Most people become very wealthy when their investments, such as stocks, increase in value.
Where I live, Silicon Valley, many people get pretty wealthy because their house appreciated in value. "Pretty wealthy" in this context means fully owning an asset worth over $1 million. For a lot of people, this seems to be their retirement plan: retire, sell the house, and move somewhere where housing prices are vaguely sane.
I don't have any numbers to back that intuition. Do you know of any studies showing the net wealth of American households and what assets that wealth is in? I'd be curious to understand better.
I think the answer is to place tariffs on goods from other nations based on how workers are treated in those countries.
That's cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They don't pay their workers what you think they ought to so you cut off the market for their goods so they employ even fewer workers?
If you're trying to improve those workers' lots in life, that's working at cross purposes. "Here, we're going to subject you to some temporary hardship and difficulty but trust us, you'll appreciate the eventual outcome." I don't know about you friend but I wouldn't.
Many of their tricks to determine how much I will pay for a flight are morally questionable.
I'm sure there's an algorithm behind airline pricing. I'd love to know what it is. I'd love to just know what the inputs are, never mind what computation happens with those inputs.
Specifically, I assume the airlines have actually figured out that their obtuse pricing actually maximizes their revenue and profits. The odd prices must have some benefit (e.g. the plane is being repositioned so any seat they sell is a win). That being said, I find it difficult to envision how selling a ticket but not having a passenger use it could possibly cause any harm to Lufthansa. I don't see how Lufthansa offering a different ticket which the customer didn't buy is at all relevant. If you go that route, Lufthansa could require me to fly from Munich to Berlin as a requirement when I'm trying to get from San Francisco to Bangalore.
You believe they think a monopoly is even possible on ride hailing?
It's marxist dogma that all business people want and expect to get an eventual monopoly.
Is it possible? Sure, Lyft/Uber/Whoever just has to convince a legislature to grant them one. "We've decided to address the congestion issues in Manhattan by granting Uber an exclusive contract for ride-sharing services on the island (in exchange for letting us regulate their operations)." Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.
Do you mean, could Uber or Lyft get an effective monopoly (that is, over X% of the drivers and/or riders, where X might be anywhere from 60 to 99)? That's where I think Tim glossed over the point. The whole point of blitzscaling is the network effect. He mentioned it at the top but kinda dropped it after that. You blitzscale because you think you're operating in a market with a network effect. Ride sharing seems like that. Any given driver can really only have one app open at a time. If more drivers have Uber open, Uber riders will have shorter pickup times, so more riders will check the Uber app first. If there are more Uber riders, drivers will have shorter delays between rides so they'll make more cash. If Uber and Lyft started with a 50.1%/49.9% market split, I'd expect Uber to eventually crush Lyft, even if the services were identical.
Think about it. You're leaving the bar and need a ride. Do you really want to check two apps to see which driver will do the better job? Or would you much rather check one app so you can get on with peeing/throwing up/getting jiggy with the hot babe you just picked up? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, nix that last option.
So yes, It's possible Uber could become the defacto monopoly, just like Microsoft has a defacto monopoly on desktop computing. Sure, there are other products but no one is bothering to compete with them on just the desktop any more. Apple, for instance, competes with the entire ecosystem of iDevices and iSoftware so it's not like the competing products is just iOS and Windows 10.
Regarding monopoly status, I'm sure every business person wants to dominate their market. "Dominate", for the companies I've worked for, means have something like 60% market share or greater. That's get-a-book-written-about-you territory. I don't think anyone thinks they have a realistic shot of a 90+% market share, any more than anyone thinks they have a realistic shot of playing in the National Hockey League. Sure, you can try but you really ought to have a plan B.
Given how much attention is showered on near monopolies, my guess is many CEOs would just as soon have 60% market share with a bunch of ankle-biter competitors. That gets you most of the money with many fewer headaches. Sore ankles, perhaps.
Are you factoring in the fact that automation is already beginning to remove the need for manual labor, and is poised to advance rapidly in the next decades? Not to mention a great deal of intellectual labor - one of the reasons the pace of technological advances has increased so much.
I'm trying to. But I'm also not discounting the amount of manual labor is still required to get things done. Automating something can be really expensive and is only worth it if you're going to produce a lot of output (and the automation job is pretty simple). So for example, no one is automating me out of a before I retire, much as they've been threatening it since I started working (back when dinosaurs roamed the land).
That means much of the wealth currently being generated can continue to be generated going forward (though distributing it gets dicey), with minimal human involvement, vastly increasing the global productivity per man-hour.
Perhaps. I hope so. But I think keeping things running is still going to be harder than you anticipate. Take my Intel example. A state of the art fab is massively automated. It also employs hundreds to thousands of people and took tens of thousands to build. I'm sure gear breaks every day and all the automated machinery needs maintenance, adjustments, calibration, cleaning, whatever. It's still massively labor intensive and a much smaller population just won't be able to sustain that investment. And it's not like there are hundreds of these fabs in the world. Intel probably has what, 5-10 top of the line fabs? At most? Maybe, maybe there are 100 world wide making all the super cool chips you use every day. And an Intel fab makes one thing, processors. You can't repurpose it to do anything else. It's way too specialized for that. So no, it's not the gift which will keep on giving.
Maybe not to support your business unit, but are there really fewer than 100 such business units on the entire planet?
I think there are less than ten. We're quite specialized.
It's not like we'd be left in the dark ages just because of us. It would just become more expensive to run computer systems because you'd have less efficient backups. It's quite trivial in the grand scheme of things but that's my point. With so many people, we can afford to do very, very narrowly focused things and that's why we're rich. The more we specialize, the more efficient and productive we become, and that is what leads to growing prosperity. With dramatically fewer people, we son't be able to specialize nearly as much and global productivity (output per hour worked, not total output) will plummet.
Thanos was completely wrong, economically speaking. If a society is struggling, what it needs is more people, not fewer.
Oh, I forgot to add. I think this is mindless speculation. If our population drops and it causes problems, we'll react fast enough to correct it.
I couldn't get to the source data so I don't know what supports the 99% drop number and what timeframe we're talking about. Let's assume that's 200 years from now, basically infinitely far in the future as far as predicting human behavior is concerned. That's about 7 generations (just under 30 years each, which is a hair generous). To drop to.01, that means we need the seventh root of.01, which turns out to be about 1 child per couple. That's not what real people tend to choose, real people tend to choose two (and by "real people" I mean "billions of couples around the globe who are reasonably sure their children will survive and who have access to cheap and effective birth control").
So, is a 99% reduction impossible? Well, not as impossible as it might seem. I just think it's vanishingly improbable, enough so that I'll worry about meteor strikes first.
I think many markets will become so niche that they're not going to be worth the fixed costs. For example, I work on disk-based storage solutions for secondary storage. That's ridiculously specialized. I have no doubt that with 1% of the world population, there wouldn't be enough of a market to support my business unit. You just couldn't support all the engineers working on the product.
I'm quite sure that will happen to zillions of other products. I know it's fashionable to decry the excess of choice we have. I'm with you, I loathe walking into a store and being bewildered by 50 types of toothpaste (and, as it turns out, psychologists can measure this effect). Don't let that blind you to the benefit having so many products tuned to your exact needs. Do you really need 1000 kinds of bathroom tile? No, of course not. Are you (or your spouse) pleased by it? I don't know about you pal but mine sure is.
To take another example, 3D printing. You suggest that will cushion us. We'll all just email around car part schematics and print vehicles in our garage. "Car,
roadster, smokin' hot". It's not going to happen. 3D printing now is a niche, expensive way to product generally inferior parts, quickly. No one 3D prints parts in bulk if they can possibly avoid it. It's going to take a ton of time and effort (from non-existent people) to make it into the general purpose replicator you're thinking of. But we won't be able to afford it. We're going to be so busy slowly and inefficiently building houses, we won't have time or energy to tinker with 3D printers. Never mind I don't even know we'll still have an internet with that few people--who's going to build out the infrastructure and keep it working? Magic network elves?)
Anyway, I think it's all about fixed and marginal costs. Many products and services are only worth providing if the market is huge (so you can amortize the fixed costs). A lot of the products you use and enjoy just won't be worth the investment. And I am not nearly as optimistic as you are that we'll keep the level of technology we have. Like I said, Intel won't build another $10 billion fab. Eventually their current fabs will wear out and break and there won't be any suppliers to replace the parts (because there just isn't enough of a market). Slowly much of our current production will crumble.
I agree, we won't go back to 1819. There's a lot we know now which you can't take away, like knowing the germ theory of disease. Wash your hands with soap and mothers won't die after childbirth. Pretty simple, very cheap, and as long as we don't forget, we'll have that forever. We know relativity, we know the periodic table (although I doubt we'll be able to isolate all the elements for long). So things will be better than before, just not nearly as good as they are now.
Every major corporation on Earth was once 1/100th of it's current size and thriving.
They were also doing quite a bit less than they do today. Do you really think we'd have as many models of cars or laptops as we do today for a much smaller market? For that matter, do you think we'd be able to afford to develop 5G networks, Teslas, or Netflix Originals with a 100x smaller market?
My completely uninformed and unsupported guess is incomes for the richest people (that's you and me) would fall by at least 10x, probably more. The effects would be less pronounced the lower you go on the income scale, down to the poorest of the poor. They'd probably not notice much since they basically don't have any commerce (except that's not true, every time I see pictures of the poorest people, they're wearing machine-woven clothes, not homespun).
Even a 99% reduction in population from current levels wouldn't be real a problem
You think so? How many companies are going to survive having their market reduced by 99%? Most of the ones I've worked for are terrified of sales going down by just 10%.
I think reduction of 99% would be catastrophic. We'd basically go back to a 18th century lifestyle. I, for one, don't fancy riding a horse everywhere.
People might not change but their environment surely does. Up until recently, most humans lived in mud huts and were one poor harvest away from starving to death. Half their children died before age 5. And by "recently" I mean 50-100 years ago, compared to 10,000 years of recorded history.
Compare that to today. About a billion people today live in dire poverty, out of 7 billion. A billion people is a lot but having "only" one seventh of our population in that situation is revolutionary. We've never been this wealthy or healthy, historically speaking. And being healthy and wealthy definitely changes how you behave.
Please don't misinterpret me. I'm not saying six billion people are living in McMansions and have trouble deciding which sports car to drive to work. Most of the world is still pretty poor compared to my neighborhood in California. All I'm saying is they're much better off than the subsistence farmers throughout most of human history.
I just read a paragraph by Hans Rosling where he quotes an Indian UN representative as essentially pounding the table saying you can't talk about CO2 emissions, you have to talk about it per-capita. The absolute numbers can be quite misleading.
The context was a climate discussion talking about reducing carbon dioxide emissions per country and India, with a rapidly growing population and growing economy would up looking quite bad in historical comparisons but great on current numbers. Can't say he's wrong although we also really care about the CO2 per Earth atmosphere.
No single allegedly Euronorm 4 compliant Diesel comes close to the emission limits set by the standard during normal operation,
I've heard this sort of comment a zillion times but never with any actual numbers to give it context. Do you know what the Euronorm 4 levels are, what levels of emissions some of the German Diesels had, and how that compares to typical city air or some other relevant standard?
I see two general cases. One, the standard was impossibly high and well past the level of diminishing health returns. The other is the standard was quite reasonable and the diesels really did emit enough pollution to cause health affects. Neither case justifies lying about it, mind you, I just want to know what the actual expected health effects were. I'm frustrated no one seems to put the actual emissions into context with something real (as opposed to a legal standard, which may or may not mean anything).
Full disclosure: I owned a VW Diesel Passat and turned it in as part of the Dieselgate scandal. It's too bad, I really liked driving it. I personally never noticed any emissions but I never sniffed the tailpipe while cruising (at 50 MPG) on the freeway.
I have the same response to people trying to save mosquitoes from genetically engineered extinction.
There's 600,000 people on one side of the trolley track, a swarm of annoying bloodsuckers on the other, and we keep letting the trolley run over the people.
Generally speaking, I'm fine with exterminating mosquitoes, hopefully in an extremely painful way. However, we've seen time and again that when we introduce or destroy a species from an area, there are unexpected consequences. I think it behooves us to be a bit more humble before just going out with flamethrowers or gene drives.
To be more specific, perhaps there's a way to just kill the malaria parasite without killing the mosquitoes. And perhaps there is some critter which eats the mosquitoes who we'd adversely affect. Or there's some critter who's numbers are kept in check by malaria infestations. Or there's some reason humans need the occasional malaria infection to keep our immune system from attacking us. These are just the questions I can think up. I'm sure the biologists involved can come up with a hundred better questions.
All the societal impacts aside, fiddling with the human genome, when we BARELY understand how this stuff works seems like a really dangerous idea.
We understand the CRISPR mechanism in great detail. It's simple and reliable (relatively speaking). My Cal-student daughter uses CRISPR in her lab experiments. I'm astounded by this but there you are.
What we don't really understand, and what Egli is trying to figure out, is how reliable this is in an embryo and whether it actually works to correct gene defects. I'm surprised he's doing this in human embryos instead of some other organism but I'm willing to trust he has his reasons. I personally don't know if we've shown this concept works in, say, pigs or rabbits. Or zebrafish, everyone's favorite biological model organism.
I heard and interview with Egli. It sounds like he's proceeding the right way. He's not being secretive and he's run his experiments past various review panels ahead of time. I'm sure they've thought of all these objections already and trust he had compelling answers.
Adverse effects (usually around one in a million for most vaccines for severe adverse reactions, one in ten for most mild ones). Correlation here is risk calculation and game theory, not "stupid parents".
First of all, remind yourself that wealthy parents in upper middle class tend to have only one child. That means that "all their eggs are in one basket".
I think it's closer to two children but that doesn't really change your point. Both rug rats are precious snowflakes.
What I think is missing is the alternative risk. Say there's a one in a million risk for a serous complication (I have no idea whether that's correct and what the complication might be. I do know autism isn't one of the possible complications.) What are the chances of getting measles without the vaccine? Apparently slightly higher than one in a million because we have more than 300 cases in Washington alone.
Given that measles can kill you, I'm not sure it's all that clear cut that your snowflakes are safer without the shot.
There's a class of people that are smarter than the US average, yet still rather stupid and arrogantly over-confident from an actually smart point of view.
Psychologists have studied this and I was just reading about it a week or so ago (but lost the reference--I hate getting old.) Basically, there's a negative correlation between how much you know and how much you think you know. In other words, the less you know about a topic, the more you tend to believe you know a lot about it and believe you can make accurate judgments.
That sounds like what's going on here. Affluent people tend to think they know a lot about a lot of topics. In the case of vaccines, they actually don't and don't even realize they don't.
Beware this pitfall yourself. It's useful to question how much you actually know about something and why you think that.
The Enron disaster didn't occur because of "government price fix". It all blew up because Enron was manipulating markets after deregulation.
I never followed the details of Enron all that carefully. IIRC, the California electricity market blew up because California regulated the rates PG&E (etc.) could sell electricity but deregulated the rates at which they could buy it. Wholesale prices went up (that's where Enron fits in) and the electric companies took a bath.
( Side story... crazy eco-terrorists have destroyed Papaya crops in Hawaii due to their ignorance on the topic. )
That's sad. We need the same thing for Cavendish (sp?) bananas. Either that or we need to realize having vast crop monocultures is a risky proposition. In most years, it works out great (good, consistent yields which meet consumer's simplistic views of what "banana" means). Every now and again it's an over-the-cliff-disaster. But that's the conversation to have: we have a papaya crop, it's extremely vulnerable to this pest, how do we want to address it? Grow more papaya varieties? Chemical anti-fungals? GMO papayas? Just give up on ever having a good jerk chicken again?
The largest issue with GM crops right now is the modification itself. Its highly unlikely the gene that coveys resistance to âoeround-upâ is dangerous.... what is dangerous is dumping hundreds of tons of round-up herbicide on everything!!
I assume you missed a "not" in there, specifically "...is not the modification...
If so, well done. I wish other people were more specific about what exactly is the problem they're trying to solve. I concur, the Round Up ready corn is certainly no more or less healthy and nutritious than non-Round Up ready corn, and that the real issue is whether spraying more Round Up on corn fields is a good idea (assuming that's in fact what happens, which I don't actually know).
I was talking with my brother yesterday and he was telling me about the four Mayan Philosophies. One is "do not make assumptions". In other words, question what you know and be clear what you know, what you believe, and why you believe it. Question whether the things you know could be wrong. And don't assume someone who disagrees with you is vile and evil. They are most likely good people who believe different things from you. Why might that be? See if you can imagine what set of facts might lead them to act the way they do.
We just need an approval committee for GM work.
Be careful with that. Think for a second how likely are these two scenarios:
The committee is filled with honest, clear-eyed, altruistic individuals who just want to determine what will be best for all involved (however hard that is to determine), or
The committee is filled with people who have an agenda and interests and will push to further those interests (because determining the global best path is impossibly hard anyway). Remember also the article which spurred this conversation.
Further, name me one regulatory body which behaves like the first instead of the second. Just one, please.
Smug fake-science Monsanto shills sneer "nah nah, you're a stupid-pants!!" at everyone who doesn't want to poison themselves and damage the environment with dangerous frankenfoods
I would really like to see your results of a quiz on GMOs. No offense but you sound like a poster child for the people the article is writing about. It would be very interesting to see whether you really know a lot about GMOs and have an informed opinion, or whether you know much less than you think and are parroting positions shared by your tribe.
So in the interest of science, just how much do you know about GMOs and how do you know how much you know, and where do you think you land on the spectrum of "know nothing" to "invented CRISPR and publish papers on GMOs"?
Let me see if I can answer. I think I know a moderate amount. There is a ton I don't understand, in the science, the practical effects of using GMOs, and the politics. I think I can articulate the major benefits and downsides along the spectrum of industrial farming with GMOs to traditional breeding to organic naturally-occurring foods. I also have a pro-GMO bias because my daughter is studying plant biology at UC Berkeley and would like to work with the group which invented CRIPSR (truth be told, I was thrilled she chose this field so I was pro-GMO even before she enrolled). I get most of my knowledge by reading articles on-line, trying to avoid the popular media but also not digging into actual academic articles.
Unfortunately the "experts" sometimes have a financial incentive to "know" what they claim is true.
What's that quote? The hardest thing to do it convince someone of something that's in their interest to not believe. Something like that.
IOW, if I have some stake in believing something, it's very hard to convince me otherwise. The stake might be financial, political, tribal, self-image, pride, or any number of things. Basically, humans are nowhere as rational as we want to tell ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people become very wealthy when their investments, such as stocks, increase in value.
Where I live, Silicon Valley, many people get pretty wealthy because their house appreciated in value. "Pretty wealthy" in this context means fully owning an asset worth over $1 million. For a lot of people, this seems to be their retirement plan: retire, sell the house, and move somewhere where housing prices are vaguely sane.
I don't have any numbers to back that intuition. Do you know of any studies showing the net wealth of American households and what assets that wealth is in? I'd be curious to understand better.
I think the answer is to place tariffs on goods from other nations based on how workers are treated in those countries.
That's cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They don't pay their workers what you think they ought to so you cut off the market for their goods so they employ even fewer workers?
If you're trying to improve those workers' lots in life, that's working at cross purposes. "Here, we're going to subject you to some temporary hardship and difficulty but trust us, you'll appreciate the eventual outcome." I don't know about you friend but I wouldn't.
Many of their tricks to determine how much I will pay for a flight are morally questionable.
I'm sure there's an algorithm behind airline pricing. I'd love to know what it is. I'd love to just know what the inputs are, never mind what computation happens with those inputs.
Specifically, I assume the airlines have actually figured out that their obtuse pricing actually maximizes their revenue and profits. The odd prices must have some benefit (e.g. the plane is being repositioned so any seat they sell is a win). That being said, I find it difficult to envision how selling a ticket but not having a passenger use it could possibly cause any harm to Lufthansa. I don't see how Lufthansa offering a different ticket which the customer didn't buy is at all relevant. If you go that route, Lufthansa could require me to fly from Munich to Berlin as a requirement when I'm trying to get from San Francisco to Bangalore.
Airlines build a pricing system that enables this sort of behavior then blames the customer for using it?
I'm trying to figure out how suing your customers is ever going to be a winning business strategy.
I'm favorably inclined toward Lufthansa but someone needs to be hit by a giant foam cluebat.
You believe they think a monopoly is even possible on ride hailing?
It's marxist dogma that all business people want and expect to get an eventual monopoly.
Is it possible? Sure, Lyft/Uber/Whoever just has to convince a legislature to grant them one. "We've decided to address the congestion issues in Manhattan by granting Uber an exclusive contract for ride-sharing services on the island (in exchange for letting us regulate their operations)." Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.
Do you mean, could Uber or Lyft get an effective monopoly (that is, over X% of the drivers and/or riders, where X might be anywhere from 60 to 99)? That's where I think Tim glossed over the point. The whole point of blitzscaling is the network effect. He mentioned it at the top but kinda dropped it after that. You blitzscale because you think you're operating in a market with a network effect. Ride sharing seems like that. Any given driver can really only have one app open at a time. If more drivers have Uber open, Uber riders will have shorter pickup times, so more riders will check the Uber app first. If there are more Uber riders, drivers will have shorter delays between rides so they'll make more cash. If Uber and Lyft started with a 50.1%/49.9% market split, I'd expect Uber to eventually crush Lyft, even if the services were identical.
Think about it. You're leaving the bar and need a ride. Do you really want to check two apps to see which driver will do the better job? Or would you much rather check one app so you can get on with peeing/throwing up/getting jiggy with the hot babe you just picked up? Oh wait, this is Slashdot, nix that last option.
So yes, It's possible Uber could become the defacto monopoly, just like Microsoft has a defacto monopoly on desktop computing. Sure, there are other products but no one is bothering to compete with them on just the desktop any more. Apple, for instance, competes with the entire ecosystem of iDevices and iSoftware so it's not like the competing products is just iOS and Windows 10.
Regarding monopoly status, I'm sure every business person wants to dominate their market. "Dominate", for the companies I've worked for, means have something like 60% market share or greater. That's get-a-book-written-about-you territory. I don't think anyone thinks they have a realistic shot of a 90+% market share, any more than anyone thinks they have a realistic shot of playing in the National Hockey League. Sure, you can try but you really ought to have a plan B.
Given how much attention is showered on near monopolies, my guess is many CEOs would just as soon have 60% market share with a bunch of ankle-biter competitors. That gets you most of the money with many fewer headaches. Sore ankles, perhaps.
Are you factoring in the fact that automation is already beginning to remove the need for manual labor, and is poised to advance rapidly in the next decades? Not to mention a great deal of intellectual labor - one of the reasons the pace of technological advances has increased so much.
I'm trying to. But I'm also not discounting the amount of manual labor is still required to get things done. Automating something can be really expensive and is only worth it if you're going to produce a lot of output (and the automation job is pretty simple). So for example, no one is automating me out of a before I retire, much as they've been threatening it since I started working (back when dinosaurs roamed the land).
That means much of the wealth currently being generated can continue to be generated going forward (though distributing it gets dicey), with minimal human involvement, vastly increasing the global productivity per man-hour.
Perhaps. I hope so. But I think keeping things running is still going to be harder than you anticipate. Take my Intel example. A state of the art fab is massively automated. It also employs hundreds to thousands of people and took tens of thousands to build. I'm sure gear breaks every day and all the automated machinery needs maintenance, adjustments, calibration, cleaning, whatever. It's still massively labor intensive and a much smaller population just won't be able to sustain that investment. And it's not like there are hundreds of these fabs in the world. Intel probably has what, 5-10 top of the line fabs? At most? Maybe, maybe there are 100 world wide making all the super cool chips you use every day. And an Intel fab makes one thing, processors. You can't repurpose it to do anything else. It's way too specialized for that. So no, it's not the gift which will keep on giving.
Maybe not to support your business unit, but are there really fewer than 100 such business units on the entire planet?
I think there are less than ten. We're quite specialized.
It's not like we'd be left in the dark ages just because of us. It would just become more expensive to run computer systems because you'd have less efficient backups. It's quite trivial in the grand scheme of things but that's my point. With so many people, we can afford to do very, very narrowly focused things and that's why we're rich. The more we specialize, the more efficient and productive we become, and that is what leads to growing prosperity. With dramatically fewer people, we son't be able to specialize nearly as much and global productivity (output per hour worked, not total output) will plummet.
Thanos was completely wrong, economically speaking. If a society is struggling, what it needs is more people, not fewer.
Oh, I forgot to add. I think this is mindless speculation. If our population drops and it causes problems, we'll react fast enough to correct it.
I couldn't get to the source data so I don't know what supports the 99% drop number and what timeframe we're talking about. Let's assume that's 200 years from now, basically infinitely far in the future as far as predicting human behavior is concerned. That's about 7 generations (just under 30 years each, which is a hair generous). To drop to .01, that means we need the seventh root of .01, which turns out to be about 1 child per couple. That's not what real people tend to choose, real people tend to choose two (and by "real people" I mean "billions of couples around the globe who are reasonably sure their children will survive and who have access to cheap and effective birth control").
So, is a 99% reduction impossible? Well, not as impossible as it might seem. I just think it's vanishingly improbable, enough so that I'll worry about meteor strikes first.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree.
I think many markets will become so niche that they're not going to be worth the fixed costs. For example, I work on disk-based storage solutions for secondary storage. That's ridiculously specialized. I have no doubt that with 1% of the world population, there wouldn't be enough of a market to support my business unit. You just couldn't support all the engineers working on the product.
I'm quite sure that will happen to zillions of other products. I know it's fashionable to decry the excess of choice we have. I'm with you, I loathe walking into a store and being bewildered by 50 types of toothpaste (and, as it turns out, psychologists can measure this effect). Don't let that blind you to the benefit having so many products tuned to your exact needs. Do you really need 1000 kinds of bathroom tile? No, of course not. Are you (or your spouse) pleased by it? I don't know about you pal but mine sure is.
To take another example, 3D printing. You suggest that will cushion us. We'll all just email around car part schematics and print vehicles in our garage. "Car, roadster, smokin' hot". It's not going to happen. 3D printing now is a niche, expensive way to product generally inferior parts, quickly. No one 3D prints parts in bulk if they can possibly avoid it. It's going to take a ton of time and effort (from non-existent people) to make it into the general purpose replicator you're thinking of. But we won't be able to afford it. We're going to be so busy slowly and inefficiently building houses, we won't have time or energy to tinker with 3D printers. Never mind I don't even know we'll still have an internet with that few people--who's going to build out the infrastructure and keep it working? Magic network elves?)
Anyway, I think it's all about fixed and marginal costs. Many products and services are only worth providing if the market is huge (so you can amortize the fixed costs). A lot of the products you use and enjoy just won't be worth the investment. And I am not nearly as optimistic as you are that we'll keep the level of technology we have. Like I said, Intel won't build another $10 billion fab. Eventually their current fabs will wear out and break and there won't be any suppliers to replace the parts (because there just isn't enough of a market). Slowly much of our current production will crumble.
I agree, we won't go back to 1819. There's a lot we know now which you can't take away, like knowing the germ theory of disease. Wash your hands with soap and mothers won't die after childbirth. Pretty simple, very cheap, and as long as we don't forget, we'll have that forever. We know relativity, we know the periodic table (although I doubt we'll be able to isolate all the elements for long). So things will be better than before, just not nearly as good as they are now.
Every major corporation on Earth was once 1/100th of it's current size and thriving.
They were also doing quite a bit less than they do today. Do you really think we'd have as many models of cars or laptops as we do today for a much smaller market? For that matter, do you think we'd be able to afford to develop 5G networks, Teslas, or Netflix Originals with a 100x smaller market?
My completely uninformed and unsupported guess is incomes for the richest people (that's you and me) would fall by at least 10x, probably more. The effects would be less pronounced the lower you go on the income scale, down to the poorest of the poor. They'd probably not notice much since they basically don't have any commerce (except that's not true, every time I see pictures of the poorest people, they're wearing machine-woven clothes, not homespun).
Even a 99% reduction in population from current levels wouldn't be real a problem
You think so? How many companies are going to survive having their market reduced by 99%? Most of the ones I've worked for are terrified of sales going down by just 10%.
I think reduction of 99% would be catastrophic. We'd basically go back to a 18th century lifestyle. I, for one, don't fancy riding a horse everywhere.
People don't change.
People might not change but their environment surely does. Up until recently, most humans lived in mud huts and were one poor harvest away from starving to death. Half their children died before age 5. And by "recently" I mean 50-100 years ago, compared to 10,000 years of recorded history.
Compare that to today. About a billion people today live in dire poverty, out of 7 billion. A billion people is a lot but having "only" one seventh of our population in that situation is revolutionary. We've never been this wealthy or healthy, historically speaking. And being healthy and wealthy definitely changes how you behave.
Please don't misinterpret me. I'm not saying six billion people are living in McMansions and have trouble deciding which sports car to drive to work. Most of the world is still pretty poor compared to my neighborhood in California. All I'm saying is they're much better off than the subsistence farmers throughout most of human history.
I just read a paragraph by Hans Rosling where he quotes an Indian UN representative as essentially pounding the table saying you can't talk about CO2 emissions, you have to talk about it per-capita. The absolute numbers can be quite misleading.
The context was a climate discussion talking about reducing carbon dioxide emissions per country and India, with a rapidly growing population and growing economy would up looking quite bad in historical comparisons but great on current numbers. Can't say he's wrong although we also really care about the CO2 per Earth atmosphere.
No single allegedly Euronorm 4 compliant Diesel comes close to the emission limits set by the standard during normal operation,
I've heard this sort of comment a zillion times but never with any actual numbers to give it context. Do you know what the Euronorm 4 levels are, what levels of emissions some of the German Diesels had, and how that compares to typical city air or some other relevant standard?
I see two general cases. One, the standard was impossibly high and well past the level of diminishing health returns. The other is the standard was quite reasonable and the diesels really did emit enough pollution to cause health affects. Neither case justifies lying about it, mind you, I just want to know what the actual expected health effects were. I'm frustrated no one seems to put the actual emissions into context with something real (as opposed to a legal standard, which may or may not mean anything).
Full disclosure: I owned a VW Diesel Passat and turned it in as part of the Dieselgate scandal. It's too bad, I really liked driving it. I personally never noticed any emissions but I never sniffed the tailpipe while cruising (at 50 MPG) on the freeway.
Two words: gamma rays.
Works every time. Except when it kills you.
I have the same response to people trying to save mosquitoes from genetically engineered extinction.
There's 600,000 people on one side of the trolley track, a swarm of annoying bloodsuckers on the other, and we keep letting the trolley run over the people.
Generally speaking, I'm fine with exterminating mosquitoes, hopefully in an extremely painful way. However, we've seen time and again that when we introduce or destroy a species from an area, there are unexpected consequences. I think it behooves us to be a bit more humble before just going out with flamethrowers or gene drives.
To be more specific, perhaps there's a way to just kill the malaria parasite without killing the mosquitoes. And perhaps there is some critter which eats the mosquitoes who we'd adversely affect. Or there's some critter who's numbers are kept in check by malaria infestations. Or there's some reason humans need the occasional malaria infection to keep our immune system from attacking us. These are just the questions I can think up. I'm sure the biologists involved can come up with a hundred better questions.
All the societal impacts aside, fiddling with the human genome, when we BARELY understand how this stuff works seems like a really dangerous idea.
We understand the CRISPR mechanism in great detail. It's simple and reliable (relatively speaking). My Cal-student daughter uses CRISPR in her lab experiments. I'm astounded by this but there you are.
What we don't really understand, and what Egli is trying to figure out, is how reliable this is in an embryo and whether it actually works to correct gene defects. I'm surprised he's doing this in human embryos instead of some other organism but I'm willing to trust he has his reasons. I personally don't know if we've shown this concept works in, say, pigs or rabbits. Or zebrafish, everyone's favorite biological model organism.
I heard and interview with Egli. It sounds like he's proceeding the right way. He's not being secretive and he's run his experiments past various review panels ahead of time. I'm sure they've thought of all these objections already and trust he had compelling answers.
Birth is 100% fatal (well except for 7 billion exceptions but just wait).
Adverse effects (usually around one in a million for most vaccines for severe adverse reactions, one in ten for most mild ones). Correlation here is risk calculation and game theory, not "stupid parents".
First of all, remind yourself that wealthy parents in upper middle class tend to have only one child. That means that "all their eggs are in one basket".
I think it's closer to two children but that doesn't really change your point. Both rug rats are precious snowflakes.
What I think is missing is the alternative risk. Say there's a one in a million risk for a serous complication (I have no idea whether that's correct and what the complication might be. I do know autism isn't one of the possible complications.) What are the chances of getting measles without the vaccine? Apparently slightly higher than one in a million because we have more than 300 cases in Washington alone.
Given that measles can kill you, I'm not sure it's all that clear cut that your snowflakes are safer without the shot.
There's a class of people that are smarter than the US average, yet still rather stupid and arrogantly over-confident from an actually smart point of view.
Psychologists have studied this and I was just reading about it a week or so ago (but lost the reference--I hate getting old.) Basically, there's a negative correlation between how much you know and how much you think you know. In other words, the less you know about a topic, the more you tend to believe you know a lot about it and believe you can make accurate judgments.
That sounds like what's going on here. Affluent people tend to think they know a lot about a lot of topics. In the case of vaccines, they actually don't and don't even realize they don't.
Beware this pitfall yourself. It's useful to question how much you actually know about something and why you think that.
The Enron disaster didn't occur because of "government price fix". It all blew up because Enron was manipulating markets after deregulation.
I never followed the details of Enron all that carefully. IIRC, the California electricity market blew up because California regulated the rates PG&E (etc.) could sell electricity but deregulated the rates at which they could buy it. Wholesale prices went up (that's where Enron fits in) and the electric companies took a bath.
( Side story... crazy eco-terrorists have destroyed Papaya crops in Hawaii due to their ignorance on the topic. )
That's sad. We need the same thing for Cavendish (sp?) bananas. Either that or we need to realize having vast crop monocultures is a risky proposition. In most years, it works out great (good, consistent yields which meet consumer's simplistic views of what "banana" means). Every now and again it's an over-the-cliff-disaster. But that's the conversation to have: we have a papaya crop, it's extremely vulnerable to this pest, how do we want to address it? Grow more papaya varieties? Chemical anti-fungals? GMO papayas? Just give up on ever having a good jerk chicken again?
The largest issue with GM crops right now is the modification itself. Its highly unlikely the gene that coveys resistance to âoeround-upâ is dangerous.... what is dangerous is dumping hundreds of tons of round-up herbicide on everything!!
I assume you missed a "not" in there, specifically "...is not the modification...
If so, well done. I wish other people were more specific about what exactly is the problem they're trying to solve. I concur, the Round Up ready corn is certainly no more or less healthy and nutritious than non-Round Up ready corn, and that the real issue is whether spraying more Round Up on corn fields is a good idea (assuming that's in fact what happens, which I don't actually know).
I was talking with my brother yesterday and he was telling me about the four Mayan Philosophies. One is "do not make assumptions". In other words, question what you know and be clear what you know, what you believe, and why you believe it. Question whether the things you know could be wrong. And don't assume someone who disagrees with you is vile and evil. They are most likely good people who believe different things from you. Why might that be? See if you can imagine what set of facts might lead them to act the way they do.
We just need an approval committee for GM work.
Be careful with that. Think for a second how likely are these two scenarios:
Further, name me one regulatory body which behaves like the first instead of the second. Just one, please.
Article summarized:
Smug fake-science Monsanto shills sneer "nah nah, you're a stupid-pants!!" at everyone who doesn't want to poison themselves and damage the environment with dangerous frankenfoods
I would really like to see your results of a quiz on GMOs. No offense but you sound like a poster child for the people the article is writing about. It would be very interesting to see whether you really know a lot about GMOs and have an informed opinion, or whether you know much less than you think and are parroting positions shared by your tribe.
So in the interest of science, just how much do you know about GMOs and how do you know how much you know, and where do you think you land on the spectrum of "know nothing" to "invented CRISPR and publish papers on GMOs"?
Let me see if I can answer. I think I know a moderate amount. There is a ton I don't understand, in the science, the practical effects of using GMOs, and the politics. I think I can articulate the major benefits and downsides along the spectrum of industrial farming with GMOs to traditional breeding to organic naturally-occurring foods. I also have a pro-GMO bias because my daughter is studying plant biology at UC Berkeley and would like to work with the group which invented CRIPSR (truth be told, I was thrilled she chose this field so I was pro-GMO even before she enrolled). I get most of my knowledge by reading articles on-line, trying to avoid the popular media but also not digging into actual academic articles.
Unfortunately the "experts" sometimes have a financial incentive to "know" what they claim is true.
What's that quote? The hardest thing to do it convince someone of something that's in their interest to not believe. Something like that.
IOW, if I have some stake in believing something, it's very hard to convince me otherwise. The stake might be financial, political, tribal, self-image, pride, or any number of things. Basically, humans are nowhere as rational as we want to tell ourselves.