No, output keeps growing because the aquifers are being drained. When they are fully drained, there's going to be a hard agricultural collapse.
Oh spare me the disaster movie scenarios. There is going to be no "collapse". There is going to be a soft landing as some regions that never should have been used for agriculture will be moved out of production because they are not competitive anymore. That's how the economics of finite resources like water and oil work. Only economically ignorant people believe this leads to "collapse".
Furthermore, places like California right now are incredibly wasteful with water. If they drain their aquifers, they have plenty of alternatives they can switch to.
What countermeasures? By drilling deeper to get to the last more meager ground water? By using more fertilizer (which causes its own problems) to try and get output out of a more barren soil?
By charging farmers more for water, reducing other kind of water usage, using GMOs, and moving marginal land out of production, for example.
There's a hole in the roof and it's patched with several layers of duck-tape.
You can believe whatever fantasies you like. Reality is that US agricultural productivity keeps going up.
We're already in the middle of one of the largest mass-extinctions the planet has ever seen
Clearly, humans are responsible for a high extinction rate, but that doesn't make it "one of the largest mass-extinctions". Nor, for that matter, are mass extinctions necessarily bad.
Sure, Russia and Canada look to see some serious long-term improvements in real estate values. Most of the rest of the world though will be losers.
The US and Europe will be fine too. The fact that the rest of the world will be losers is not the West's problem or responsibility. The problems in Africa, China, and South America aren't due to climate change, they are due to their political systems and the political choices their populations are making. If you swapped the populations of Germany and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (similar areas, similar population sizes, similar area of arable land), within a few decades, Congo would be prosperous and Germany would be in ruins, and Congo would have no trouble dealing with climate change.
In the US, farm output has grown at an average of 1.5% per year since 1948, so we are producing more food with less land. And in the US, farm land is mostly lost to development, a more productive use. So, as far as the US is concerned, there is no significant problem. I don't have the numbers for Europe, but generally, land is often taken out of production in Europe because it is simply not needed.
The fact that South America, China, and Africa are destroying their environments, destroying their farms, and experiencing overpopulation isn't our fault or our problem; those countries have chosen to become socialist shitholes and they will have to deal with that themselves or deal with the consequences themselves. US food aid is not going to save them, and, realistically, their starving masses will not be welcome in either the US or Europe.
An increase of 44% by the end of the century from another source
Luckily, that increase will be primarily in higher latitudes, that is Europe, Canada, the US, and Russia, meaning we have to worry about it even less.
if we don't stop treating arable soil as if it's expendable somehow
"We" (in the US, Canada, and Europe) don't. Other countries do, but that's something "we" have no influence over.
The original rice plant wasn't all that nutritious either but was improved through breeding. Adapting rice plants to higher CO2 concentrations should be fairly simple. And it's not like we have a choice: there is no way to prevent a substantial increase in atmospheric carbon concentrations. We'll likely end up with about 600-800ppm CO2 before switching to solar, and that's fine.
In Australia the idea of getting shot is akin to getting hit by a meteorite. Just not going to happen.
The homicide rate in Australia is about 1:100000; the homicide rate in the US is about 4:100000, but less than 2:100000 outside minority populations; not particularly big differences. If you correct further for demographics, you find that mainstream US society is not particularly violent.
Gun ownership rates among countries and states actually correlate slightly negatively with homicide rates. The major factors correlating positively with homicide rates are economic and social.
Australia shares with the US that homicide is a massive problem among certain minorities (African Americans in the US, aborigines in Australia). When you figure out how to solve that problem, please share it with the US. Your advice on gun control is irrelevant and ill informed.
And when statistics are used to show that too many guns, not "too many doors" or "not enough armed teachers" is the problem? Well, that's when you hear the most ridiculous nonsense from gun nuts.
There is no significant correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates, either at the country level of at the US state level; those are the simple, easily verifiable facts.
It is quite beyond any understanding how much Americans love their guns.
We Americans love our liberty, and we don't like to be told that we can't do things because a bunch of hysterical, irrational ninnies are throwing temper tantrums.
Oh, and I don't love guns. I don't own a gun, I have never shot a gun, and I don't expect I ever will. Nevertheless, I want guns to remain legal because I want to continue to live in a free society.
Trump doesn't handle negative feedback very well at all. He is of the type that believes he is right and the world is wrong. This is typical Anti-Social Personality Disorder with Narcissistic Tendencies. Every time someone tries to tell him that what he's doing is wrong or illegal, he tries to undermine and discredit them.
We had a choice between two presidential candidates, and while Trump does have those tendencies, Hillary was far worse on each of them. That's why Americans made the choice they did.
US presidential elections tend to be a choice of the lesser of two evils. Bush was not as bad as Gore, Obama was not as bad as McCain, and Trump was not as bad as Hillary. But Democrats talk about Gore, Obama, and Hillary as if they were the Second Coming, instead of the narcissistic, corrupt mediocrities that all presidents are.
Kinda ironic given how much stick he gave crooked Hillary for ignoring security on email.
Hillary did much more. Hillary sent and received classified information on a private server in her bathroom and destroyed evidence, probably to conceal influence peddling.
Trump tweets from an iPhone; no classified information or even private information there. What exactly do you think is the risk there?
I start with the observation that genitalia and colour are not actually part of the definition of an engineer. I then note that if you insinuate those factors into your classification algorithm then you have exactly an institutionalized bias. I conclude that it becomes a real problem If you then use that classification algorithm to filter who gets admitted into the college of engineering.
Yes, and that conclusion makes no sense. A classification algorithm for admission to an engineering school doesn't classify people based on whether they "are engineers", they classify people based on whether they are likely to succeed as engineers, a completely different question. Furthermore, people don't "insinuate those factors" into classification algorithms; factors are used only if they are actually predictive, and gender and race would not be predictive for a system that evaluates university applications.
The algorithm then reinforces its own bias.
That would happen if admissions algorithms classify students according to "is the person an engineer", but that's not what they do.
I don't even think you know what insitutionalised bias is.
"A tendency for the procedures and practices of particular institutions to operate in ways which result in certain social groups being advantaged or favoured and others being disadvantaged or devalued." That doesn't apply here. Women are underrepresented in universities not because of institutional biases against them, but because they choose not to go into engineering.
The salient feature of an engineer is not his or her bits and bobs.
Correct. The salient feature of an engineer is that they complete an engineering education, something that women tend to do less than men. The reasons for that are not historical but women's preferences and interests. How do we know that? Because those preferences are cultural universals. In fact, "in countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions".
Whereas the gender and age of a human engineering population is merely an artefact of history, albeit a patriarchal colonial history that recently remade much of the world in its own image,
That's a belief you hold and it happens to be an incorrect belief with no supporting evidence. It is not surprising that you draw incorrect conclusions from incorrect beliefs.
It's called a paraphrase. In fact, your actual words were even worse, so let's use them:
How do you get from the observation that the typical engineer in the US is white and male to "use that classification algorithm to filter who gets admitted into the college of engineering"?
So, stop avoiding the issue and answer the question.
Think of it as a brand-new Tesla that can do 0-60 under 4 seconds vs. a brand-new Tesla trying to move at all with a huge log chain tying it to a tree (GOP opposition).
The GOP was indeed opposed to the ACA, but how did that opposition affect the ACA? The ACA was designed and passed by Obama and the Democrats without any GOP votes.
Yes, the car capable if ALLOWED TO DO SO.
Yes, that's roughly what the ACA designers said. Specifically, they knew that the ACA itself was just a first step, and they believed they could make it work sooner or later if they were just allowed to tinker with new regulations, mandates, laws, and subsidies. But that's not what they promised publicly and it was a foolish bet to make.
More importantly, it wasn't going to work. The ACA ended up handing out massive amounts of money to special interest groups important to Democrats without addressing all the really hard problems of health care reform: cost controls, coverage limits, and an end to the socialization of risk.
How do you get from the observation that the typical engineer in the US is white and male to "we filter applications based on race and gender"?
Big data algorithms wouldn't use race and gender to filter applications because race and gender are not informative compared to grades, degrees, and other accomplishments. But a consequence of not using race and gender to filter applications is precisely that the typical engineer in the US ends up white and male.
Sorry you're right, it was massively watered down by corporate lobbying on democrats. Point is the same, the populous calling the ACA Obama Care couldn't be further from the truth given what he wanted to pass, and what eventually made it through your process. The ACA is what it is despite Obama, not because of Obama.
So you agree then that the ACA was a crony capitalist handout to big corporations. That's not the fault of Republicans, nor is it the fault of big corporations. It was the job of Democrats and Obama to represent the interests of the people and do what is right and they both failed miserably.
You know things like low unemployment, supporting marginalised groups against bigotry, pushing towards a greener and more environmentally friendly country, increasing energy independence, stopped torturing people, reduced homelessness, improved the economy on every primary metric which is especially amazing since under his watch there were more jobs created than any other president despite the entire economy being flushed down the toilet just as he started.
Most of those supposed accomplishments are figments of your imagination.
Yeah a bit of socialism helps too
You know, I come from a fairly poor family and grew up under both democratic socialism and Eastern European socialism. The idea that any form of socialism "helps" anybody other than a privileged intelligentsia is laughable.
Really? The people whose profession it is to analyse governments ought not to run them?
Indeed, just like music critics rarely are good performers.
Don't worry mate, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho should be running for office in 2020.
Don't worry "mate", your superior culture will vote itself the next strong, smart leader into power yet, just like Germany and Italy did a century ago; it's what superior cultures do. And I know you will love it, given your evident preference for much of the 25 Point Program and eugenics (Idiocracy). Have you ever wondered what had happened to Europe by 2506, by the way?
We in the US will muddle through with our Camachos and do just fine. Don't you worry your pretty little head about us.
It's an interesting point. The last thing we want to do is institutionalize our biases.
The typical engineer in the US is male, white, and middle aged, just like the typical giraffe is spotted, has four legs and is about 18 ft tall. Those are just facts. Picking typical representatives of a class to represent the class is not an "institutionalized bias".
Putting Limor Fried on the cover of a magazine and pretend that she is representative of engineers in general is objectively false, because she is an outlier and an atypical example of an engineer.
The summary is wrong - these folks are making an argument more about big data systems that let their data skew in ways that may end up with unethical results if used blindly.
Except that big data systems don't skew things in "unethical" ways. "Unethical" is simply coded language for "outcomes we don't like". For example, if you feed demographic information and credit repayment rates into a big data system, it will come up with individual scores based on that information. When you then look at that data in aggregate, you'll find that many "marginalized groups" score worse in aggregate. That's not because the big data system discriminates, it's because objectively, those "marginalized groups" have a higher percentage of individuals that are a high credit risk.
We're talking about Obama's presidency here and whether he kept his promises. In many cases, Obama didn't even try.
I have no opinion on whether Obama did better or worse in that regard than Trump; that's a question we can revisit in another six years, at the end of Trump's presidency.
Are you high? None of that is true, thinking of abortions and hypocrisy off the top of my head.
How does the Republican position ("fetuses are human beings and deserving of the same protections as children") contradict "freedom of association, private property, free markets, and freedom of speech"? Where do you see the "hypocrisy"?
No, that's not what they are claiming. They are claiming a "continuing exchange of biomaterial", not a synchronized evolutionary history. The latter is a much stronger claim.
You may disagree with Reagans policies but he was not ignorant he understood his own beliefs and why he believed they were right.
I have seen no indication that that is any different for Trump. If anything, Trump has been more consistent about implementing his campaign promises than other politicians: reduce regulations, tough negotiations with the Chinese on trade, get illegals out of the country, try to reverse ACA, cut corporate and personal taxes, appoint conservative judges, charter schools and school vouchers, etc. Those are traditional, rational, moderately conservative views.
Wow. Ignore reality much, do we? The right actually campaigned as their major primary plank to make obama a lame duck president.
What Republicans actually campaigned on was opposition to Obama's policies and his vision for America, and Obama knew that going in, so he shouldn't have promised things that he couldn't deliver. But that isn't even the issue here.
The real problem with Obama was that his positions changed greatly from when he was campaigning to when he became president. He ran on restoring constitutionality, the rule of law, listening to voters, privacy, and fiscal responsibility, and all that went out the window when he became president.
Miserable performance in what? By all accounts and looking at it from a different country's perspective (i.e. I don't have skin in the game of your silly politics)
Most likely, what you like about Obama and his accomplishments is that he made the US more like a European progressive welfare state. You consider that "better", Americans by and large don't.
Your "missed opportunity on healthcare" is especially interesting on this given what he initially proposed and what the republicans who's support it needed eventually watered it down to.
ACA was passed without Republican support, hence Republicans had no opportunity of watering it down.
That's Anti-intellectualism at its finest. A great way to run politics if your idea of politics is people bashing each other with sticks, and the muscliest man gets to impregnate all the women.
You suffer from the typical misconception that "intellectual" = "intelligent, rational". In fact, "intellectual" is simply a class of professions: academics, journalists, writers--people who make their money from using their intellect. Karl Marx, Lothrop Stoddard, Charles William Elliot, and Giovanni Gentile were intellectuals. Henry Ford and Winston Churchill were not. You bet I'm "anti-intellectual": people whose main accomplishment in life is to theorize about how other people ought to run their lives ought not to run countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh spare me the disaster movie scenarios. There is going to be no "collapse". There is going to be a soft landing as some regions that never should have been used for agriculture will be moved out of production because they are not competitive anymore. That's how the economics of finite resources like water and oil work. Only economically ignorant people believe this leads to "collapse".
Furthermore, places like California right now are incredibly wasteful with water. If they drain their aquifers, they have plenty of alternatives they can switch to.
By charging farmers more for water, reducing other kind of water usage, using GMOs, and moving marginal land out of production, for example.
You can believe whatever fantasies you like. Reality is that US agricultural productivity keeps going up.
And the US is dealing with it like a functioning society does: we take appropriate countermeasures. That's why output still keeps growing.
Clearly, humans are responsible for a high extinction rate, but that doesn't make it "one of the largest mass-extinctions". Nor, for that matter, are mass extinctions necessarily bad.
The US and Europe will be fine too. The fact that the rest of the world will be losers is not the West's problem or responsibility. The problems in Africa, China, and South America aren't due to climate change, they are due to their political systems and the political choices their populations are making. If you swapped the populations of Germany and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (similar areas, similar population sizes, similar area of arable land), within a few decades, Congo would be prosperous and Germany would be in ruins, and Congo would have no trouble dealing with climate change.
In the US, farm output has grown at an average of 1.5% per year since 1948, so we are producing more food with less land. And in the US, farm land is mostly lost to development, a more productive use. So, as far as the US is concerned, there is no significant problem. I don't have the numbers for Europe, but generally, land is often taken out of production in Europe because it is simply not needed.
The fact that South America, China, and Africa are destroying their environments, destroying their farms, and experiencing overpopulation isn't our fault or our problem; those countries have chosen to become socialist shitholes and they will have to deal with that themselves or deal with the consequences themselves. US food aid is not going to save them, and, realistically, their starving masses will not be welcome in either the US or Europe.
Luckily, that increase will be primarily in higher latitudes, that is Europe, Canada, the US, and Russia, meaning we have to worry about it even less.
"We" (in the US, Canada, and Europe) don't. Other countries do, but that's something "we" have no influence over.
The original rice plant wasn't all that nutritious either but was improved through breeding. Adapting rice plants to higher CO2 concentrations should be fairly simple. And it's not like we have a choice: there is no way to prevent a substantial increase in atmospheric carbon concentrations. We'll likely end up with about 600-800ppm CO2 before switching to solar, and that's fine.
The homicide rate in Australia is about 1:100000; the homicide rate in the US is about 4:100000, but less than 2:100000 outside minority populations; not particularly big differences. If you correct further for demographics, you find that mainstream US society is not particularly violent.
Gun ownership rates among countries and states actually correlate slightly negatively with homicide rates. The major factors correlating positively with homicide rates are economic and social.
Australia shares with the US that homicide is a massive problem among certain minorities (African Americans in the US, aborigines in Australia). When you figure out how to solve that problem, please share it with the US. Your advice on gun control is irrelevant and ill informed.
There is no significant correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates, either at the country level of at the US state level; those are the simple, easily verifiable facts.
We Americans love our liberty, and we don't like to be told that we can't do things because a bunch of hysterical, irrational ninnies are throwing temper tantrums.
Oh, and I don't love guns. I don't own a gun, I have never shot a gun, and I don't expect I ever will. Nevertheless, I want guns to remain legal because I want to continue to live in a free society.
You don't know what you're talking about.
I merely quoted a response, I didn't attribute the quote to you.
Oh, spare me your self-righteous indignation. You're an ignorant prick, that's all. Now go to hell.
We had a choice between two presidential candidates, and while Trump does have those tendencies, Hillary was far worse on each of them. That's why Americans made the choice they did.
US presidential elections tend to be a choice of the lesser of two evils. Bush was not as bad as Gore, Obama was not as bad as McCain, and Trump was not as bad as Hillary. But Democrats talk about Gore, Obama, and Hillary as if they were the Second Coming, instead of the narcissistic, corrupt mediocrities that all presidents are.
Hillary did much more. Hillary sent and received classified information on a private server in her bathroom and destroyed evidence, probably to conceal influence peddling.
Trump tweets from an iPhone; no classified information or even private information there. What exactly do you think is the risk there?
Yes, and that conclusion makes no sense. A classification algorithm for admission to an engineering school doesn't classify people based on whether they "are engineers", they classify people based on whether they are likely to succeed as engineers, a completely different question. Furthermore, people don't "insinuate those factors" into classification algorithms; factors are used only if they are actually predictive, and gender and race would not be predictive for a system that evaluates university applications.
That would happen if admissions algorithms classify students according to "is the person an engineer", but that's not what they do.
"A tendency for the procedures and practices of particular institutions to operate in ways which result in certain social groups being advantaged or favoured and others being disadvantaged or devalued." That doesn't apply here. Women are underrepresented in universities not because of institutional biases against them, but because they choose not to go into engineering.
Correct. The salient feature of an engineer is that they complete an engineering education, something that women tend to do less than men. The reasons for that are not historical but women's preferences and interests. How do we know that? Because those preferences are cultural universals. In fact, "in countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions".
That's a belief you hold and it happens to be an incorrect belief with no supporting evidence. It is not surprising that you draw incorrect conclusions from incorrect beliefs.
It's called a paraphrase. In fact, your actual words were even worse, so let's use them:
How do you get from the observation that the typical engineer in the US is white and male to "use that classification algorithm to filter who gets admitted into the college of engineering"?
So, stop avoiding the issue and answer the question.
The GOP was indeed opposed to the ACA, but how did that opposition affect the ACA? The ACA was designed and passed by Obama and the Democrats without any GOP votes.
Yes, that's roughly what the ACA designers said. Specifically, they knew that the ACA itself was just a first step, and they believed they could make it work sooner or later if they were just allowed to tinker with new regulations, mandates, laws, and subsidies. But that's not what they promised publicly and it was a foolish bet to make.
More importantly, it wasn't going to work. The ACA ended up handing out massive amounts of money to special interest groups important to Democrats without addressing all the really hard problems of health care reform: cost controls, coverage limits, and an end to the socialization of risk.
How do you get from the observation that the typical engineer in the US is white and male to "we filter applications based on race and gender"?
Big data algorithms wouldn't use race and gender to filter applications because race and gender are not informative compared to grades, degrees, and other accomplishments. But a consequence of not using race and gender to filter applications is precisely that the typical engineer in the US ends up white and male.
So you agree then that the ACA was a crony capitalist handout to big corporations. That's not the fault of Republicans, nor is it the fault of big corporations. It was the job of Democrats and Obama to represent the interests of the people and do what is right and they both failed miserably.
Most of those supposed accomplishments are figments of your imagination.
You know, I come from a fairly poor family and grew up under both democratic socialism and Eastern European socialism. The idea that any form of socialism "helps" anybody other than a privileged intelligentsia is laughable.
Indeed, just like music critics rarely are good performers.
Don't worry "mate", your superior culture will vote itself the next strong, smart leader into power yet, just like Germany and Italy did a century ago; it's what superior cultures do. And I know you will love it, given your evident preference for much of the 25 Point Program and eugenics (Idiocracy). Have you ever wondered what had happened to Europe by 2506, by the way?
We in the US will muddle through with our Camachos and do just fine. Don't you worry your pretty little head about us.
The typical engineer in the US is male, white, and middle aged, just like the typical giraffe is spotted, has four legs and is about 18 ft tall. Those are just facts. Picking typical representatives of a class to represent the class is not an "institutionalized bias".
Putting Limor Fried on the cover of a magazine and pretend that she is representative of engineers in general is objectively false, because she is an outlier and an atypical example of an engineer.
Except that big data systems don't skew things in "unethical" ways. "Unethical" is simply coded language for "outcomes we don't like". For example, if you feed demographic information and credit repayment rates into a big data system, it will come up with individual scores based on that information. When you then look at that data in aggregate, you'll find that many "marginalized groups" score worse in aggregate. That's not because the big data system discriminates, it's because objectively, those "marginalized groups" have a higher percentage of individuals that are a high credit risk.
We're talking about Obama's presidency here and whether he kept his promises. In many cases, Obama didn't even try.
I have no opinion on whether Obama did better or worse in that regard than Trump; that's a question we can revisit in another six years, at the end of Trump's presidency.
How does the Republican position ("fetuses are human beings and deserving of the same protections as children") contradict "freedom of association, private property, free markets, and freedom of speech"? Where do you see the "hypocrisy"?
No, that's not what they are claiming. They are claiming a "continuing exchange of biomaterial", not a synchronized evolutionary history. The latter is a much stronger claim.
You're projecting Hillary Clinton's shortcomings onto Trump.
I have seen no indication that that is any different for Trump. If anything, Trump has been more consistent about implementing his campaign promises than other politicians: reduce regulations, tough negotiations with the Chinese on trade, get illegals out of the country, try to reverse ACA, cut corporate and personal taxes, appoint conservative judges, charter schools and school vouchers, etc. Those are traditional, rational, moderately conservative views.
What Republicans actually campaigned on was opposition to Obama's policies and his vision for America, and Obama knew that going in, so he shouldn't have promised things that he couldn't deliver. But that isn't even the issue here.
The real problem with Obama was that his positions changed greatly from when he was campaigning to when he became president. He ran on restoring constitutionality, the rule of law, listening to voters, privacy, and fiscal responsibility, and all that went out the window when he became president.
Most likely, what you like about Obama and his accomplishments is that he made the US more like a European progressive welfare state. You consider that "better", Americans by and large don't.
ACA was passed without Republican support, hence Republicans had no opportunity of watering it down.
You suffer from the typical misconception that "intellectual" = "intelligent, rational". In fact, "intellectual" is simply a class of professions: academics, journalists, writers--people who make their money from using their intellect. Karl Marx, Lothrop Stoddard, Charles William Elliot, and Giovanni Gentile were intellectuals. Henry Ford and Winston Churchill were not. You bet I'm "anti-intellectual": people whose main accomplishment in life is to theorize about how other people ought to run their lives ought not to run countries.