"By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people." " I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..." in 1970, he warned that "[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish." In 1968 he wrote "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." Well, you can argue about that one, since the population hadn't grown by 200 million in that timeframe, but now the populationis 800 million greater and don't look worse off than back then..
So great, in the opinion of his co-author Ehrlich isn't an alarmist. I'd call; him a hysterical headline grabber with a predictiveusefulness of zero.
Well I'm sure the average slashdotter is thinking of something involving KY jelly, but I use my iPod to listen to music (it works very well) and my smartphone for sending and receiving phone calls and texts (it works very well). I don't wake up in cold sweats worrying about either device. TFA is whiny snowflaking.
My bodyguard shoots you. You killed me after I lived for 65 years, I had you killed after you scraped through some second rate college and worked in a cubicle for a couple of years. i win.
Having driven a bit in Detroit I think you exaggerate. You forget that the most important bit of learning to drive is experience, so even if the US driving tests set a low bar, inside of a year they will be more or less where typical young drivers from elsewhere would be, skill wise.
Of course you could actually look for some data to support your contention, for example what is the crash rate of US citizens on holiday in the EU compared with Australians (who have a ridiculously long probationary period, something like 120 hours of supervised driving)?
Wow, strong language from an AC. Bet you don't talk like that in real life. Well, no, probably you do, to women and children. While I enjoy winding up losers from the mendicant state, i'd point out that both of my houses are more than self sufficient for electricity. So, take your foul little tongue and stick it back up a politician's arsehole.
Here's the forecast for electricity shortages for the next year in South Australia. Click on the SA button. The red bits are 'reserve shortfalls', or as we might say, times when whole areas will have their supply cut. Enjoy, foul mouthed loser.
"the mayor of Atlanta, told reporters he had travelled to Europe "
Well, I hope he rowed over in a boat otherwise he was burning fossil fuels.
If these 7400 bunches of idiots would like to check out what is happening in South Australia with a 50% renewable target, they might have a bit of a rethink. if not I'm sure their constituents will help them to revise their opinions.
My first house was frankly a bit nasty. The children seem to think their first house should be like the one I live in now, in a nice part of town. They drive shiny cars. I drove a Toyota Corona for 12 years. In fact the/unemployed/ daughter in law seems to think their first house should be BETTER than the one her parents live in.
Fuck i'm going to laugh when I die and she discovers she's getting $10000 and a big fuck off from me.She's expecting a house.
The other one's OK, even with a newborn baby she does part time work. Her bf built a house that is bright and shiny and not well made in a new suburb, which is probably a good long term plan..They do have $5 coffees and $20 brunces and shiny cars, so I don't exactly think they are on struggle street, despite the whingeing.
"Most People are basically useless by the time their in their mid 50s" I'm 56, recovering from cancer, working three days a week, I'm paid a lot in a safety critical job and I do well from my investments. Absent the worst case scenario I'm good for another 5 years of productive life. Yes, I'd love to be thirty again. Yes I'd love to have only one medical issue at a time. But... them's the breaks.I'm certainly not basically useless.
I paid my own way through uni and my parents have never lent me money or bought me stuff. They did bring me up to be self reliant and independent. So why don't you try that?
That's a pretty impressive savings rate. A bit of history. A friend of mine lived in rented accommodation, all his working life. His theory was that his savings were going up faster than house prices were going up. He was right, sort of, and they were able to retire five years sooner than me. (he's a lot better at investing and was paid far more than me). But they still have the hassle of landlords, and anything they do in the garden is short term.
On the other hand I bought a house early on and now have another as a weekender. I think overall he's better off financially and has more free time, I spend my spare time thinking about gutters and solar panels and vegetable patches.
I assume you have a job. This is how I did it: no $5 coffees or brunches or random workplace social functions. Go out once or twice a week in the evening. Cook a lot for your friends rather than seeing them down the pub. Live in a small flat. Drive a nasty car. I did that for 6 years and had enough money saved to buy my first house for cash. It was functional, but not attractive, in a suburb with a less than snobby reputation (not the worst part of town but downmarket). When I moved in I carried on living in more or less the same fashion, maintained the house myself but did not improve it. Ten years later I had saved/invested enough to have it knocked down, and a new one built in its placed. Meanwhile the suburb had gone up in reputation and so I had not over capitalised..
I would agree that the savings you can make from a frugal lifestyle are smaller in the USA as you don't suffer from stupid Australian prices Just in case I sound like it was a prison sentence my personal extravagance is travel, I always went overseas every couple of years. I also worked on a racing team (unpaid) which has a way of absorbing any amount of free time. Even now i have a spreadsheet of income and expenses, and if I can't pay cash for something then I don't buy it. My one exception to that is a margin loan for my shares which I now occasionally use as a short term buffer, but that nearly cost me all my savings,twice, so I'm glad I wasn't using it early on.
If you haven't got a job yes you are fucked.Incidentally I paid my own way through uni and my parents have never lent me money or paid for stuff.
I didn't read TFA or any of the comments, so this may be redundant. My perspective is that by the time you kids are retiring any government funding for old people will have vanished under shear weight of numbers, and lack of workers to pay for it. This isn't entirely disastrous as government funding for old people is supposed to be a safety net, whereas in Australia at least it is a big part of many people's retirement plans at the moment. Roughly speaking if you have less than half a million dollars in financial assets you'll get a state pension (your prime residence is not included in that). To make up for what you lose by having assets in excess of that you need about 1.5 million. So for the vast proportion of people at the moment quite simply finding a loose million in spare change isn't an option, so they de-asset one way or another (house improvements,caravan, boat and 4wd) and get the state pension.
If we assume that 1.5 million is a reasonable target in 2017 (it is way low in my opinion but at least it's a peg in the ground), I'd point out that is roughly ten years pay, so compound interest is your friend, you aren't going to save that directly. But of all the investments I've made (or gambles as they should be known), buying a fairly nasty house in a fairly unloved inner city suburb actually turned out to return 8%, over 17 years, plus I had somewhere to live, saving me $6-10k/year. Of course there are costs in house ownership, and although it wasn't the plan, the gentrification of that suburb was pretty obvious in hindsight.. I also have a bunch of shares, and much of my stash was made during the GFC, when I had some sleepless nights after some brave decisions. Now I just sit on high dividend blue chips.
I actually found an investment advisor useful as he knows his way around the tax system, BUT he made no recommendations to change my basic approach. If you are less than 50 you probably don't need to talk to one every year, I'd have thought 5 years was more like it. Worth shopping around, the big end of town charges like wounded bulls. The little guy working for an industry fund was cheap but useless.
Mainly you need two things. A plan. And a job.
Now if I put my tin foil hat on, all these self funded retirees are going to have a pot of money the government would like to get its hands on. My guess is that income tax will be extended up until you die, if they can't think of any other method, and there will be bigger attempts to get people out of using public services.
So, to be kind, you made a choice to live in a house 4 miles from public transport and chose to work at a place that is not served by public transport. That's fine, I made a similar choice. If I were to use public transport to get to work then it would take 3-4 hours, the first step would be to catch the school bus, which I am not quite old enough to do. I'd rather drive, it is 54 miles and takes 59 minutes. 8 miles of that are on gravel tracks.
Whatever you are talking about isn't engineering. Please use a different word for that activity. It sounds like some sort of clerical shit. Maybe you could call it keyboard banging.
I think that is an excellent point and I'm surprised it got modded down. I work from home, and I am the best of the best (or at least the third highest paid engineer out of 1000), but yes, at some point it is possible that 'they' could find an English speaking engineer who can do my job effectively and has my experience but would be paid less. If I find her first then I'll be her agent.
But, that person doesn't seem to be likely to come from any of the obvious outsourcing countries.So a factor of 8 on salary seems unlikely. Last time I looked a Chinese engineer with a good enough grasp of spoken and written English wa paid almost as much as an Australian one( who admittedly might fail either or both of those requirements depending on your prejudices).
The Australian Government's (both Labor and Coalition) over the last 15 years have conspicuously failed to support the automotive industry in the face of the high exchange rate caused by our enormous mineral exports. This is in opposition to the way they supported the banks via all sorts of funny schemes.
As a result Australia is the only country I have ever heard of which has decided that the auto industry is not a good idea.
So first the assembly workers went. Then the factories went. That meant there was no critical volume for precision machining, so then the toolmakers went. That meant the local aircraft maintenance industry couldn't get the stuff they needed, so aircraft maintenance was offshored. Meanwhile all the suppliers of parts had to diversify into less rigorous but less profitable lines. So the engineers went.
I'm lucky, we still design and develop cars for manufacture all over the world (except in Australia), so our product development centre is expanding.But an industry that used to employ around 50-100 000 well paid highish technology or skilled jobs is practically dead, with maybe 2000 people left.
So escaping the GFC probably is not due to the incredible foresight of the gummint, just lucky.
I'll pick on India, as I like to. For the most part (ie >50%) people there are desperately poor, have unreliable power, no proper sewage system, fairly corrupt government, and are indian. There is not much we can do about the latter. But for the rest of it even their monumentally stupid government realises they need to get people off the subsistence farming model and for that they need electricity. And, since airy fairy renewables are not cost effective without subsidies, that means coal. And lots of it. Whatever western wankers might think, the impact of the west on CO2 for the next few decades is tiny compared with the third worlders who want, reasonably enough, to join the first world party.
"It's not Amateur Night on Planet Earth anymore, things have gotten terribly, horribly real,"
Poor people are living longer, earning more, eating more, all over the world. There are fewer large wars.Sure there's a few existential problems around, but you are living in a very successful century so far as homo sapiens is concerned.
" Our current best estimate is that 100% of global warming is caused by human activity. [realclimate.org]"
Gosh, that is quite hilarious. Presumably you have heard of Ice Ages large and small and the Holocene optimum. Why has natural variation in temperatures ceased just because we are on the scene?
I'll assume you are going to claim fossil fuel burning is a large part of changes since 1880 (I would), but if you look at HADCET you'll see that recent (since 1880) spikes in temperature change are not unusual in rapidity or amplitude over the few hundred years of that data. Now I realise I am using HADCET as a proxy for global temperatures, but its a damn sight better than a few trees.
100% wow. 100% he he hee. Thanks, you've cheered me up no end, the chicken littles really are just plain silly
Last year my taxable income was $190000. You can buy shares in my employer. I wouldn't.
So, 16 years ago I paid a year's pay at the time (85k) in cash for a solid, but unattractive, house in a working class, decent suburb.
Three years ago, after I got a lot of pay rises, because good real engineers are well paid, I paid 300k cash to have it knocked down and a new one built. That is now worth 600k.
So which of you dummies in the IT game can't figure out how to do that?
Meanwhile, I bought a weekender. For cash. But that was mainly to annoy you lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, thank you. Amongst Ehrlich's funny predictions
"By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people." ..."
" I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate
in 1970, he warned that "[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
In 1968 he wrote "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." Well, you can argue about that one, since the population hadn't grown by 200 million in that timeframe, but now the populationis 800 million greater and don't look worse off than back then..
So great, in the opinion of his co-author Ehrlich isn't an alarmist. I'd call; him a hysterical headline grabber with a predictiveusefulness of zero.
Well I'm sure the average slashdotter is thinking of something involving KY jelly, but I use my iPod to listen to music (it works very well) and my smartphone for sending and receiving phone calls and texts (it works very well). I don't wake up in cold sweats worrying about either device. TFA is whiny snowflaking.
My bodyguard shoots you. You killed me after I lived for 65 years, I had you killed after you scraped through some second rate college and worked in a cubicle for a couple of years. i win.
Having driven a bit in Detroit I think you exaggerate. You forget that the most important bit of learning to drive is experience, so even if the US driving tests set a low bar, inside of a year they will be more or less where typical young drivers from elsewhere would be, skill wise.
Of course you could actually look for some data to support your contention, for example what is the crash rate of US citizens on holiday in the EU compared with Australians (who have a ridiculously long probationary period, something like 120 hours of supervised driving)?
The lack of response to this gem of a post is revealing. The confected outrage in TFA is ridiculous.
Fleet average age in the USA is 11.6 years. So 8 years life is bullshit.
Wow, strong language from an AC. Bet you don't talk like that in real life. Well, no, probably you do, to women and children. While I enjoy winding up losers from the mendicant state, i'd point out that both of my houses are more than self sufficient for electricity. So, take your foul little tongue and stick it back up a politician's arsehole.
Here's the forecast for electricity shortages for the next year in South Australia. Click on the SA button. The red bits are 'reserve shortfalls', or as we might say, times when whole areas will have their supply cut. Enjoy, foul mouthed loser.
https://www.aemo.com.au/Electr...
"the mayor of Atlanta, told reporters he had travelled to Europe "
Well, I hope he rowed over in a boat otherwise he was burning fossil fuels.
If these 7400 bunches of idiots would like to check out what is happening in South Australia with a 50% renewable target, they might have a bit of a rethink. if not I'm sure their constituents will help them to revise their opinions.
change in heat content since 1970=3 e23 J (from TFA)
SHC of water =4e3 J/kg/deg C
mass of oceans = 1.4e21 kg
temperature rise is 3e23/1.4e21/4e3, about 0.05 deg C
Hmm, in 50 years? Colour me unexcited.
My first house was frankly a bit nasty. The children seem to think their first house should be like the one I live in now, in a nice part of town. They drive shiny cars. I drove a Toyota Corona for 12 years. In fact the /unemployed/ daughter in law seems to think their first house should be BETTER than the one her parents live in.
Fuck i'm going to laugh when I die and she discovers she's getting $10000 and a big fuck off from me.She's expecting a house.
The other one's OK, even with a newborn baby she does part time work. Her bf built a house that is bright and shiny and not well made in a new suburb, which is probably a good long term plan..They do have $5 coffees and $20 brunces and shiny cars, so I don't exactly think they are on struggle street, despite the whingeing.
"Most People are basically useless by the time their in their mid 50s" I'm 56, recovering from cancer, working three days a week, I'm paid a lot in a safety critical job and I do well from my investments. Absent the worst case scenario I'm good for another 5 years of productive life. Yes, I'd love to be thirty again. Yes I'd love to have only one medical issue at a time. But... them's the breaks.I'm certainly not basically useless.
I paid my own way through uni and my parents have never lent me money or bought me stuff. They did bring me up to be self reliant and independent. So why don't you try that?
That's a pretty impressive savings rate. A bit of history. A friend of mine lived in rented accommodation, all his working life. His theory was that his savings were going up faster than house prices were going up. He was right, sort of, and they were able to retire five years sooner than me. (he's a lot better at investing and was paid far more than me). But they still have the hassle of landlords, and anything they do in the garden is short term.
On the other hand I bought a house early on and now have another as a weekender. I think overall he's better off financially and has more free time, I spend my spare time thinking about gutters and solar panels and vegetable patches.
I assume you have a job. This is how I did it: no $5 coffees or brunches or random workplace social functions. Go out once or twice a week in the evening. Cook a lot for your friends rather than seeing them down the pub. Live in a small flat. Drive a nasty car. I did that for 6 years and had enough money saved to buy my first house for cash. It was functional, but not attractive, in a suburb with a less than snobby reputation (not the worst part of town but downmarket). When I moved in I carried on living in more or less the same fashion, maintained the house myself but did not improve it. Ten years later I had saved/invested enough to have it knocked down, and a new one built in its placed. Meanwhile the suburb had gone up in reputation and so I had not over capitalised..
I would agree that the savings you can make from a frugal lifestyle are smaller in the USA as you don't suffer from stupid Australian prices Just in case I sound like it was a prison sentence my personal extravagance is travel, I always went overseas every couple of years. I also worked on a racing team (unpaid) which has a way of absorbing any amount of free time. Even now i have a spreadsheet of income and expenses, and if I can't pay cash for something then I don't buy it. My one exception to that is a margin loan for my shares which I now occasionally use as a short term buffer, but that nearly cost me all my savings,twice, so I'm glad I wasn't using it early on.
If you haven't got a job yes you are fucked.Incidentally I paid my own way through uni and my parents have never lent me money or paid for stuff.
I didn't read TFA or any of the comments, so this may be redundant. My perspective is that by the time you kids are retiring any government funding for old people will have vanished under shear weight of numbers, and lack of workers to pay for it. This isn't entirely disastrous as government funding for old people is supposed to be a safety net, whereas in Australia at least it is a big part of many people's retirement plans at the moment. Roughly speaking if you have less than half a million dollars in financial assets you'll get a state pension (your prime residence is not included in that). To make up for what you lose by having assets in excess of that you need about 1.5 million. So for the vast proportion of people at the moment quite simply finding a loose million in spare change isn't an option, so they de-asset one way or another (house improvements,caravan, boat and 4wd) and get the state pension.
If we assume that 1.5 million is a reasonable target in 2017 (it is way low in my opinion but at least it's a peg in the ground), I'd point out that is roughly ten years pay, so compound interest is your friend, you aren't going to save that directly. But of all the investments I've made (or gambles as they should be known), buying a fairly nasty house in a fairly unloved inner city suburb actually turned out to return 8%, over 17 years, plus I had somewhere to live, saving me $6-10k/year. Of course there are costs in house ownership, and although it wasn't the plan, the gentrification of that suburb was pretty obvious in hindsight.. I also have a bunch of shares, and much of my stash was made during the GFC, when I had some sleepless nights after some brave decisions. Now I just sit on high dividend blue chips.
I actually found an investment advisor useful as he knows his way around the tax system, BUT he made no recommendations to change my basic approach. If you are less than 50 you probably don't need to talk to one every year, I'd have thought 5 years was more like it. Worth shopping around, the big end of town charges like wounded bulls. The little guy working for an industry fund was cheap but useless.
Mainly you need two things. A plan. And a job.
Now if I put my tin foil hat on, all these self funded retirees are going to have a pot of money the government would like to get its hands on. My guess is that income tax will be extended up until you die, if they can't think of any other method, and there will be bigger attempts to get people out of using public services.
So, to be kind, you made a choice to live in a house 4 miles from public transport and chose to work at a place that is not served by public transport. That's fine, I made a similar choice. If I were to use public transport to get to work then it would take 3-4 hours, the first step would be to catch the school bus, which I am not quite old enough to do. I'd rather drive, it is 54 miles and takes 59 minutes. 8 miles of that are on gravel tracks.
Whatever you are talking about isn't engineering. Please use a different word for that activity. It sounds like some sort of clerical shit. Maybe you could call it keyboard banging.
I think that is an excellent point and I'm surprised it got modded down. I work from home, and I am the best of the best (or at least the third highest paid engineer out of 1000), but yes, at some point it is possible that 'they' could find an English speaking engineer who can do my job effectively and has my experience but would be paid less. If I find her first then I'll be her agent.
But, that person doesn't seem to be likely to come from any of the obvious outsourcing countries.So a factor of 8 on salary seems unlikely. Last time I looked a Chinese engineer with a good enough grasp of spoken and written English wa paid almost as much as an Australian one( who admittedly might fail either or both of those requirements depending on your prejudices).
The Australian Government's (both Labor and Coalition) over the last 15 years have conspicuously failed to support the automotive industry in the face of the high exchange rate caused by our enormous mineral exports. This is in opposition to the way they supported the banks via all sorts of funny schemes.
As a result Australia is the only country I have ever heard of which has decided that the auto industry is not a good idea.
So first the assembly workers went. Then the factories went. That meant there was no critical volume for precision machining, so then the toolmakers went. That meant the local aircraft maintenance industry couldn't get the stuff they needed, so aircraft maintenance was offshored. Meanwhile all the suppliers of parts had to diversify into less rigorous but less profitable lines. So the engineers went.
I'm lucky, we still design and develop cars for manufacture all over the world (except in Australia), so our product development centre is expanding.But an industry that used to employ around 50-100 000 well paid highish technology or skilled jobs is practically dead, with maybe 2000 people left.
So escaping the GFC probably is not due to the incredible foresight of the gummint, just lucky.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
is one take that is not out of line with most I've seen. Almost all projected growth in CO2 emissions to 2040 is China and India.
I'll pick on India, as I like to. For the most part (ie >50%) people there are desperately poor, have unreliable power, no proper sewage system, fairly corrupt government, and are indian. There is not much we can do about the latter. But for the rest of it even their monumentally stupid government realises they need to get people off the subsistence farming model and for that they need electricity. And, since airy fairy renewables are not cost effective without subsidies, that means coal. And lots of it. Whatever western wankers might think, the impact of the west on CO2 for the next few decades is tiny compared with the third worlders who want, reasonably enough, to join the first world party.
"It's not Amateur Night on Planet Earth anymore, things have gotten terribly, horribly real,"
Poor people are living longer, earning more, eating more, all over the world. There are fewer large wars.Sure there's a few existential problems around, but you are living in a very successful century so far as homo sapiens is concerned.
" Our current best estimate is that 100% of global warming is caused by human activity. [realclimate.org]"
Gosh, that is quite hilarious. Presumably you have heard of Ice Ages large and small and the Holocene optimum. Why has natural variation in temperatures ceased just because we are on the scene?
I'll assume you are going to claim fossil fuel burning is a large part of changes since 1880 (I would), but if you look at HADCET you'll see that recent (since 1880) spikes in temperature change are not unusual in rapidity or amplitude over the few hundred years of that data. Now I realise I am using HADCET as a proxy for global temperatures, but its a damn sight better than a few trees.
100% wow. 100% he he hee. Thanks, you've cheered me up no end, the chicken littles really are just plain silly
Last year my taxable income was $190000. You can buy shares in my employer. I wouldn't.
So, 16 years ago I paid a year's pay at the time (85k) in cash for a solid, but unattractive, house in a working class, decent suburb.
Three years ago, after I got a lot of pay rises, because good real engineers are well paid, I paid 300k cash to have it knocked down and a new one built. That is now worth 600k.
So which of you dummies in the IT game can't figure out how to do that?
Meanwhile, I bought a weekender. For cash. But that was mainly to annoy you lot.
" imposed on top of a long-term global warming trend that continues unabated"
doesn't seem very ambiguous to me.