The whole "carbon credit" trading scheme has already proven totally shady, since it's a carte blanche license to pollute.
It would probably work great if there was one global program. But without universal participation, a more aggressive standard will only penalize participants, while rewarding outsiders. Faking it and putting in-place a system that does nothing is the only option.
If the taxpayers are footing the bill, then the taxpayers have a right to know their money is being spent on the things they approved it to be spent on.
But this feel-good tactic is completely WRONG. Primarily because a voucher system gives the recipient NO INCENTIVE to find ways to SAVE money on some or all of those (rent being the biggest). Just start with a basic income that is slightly LOWER than the average cost of those voucher programs, and if recipients find a way to save enough money on their necessities that they can afford cable TV, then good for them, nobody is being harmed and it might even help the economy.
In addition, the basic income eliminates the risk of fraud, and eliminates all that administrative overhead involved in administering and policing the voucher system.
housing has extremely inelastic supply in many areas, especially in areas where people want to live.
Most people choose to live in expensive areas ONLY because they MUST to get a good-paying job, not because they really "want to." With a large enough basic income, many people will be happy to quit their jobs and move somewhere much cheaper. We see this pattern repeated quite frequently with retirees. A basic income would just extend the behavior to younger people who were working hard but barely getting ahead.
His apology was insincere and passive aggressive, ala. "I'm sorry I can't prove you wrong right now."
His "sorry not sorry" came right after he just finished calling me "arrogant as hell", saying I "know Jack Shit", etc.
And this after I bothered to type-up a page-long rebuttal in reply to his flippant one-liners, including lots of information for his benefit, which he proceeded to dismiss out-of-hand.
Happy birthday IMDB! You've done more than any other site on the internet to convince me of the necessity of ad-blocking! Those HUGE banners above everything else, especially when they are the last thing to load and make the page move while I'm trying to click on the search bar but instead get taken elsewhere. The nice blurring of the line between just listing what's new, and giving huge extra amounts of intrusive space to movies that are paying you for clicks... And let's not even get started on locking-up content behind a paid service that was previously freely available (and still available on other sites). Or the Yahoo/Amazon-esque cramming more crap into every page, or spreading the content across dozens more pages, so that it takes 4 extra clicks to look-up the basic info nearly everybody visiting your site is looking for...
No other site makes me curse for needing to use it like you do, IMDB. So happy birthday...
For example, I'll call you at noon. Wouldn't it be nice if we had the same noon?
No, that would be a nightmare. Noon for you could be 3AM for me. Instead of needing one small (time-zone offset) number to adjust for time-zones, you'll need a more precise location, and always have to look-up the business-hours of that location.
When you abolish time-zones, you end up with INFINITE time-zones...
Hey, one network even said "...at 7 ET". There is no such thing as ET. There's EDT, and there's EST. You figure out which one they meant.
Absolutely everybody knows what they mean, and their notation is more-correct and consistent. You're just being pedantic. I wouldn't do business with anybody who specified and/or used ST in a DST-observing location... that would be completely-unnecessary insanity! They might as well say they're on METRIC time, and they start work at 22:85 every day...
If it's winter, I can start work at 9, I can start at 10, I can start an hour after sunrise. I don't need to adjust my clock to start work at the same clock-display every day.
Actually, you probably can't. Just because you decide to get started an hour earlier, doesn't mean anybody else will. Your 7am start time will simply be before other businesses open, so you'll be unable to do a great many things. Switching our clocks, all at the same time, is by far the easiest way to coordinate our schedules. There are precious few jobs where people are completely independent of the rest of the world, so coordination is generally required.
I see nothing wrong with a company that has different business-hours by the season.
I almost agree with you there... I wouldn't mind working for a company that does something like nullifying DST by changing work hours to match. EXCEPT they are going to have to make it a big damn footnote for anyone they do business with.
I can imagine plenty of folks will opt not to do business with them, rather than deal with the constantly changing schedule... I've certainly avoided some retail stores that shortened their hours, because it was such a damn inconvenience to me. Ironic that their money-saving effort costs them more sales, but presumably that was accounted for in their calculations.
I assume we can lower the cost significantly, but it's still going to be really expensive, and lots of rocket launches will cause a lot of pollution (the things aren't exactly eco-friendly).
I made it as clear as I could that I'm talking about centuries into the future. Humanity has only just barely been airborne for about one century, now. With a few more, a trip out of our gravity-well will get dramatically more efficient. A space elevator is a little too speculative at this point, but you can look at existing technologies like ramjets, maglevs/railguns, high altitude planes/balloons, and see a lot of potential if they have some time to develop, further. If fueled by solar power, they produce practically no net pollution, either. And if a space elevator works out, it's Katy bar the door, because space travel will look a lot like train travel at that point...
If we grow crops and make machines off-planet, it's going to be expensive in energy to send them back to Earth. It probably won't be worth it.
That's nonsense. It's expensive to go up, but can be quite cheap to come back down, if you've got a source of materials (via something like lunar mining), you're not on a tight schedule, and safety/reliability isn't a big concern (you win some, you lose some).
At any fixed rate of population growth, there will be a limit, if only when the mass of humans exceeds the total mass in a sphere expanding at the speed of light.
Back in the real world, nature provides lots of population controls... How many centuries between major asteroid impacts? How much human population growth can we practically manage, in-between cataclysms?
There's no practical reason you couldn't fill unmanned high altitude balloons with hydrogen.
Yes there is... They don't start, and stay, at high altitude. It's going to be a person on the ground filling those balloons up with helium. It's going to be a person on the ground recovering the big bag of boom bomb after a few weeks in the air. And if it gets lucky and comes down on top of power lines? Or if there's one errant spark or flame while being maintained?
There's probably little safety regulation in Indonesia, so maybe there isn't anything to stop them, but it's a TERRIBLE idea.
It's no use, I really don't have enough time to do anything other than sound like I'm just ranting, which comes off little better than the trolls I've grown to hate so damned much.
While I'd like to support the guy that's trying to save his students some money, his colleague & supporter Hassan is nuts, and making his position sound irrational: "If the university thinks you are good enough to teach the course, they should let you pick the materials," he said.
A world full of "We can do whatever the hell we want", is not a place I'd want to live. I would be furious if semesters 1, 2 & 3 of a course each required a DIFFERENT BOOK, instead of using the same one. Perhaps all three books having been written by each professor... Perhaps all three costing $180 a piece!
While the $75 book sounds like a better deal than the $180 book, it isn't so good for students that continue into the next course, under a different professor, and thus still need to buy that $180 book, in addition to that previous $75 down the drain.
I am perfectly aware that one of the options is to expand out of the planet and only not cited this explicitly. This said, I'm not "demanding" population control.
Your comment explicitly stated that population control is necessary, which implicitly dismisses all possible alternatives:
"impossible to maintain a growing population"
"you will have to think about acceptable means of population control"
Perhaps you didn't mean it, but you can't claim that you didn't say it. And expanding off Earth is not the only option. Technological improvements could very possibly allow humanity to expand non-stop on Terra, with ever-greater density, right up until the odds run out and the universe steps in and dramatically thins the herd.
We tamper with things about this planet we barely understand, then scratch our heads in confusion when everything gets fouled up.
Yeah, we sure are incompetent... I forget, when exactly was the last famine in the western world, by the way?
I'd much rather be considered a doom-sayer than a doe-eyed fool who never even considered what might go wrong.
You pretend as if those are equally valid options, when they're not. One side (mine) has facts, figures, and centuries of history backing it up. The other side is based on a complete ignorance of human behavior and the science and mechanisms at work
We aren't fit to colonize another planet until we learn to take care of this one!
Odd... before you were talking about a big human catastrophe. Now you seem to be discouraging ways to avoid it, and encouraging self-destruction as some kind of penance for our crimes of hurting the rock we're currently located upon. You should have said up-front you are a crazy enviro-nut, so I could have ignored you to begin with.
I previously looked-up high altitude balloons, and found figures of about $1 million every launch, with them only staying airborne maybe a week at a time.
What's more, this isn't the middle of nowhere. TFA says Indonesia already has a widespread cellular telephone infrastructure:
"in Indonesia, where there the number of mobile phones â" about 319 million â" outnumber people. But most of those phones donâ(TM)t connect to the Internet because users canâ(TM)t afford data plans"
And with the high ongoing costs of balloons, it seems that Google's toy will quickly cost more than conventional infrastructure upgrades already started:
"Telkom is building a fiber optic system connecting the provinces of Maluku and Papua worth hundreds of millions of dollars."
I'd call Elon Musk's plan (WorldVu/OneWeb/L5) with lots of LEO satellites infinitely more practical and viable:
Personally, I don't see why one-way datacasting hasn't gained some popularity. Whether via local TV, AM/MW radio, or worldwide coverage with shortwave radio. It would cost next to nothing to modulate a data signal underneath the audio, and just start beaming the (compressed) full text of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and any other free content made available. Receivers would just need to add SD card slots, and include a very low-end processor (or piggyback on an existing DSP).
While long overdue, VOA has been trying it out with their Radiogram test program the past couple years:
It isn't what Google/Facebook want, as they can't datamine and sell ads on one-way broadcasts targeting these dirt-poor folks, it would vastly improve life for everyone off-the-grid and unable to afford satellite internet service.
Slashcode is a real fucked-up zombie mess of 5 layers of cruft, these days. You don't realize how painful it is, until you spend a few weeks on Pipedot, then curse non-stop when you come back here.
In the long run it is impossible to maintain a growing population indefinitely
Yes, quite a few centuries from now, we'll either have to cap human populations, OR we can just simply start colonizing other planets... That would work even better. Hydroponics in earth orbit would allow for an endless food supply as well. And then there's the eventual possibility of Star Trek TNG style food replicators, which requires just energy without growing crops. Or perhaps feeding humans from sky-scraper high tubes growing nutritionally fortified algae. Or completely synthetic foods, produced by directly converting minerals. Or possibly bypassing food all-together, wiring humans with electric charging ports, combined with just vitamin & mineral supplements, and very small amount of calories.
At some point you will have to think about acceptable means of population control or will be chaos.
Population control is only necessary if we choose NOT to do any of several other possibly viable alternatives. It's incredibly foolish to pretend you can look centuries into the future, and decide nothing else will ever pan-out, and therefore demand population control.
So how long do you think that'll remain true, if the population of humans on the planet keeps increasing?
I think we can continue to scale-up crops to satisfy linear population growth for many centuries to come. And at that point, humans should be colonizing other planets, which opens-up a whole new surface area to grow food upon.
how much more can the Earth stand of having forests and other wild lands cleared to grow crops
Funny, the big thing people are bitching about right now is that California brought water to the arid central valley to grow crops... No forests were harmed, yet people object.
We have a LOT of empty, arid lands, which will work as farmland, once initially fertilized and irrigated. There's even more marginal lands, which will work great with the simple addition of a greenhouse. In fact we've only tapped the tiniest fraction, thus far.
And when that available farm-land gets scarce, the economics will shift to make it more profitable to grow staple crops (rice, wheat, potatoes, beans, etc), rather than feeding and raising cattle...
Genetic modifications of crops will help them continue to grow more efficiently... Requiring less fertilization, less sunlight, fewer insecticides, growing more dense, etc.
And further down the road, technology will intervene. PV panels are already more efficient than plants at turning sunlight into usable energy... LEDs have gotten extremely efficient, too, and they can be built monochromatic to produce just the wavelengths plants need, with little wasted energy. While it'll take many decades for the economics to work-out, in the future, fields will be covered with PV solar panels, with crops underneath, illuminated by LEDs, and still producing excess electricity to the grid. In fact that's what's needed for multi-story farms to work... One roof-full of PV panels producing enough power and light to grow multiple stories of crops. And later, maybe those solar panels will be up in orbit, much more efficiently harnessing the solar energy...
This kind of progress can continue for centuries, unhindered. With all the untapped land area, we could surely support several orders of magnitude higher global populations without even needing to start doing significant harm to the environment. Although, at some point we will also find ways to make those wild forests considerably more efficient, too.
Honestly, your fatalism is ridiculously myopic. There have been such fears of scarcity since the origin of humanity, but the future CHANGES, it doesn't just scale-up the same methods used in the past. I can imagine your counterparts hundreds of years ago were concerned that there weren't enough trees in the world to support building log-cabins for increasing populations of people... Which is why everybody simply doesn't live in a log cabin, today. Perhaps bronze-age man worrying about the limited available supplies of copper & tin, which in-turn led to the iron age... These problems practically solve themselves, when the time comes. But it's certainly not easy to predict accurately with distant foresight, long before there is any need to address them.
We have a lot of old people so need even more young people in the hope that some will look after them.
That's utter nonsense. One old person don't require two young people's full-time attention for decades. Instead, said old person just needs to have the financial wherewithal to be able to pay a part-time, minimum wage employee for (on average) a couple years (in addition to their own bills).
Contact anyone who has acted as a care-taker for infirm seniors, and ask them how many people they've cared for, until their demise. One person who makes a career out of care-taking, can care for over 100 people, before they retire... That works out to single-digit percentages of the workforce, and since the wages are low, less than 1% of GDP.
Of course those with plenty of money to throw around in their old age, may WANT and demand higher levels of care, but that's besides the point, and is more a positive contributor to the economy, not a drain...
Whats the solution? Wish I knew.
At least Japan believes the answer is ROBOTS. Much as the industrial revolution, as robots advance, they certainly could reduce the human care-taker time and effort. But I'm a bit dubious, as robots will need to become very inexpensive to become a viable alternative to (some) inexpensive, unskilled human labor, and cover a diverse range of topics.
At worst, self-driving cars could fill one niche role that care-takers currently perform. Increased home automation, plus more fully-automatic, push-button and reliable appliances could shave some more tasks from the job, as well. But none of that resembles what Japan's robots are being designed to do.
humans, as an entire global race of beings, does need to learn to manage their population growth. We are running out of resources. Most immediately, we are running out of ways to keep everyone fed.
People have made such predictions, endlessly, and they've all been utterly wrong. We have an obscene amount of land area on this planet, enough to feed orders of magnitude more people than exist today... They just won't all be eating steaks all the time:
There is a dealer in Minneapolis that sells nothing but used cars, and most of them are like 1-2 years old with very low miles
Car dealers have gone insane. All the major dealers around here are selling older, old used cars for very nearly the cost of NEW vehicles. I guess they cater to drooling morons who are impressed by vehicles cleaned with harsh chemicals that give them that "new car smell". Load up the Kelly Blue Book app on your phone, and show the suggested list price to your salesman, and then watch them squirm and lie through their teeth... In the case of one inexpensive car, a dealer actually priced it HIGHER than the MSRP for a brand NEW one!
And worse, dealers are all adopting some new model of long, slow haggling. You ask them for their best price, they'll come back quoting list price+taxes+fees, and every time you go back and forth they'll only barely keep shaving a tiny amount off that price. It's all kinds of crap. At least one salesman was honest, and suggested getting a Costco or USAA membership. Then selecting the car via the Costco/USAA website, so you can skip that first infuriating part and time-consuming part, and start-off at what used-to be the first quote customers would get... Then you can try negotiating downward.
And that's the best case, even when you already know all the tricks in the game. The first thing a sales-douche will ask you is how much money you have... If you tell them your target price, you'll NEVER hear about anything cheaper than that. (Tell them you'd like to see their FREE cars, and work your way up from there.) It's all kinds of crap, and I wasted a couple months driving around, accomplishing nothing.
Fortunately, just about the exact car I wanted showed-up as a private party sale on Craigslist for 1/5th what dealers were asking, lower mileage, a hair below even private party bluebook value, and no big oil leaks or accidents in the vehicle history. Sure, I had to clean it myself, and spend a few hundred dollars to replace some ugly, aging parts, but I saved thousands in the process.
In the US it seemed dealers really needed to be able to deliver a car TODAY, not tomorrow or next week.
"Want", not "need". And it's the dealers, not consumers, who initiate that mode of operation.
Every aspect of consumer behavior before a purchase is analyzed down to the finest detail, and one of the most relevant things to car dealers is that if you don't make the sale on day-one (before the customer leaves your lot and looks around, or otherwise just has time to think about it), then the odds of them eventually making a purchase from you is dramatically reduced. It's a valid question whether they've got the cause and effect backwards, but quite simply, dealers want to have your desired car in-stock, ready to drive off the lot, so you're slightly more likely to sign the papers and close the sale, immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
A few clear, viable, and widely agreed-upon solutions:
- Stop burning coal
- Increase energy efficiency (buildings, appliances, vehicles, etc.) as much as possible
- Stop Deforestation
- Slow population growth
- Eat more plants and reduce production of meat
- Switch to non-fossil energy sources as quickly as possible
With a simple search, you can find plenty of lists like this all over the web:
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...
It would probably work great if there was one global program. But without universal participation, a more aggressive standard will only penalize participants, while rewarding outsiders. Faking it and putting in-place a system that does nothing is the only option.
But this feel-good tactic is completely WRONG. Primarily because a voucher system gives the recipient NO INCENTIVE to find ways to SAVE money on some or all of those (rent being the biggest). Just start with a basic income that is slightly LOWER than the average cost of those voucher programs, and if recipients find a way to save enough money on their necessities that they can afford cable TV, then good for them, nobody is being harmed and it might even help the economy.
In addition, the basic income eliminates the risk of fraud, and eliminates all that administrative overhead involved in administering and policing the voucher system.
Most people choose to live in expensive areas ONLY because they MUST to get a good-paying job, not because they really "want to." With a large enough basic income, many people will be happy to quit their jobs and move somewhere much cheaper. We see this pattern repeated quite frequently with retirees. A basic income would just extend the behavior to younger people who were working hard but barely getting ahead.
What's this? There's a troll on the internet?! Stop the presses, the world must know!
I'm allergic to cookies...
Now, if it was just a GET option I could append onto the URL, I'd be interested.
I'm not new here.
His apology was insincere and passive aggressive, ala. "I'm sorry I can't prove you wrong right now."
His "sorry not sorry" came right after he just finished calling me "arrogant as hell", saying I "know Jack Shit", etc.
And this after I bothered to type-up a page-long rebuttal in reply to his flippant one-liners, including lots of information for his benefit, which he proceeded to dismiss out-of-hand.
Happy birthday IMDB! You've done more than any other site on the internet to convince me of the necessity of ad-blocking! Those HUGE banners above everything else, especially when they are the last thing to load and make the page move while I'm trying to click on the search bar but instead get taken elsewhere. The nice blurring of the line between just listing what's new, and giving huge extra amounts of intrusive space to movies that are paying you for clicks... And let's not even get started on locking-up content behind a paid service that was previously freely available (and still available on other sites). Or the Yahoo/Amazon-esque cramming more crap into every page, or spreading the content across dozens more pages, so that it takes 4 extra clicks to look-up the basic info nearly everybody visiting your site is looking for...
No other site makes me curse for needing to use it like you do, IMDB. So happy birthday...
No, that would be a nightmare. Noon for you could be 3AM for me. Instead of needing one small (time-zone offset) number to adjust for time-zones, you'll need a more precise location, and always have to look-up the business-hours of that location.
When you abolish time-zones, you end up with INFINITE time-zones...
Absolutely everybody knows what they mean, and their notation is more-correct and consistent. You're just being pedantic. I wouldn't do business with anybody who specified and/or used ST in a DST-observing location... that would be completely-unnecessary insanity! They might as well say they're on METRIC time, and they start work at 22:85 every day...
Actually, you probably can't. Just because you decide to get started an hour earlier, doesn't mean anybody else will. Your 7am start time will simply be before other businesses open, so you'll be unable to do a great many things. Switching our clocks, all at the same time, is by far the easiest way to coordinate our schedules. There are precious few jobs where people are completely independent of the rest of the world, so coordination is generally required.
I almost agree with you there... I wouldn't mind working for a company that does something like nullifying DST by changing work hours to match. EXCEPT they are going to have to make it a big damn footnote for anyone they do business with.
I can imagine plenty of folks will opt not to do business with them, rather than deal with the constantly changing schedule... I've certainly avoided some retail stores that shortened their hours, because it was such a damn inconvenience to me. Ironic that their money-saving effort costs them more sales, but presumably that was accounted for in their calculations.
I made it as clear as I could that I'm talking about centuries into the future. Humanity has only just barely been airborne for about one century, now. With a few more, a trip out of our gravity-well will get dramatically more efficient. A space elevator is a little too speculative at this point, but you can look at existing technologies like ramjets, maglevs/railguns, high altitude planes/balloons, and see a lot of potential if they have some time to develop, further. If fueled by solar power, they produce practically no net pollution, either. And if a space elevator works out, it's Katy bar the door, because space travel will look a lot like train travel at that point...
That's nonsense. It's expensive to go up, but can be quite cheap to come back down, if you've got a source of materials (via something like lunar mining), you're not on a tight schedule, and safety/reliability isn't a big concern (you win some, you lose some).
Back in the real world, nature provides lots of population controls... How many centuries between major asteroid impacts? How much human population growth can we practically manage, in-between cataclysms?
Yes there is... They don't start, and stay, at high altitude. It's going to be a person on the ground filling those balloons up with helium. It's going to be a person on the ground recovering the big bag of boom bomb after a few weeks in the air. And if it gets lucky and comes down on top of power lines? Or if there's one errant spark or flame while being maintained?
There's probably little safety regulation in Indonesia, so maybe there isn't anything to stop them, but it's a TERRIBLE idea.
Well, at least we can agree on something...
While I'd like to support the guy that's trying to save his students some money, his colleague & supporter Hassan is nuts, and making his position sound irrational: "If the university thinks you are good enough to teach the course, they should let you pick the materials," he said.
A world full of "We can do whatever the hell we want", is not a place I'd want to live. I would be furious if semesters 1, 2 & 3 of a course each required a DIFFERENT BOOK, instead of using the same one. Perhaps all three books having been written by each professor... Perhaps all three costing $180 a piece!
While the $75 book sounds like a better deal than the $180 book, it isn't so good for students that continue into the next course, under a different professor, and thus still need to buy that $180 book, in addition to that previous $75 down the drain.
Your comment explicitly stated that population control is necessary, which implicitly dismisses all possible alternatives:
"impossible to maintain a growing population"
"you will have to think about acceptable means of population control"
Perhaps you didn't mean it, but you can't claim that you didn't say it. And expanding off Earth is not the only option. Technological improvements could very possibly allow humanity to expand non-stop on Terra, with ever-greater density, right up until the odds run out and the universe steps in and dramatically thins the herd.
TFA says you're completely wrong, and I even posted a couple quotes to that effect in my comment.
There aren't too many "60,000 feet" (in the /. summary) long balloon tethers out there. That's just shy of 12 miles (18 km).
Yeah, we sure are incompetent... I forget, when exactly was the last famine in the western world, by the way?
You pretend as if those are equally valid options, when they're not. One side (mine) has facts, figures, and centuries of history backing it up. The other side is based on a complete ignorance of human behavior and the science and mechanisms at work
Odd... before you were talking about a big human catastrophe. Now you seem to be discouraging ways to avoid it, and encouraging self-destruction as some kind of penance for our crimes of hurting the rock we're currently located upon. You should have said up-front you are a crazy enviro-nut, so I could have ignored you to begin with.
I previously looked-up high altitude balloons, and found figures of about $1 million every launch, with them only staying airborne maybe a week at a time.
What's more, this isn't the middle of nowhere. TFA says Indonesia already has a widespread cellular telephone infrastructure:
"in Indonesia, where there the number of mobile phones â" about 319 million â" outnumber people. But most of those phones donâ(TM)t connect to the Internet because users canâ(TM)t afford data plans"
And with the high ongoing costs of balloons, it seems that Google's toy will quickly cost more than conventional infrastructure upgrades already started:
"Telkom is building a fiber optic system connecting the provinces of Maluku and Papua worth hundreds of millions of dollars."
I'd call Elon Musk's plan (WorldVu/OneWeb/L5) with lots of LEO satellites infinitely more practical and viable:
http://pipedot.org/story/2014-...
Personally, I don't see why one-way datacasting hasn't gained some popularity. Whether via local TV, AM/MW radio, or worldwide coverage with shortwave radio. It would cost next to nothing to modulate a data signal underneath the audio, and just start beaming the (compressed) full text of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and any other free content made available. Receivers would just need to add SD card slots, and include a very low-end processor (or piggyback on an existing DSP).
While long overdue, VOA has been trying it out with their Radiogram test program the past couple years:
http://voaradiogram.net/
It isn't what Google/Facebook want, as they can't datamine and sell ads on one-way broadcasts targeting these dirt-poor folks, it would vastly improve life for everyone off-the-grid and unable to afford satellite internet service.
It's called: "Comment byte limit"
You can find it here:
https://slashdot.org/my/commen...
Slashcode is a real fucked-up zombie mess of 5 layers of cruft, these days. You don't realize how painful it is, until you spend a few weeks on Pipedot, then curse non-stop when you come back here.
Yes, quite a few centuries from now, we'll either have to cap human populations, OR we can just simply start colonizing other planets... That would work even better. Hydroponics in earth orbit would allow for an endless food supply as well. And then there's the eventual possibility of Star Trek TNG style food replicators, which requires just energy without growing crops. Or perhaps feeding humans from sky-scraper high tubes growing nutritionally fortified algae. Or completely synthetic foods, produced by directly converting minerals. Or possibly bypassing food all-together, wiring humans with electric charging ports, combined with just vitamin & mineral supplements, and very small amount of calories.
Population control is only necessary if we choose NOT to do any of several other possibly viable alternatives. It's incredibly foolish to pretend you can look centuries into the future, and decide nothing else will ever pan-out, and therefore demand population control.
I think we can continue to scale-up crops to satisfy linear population growth for many centuries to come. And at that point, humans should be colonizing other planets, which opens-up a whole new surface area to grow food upon.
Funny, the big thing people are bitching about right now is that California brought water to the arid central valley to grow crops... No forests were harmed, yet people object.
We have a LOT of empty, arid lands, which will work as farmland, once initially fertilized and irrigated. There's even more marginal lands, which will work great with the simple addition of a greenhouse. In fact we've only tapped the tiniest fraction, thus far.
And when that available farm-land gets scarce, the economics will shift to make it more profitable to grow staple crops (rice, wheat, potatoes, beans, etc), rather than feeding and raising cattle...
Genetic modifications of crops will help them continue to grow more efficiently... Requiring less fertilization, less sunlight, fewer insecticides, growing more dense, etc.
And further down the road, technology will intervene. PV panels are already more efficient than plants at turning sunlight into usable energy... LEDs have gotten extremely efficient, too, and they can be built monochromatic to produce just the wavelengths plants need, with little wasted energy. While it'll take many decades for the economics to work-out, in the future, fields will be covered with PV solar panels, with crops underneath, illuminated by LEDs, and still producing excess electricity to the grid. In fact that's what's needed for multi-story farms to work... One roof-full of PV panels producing enough power and light to grow multiple stories of crops. And later, maybe those solar panels will be up in orbit, much more efficiently harnessing the solar energy...
This kind of progress can continue for centuries, unhindered. With all the untapped land area, we could surely support several orders of magnitude higher global populations without even needing to start doing significant harm to the environment. Although, at some point we will also find ways to make those wild forests considerably more efficient, too.
Honestly, your fatalism is ridiculously myopic. There have been such fears of scarcity since the origin of humanity, but the future CHANGES, it doesn't just scale-up the same methods used in the past. I can imagine your counterparts hundreds of years ago were concerned that there weren't enough trees in the world to support building log-cabins for increasing populations of people... Which is why everybody simply doesn't live in a log cabin, today. Perhaps bronze-age man worrying about the limited available supplies of copper & tin, which in-turn led to the iron age... These problems practically solve themselves, when the time comes. But it's certainly not easy to predict accurately with distant foresight, long before there is any need to address them.
That's utter nonsense. One old person don't require two young people's full-time attention for decades. Instead, said old person just needs to have the financial wherewithal to be able to pay a part-time, minimum wage employee for (on average) a couple years (in addition to their own bills).
Contact anyone who has acted as a care-taker for infirm seniors, and ask them how many people they've cared for, until their demise. One person who makes a career out of care-taking, can care for over 100 people, before they retire... That works out to single-digit percentages of the workforce, and since the wages are low, less than 1% of GDP.
Of course those with plenty of money to throw around in their old age, may WANT and demand higher levels of care, but that's besides the point, and is more a positive contributor to the economy, not a drain...
At least Japan believes the answer is ROBOTS. Much as the industrial revolution, as robots advance, they certainly could reduce the human care-taker time and effort. But I'm a bit dubious, as robots will need to become very inexpensive to become a viable alternative to (some) inexpensive, unskilled human labor, and cover a diverse range of topics.
At worst, self-driving cars could fill one niche role that care-takers currently perform. Increased home automation, plus more fully-automatic, push-button and reliable appliances could shave some more tasks from the job, as well. But none of that resembles what Japan's robots are being designed to do.
People have made such predictions, endlessly, and they've all been utterly wrong. We have an obscene amount of land area on this planet, enough to feed orders of magnitude more people than exist today... They just won't all be eating steaks all the time:
https://overpopulationisamyth....
Yeah, with all those exception, the one-child policy probably only affects about 1 billion people...
Car dealers have gone insane. All the major dealers around here are selling older, old used cars for very nearly the cost of NEW vehicles. I guess they cater to drooling morons who are impressed by vehicles cleaned with harsh chemicals that give them that "new car smell". Load up the Kelly Blue Book app on your phone, and show the suggested list price to your salesman, and then watch them squirm and lie through their teeth... In the case of one inexpensive car, a dealer actually priced it HIGHER than the MSRP for a brand NEW one!
And worse, dealers are all adopting some new model of long, slow haggling. You ask them for their best price, they'll come back quoting list price+taxes+fees, and every time you go back and forth they'll only barely keep shaving a tiny amount off that price. It's all kinds of crap. At least one salesman was honest, and suggested getting a Costco or USAA membership. Then selecting the car via the Costco/USAA website, so you can skip that first infuriating part and time-consuming part, and start-off at what used-to be the first quote customers would get... Then you can try negotiating downward.
And that's the best case, even when you already know all the tricks in the game. The first thing a sales-douche will ask you is how much money you have... If you tell them your target price, you'll NEVER hear about anything cheaper than that. (Tell them you'd like to see their FREE cars, and work your way up from there.) It's all kinds of crap, and I wasted a couple months driving around, accomplishing nothing.
Fortunately, just about the exact car I wanted showed-up as a private party sale on Craigslist for 1/5th what dealers were asking, lower mileage, a hair below even private party bluebook value, and no big oil leaks or accidents in the vehicle history. Sure, I had to clean it myself, and spend a few hundred dollars to replace some ugly, aging parts, but I saved thousands in the process.
"Want", not "need". And it's the dealers, not consumers, who initiate that mode of operation.
Every aspect of consumer behavior before a purchase is analyzed down to the finest detail, and one of the most relevant things to car dealers is that if you don't make the sale on day-one (before the customer leaves your lot and looks around, or otherwise just has time to think about it), then the odds of them eventually making a purchase from you is dramatically reduced. It's a valid question whether they've got the cause and effect backwards, but quite simply, dealers want to have your desired car in-stock, ready to drive off the lot, so you're slightly more likely to sign the papers and close the sale, immediately.