Well first off, we define pedophilia as sex with anyone under 18
Not quite, although this may be the case in the US (I don't know, simply). Some countries set a legal age for when sex is considered legal - in some countries this may be as low as 13 (Japan, I believe).
That, however, is beside the point: it is well established scientifically, that sexual abuse of children is devastatingly harmful to those children. Trying to correct the problem with punishments and restrictions is not likely to have a noticeable effect, not least since the perpetrators have already chosen to step outside what is the accepted norm in society - the prospect of punishment and social exclusion is no longer a deterrent. A better way forward clearly must involve looking at why some become pedophile, and how we can address the issue; we need to cure the disease - punishment alone is like treating cancer with painkillers.
AMERICA IS AWESOME!!!!!! We're #1! We're #1!!!! WHOOOOO!
Sure, for a given value of 1, certainly:-)
However, there is not necessarily a direct connection between quality of education and top scientific achievement; and ther eare many reasons for this.
Historically, America got to the top, scientifically, by scavenging German scientists after WWII, quite often ignoring their active participation in the Nazi atrocities, it appears.
Be that as it may, out of all the graduates produced, only a very small percentage actually make it through to scientific research, let alone the very top in research. The ones who make it in good times are quite likely to be the ones that have the talent and determination to make it to the top even if the circumstances were poor.
I think the two strongest factors in determining scientific achievement are 1) funding and 2) culture. #1 is obvious, I should think, but #2 is where America (and the West in general) is getting weaker; this is about people's attitude towards science and scientists. In America, a large segment of the population are either hostile (like in anti-evolution), contemptuous ('scientists are crazy nerds) or indifferent towards science, so fewer young people want to be scientists, and fewer people believe a highly educated person would be useful.
As a contrast, in China, particularly, science, engineering and scientists are held in much higher regard, and as a result a much higher proportion of the young want to study science or engineering, and they are much more likely to be seen as useful.
So, you're saying that because Mohammed allegedly was not a nice man, the religion he instituted must be bad? By extension, the religion instituted by Abraham must be bad, because he too was as bad (or good, who knows?) as the people around him at the tmie, and if we examine the other founders of religions, I am sure one can find things that "prove" that they were "bad". And so on.
The point, however, is that it makes no difference; a religion is as good and as bad as its followers. We all know of examples of people who were in every sense truly devout Christians/Jews/Muslims/..., and who were thouroughly vile people. And there plenty of examples of profoundly good people, who denied believing in any religion. Good or evil has little to nothing to do with what you believe in and everything to do with what you choose to do every day. If you seek strife, what are you? If you seek peace and consolation, what are you? Stop hiding behind the skirts of your religious dogma.
Countering radical measures with radical measures is not productive because it does not address the real problem: the fact that there are people who grow up to do this kind of things. Falkvinge's "Freedom uber alles, Sieg heil" stance is no better than the reactionary belief in more punishment and restrictions.
We need to find out what causes paedophilia. It seems clear from observation of other, closely related species (like mammals in general), that it is not a natural state of affairs when adults have sex with immature young. This also ties in with the view that hurting your offspring is counter-evolutionary.
I have no idea what causes adults to abuse children sexually, but that is what we need to find out, so we can consider how to solve the problem. Sadly, there seems to be little political interest in funding the necessary research.
The real problem with comments isn't their color, it's when they AREN'T THERE AT ALL
Bad comments are worse than no comments. And good comments become bad when they are not being maintained along with the code.
I think it is a question of attitude; people in general do not think of documentation and comments as being as important as the code, and it starts at management level. But there is another side to this problem: people have not been taught how to comment well, so actually, the problem to some extent starts even before project leaders get their grubby hands on things.
And writing good comments isn't easy; but I think the best way is to write relatively few, relatively large blocks of explanations, which DO NOT point out the obvious, but explain things like which part of the code the comment concerns, what the parameters and return value mean (not what they are, what they mean) and how other parts of the environment influence the execution. And not least, how and why this code is deviates from what you would expect to find, if applicable.
The problem is that change happens, but the speed it happens with. It's like stopping your car - if you apply the brakes gently, you hardly feel a thing, but if you hit a road tree, well, you still won't feel it, but for other reasons.
I find it very hard to ascertain what the facts are when it comes to China. One very big reason is that there are so many groups with an extreme anti-China agenda, who will invent or distort just about any tall tale to support their claims; I don't think I need to dig out any references - they must be well known by now. So can we trust what "Labor rights group China Labor Watch" have to say? I don't know.
So, to me it is back to what seems plausible. That factory workers in China seem to regard their work in the same way as any factory worker in the West does - that seems plausible to me. It is not unlikely that they are expected to work much harder than we are used to - the Chinese I know personally all have an unbelievable work discipline. Just to compare: I've had a British builder do some work on my house; he turned up around 9 am and left around 5 pm after doing some quite decent work. I've recently had a Chinese builder do a similar sort of job, to the same standard; but he didn't leave until around 8 pm. I think it is simply in their culture to work very hard, and what would feel like unreasonable to an American or European may seem quite reasonable to a Chinese.
One of the reasons why people in the developing world get so many children is the high child mortatlity. I doubt any family (outside certain religious circles) actually wants to shoulder the very significant burden of bringing up many children to adulthood. If you are confident that your children will survive, then it makes much more sense to invest your efforts in just a few.
Simple: Linux is useful and fun for my purposes. In Linux (and other UNIXes), if a thing is logically possible, then it is by and large also possible to simply go and do it. In Windows I have always run in to what seems like arbitrary limitations on what I am allowed to do.
I think you should think abut what good systems administration consists of and look for those qualities. Having ready knowledge is not nearly as important as having the right attitude, and while it can be useful if the person knows their way about Windows, that is something that can be picked up. You don't some fool who can't get his head around the idea that not everything is Windows-shaped and comes with a domain server and clickable interfaces.
Personally, I would look for a UNIX guy with some Windows experience and an open mind towards the onerous task of navigating the shifting sands of different versions of Windows - and who knows Samba well. Believe me, you don't want somebody who is going to try to change the whole way you run your admin to fit the Windows concept.
I think there are more fundamental problems: epi-genetics or genomics or whatever the term is now is a very major factor in what makes up the traits of a species - the same set of genes can be expressed in many ways depending on how they are regulated, so it may not be as simple as reconstructing most of the genes of a species; perhaps they need to be 'booted up' in the right way too?
I was looking at some family pictures going back to the Eisenhower Administration -weddings and stuff- and some photos from Riverview Amusement Park (which closed in the '60s)...
Yes, I have made the same observation recently. Take Laurel and Hardy - I remember in my childhood how everyone agreed that mr Hardy was unbelievably fat, but looking at the pictures now, he seems almost slim. Things really have gone overboard, and for a long time now.
Another interesting experience - in the last few years I have been growing steadily fatter, and a couple of months ago I got a stern warning from my doctor; I was just on the verge of being diabetic or having metabolic syndrome. That scared the hell out of me, and I stopped eating anything except my three meals a day - no snacks at all. And I lost weight, of course. I have now started snacking again, but still avoid any sweets, cakes etc, and the funny thing is, I still lose weight.
I think the simple explanation is that when you eat sugary products, you keep craving more - the blood sugar level goes up and comes down again quickly, and you keep wanting to stuff your face until you feel sick enough to override the cravings. When you avoid sweets (and I include artificial sweeteners, because they seem to do something similar to you), you normally lose interest in eating when you are no longer hungry; at least that is how it works for me.
My conclusion is that we, in the industrialised world, get fat because sugary luxury items modify our behaviour in the direction of overeating, and that is why we have an obesity epidemy. Now, I am not really saying that sugar is bad in itself - as many of the sugar industry's paid advocates will point out, sugar is natural and a necessary fuel etc; however, the extreme overabundance of oversugared products everywhere IS bad. I mean, just as an example, if you feel a little peckish and you have a bit of change on you, what is easiest: buying a chocolate bar or buying a small bowl of salad? It is not that you lack willpower, when you fall for it, it is simply that these cravings get behind your defences, and you end up having bought the chocolate before you remember that you had decided to avoid that crap. And then you eat it, even though you begin to feel disgusted half way through, because you don't throw out money.
So why regulate apps? You can more or less claim your snake oil does anything you want, so long as you hide a disclaimer some place that your claims have not been confirmed by the FDA. If we're going to regulate medical self help and remedies then it should be all inclusive, not limited to apps.
OK, having looked around on the responses, I think there is a need for a bit of a balancing viewpoint in favour of regulation.
Perhaps we really should regulate not just apps, but also advertising and a lot of other things. And it isn't really a question of "should we" since most of these things are already regulated to some extent in most industrialised countries, it is just a question about how much. Far too many charlatans get away with far too much far too easily, IMO.
As far as I can see, it doesn't necessarily imply giving monopoly status to a narrow group of experts - there are already regulatory bodies that supervise advertising (at least in Europe) and one could adjust their powers, strengthen the penalties imposed etc.
We, as consumers, can do something about too; we could for example be louder about "naming and shaming" things we find unacceptable.
But many people buy supplemental health insurance because they want more of a premium plan with extra coverage/benefits
Actually the NHS is very good - I used to have private healthcare through my workplace, but I stopped because I can't see the point of receiving a taxable benefit that gives me so little extra.
Photosynthesis as far as we know, produces sugar - the one thing that aphids find in such overwhelming abundance in their food (plant sap) that they have to excrete most of it. On the surface, at least, it would seem surprising if they were to produce their own suger by means of photosynthesis; this is possibly just the summary that overinterprets the findings of the article, is my guess.
Maths isn't directly necessary in most programming. But...
Is history necessary for most people's jobs? What is the practical value of learning about literature, religion,...? You don't need them if you are hammering nails all day, or writing programs, but they give you a background that is often valuable in other circumstances. Do you need to know about golf to do your job? Of course not, but if your boss plays golf, it can give better contact to him because you can talk about a shared interest.
In order to learn mathmatics you need to learn a certain way of thinking and solving problems, which is very useful in general and in programming in particular. So, you do need your maths.
The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,
Science is only as important as "shares rating on Wall Street"? Scientists do real work - they make new discoveries that in time benefit us all in uncounted ways. Investors, bankers and stock brokers, on the other hand, produce nothing and discover nothing; they live by siphoning nutrients out of the money stream, so to speak - they are best compared to filter feeders or parasites. Science is many orders of magnitude more valuable than what goes on in Wall Street.
Smart phones may be cool and all, but the infrastructure is missing - the network coverage is simply not good enough and what there is, is not too reliable. It may be good enough for those that mostly use messaging, but when your business depends on you being accessible and on the move, it is no good. You can't have a conversation if you lose signal every few minutes.
The thing is, once you get past the wow-factor of the iPhone et al, what you have is basically a clumsy mobile phone and a computer that is too small and slow, with an unreliable internet connection; and you are sqeezed to pay for everything you try to do, more or less. I can't see that as a lasting businesss model - the benefits are too small for the price.
I'd like to add that our specis' survival isn't enough in itself; we are part of an eco-system where every part depends on the others, and the very likely risk is that we don't have the option of losing "a few" or a minor percentage of all species - it could well be that the whole system collapses and a majority of species disappear. To illustrate, just imagine that bees went extinct - it wouldn't just mean "no more honey", since a very major part of our crops depend on bees for pollination. No bees = big problems with our food supply. And the real picture is much more complicated.
No economist will say, "the economy can grow indefinitely." They WILL say, "we don't know how much it can grow."
Which effectively amounts to the same thing, since it inevitably gets interpreted that way by the numbskulls that lead Western nations. There is a huge difference between accepting that "theoretically" growth is limited (but implicitly assuming that any limits are a very long way off) and understanding that we are now close to the limit, even if we don't know exactly how close.
It's like the difference between saying "We don't know and we don't care" and "We don't know, we'd better find out ASAP".
There are worse things, I think. Just because our current world order builds on overexploitation, it doesn't mean that we can't live in another way, and live better too.
The current version of capitalism assumes (falsely) that the economy can grow indefinitely. The obsession with growth is what lies behind things like the ever escalating over-consumption (which drives eg. the obesity epidemy and the idiotic chasing after the latest, indifferent fad); it also lies at the heart of our over-exploitation of resources and pollution. Ironically, we don't need all that crap; I think, probably, most of us don't even really want it.
In the long run, whether we do anything or not will not matter all that much; at som point in the future the world will be in a situation where things are once more close to a state of balance. How we get there should interest us - if we do nothing, like now, we will at some point have a catastrophe that will put an abrupt stop to things, we all know that. If we work hard on it, we may find a way to make a soft landing.
Of course, this post will as usual either get ignored or be met with a chorus of "tree-hugger hysteria" and "OMG we're all gonna die" etc. I don't mind - of course we ARE all going to die, that is part of natural life, but what kind of idiot would race down a track totally out of control without even trying to do something about it - and instead trying to explain the problem away? Well, I guess we already know.
Slashdot Mirror
Well first off, we define pedophilia as sex with anyone under 18
Not quite, although this may be the case in the US (I don't know, simply). Some countries set a legal age for when sex is considered legal - in some countries this may be as low as 13 (Japan, I believe).
That, however, is beside the point: it is well established scientifically, that sexual abuse of children is devastatingly harmful to those children. Trying to correct the problem with punishments and restrictions is not likely to have a noticeable effect, not least since the perpetrators have already chosen to step outside what is the accepted norm in society - the prospect of punishment and social exclusion is no longer a deterrent. A better way forward clearly must involve looking at why some become pedophile, and how we can address the issue; we need to cure the disease - punishment alone is like treating cancer with painkillers.
AMERICA IS AWESOME!!!!!! We're #1! We're #1!!!! WHOOOOO!
Sure, for a given value of 1, certainly :-)
However, there is not necessarily a direct connection between quality of education and top scientific achievement; and ther eare many reasons for this.
Historically, America got to the top, scientifically, by scavenging German scientists after WWII, quite often ignoring their active participation in the Nazi atrocities, it appears.
Be that as it may, out of all the graduates produced, only a very small percentage actually make it through to scientific research, let alone the very top in research. The ones who make it in good times are quite likely to be the ones that have the talent and determination to make it to the top even if the circumstances were poor.
I think the two strongest factors in determining scientific achievement are 1) funding and 2) culture. #1 is obvious, I should think, but #2 is where America (and the West in general) is getting weaker; this is about people's attitude towards science and scientists. In America, a large segment of the population are either hostile (like in anti-evolution), contemptuous ('scientists are crazy nerds) or indifferent towards science, so fewer young people want to be scientists, and fewer people believe a highly educated person would be useful.
As a contrast, in China, particularly, science, engineering and scientists are held in much higher regard, and as a result a much higher proportion of the young want to study science or engineering, and they are much more likely to be seen as useful.
...[a lenthy comment about this and that ] ...
So, you're saying that because Mohammed allegedly was not a nice man, the religion he instituted must be bad? By extension, the religion instituted by Abraham must be bad, because he too was as bad (or good, who knows?) as the people around him at the tmie, and if we examine the other founders of religions, I am sure one can find things that "prove" that they were "bad". And so on.
The point, however, is that it makes no difference; a religion is as good and as bad as its followers. We all know of examples of people who were in every sense truly devout Christians/Jews/Muslims/..., and who were thouroughly vile people. And there plenty of examples of profoundly good people, who denied believing in any religion. Good or evil has little to nothing to do with what you believe in and everything to do with what you choose to do every day. If you seek strife, what are you? If you seek peace and consolation, what are you? Stop hiding behind the skirts of your religious dogma.
Countering radical measures with radical measures is not productive because it does not address the real problem: the fact that there are people who grow up to do this kind of things. Falkvinge's "Freedom uber alles, Sieg heil" stance is no better than the reactionary belief in more punishment and restrictions.
We need to find out what causes paedophilia. It seems clear from observation of other, closely related species (like mammals in general), that it is not a natural state of affairs when adults have sex with immature young. This also ties in with the view that hurting your offspring is counter-evolutionary.
I have no idea what causes adults to abuse children sexually, but that is what we need to find out, so we can consider how to solve the problem. Sadly, there seems to be little political interest in funding the necessary research.
When you sit at the trading terminal you look for the sucker
What an immensely sad comment on the nature of Capitalism, but very elegantly summed up.
The real problem with comments isn't their color, it's when they AREN'T THERE AT ALL
Bad comments are worse than no comments. And good comments become bad when they are not being maintained along with the code.
I think it is a question of attitude; people in general do not think of documentation and comments as being as important as the code, and it starts at management level. But there is another side to this problem: people have not been taught how to comment well, so actually, the problem to some extent starts even before project leaders get their grubby hands on things.
And writing good comments isn't easy; but I think the best way is to write relatively few, relatively large blocks of explanations, which DO NOT point out the obvious, but explain things like which part of the code the comment concerns, what the parameters and return value mean (not what they are, what they mean) and how other parts of the environment influence the execution. And not least, how and why this code is deviates from what you would expect to find, if applicable.
*groan* Why did I not read my post before I pressed "Submit"? It should have said "The problem is not that ...", obviously.
The problem is that change happens, but the speed it happens with. It's like stopping your car - if you apply the brakes gently, you hardly feel a thing, but if you hit a road tree, well, you still won't feel it, but for other reasons.
Uranuscrats
Certainly not! Not In My Anus!
Well, you say that, but they may have an opportunity now: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/04/intel-explores-mineral-oil-cooling/
I find it very hard to ascertain what the facts are when it comes to China. One very big reason is that there are so many groups with an extreme anti-China agenda, who will invent or distort just about any tall tale to support their claims; I don't think I need to dig out any references - they must be well known by now. So can we trust what "Labor rights group China Labor Watch" have to say? I don't know.
So, to me it is back to what seems plausible. That factory workers in China seem to regard their work in the same way as any factory worker in the West does - that seems plausible to me. It is not unlikely that they are expected to work much harder than we are used to - the Chinese I know personally all have an unbelievable work discipline. Just to compare: I've had a British builder do some work on my house; he turned up around 9 am and left around 5 pm after doing some quite decent work. I've recently had a Chinese builder do a similar sort of job, to the same standard; but he didn't leave until around 8 pm. I think it is simply in their culture to work very hard, and what would feel like unreasonable to an American or European may seem quite reasonable to a Chinese.
... they'll all die of starvation anyway.
One of the reasons why people in the developing world get so many children is the high child mortatlity. I doubt any family (outside certain religious circles) actually wants to shoulder the very significant burden of bringing up many children to adulthood. If you are confident that your children will survive, then it makes much more sense to invest your efforts in just a few.
Simple: Linux is useful and fun for my purposes. In Linux (and other UNIXes), if a thing is logically possible, then it is by and large also possible to simply go and do it. In Windows I have always run in to what seems like arbitrary limitations on what I am allowed to do.
I think you should think abut what good systems administration consists of and look for those qualities. Having ready knowledge is not nearly as important as having the right attitude, and while it can be useful if the person knows their way about Windows, that is something that can be picked up. You don't some fool who can't get his head around the idea that not everything is Windows-shaped and comes with a domain server and clickable interfaces.
Personally, I would look for a UNIX guy with some Windows experience and an open mind towards the onerous task of navigating the shifting sands of different versions of Windows - and who knows Samba well. Believe me, you don't want somebody who is going to try to change the whole way you run your admin to fit the Windows concept.
I think there are more fundamental problems: epi-genetics or genomics or whatever the term is now is a very major factor in what makes up the traits of a species - the same set of genes can be expressed in many ways depending on how they are regulated, so it may not be as simple as reconstructing most of the genes of a species; perhaps they need to be 'booted up' in the right way too?
I was looking at some family pictures going back to the Eisenhower Administration -weddings and stuff- and some photos from Riverview Amusement Park (which closed in the '60s) ...
Yes, I have made the same observation recently. Take Laurel and Hardy - I remember in my childhood how everyone agreed that mr Hardy was unbelievably fat, but looking at the pictures now, he seems almost slim. Things really have gone overboard, and for a long time now.
Another interesting experience - in the last few years I have been growing steadily fatter, and a couple of months ago I got a stern warning from my doctor; I was just on the verge of being diabetic or having metabolic syndrome. That scared the hell out of me, and I stopped eating anything except my three meals a day - no snacks at all. And I lost weight, of course. I have now started snacking again, but still avoid any sweets, cakes etc, and the funny thing is, I still lose weight.
I think the simple explanation is that when you eat sugary products, you keep craving more - the blood sugar level goes up and comes down again quickly, and you keep wanting to stuff your face until you feel sick enough to override the cravings. When you avoid sweets (and I include artificial sweeteners, because they seem to do something similar to you), you normally lose interest in eating when you are no longer hungry; at least that is how it works for me.
My conclusion is that we, in the industrialised world, get fat because sugary luxury items modify our behaviour in the direction of overeating, and that is why we have an obesity epidemy. Now, I am not really saying that sugar is bad in itself - as many of the sugar industry's paid advocates will point out, sugar is natural and a necessary fuel etc; however, the extreme overabundance of oversugared products everywhere IS bad. I mean, just as an example, if you feel a little peckish and you have a bit of change on you, what is easiest: buying a chocolate bar or buying a small bowl of salad? It is not that you lack willpower, when you fall for it, it is simply that these cravings get behind your defences, and you end up having bought the chocolate before you remember that you had decided to avoid that crap. And then you eat it, even though you begin to feel disgusted half way through, because you don't throw out money.
So why regulate apps? You can more or less claim your snake oil does anything you want, so long as you hide a disclaimer some place that your claims have not been confirmed by the FDA. If we're going to regulate medical self help and remedies then it should be all inclusive, not limited to apps.
OK, having looked around on the responses, I think there is a need for a bit of a balancing viewpoint in favour of regulation.
Perhaps we really should regulate not just apps, but also advertising and a lot of other things. And it isn't really a question of "should we" since most of these things are already regulated to some extent in most industrialised countries, it is just a question about how much. Far too many charlatans get away with far too much far too easily, IMO.
As far as I can see, it doesn't necessarily imply giving monopoly status to a narrow group of experts - there are already regulatory bodies that supervise advertising (at least in Europe) and one could adjust their powers, strengthen the penalties imposed etc.
We, as consumers, can do something about too; we could for example be louder about "naming and shaming" things we find unacceptable.
But many people buy supplemental health insurance because they want more of a premium plan with extra coverage/benefits
Actually the NHS is very good - I used to have private healthcare through my workplace, but I stopped because I can't see the point of receiving a taxable benefit that gives me so little extra.
Photosynthesis as far as we know, produces sugar - the one thing that aphids find in such overwhelming abundance in their food (plant sap) that they have to excrete most of it. On the surface, at least, it would seem surprising if they were to produce their own suger by means of photosynthesis; this is possibly just the summary that overinterprets the findings of the article, is my guess.
Maths isn't directly necessary in most programming. But ...
Is history necessary for most people's jobs? What is the practical value of learning about literature, religion, ...? You don't need them if you are hammering nails all day, or writing programs, but they give you a background that is often valuable in other circumstances. Do you need to know about golf to do your job? Of course not, but if your boss plays golf, it can give better contact to him because you can talk about a shared interest.
In order to learn mathmatics you need to learn a certain way of thinking and solving problems, which is very useful in general and in programming in particular. So, you do need your maths.
The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,
Science is only as important as "shares rating on Wall Street"? Scientists do real work - they make new discoveries that in time benefit us all in uncounted ways. Investors, bankers and stock brokers, on the other hand, produce nothing and discover nothing; they live by siphoning nutrients out of the money stream, so to speak - they are best compared to filter feeders or parasites. Science is many orders of magnitude more valuable than what goes on in Wall Street.
Smart phones may be cool and all, but the infrastructure is missing - the network coverage is simply not good enough and what there is, is not too reliable. It may be good enough for those that mostly use messaging, but when your business depends on you being accessible and on the move, it is no good. You can't have a conversation if you lose signal every few minutes.
The thing is, once you get past the wow-factor of the iPhone et al, what you have is basically a clumsy mobile phone and a computer that is too small and slow, with an unreliable internet connection; and you are sqeezed to pay for everything you try to do, more or less. I can't see that as a lasting businesss model - the benefits are too small for the price.
Very true.
I'd like to add that our specis' survival isn't enough in itself; we are part of an eco-system where every part depends on the others, and the very likely risk is that we don't have the option of losing "a few" or a minor percentage of all species - it could well be that the whole system collapses and a majority of species disappear. To illustrate, just imagine that bees went extinct - it wouldn't just mean "no more honey", since a very major part of our crops depend on bees for pollination. No bees = big problems with our food supply. And the real picture is much more complicated.
No economist will say, "the economy can grow indefinitely." They WILL say, "we don't know how much it can grow."
Which effectively amounts to the same thing, since it inevitably gets interpreted that way by the numbskulls that lead Western nations. There is a huge difference between accepting that "theoretically" growth is limited (but implicitly assuming that any limits are a very long way off) and understanding that we are now close to the limit, even if we don't know exactly how close.
It's like the difference between saying "We don't know and we don't care" and "We don't know, we'd better find out ASAP".
Good luck at that, it would be economic suicide.
There are worse things, I think. Just because our current world order builds on overexploitation, it doesn't mean that we can't live in another way, and live better too.
The current version of capitalism assumes (falsely) that the economy can grow indefinitely. The obsession with growth is what lies behind things like the ever escalating over-consumption (which drives eg. the obesity epidemy and the idiotic chasing after the latest, indifferent fad); it also lies at the heart of our over-exploitation of resources and pollution. Ironically, we don't need all that crap; I think, probably, most of us don't even really want it.
In the long run, whether we do anything or not will not matter all that much; at som point in the future the world will be in a situation where things are once more close to a state of balance. How we get there should interest us - if we do nothing, like now, we will at some point have a catastrophe that will put an abrupt stop to things, we all know that. If we work hard on it, we may find a way to make a soft landing.
Of course, this post will as usual either get ignored or be met with a chorus of "tree-hugger hysteria" and "OMG we're all gonna die" etc. I don't mind - of course we ARE all going to die, that is part of natural life, but what kind of idiot would race down a track totally out of control without even trying to do something about it - and instead trying to explain the problem away? Well, I guess we already know.