That's not correct. You forget immigration in your equations.
The indigenous populations of the Western countries are decreasing, but the countries are still seeing a constant net growth.
And the impact of each individual in the developed countries is increasing constantly so that it doesn't really matters: One fat couch dweller family whit their cars, their 4K TVs on every room including the WC (no joking), the ma who takes the kids to school in her SUV to later go shopping just out of pure bordom, their Big Macs and their holidays by plane (not forgetting the baby and his/her diaper made of virgin forest trees) have a higher impact than 10 or more families in the 3rd world and this is increasing year by year.
The resource that is even now the scarcest is agricultural fertile soil. We may already have reached the peak here and the problem is not that we use every time more, the real problem is that there is every time less, through erosion.
And erosion works very very fast, you have had a few extreme examples in the USA and in the European Community countries likes Spain can tell how the fertile soil of the south west dissapeared. I have myself seen how a plot used to grow grow cotton that was at level with a road went to be 2-3m below the road in less than 3 years.
And this is happening every day at a massive scale in all the countries of arid zones the world were industrial agriculture is being applied.
Water wells for Africa? they have proven to just do worse: People that were nomadic settled, exploiting the soil even more intensely and the wells themselves proved to be a real nightmare: at the same time that drinkable water is pumped to the surface salty water is taking it's place. Not always from the oceans but many times the salts come from the fertilisers used on the crops.
Would you tell me what type of industrialisation you would expect from people living at the edge of starvation?
Add to the picture the increasing use of soil for biofuels and the even worse practice of using this soil to grow crops to feed livestock which is inefficient in a ration of 3/1 (in soil alone and 10/1 in water), meaning that we need 3 times as many resources to grow 1 calorie of beef than 1 calorie of vegetables/
And I am quite sorry again, but before you can even thing on industrializing anything you need to feed the potential workers
GMO have already proven worth nothing, else we would be seeing green deserts by now, and they aren't only as dry as ever, they are even bigger.
Maybe this Final Solution will come all by itself, just look at the streams of immigrants that are pressing northwards to the USA and Europe.
There will be (are already are) more and more tension, more and more Boko Haram, Al Qaida, Syria, Chad...
A nuke, a designer organism in hands of any nutjob, from Christian anti-evolutionists, UFO nuts, Islamists, extreme animal rights activists or anti-humanist nihilists (remember 12 Monkeys?).
It doesn't take too much, even a simple accident: remember that we still have nukes enough to eradicate all live on earth 100 times. And what about "mother" Nature herself?
In Ecology soil, water and minerals (and energy) are called "limiting factors". You True Believers are always talking about how the Market behaves like an ecosystem or an organism... but very few have ever bothered to really understand this analogy in all it's implications but just cherrypicking the aspects of ecology and biology that fit your needs while you fail to understand a basic fact: That ecology is nothing more and nothing less than information science applied to living systems and that it's basic premises are no more and no less than applying the principles of thermodynamics to ecosystems; it's just data at the end of the day and it can really be extrapolated to almost anything, specially economy.
And you don't need to be very bright to infer that economy can not just ignore it's basic limiting factors which are very much the same as in ecology: Soil to grow food to nourish the masses, feed the workers and produce goods for he consumers, energy to keep everything rolling including the very computers that the financial system is based upon, and minerals to makes stuff from that can be sold...
"Retirement funds" nice. I put these on my list of mythological creatures to look up in parthenon.org
A retirement fund sounds like something pretty amazing but in reality it's nothing more than any other of these fantasies of capitalism.
It is supposed to provide cash for the future... while in reality we are seeing that many have actually become de-funded what in fact means that they are _costing_ us money. Specially in countries like mine where we are forced the darn funds down the throat like it or not with the sole reason that in the 1980s it sounded so much more cool and smart "Hey, we are modern, we have a mullet, shoulder pads and retirement funds, mate are we smart!!!"
Thus, nothing but another useless chimera.
Had the government taken my money instead and used it to fund the pension system there would have been no difference, but at least I wouldn't have had to swallow all the religious bullshit from the suites. And maybe, just maybe I would be better off.
And sorry, I do still believe in Malthus, at least until we can build technology and goods out of pure photons... or finally decide to cut the crap and take space more seriously. But for that we need to stop thinking in the quarterly results that the makes the butts of the suits water.
And the fact hat plastic is broken down doesn't mean that the polymers will just dissapear into another universe, the chains may get shorter and some may degrade into (complex) hydrocarbons that they will still be here.
And PVC does actually NOT degrade with UV light.
The degradation of plastic material is a slow process that can occur mechanically, chemically (thermo- or photo-oxidative), and to a lesser degree, biologically (Kulshreshtha, 1992; Shah et al., 2008; Cooper and Corcoran, 2010). The persistence of plastic in the environment has been estimated to be in the range of hundreds to thousands of years, although longevity can increase in cool climates and where material is buried on the ocean bottom or under sediment (Gregory and Andrady, 2003). A recent study examining the accumulation of marine ocean debris at depths of 25–3971 m over a 22-year period shows that 33% of all debris in Monterey Bay, California, USA, is composed of plastic litter (Schlining et al., 2013). Similar results from other localities reveal that much of plastic debris is below
the water surface (Goldberg, 1997; Galgani et al., 2000; Keller et al., 2010). This debris may be composed of high-density plastics or low-density plastics with fouled surfaces (Ye and Andrady, 1991; Goldberg, 1997; Gregory, 2009; Lobelle and Cunliffe, 2011). Given the low water temperatures and decreased exposure to UV light at greater depths within and below the photic zone, sunken plastic debris has good potential to persist and eventually form part of the rock record. On beaches, plastic debris, such as resin pellets, fragments, and expanded polystyrene up to 11 mm in size, may be preserved within the upper 5 cm of beach sediment (Kusui and Noda, 2003). Claessens et al. (2011) identified microplastics in beach sediment cores at depths down to 32 cm. In addition, Fisner et al. (2013), in their study of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in pellets, were able to locate plastic debris at sediment depths as great as 1 m. However, we found no visible loose plastic fragments at depths >10 cm in sand on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii. Given the beach’s constant exposure to the northeasterly trade winds, much of the small (
http://www.geosociety.org/gsat...
So, you don't need to go back to the article.
And yes, I agree: It's all a scam to tax the poor American tax payer and Climate does not exist.
And if there are enough of them there will maybe some predators speciallised on them and some may even use the plastics for things like float ability or organs!!!
I have read a lot of articles about how the animals of the future may come to look like, but none ever thought on adding the massive amount of plastics, metals and others stuff we are adding to the ecosystem.
Crap, I need a time machine. Now!
Same a the EU does.
Half of the money we taxpayers pay goes to argrarian subsidies. And these do not go to poor farmers but to our own megacorps like Unilever.
Ah, what is actually the difference between a microconsole and a smarthphone?
Ah, yeah, the name... so that Apple fanboys buy two devices that do exactly the same and spent double as much money.
Well thought!
And by next year the Giga-iphone: A giant 4K screen that you can also use to watch TV!!! AWESOME
Right, but this is nitpicking or as we say in Dutch mierenneuken.
If you want to go this way: God as the concept laid out by the Christians and Muslims does definitely not exist because He is not only improbable from the point of view of existing science but the concepts that define Him are also logically contradictory in the very logic they are expressed.
If there is a sentient über-being who created (at least) this universe is another very different question because the issue here is about Jahveh not about some sort of Brahman even if Brahman very much resembles the more modern ideas of God-Jahveh
It is thus not such an act of fait to say that there is no being who created the planet earth (or the universe), has three avatars (one of them under-used) had himself crucified, resurrected himself (wasn't he already inmortal?) is surrounded by a legion of subordinate gods called "angels" and saints and demons, listens to the particular wishes of his believers...etc.
Ah, and sorry Muslims you will never be able to maintain your principles of "There is no God but Allah" because angels aren't anything else but minor gods with a different name. So sorry mates, please don't blow up your balls anywhere close to me: Do it in the Mariannes Trench, the 70 Virgins will still be waiting for you with a tube of sex lube and the abyssal fishes will love some fresh meat!!
BUT we do not pray to "no God" not do we pretend to have a direct link to nobody...
and better yet: When we fuck up we do not have the cheap way out of repenting and praying or like the Catholics confess, pray a few cheap prayers and that's it.
AND we do not ask our governments for subventions for our "churches" or to screw other people's rights just because we don't like something.
Thus, as long as Christians and Muslims and similars keep their beliefs to themselves they can pray their butts sore if they want. I have no probs with the few elderly who still believe these things (at least here in the EU), but don't force your jeebuses down my throat.
Reminds me of a guy who lived in California and had a bunch of followers... the place was Spahn Ranch and the guy's name, well, you know him,for sure.;)
Sorry. The existence of Lendulus Batiatus is an historicla fact such as the existence of Marcus Linius Crassus, Rameses III and Napeoleon Bonaparte.
The existence of a guy called Jesus is an historical plausibility. There are no birth certificates, no first hand evidence (he did not write anything nor build anything) no evidence of his death, only third hand and indirect references that may even be of very different persons.
The only thing known is that there was a lot of religious violence in the Israeli region and that a sect appeared that called themselves "Christians" somewhere in Egypt, Greece or Rome between some decades and a couple of centuries after the alleged dead of their guru. That's a bit fuzzy for an "historical fact" in a time when there actually was a discipline called history.
Now to your "theory"... if something has been observed in laboratory... what else does t need to be a "fact"?
Do you know that Einstein's relativity has not only been proven many times "officially" but also needs to be counted with in GPS satelli ? So, is it a fact or not?
is Avian Flu a fact or not? Are resistant infections and plagues facts or just theories? Is this fact or just theory?
Or maybe in your universe only the equation 2+2=4 is called "fact".
Well, "most verified" is a little exaggerated, to say it mildly as there are only 3 known references, none is contemporary and all are disputed to a certain point. And all that in a time were we even know what brand the favourite underwear of Julius Caesar was... he actually wrote stuff himself you know? And he wasn't busy with saving humanity, just with a few pesky Gauls.
Just note the difference: IN the article in wikiepdia it says that Most modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed... try to extrapolated this changing "Jesus" for "Julius Caesar", "Vercingetorix", "Cleopatra","Archimedes" or "Scipio Africanus". Do you see it now? I will give you hint: The phrase makes no sense if you change 'Jesus' with any of these and this means that your Saviour is an almost unknown person/s of which even people living only decades after his dead didn not had a clear idea of what he did or even where he was born. Not too cool for "one of the best documented persons" of an age were they were short of having steam machines, don't you agree?
And where the heck did you hear this about "many unbelievers. blah, blah..." that's stupid. It's like me telling a Christian that many Christians tell other Christians that they should paint their crosses dayglo pink.
I would suggest to buy yourself a good pair of underpants, this way your fruits wouldn't hang so low;)
Exactly.
And knowing and understanding natural selection, genetics, cell division, mutation, geological scale of times and ecology IS knowing science.
And none of these matters has anything to do with cultural or religious identity.
So, what part of the sciences are they considering then if you scrap a large part of biology from it including parts that are directly related to modern genetic technology?
What is science then? Only physics? Well, we have the big bang there and cosmology and these are considered by the reli-nuts equally wrong as evolution. Because the nutjobs who deny evolutions are the very same that say that the earth is 6000 years old. Good luck trying to fit that with even a moderate knowledge of physics.
So, what is left from "sciences" if we take away biology and physics? Theology? Paperfolding?
Doesnt' makes sense to me.
The last thing I would be afraid of if I were I chick would be to be raped by a huge horde of nerds. And I say a huge horde because the idea of being raped by less than a huge horde is a concept that even in the form of mere thought is contrary to the laws of this space-time continuum.
Slashdot Mirror
The indigenous populations of the Western countries are decreasing, but the countries are still seeing a constant net growth.
And the impact of each individual in the developed countries is increasing constantly so that it doesn't really matters: One fat couch dweller family whit their cars, their 4K TVs on every room including the WC (no joking), the ma who takes the kids to school in her SUV to later go shopping just out of pure bordom, their Big Macs and their holidays by plane (not forgetting the baby and his/her diaper made of virgin forest trees) have a higher impact than 10 or more families in the 3rd world and this is increasing year by year.
Thanks
Sorry to sour your fairytale.
The resource that is even now the scarcest is agricultural fertile soil. We may already have reached the peak here and the problem is not that we use every time more, the real problem is that there is every time less, through erosion.
And erosion works very very fast, you have had a few extreme examples in the USA and in the European Community countries likes Spain can tell how the fertile soil of the south west dissapeared. I have myself seen how a plot used to grow grow cotton that was at level with a road went to be 2-3m below the road in less than 3 years.
And this is happening every day at a massive scale in all the countries of arid zones the world were industrial agriculture is being applied.
Water wells for Africa? they have proven to just do worse: People that were nomadic settled, exploiting the soil even more intensely and the wells themselves proved to be a real nightmare: at the same time that drinkable water is pumped to the surface salty water is taking it's place. Not always from the oceans but many times the salts come from the fertilisers used on the crops.
Would you tell me what type of industrialisation you would expect from people living at the edge of starvation?
Add to the picture the increasing use of soil for biofuels and the even worse practice of using this soil to grow crops to feed livestock which is inefficient in a ration of 3/1 (in soil alone and 10/1 in water), meaning that we need 3 times as many resources to grow 1 calorie of beef than 1 calorie of vegetables/
And I am quite sorry again, but before you can even thing on industrializing anything you need to feed the potential workers
GMO have already proven worth nothing, else we would be seeing green deserts by now, and they aren't only as dry as ever, they are even bigger.
Maybe this Final Solution will come all by itself, just look at the streams of immigrants that are pressing northwards to the USA and Europe.
There will be (are already are) more and more tension, more and more Boko Haram, Al Qaida, Syria, Chad...
A nuke, a designer organism in hands of any nutjob, from Christian anti-evolutionists, UFO nuts, Islamists, extreme animal rights activists or anti-humanist nihilists (remember 12 Monkeys?). It doesn't take too much, even a simple accident: remember that we still have nukes enough to eradicate all live on earth 100 times. And what about "mother" Nature herself?
In Ecology soil, water and minerals (and energy) are called "limiting factors". You True Believers are always talking about how the Market behaves like an ecosystem or an organism... but very few have ever bothered to really understand this analogy in all it's implications but just cherrypicking the aspects of ecology and biology that fit your needs while you fail to understand a basic fact: That ecology is nothing more and nothing less than information science applied to living systems and that it's basic premises are no more and no less than applying the principles of thermodynamics to ecosystems; it's just data at the end of the day and it can really be extrapolated to almost anything, specially economy.
And you don't need to be very bright to infer that economy can not just ignore it's basic limiting factors which are very much the same as in ecology: Soil to grow food to nourish the masses, feed the workers and produce goods for he consumers, energy to keep everything rolling including the very computers that the financial system is based upon, and minerals to makes stuff from that can be sold...
Can you see Malthus dead hand waving now?
A retirement fund sounds like something pretty amazing but in reality it's nothing more than any other of these fantasies of capitalism.
It is supposed to provide cash for the future... while in reality we are seeing that many have actually become de-funded what in fact means that they are _costing_ us money. Specially in countries like mine where we are forced the darn funds down the throat like it or not with the sole reason that in the 1980s it sounded so much more cool and smart "Hey, we are modern, we have a mullet, shoulder pads and retirement funds, mate are we smart!!!"
Thus, nothing but another useless chimera.
Had the government taken my money instead and used it to fund the pension system there would have been no difference, but at least I wouldn't have had to swallow all the religious bullshit from the suites. And maybe, just maybe I would be better off.
And sorry, I do still believe in Malthus, at least until we can build technology and goods out of pure photons... or finally decide to cut the crap and take space more seriously. But for that we need to stop thinking in the quarterly results that the makes the butts of the suits water.
For $Deitie's sake, gief zeese man a "+1 funee" I runned out of ze moderation pointz, sacrebleu!
And the fact hat plastic is broken down doesn't mean that the polymers will just dissapear into another universe, the chains may get shorter and some may degrade into (complex) hydrocarbons that they will still be here. And PVC does actually NOT degrade with UV light.
I don't get it; sarcasm is in the dictionary I read it many times. How can there be sarcasm in Stuarticus' comment? Can you explain that?
the water surface (Goldberg, 1997; Galgani et al., 2000; Keller et al., 2010). This debris may be composed of high-density plastics or low-density plastics with fouled surfaces (Ye and Andrady, 1991; Goldberg, 1997; Gregory, 2009; Lobelle and Cunliffe, 2011). Given the low water temperatures and decreased exposure to UV light at greater depths within and below the photic zone, sunken plastic debris has good potential to persist and eventually form part of the rock record. On beaches, plastic debris, such as resin pellets, fragments, and expanded polystyrene up to 11 mm in size, may be preserved within the upper 5 cm of beach sediment (Kusui and Noda, 2003). Claessens et al. (2011) identified microplastics in beach sediment cores at depths down to 32 cm. In addition, Fisner et al. (2013), in their study of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in pellets, were able to locate plastic debris at sediment depths as great as 1 m. However, we found no visible loose plastic fragments at depths >10 cm in sand on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii. Given the beach’s constant exposure to the northeasterly trade winds, much of the small ( http://www.geosociety.org/gsat...
So, you don't need to go back to the article.
And yes, I agree: It's all a scam to tax the poor American tax payer and Climate does not exist.
And if there are enough of them there will maybe some predators speciallised on them and some may even use the plastics for things like float ability or organs!!! I have read a lot of articles about how the animals of the future may come to look like, but none ever thought on adding the massive amount of plastics, metals and others stuff we are adding to the ecosystem. Crap, I need a time machine. Now!
EVer heard about a stuff called sand? Or soil and dirt? Mud? No? Well, never mind.
Looks like there is a New World Order in the making.
Same a the EU does. Half of the money we taxpayers pay goes to argrarian subsidies. And these do not go to poor farmers but to our own megacorps like Unilever.
Like a pie?
What in fucks holy name oes the Linux Documentation Project need drones for?
I think I spending too much time on slasdot...
Ah, what is actually the difference between a microconsole and a smarthphone? Ah, yeah, the name... so that Apple fanboys buy two devices that do exactly the same and spent double as much money. Well thought! And by next year the Giga-iphone: A giant 4K screen that you can also use to watch TV!!! AWESOME
Well, they will do whatever the PAYING 1% tells them to do ;)
If you want to go this way: God as the concept laid out by the Christians and Muslims does definitely not exist because He is not only improbable from the point of view of existing science but the concepts that define Him are also logically contradictory in the very logic they are expressed.
If there is a sentient über-being who created (at least) this universe is another very different question because the issue here is about Jahveh not about some sort of Brahman even if Brahman very much resembles the more modern ideas of God-Jahveh
It is thus not such an act of fait to say that there is no being who created the planet earth (or the universe), has three avatars (one of them under-used) had himself crucified, resurrected himself (wasn't he already inmortal?) is surrounded by a legion of subordinate gods called "angels" and saints and demons, listens to the particular wishes of his believers...etc.
Ah, and sorry Muslims you will never be able to maintain your principles of "There is no God but Allah" because angels aren't anything else but minor gods with a different name. So sorry mates, please don't blow up your balls anywhere close to me: Do it in the Mariannes Trench, the 70 Virgins will still be waiting for you with a tube of sex lube and the abyssal fishes will love some fresh meat!!
BUT we do not pray to "no God" not do we pretend to have a direct link to nobody...
and better yet: When we fuck up we do not have the cheap way out of repenting and praying or like the Catholics confess, pray a few cheap prayers and that's it.
AND we do not ask our governments for subventions for our "churches" or to screw other people's rights just because we don't like something.
Thus, as long as Christians and Muslims and similars keep their beliefs to themselves they can pray their butts sore if they want. I have no probs with the few elderly who still believe these things (at least here in the EU), but don't force your jeebuses down my throat.
Helter Skelter !
The existence of a guy called Jesus is an historical plausibility. There are no birth certificates, no first hand evidence (he did not write anything nor build anything) no evidence of his death, only third hand and indirect references that may even be of very different persons.
The only thing known is that there was a lot of religious violence in the Israeli region and that a sect appeared that called themselves "Christians" somewhere in Egypt, Greece or Rome between some decades and a couple of centuries after the alleged dead of their guru. That's a bit fuzzy for an "historical fact" in a time when there actually was a discipline called history.
Now to your "theory"... if something has been observed in laboratory... what else does t need to be a "fact"? Do you know that Einstein's relativity has not only been proven many times "officially" but also needs to be counted with in GPS satelli ? So, is it a fact or not?
is Avian Flu a fact or not? Are resistant infections and plagues facts or just theories? Is this fact or just theory?
Or maybe in your universe only the equation 2+2=4 is called "fact".
BTW, I do NOT believe in Darwinian evolution.
Historicity of jesus
Just note the difference: IN the article in wikiepdia it says that Most modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed... try to extrapolated this changing "Jesus" for "Julius Caesar", "Vercingetorix", "Cleopatra","Archimedes" or "Scipio Africanus". Do you see it now? I will give you hint: The phrase makes no sense if you change 'Jesus' with any of these and this means that your Saviour is an almost unknown person/s of which even people living only decades after his dead didn not had a clear idea of what he did or even where he was born. Not too cool for "one of the best documented persons" of an age were they were short of having steam machines, don't you agree?
And where the heck did you hear this about "many unbelievers. blah, blah..." that's stupid. It's like me telling a Christian that many Christians tell other Christians that they should paint their crosses dayglo pink.
I would suggest to buy yourself a good pair of underpants, this way your fruits wouldn't hang so low ;)
So, what part of the sciences are they considering then if you scrap a large part of biology from it including parts that are directly related to modern genetic technology?
What is science then? Only physics? Well, we have the big bang there and cosmology and these are considered by the reli-nuts equally wrong as evolution. Because the nutjobs who deny evolutions are the very same that say that the earth is 6000 years old. Good luck trying to fit that with even a moderate knowledge of physics.
So, what is left from "sciences" if we take away biology and physics? Theology? Paperfolding?
wishful thinking again?
Doesnt' makes sense to me. The last thing I would be afraid of if I were I chick would be to be raped by a huge horde of nerds. And I say a huge horde because the idea of being raped by less than a huge horde is a concept that even in the form of mere thought is contrary to the laws of this space-time continuum.