You have a rather curious definition of a disaster. Obama inherited a country at war (make that two wars) and in the worst depression since 1929, yet he has seemingly safely delivered us to the other side: the economy is picking up, we are out of Iraq and bin Laden is dead, all while battling a congress hell bent in destroying any and every action he wished to take.
If that is a disaster, then Bush must be the apocalypse.
Yet that didn't take Bush any closer to leaving Iraq,,,. hmmm.
The truth is, our country has its own "business" that is seperate of who is in office.
This I agree with, but this is not to say that everything remains the same. There is room around the margins and it is quite substantial e.g John Roberts vs. Elena Kagan; or Obamacare vs. no healthcare.
Obama said he would give us a public option... he lied.
Last I checked this was the fault of a singularly uncooperative republican caucus in Congress. A caucus which, for the first time in history declared that their overriding goal was to make Obama a one term president even if that meant damaging the country.
Yes it has. It's moved from undefined long term deployments (we might sill be there a hundred years from now--John McCain) to well defined missions with objectives. We are out of Iraq, we got bin Laden, and we won't be in Afghanistan in a couple of years.
Sure, we've drawn down troops in one country, and increased the number in others.
Net number is down, with more reductions in the way.
Have you kept track of recent US space exploration and satellite programs, none of which require a human to be aboard?
I have, have you? The number of launches in the USA has steadily declined from mid-30s in the late 90s to 15-20 in the last few years.
People like to talk about how freedoms have been lost, but aside from isolated anecdotes or complaints about airport security,
"Isolated anecdotes or complaints"?? The entire USA population is subject to be groped or looked at in the nude at the airport. These are not isolated anecdotes, this is every day life.
no one is typically able to identify a freedom that they have ACTUALLY LOST.
Either they exist only in your imagination or they are not very bright. All they need to do is point to the Patriot Act for a list.
Among freedoms and rights lost are the freedom to fly without government issued ID, the freedom to take pictures of airports, the freedom not to have your computer communications intercepted without a warrant. You don't have to trust me on this one, as parts of the Patriot Act have already been found unconstitutional by the courts.
mankind is slowing down - literally, it is more or less abandoning manned space exploration, science is giving way to obscurantism, governments are slowly tightening their grip on their populations,...
You seem to be confusing the USA with "mankind". Europe and Russia's space programs are still strong, China, India and Brazil are recent newcomers expanding their space programs, science is still strong in the civilized world and people in Europe are no less free than they were before 9/11.
I think this tidbit was the most important part. It's the first official confirmation that a lot of what happens in the inspection lanes is pure theatre as many had claimed before:
And despite the radically reduced risk that knives and box cutters presented in the post-9/11 world, allowing them back on board was considered too emotionally charged for the American public.
Every critical data center worth its salt has sleep-bunkering facilities. I still recall my visit to a bank's main data center. Before entering we had to sign a release since in case of an emergency, the armored door to the facility could close and we could remain confined with the rest of the sys admins for up to two weeks.
Number of cities > 1 Million people in the world: 302.
Bzzt. Wrong. If you consider the urban agglomeration area, as opposed to some meaningless county/administrative region line, the number of cities with more than 1 Million people is in the order of 800-1000. Assuming you want to hit every city twice, just in case of a dud, you need 2K nuclear warheads.
The source you linked to, while having some valid points, is from 1999. Many things (particularly salaries) have changed quite a bit since then.
They've only gotten worse. A professor in UC Berkeley today is making less than he/she was ten years ago. Most other state schools are not far from that.
Getting grants has also become harder, ever since republicans took control of Congress.
Gladly, last time I did, I came back with 90 billion kilos of catch (size of commercial fishery in 2009).
Surely you are not suggesting this is a resource in short supply, particularly now when we are moving away from commercial fishery to aquaculture with production going up 5% a year every year.
By your argument shooting your opponent is just politics, so how come people don't do it?
The answer is, of course, that it wouldn't work, not just because it is illegal but also because people generally disapprove of such moves.
Somehow in the USA it has become acceptable for candidates to tell outright lies and for the press not to call them on it. Watch a BBC interview with one of their local politicians to see how differently they react to a politician telling a whopper. They forcibly and knowledgeably challenge the politician.
In contrast the NYT had, until recently, a policy that nothing said by a politician could be called a falsehood, no matter how detached from reality it was.
My point is that we, as a society, set the rules.
Another example, not long ago the political obstructionism shown by Republican representatives would have meant a sure loss in the elections. Now we think its par for the course. Who makes that decision? we do.
-First, a lot of these "projections" are nothing of the sort as they already took place. You see, if you have one hundred couples who only had 125 babies during their reproductive years, then sixty years from now when they couples passes away we'll see a net drop of population of 200-125 = 75 people. There is no projection aspect on that component. It already happened although it will take 60 years to show up in our census counts. For example in China the population rearing group consisting of 112.5M couples (or 225M people) gave birth to 152.7M children for an already dialed in drop of population 50 years from now of 72.3M people give or take a few million.
-Second as for actual projections such as future fertility rates, I don't trust published predictions, because you see, for the last thirty years they have been far too pessimistic, with population growth routinely coming well below projected levels. Looking at the numbers themselves, there is a clear trend toward peak population around early 2040s.
But even if the global population is well on track to stabilize
It won't stabilize. In fact it will start falling almost right away and do so incredibly rapidly by the end of the century.
Look at the fresh water issues around the world.
I have, and again while I do see scarcity and need for rationing, I fail to see the OMG panic scenario so in vogue with Malthusians. Look at Israel, one of the most water starved countries in the world yet able to support local agriculture.
So far it's been growing in most of the world, including the U.S.
Only because of vast immigration programs. Second generation native born population has been below replacement level in all Western Countries since sometime in the 70s. Such drop will not be reflected until the putative parental couple dies whend their place we'll be taken by 1.3-1.7 children.
Outside of Africa and the Philipines, nearly all countries in the world are at fertility rates near or below replacement levels and falling rapidly towards 1.3 children per couple.
p.s. I started following population figures about 35 years ago at a time when things were still looking pretty dire, but like the OP post said at some point the data showed that we turned the corner and I stopped worrying about it. In fact demographers are now more worried about a steep population drop, the so called graying of the population.
We were not running out of firewood. Coal was just much better.
This is not the case. Here are two sources, there are hundreds more:
The shift to coal first happened in England, where the shortage of wood was most acute. Wood was not only used for the construction of ships but also for heating and cooking as well as industrial processes. In order to provide a sufficient supply of charcoal woodlands in England were managed with a coppice rotation system but over time these woodlands could not supply enough fuel for the growing demands of domestic users and industry, in particular the iron industry.
As the land in the late Middle Ages was increasingly deforested to provide fuel and agricultural space for a growing population, basic heating, cooking, and manufacturing needs could no longer be met by burning wood. A shift to reliance on coal began, gradually and with apparent reluctance. Coal was definitely a fuel of secondary desirability, being more costly to obtain and distribute than wood, as well as being dirty and polluting. Coal was more restricted in its spatial distribution than wood, so that a whole new, costly distribution system had to be developed. Mining of coal from the ground was more costly than obtaining a quantity of wood equivalent in heating value, and became even more costly as the most accessible reserves of this fuel were depleted. Mines had to be sunk ever deeper, until groundwater flooding became a serious problem. --The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter
And the crucial part is, there was still enough wood to complete the switch.
Just like there is more than enough oil to complete the switch. Peak oil does not predict a rapid decline in oil production, but a plateau followed by a long term decline.
That will peak only some decades later, and there will be price shocks during the infrastructure switch.
Sure, the transition won't be perfectly smooth, but neither will it be a Max Mad world as tinfoil hat peak oilers like to claim.
And there has never been a time in history when people had to change their primary fuel source on the global scale,
Except when we switched from firewood to coal.
but the peak of the oil-fueled civilization may be happening now.
I agree, if not now, within the next decade or so. But we already have the replacement options: natural gas and soon enough solar power as solar cells keep dropping in price and efficiency keeps on going up.
This is in no way a predetermined part of politics.
This only works because we have gotten used to it and we let them get away with it. In many other countries when opponents nit pick like this they tend to get punished in the polls so it is a lot less common.
at an exponentially growing rate, which is what the humankind has been doing to date.
No it hasn't. From past experience we know that all "exponential" natural processes are actually tracking a logistic function.
In fact population growth is already well past the inflection point (change in sign of the second derivative) predicted by a logistic function. Nowadays even the most pessimistic projections predict a drop in population at some point in the second half of the XXI century with less alarmist projections placing the start of the population drop somewhere in 2040-2050.
a finite resource
Simply stating that a resource is finite is no proof that we are about to run out of it. The ocean is finite, yet we are not in any danger of running out of sea water.
In fact, energy, which is our most pressing resource is for all practical purposes a renewable resource (think solar power) and hence not finite in any practical sense of the word.
If you look at the cold hard numbers we have turned the corner in terms of resource usage and population growth. Population will rapidly drop and together with it a much larger decrease in energy use because there will no longer be a need for new roads, schools, or houses.
To give an example of this, a few years back I happened to be in Germany during the opening of the latest autobahn. The local newspapers were talking about the distinct possibility that this could well be the last new highway to ever be built on the former West Germany, since population is rapidly declining and the country transit infrastructure on the West is fully built out.
This is like saying that my prediction that the world was going to end today at 7am was never disproved in principle, it was just my timing that was off.
Malthusians have been wrong for 200 years, and they will continue to be wrong for the next 200.
Blackberry got to where it was on the strength of its hardware. Problem is the iPhone changed the game and now the software is as important as the hardware.
The blackberry web browser was inferior until rather recently. Developing apps for a BB was a mess compared to the iPhone, the playbook couldn't even read emails until the latest update.
RIM can easily survive: Apple was in worse shape for far longer than RIM and still made a come back. However they need their own Steve Jobs who can refocus the company and develop a product that is a unique proposition, just like Apple developed, in rapid sequence the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
No you wouldn't, and if you had spent five seconds thinking about it you would see the obvious flaws on your naÃve solution. Or you can call it "libertarian" and automatically feel validated without having to think about it.
President Bush (the Elder) apologized for it, and when some Americans expressed displeasure for him having apologized he said:
All I'm saying is that if that had happened in Canada and we had seen the United States flag flown upside-down, every American would have been very, very upset.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama is a disaster.
You have a rather curious definition of a disaster. Obama inherited a country at war (make that two wars) and in the worst depression since 1929, yet he has seemingly safely delivered us to the other side: the economy is picking up, we are out of Iraq and bin Laden is dead, all while battling a congress hell bent in destroying any and every action he wished to take.
If that is a disaster, then Bush must be the apocalypse.
The mission was over. Saddam is dead.
Yet that didn't take Bush any closer to leaving Iraq,,,. hmmm.
The truth is, our country has its own "business" that is seperate of who is in office.
This I agree with, but this is not to say that everything remains the same. There is room around the margins and it is quite substantial e.g John Roberts vs. Elena Kagan; or Obamacare vs. no healthcare.
Obama said he would give us a public option... he lied.
Last I checked this was the fault of a singularly uncooperative republican caucus in Congress. A caucus which, for the first time in history declared that their overriding goal was to make Obama a one term president even if that meant damaging the country.
Yes it has. It's moved from undefined long term deployments (we might sill be there a hundred years from now--John McCain) to well defined missions with objectives. We are out of Iraq, we got bin Laden, and we won't be in Afghanistan in a couple of years.
Sure, we've drawn down troops in one country, and increased the number in others.
Net number is down, with more reductions in the way.
Bush went to war against Iraq, Obama got us out. Can you see the wee-bit of difference there? I can and I'm voting for Obama.
Have you kept track of recent US space exploration and satellite programs, none of which require a human to be aboard?
I have, have you? The number of launches in the USA has steadily declined from mid-30s in the late 90s to 15-20 in the last few years.
People like to talk about how freedoms have been lost, but aside from isolated anecdotes or complaints about airport security,
"Isolated anecdotes or complaints"?? The entire USA population is subject to be groped or looked at in the nude at the airport. These are not isolated anecdotes, this is every day life.
no one is typically able to identify a freedom that they have ACTUALLY LOST.
Either they exist only in your imagination or they are not very bright. All they need to do is point to the Patriot Act for a list.
Among freedoms and rights lost are the freedom to fly without government issued ID, the freedom to take pictures of airports, the freedom not to have your computer communications intercepted without a warrant. You don't have to trust me on this one, as parts of the Patriot Act have already been found unconstitutional by the courts.
"9/11" has zero to do with this argument.
Right, the Patriot Act has zero to do with 9/11.
You are a troll.
mankind is slowing down - literally, it is more or less abandoning manned space exploration, science is giving way to obscurantism, governments are slowly tightening their grip on their populations, ...
You seem to be confusing the USA with "mankind". Europe and Russia's space programs are still strong, China, India and Brazil are recent newcomers expanding their space programs, science is still strong in the civilized world and people in Europe are no less free than they were before 9/11.
I think this tidbit was the most important part. It's the first official confirmation that a lot of what happens in the inspection lanes is pure theatre as many had claimed before:
And despite the radically reduced risk that knives and box cutters presented in the post-9/11 world, allowing them back on board was considered too emotionally charged for the American public.
Noobs.
Every critical data center worth its salt has sleep-bunkering facilities. I still recall my visit to a bank's main data center. Before entering we had to sign a release since in case of an emergency, the armored door to the facility could close and we could remain confined with the rest of the sys admins for up to two weeks.
I was following on the logic of the OP, not necessarily advocating a specific number of weapons or even nuclear warfare.
Dropping a bomb in the middle of a city isn't going to completely wipe it out,
[citation needed]
Number of cities > 1 Million people in the world: 302.
Bzzt. Wrong. If you consider the urban agglomeration area, as opposed to some meaningless county/administrative region line, the number of cities with more than 1 Million people is in the order of 800-1000. Assuming you want to hit every city twice, just in case of a dud, you need 2K nuclear warheads.
The source you linked to, while having some valid points, is from 1999. Many things (particularly salaries) have changed quite a bit since then.
They've only gotten worse. A professor in UC Berkeley today is making less than he/she was ten years ago. Most other state schools are not far from that.
Getting grants has also become harder, ever since republicans took control of Congress.
Gladly, last time I did, I came back with 90 billion kilos of catch (size of commercial fishery in 2009).
Surely you are not suggesting this is a resource in short supply, particularly now when we are moving away from commercial fishery to aquaculture with production going up 5% a year every year.
By your argument shooting your opponent is just politics, so how come people don't do it?
The answer is, of course, that it wouldn't work, not just because it is illegal but also because people generally disapprove of such moves.
Somehow in the USA it has become acceptable for candidates to tell outright lies and for the press not to call them on it. Watch a BBC interview with one of their local politicians to see how differently they react to a politician telling a whopper. They forcibly and knowledgeably challenge the politician.
In contrast the NYT had, until recently, a policy that nothing said by a politician could be called a falsehood, no matter how detached from reality it was.
My point is that we, as a society, set the rules.
Another example, not long ago the political obstructionism shown by Republican representatives would have meant a sure loss in the elections. Now we think its par for the course. Who makes that decision? we do.
Wait, so you trust predictions in this area?
Two answers:
-First, a lot of these "projections" are nothing of the sort as they already took place. You see, if you have one hundred couples who only had 125 babies during their reproductive years, then sixty years from now when they couples passes away we'll see a net drop of population of 200-125 = 75 people. There is no projection aspect on that component. It already happened although it will take 60 years to show up in our census counts. For example in China the population rearing group consisting of 112.5M couples (or 225M people) gave birth to 152.7M children for an already dialed in drop of population 50 years from now of 72.3M people give or take a few million.
-Second as for actual projections such as future fertility rates, I don't trust published predictions, because you see, for the last thirty years they have been far too pessimistic, with population growth routinely coming well below projected levels. Looking at the numbers themselves, there is a clear trend toward peak population around early 2040s.
But even if the global population is well on track to stabilize
It won't stabilize. In fact it will start falling almost right away and do so incredibly rapidly by the end of the century.
Look at the fresh water issues around the world.
I have, and again while I do see scarcity and need for rationing, I fail to see the OMG panic scenario so in vogue with Malthusians. Look at Israel, one of the most water starved countries in the world yet able to support local agriculture.
So far it's been growing in most of the world, including the U.S.
Only because of vast immigration programs. Second generation native born population has been below replacement level in all Western Countries since sometime in the 70s. Such drop will not be reflected until the putative parental couple dies whend their place we'll be taken by 1.3-1.7 children.
Outside of Africa and the Philipines, nearly all countries in the world are at fertility rates near or below replacement levels and falling rapidly towards 1.3 children per couple.
p.s. I started following population figures about 35 years ago at a time when things were still looking pretty dire, but like the OP post said at some point the data showed that we turned the corner and I stopped worrying about it. In fact demographers are now more worried about a steep population drop, the so called graying of the population.
So far not very succesfully:
% lynx http://google.com/
Google
Egyptian porn_____________________
[Google Search] [I'm Feeling Lucky] [Advanced search]
Web Results 1 - 10 of about 10,200,000 for Egyptian porn.
(0.53 seconds)
We were not running out of firewood. Coal was just much better.
This is not the case. Here are two sources, there are hundreds more:
The shift to coal first happened in England, where the shortage of wood was most acute. Wood was not only used for the construction of ships but also for heating and cooking as well as industrial processes. In order to provide a sufficient supply of charcoal woodlands in England were managed with a coppice rotation system but over time these woodlands could not supply enough fuel for the growing demands of domestic users and industry, in particular the iron industry.
As the land in the late Middle Ages was increasingly deforested to provide fuel and agricultural space for a growing population, basic heating, cooking, and manufacturing needs could no longer be met by burning wood. A shift to reliance on coal began, gradually and with apparent reluctance. Coal was definitely a fuel of secondary desirability, being more costly to obtain and distribute than wood, as well as being dirty and polluting. Coal was more restricted in its spatial distribution than wood, so that a whole new, costly distribution system had to be developed. Mining of coal from the ground was more costly than obtaining a quantity of wood equivalent in heating value, and became even more costly as the most accessible reserves of this fuel were depleted. Mines had to be sunk ever deeper, until groundwater flooding became a serious problem. --The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter
And the crucial part is, there was still enough wood to complete the switch.
Just like there is more than enough oil to complete the switch. Peak oil does not predict a rapid decline in oil production, but a plateau followed by a long term decline.
That will peak only some decades later, and there will be price shocks during the infrastructure switch.
Sure, the transition won't be perfectly smooth, but neither will it be a Max Mad world as tinfoil hat peak oilers like to claim.
And there has never been a time in history when people had to change their primary fuel source on the global scale,
Except when we switched from firewood to coal.
but the peak of the oil-fueled civilization may be happening now.
I agree, if not now, within the next decade or so. But we already have the replacement options: natural gas and soon enough solar power as solar cells keep dropping in price and efficiency keeps on going up.
So no biggie there.
This is in no way a predetermined part of politics.
This only works because we have gotten used to it and we let them get away with it. In many other countries when opponents nit pick like this they tend to get punished in the polls so it is a lot less common.
at an exponentially growing rate, which is what the humankind has been doing to date.
No it hasn't. From past experience we know that all "exponential" natural processes are actually tracking a logistic function.
In fact population growth is already well past the inflection point (change in sign of the second derivative) predicted by a logistic function. Nowadays even the most pessimistic projections predict a drop in population at some point in the second half of the XXI century with less alarmist projections placing the start of the population drop somewhere in 2040-2050.
a finite resource
Simply stating that a resource is finite is no proof that we are about to run out of it. The ocean is finite, yet we are not in any danger of running out of sea water.
In fact, energy, which is our most pressing resource is for all practical purposes a renewable resource (think solar power) and hence not finite in any practical sense of the word.
If you look at the cold hard numbers we have turned the corner in terms of resource usage and population growth. Population will rapidly drop and together with it a much larger decrease in energy use because there will no longer be a need for new roads, schools, or houses.
To give an example of this, a few years back I happened to be in Germany during the opening of the latest autobahn. The local newspapers were talking about the distinct possibility that this could well be the last new highway to ever be built on the former West Germany, since population is rapidly declining and the country transit infrastructure on the West is fully built out.
This is like saying that my prediction that the world was going to end today at 7am was never disproved in principle, it was just my timing that was off.
Malthusians have been wrong for 200 years, and they will continue to be wrong for the next 200.
ITSS: It's the software stupid.
Blackberry got to where it was on the strength of its hardware. Problem is the iPhone changed the game and now the software is as important as the hardware.
The blackberry web browser was inferior until rather recently. Developing apps for a BB was a mess compared to the iPhone, the playbook couldn't even read emails until the latest update.
RIM can easily survive: Apple was in worse shape for far longer than RIM and still made a come back. However they need their own Steve Jobs who can refocus the company and develop a product that is a unique proposition, just like Apple developed, in rapid sequence the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
Windows. I thought by now an HTML form editor would be smart enough to convert on its own to HTML entities but I was wrong.
I tried previewing it, but got a 406 message and then the thing got posted automagically when I tried to preview it again.
Naïveté
The proper English spelling of naÃveté is libertarianism, as in, "all we need to do is create our own island and we would be free".
No you wouldn't, and if you had spent five seconds thinking about it you would see the obvious flaws on your naÃve solution. Or you can call it "libertarian" and automatically feel validated without having to think about it.
President Bush (the Elder) apologized for it, and when some Americans expressed displeasure for him having apologized he said:
All I'm saying is that if that had happened in Canada and we had seen the United States flag flown upside-down, every American would have been very, very upset.
I hope that this means "high level description of method+implement it" software patents are no longer valid.