The solution is to drop the birth rate and immigration.
US birthrate is below replacement rate now. Population increases are entirely due to immigration, legal and otherwise.
BLOCKQUOTE>Access to water, food, transportation, trade, and industry, and the increasing shortage of arable land, are all squeezing available living space and ruining the dream of "owning you rown home".
Umm, no. What's ruining the dream of "owning your own home" is the hidden qualifier "any place I happen to want to live".
I own my own home. Ditto my parents and siblings. And my cousins. And children of same are mostly paying off mortgages. Mostly because we didn't choose to live in places like Silly Valley or LA or NYC....
When they signed the agreement, didn't it effectively become law?
Not speaking for the Dutch in particular, but in general, no, agreements with other nations do not have the force of law until appropriate enabling legislation is enacted.
A 20 minute data Lag for a modern CEO could cause major business issues.
A multibillion dollar corporation that requires the CEO on call every minute of every day is filled with complete incompetents on every level. I can't even imagine a decision that requires the CEO to be available 24/7 - if nothing else, running the decision past the legal department gives enough padding that the CEO will have hours, if not days to make any decision....
Not a lot of storage is necessary as long as electricity is never priced below market equilibrium
Those of us who have to run our air-conditioners 24/7 seven+ months of the year disagree. A lot of storage is necessary, or a lot of the energy producers have to be baseload. For which read "nuclear"....
Capitalism, unlike how it is portrayed by unions, is not a system by which companies make more money by paying people less. So the capitalism solution is not to have people get paid nothing at a recycling center, but for the recycling center to find out how it will be profitable.
Couldn't agree more.
Qualifiers:
1) it's not capitalist to say "if we can convince the government to force people to use our service, we'll be profitable".
2) if your only "customer" is the government, capitalism is largely meaningless to you (buying favourable legislation isn't a new idea, contrary to popular rumour, and it always happens when it becomes cheaper to buy legislation than to compete in the marketplace.
2) Note that the guy I was responding to was the one saying that capitalism was a bad thing. I'm all for it, because, ultimately, capitalism is all about getting paid for your (hard) work. And I like to get paid.
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
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Recycling Is Dying
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· Score: 1
Is it the government that requires you to do extra work and pay extra money, or is it just life?
It was definitely the government. I don't have to send a check to life every month for water, sewer, and garbage collection.
Recycling takes a certain amount of work. The government may be trying to split it with you. If they did all of the work, maybe the would have to charge even more.
Then they shouldn't have put the tax to pay for the recycling center on the ballot as a "cost saving measure".
Of course, there's the whole "it's been in contact with food so it's not recyclable" thing too. Which probably, before they ever started, eliminated 75% of the recyclables. But that's another rant....
âoeWe have a traffic fatality rate in San Diego thatâ(TM)s greater than our murder rate," exclaimed Jim Stone, Executive Director of Circulate San Diego.
my first thought was "what an idiot! murder rate is lower than traffic fatality rates pretty much everywhere".
The only way he's going to get traffic fatality rates below murder rates is to really encourage murder, or alternatively, redefine "traffic fatality" to not include 80% of what is currently defined as traffic fatalities (which is the path he seems to have taken, since he seems to be defining traffic fatalities as "pedestrians killed in auto accidents")
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
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Recycling Is Dying
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· Score: 2
I'd sort, but I'm not going to sort AND pay extra money.
Yep. I was pretty diligent about recycling right up till the local government decided that they needed to charge extra for recycling. When they required me to do extra work AND pay extra money for the service, I stopped using the service....
If we don't want to save the world because it's "not profitable", then we are truly fucked. What are we, Ferengi?
Simple solution for you, then - go work for a recycling center for free. That'll lower the cost of running the recycling center, thus allowing it to save the world. And it's not like you need the money, right?
When government is huge and has their fingers in every pie, it creates a great deal of motivation to influence those fingers.
Yeppers. There's better than a trillion at stake every year in discretionary spending. With that much money on the line, you can afford to spend a metric buttload of money buying yourself a piece of it....
Toy makers produce toys that they expect to sell better than others. If there's any kind of stereotyping it is not on the side of the toy maker but on the side of the toy buyer.
So, you don't consider it stereotyping for the toy manufacturers to think that pink toys will sell better to girls?
It is generally believed that the earths magnetic field protects the atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind. Given that Venus has no (very small) magnetic field, this explains why the planet has such a dense atmosphere.
So, our magnetic field gives Earth a thick atmosphere, but Venus' lack of a magnetic field gives it an even thicker atmosphere?
so, got any evidence of overpopulation among humans? Other than a number that frightens you badly?
Since I was a kid, population has more than doubled, but people are living longer, there are fewer famines (other than those engineered by governments to get rid of undesired minorities), fewer plagues, fewer wars. Basically, double-triple the population but living better than any time in history....
I remember when deer overran our area. They denuded large swaths of land. By the time the local governments got around to doing something to cull the herd, disease and hunger took them down.
Was this back when everyone was whinging that hunting was evil and shouldn't be allowed?
Note that hunting seasons pretty much eliminate that sort of problem, unless of course you make owning firearms illegal....
So, last time I checked (a couple of days back, when this first appeared in the news), "background extinction rate" is a great deal of SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).
We don't know the total number of species alive now or at any particular time in the past. We never have, and it's likely we never will (until that number is 1). Which makes any estimate of the rate of extinction now or in the past more guess than science.
Without an accurate guesstimate of number of species at any given time, "background extinction rate" is an even less accurate guesstimate.
And with the denominator of (current extinction rate/background extinction rate) a guesstimate, the number produced (114 in this case) is another guesstimate (we don't even know the number of species going extinct now, much less the average number - what we know is the number of species that we notice going extinct).
So, I'm less than excited by this particular prediction. Maybe in a century or two we'll know enough to make this a major concern (note that 114x background rate translates to ~225 species going extinct per million years - it's hardly going to be a swift extinction, except in geological terms).
Seeing tanks driving down the street can bring up some scary memories for some people.
I used to live by an army base when I was a kid. I remember occasionally seeing tanks and halftracks on the road.
Ditto. I also remember "firepower displays" in a couple of places. They invite the families out to watch them blow up shit with pretty much everything on hand from.50 cal to 8" howitzers. The "time on target" was really impressive.
FYI: a "time on target" is where they fire all the artillery attached to a division staggered in such a way that the shells all arrive on the target at the same time. Basically, one big boom! using everything from 4.2" mortars on up at once....
Come to think of it, first time I lived in a civilian town was when I was 12 or so. I was shocked to find out that some kids had never even seen a tank, much less climbed on one....
Slashdot Mirror
US birthrate is below replacement rate now. Population increases are entirely due to immigration, legal and otherwise.
BLOCKQUOTE>Access to water, food, transportation, trade, and industry, and the increasing shortage of arable land, are all squeezing available living space and ruining the dream of "owning you rown home".
Umm, no. What's ruining the dream of "owning your own home" is the hidden qualifier "any place I happen to want to live".
I own my own home. Ditto my parents and siblings. And my cousins. And children of same are mostly paying off mortgages. Mostly because we didn't choose to live in places like Silly Valley or LA or NYC....
And on a (nearly) unrelated note - on average, 200 people are murdered across the USA in any particular week.
Let's not lose sight of the other 190 in our haste to remember the nine....
Not speaking for the Dutch in particular, but in general, no, agreements with other nations do not have the force of law until appropriate enabling legislation is enacted.
A multibillion dollar corporation that requires the CEO on call every minute of every day is filled with complete incompetents on every level. I can't even imagine a decision that requires the CEO to be available 24/7 - if nothing else, running the decision past the legal department gives enough padding that the CEO will have hours, if not days to make any decision....
I take it you've met me and my wife, then. Alas, the only Dave I remember from back then died many years ago....
Those of us who have to run our air-conditioners 24/7 seven+ months of the year disagree. A lot of storage is necessary, or a lot of the energy producers have to be baseload. For which read "nuclear"....
Hare-brained. It's an analogy to rabbits, not to people with ingrown follicles....
Couldn't agree more.
Qualifiers:
1) it's not capitalist to say "if we can convince the government to force people to use our service, we'll be profitable".
2) if your only "customer" is the government, capitalism is largely meaningless to you (buying favourable legislation isn't a new idea, contrary to popular rumour, and it always happens when it becomes cheaper to buy legislation than to compete in the marketplace.
2) Note that the guy I was responding to was the one saying that capitalism was a bad thing. I'm all for it, because, ultimately, capitalism is all about getting paid for your (hard) work. And I like to get paid.
It was definitely the government. I don't have to send a check to life every month for water, sewer, and garbage collection.
Then they shouldn't have put the tax to pay for the recycling center on the ballot as a "cost saving measure".
Of course, there's the whole "it's been in contact with food so it's not recyclable" thing too. Which probably, before they ever started, eliminated 75% of the recyclables. But that's another rant....
my first thought was "what an idiot! murder rate is lower than traffic fatality rates pretty much everywhere".
The only way he's going to get traffic fatality rates below murder rates is to really encourage murder, or alternatively, redefine "traffic fatality" to not include 80% of what is currently defined as traffic fatalities (which is the path he seems to have taken, since he seems to be defining traffic fatalities as "pedestrians killed in auto accidents")
Yep. I was pretty diligent about recycling right up till the local government decided that they needed to charge extra for recycling. When they required me to do extra work AND pay extra money for the service, I stopped using the service....
Simple solution for you, then - go work for a recycling center for free. That'll lower the cost of running the recycling center, thus allowing it to save the world. And it's not like you need the money, right?
Further back than that. Europe was fighting the Muslims during Charlemagne's reign (about 800AD)....
Assange has no interest in talking to Swedish investigators. Just with people who will treat him as if he's the greatest thing since sliced bread....
Yeppers. There's better than a trillion at stake every year in discretionary spending. With that much money on the line, you can afford to spend a metric buttload of money buying yourself a piece of it....
So, you don't consider it stereotyping for the toy manufacturers to think that pink toys will sell better to girls?
So, our magnetic field gives Earth a thick atmosphere, but Venus' lack of a magnetic field gives it an even thicker atmosphere?
I'm missing something obviously....
Really? My monthly mobile data plan costs less than a family dinner at one of our better restaurants. Or two dinners at an average restaurant....
Well, that was an impressive leap!
so, got any evidence of overpopulation among humans? Other than a number that frightens you badly?
Since I was a kid, population has more than doubled, but people are living longer, there are fewer famines (other than those engineered by governments to get rid of undesired minorities), fewer plagues, fewer wars. Basically, double-triple the population but living better than any time in history....
Was this back when everyone was whinging that hunting was evil and shouldn't be allowed?
Note that hunting seasons pretty much eliminate that sort of problem, unless of course you make owning firearms illegal....
So, last time I checked (a couple of days back, when this first appeared in the news), "background extinction rate" is a great deal of SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).
We don't know the total number of species alive now or at any particular time in the past. We never have, and it's likely we never will (until that number is 1). Which makes any estimate of the rate of extinction now or in the past more guess than science.
Without an accurate guesstimate of number of species at any given time, "background extinction rate" is an even less accurate guesstimate.
And with the denominator of (current extinction rate/background extinction rate) a guesstimate, the number produced (114 in this case) is another guesstimate (we don't even know the number of species going extinct now, much less the average number - what we know is the number of species that we notice going extinct).
So, I'm less than excited by this particular prediction. Maybe in a century or two we'll know enough to make this a major concern (note that 114x background rate translates to ~225 species going extinct per million years - it's hardly going to be a swift extinction, except in geological terms).
Or not....
"Well, you were wrong"
Ditto. I also remember "firepower displays" in a couple of places. They invite the families out to watch them blow up shit with pretty much everything on hand from .50 cal to 8" howitzers. The "time on target" was really impressive.
FYI: a "time on target" is where they fire all the artillery attached to a division staggered in such a way that the shells all arrive on the target at the same time. Basically, one big boom! using everything from 4.2" mortars on up at once....
Come to think of it, first time I lived in a civilian town was when I was 12 or so. I was shocked to find out that some kids had never even seen a tank, much less climbed on one....
Privatize & privatise.
Like Obama and Hillary, for instance? Seems to me Teddy Kennedy was much the same back in the day as well.