Thanks. That's the plan, but it seems that anything I find appealing makes up a very tiny segment of the overall software development market. It really looks like at least 90% of job openings are Java,.net, and/or Javascript. Boooooring:P
I'm in it for the long haul, though. I'm hoping eventually I'll find something.
I don't doubt that we could fit an arbitrarily large population of humans on Earth. Sustainably, even. You're correct in pointing out that even living on Antarctica or on the ocean floor would be cheaper and easier than living off-world. I was merely trying to point out that doing so would still be very costly; much, much more costly than doing things the old fashioned way. If extreme increase in cost is a valid argument against extraterrestrial colonization, it's only slightly less valid of an argument against Antarctic or deep-sea colonization. If we're going to experience a huge upheaval of the current social order (which seems inevitable if the cost of supporting the global population were to increase dramatically), we might as well get some security against a global catastrophe from the deal.
The design of Project Orion is in many ways considerably simpler than today's chemical rockets. According to the people that actually worked on these studies, the only thing stopping us from building it is political opposition to anything nuclear.
No, it's not about what I think. It's about what Freeman Dyson thinks, since he's the one that actually did the math instead of talking about how mind-boggling the problem is.
133 years to Alpha Centauri based on 1960s technology, topping out at 0.033c. Later studies have shown a maximum velocity in the 0.1c range is likely if thermonuclear bombs are used instead of fission bombs. That would get you to Alpha Centauri in 44 years, which is nowhere near the "centuries" you're claiming.
That's actually my plan. Hoping in two or three years I'll have enough socked away to backpack around the world for a while. Just taking it a day at a time til then.
I'm 32. I didn't really get a "real job" as a developer until I was 27. I've been coding for fun since I was 13. Now I daydream about doing anything other than writing code.
I don't know how it happened. All I know is that I went from having fun coding for free to hating coding for money. Perhaps the moral of the story is to never get a job doing what you love, because it will turn your love into hate. Or maybe the moral of the story is that Java kinda sucks, but Spring causes suicidal tendencies.
My job consists of figuring out a way to solve problems with Spring MVC. It doesn't matter what the problem is, Spring MVC is the answer. It doesn't matter if you can produce a solution using 5 lines of perl, Spring MVC is the only answer. If this is what development has become, I weep tears of nostalgia for the days of assembly language.
Recently purchased Kerrisk's "The Linux Programming Interface", Bovet's "Understanding the Linux Kernel", and Corbet's "Linux Device Drivers" hoping that delving into the guts of awesomeness will counteract some of the stupid that I've had to endure. Let's hope.
Do migrant workers live in drafty one room houses with leaky roofs no windows and dirt floors? Serfs did. Do migrant workers diet consist of onion, potatoes and bread? Serfs did. Migrant workers work 40-50 hours a weeks while serfs worked 60-80 hours a week.
Did serfs live in houses with 30+ others? Migrant workers do. Did serfs' diets consist of beans, rice, and water? Migrant workers' do. Regarding the hours-per-week claims, they seem totally disconnected from the realities I've seen. I've never seen a migrant worker that worked nice short days or took weekends off, but without reliable statistics, we'll just have to agree to disagree here.
Any wages a person with no legal right to work makes are illegal wages. They choose to enter the country illegally and work illegally why should anyone be shocked if they are paid illegally.
I didn't realize that only shocking facts were relevant to this conversation.
There are many assumptions you make that lead to this wrong conclusion, or maybe it's just your way of convincing yourself it's ok to be lazy.
...
-There are fewer people farming then there was 600 years ago, this means fewer people are doing the farming for a larger population
That they are doing the farming for a larger population does not follow from the fact that there are fewer people farming than there were 600 years ago. Non sequitur.
-You seem to think society has not gotten any more complex, there is not just a carpenter, blacksmith, and farmer any more. All the people that would be farming are doing something else, thousands of job fields that have to serve the whole population.
Unwarranted assumption. I never said anything about the complexity of society remaining constant. If anything, I alluded to the opposite by explicitly identifying the creation of new classes of jobs such as the design, building, and maintenance of agricultural machinery. I specifically stated that if these jobs had an equal requirement for labor as the jobs they replaced, the logical conclusion would be that there was no net gain in productivity. Since there was in fact dramatic gains in productivity, the claim that these new jobs simply replaced the old jobs is demonstrated false. This is what's called a proof by contradiction.
-Now if people use technology to do just enough to get by they are setting themselves up for failure, when their technology breaks they will have to work harder to fix it or pay to have it fixed and thus will now have to work harder to maintain their same lifestyle.
That's an interesting claim. Do you have any basis for making it? Specifically, do you have any evidence that they would have to work less hard to fix broken technology if they do more than "just enough to get by"? Also, it seems contradictory to say that people that use technology to do just enough to get by will have to work harder to maintain their same lifestyle when technology breaks. Wouldn't the necessary implication be that they weren't doing enough to get by if getting by gets harder? What's your definition of getting by?
Gains in efficiency are pocked by the by the people paying for the technology, if migrant workers are not paying for the technology then they won't see as much of the benefit. Why should the person risking their capital forfeit the benefits?
To avoid death at the hands of an angry mob. I can't believe you've never heard of the French revolution. Amazing.
Are you familiar at all with serfdom? A serf in the middle ages did not have it better then modern migrant workers.
I never said otherwise. I was saying that a serf in the middle ages had it more or less equally good as modern migrant workers.
Could you be specific about what migrant workers you are talking about. I doubt there is any place in this world where migrant workers are taking advantage technology to improve their efficiency and do not have modern amenities like cell phones.
The kind that lack a legal right to work, work for illegally low wages, have little to no wealth, and pick fruits and vegeables on industrial farms that were tilled, sowed, and irrigated using modern technology. I suppose you might say that while agriculture overall has benefited from tremendous gains in efficiency, this one part of it hasn't, and therefore migrant workers shouldn't be expected to have a better quality of life than serfs from back in the day. I'd argue that that's my point. There's gains in productive efficiency, but they're not distributed equitably across all of society. You used to need all kinds of people to run a farm. Now you need a bunch of machines for most of it and a bunch of Mexicans for a small remainder. If it took as many people to design/build/maintain the machines as it did to do the work manually, there would not have been any gains in productivity, which is contradicted by reality. So we can agree that we need fewer people to do the same work, and yet somehow we still need everyone working full time? I call bullshit.
Gains in efficiency are disproportionately pocketed by the wealthy. That's only a problem because the poor are still poor. We have way more than enough money to fund basic necessities for everyone and have enough left over for the wealthy to buy their yachts and jets. If you disagree that stratification of wealth is a problem in our society, that's fine. In the end, it won't matter anyway. Were the aristocrats of France wrong for hoarding their wealth? Even if they weren't, they still got killed. Interestingly, the stratification of wealth in the US today is approaching levels seen in France leading up to the revolution. Let's hope that we can come up with a better solution to this issue on this side of the pond, because as we've seen before, pretending everything's fine may have disasterous consequences.
So instead what has happened is that racists, sexists, and homophobes have resorted to speaking in code. Nobody calls them on it even though they're really communicating the same ideas. They're just using the right words, so it's okay. This is what's meant by political correctness. Not that the old isms are no longer acceptable, but merely that using old language is no longer acceptable. It's not politically correct to say that one's uncomfortable around black people, but where are the funny looks when one says they're uncomfortable around urban populations? These faux niceness is causing gross perversions in the English language. With a wink and a nudge, people get around these absurd social norms and in the end our society is just as bigoted as it was last year. The only things that really change are the utility and clarity of the English language.
If you get all riled up when someone uses the wrong word, you damn well better get just as riled up when they express the same sentiment using doublespeak. I hate this euphemism shit that the political correctness crowd is pushing us towards because it prevents people from being able to communicate clearly.
It's true though. The requirement of policital correctness is what's driving us towards a world of doublespeak. Certain things that need to be said (but can't be said) just end up being said in an idiotic way to appease those who would attack the speaker for being politically incorrect. It's the reason why we can't have honest discussions using plain language, and it fucking sucks.
Politically. I'm not sure what you're asking here. I never alleged that he was "incorrect". I doubt that he's incorrect about his hopes; he would know his hopes better than anyone else, no? The second part of his post is a subjective value statement and the idea of correctness doesn't really apply. Your question presupposes that he is incorrect, which doesn't really make sense to me, but if you're asking how he is incorrect, my only response is that he is politically incorrect.
Disease is a significant problem in Africa and India. Neither are exactly nice places to live for most of their inhabitants, which is why so many of them try to move to Western nations. Overpopulation is a huge problem in both areas.
Indeed, part of this is true. Disease is a significant problem. Neither are a nice place to live. Many try to move to Western nations. However, the average population density of the African continent is 95 people per square mile. For comparison, Europe has 186 people per square mile. Overpopulation can't explain why Africa is shittier than Europe. India has 954 people per square mile, but South Korea has 1288 people per square mile. Overpopulation can't explain why India is shittier than South Korea. While overpopulation may or may not be a huge problem in both areas, it's not hard to point to places with greater population [density] but much better conditions.
We, as Westerners, need to stop hiding behind political correctness. It's the only way the problems in those areas will ever get dealt with properly.
I agree that political correctness has ruined public discourse. However, this is not one of those times. pigiron's comment was not only offensive, it was also worthless. Wishing death upon the poor isn't going to fix this problem, unless you think the problem is the existence of poor people (in which case actively killing them would be a much better "solution" anyway).
Africans and Indians do need to stop reproducing if there just aren't enough resources to sustain the population that already exists, never mind any new people. It's just common sense. Adding more people when there aren't enough resources to go around is just going to make a bad situation even worse.
Hi, welcome to life on Earth. You must be new here. Westerners do need to stop pumping toxins into the air and water if they're already fucking up the global environment. It's just common sense. Fisherman do need to stop industrial-scale fishing if global fish stocks are nearly gone. It's just common sense.
If they can't figure this out on their own, then it is up to Westerners to inform them of the situation and how to deal with it.
So you're saying it's up to us to offer up such great solutions as "die from Ebola"? Forgive me for doubting that these people will be very receptive to this solution.
Which part is untested? Detonating nukes? Having the blast act on a metal plate? The simplicity of Project Orion seems obvious to me; what part is "no supported tech"? Dr. Dyson and the folks at General Atomics seemed quite convinced that this could have been done with 60s technology. Which point do you disagree with them on?
So to clarify, the distributor only sparked the plugs while the ECU still controlled the fuel injectors?
For the record, my '84 T-bird was a piece of shit. I bought it for $500 and it lasted me for one whole summer. The engine kept stalling at the most fantastic times, usually as soon as the throttle was opened up from idle. People must've thought I was learning to drive a stick, though the car was automatic. Over the course of those few months, I managed to collide with countless immobile objects (curbs, signs, fences) due to totally bald tires and a reckless mentality. I even took it offroading (?!) once, through a swamp. Ran over a log that shot up and put a rather massive dent in the side sill, nearly permanently closing the passenger side door. Later that day, the engine stalled one last time, never to start again. Laying on the ignition just released the magic smoke from the distributor. RIP shitty T-bird.
That's why I'm not a car guy. I thought it was the ECU that was fried by an EMP (which would kill a modern car). I didn't realize the injectors themselves would be affected. The 84 T-bird's injection was timed by a distributor, not an ECU.
The ignition I know nothing about. I turned the key, it started. Is a '68 Plymouth usually crank-started?
The 9V battery has a special place in my heart. And on my tongue.
In the mid 90s, I was an avid player of the electric guitar. My interest in hard rock, metal, grunge, punk, and other genres led me to purchase a variety of effects pedals of the stompbox variety (and eventually a multi-FX device, but that's not relevant here). Most such pedals were powered by 9V batteries, and so I always had a bunch of these 9V batteries scattered around. Well, there's something that differentiates a 9V battery from most other common batteries: both terminals are on the same side of the battery, and the voltage between them is sufficient to cause a mild current to flow across a tongue when pressed against them.
So that's around the time I became a regular on Undernet. I was like "... Nickname? I don't have a nickname! Well, hmm..."
You see, I don't really play guitar anymore, because I realized that I don't have that flavor of creativity. It should've been obvious to me even then, just from the fact that I chose my handle based on the first thing that came to mind, which was the first thing I saw when I looked away from the CRT. NineVolt. And so the name stuck.
My 1968 Plymouth is certainly going to gain in value over the years
Certainly?... Certainly?!
Sure, and maybe I shouldn't have junked my '84 T-bird (which was the worst piece of shit I've ever had the pleasure of driving: it was also EMP-proof until the engine seized and the distributor housing melted).
Land is plentiful, water is, indeed, needed to make it arable, but desalination is a solved problem — you just need electricity. And we can provide that even today in abundance with fission (nuclear plants) and will certainly be able to have it even better in the future with fusion.
Somehow this sounds a little bit more expensive than just using existing arable land or existing potable water, something which we've been doing since the dawn of civilization. Dare I say, orders of (decimal) magnitude more expensive.
All of the problems you listed are several orders of (decimal) magnitude worse on other bodies of the Solar System.
Well, using nuclear power to desalinate seawater to irrigate nonarable land is also several orders of (decimal) magnitude worse than just having naturally arable land and clean water, but you don't seem to think that's an issue. Doing it in space is "only" several orders of magnitude worse still, so if the step to nuclear agriculture isn't so bad, the step from there to space shouldn't be any worse, right?
And the problem of inter-star travel has not been solved yet even in theory — nor even is it obvious, the solution will ever be found.
I refer you to Project Orion. This shit has been figured out since the 60s. The technical solution is nearly a half-century old. A half century. The political solution, on the other hand...
We will, probably, colonize Mars some day, but the South Pole is much more comfortable for humans than any spot of the Red Planet. And the ping-times are much shorter...
Ah, thank god, we won't have to deal with that dreaded latency. Because that is the main downside of the Malthusian catastrophe. Not the extreme costs of developing a sustainable closed-loop system that supports human life. Ping times.
I'm pretty sure I am NineVolt, but I lost the credentials to the account. In places where my usual handle is taken, I go by the obnoxiously long-winded NoImNotNineVolt instead of the considerably less creative NineVolt2.
I am absolutely not saying that, your work ethic is not the only thing that you need to work on.
I don't follow. If gains in productivity (efficiency of production) have resulted in orders of magnitude more productive output per unit of manual labor, only a tiny fraction of the manual labor expected of the average worker from 600 years ago would yield the same productive output. You claimed that this level of output would yield a lifestyle comparable to one enjoyed by a laborer from that era. I'm saying it doesn't, in that it does not provide sufficient income to pay for food, clothing, and shelter. What is it exactly that I need to work on?
Migrant workers have cell phones, cars, indoor plumbing, heating
I was with you until I got to that sentence. I think we're talking about different migrant workers. The ones I'm talking about don't have cell phones or cars, and they only have indoor plumbing and heating when fitting 30 people in a residence designed for 4.
I don't think the concern is that there will not be enough for residential accomodations.
I think the concern is that there will not be enough necessary resources. Arable land, potable water, things like that. Sure, we could put sustainable greenhouses in the places you list. We can improve water filtration and desalination technology to the point that we stay sufficiently wet. However, shit like that costs money, big money. At that point, we'd have a nice sustainable closed-loop system to live in, with no need for pillaging the Earth's easily accessible resources of yore.
It starts to sound a lot like living off-Earth at that point, no?
Slashdot Mirror
The project I'm on, at the very start, management told us they wanted us to go Agile.
I refused. They relented. At least that's one battle won. I think I would've quit if they had insisted.
Thanks. That's the plan, but it seems that anything I find appealing makes up a very tiny segment of the overall software development market. It really looks like at least 90% of job openings are Java, .net, and/or Javascript. Boooooring :P
I'm in it for the long haul, though. I'm hoping eventually I'll find something.
I don't doubt that we could fit an arbitrarily large population of humans on Earth. Sustainably, even. You're correct in pointing out that even living on Antarctica or on the ocean floor would be cheaper and easier than living off-world. I was merely trying to point out that doing so would still be very costly; much, much more costly than doing things the old fashioned way. If extreme increase in cost is a valid argument against extraterrestrial colonization, it's only slightly less valid of an argument against Antarctic or deep-sea colonization. If we're going to experience a huge upheaval of the current social order (which seems inevitable if the cost of supporting the global population were to increase dramatically), we might as well get some security against a global catastrophe from the deal.
The design of Project Orion is in many ways considerably simpler than today's chemical rockets. According to the people that actually worked on these studies, the only thing stopping us from building it is political opposition to anything nuclear.
No, it's not about what I think. It's about what Freeman Dyson thinks, since he's the one that actually did the math instead of talking about how mind-boggling the problem is.
133 years to Alpha Centauri based on 1960s technology, topping out at 0.033c. Later studies have shown a maximum velocity in the 0.1c range is likely if thermonuclear bombs are used instead of fission bombs. That would get you to Alpha Centauri in 44 years, which is nowhere near the "centuries" you're claiming.
That's actually my plan. Hoping in two or three years I'll have enough socked away to backpack around the world for a while. Just taking it a day at a time til then.
I'm 32. I didn't really get a "real job" as a developer until I was 27. I've been coding for fun since I was 13. Now I daydream about doing anything other than writing code.
I don't know how it happened. All I know is that I went from having fun coding for free to hating coding for money. Perhaps the moral of the story is to never get a job doing what you love, because it will turn your love into hate. Or maybe the moral of the story is that Java kinda sucks, but Spring causes suicidal tendencies.
My job consists of figuring out a way to solve problems with Spring MVC. It doesn't matter what the problem is, Spring MVC is the answer. It doesn't matter if you can produce a solution using 5 lines of perl, Spring MVC is the only answer. If this is what development has become, I weep tears of nostalgia for the days of assembly language.
Recently purchased Kerrisk's "The Linux Programming Interface", Bovet's "Understanding the Linux Kernel", and Corbet's "Linux Device Drivers" hoping that delving into the guts of awesomeness will counteract some of the stupid that I've had to endure. Let's hope.
Do migrant workers live in drafty one room houses with leaky roofs no windows and dirt floors? Serfs did. Do migrant workers diet consist of onion, potatoes and bread? Serfs did. Migrant workers work 40-50 hours a weeks while serfs worked 60-80 hours a week.
Did serfs live in houses with 30+ others? Migrant workers do. Did serfs' diets consist of beans, rice, and water? Migrant workers' do. Regarding the hours-per-week claims, they seem totally disconnected from the realities I've seen. I've never seen a migrant worker that worked nice short days or took weekends off, but without reliable statistics, we'll just have to agree to disagree here.
Any wages a person with no legal right to work makes are illegal wages. They choose to enter the country illegally and work illegally why should anyone be shocked if they are paid illegally.
I didn't realize that only shocking facts were relevant to this conversation.
There are many assumptions you make that lead to this wrong conclusion, or maybe it's just your way of convincing yourself it's ok to be lazy.
...
-There are fewer people farming then there was 600 years ago, this means fewer people are doing the farming for a larger population
That they are doing the farming for a larger population does not follow from the fact that there are fewer people farming than there were 600 years ago. Non sequitur.
-You seem to think society has not gotten any more complex, there is not just a carpenter, blacksmith, and farmer any more. All the people that would be farming are doing something else, thousands of job fields that have to serve the whole population.
Unwarranted assumption. I never said anything about the complexity of society remaining constant. If anything, I alluded to the opposite by explicitly identifying the creation of new classes of jobs such as the design, building, and maintenance of agricultural machinery. I specifically stated that if these jobs had an equal requirement for labor as the jobs they replaced, the logical conclusion would be that there was no net gain in productivity. Since there was in fact dramatic gains in productivity, the claim that these new jobs simply replaced the old jobs is demonstrated false. This is what's called a proof by contradiction.
-Now if people use technology to do just enough to get by they are setting themselves up for failure, when their technology breaks they will have to work harder to fix it or pay to have it fixed and thus will now have to work harder to maintain their same lifestyle.
That's an interesting claim. Do you have any basis for making it? Specifically, do you have any evidence that they would have to work less hard to fix broken technology if they do more than "just enough to get by"? Also, it seems contradictory to say that people that use technology to do just enough to get by will have to work harder to maintain their same lifestyle when technology breaks. Wouldn't the necessary implication be that they weren't doing enough to get by if getting by gets harder? What's your definition of getting by?
Gains in efficiency are pocked by the by the people paying for the technology, if migrant workers are not paying for the technology then they won't see as much of the benefit. Why should the person risking their capital forfeit the benefits?
To avoid death at the hands of an angry mob. I can't believe you've never heard of the French revolution. Amazing.
Awesome, thanks!
Are you familiar at all with serfdom? A serf in the middle ages did not have it better then modern migrant workers.
I never said otherwise. I was saying that a serf in the middle ages had it more or less equally good as modern migrant workers.
Could you be specific about what migrant workers you are talking about. I doubt there is any place in this world where migrant workers are taking advantage technology to improve their efficiency and do not have modern amenities like cell phones.
The kind that lack a legal right to work, work for illegally low wages, have little to no wealth, and pick fruits and vegeables on industrial farms that were tilled, sowed, and irrigated using modern technology. I suppose you might say that while agriculture overall has benefited from tremendous gains in efficiency, this one part of it hasn't, and therefore migrant workers shouldn't be expected to have a better quality of life than serfs from back in the day. I'd argue that that's my point. There's gains in productive efficiency, but they're not distributed equitably across all of society. You used to need all kinds of people to run a farm. Now you need a bunch of machines for most of it and a bunch of Mexicans for a small remainder. If it took as many people to design/build/maintain the machines as it did to do the work manually, there would not have been any gains in productivity, which is contradicted by reality. So we can agree that we need fewer people to do the same work, and yet somehow we still need everyone working full time? I call bullshit.
Gains in efficiency are disproportionately pocketed by the wealthy. That's only a problem because the poor are still poor. We have way more than enough money to fund basic necessities for everyone and have enough left over for the wealthy to buy their yachts and jets. If you disagree that stratification of wealth is a problem in our society, that's fine. In the end, it won't matter anyway. Were the aristocrats of France wrong for hoarding their wealth? Even if they weren't, they still got killed. Interestingly, the stratification of wealth in the US today is approaching levels seen in France leading up to the revolution. Let's hope that we can come up with a better solution to this issue on this side of the pond, because as we've seen before, pretending everything's fine may have disasterous consequences.
Ever been to Harry Brown's farm?
So instead what has happened is that racists, sexists, and homophobes have resorted to speaking in code. Nobody calls them on it even though they're really communicating the same ideas. They're just using the right words, so it's okay. This is what's meant by political correctness. Not that the old isms are no longer acceptable, but merely that using old language is no longer acceptable. It's not politically correct to say that one's uncomfortable around black people, but where are the funny looks when one says they're uncomfortable around urban populations? These faux niceness is causing gross perversions in the English language. With a wink and a nudge, people get around these absurd social norms and in the end our society is just as bigoted as it was last year. The only things that really change are the utility and clarity of the English language.
If you get all riled up when someone uses the wrong word, you damn well better get just as riled up when they express the same sentiment using doublespeak. I hate this euphemism shit that the political correctness crowd is pushing us towards because it prevents people from being able to communicate clearly.
It's true though. The requirement of policital correctness is what's driving us towards a world of doublespeak. Certain things that need to be said (but can't be said) just end up being said in an idiotic way to appease those who would attack the speaker for being politically incorrect. It's the reason why we can't have honest discussions using plain language, and it fucking sucks.
Fascinating. Thanks for the info. Link to video?
How is he incorrect, though?
Politically. I'm not sure what you're asking here. I never alleged that he was "incorrect". I doubt that he's incorrect about his hopes; he would know his hopes better than anyone else, no? The second part of his post is a subjective value statement and the idea of correctness doesn't really apply. Your question presupposes that he is incorrect, which doesn't really make sense to me, but if you're asking how he is incorrect, my only response is that he is politically incorrect.
Disease is a significant problem in Africa and India. Neither are exactly nice places to live for most of their inhabitants, which is why so many of them try to move to Western nations. Overpopulation is a huge problem in both areas.
Indeed, part of this is true. Disease is a significant problem. Neither are a nice place to live. Many try to move to Western nations. However, the average population density of the African continent is 95 people per square mile. For comparison, Europe has 186 people per square mile. Overpopulation can't explain why Africa is shittier than Europe. India has 954 people per square mile, but South Korea has 1288 people per square mile. Overpopulation can't explain why India is shittier than South Korea. While overpopulation may or may not be a huge problem in both areas, it's not hard to point to places with greater population [density] but much better conditions.
We, as Westerners, need to stop hiding behind political correctness. It's the only way the problems in those areas will ever get dealt with properly.
I agree that political correctness has ruined public discourse. However, this is not one of those times. pigiron's comment was not only offensive, it was also worthless. Wishing death upon the poor isn't going to fix this problem, unless you think the problem is the existence of poor people (in which case actively killing them would be a much better "solution" anyway).
Africans and Indians do need to stop reproducing if there just aren't enough resources to sustain the population that already exists, never mind any new people. It's just common sense. Adding more people when there aren't enough resources to go around is just going to make a bad situation even worse.
Hi, welcome to life on Earth. You must be new here. Westerners do need to stop pumping toxins into the air and water if they're already fucking up the global environment. It's just common sense. Fisherman do need to stop industrial-scale fishing if global fish stocks are nearly gone. It's just common sense.
If they can't figure this out on their own, then it is up to Westerners to inform them of the situation and how to deal with it.
So you're saying it's up to us to offer up such great solutions as "die from Ebola"? Forgive me for doubting that these people will be very receptive to this solution.
Which part is untested? Detonating nukes? Having the blast act on a metal plate? The simplicity of Project Orion seems obvious to me; what part is "no supported tech"? Dr. Dyson and the folks at General Atomics seemed quite convinced that this could have been done with 60s technology. Which point do you disagree with them on?
Mod parent up: Informative
So to clarify, the distributor only sparked the plugs while the ECU still controlled the fuel injectors?
For the record, my '84 T-bird was a piece of shit. I bought it for $500 and it lasted me for one whole summer. The engine kept stalling at the most fantastic times, usually as soon as the throttle was opened up from idle. People must've thought I was learning to drive a stick, though the car was automatic. Over the course of those few months, I managed to collide with countless immobile objects (curbs, signs, fences) due to totally bald tires and a reckless mentality. I even took it offroading (?!) once, through a swamp. Ran over a log that shot up and put a rather massive dent in the side sill, nearly permanently closing the passenger side door. Later that day, the engine stalled one last time, never to start again. Laying on the ignition just released the magic smoke from the distributor. RIP shitty T-bird.
That's why I'm not a car guy. I thought it was the ECU that was fried by an EMP (which would kill a modern car). I didn't realize the injectors themselves would be affected. The 84 T-bird's injection was timed by a distributor, not an ECU.
The ignition I know nothing about. I turned the key, it started. Is a '68 Plymouth usually crank-started?
The 9V battery has a special place in my heart. And on my tongue.
In the mid 90s, I was an avid player of the electric guitar. My interest in hard rock, metal, grunge, punk, and other genres led me to purchase a variety of effects pedals of the stompbox variety (and eventually a multi-FX device, but that's not relevant here). Most such pedals were powered by 9V batteries, and so I always had a bunch of these 9V batteries scattered around. Well, there's something that differentiates a 9V battery from most other common batteries: both terminals are on the same side of the battery, and the voltage between them is sufficient to cause a mild current to flow across a tongue when pressed against them.
So that's around the time I became a regular on Undernet. I was like "... Nickname? I don't have a nickname! Well, hmm..."
You see, I don't really play guitar anymore, because I realized that I don't have that flavor of creativity. It should've been obvious to me even then, just from the fact that I chose my handle based on the first thing that came to mind, which was the first thing I saw when I looked away from the CRT. NineVolt. And so the name stuck.
Moral of the story: go lick a 9V battery.
My 1968 Plymouth is certainly going to gain in value over the years
Certainly? ... Certainly?!
Sure, and maybe I shouldn't have junked my '84 T-bird (which was the worst piece of shit I've ever had the pleasure of driving: it was also EMP-proof until the engine seized and the distributor housing melted).
Odd poem. Needs more rhyme.
Land is plentiful, water is, indeed, needed to make it arable, but desalination is a solved problem — you just need electricity. And we can provide that even today in abundance with fission (nuclear plants) and will certainly be able to have it even better in the future with fusion.
Somehow this sounds a little bit more expensive than just using existing arable land or existing potable water, something which we've been doing since the dawn of civilization. Dare I say, orders of (decimal) magnitude more expensive.
All of the problems you listed are several orders of (decimal) magnitude worse on other bodies of the Solar System.
Well, using nuclear power to desalinate seawater to irrigate nonarable land is also several orders of (decimal) magnitude worse than just having naturally arable land and clean water, but you don't seem to think that's an issue. Doing it in space is "only" several orders of magnitude worse still, so if the step to nuclear agriculture isn't so bad, the step from there to space shouldn't be any worse, right?
And the problem of inter-star travel has not been solved yet even in theory — nor even is it obvious, the solution will ever be found.
I refer you to Project Orion. This shit has been figured out since the 60s. The technical solution is nearly a half-century old. A half century. The political solution, on the other hand...
We will, probably, colonize Mars some day, but the South Pole is much more comfortable for humans than any spot of the Red Planet. And the ping-times are much shorter...
Ah, thank god, we won't have to deal with that dreaded latency. Because that is the main downside of the Malthusian catastrophe. Not the extreme costs of developing a sustainable closed-loop system that supports human life. Ping times.
Nobody's modding me down for this? Really? :P
I'm pretty sure I am NineVolt, but I lost the credentials to the account. In places where my usual handle is taken, I go by the obnoxiously long-winded NoImNotNineVolt instead of the considerably less creative NineVolt2.
I am absolutely not saying that, your work ethic is not the only thing that you need to work on.
I don't follow. If gains in productivity (efficiency of production) have resulted in orders of magnitude more productive output per unit of manual labor, only a tiny fraction of the manual labor expected of the average worker from 600 years ago would yield the same productive output. You claimed that this level of output would yield a lifestyle comparable to one enjoyed by a laborer from that era. I'm saying it doesn't, in that it does not provide sufficient income to pay for food, clothing, and shelter. What is it exactly that I need to work on?
Migrant workers have cell phones, cars, indoor plumbing, heating
I was with you until I got to that sentence. I think we're talking about different migrant workers. The ones I'm talking about don't have cell phones or cars, and they only have indoor plumbing and heating when fitting 30 people in a residence designed for 4.
Vast areas of Earth remain unpopulated.
I don't think the concern is that there will not be enough for residential accomodations.
I think the concern is that there will not be enough necessary resources. Arable land, potable water, things like that. Sure, we could put sustainable greenhouses in the places you list. We can improve water filtration and desalination technology to the point that we stay sufficiently wet. However, shit like that costs money, big money. At that point, we'd have a nice sustainable closed-loop system to live in, with no need for pillaging the Earth's easily accessible resources of yore.
It starts to sound a lot like living off-Earth at that point, no?