It is not bad, really ! When in 2100, and with the global fertility rate at the usual population replacement rate (around 2.5), the number stabilise to the projected 10 billions, we would be JUST 50% more people. Since ALREADY we have the technology AND THE RESOURCES (yes, we have them) to sustain this population, we just need to better organise social-economical-political.
"Just" need to better organise [the] social-economic-political [systems in order to mitigate the problem]
Just.
I don't think that word means what you would hope it means.
Did Darwin's use of the term "natural selection" actually imply that the effects of the individual's group should be discounted from the process? E.g., if prairie dogs take care of the sick members of their groups, who then get better and reproduce, are these dogs not naturally selected?
(Disclaimer: I know nothing of prairie dogs).
"Selection" works on species, not individuals. If a group of prairie dogs took care of it's young (I will use that instead of 'it's sick' because it is a more realistic issue) better than another group and had bigger litters and out competed the less nurturing group, then it would be, by definition, more successful and it would be 'selected for' - there would be more individuals in the nurturing group than the non nurturing group. If there were any genetic elements responsible for those behaviors they would be preferentially transmitted to the pups and remain in the gene pool.
However, if after a couple of dozen generations the nurturing PDs ate themselves out of house and home because there were too many of them for the environment, then their populations would drop and perhaps the less nurturing group could move back in and become more 'successful' (for that time and place).
So individuals are certainly part of the process, but the term 'selection' is defined to operate on species (which in an of itself is a difficult term to define).
But again, it goes back to energy. If you had unlimited fusion power, you can desalinate and transport all the water you want. There is plenty of water on the planet, just not in the shape or place it's always needed. Currently changing that takes too much energy - change that and you're golden.
Of course, cheap fusion is always just around the corner. Staking civilization's well being on a mythical technology is probably not the best of ideas.
While population may go down, resource use usually doesn't. In fact, as populations get industrialized, resource use goes up. And the major point of discussion here is resource use, not necessarily the number of warm bodies on the planet.
Don't get so hung up on genetics. It's overrated....
Adopting and raising a child or even helping teach children will do more to transmit whatever is important to you than all of your genes combined. You can tell family stories to anyone, they might even appreciate it.
Thought experiment: If we lived in an age before paternity was easily determined and your wife got pregnant from another man but you and your wife raised the child as your own, would anything be different other than the relative copies of different gene alleles?
Energy isn't getting any cheaper. Does not need, to we can use less. My current fancy HDTV uses way less power than the SDTV it replaced. Same with the computer I use now vs the p4 machine I had before.
There are many kinds of power available to us now, they might cost a little more but by and large we will get by.
Perhaps, but as you might have noticed, our economy isn't doing all that well in part because energy costs are going up. There likely is a ceiling on how high energy costs can go and allow Business As Usual to proceed. Now, if you would like to posit that we could get by with what economists would call at generational depression - negative growth for 30, 50, 100 years and we would survive, if not handily, then at least we would survive, then you are likely correct. (Sorry for the run on). But try to convince any politician or the vast majority of voters that this is a reasonable strategy and you would be lynched.
While true, it typically increases resource demand through higher standards of living. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing but it puts additional strain on the ecosystem. If Bangladesh manages to cut population growth to near zero, but increases energy use per person tenfold, like other developed countries, you haven't worked your way out of the problem, you've just changed it slightly.
What you missed is the ability to live day in, day out, month in, month out (now 10 years) in.... space. You know, that hostile place where we will have to live for....years.... when (if?) we get motivated to move out of LEO. Yes, I'd like sexier things, bigger targets, more expansive visions but you only get what you pay for.
We are much better at mundane station keeping than we were before the ISS. Hopefully we can put that knowledge to use before we forget it.
If you use the term 'billionaires' to mean 'so incredibly wealthy that they can bend governments and most men to their wishes' I think you will see them throughout history. Perhaps they were 'Princes' or other nobility, perhaps they were members of the Church and sometimes they were simply merchants (17th, 18th Century Dutch merchants for example). But they existed.
So, we take all the billionaires in their Hawker-Sidley (Really? They still fly those things?) jets, their personal 767's and DC-9's and park them, along with their respective owners and bank accounts in deepest, most destitute Africa (or Asia or New Jersey or whatever wasteland you propose) and give them to the locals.
Wait 10 years and see what happens.
You have a new bunch of billionaires, this time flying something reasonable like Gulfstreams. You still have starvation, destitution and Trenton.
While I viscerally have problems with the super rich, they represent just a tiny fraction of the area under the curve that is Homo Industrialis that they can safely be ignored. Or burned, however your conscious dictates.
Its not like the HID lamps fucking blind you enough as it is, we need LASERS! so we can be blinded up to 2 miles away
My thoughts exactly. Biking in the dark and rain, oncoming headlines make it impossible to see anything other than painful light surrounded by a lot of dark. I'd like to see headlamps toned down a bit.
A.22 pistol with good laser sights. Tones those headlamps down in a snap. And if you miss and clobber the radiator, at least you've helped the next guy.
(Disclaimer: Stunt performed on a closed circuit with professional drivers, do not attempt this by yourself)
You can combine it with a rotating mirror and a DLP and make monochrome pictures on a wall a long way away? You can fire it at a spinning screen and make Star Wars Holonet-style images?
A sixty foot image of Princess Lea in the middle of the park?
What, exactly, is it that is bad about preparing for wars you have empirical evidence to indicate can happen?
Nothing. Just costs a lot when you try to prepare for everything. Nucs, Carrier battle groups, B1s, B2s, F22s, F35s for the big nasties. Littoral combat ships, helicopters, helicopters, helicopters, planes, trucks, trucks, bombproof trucks, soldier proof trucks for the little guys. AWACS, satellites, boosters, XB-37, the Space Shuttle (oopsies) Lots and lots of people. We spend, I think, 7 times more on military pieces parts THAN THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED
Time to take a break folks. Put the power back on the shelf for a bit. Let the rest of the world beat themselves up by and for themselves just a little.
Or perhaps, maybe, spend some of that money actually helping people. Yes, raw military might is often the sole determiner of whose left, but it seems timely to suggest that the US might try 'shock and awe' in some other arena. People (as opposed to the typical tin pot despot we tend to support) might actually like us for a change.
Or is this more for some imagined future conflict with tanks rolling around China or Russia?
Remember, the classic military mistake is to plan on fighting the previous war. Of course, the current US military seems hell bent on not making that particular error by trying to fight every possible combination of conflict simultaneously. The weaknesses of that policy are left as an exercise to the reader.
Maybe someone can explain to me this still on-going fascination with "social networking" sites? Maybe I out grew it when I lived through the explosion of mIRC and ICQ.
I think you need another digit in your UID to understand the phenomena. It's OK to ask everyone to get off your lawn now.
It's not just the litigation, Apple have completely lost the plot.
Having to copy a large document prior to working on it -- to prevent it being overwritten by Lions autosave is the single most stupid design decision I've ever come across.
Then there's the attempted repackaging of iMovie as an upgrade to a leading NLE solution. Avid MC sales are up 30% and Adobe premiere sales are up too, Apple no longer have an NLE suitable for professional workflow.
The discontinuation of the server line... let's stop because this list goes on and on.
Sorry, no. Apple didn't lose the plot. They may have lost your business but they've discovered that, for every professional user of Final Cut Pro there are 100 (200, some reasonably large number) wannabe prosumer / amateur / whatever users and that they can make more money by catering to them at $299 rather than dealing with cranky pros at $899 or whatever.
They're going for the money. And the money isn't in professional level programs. Unfortunately for the Mac fans who do professional audio / video / graphics, Apple is going to let them wither on the vine. Which wouldn't bother me all that much (at least Windows 7 is 'OK') except that it leaves us in the clutches of Adobe and Autodesk.
If you folks think that Apple is evil, well, you haven't seen the pros at work.
Give it a break already. If batshit insane libertarianism was at all a possibility for any human society larger than a bunch of proto monkeys on the Serengeti, somebody would have tried it.
It's OK to have meaningful relationships with other humans. It really is. Try it sometime.
Doubt it, those of us who value digital openess are already avoiding Apple products like the plague.
All ten thousand of you (to be charitable). The Apple marketing department is hold all night meetings (they bribed the Starbucks crew to let them stay late). They're shivering in their turtlenecks.
after the Christmas retail season where retailers are sitting on mountains of unsold non-iPad tablet stock.
It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Maybe I won't be too grumpy around Christmas season after all. By then the warmth of the soldering iron will be appreciated.
Are you insane? That looks nothing like an iPhone. It has TWO rectangles (the big outside one and the squashed slightly rounded silvery button thing). The iPhone has a rectangle and a circle.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not bad, really !
When in 2100,
and with the global fertility rate at the usual population replacement rate (around 2.5),
the number stabilise to the projected 10 billions,
we would be JUST 50% more people.
Since ALREADY we have the technology AND THE RESOURCES (yes, we have them) to sustain this population,
we just need to better organise social-economical-political.
"Just" need to better organise [the] social-economic-political [systems in order to mitigate the problem]
Just.
I don't think that word means what you would hope it means.
Did Darwin's use of the term "natural selection" actually imply that the effects of the individual's group should be discounted from the process? E.g., if prairie dogs take care of the sick members of their groups, who then get better and reproduce, are these dogs not naturally selected?
(Disclaimer: I know nothing of prairie dogs).
"Selection" works on species, not individuals. If a group of prairie dogs took care of it's young (I will use that instead of 'it's sick' because it is a more realistic issue) better than another group and had bigger litters and out competed the less nurturing group, then it would be, by definition, more successful and it would be 'selected for' - there would be more individuals in the nurturing group than the non nurturing group. If there were any genetic elements responsible for those behaviors they would be preferentially transmitted to the pups and remain in the gene pool.
However, if after a couple of dozen generations the nurturing PDs ate themselves out of house and home because there were too many of them for the environment, then their populations would drop and perhaps the less nurturing group could move back in and become more 'successful' (for that time and place).
So individuals are certainly part of the process, but the term 'selection' is defined to operate on species (which in an of itself is a difficult term to define).
But again, it goes back to energy. If you had unlimited fusion power, you can desalinate and transport all the water you want. There is plenty of water on the planet, just not in the shape or place it's always needed. Currently changing that takes too much energy - change that and you're golden.
Of course, cheap fusion is always just around the corner. Staking civilization's well being on a mythical technology is probably not the best of ideas.
While population may go down, resource use usually doesn't. In fact, as populations get industrialized, resource use goes up. And the major point of discussion here is resource use, not necessarily the number of warm bodies on the planet.
Don't get so hung up on genetics. It's overrated....
Adopting and raising a child or even helping teach children will do more to transmit whatever is important to you than all of your genes combined. You can tell family stories to anyone, they might even appreciate it.
Thought experiment: If we lived in an age before paternity was easily determined and your wife got pregnant from another man but you and your wife raised the child as your own, would anything be different other than the relative copies of different gene alleles?
Energy isn't getting any cheaper.
Does not need, to we can use less. My current fancy HDTV uses way less power than the SDTV it replaced. Same with the computer I use now vs the p4 machine I had before.
Let me introduce you to Jevon's Paradox.
There are many kinds of power available to us now, they might cost a little more but by and large we will get by.
Perhaps, but as you might have noticed, our economy isn't doing all that well in part because energy costs are going up. There likely is a ceiling on how high energy costs can go and allow Business As Usual to proceed. Now, if you would like to posit that we could get by with what economists would call at generational depression - negative growth for 30, 50, 100 years and we would survive, if not handily, then at least we would survive, then you are likely correct. (Sorry for the run on). But try to convince any politician or the vast majority of voters that this is a reasonable strategy and you would be lynched.
While true, it typically increases resource demand through higher standards of living. In and of itself, that's not a bad thing but it puts additional strain on the ecosystem. If Bangladesh manages to cut population growth to near zero, but increases energy use per person tenfold, like other developed countries, you haven't worked your way out of the problem, you've just changed it slightly.
We're still hosed.
Some ugg boots, a remote sandy beach, and photoshop and I could do the same thing!
Add a Sports Illustrated model or two and you have the makings of a great reality TV show.
What you missed is the ability to live day in, day out, month in, month out (now 10 years) in .... space. You know, that hostile place where we will have to live for ....years.... when (if?) we get motivated to move out of LEO. Yes, I'd like sexier things, bigger targets, more expansive visions but you only get what you pay for.
We are much better at mundane station keeping than we were before the ISS. Hopefully we can put that knowledge to use before we forget it.
If you use the term 'billionaires' to mean 'so incredibly wealthy that they can bend governments and most men to their wishes' I think you will see them throughout history. Perhaps they were 'Princes' or other nobility, perhaps they were members of the Church and sometimes they were simply merchants (17th, 18th Century Dutch merchants for example). But they existed.
So, we take all the billionaires in their Hawker-Sidley (Really? They still fly those things?) jets, their personal 767's and DC-9's and park them, along with their respective owners and bank accounts in deepest, most destitute Africa (or Asia or New Jersey or whatever wasteland you propose) and give them to the locals.
Wait 10 years and see what happens.
You have a new bunch of billionaires, this time flying something reasonable like Gulfstreams. You still have starvation, destitution and Trenton.
While I viscerally have problems with the super rich, they represent just a tiny fraction of the area under the curve that is Homo Industrialis that they can safely be ignored. Or burned, however your conscious dictates.
When referring to a vehicle manufactured by BMW, the following rules should be used:
2 wheels: "Beamer"
4 wheels: "Bimmer"
Either one at end of warranty period "Bummer"
"very bright and pleasant to the eye"
Just a small oxymoron for today's viewing pleasure.
Its not like the HID lamps fucking blind you enough as it is, we need LASERS! so we can be blinded up to 2 miles away
My thoughts exactly. Biking in the dark and rain, oncoming headlines make it impossible to see anything other than painful light surrounded by a lot of dark. I'd like to see headlamps toned down a bit.
A .22 pistol with good laser sights. Tones those headlamps down in a snap. And if you miss and clobber the radiator, at least you've helped the next guy.
(Disclaimer: Stunt performed on a closed circuit with professional drivers, do not attempt this by yourself)
You can combine it with a rotating mirror and a DLP and make monochrome pictures on a wall a long way away? You can fire it at a spinning screen and make Star Wars Holonet-style images?
A sixty foot image of Princess Lea in the middle of the park?
What's not to like?
What, exactly, is it that is bad about preparing for wars you have empirical evidence to indicate can happen?
Nothing. Just costs a lot when you try to prepare for everything. Nucs, Carrier battle groups, B1s, B2s, F22s, F35s for the big nasties. Littoral combat ships, helicopters, helicopters, helicopters, planes, trucks, trucks, bombproof trucks, soldier proof trucks for the little guys. AWACS, satellites, boosters, XB-37, the Space Shuttle (oopsies) Lots and lots of people. We spend, I think, 7 times more on military pieces parts THAN THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED
Time to take a break folks. Put the power back on the shelf for a bit. Let the rest of the world beat themselves up by and for themselves just a little.
Or perhaps, maybe, spend some of that money actually helping people. Yes, raw military might is often the sole determiner of whose left, but it seems timely to suggest that the US might try 'shock and awe' in some other arena. People (as opposed to the typical tin pot despot we tend to support) might actually like us for a change.
Or is this more for some imagined future conflict with tanks rolling around China or Russia?
Remember, the classic military mistake is to plan on fighting the previous war. Of course, the current US military seems hell bent on not making that particular error by trying to fight every possible combination of conflict simultaneously. The weaknesses of that policy are left as an exercise to the reader.
Maybe someone can explain to me this still on-going fascination with "social networking" sites? Maybe I out grew it when I lived through the explosion of mIRC and ICQ.
I think you need another digit in your UID to understand the phenomena. It's OK to ask everyone to get off your lawn now.
It's not just the litigation, Apple have completely lost the plot.
Having to copy a large document prior to working on it -- to prevent it being overwritten by Lions autosave is the single most stupid design decision I've ever come across.
Then there's the attempted repackaging of iMovie as an upgrade to a leading NLE solution. Avid MC sales are up 30% and Adobe premiere sales are up too, Apple no longer have an NLE suitable for professional workflow.
The discontinuation of the server line... let's stop because this list goes on and on.
Sorry, no. Apple didn't lose the plot. They may have lost your business but they've discovered that, for every professional user of Final Cut Pro there are 100 (200, some reasonably large number) wannabe prosumer / amateur / whatever users and that they can make more money by catering to them at $299 rather than dealing with cranky pros at $899 or whatever.
They're going for the money. And the money isn't in professional level programs. Unfortunately for the Mac fans who do professional audio / video / graphics, Apple is going to let them wither on the vine. Which wouldn't bother me all that much (at least Windows 7 is 'OK') except that it leaves us in the clutches of Adobe and Autodesk.
If you folks think that Apple is evil, well, you haven't seen the pros at work.
And buy stock in HP!
Oh, wait.
roman:
Give it a break already. If batshit insane libertarianism was at all a possibility for any human society larger than a bunch of proto monkeys on the Serengeti, somebody would have tried it.
It's OK to have meaningful relationships with other humans. It really is. Try it sometime.
Nope, I own just as many Samsung tables as I do Apple products.
And fish generally don't ride bicycles.....
Doubt it, those of us who value digital openess are already avoiding Apple products like the plague.
All ten thousand of you (to be charitable). The Apple marketing department is hold all night meetings (they bribed the Starbucks crew to let them stay late). They're shivering in their turtlenecks.
You are not the Droids they are looking for.
after the Christmas retail season where retailers are sitting on mountains of unsold non-iPad tablet stock.
It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Maybe I won't be too grumpy around Christmas season after all. By then the warmth of the soldering iron will be appreciated.
Are you insane? That looks nothing like an iPhone. It has TWO rectangles (the big outside one and the squashed slightly rounded silvery button thing). The iPhone has a rectangle and a circle.
Haters gotta hate, I guess.