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NOAA Report: World Labor Capacity Dropping Because of Increased Temperatures
pigrabbitbear writes with a story about some interesting possible effects of Global Warming. From the article: "It's a good thing that robots are stealing our jobs, because in about thirty-five years, nobody in their right mind is going to want to do them. Scientists from NOAA just published a report ... that details how a warming climate impacts the way we work, and the results are pretty clear — we do less of it. NOAA discovered that over the last 60 years, the hotter, wetter climate has decreased human labor capacity by 10%. And it projects that by 2050, that number will double."
Apparently the US Army disagrees, because it's their research (amoungst others') on people's ability to work under heat stress that forms the basis for the model.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Dude, the difference is SLAVERY. All large civilizations are built on the backs of slaves...
Not, they aren't; it may be PC to say so, but it's just not true. No large modern civilization was built mainly on slavery, because slavery is just not efficient and productive enough. It's risky and expensive to educate slaves, so you can't build serious industrial capacity on slavery, their mobility as a workforce is minimal, you get lots of extra expenses for security, not to mention motivation.
Even in America, where slavery was much more prevalent and lasted more than in most other world powers, the productivity of the industrialized North (based mostly on immigrant labor) was far ahead of the productivity of the slave-owning South. Look at the 1850 census, especially here http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1850c-06.pdf (table CXCV, on page 11) to see how the gross manufacturing production of non-slaveholding states dwarfs the GP of slave-holding states. Though the difference isn't as great, the agricultural production (http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1850c-05.pdf) AND productivity was also larger in the North.
Of course, this doesn't mean the slaves didn't contribute, or had it easy, but, if you really want America to have been build on somebody's back, that back would belong to the immigrant laborer.