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Complex Systems Theorists Predict We're About One Year From Global Food Riots
pigrabbitbear writes with conjecture on what triggers global unrest. Quoting the article: "In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest."
Means we can buy their cities for half price. Engage the diplomat unis!
No man is more than three square meals away from revolution.
Malthus? Is that you?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
"Experts" have been incorrectly predicting that vast swaths of humanity would startve to death at least since Malthus. How can claims like this still be taken seriously?
Perhaps I could buy the claim that "food riots will happen, despit no lack of food"; after all, we do as a species love to protest. We produce enough food to feed everyone as the populaiton grows while less land is needed for farming every decade. The WHO warns about similar numbers of people facing obesity problems as they do starvation problems. Yes, there will always be governments that withhold food as a weapon against their own citizens, but beyond that any claim of a food shortage just seems silly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In a 2011 paper ... explained why ... in 2008 and 2011
It's easy to make a model that correctly accounts for the past. Before I read the article, I was hoping that it was a model they created earlier, and just released last year. It wasn't. From the article:
We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point ... in 2012-2013
Oh wait...
That the contemporary "Zombie" as portrayed in movies, at the receiving end of a chainsaw or shotgun, looks and acts very much like a hungry person would?
Sometimes I wonder if that's just a co-incidence or by design... After all, there's not much difference between a starving person calling out "Brains" and "Grains" is there?
And when I do wonder that, I really, really hope it's by co-incidence.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I think it's time the one-child policy went global.
My other account has mod points!
Did they include their report as one of the catalysts?
While there have been several suggested origins of the food price increases, we find the dominant ones to be investor speculation and ethanol production.
I'm more inclined to believe the latter, because there was never a shortage of grain - just high prices. The US wasted millions of tons of grain making ethanol in a misguided attempt to not burn fossil fuel.
He's got a whole bunch more food stamps to hand out.
You can use those to get your food.
does this have anything to do with the global gun ban they're trying to push through the UN?
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
We'll start with Soylents Brown and Red, made from soy bean and lentil, hence the name.
Later we'll have to start harvesting the ocean and make our new Soylent Green, made from seaweed. No kidding! Seaweed! Yep
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Voice over PA: First stage removal. First stage removal. Streets prohibited to non-permits in one hour. Streets prohibited to non-permits in one hour.
Not surprising when we're burning so much food by turning it into ethanol and putting it in our cars.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
He wants his Foundation plot back!
I'd stock up on emergency rations and canned goods to last me a few years, but would just get flagged by Homeland Security...
The sad, self-indulgent wankers over at CNN like to claim that the so-called 'Arab Spring', came about because of Twitter, Facebook and smartphones.
The reality, according to people in the know, is that the Angry Arab Jamboree of 2011/2012 was caused by severe financial pressure caused by food poverty on already badly-run middle-eastern Muslim countries. The people who run these countries like to keep their people illiterate, corrupt, religious and poor so they can maintain control; unfortunately for them, it gives them VERY little margin for error when a few harvests fail, especially when even in good times, 70% of the country is quite literally on the breadline.
I have little sympathy for anybody here. It's self inflicted -- people dumb enough to wait until they're starving -- and spending 70% of their incomes on bread -- before they hold their governments accountable probably deserve the kicking they're getting.
Of course, some will riot if the food isn't prepared to their satisfaction;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-19549082
although, how many people does it take to constitute a 'food riot'?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I thought these civilization-collapse nuts were fixated on December 21. There's not going to *be* a next year, right?! If most think tanks watched a puppy growing for the first month of its life, they would conclude that one year from now it will be 300-foot-tall monster trashing downtown Tokyo.
The next time you're driving to work, take a glance to your left.
That 30' wide median strip? You know, the one they pay some public works teams to spend an entire week mowing several times a season? Yeah. Fully exposed to sunlight, easy access, on a major transportation route.
Now, granted, you're not going to want to grow food veggies in the median of a major interstate? Too much toxins from the exhaust and worse. But now that we've got the idea in your heads, take a look at the medians in your local town. Definitely not as much traffic, but sometimes just as wide, covered in very thirsty, very costly grass and/or other landscape plants, and 100% under-utilized.
So. When it looks like the global food riots are going to start, show up at your local council/zoning board and say, "Here's what's going on, here's what we're going to do about it. We will be growing food. We will take care of all maintenance and upkeep, and save the town (insert 5-6 figure amount) of dollars per year. If you interfere, we will sue you into oblivion. If you try to arrest us, we'll keep coming in until we're all incarcerated. Then YOU will have to pay for feeding us."
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People seem to forget models don't prove SHIT. Models model. So they are only as useful as their predictive ability. However you can't know that until you've released a model, and see what happens. If your model repeatedly makes correct predictions (and fails to make incorrect ones) then you can say it is a good model.
It doesn't mean shit if everything is historical. Yes, yes, you tweaked it until it modeled history accurately. Of course, that's a good first step. However that could just mean you made a model that generates a line in the right shape, rather than actually models anything useful. You have to wait and see how it does at predicting reality before you go and claim it is useful.
This also seems like a good case of "correlation isn't causation." So there's a correlation. Great, that means fuck-all. Another explanation for a bunch of riots would be things like the Arab Spring concept in that people see their neighbors rise up against their oppressors and say "Hey, we should do that too!"
Quote from the actual paper: "[T]he underlying trend of increasing prices will reach the threshold of instability in July 2012 if we consider current prices [current when the paper was written]" Or maybe the inflation was so rampant, that a correction was necessary, as in "April 2013 if we correct prices for reported inflation." Alrighty.
Study invalidated.
Necessity has no law.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
because agribusiness wants more money. As for speculation, you can thank the Bush Administration for that. It's simple really. You used to have to take delivery of the commodities you bought. Bush did away with that. That opened speculation to a whole new class. They "buy" grain and "sell" it without ever taking possession. What they're really doing is using their existing wealth and connections to skim off the top.
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was a prediction.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
... the sky is falling predictions because it's hard to sell ad space predicting happiness and civility. If you read the history, people in the 1970's were predicting the same thing.
Actually, I'm more interested in the fact that they're moving the majority of all heavy assets away from the coastlines on both sides of the country.
Several videos on YouTube of 100+ car trains, each one carrying two M1 Abrams tanks, all heading inland. Rumors of major military bases on the east coast being evacuated. (Lotsa rumors, but no evidence.) CIA moving from Maryland to Colorado. Background radiation counts going up all across the nation. Radon spikes in the New Madrid zone. Mt. Fuji about to blow it's stack. The island of La Palma becoming more active.
At current count, there are 311 million people in the United States. It sure would solve the "hunger problem" if there were a major disaster that "nobody knew" was coming?
And it sure would get rid of all those pesky liberals, wouldn't it? The only people left would be those living in Jesusland.
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I don't think they're wrong. I own about 500 acres of farmland that I rent out and this is something I've been watching the past couple years and something that a lot of the ag people have been warning about is the fact even the United States as of right now has less than a 90 day carry over (seems like I read something the other day that the supply had now dropped to something like 60 days). The carry over was 18 months in the 1950's. Frankly I find that a little scary.
That means that if there is a major disruption somewhere in the supply chain(oil supplies disrupted), another summer or two like this past one, or some major event like a large volcanic eruption on the scale of Krakatoa with global weather impact and the United States is 3 months away from having no food. This isn't the price becomes too high for people to afford, this is literally THERE IS NO FOOD. The physical supply doesn't exist. And that's kind of scary.
Let's just take this past summer. The United States produces roughly 40% of the world's corn. We'll be lucky to produce half that due to the weather this summer. That means globally about 20% of the global supply of corn this year is gone, it doesn't exist this year. Furthermore drought in Russia, Europe, and Australia means they aren't having bumper crops to offset that loss.
Short term that means people will likely turn to rice to replace corn as their staple. Rice prices aren't much changed from a year ago. (We raise Rice and Soybeans so that's what I primarily pay attention to). Soybean prices on the other hand are the highest I've seen it in my lifetime. And I remember early in the summer the commodity traders were assuming a near perfect yield this year in the prices of corn and soybeans, et. al. and that was *before* the drought. (I know, why those idiots were assuming that in the first place is another discussion)
What has surprised me is how little this gets reported in the main stream press. The only reason I know anything about it is the fact I own farms and read some of the ag publications so I have some idea of what is going on in that world.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
This is semi-related, but one of the things I heard on the Stuff You Should Know podcast was an episode around carrying capacity. It was stated that we are growing as a global population at an exponential rate, but the technology for producing food is only growing at a linear rate. So at some point (what that point is, is HIGHLY debatable by people much smarter than I) there will simply be too many mouths to feed and not enough food.
So, if and when this doesn't happen, the Complex Systems Institute will admit they have no idea what they're talking about, right? Otherwise they're no better than any other end-of-the-world cult.
I need to start training my kids at killing other kids in archery so that we can win the games this year?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
... especially of the future.
That a new computer model "forecasts" an event in the past fails to arouse.
I liked the earth better with 3 billion people on it.
If it does the liberal democrats win.
Did we really need a computer model to make this prediction? I've heard sociologists and apocalypse junkies saying this for a while.
Really. Food prices get so high billions of people can't afford to eat. And because there's no political solution in sight they'll riot. Hard to believe. I wonder how much these guys got paid for this brilliant insight.
When has any "scientist" correctly predicted a major disaster? Never! Us damn humans just keep ignoring them and multiplying. Don't bet against us even if you think we are near peak. You're wrong!
1. Riots aren't always a bad thing when they precipitate the overthrow of autocratic regimes and create the possibility for self-rule. It remains to be seen the extent to which this is true of the "Arab Spring", but there's a distinct possibility that at least some of the affected states will see lasting and positive change.
2. It's not necessarily a given that a warming planet will lead to food shortages. Some guys in the U.K. seem to think we could see yields (for some crops) increase by 50% by 2050. They could very well be wrong. Or they could be right.
I have to disagree with your characterization of the EU as a food exporter. In fact the EU is a major net food importer. Grain and soybeans to feed lifestock from Brazil and Argentina, fruit and vegetables from Africa. To the point where they're actually contributing to the problems with food insecurity in some parts of the world by exporting their opposition to various modern ag technologies to countries that depend on EU to buy their crops. Also, the US doesn't withhold exports to keep food prices high. We do other things that mean the price of US grown food is higher than it would be otherwise (like subsidizing ethanol and paying farmers not to farm certain acres through the CRP program.) but there aren't any barriers other than the higher prices preventing that food from being exported from the country. The ultimate effect is the same though, so I suppose it's one of one, half a dozen of another.
Current industrial farming practices use 10 calories of energy (mostly from petrochemicals) to produce 1 calorie of food.
Contemporary farming techniques are heavily dependent on petrochemicals to produce fertilizer.
Contemporary farming techniques deplete topsoil faster than it will naturally replenish.
That said, there're a lot of dandelions and wild garlic in most yards (and more acreage in lawns in the U.S. than any single crop).
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Great to hear from someone so close to actual food production.
When it comes to rice is there really enough slack in the system to make a dent in the missing corn? My understanding is the amount of rice traded internationally is actually quite small (most is eaten in the same country it's grown in). I'm sure you/your tenants will get a great price for this year's crop, but realistically it seems the only place we'll be able to find slack in the US food system would be relaxing the ethanol mandate for one growing season (seems unlikely especially in an election year) or significantly reducing meat production. It's sounding like the second may already be happening, with many ranchers and feedlots thinning out their herds drastically this fall because the math shows they won't be able to afford to feed all their livestock at the prices corn is headed towards this winter.
In countries without a lot of meat consumption it's not clear what people will be able to do besides spend a lot more of their budgets on food or start missing a lot of meals.
The derivatives market is worth $800,000,000,000,000.00.
That's eight hundred trillion with a "T". It doesn't represent equity in any company, or commodity. It's not for business expansion or for building new factories or for putting new seed in the ground.
It's $800 trillion in real money that's used on a big monopoly board by extremely wealthy individuals and corporations. Remember, this is not the stock market, it is not shares in companies or bars of gold or bushels of corn. It's part of a big game of Texas Hold 'Em where if you lose, you send the bill to the taxpayers of some country or other.
It also happens to represent more than TEN TIMES the gross domestic products of all countries in the world. The derivatives market is worth several times that of the entire world. Possibly disruptive, no?
More than 3 BILLION people (50% of the world population, give or take) exist on less than $2/day.
There are about 1100 billionaires in the world and about 10 million millionaires (0.15%). About 25% of the world population is unemployed.
There is a whole lot of research that shows replicable, reliable correlation between growing wealth and income disparity and growth in every single negative metric of human society, from disease, to violence, to mental illness and back again. Not one bit of research that shows a positive effect of growing disparity of income and wealth.
In arguably the most prosperous of nations, the US, 40% of the population has a net worth of zero. The average person over 55 will retire with enough wealth to live for about 2.5 years. And much of the rest of the world only dreams about this kind of prosperity.
"Food riots?" Yah think? But just remember, it's not because there's not enough wealth to go around. You come up with a solution, because I'm going back down to the bunker.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In the United States most food commodities required you take possession. To be fair, a lot of that started under Clinton (who was a fiscal conservative, only liberal on social issues), but as the article points out things didn't really get going on the speculative markets until 2008, round the Obama was handed Bush's mess to clean up (and a Congress full of DINOs, Democrats in Name Only).
:P.
There are many, many things in this world that are complex. Physics, chemistry, mathematics. Economics isn't one of them. People are simple, scared and greedy. Google the phrases 'Southern Strategy' and 'Vulture Capitalism' and you pretty much have everything you need to know to understand it. Everything else is just tossing numbers around.
But don't take my word for it. Take this example. How do the Rich avoid taxes? Complex and amazing tax loopholes? Not so much. Turns out they just borrow money below interest (loaned to them by rich buddies in charge of the banking system) and live off that. That's the best irony in the world. The super wealthy are some of the poorest people in the world. No money (to tax) you see. Again, google it. I found that linked article for you, so you can do the rest
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At the very least they didnt took into account the effect that will have their own predictions in the future, like measures taken by governments, corporations and individuals. Maybe won't try to stop that to happen, or push to make that a reality, or just no matter what they try to do it will happen, but anyway, is a factor.
Another factor that they didn't took into account is how much we changed with internet, and how much control on what goes there have some governments. Is a very comfortable medium to coordinate things, or express ourselves. Will be riots if the people get detained even before they try to do something?
I'll try not to lose any sleep over this.
The rioters are bringing a swifter death upon themselves.
Thinking the world has some fixed population limit that we've passed is thinkingthat technologicl advancement has stopped. Not likely.
That's not the reality that I'm afraid of. The reality I'm afraid of is the absolute truth that every biological system on earth is in decline right now. How does your technology return the ability of our biological systems to support more life? How are you going to replace all of the world's collapsed fisheries or herd populations? How is technology going to make crop yields grow when you don't have enough oil to create fertilizer, or transport fertilizer, or power earth moving equipment, harvesting equipment, or get the food back to the cities where it's needed before it rots?
The earth is a closed system, and really isn't any different from a very large spaceship. Every indicator points to our life support systems being on the downward slope, and with the addition of the change in climate, all of our current models are getting less and less useful and certainly less predictable.
Since our largest economies are now based on speculative models, you're forcing people with virtually no money to compete with people who have virtually unlimited amounts of money. This will lead to huge price fluctuations which will cause societies on the edge of subsistence to collapse, and that's what, two billion people right now? When one third of the world doesn't have enough food to eat, or doesn't know how much bread will cost tomorrow or the day after, you can guarantee that instability will be a problem.
The earth will regain balance eventually, and our population, as a result of physics, will return to a sustainable size. The question is whether our civilizations will survive with the planet.
what you bought actually only has a 2 year shelf life, I don't care what their marketing department tells you.
The supplier's website says that with mild, dry storage conditions, the food is good for up to 25 years. My guess is their estimate is closer to the truth than yours.
How long has that supplier been in business? How long has the manufacturer of the goods they carry been in business? I'd be a little concerned about some company just jumping on the Y2K, Mayan 2012, etc bandwagon and not planning on being around for very long (in the fly-by-night business sense, not the apocalypse sense). I'd want to know a little more about who is making that 25 year claim.
Plus a supplier's claim is more suspicious than a manufacturer's claim. I saw some sort of food hoarder on TV with a similar cache. I recognize one of the brand names, "Mountain House" a quite respectable company making food for backpackers and such. The hoarder claimed something around 25 years too. Strange, the "Mountain House" freeze dried dehydrated vacuum sealed food packets I recently purchased for a backpacking trip had a use by 2017 date, a 5 year shelf life.
Now that experts are predicting global food riots.
Can we still laugh at preppers and survivalists?
Let's hope it doesn't become an instruction manual like 1984.
Ever since the novel "1984" was published, back in 1949, the world has been actively "prepared" for the fruition
Do you know that the world population more than double, - almost triple - since 1949?
Back in the 1950's, global population of human being was around 2,556,000,000
Now, 7,000,000,000 and rising, by the second !!
With that many more mouths to feed, and the planet ain't getting any bigger, it sure is a recipe for disasters, big disasters
And with big disasters come big opportunities, for some
I won't be surprised at another global calamity 10 to 30 years in the future - and by then, blood may flow like rivers and corpse may pile up like hills and mountains - it would apocalypse, in every sense of the term
And I hope I will be dead before that happen
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Firstly, fructose doesn't spike GI which means it doesn't promote fat formation nor induce lethargy.
Secondly, even the infamous HFCS has been shown to be no worse for weight problems than sucrose.
Saying "My prediction was accurate except something unexpected happened," it just a weasel way of saying "I was wrong." A prediction isn't useful unless it is correct.
Also it is pretty stupid to make predictions based off of the idea that whatever the state of things now will continue forever. Scott Adams has a great funny quote along those lines:
"Some people try to predict the future by assuming current trends will continue. This is a bad method. For example, if you applied that forecasting to a puppy, you'd predict that the puppy would continue growing larger and larger until one day - in a fit of uncontrollable happiness - its wagging tail would destroy a major metropolitan area. But that rarely happens, thanks to the National Guard."
The puppy example is a good one of what just looking at what is happening and saying "I know what will happen in the future based on this," is dumb. A more global and nuanced example would be something like the development of the Internet. Utterly unpredicted and it totally changed the way global communication works. And prediction made on how humans would communicate that didn't take it in to account is way off base because of it.
He has another good quote, on point with the food issue:
"Whenever humans notice a bad trend, they try to change it. The prediction of doom causes people to do things differently and avoid the doom. Any doom that can be predicted won't happen."
That is also rather true. The best recent example would be Y2K. Notice that it came and went basically without a hitch. Well part of that was because it was overblown, as many predictions of doom are, but also it is because humans realized it was a problem, worked out solutions, and solved it.
See:
The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update
"A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality"
Geen Illusions by Ozzie Zehner
Carrying capacity of the planet is dependent on how you structure civilization; any estimate is political in nature and open to discussions regarding consumption of energy, food, hard goods and waste handling. To believe otherwise is to leave the decisions to others. If you believe less government is the ultimate solution, I won't have to encourage you to revisit history.
~ You'll be reliving it soon enough.
Two years of freeze dried foods and Meals Ready to Eat and your colon will be rioting even with a full stomach.
Just stay away from open flame and you should be all right.
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
can we accept the brink argument - it's a year away?
If these people can predict prices a year in advance - for anything - they'd be fairly rich investors, no?
I'd say "1 year away" is just long enough to make people listen to the argument but not so soon as to be easily disproven. Much like the "oh, about 15 minutes" estimate you get when asking how long the next table will be open at your favorite restaurant.
How about looking back 1 year for all the "one year hence" forecasters? Where are they now?
If all farmers get a bad crop this year, then there will be food riots next year. It doesn't take a wizard to predict that. Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria said: "A peasant should be able to put a chicken in his pot, once a week on a Sunday." It is still true today.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If China hadn't got their shit together it would have happened as predicted.
The high price of oil is largely what is driving grain prices up. Higher water prices are also not helping.
I can't speak for the rest of the planet, but in the US many politicians have been attracted to the idea of getting the US off oil by artifically raising the price of oil. Well, that's an idea but there are consequences. And one of those consequences is that everything linked to fuel goes up in price as well.
The other issue is water. Many cities have grown in size while not increasing their water resources. They haven't built reservoirs at the same rate that their populations have increased. And as a result, when there is a water shortage they run out of water much faster then they should. In the real world yearly rainfall is not constant. It changes from year to year. But it is fairly consistent decade over decade. so what you do is have storage such that you can survive a few bad years by gathering extra water in the good years. THIS IS BASIC. The Romans had this down to a science.
What the cities have been doing instead is pilfering the farmer's water to make up their own shortfall. They figure "oh the farmers use lots of water, why build more infrastructure when it's easier to just gank their water." Well fine... genius move... Farmers in Australia started literally... LITERALLY committing suicide when the local government started taking their water away. They were losing their family farms... and all because they couldn't get any water. And why? Because the cities didn't build water infrastructure that had been planned over 50 years prior to that point.
So why is food going up? Because politicians are dicking over farmers. It's the sort of short sighted penny wise and pound foolish thinking we've come to expect from the political class. They only think about the next election and never about planning for the future.
It's really pretty simple. If you want more food... grow more food. How do you grow more food? Provide what farmers need to grow food.
That is... fuel for farm equipment (unless you want to mobilize 60 percent of the labor force to do farm labor), oil for pesticides (unless you want upwards of 50 percent of all produce to be eaten by insects before it reaches market), fertilizer (unless you want farmers to use 80 percent more land and 80 percent more water), and of course... Water.
The cities need to stop stealing the farmer's water and politicians need to stop dicking with the fuel supply.
That or enjoy spiking food prices and global instability as large portions of the developing world start literally starving and things get really ugly.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's not the amount of food that's the problem (there's more than enough food for twice the wold population already), but the distribution.
Basically the population is decreasing (save for immigration) in the areas with surplus food production and increasing in areas that's already a long way past a sustainable food production.
So I doubt we'll see true food riots. We might see food mass migrations and we might see riots using food as an excuse, but not the hungry masses rising up.
I have no doubt that food will be an excuse for some riots. Usually riots seems to originate with groups of habitual criminals offended that the police are doing their job, and using either stupidities committed by the police or unsubstantiated rumors to cause a widespread reaction and turn it into a full riot and thus a free for all crime spree, complete with looting, arson and massive vandalism.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Much of the "green revolution" occurred because of extra energy input in the form of oil. Cheap oil allowed for the expansion of nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and mechanical harvesting. While the last two don't use an enormous amount of oil, the first does. As fossil fuels become more expensive, so does nitrogen based fertilizer.
So there is likely a limit to the ability of said revolution to feed the planet. And I'm ignoring other potential limiters such as water, salinization of croplands and many others.
According to a recent report on "feeding the world" on the economist, thanks to cheap fertilizer the limiting factor to crop productivity is no longer nitrogen, as it was for most of human history, nor so much land, but mainly water.
Look at how many of the world's great rivers hardly reach the ocean anymore because they are used so intensively, worry about how river flow becomes more seasonal when there is less perennial snow, and worry about the potential for conflict between countries that are upriver and those dowriver ( as an example).
We shouldn't be arguing about mass starvation and malthusian catastrophes. Nor is that what TFA is predicting: you don't need to get nearly that far for a tightening of food supply to have dangerous consequences. I don't think anyone seriously contests that the spike in food prices was a big factor in the recent unrest in the arab world...
And in all this the US, the world's largest corn producer, is currently burning 40% of it's corn production by putting 10% etanol in gas. Stopping this senseless waste would be a concrete step to ease the upward pressure on food prices, and the unpredictable consequences it can bring.
It's misguided because the farmland used to produce that grain could have produced food for human consumption, correct?
It's misguided because about 40% of the corn produced by the world's biggest corn producer, the USA, fills 10% of US car's gas tanks. Do the math. It just does not work. 40% of US corn production is enough to give a noticable upwards push to fuel prices worldwide, while the corresponding ethanol production is barely a blimp in the radar of world energy sources.
Strange. You know, as Dostoyevsky and others reiterated and echoed stories of power obtained by making the masses dependent upon a loaf of bread... I think they were on to something. I guess that makes our complex system theorists the naive ones? And as much as the U.S. has been bitching about socialism and communism, I see 99% of this country incapable of growing their own food or being self-susficient. Even the millionaires are the worse cases of intolerable, incompetent human beings who'd fall first as a fawn to a lion would. Oh, was Dostoyevsky not just speaking about Russia?
You are going to have much bigger problems than that before the end. ;)
Otherwise, why bother being so very protective?
We live on through our children.
I got more then a thousand pairs of shoes and they all got souls. Made from the finest baby leather, treated in the tears of their mothers. This nonsense we right-wingers are soulless must stop.
And as for that silly question you left-wingers keep asking: Will you state that you have stopped eating the unborn.
No I have not stopped doing that. Now stop squirming as a I rape your ass while you secretly still vote for me because one day you hope to be eating the unborn too.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Too Many People."
Personally I had a vasectomy once I'd had two children - that's one each to replace me and my partner. Me fathering any more would be irresponsible.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
What a depressing view of human potential. A child born may be a problem, true, but also has the potential to come up with any number of solutions. And, yes, how is an unsubstantiated claim that a whole swathe of people delimited by region and religion are 'not that intelligent' not racist?
Take a look at the facts instead. With decreasing poverty, overall birth rates tend to decrease, Arab countries included. Whilst war tends to increase birthrates and long term population densities.
Quick! Change all of our "Occupy Wall Street" banners to "Occupy McDonald's"!
"So lock-in your futures bids now to guarantee the biggest profits!!!"
May I welcome you, dear psychohistorians?
Conserve as much as possible so your fat-ass, lazy, consumerist neighbors can live in profligate comfort just a bit longer.
In our current steady state, I think you're right about the distribution, but that steady state isn't going to last much longer.
Over 40 MILLION Americans currently on food stamps.
Ben Bernanke debasing the currency to finance exorbitant federal deficits (QE1 and QE2 sparked the last round of soaring food prices).
Drought conditions potentially impacting this year's harvest.
What happens when the monthly food stamp allotment (or for that matter a SS check) will no longer provide enough for basic subsistence?
Consider the possibility of a war with Iran and its effect on oil prices coupled with the intimate relationship between food and petroleum products.
I think there will definitely be widespread civil unrest, and empty stomachs will be the precipitating factor.
From the article the two major reason for the price increase is speculation and ethanol production. Speculators like Golman Sachs in their best rent seeking way drive the price of food up. Futures was meant to protect producers and users. It was not meant to be use as a vehicle for rent seekers to make money. The politicians and regulators that Goldman Sachs owns will protect them while Goldman Sachs kill millions with their price manipulations.
...Malthus saw one iteration of a fixed-point solution to a resource allocation problem, and assumed it applied to *all* resource allocation problems. It doesn't. The mathematical model that these dire predictions are based on could benefit from a more game-theoretic approach. What is going to happen is the establishment of a series of Nash equilibria until our species lands on the right (read: optimal) strategy for resource allocation. Right now, a little under half the planet's food supply is produced in nations that account for less than a fifth of the planet's human population. These food producing nations are bound by extremely strong and resilient cultural, political, and social ties...you don't have to be John Nash to see where I'm going with this: there is no way in hell that humans aligned with these nations are going to suffer a food crisis under any new Nash equilibrium. Will there be food riots? Yes. Will they affect resource allocation? No. A new equilibrium will be established, and humanity will carry on.
Drink cheap beer instead... It's like they say, "There's food value in beer, but never beer value in food!" And it cures obesity. You'll never see a fat alcoholic!
I think we just found the Governor from The Walking Dead...
What a depressing view of human potential. A child born may be a problem, true, but also has the potential to come up with any number of solutions. And, yes, how is an unsubstantiated claim that a whole swathe of people delimited by region and religion are 'not that intelligent' not racist?
Take a look at the facts instead. With decreasing poverty, overall birth rates tend to decrease, Arab countries included. Whilst war tends to increase birthrates and long term population densities.
I won't even say children being born is a problem. They may be a "burden" on society and upon their families while they are young, learning, and may be unproductive compared to middle aged adults (using the term very broadly meaning somebody from the age of 20 to the age of 70, give or take a few years on each end of the age range), but you are correct that the potential of children to grow up and become a part of the solution to the problems posed by over population is something to consider as well.
The limiting factor for population growth really is, at least to me, freedom to choose or even freedom at its most basic level. It is the freedom to move from wherever you are to wherever you may like to be. The freedom to start a business and solve a problem that you see which you think will not only help your neighbors but also yourself. It is the freedom to do what you want, when you want, however you want. As long as you aren't harming your neighbors (yeah, that isn't an easy concept to nail down either... such is life), you shouldn't be prohibited from doing that.
I would dare say that those parts of the world where poverty is most rampant, where population pressures cause the most distress and seem to be the best candidates for a demonstration of Malthus' ideas are also the places in the world where the government is most oppressive, where people aren't even capable of posting a message on Slashdot not because of a lack of language skills, but because the government of that country won't even let the citizens express their opinion on line. In nearly every situation you can bring up, when the governments involved opened up and granted freedoms to their citizens in even the smallest degree, economic prosperity resulted and the country as a whole became much stronger... especially compared to its neighbors but also in terms of the ability of that country to deal with issues like poverty, disease, famine, and other major issues that can result from what seems on the outside to be a crushing population.
China is an excellent example, where for many generations there have been oppressive governments (before and after the Communist take-over) and ordinary citizens had little to do other than simply obey the local magistrate or party chief. People with advanced degrees in physics or engineering (particularly in the "Cultural Revolution") had their talents completely crushed under by being forced at gun point to work in rice paddies and manually plant the crops and to perform those tasks in the most inefficient manner possible. The fact that those folks even had degrees should be impressive at all, but it got worse under Mao than it had been earlier.... and that is saying quite a bit. It shouldn't be a wonder that with such inefficiencies and lack of respect for people that millions starved to death in China.
With the granting of economic freedoms in China and a general relaxed attitude toward political dissent (not up to western Europe standards, but far more tolerated than it w
I wasn't aware that one could make up facts to justify an argument:
"Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest food prices in Tunisia."
No, he "set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, in protest of the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation that he reported was inflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi
Steve Jobs made $1 in salary. Borrowed money using his stock options as collateral. Same with Zuckerburg and a bunch of others. The wealthy and rich do not make high incomes and when they do, they offset those high incomes with tax shelters normal pay check to pay check Americans can not afford.
Income taxes, especially when they involve tax credits to low earners, do nothing but discourage work and punish the middle class.
I'd like to see a law where corporations have to pay taxes at least 10x what they spend on lobbying. It is obscene that the GEs of this world spend more on payoffs to politicians then they put into the general fund.
You can't "water away" salinity, the rising water table _is_ the problem.
eg: Salinity in Australia
Sine the US grain belt exports 70% of the grain used to feed India and China, I suppose this puts us in a power position. Just what we need to fix our economy, get some demand-inflated prices for our largest and most important export. Everyone else can sit around blaming each other for overpopulating their country while we sit here self-sufficient at .312 billion. Glorious.
When gas prices first hit $4/gallon a few years ago I remember hearing a report on public radio about how the high gas prices were really hurting the public sector as their expense budgets didn't account for a huge price increase for fuel.
At the same time of this radio report, I was in my car watching a huge tractor-type mower mow a section of median that was maybe 1-2 ft. high with some kind of grass.
I thought to myself, why don't they just suspend mowing operations except where it's a visibility issue (intersections, etc), and then I thought -- why mow the median AT ALL? Why not just let it grow, die, etc.
In Minnesota alone we'd save big money on fuel, machinery costs and especially labor.
The only thing I could think of was that the mowing serves to keep nuisance brush (tree saplings, etc) from becoming a bigger maintenance issue. But then I figured it's less about that than basically a huge jobs program.
Malthus thought population would continue to increase geometrically forever. Turns out that's not true. For whatever reason, people, usually when they reach a certain economic level -- or increasingly even if they don't, drop their total fertility rate to 2, or even less.
So, far from overpopulation, we may be worrying about extinction due to people not caring enough to reproduce themselves in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Like Ptolemy explained planet movements?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Soylent Green!
So long as the few can make obscene amounts of money and increase the exertion of their power by manipulating
food prices and distribution, people will suffer. Those are the ONLY reasons that anyone goes hungry. It's simply not
in their (the power brokers) interest to waste resources distributing food to places where it's not going to make the
biggest profit, be it monetary or otherwise.
Here is wisdom: "Hope for the best, plan for the worst."
It's coming, you know...the worst.
It's on its way and nothing will stop it.
If you're caught unprepared or with your head in the sand, you have no one to blame but yourself.
People think my sig is just hyperbole. Wrong.
Reality WILL assert itself just in the way it wants, because that's what reality IS. Romney and Paul and and the CATO Institute and all the other instruments of the Koch brothers denial machine can tell all the lies they want;, it's still going to happen, and when it does, when that series of circumstances which was taken from very very very unlikely to very highly probable finally actually materializes, it will be, amongst other things the end of the " conservative movement".
If you think Saddam lived to see a loss of political and personal power, that's nothing compared to what's coming down the pike at American conservatives libertarians and Republicans and the subset of evolution-denying, science-denying Christians.
Think about this. Just the fact that we've been delayed in acting in light of a known reality by this specific easily identified portion of our electorate means something very significant which no one is really talking about. It means democracy has already failed.
There may be food riots next year or the year after, there may be forced rationing of food with price and wage controls; the weather may proceed monotonically from last year onwards moving only to equally bad or worse. The climate may get into a positive feedback loop where the oceans finally begin to give up the heat they've been sequestering as they begin to die taking the base of the food chain with it. No one really know how the powder keg is going to explode, but the fact that we CAN TELL that we are now inarguably in this precarious position, where our possible extinction is on the table at all, means that democracy has demonstrably failed.
Because deniers held sway, because we as a nation and a society were delayed in acting as a result of a failure in the political process, then by definition, democracy has failed to protect its citizens from the most depraved and criminal elements within it.
It has failed to keep it citizens safe and to sustain itself and the world into the future. That's what is true now.
What Obama and the CIA et. al,. need to do now, the most civilized and least disruptive thing to do, is throw enough elections so that Democrats control both houses in November. They then need to neutralize the terrorists' funding sources and remove those voices in our media and body politic who are leading the denial charge. Then a full scale economic Marshall Plan holding nothing in reserve needs to be undertaken in coordination with the rest of the world's nations, most of whom who have been ready to go for decades now.
We need to fund alternative energy sources and research until we've completed this moon shot, or died trying .
The voices of doubt and dissent need to be systematically crippled and silenced using any means that achieves that ends.
Nothing is unlawful now for the duly elected and lawfully empowered guardians of our national security because the United States is facing a mortal terrorist threat that makes 9-11 look like a Sunday picnic with the cast of the Andy Griffiths Show.
The President needs to suspend democracy and the usual laws that define it the same way Lincoln did, and act against the terrorists within this nation's borders unilaterally, decisively and without compunction.
He does not need to announce that he's doing this however.
It's not LIKE WW3; it's not analogous to WW3 it IS WWIII and this war is a total absolute war, with one final and binary outcome- either we stop them and deal with AGW through every means at our disposal, or they destroy human civilization for all time.
You have a choice. You can either signal to your President and your legislators that this is the worst thing ever to threaten humanity and you expect them to act accordingly, or you effectively let David and Charles Koch walk through your front door, point a pistol at the temple of your sleeping children and pull the trigger.
That's the choice you have. That's reality, whether you choose to face it or not.
Malthus's predictions were correct given the constraints he understood at the time. Namely that ag productivity was known, and that population would eventually outstrip it.
What's changed are some constants in the equation regarding ag productivity, largely as a result of fertilizers, pesticides, some improvements in crop productivity (through selective breeding and genetic modification), and mechanization. Improvements in transport and storage also mean vastly reduced wastage between field and table.
What has not changed is the fact that there remain limits to ag productivity. They're higher than Malthus predicted, but they remain -- there's only so much incoming solar energy per acre, only so much efficiency in plant conversion of this to edible food, only so much arable land, and larger limits on other inputs, most notably water.
We've also been practicing ag methods which, over time, tend to reduce, erode, diminish, and/or poison the soil. Especially in desert regions in which large amounts of irrigation water are applied to fertilized/pesticide-treated fields: the water evaporates leaving behind salts and residues.
A saying in ecology is "forests came before humans, deserts followed them". It's a very persistent pattern.
There are limits to population growth. We'll either manage our way beneath them, or, more likely, accommodate them in the usual way via the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, conquest, famine, and disease.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I wonder how far back scientific thought will be set back after this die-off?
Control = Rape
Alt = Pillage
Delete = Burn
simple
But in all seriousness, if this is to become a problem in the States, we have a few options, two of which come to mind:
1.) Reduce the population (birth control, 2-child policy, etc.) or
2.) Make the land more fertile
The first is what a fair number of people are clamoring for, and the second requires some intelligence. I have an experiment I'd like to run some day, of enclosing several acres of farm-land in an inexpensive plastic, ala a large green-house, to see if I cannot grow a full crop of some plant in the northern latitudes during the winter. I have a general idea of how it might work.
As we would then be controlling the environment, namely the climate, of this enclosed area, it might be easy to not only grow crops during the winter (and other seasons), but to greatly increase the yields in general. However, it may not do much for the local scenery. It is also possible that if the yields are large enough, and with some of the risk removed, we might be able to shrink our farm land usage.
I am John Hurt.
As they say there are two places to see a real genuine communist these days: 1. A theme park in Poland, 2. A western university humanities department.
I thought the Republican convention was on the list. Communism is where the leaders own everything (well, theoretically, the people do, but the people, in practice, have no say). Republicanism is where the business owners own the government, thus the leaders to own everything.
You are making the common mistake of equating the philosophy of communism with the actual model employed by the states that have called themselves communist.
Here's a tip: It's not the same thing. What the Republicans espouse is actually much closer (as I understand it) to fascism, in which the state and the corporations more or less merge.
Of course, that's a loaded term, too, and when you say it, you're not likely to have people understand what you actually mean; they'll just think you're calling the Republicans Nazis.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
"Have you every tried fighting a war while starving? "
FWIW, I've noticed my performance at paintball increases dramatically when on an empty stomach.
Fine. Now fast for three full days and nights before playing paintball and see if that increases your performance.
"An empty stomach" for a lower-middle-class or above person in the West is a very, very long way from "starving."
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Urbmon Monad, here we come...
Source?
Ned Ludd, is that you?
Mecanization is awesome for society. Just compare our living standards today with those in 1600.
Those people who "lose their jobs to the machines" become able to work in other areas, increasing the production of those areas. The net result is more production for the same effort. This is unambiguosly good.
Watching the news feeds from the Middle Eastern street in reaction to "Innocence of Mohammed" makes me think the Zombie Apocalypse is already here ...
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
I would've called it a wild guess.
Bees have been co-evolving with bacteria and fungi for millions of years in a battle to make a microbe-proof honey. The bees won.
They couldn't beat the humans, though! Die, bees! ....oops.