Just not by the same people. Never mind the huge effort to have the labor & government side of the equation shoulder all the risk, training, and guesswork.
You are constraining your worldview to your developed world country. The developing world is having no such problems employing people or finding demand for labor. This includes handling the risk, training, and guesswork.
My view on this is let's first reward employers for employing people instead of actively punishing them. Labor power comes from high demand for labor, not from laws.
Not if they are going to pay less than it costs to live.
Ok, so why is it Walmart or McDonalds responsibility to pay a living wage? And if people really are desperate enough to accept this lower wage, isn't that still an enormous boon for people who otherwise would be even worse off?
Remind me again. What was the point of the social programs again? How does Walmart and McDonalds employing people on top of those programs make things worse rather than better?
It's the same dumb shit over and over again. You want companies to paying "living wages", but you don't want the economy that would deliver that. And somehow it's more important to stop companies from milking imaginary subsidies rather than helping poor people. Maybe you ought to think here about consequences and about what a society should be delivering here.
It's not some morality play where the highest goal is punishing behavior that doesn't fit in with the present groupthink.
I found an old hotdog under the back seat, do you want food or not?
It's still better than starving to death. And you don't make the situation any better by taking away this desperate choice for their own good.
There is nothing two faced about it. In your second reference to my posts, Walmart is NOT paying a living wage, they're leeching off of the public to make up the difference. Same for the third case.
And again, what's the problem with that? Don't we want Walmart to employ poor people rather than not?
Consider this, do you think manufacturers should be forced to provide goods below the marginal cost of production?
Or forced to pay more for employees than they're worth?
Well, that 39.5 hours/week costs the employee real money to produce.
I assure you that if maintenance employs as many people as not having the automation
Read the grandparent's post. He was implying that even maintenance jobs were in rapid decline. I merely noted that an independent shop like that would be hit hard by manufacturer-side service contracts and those jobs have probably just moved around.
These sort of phrases reveal economic ignorance. There is always more demand for labor. But then I don't feel the need to throw obstacles in the way of employing people either and then complain that there's no pent-up demand for labor.
For example, from this story we have your usual two-faced opinion on minimum wage. First, paying someone "living wages" is supposedly important:
The fair wage for full time work is a living wage. Full stop.
But when Walmart and McDonalds do so (when including various government programs to the poor), we find paying poor people is somehow a bad thing:
Believe it! That's why Walmart and McDonald's HR include people to help you get food stamps. They know they don't pay well enough to actually live. The expectations are food that is legal to buy for human consumption and housing that hasn't been condemned as uninhabitable.
If raising the minimum wage makes a business not start up, then it wasn't viable because it couldn't pay the actual cost of it's labor without getting the public to pay it's payroll for it.
Maybe, if we want businesses to employ poor people we should be encouraging that?
So how does automation explain this huge drop in maintenance demand? Sorry, there's no automated maintenance yet. What's actually happened here is that the maintenance is done by the producers of the robots. The labor is still there, your friend's company is just cut out of the contracts.
That makes your position even more indefensible, if only because it has never been true!
Sure, we can look in isolation at an automated assembly line and see the oh, 100 jobs replaced with one job. 99 net jobs lost right? But that sort of analysis ignores a variety of things. The wealth created by far cheaper production goes to employing people in other areas (for example, the one person of the above example will still have needs). The 99 people are now free to do other jobs. And with that labor freed, we have opportunity for more assembly lines to make more things. Finally, it's worth noting that all this automation makes human labor more valuable.
And that's why, we've never, even to the present date, had a net loss in jobs from automation.
One could use the same reasoning to claim that all cost is derived from Pokemon trading cards. For example, to deal with the inevitable objects, it is easy to determine the Pokemon cost of labor by using wages to determine how many Pokemon cards one can buy. And you've already claimed that labor is the fundamental cost factor, which means we thus, have a means to derive the cost of everything in terms of the true cost in Pokemon cards. QED.
Nice. I haven't been able to escape the clutches of paper personally (even ignoring my current job). I jot down notes. I've seen some PDAs that can do that reasonably well, but I haven't looked into it.
Well, it had to happen at some point before the complete defeat of Nazi Germany. I doubt there were many German's surprised by the war's outcome by the time the USSR overran Berlin.
Stalingrad probably is the starting point merely because a bunch of people would have notice that all of Germany's victories on the eastern front started to move west rather quickly afterward and read between the lines of the propaganda. Survivors of these conflicts would also be a good source of information even in such a controlled society.
Of course not. If companies had to pay for their own security in the Middle East, it would be vastly cheaper.
Of course you will provide references to back that claim up.
Because? What oil company needed to invade Iraq or Afghanistan to protect their infrastructure?
What if they pay a bunch of guys to risk their lives so you don't have to risk yours What's that worth to you?
Sounds like it could be negative value here to me. My life isn't infinite in value and it would take very few deaths to outweigh the value of my life.
And why isn't the cost of those wars counted towards the cost of renewable energy subsidies?
Because we're not in the middle east securing the use of solar panels? Really?
The transportation network is very heavily petroleum-dependent and you argued that the full cost of Middle East wars should be laid at the feet of petroleum producers and users. Well, that includes solar panels. They don't magically grow on houses.
That's your opinion, the facts says otherwise.
Renewables are the next big industry. Imagine having this same discussion when oil was discovered. You'd be complaining that we shouldn't bother with this new oil fad, let's stick with burning wood and steam engines.
Do you have a link to these "facts"? I couldn't help but notice that your link didn't support your assertion. It merely claims that "investment" which is not "subsidy" was higher in the developing world for the first time in 2016. There were plenty of years before 2016 and plenty of subsidies in the developed world which aren't being counted here.
Too late, renewables are already cheaper for developing countries with no existing infrastructure, and getting cheaper every day.
You are betting that you can keep modifying your typewriter to an electronic version to compete with PCs.
Then the switch from fossil fuels to renewables will happen sooner than I expect. I have no problem with that, assuming your assertions are actually true.
China is the world's leading investor in renewables. They have already recognised the folly of fossil fuels and have jumped in with both feet. Would you prefer the new global mega industry to be monopolised by the Chinese, or should America try get a slice of that pie?
Why do you think the US has a chance? They've already lost to the Chinese on this.
Why should I expect either to have good future capital gain over a typical investment horizon?
The choice is gains (get involved) or losses (let the Chinese and Germans own the next big thing). Which do you prefer?
False dilemma. First, the Chinese are already owning the Germans despite a variety of German and EU protectionist schemes, including renewable energy subsidies.
Second, by letting the Chinese and Germans pay the huge development costs, we'd just pay for the final product. Far cheaper to do it that way especially since renewable energy isn't that big a deal. If they overcharge for these products, then just continue to use existing fossil fuels and other such competitors. It's a buyers market out there.
1. A sum of money granted by the state or a public body to help an industry or business keep the price of a commodity or service low:
1.1 A sum of money granted to support an undertaking held to be in the public interest:
1.2 A grant or contribution of money:
Welfare is not a subsidy. And note that I didn't say all corporate welfare was subsidy either!
Did you pay full fees for your school? The roads you drive on? The water out of your tap? Your Internet service? How about the fact you don't speak Russian now, how much did you pay for that on the day you were born? No, the government subsidises the cost of these things because they have a benefit to society greater than the cost of the subsidy.
None of that is subsidy. You aren't even close.
Energy independence is quite possibly the greatest benefit any country can achieve, because upon that everything else can be built,
Greater than freedom? Greater than long life? Greater than education? Greater than prosperity? You can build all these things on energy dependence too as the Japanese have discovered.
and the most costly thing to the economy, war can be largely avoided.
Except when war can't be largely avoided. To note a recent example, Iraq was unable to avoid being invaded in 2003.
The big problem with nuclear power is that accidents are extremely dangerous and costly. That wouldn't be a problem if accidents were extremely unlikely. We know how to design and operate nuclear power plants safely, the problem is that we won't. Fukushima showed that. That accident was entirely avoidable. They needed only to build the walls higher.
Suuure, that magnitude 9 earthquake was easily preventable./sarc
They needed only to build the walls higher.
Let us note that they actually were in the process of doing so. Research had been completed a few years earlier to show the site did indeed experience higher tsunami than the 1960s era estimates (roughly 1 in a century worst case) indicated. The wheels of bureaucracy would have eventually determined that the walls should be built higher and the walls built. The earthquake just happened first.
But management chose to ignore the recommendations and build a lower wall, to save a little money.
And the evidence for that? You really should look at a time line here. Japanese researcher demonstrates that there was a risk of higher tsunami in 2001. Then the Japanese nuclear regulators get ahold of it and start requesting that plant operators investigate the threat to their reactors.
Regulators determine wall isn't needed because the reactors are going to be shutdown in a few years. The Fukushima reactors aren't actually shutdown down because regulators discontinued all new reactor construction earlier in the decade. Then the earthquake happens in the middle of all this.
The walls would have been built higher eventually. But there was all this bureaucracy to make reactors safe which got in the way.
And that's your simple-minded observation about knowing how to make reactors safe, but not doing so is so annoying. Sure, we do, but the intent to make reactors safe with a massive pile of regulation, halted construction of new Japanese plants, and extremely slow decision processes made them more unsafe rather than less in this case.
This isn't the first time that making something safe actually made it less safe.
You will wake up about 5 generations beyond where you are now. Assuming her death doesn't end the bloodline altogether, the relatives she has in 100 years will have no real familial connection to her. Everyone and everything that defines her sense of happiness now will likely be dead and gone or so evolved that it is unrecognizable (like tech and hobbies).
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally.
So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age. For all we know, Mandarin could replace English by 2116.
What's bizarre here is that you think this is worse than death. I guess you're one of those believers in an afterlife that no one, including the powerful supernatural beings who supposedly manage the thing, has bothered to show exists.
Neither has +4 C global warming. Neither have you died of old age. Just because something hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it won't nor that we're not already headed in that direction.
But it is a good indication that you're missing important dynamics here.
Of course not. If companies had to pay for their own security in the Middle East, it would be vastly cheaper. For example, if government pays $100 per pet for robotic poop scoopers so that I don't have to exert myself for the $1 of time and effort it takes to collect the poop from my pet, it's not $100 of subsidy to me. It's $1 of subsidy.
And why isn't the cost of those wars counted towards the cost of renewable energy subsidies? They benefit too even if it is a little bit more tenuously than fossil fuels (these wars after all stabilize global trade which renewable energy is dependent on). That's the usual double standard in play.
7 million deaths each and every year for free, pretty much a WW2 every decade.
Dishonest comparison since the renewable energy subsidies won't be in the places with the deaths (developed world subsidies versus developing world pollution and deaths) and of course, ignoring the positive externality of cheaper energy.
Further, we could eliminate most of these deaths with the usual pollution controls developed in the 1970s and 80s. No need to switch to renewables when there's a cheaper option at hand.
You see this repeatedly in play. For example, the IMF estimated $5.3 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2015. They gloss over that more than $2 trillion of that is just due to China's mess (air pollution and "other vehicle externalities"). Further, despite generating more CO2 than the US from energy production and vehicle use, the Chinese contribution to global warming is somehow an order of magnitude lower. And of course, positive externality of cheap energy is nowhere to be seen in their charts.
There's two paybacks from investing, dividends and capital gain. Apple shares, like the new energy industry has experienced massive capital gain.
Why should I expect either to have good future capital gain over a typical investment horizon?
Yes, much like the benefits you receive from a stable democratic government that required no effort from you for the first 18 years of your life.
Funny how those things aren't much like subsidies. They're a variety of paid for services operated by government. Actual subsidies are near universally corporate welfare.
What if the population of those who believe in reproducing like bunnies, increases faster than the resulting children can be convinced to abandon their father's ways?
You can disagree all you want. But a bad state actor can build a lot of nukes while you aren't looking. And the strategy of stealth rearmament following a period of mutual disarmament is a tactic that has been used before.
I think that's just another symptom of our 'immaturity'
Alternately, we're permanently immature. Better plan for that than rather than hope that it is possible to fix the unfixable.
It's also worth noting that even when there are high fertility families for whatever reason, their children tend to be a lot lower in fertility. It's just not happening in the developed world. And more and more of the world becomes developed world.
The alternative is to spend thousands of years traveling to another planet and potentially find it uninhabitable or die on the way. Any other planet would have a distinctly different gravity - one on which we have not evolved. How would we enable a breathable atmosphere? How would we remove toxins from the environment. It's quite probable that most of the environment would in one way or another be toxic.
The obvious answer is "engineering". We have a huge track record of solving hard problems. This is just a bunch of hard problems most which would already be solved in order for the dilemma to happen at all. If you're flying for thousands of years to another star system, then you've solved the gravity problem; how to enable a breathable atmosphere; and how to remove toxins from the environment.
How would we get a significant number of people to this planet?
It's just a matter of mass. So much habitat, resources, etc needs to be brought per person. So want more people to go? Then send more mass, including of course, the people.
We would need to apply and quickly adapt the most cutting edge technology to survive - would we only take scientists, engineers and mathematicians?
No, we wouldn't. If it takes us thousands of years to travel somewhere, then we can take thousands of years to pretty up the destination. There's no urgency.
How would we successfully synthesize soil quickly enough?
Use the same tools as on Earth to successfully produce Earth soil. The laws of physics and chemistry haven't changed.
How would be know what kind of weather patterns to expect and how would we cope with them? Category 5 hurricanes could be a daily occurrence. Would we get enough sunlight? How would we make sure the temperatures do not exceed tolerable limits?
By going there and finding out. It's a pretty complicated procedure, of course.
Why not stay here on earth and gradually reduce the human population to around 500 million people. 500 million people could maintain a high standard of living without making Earth uninhabitable.
Fine, of course, if you're in charge. Most of those 500 million will be on the bottom of the heap. And when something kills off the 500 million people, perhaps it would be best to not be there.
And we need a conversation about who does and does not care. The Middle East does not care about the planet. Neither does India or China or Indonesia or most of Africa. India's population has almost caught up with China. Regardless of reducing the world population or escaping the planet, how would we do this if most of the planet is not on board?
Simple. Ignore them. If they aren't contributing, then they don't matter. If they don't want to go, then I'm not going to force them.
Nor do we need the input of the entirety of humanity. Manufacture and design are becoming more capable and cheaper. In a century or two, multi-generational interstellar travel may be within reach of large NGOs to develop and build. At that point, you wouldn't even need a single Earth-side government on board (aside from issuing the necessary permits) to make it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
And pay licensing fees for the rest of life to foreigners.
Would happen anyway. The US has demonstrated considerable prowess at inventing stuff and then technology-transferring it to other countries.
Just not by the same people. Never mind the huge effort to have the labor & government side of the equation shoulder all the risk, training, and guesswork.
You are constraining your worldview to your developed world country. The developing world is having no such problems employing people or finding demand for labor. This includes handling the risk, training, and guesswork.
My view on this is let's first reward employers for employing people instead of actively punishing them. Labor power comes from high demand for labor, not from laws.
Not if they are going to pay less than it costs to live.
Ok, so why is it Walmart or McDonalds responsibility to pay a living wage? And if people really are desperate enough to accept this lower wage, isn't that still an enormous boon for people who otherwise would be even worse off?
Remind me again. What was the point of the social programs again? How does Walmart and McDonalds employing people on top of those programs make things worse rather than better?
It's the same dumb shit over and over again. You want companies to paying "living wages", but you don't want the economy that would deliver that. And somehow it's more important to stop companies from milking imaginary subsidies rather than helping poor people. Maybe you ought to think here about consequences and about what a society should be delivering here.
It's not some morality play where the highest goal is punishing behavior that doesn't fit in with the present groupthink.
I found an old hotdog under the back seat, do you want food or not?
It's still better than starving to death. And you don't make the situation any better by taking away this desperate choice for their own good.
There is nothing two faced about it. In your second reference to my posts, Walmart is NOT paying a living wage, they're leeching off of the public to make up the difference. Same for the third case.
And again, what's the problem with that? Don't we want Walmart to employ poor people rather than not?
Consider this, do you think manufacturers should be forced to provide goods below the marginal cost of production?
Or forced to pay more for employees than they're worth?
Well, that 39.5 hours/week costs the employee real money to produce.
So? 0 hours/week costs the employee too.
I assure you that if maintenance employs as many people as not having the automation
Read the grandparent's post. He was implying that even maintenance jobs were in rapid decline. I merely noted that an independent shop like that would be hit hard by manufacturer-side service contracts and those jobs have probably just moved around.
You pre-suppose a pent-up demand for labor.
These sort of phrases reveal economic ignorance. There is always more demand for labor. But then I don't feel the need to throw obstacles in the way of employing people either and then complain that there's no pent-up demand for labor.
For example, from this story we have your usual two-faced opinion on minimum wage. First, paying someone "living wages" is supposedly important:
The fair wage for full time work is a living wage. Full stop.
But when Walmart and McDonalds do so (when including various government programs to the poor), we find paying poor people is somehow a bad thing:
Believe it! That's why Walmart and McDonald's HR include people to help you get food stamps. They know they don't pay well enough to actually live. The expectations are food that is legal to buy for human consumption and housing that hasn't been condemned as uninhabitable.
And of course, there is your usual "we didn't want those jobs anyway" attitude:
If raising the minimum wage makes a business not start up, then it wasn't viable because it couldn't pay the actual cost of it's labor without getting the public to pay it's payroll for it.
Maybe, if we want businesses to employ poor people we should be encouraging that?
So how does automation explain this huge drop in maintenance demand? Sorry, there's no automated maintenance yet. What's actually happened here is that the maintenance is done by the producers of the robots. The labor is still there, your friend's company is just cut out of the contracts.
Automation has always been a net job destroyer
That makes your position even more indefensible, if only because it has never been true!
Sure, we can look in isolation at an automated assembly line and see the oh, 100 jobs replaced with one job. 99 net jobs lost right? But that sort of analysis ignores a variety of things. The wealth created by far cheaper production goes to employing people in other areas (for example, the one person of the above example will still have needs). The 99 people are now free to do other jobs. And with that labor freed, we have opportunity for more assembly lines to make more things. Finally, it's worth noting that all this automation makes human labor more valuable.
And that's why, we've never, even to the present date, had a net loss in jobs from automation.
All cost is derived from human labour.
One could use the same reasoning to claim that all cost is derived from Pokemon trading cards. For example, to deal with the inevitable objects, it is easy to determine the Pokemon cost of labor by using wages to determine how many Pokemon cards one can buy. And you've already claimed that labor is the fundamental cost factor, which means we thus, have a means to derive the cost of everything in terms of the true cost in Pokemon cards. QED.
I corrected your earlier post, but you still choose to be wrong. I won't bother to attempt to fix this any further.
Given that these joker outfits that call themselves exchanges keep getting hacked ever other week
Well, say they get hacked every other week. I think this is quite the learning experience for those who pay attention.
Nice. I haven't been able to escape the clutches of paper personally (even ignoring my current job). I jot down notes. I've seen some PDAs that can do that reasonably well, but I haven't looked into it.
Hindsight Bias Effect
Well, it had to happen at some point before the complete defeat of Nazi Germany. I doubt there were many German's surprised by the war's outcome by the time the USSR overran Berlin.
Stalingrad probably is the starting point merely because a bunch of people would have notice that all of Germany's victories on the eastern front started to move west rather quickly afterward and read between the lines of the propaganda. Survivors of these conflicts would also be a good source of information even in such a controlled society.
Could you characterize what your office does? Because that sounds pretty amazing. My office on the other hand, hates trees.
Of course not. If companies had to pay for their own security in the Middle East, it would be vastly cheaper.
Of course you will provide references to back that claim up.
Because? What oil company needed to invade Iraq or Afghanistan to protect their infrastructure?
What if they pay a bunch of guys to risk their lives so you don't have to risk yours What's that worth to you?
Sounds like it could be negative value here to me. My life isn't infinite in value and it would take very few deaths to outweigh the value of my life.
And why isn't the cost of those wars counted towards the cost of renewable energy subsidies?
Because we're not in the middle east securing the use of solar panels? Really?
The transportation network is very heavily petroleum-dependent and you argued that the full cost of Middle East wars should be laid at the feet of petroleum producers and users. Well, that includes solar panels. They don't magically grow on houses.
That's your opinion, the facts says otherwise. Renewables are the next big industry. Imagine having this same discussion when oil was discovered. You'd be complaining that we shouldn't bother with this new oil fad, let's stick with burning wood and steam engines.
Do you have a link to these "facts"? I couldn't help but notice that your link didn't support your assertion. It merely claims that "investment" which is not "subsidy" was higher in the developing world for the first time in 2016. There were plenty of years before 2016 and plenty of subsidies in the developed world which aren't being counted here.
Too late, renewables are already cheaper for developing countries with no existing infrastructure, and getting cheaper every day. You are betting that you can keep modifying your typewriter to an electronic version to compete with PCs.
Then the switch from fossil fuels to renewables will happen sooner than I expect. I have no problem with that, assuming your assertions are actually true.
China is the world's leading investor in renewables. They have already recognised the folly of fossil fuels and have jumped in with both feet. Would you prefer the new global mega industry to be monopolised by the Chinese, or should America try get a slice of that pie?
Why do you think the US has a chance? They've already lost to the Chinese on this.
Why should I expect either to have good future capital gain over a typical investment horizon?
The choice is gains (get involved) or losses (let the Chinese and Germans own the next big thing). Which do you prefer?
False dilemma. First, the Chinese are already owning the Germans despite a variety of German and EU protectionist schemes, including renewable energy subsidies.
Second, by letting the Chinese and Germans pay the huge development costs, we'd just pay for the final product. Far cheaper to do it that way especially since renewable energy isn't that big a deal. If they overcharge for these products, then just continue to use existing fossil fuels and other such competitors. It's a buyers market out there.
They are exactly the same thing.
Words have meaning. For subsidy:
1. A sum of money granted by the state or a public body to help an industry or business keep the price of a commodity or service low:
1.1 A sum of money granted to support an undertaking held to be in the public interest:
1.2 A grant or contribution of money:
Welfare is not a subsidy. And note that I didn't say all corporate welfare was subsidy either!
Did you pay full fees for your school? The roads you drive on? The water out of your tap? Your Internet service? How about the fact you don't speak Russian now, how much did you pay for that on the day you were born? No, the government subsidises the cost of these things because they have a benefit to society greater than the cost of the subsidy.
None of that is subsidy. You aren't even close.
Energy independence is quite possibly the greatest benefit any country can achieve, because upon that everything else can be built,
Greater than freedom? Greater than long life? Greater than education? Greater than prosperity? You can build all these things on energy dependence too as the Japanese have discovered.
and the most costly thing to the economy, war can be largely avoided.
Except when war can't be largely avoided. To note a recent example, Iraq was unable to avoid being invaded in 2003.
The big problem with nuclear power is that accidents are extremely dangerous and costly. That wouldn't be a problem if accidents were extremely unlikely. We know how to design and operate nuclear power plants safely, the problem is that we won't. Fukushima showed that. That accident was entirely avoidable. They needed only to build the walls higher.
Suuure, that magnitude 9 earthquake was easily preventable. /sarc
They needed only to build the walls higher.
Let us note that they actually were in the process of doing so. Research had been completed a few years earlier to show the site did indeed experience higher tsunami than the 1960s era estimates (roughly 1 in a century worst case) indicated. The wheels of bureaucracy would have eventually determined that the walls should be built higher and the walls built. The earthquake just happened first.
But management chose to ignore the recommendations and build a lower wall, to save a little money.
And the evidence for that? You really should look at a time line here. Japanese researcher demonstrates that there was a risk of higher tsunami in 2001. Then the Japanese nuclear regulators get ahold of it and start requesting that plant operators investigate the threat to their reactors.
Regulators determine wall isn't needed because the reactors are going to be shutdown in a few years. The Fukushima reactors aren't actually shutdown down because regulators discontinued all new reactor construction earlier in the decade. Then the earthquake happens in the middle of all this.
The walls would have been built higher eventually. But there was all this bureaucracy to make reactors safe which got in the way.
And that's your simple-minded observation about knowing how to make reactors safe, but not doing so is so annoying. Sure, we do, but the intent to make reactors safe with a massive pile of regulation, halted construction of new Japanese plants, and extremely slow decision processes made them more unsafe rather than less in this case.
This isn't the first time that making something safe actually made it less safe.
You will wake up about 5 generations beyond where you are now. Assuming her death doesn't end the bloodline altogether, the relatives she has in 100 years will have no real familial connection to her. Everyone and everything that defines her sense of happiness now will likely be dead and gone or so evolved that it is unrecognizable (like tech and hobbies).
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally.
So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age. For all we know, Mandarin could replace English by 2116.
What's bizarre here is that you think this is worse than death. I guess you're one of those believers in an afterlife that no one, including the powerful supernatural beings who supposedly manage the thing, has bothered to show exists.
Neither has +4 C global warming. Neither have you died of old age. Just because something hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it won't nor that we're not already headed in that direction.
But it is a good indication that you're missing important dynamics here.
Every war ever fought in the middle east.
Of course not. If companies had to pay for their own security in the Middle East, it would be vastly cheaper. For example, if government pays $100 per pet for robotic poop scoopers so that I don't have to exert myself for the $1 of time and effort it takes to collect the poop from my pet, it's not $100 of subsidy to me. It's $1 of subsidy.
And why isn't the cost of those wars counted towards the cost of renewable energy subsidies? They benefit too even if it is a little bit more tenuously than fossil fuels (these wars after all stabilize global trade which renewable energy is dependent on). That's the usual double standard in play.
7 million deaths each and every year for free, pretty much a WW2 every decade.
Dishonest comparison since the renewable energy subsidies won't be in the places with the deaths (developed world subsidies versus developing world pollution and deaths) and of course, ignoring the positive externality of cheaper energy.
Further, we could eliminate most of these deaths with the usual pollution controls developed in the 1970s and 80s. No need to switch to renewables when there's a cheaper option at hand.
You see this repeatedly in play. For example, the IMF estimated $5.3 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2015. They gloss over that more than $2 trillion of that is just due to China's mess (air pollution and "other vehicle externalities"). Further, despite generating more CO2 than the US from energy production and vehicle use, the Chinese contribution to global warming is somehow an order of magnitude lower. And of course, positive externality of cheap energy is nowhere to be seen in their charts.
There's two paybacks from investing, dividends and capital gain. Apple shares, like the new energy industry has experienced massive capital gain.
Why should I expect either to have good future capital gain over a typical investment horizon?
Yes, much like the benefits you receive from a stable democratic government that required no effort from you for the first 18 years of your life.
Funny how those things aren't much like subsidies. They're a variety of paid for services operated by government. Actual subsidies are near universally corporate welfare.
What if the population of those who believe in reproducing like bunnies, increases faster than the resulting children can be convinced to abandon their father's ways?
"IF". Hasn't happened yet.
I think that's just another symptom of our 'immaturity'
Alternately, we're permanently immature. Better plan for that than rather than hope that it is possible to fix the unfixable.
It's also worth noting that even when there are high fertility families for whatever reason, their children tend to be a lot lower in fertility. It's just not happening in the developed world. And more and more of the world becomes developed world.
The alternative is to spend thousands of years traveling to another planet and potentially find it uninhabitable or die on the way. Any other planet would have a distinctly different gravity - one on which we have not evolved. How would we enable a breathable atmosphere? How would we remove toxins from the environment. It's quite probable that most of the environment would in one way or another be toxic.
The obvious answer is "engineering". We have a huge track record of solving hard problems. This is just a bunch of hard problems most which would already be solved in order for the dilemma to happen at all. If you're flying for thousands of years to another star system, then you've solved the gravity problem; how to enable a breathable atmosphere; and how to remove toxins from the environment.
How would we get a significant number of people to this planet?
It's just a matter of mass. So much habitat, resources, etc needs to be brought per person. So want more people to go? Then send more mass, including of course, the people.
We would need to apply and quickly adapt the most cutting edge technology to survive - would we only take scientists, engineers and mathematicians?
No, we wouldn't. If it takes us thousands of years to travel somewhere, then we can take thousands of years to pretty up the destination. There's no urgency.
How would we successfully synthesize soil quickly enough?
Use the same tools as on Earth to successfully produce Earth soil. The laws of physics and chemistry haven't changed.
How would be know what kind of weather patterns to expect and how would we cope with them? Category 5 hurricanes could be a daily occurrence. Would we get enough sunlight? How would we make sure the temperatures do not exceed tolerable limits?
By going there and finding out. It's a pretty complicated procedure, of course.
Why not stay here on earth and gradually reduce the human population to around 500 million people. 500 million people could maintain a high standard of living without making Earth uninhabitable.
Fine, of course, if you're in charge. Most of those 500 million will be on the bottom of the heap. And when something kills off the 500 million people, perhaps it would be best to not be there.
And we need a conversation about who does and does not care. The Middle East does not care about the planet. Neither does India or China or Indonesia or most of Africa. India's population has almost caught up with China. Regardless of reducing the world population or escaping the planet, how would we do this if most of the planet is not on board?
Simple. Ignore them. If they aren't contributing, then they don't matter. If they don't want to go, then I'm not going to force them.
Nor do we need the input of the entirety of humanity. Manufacture and design are becoming more capable and cheaper. In a century or two, multi-generational interstellar travel may be within reach of large NGOs to develop and build. At that point, you wouldn't even need a single Earth-side government on board (aside from issuing the necessary permits) to make it happen.