand wave, hand wave. "Automation" isn't a magic word corporations may intone and suddenly replace all their people with robot assembly lines and 3d printers. Otherwise every McDonalds would just be a big RedBox that you get your McMuffins from, with a single employee restocking its supplies.

This is what I used

Actually, between education, economics, and so forth, yeah they do. Several countries already have negative or neutral birthrates and are only net positive due to immigration.

There is no reason to beleive humans could not acheive equilibrium.

Ah the classic "Go pee on that forest fire, that will save us!" argument.
Look at the rate of growth in population and then look at the rate of decrease breeding rate due to education.
Education as a fix, is 1 guy trying to put out a massive forest fire by peeing on it. The fire is still going to burn everything including that 1 guy.
When "equilibrium" is attained it is not going to be pretty.

Looking at your Wikipedia link is says we hit 7 billion in 2011 and we will hit 8 billion in ~2025...
If that is the case why are we 5 years later, at ~7.5 billion? http://www.worldometers.info/w...
Looking at the real rate of increase we will see 8 billion in ~5 years not ~10. Your chart is hopelessly optimistic and clearly VERY wrong.
We will all die for babies.

Look around you, I guess birth verus death rate is 1:1 likley the burth rate is lower ... get out from under your rock.

Really? http://www.worldometers.info/w... http://www.census.gov/popclock...

I might be convinced that it's somehow earth's method of population control, that if lifespans are shortened so the overall population is more manageable or something along those lines;

Doesn't really work that way, if people reproduce at 30 and die at 50 or 100 or 200 that only adds a constant factor to the total population. It might lead to one-time "fill-up" effects where new children are born and old people die later because of longer lifespan adjusting that factor, but the only long term control on population is the reproduction rate. And during reproductive growth the young outnumber the old simply because there's more in this generation than in the last.

This is why people are no longer so extremely worried about population explosion, birth rates are way down and trending down but due to an aging population and advances in healthcare we will become closer to 10 billion. Europe and North America is below replacement fertility but still growing because of this, Asia and Latin American spot on, Oceania slightly above and then there's Africa which is still way high but below the world average from 1950-1970.

High reproduction is also related to extreme poverty, basically if you need many children to support you when you grow older it is "necessary" to have many. Sure most people still like to have kids but only a few and not a whole bunch. China and India seem to be pulling people out of extreme poverty quite quick, so I think they're moving into "safer" territory there. Africa is again challenging, you have countries like Nigera still in explosive growth and GDP per capita barely increasing, only 60% of the population is even literate.

That said, they're seeing a communications revolution in the last decade in Africa, from almost nobody having a cell phone almost everyone has one, smartphone penetration is low but not absent. I think that'll have a big effect on education and literacy but it'll take a few decades to really show net results. With the exception of certain retards in the Middle East that want to bring us back to the Dark Ages, things are actually progressing quite well. A bit worried about mass surveillance and authoritarian states, but not overpopulation and lack of basic necessities.

As mean-spirited as some people will interpret this statement, it must be said that the human population has outstripped the resources and as such a massive correction will eventually restore the natural balance. Meddling by developed countries has exacerbated the problem. The low morality and barbaric societies plaguing the planet will be purged by nature and it would be better if we allowed death to swallow the weak, the stupid, the over reproducing.

I might be convinced that it's somehow earth's method of population control, that if lifespans are shortened so the overall population is more manageable or something along those lines;

Doesn't really work that way, if people reproduce at 30 and die at 50 or 100 or 200 that only adds a constant factor to the total population. It might lead to one-time "fill-up" effects where new children are born and old people die later because of longer lifespan adjusting that factor, but the only long term control on population is the reproduction rate. And during reproductive growth the young outnumber the old simply because there's more in this generation than in the last.

This is why people are no longer so extremely worried about population explosion, birth rates are way down and trending down but due to an aging population and advances in healthcare we will become closer to 10 billion. Europe and North America is below replacement fertility but still growing because of this, Asia and Latin American spot on, Oceania slightly above and then there's Africa which is still way high but below the world average from 1950-1970.

High reproduction is also related to extreme poverty, basically if you need many children to support you when you grow older it is "necessary" to have many. Sure most people still like to have kids but only a few and not a whole bunch. China and India seem to be pulling people out of extreme poverty quite quick, so I think they're moving into "safer" territory there. Africa is again challenging, you have countries like Nigera still in explosive growth and GDP per capita barely increasing, only 60% of the population is even literate.

That said, they're seeing a communications revolution in the last decade in Africa, from almost nobody having a cell phone almost everyone has one, smartphone penetration is low but not absent. I think that'll have a big effect on education and literacy but it'll take a few decades to really show net results. With the exception of certain retards in the Middle East that want to bring us back to the Dark Ages, things are actually progressing quite well. A bit worried about mass surveillance and authoritarian states, but not overpopulation and lack of basic necessities.

Really?

http://www.census.gov/popclock...

http://www.worldometers.info/w...

If [...] you're not doing anything that hurts anyone, congrats, you're probably well ahead of at least half the human population.

<joke> correct ! Males make up 50.4% of Earth's human population. </joke>

Most of the world stays close to the 50/50 sex split. Interestingly, the largest deviations are all male-majority and all Islamic states. Examples:
Qatar(76.5% male), United Arab Emirates(70.1% male), Oman(63.6% male), Bahrain(62.2% male), Kuwait(59.8% male), and Saudi Arabia(57.5% male)

For comparison, Curaçao has the highest female/male ratio at 54.7% female,

Malthus will always be wrong, because he neglected many important factors.

He might someday 'be right', but only in the 'broken clock' way.

The issue with Malthus is that like so many people have done for just about ever, he didn't take into consideration the fact that technology moves on.

As a cleric living at the beginning of the industrial revolution, he did not correctly predict just how much that revolution would allow more people to be supported.

Then the so called green revolution came along. Another technology improvement that allows more people to be fed for less.

Want to know another failure? People who seem to think that we are running below replacment rates.

http://www.worldometers.info/w...

We're still adding, and as long as there is the celebration of Duggarism, we still will.

Now, if I were to look into my scrying mirror to predict how we can support even more people, how about this.....

In the world of the future, assuming that we don't accidentally kill ourselves off, we will be able to support many more people even than now, futrher proving Malthus wrong.

Humans have long since obliterated most other living creatures, and spread out to most livable space on the earth, and found moving underground as a cost effective place to creat more living room. To feed this number of people, millions of acres of surfce area are filled with vats of algae, with water and nutrients that bubble through the vats. Solar mirrors or nuclear powerd light generation allow great efficiencies of scale, and hundreds of thousands can be fed with the output of each vat. The resultant algae is dried and processed into different food shapes, flavors and textures.

Proteins as well, will be grown in vats.

Fresh water will be needed, so nuclear powered desalination plants will be needed. Most of the surface will be used to provide food and water to the now subterranean human race. Limitations to population growth will be amount of space that people can occupy. As we build down, efficient air conditioning will be needed to keep temperature and humidity at life sustining levels.

I'm making a wild-ass guess of a few trillion people.

As well, instead of the present day size of humans, we can be genetically engineerd to be much smaller. This would have the added advantage of humans using less food per capita, as well as allowing each level of the earth to be at a smaller heights, important as we bore down to create new areas , as each lower level in a sphere has less available area.

Perhaps we can double the number after the big people die off (another interesting issue, with some people believing humans may soon become immortal.

It will be like turning the earth into a sort of reverse Dyson sphere, the energy still coming from the outside, but with many internal shell levels.

And that is within the llimitations of anything I can imagine, humanity could become cave dwellers in the future, and extrapolation of present day technology. Of course, things come along that no one can imagine - all of my ideas are technically feasible using improvements in what we know now.

That would prove Malthus wrong for a long, long time.

Doesn't sound like my idea of fun, but hey, it's almost like a lot of us living in Mom's basement, surviving on Cheetos and Red Bull. Ahead of the curve.

"...the other is a national database of biometric data on their entire population."

Hardly. India has over 1, 3 billion citizens, the database apparently only 1 billion.

http://www.worldometers.info/w...

Well the rest of the world is extremely net positive overall. A quarter million new people or so a day.

This just means that European culture will die out as it's being replaced by immigrants from the middle east and Africa. (Who tend to have a net positive rate so Europe will expand more later on, just not White Europe)

The 5 catagories are the ones they talk about. There is one more, but that will be come clear. Think Kevin Bacon.

Basicaly the 5 cagagories are how far you are linked to a Terrorist. Lowest level is 5 steps/degrees away and that goes all the way to 1 That means you ARE a terrorist. The TSA only has access to levels 1 to 3. Level 4 and 5 (degrees away from a known terrorist) are for the real police.

The secret level 6 is for the NSA and similar agencies. Those are the names of the people that are 6 degrees away from knowing a terrorist personally.

The list is secret, but the number of those on 'list 6' is known

No, this is really an absurd profit, Standard Oil's net profit from 1882 to 1906 was $838,783,800 equal to roughly $22B today, so on an inflation adjusted basis Apple's quarterly profit was nearly equal to the majority of the lifetime profits of one of the classic robber baron trusts.

The U.S. population in 1906 was 85,450,000 compared to 2014's population of 322,583,006. Apple is definitively a world wide, global corporation. Did Standard Oil reach as far.

Sorry, but you don't have much of a comparison here.

Absolutely, I mean how can a billion Chinese be wrong?
For interest, 2 bikes are made for every car btw.

And small change...
http://www.worldometers.info/w...

Yes, we are doomed to go instinct any day now, babies are a rare thing.

http://www.worldometers.info/

Never mind, only 164 years of gas left anyhow.

http://www.worldometers.info/

but monitoring 300M+ "terrorist suspects"

To make it clear: this is in the US alone. The actaual number ca be seen right here

Just about every (if not every) demographic group on the planet is showing decreased levels of birth per person

In which reality?

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Every other source I've checked also agrees that the world population is still growing rapidly. Even optimistic estimates expect it to peak at 10 billion. That's almost 50% more than we have today.

the LIDAR unit on the top is probably dominating the price. The model in question costs around $75,000

How many LIDAR units are sold every year? Maybe a few thousand? 60 million cars are manufactured each year. That kind of volume can lead to huge price decreases.

expected price decrease in the future would be achieved by going camera-only.

Cameras don't deal well with rain, snow, and fog.

99% are recycled

Well, since there are over 1 billion cars (let alone trucks, etc.) in the world, that still means 10,000,000 batteries are getting into landfills. In fact, it was recently estimated hat 40,000,000 Metric TONS of Lead from Lead-Acid Batteries ALONE goes into landfills EVERY YEAR. This is probably more than the lead in the solder of every single lead-based electronic product, 1,000,000 times over.

So, think about it when you say that "99%" of a number that large; because that remaining 1% is STILL a HUGE number. And speaking of which, the same article cited above says it's only 97% of batteries that get recycled, making my 10,000,000 batteries-getting-into-landfills now more like 30,000,000.

Your turn...

The one we've been discussing, where robots are doing all the real labour and humans, for the most part, can only find employment doing demeaning and uncompetitive make-work or can't find employment at all.

Your projected problem, not to be confused with a current or likely problem.

But it doesn't contradict my point, which is that usage of those things is greatly reduced. I haven't argued that employment for humans will vanish, just that the majority won't be able to find jobs and that ...

Usage of these things are reduced? http://www.worldometers.info/bicycles/>

Look at the graph halfway down the page, we're building more bikes and cars, which reflects more usage, not less. Your assumptions about what is currently happening contradict reality. This should be a hint to you that your perception is faulty. If your perception of the *present* is faulty, your predictions about the future may also need some re-examination.

... Frankly, I can't think of much about government that I wouldn't classify as a form of socialism, it's all just a matter of degree to me.

You define all government activities as socialism. I define socialism as gov't control of the economy, to be contrasted to a free markets. (Where the gov't sets the rules, but does not try to control the outcomes) My definition leaves some gov't activity outside the scope of socialism (such as diplomacy, policing, and legislation).

No, there's no perfect free market, but it is the free-est markets that have created the most wealth for humanity.

If socialism makes you uncomfortable, ...

It doesn't merely make me uncomfortable, I despise it. National socialism introduced the world to industrialized mass murder. It's all rooted in how the socialist perceives the link between a gov't and the people. An "elite" who sees of the mass of humanity as useless "meat" is one that has no qualms about sending them to the glue factory. "for the greater good"

People are not horses. A horse is property; but humans aren't. Humans create jobs; horses do not. (Human ownership of horses creates jobs, but it is the human creating the job, not the horse).

This comes back to assumptions - you assume some limited supply of jobs. Again, jobs are not zero sum. Jobs come from human want, and human want is a limitless pit. Compare the richest guy you can find with the poorest guy you can find. The difference in their possessions is "want". Multiply that by however many billion people to get a rough guess of how much work needs to be done before that human want starts to be filled and there might not be new jobs. (And the rich guy still wants more! Want is unlimited, and jobs scale with want)

The society you imagine where all humanity's wants are satisfied without a corresponding amount of human jobs is a post-scarcity society - by definition, this is a a society with nigh INFINITE resources. In that world, all of our economic theories no longer apply, because our economic knowledge is all based on the distribution of scarce goods.

Since that society has so many resources, there's simply no point in worrying about it. The rich could casually throw away their semi-used goods and "the poor" (who are without want since everything is practically free) can scoop up the refuse and live like kings. The problem you imagine contradicts itself.

I don't have to show that technology generated more tragedy than the status quo. That's putting words in my mouth. I've said that these changes cause upheavals which tend to cause tragedy for some. My theory is that it is possible, without treading carefully, for a very large upheaval to cause a lot of tragedy.

I do not accept your imagination as historical evidence.

...we're going extinct.

We are?!

Considering the planet only has slightly over 6 billion inhabitants ....

Um... A billion people would like to have a word with you and your decades old statistics.

With our current population of 6bil, we are consuming about 1.4 Earths of water/food/energy. We are quickly depleting what we have. I don't think doubling the population is such a good idea.

One - there are ~7 billion humans living on Earth at the moment. 7+ if you ask UN instead of USA.
Two - are you REALLY trying to say that we are spending 140% of available resources of the planet?

Here's a fun experiment. Get a bag of chips or some other easily obtainable prepackaged food item.
Now try eating 140% of the contents of that single packet of food.

Can != Should

If these past decades since the world has been introduced to the Internet has taught us anything it is that Can == You better bloody believe it will happen.

As for doubling the population...
We are the only creatures on this planet who work on solving the problems of our ENTIRE RACE.
Regardless if you believe in "two heads are better than one" or in "the spark of genius" - more people is the solution for both.
Every additional billion humans means we acquire 20 million more geniuses.
Not to mention everyone else in the "above average" 25% (~1.75 billion at the moment) or EVERYONE when the problem actually requires physical instead of mental labor.

Just imagine what we could do with all those brains and all those brains and all those bodies!
The problems we could solve and fix.

WOW! Way to read WAY too much into a simple statement. Since there are several stories today about the earth's population reaching 7 billion this month it's not too hard to leap to the conclusion there will be food shortages and cramped cities. Especially considering that the population has more than doubled from 3 Billion in 1960.

IMHO, environmental extremism is nothing more that a reconstituted Luddite movement. This is a perfect example. It's as though they think there will suddenly be thousands of space flights every single day and more on the holidays.

Not to mention there are more effective ways to be an extremist. It's estimated there are 600,000,000 cars used every day. If we combined the exhaust from 60,000 of them, would it equal the exhaust from one rocket? Rather than advocating reducing car use by 0.01% (which takes actual work and isn't as "sexy"), it's effortless to put out a press release and shoot this down.

it's itunes,ipod and such that is driving their sales.

iTunes? Really? Have they hit 2B songs sold yet? At what? Just over $1 a song, which is revenue only, not profit?

iPods? We just stated that they sold 5X iPods compared to Macs. What's the average price of each again?

In terms of revenue alone it looks like iTunes is way down the scale compared to iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

i'd rather use my debian machine, windows machine(gaming) and my maemo OS N900 nokia and on all three of them i can install what i wish not what Mr Jobs marketing plan tells me i can and cannot do.

I also have windows installed on my MBP, although I now only run it in a VM. Haven't tried installing Linux in anything other than a VM.

and yes in terms of what this thread is about apples numbers on desktops are insignificant and OSX Server.. gimme a break.

Worldwide, somewhere around 250M or so PCs will be sold this year, around 10M of which will be Macs.

That is less than 5%, it's true. I couldn't get relative numbers just for the US, N. America or Europe. (We won't mention anything speculative like longevity differences between the two and what the effect is on the install base)

Who said anything about OSX Server?

apple.. yeah nice designs but that still doesn't hide the ugliness of their lockin plan my man

They don't work very hard at it. For example, I own an iPod, but no iTunes account.

Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time. How many power plants have been constructed over the years, and what did it cost?

The worldwide auto industry produces roughly 50 million cars a year. That works out to ~1.6 per second. Scary statements like "OMG We have to make one every EIGHT MINUTES" are peanuts to large-scale industrial production: we make cars roughly 750 times faster than you're saying we'd need to build turbines.

Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep

The aesthetic impact of that is the only part of your post that gives me any concern. The rest is perfectly doable.

http://www.volcanolive.com/vei.html

Claims "20-30", so about 1.2 million cars per volcano. Give or take a fair bit because the "lava flow" ones would be putting out a fare bit as well.

52 Million cars are projected to be made this year, and going by 3600kg per car, means they will be putting out about 187 billion kg ontop of the millions of cars already out there.

Provided all of the 4 sites are correct, the emissions from cars a year is probably about 5 to 8 times more than volcanoes a year.

Do you know what portion of the planet doesnt have clean running water? Or a reliable electricity supply? Any idea what portion of the planet exists on less than a dollar per day?

AC

Considering that there are fewer than 7 billion humans alive, quite a bit I would say - if either party represented tens of percent of humanity that would be staggering and they would in fact be the only sides worth mentioning. Or are readers supposed to be psychic and guess that you meant a small number instead of a large number?

In point of fact, I would be surprised if either party represented in close approximation the beliefs of many more than a few dozen million humans, a much smaller percentage than even your "corrected" completely made up guess. There were (for example) 44.8 million self-described Republicans in the US in 2004, or roughly .7% of humanity and roughly 15% of Americans (which is around 1/7th).

But hey - it's just numbers, right, and can't be as important as rhetoric?

What does it matter if potential customers die? Really? The world population is increasing, it matters not that this year 7 million people died from HIV, because 95 million will be born. There will always be more people to buy more medicine. http://www.worldometers.info/