Recreational sex produces over 3 million unplanned babies each and every year in the U.S. alone. That's after abortions.
Birth control when used properly generally has a 1% or higher failure rate.
Recreational sex between a fertile man and a fertile woman is procreative sex, just at a lower rate.
Recreational sex for any infertile combination has no carbon impact.
It was raised to 10 billion fairly recently. And there are some non-whack job estimates that it will go above 10 billion prior to 2100 and some legitimate but high end estimates go as high as 14 billion now. It will probably be raised to 11 billion before I kick off of old age.
Population growth is dropping but the maximum estimate is still rising.
Some high school student recently found out how to increase crop output by 75% by fixing bacteria with the seed. So some high improvements are still possible.
Food quality is lower than 20 years ago ( or the same quality is higher price). Mostly more cellulose but also less nutrients on over farmed / farmed out land.
Ebola is nasty but a wimp and likely to remain a wimp.
The Flu will probably have a mutation (maybe multiple mutations) in the next 20 years that will kill millions. And it still won't slow down the population growth rate. I think the Black Plague was the only disease that seriously slowed population growth.
I think people don't see the selective pressure for procreation currently. Careless people, religious people, people who really really want babies emotionally, and people for whom birth control doesn't work have more kids than people who are careful and for whom birth control works.
So their genes will be over represented in future generations. Those who are successful at birth control will will be under represented.
Essentially the energy available to humans has been increasing by some tiny but consistent amount since the 1600's. I fuzzily recall the article listed the energy increase at about 1.3% per year. At that rate, total energy use / heat output by the human race is doubling every 60 years.
My point isn't that we are going to melt the planet but that we are going to be unable to increase energy available to every human being this way forever.
And that forms a cap on increasing standards of living.
You can put limitations off for a while with increased efficiency but there are limits to that as well.
Here...this will illustrate my point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... Between 1990 and 2008, energy generation increased by about 22%. That may not be 1.3% but it looks close.
From 102,569 to 143,851 Terawatts.
I'll plug this in a spreadsheet. Okay for 500 years from now, assuming population growth stops today.. energy consumption would be 90,578,708 Terawatts.
Currently, 147TW is about.082% of the earth's energy budget. 90,578,708TW would take 52% of the earth's energy budget. So every year (for a looong time) would have had excess heat at that point.
You have the math handy... how long can we sustain a 1.3% annual energy increase before it becomes a problem?
Interesting because if consumption wasn't reduced, the living standards of the rest of the world would improve a lot while the top wasn't impacted.
However, living standards (and consumption) are rising rapidly in India (1.3 billion) and china (1.4 billion).
Huge numbers of indians living on under $2 per day currently will probably be making $10 per day within a decade adjusted for inflation as they fix their infrastructure, education, and other issues combined with an inflow of wealth from the rest of the world from outsourced labor. They are on track to create about 20% of the world's college graduates by 2020.
China is much further ahead. Most of its labor is already above $10 per day and its economy is growing faster than india's. At current growth rates they could be making double what they currently make in 10 years. They are also on track to create about 20% of the world's college grads by 2020.
Actually, I'm thinking about less evil things like simply not paying people to have children, providing free birth control and neonatal care, etc.
We currently pay people about $5000 per child per year via our current tax system unless they are higher earners (in which case it works out to about $2000 per child).
Ad a lot of people try to make getting birth control expensive and difficult.
A recent survey by the Guttmacher Institute outlines some sobering details about unintended pregnancy in the United States: as of now, a whopping 49 percent of the 6.7 million pregnancies per year in the United States are unintended.
So that's 3.3 million new consumers a year in the united states alone from recreational sex.
Failure rates for birth control over 1% are common.
Combine birth control failure rate with anti-abortion beliefs for a generation or three and you end up with a larger share population against abortion than you started.
Your information is a little dated. These days, the top 10% uses as much as the bottom 90%. And it's actually fairly smooth down to the top 80% using as much as the bottom 20%.
That's the point of the article. Trying to get everyone into the top 20% is going to use a lot of power. It will also produce a lot of waste. And it would overwhelm every existing recreational area.
Birth control fails. Women discover that they are unwilling to have abortions. I've known three highly recreative sex females who unintentionally have had 13 children between them by multiple fathers.
People who have recreative sex which can make babies do have babies. Just at a lower rate.
They've raised the "max" population several times in my lifetime. They keep underestimating.
Having procreative sex is one of the most carbon expensive things we can do.
Another conclusion you can draw from this article is that everyone could live very well if we would pare down the population to 2 billion.
It would only take 60 years to do this
Instead, we'll probably breed right up to the edge of capacity and then die in billions when something unexpected happens.
Tragic.
Still, I also think they are ignoring fusion and solar. But... adding heat energy to the planet at the rate it's been growing since the 1600's will also result in a planet with a temperature equal to boiling water in 500 years. I'm not talking about global warming- just the amount of energy used and released that has to be radiated off into space.
It hurts the palm of my hand to hold it the same way all the time.
Even beside that, testing it just now, my hand moves all over the thing and is in a different position each time I let go and put it back from typing.
I don't understand how this is practical. A facial or retinal scan seems more reliable, can use your existing generic camera so no need for a custom mouse.
There is a great "College Humor" on youtube that satirizes this.
The less attractive nerdy guy says "hi" and gets hit for sexual harassment and while the attractive guy gets away with murder and gets dates.
I know from experience this happens some. It also happens that pretty females get treated better. Right now an older female friend of mine is being victimized by a younger female who is slacking, dumping her work on my friend, and then flirting with the male managers to (and this is the crazy part) agree it's my friends responsibility to get it done on top of her other assignments even tho there is a clear paper trail showing it was originally assigned to the pretty girl. It's like something out of a bad TV show.
Teachers have terrible salaries for the first 20 years of their career. I know several teachers personally. They also have IT like 50-60 hour weeks. Their classes have been increased from 22 students to 30 students since 2000.
Once they get their 20 years and various advanced certifications in, the recent pattern is to lay them off and hire two younger teachers. A teacher's pay doesn't reach the national average until they are in their late 40's.
The teacher pay scale is seriously messed up and incents laying off experienced teachers.
I have a friend in the medical field. It is female dominated. She reports that the females there
a) sexually harass the younger, good looking men b) are generally verbally abusive and dismissive to the men c) exclude the men from lunches. d) preferentially break up the shit duties based on seniority.. which means mostly women have the 'good' duties and schedules and mostly men have the shit duties and schedules.
I.e. they are in the majority and they rule the roost. If the men don't want their working lives worse than they already are, they just "go along to get along" and tolerate the abuses.
The current IT field starts with self selection by gender before high school. For what ever reason, girls don't prefer IT things as a group. It gets worse in college. I have personal experience with this. We started with fewer females to begin with and when we hit the weedout courses, the females dropped out or transferred to other easier degrees at a higher rate. Keep in mind 70% of everyone of both genders who started as freshmen didn't get a degree at all. By the end, the ratio was about 99% men and 1% females.
Now we go to the work environment. Of men, I knew over 30% who would leave work and go home and "play" on computer with.net, java, html, etc. An other 10% would work after hours on project management certification or advanced degrees. Of women, I knew exactly ONE woman in 10 years who behaved like that. About 10% of women would work on pmi or advanced degrees.
After a while, those who loved computers and "played" on them outside of work hours excelled technically. More females tracked off into management than males.
Which leads to a majority male environment. There just aren't enough females interested at a young age, those who are interested drop out more in college, most that graduate don't "love" computers-- they just see IT as a job/career not as "play."
And in a majority male environment, it's hard to prevent a) Males excluding females when they socialize over fantasy football and the latest html changes. b) Hanging out with females socially is fun but risky. You could do something and get a complaint. c) Males despite being in the majority still tend to get the shit duties (such as working at night to install a program while the female gets to stay home because it's "dangerous" at night). d) Males in a majority can get *too* comfortable making off color comments or telling off color jokes. This can lead to complaints.
At the last place where I worked, females were about 70% of the managers and team leads. There were some sexual harassment issues around 2005 and after that it was annual training and an extremely dust dry environment socially. It was also an older crowd (about 42 average) so the sexual hijinks were gone.
And you are omitting the trillions spent by the military to defend "oil interests".
The middle east would be a non-factor in global politics if the price of oil collapsed.
For the U.S. from 2000-2010, you need to add in about 2 trillion dollars in subsidies for oil and then another 200 million per year until all the veterans of those actions die.
If 80% of the coal costs 25 cents/kw to extract. 10% costs 35 cents/kw to extract. 10% costs 55 cents/kw to extract.
Then all of it is priced at 55 cents/kw in short term contracts and various prices closer to 55 cents/kw for long term contracts.
Sooooo
When solar wipes out 20% of demand.. All the coal needed only costs 25 cents/kw and the more expensive mines are shut down. Some can be reopened later and some will fill with water/go bad in various ways and be essentially lost.
So suddenly, solar that was kicking ass competing with 55 cent/kw prices is over priced compared to 25 cents/kw prices. And the early adopters find themselves paying more than the going rate for power and feel like they made a mistake (when actually they just created the lower prices by reducing demand).
Solar continues to drop but batteries and inverters do not (and as demand rises, prices for batteries and inverters will probably go up unlike solar cells which have a strong downward bias). So grid tied is more likely to continue to be the preferred model over battery and inverter.
Meanwhile, over on the utility side... they previously may have paid 50 million to set up the lines but they charged people in hourly rates. So as electrical usage drops, expect to the see the fixed line costs and maintenance costs to be broken out. Which will also impact the case for grid tied solar power. (instead of paying $50 to $175, you might pay $50 to $125-- with a base charge of $50/month for lines in there instead of $15/month).
I own one solar panel. It appears to save me about $40 per year. at that rate, it will pay for itself in 25 years if it doesn't break first (which is likely). But it was sort of a hobby purchase. It has it's own microinverter and plugs in to a normal socket and runs the meter backwards/slows it down.
The funny thing is they are allegedly libertarian yet show time and again they are willing to take in millions of dollars from the government and in this case, prevent individuals from becoming independent.
The thing that is unique about these bulbs is that they are *indistinguishable* from traditional incandescent bulbs. The original bulbs were 65 watt which was noticably better for my older eyes. Sadly the newer bulbs are 820 lumens (about 62 watts) so they probably won't be as bright.
I use my older non-dimmable bulbs in open fixtures which face up and the bulbs have lasted several years but many complain that used in closed face down fixtures the bulbs die quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a temporary effect but it would be one nice "non evil" to slow things down or even get a more sustainable population level for a while.
I think that the humans who are not affected by the benefits will come to dominate the population and then the population will resume it's increase.
Recreational sex produces over 3 million unplanned babies each and every year in the U.S. alone. That's after abortions. Birth control when used properly generally has a 1% or higher failure rate. Recreational sex between a fertile man and a fertile woman is procreative sex, just at a lower rate. Recreational sex for any infertile combination has no carbon impact.
Yes.
Twenty years ago the maximum was 9 billion.
And then it was 9.5 billion a decade ago.
It was raised to 10 billion fairly recently. And there are some non-whack job estimates that it will go above 10 billion prior to 2100 and some legitimate but high end estimates go as high as 14 billion now. It will probably be raised to 11 billion before I kick off of old age.
Population growth is dropping but the maximum estimate is still rising.
Some high school student recently found out how to increase crop output by 75% by fixing bacteria with the seed. So some high improvements are still possible.
Food quality is lower than 20 years ago ( or the same quality is higher price). Mostly more cellulose but also less nutrients on over farmed / farmed out land.
Recreational sex between a fertile man and woman is procreational sex. It's just at a lower rate if they use birth control.
We have about 3.3 million unplanned pregnancies annually in the u.s. alone which are not aborted due to recreational sex.
Almost all birth control methods have a failure rate over 1% when used properly.
A lot of women discover emotionally incapable of abortion once they are pregnant. (Of course a few discover that they are capable of abortion.)
The carbon impact of sex involving truly non-fertile partners (and so homosexual sex too) is low.
The published maximum population estimates have risen slowly but consistently during my lifetime. It's now approaching 10 billion.
The current high end projections are up to 14 billion now. I don't think we'll reach there and it is further in future (2300AD).
Perhaps the increased waste from that many humans will hold down the fertility rates. They have been dropping.. perhaps due to artificial estrogens.
Ebola is nasty but a wimp and likely to remain a wimp.
The Flu will probably have a mutation (maybe multiple mutations) in the next 20 years that will kill millions. And it still won't slow down the population growth rate. I think the Black Plague was the only disease that seriously slowed population growth.
I think people don't see the selective pressure for procreation currently. Careless people, religious people, people who really really want babies emotionally, and people for whom birth control doesn't work have more kids than people who are careful and for whom birth control works.
So their genes will be over represented in future generations. Those who are successful at birth control will will be under represented.
3 million kids annually in america alone disagree with you.
I know three females who had 13 unplanned pregnancies (by different fathers) and no abortions between them.
Most birth control methods have a failure rate over 1% when used correctly.
You've been lucky- or you or your partner may have low fertility and not know it.
Essentially the energy available to humans has been increasing by some tiny but consistent amount since the 1600's. I fuzzily recall the article listed the energy increase at about 1.3% per year. At that rate, total energy use / heat output by the human race is doubling every 60 years.
My point isn't that we are going to melt the planet but that we are going to be unable to increase energy available to every human being this way forever.
And that forms a cap on increasing standards of living.
You can put limitations off for a while with increased efficiency but there are limits to that as well.
Here...this will illustrate my point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Between 1990 and 2008, energy generation increased by about 22%. That may not be 1.3% but it looks close.
From 102,569 to 143,851 Terawatts.
I'll plug this in a spreadsheet. Okay for 500 years from now, assuming population growth stops today.. energy consumption would be 90,578,708 Terawatts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Currently, 147TW is about .082% of the earth's energy budget. 90,578,708TW would take 52% of the earth's energy budget. So every year (for a looong time) would have had excess heat at that point.
You have the math handy... how long can we sustain a 1.3% annual energy increase before it becomes a problem?
Interesting because if consumption wasn't reduced, the living standards of the rest of the world would improve a lot while the top wasn't impacted.
However, living standards (and consumption) are rising rapidly in India (1.3 billion) and china (1.4 billion).
Huge numbers of indians living on under $2 per day currently will probably be making $10 per day within a decade adjusted for inflation as they fix their infrastructure, education, and other issues combined with an inflow of wealth from the rest of the world from outsourced labor. They are on track to create about 20% of the world's college graduates by 2020.
China is much further ahead. Most of its labor is already above $10 per day and its economy is growing faster than india's. At current growth rates they could be making double what they currently make in 10 years. They are also on track to create about 20% of the world's college grads by 2020.
Actually, I'm thinking about less evil things like simply not paying people to have children, providing free birth control and neonatal care, etc.
We currently pay people about $5000 per child per year via our current tax system unless they are higher earners (in which case it works out to about $2000 per child).
Ad a lot of people try to make getting birth control expensive and difficult.
http://jezebel.com/unintended-...
A recent survey by the Guttmacher Institute outlines some sobering details about unintended pregnancy in the United States: as of now, a whopping 49 percent of the 6.7 million pregnancies per year in the United States are unintended.
So that's 3.3 million new consumers a year in the united states alone from recreational sex.
http://www.cdc.gov/reproductiv...
Failure rates for birth control over 1% are common.
Combine birth control failure rate with anti-abortion beliefs for a generation or three and you end up with a larger share population against abortion than you started.
Your information is a little dated. These days, the top 10% uses as much as the bottom 90%. And it's actually fairly smooth down to the top 80% using as much as the bottom 20%.
That's the point of the article. Trying to get everyone into the top 20% is going to use a lot of power. It will also produce a lot of waste. And it would overwhelm every existing recreational area.
Here's some info and a graph..
http://www.olliesworld.com/pla...
I don't think they should have modded you troll.
Birth control fails. Women discover that they are unwilling to have abortions. I've known three highly recreative sex females who unintentionally have had 13 children between them by multiple fathers.
People who have recreative sex which can make babies do have babies. Just at a lower rate.
They've raised the "max" population several times in my lifetime. They keep underestimating.
Having procreative sex is one of the most carbon expensive things we can do.
Another conclusion you can draw from this article is that everyone could live very well if we would pare down the population to 2 billion.
It would only take 60 years to do this
Instead, we'll probably breed right up to the edge of capacity and then die in billions when something unexpected happens.
Tragic.
Still, I also think they are ignoring fusion and solar. But... adding heat energy to the planet at the rate it's been growing since the 1600's will also result in a planet with a temperature equal to boiling water in 500 years. I'm not talking about global warming- just the amount of energy used and released that has to be radiated off into space.
It hurts the palm of my hand to hold it the same way all the time.
Even beside that, testing it just now, my hand moves all over the thing and is in a different position each time I let go and put it back from typing.
I don't understand how this is practical. A facial or retinal scan seems more reliable, can use your existing generic camera so no need for a custom mouse.
There is a great "College Humor" on youtube that satirizes this.
The less attractive nerdy guy says "hi" and gets hit for sexual harassment and while the attractive guy gets away with murder and gets dates.
I know from experience this happens some. It also happens that pretty females get treated better. Right now an older female friend of mine is being victimized by a younger female who is slacking, dumping her work on my friend, and then flirting with the male managers to (and this is the crazy part) agree it's my friends responsibility to get it done on top of her other assignments even tho there is a clear paper trail showing it was originally assigned to the pretty girl. It's like something out of a bad TV show.
Teachers have terrible salaries for the first 20 years of their career. I know several teachers personally. They also have IT like 50-60 hour weeks. Their classes have been increased from 22 students to 30 students since 2000.
Once they get their 20 years and various advanced certifications in, the recent pattern is to lay them off and hire two younger teachers. A teacher's pay doesn't reach the national average until they are in their late 40's.
The teacher pay scale is seriously messed up and incents laying off experienced teachers.
I have a friend in the medical field. It is female dominated. She reports that the females there
a) sexually harass the younger, good looking men
b) are generally verbally abusive and dismissive to the men
c) exclude the men from lunches.
d) preferentially break up the shit duties based on seniority.. which means mostly women have the 'good' duties and schedules and mostly men have the shit duties and schedules.
I.e. they are in the majority and they rule the roost. If the men don't want their working lives worse than they already are, they just "go along to get along" and tolerate the abuses.
The current IT field starts with self selection by gender before high school. For what ever reason, girls don't prefer IT things as a group. It gets worse in college. I have personal experience with this. We started with fewer females to begin with and when we hit the weedout courses, the females dropped out or transferred to other easier degrees at a higher rate. Keep in mind 70% of everyone of both genders who started as freshmen didn't get a degree at all. By the end, the ratio was about 99% men and 1% females.
Now we go to the work environment. Of men, I knew over 30% who would leave work and go home and "play" on computer with .net, java, html, etc. An other 10% would work after hours on project management certification or advanced degrees. Of women, I knew exactly ONE woman in 10 years who behaved like that. About 10% of women would work on pmi or advanced degrees.
After a while, those who loved computers and "played" on them outside of work hours excelled technically. More females tracked off into management than males.
Which leads to a majority male environment. There just aren't enough females interested at a young age, those who are interested drop out more in college, most that graduate don't "love" computers-- they just see IT as a job/career not as "play."
And in a majority male environment, it's hard to prevent
a) Males excluding females when they socialize over fantasy football and the latest html changes.
b) Hanging out with females socially is fun but risky. You could do something and get a complaint.
c) Males despite being in the majority still tend to get the shit duties (such as working at night to install a program while the female gets to stay home because it's "dangerous" at night).
d) Males in a majority can get *too* comfortable making off color comments or telling off color jokes. This can lead to complaints.
At the last place where I worked, females were about 70% of the managers and team leads. There were some sexual harassment issues around 2005 and after that it was annual training and an extremely dust dry environment socially. It was also an older crowd (about 42 average) so the sexual hijinks were gone.
And coal currently kills 4000 people a year and has a lot of externalities that it doesn't pay for so it's price is artificially low.
However- to the best of my knowledge we are not having multi trillion dollar wars over coal so there is that.
And you are omitting the trillions spent by the military to defend "oil interests".
The middle east would be a non-factor in global politics if the price of oil collapsed.
For the U.S. from 2000-2010, you need to add in about 2 trillion dollars in subsidies for oil and then another 200 million per year until all the veterans of those actions die.
The tricky bit is this.
If 80% of the coal costs 25 cents/kw to extract.
10% costs 35 cents/kw to extract.
10% costs 55 cents/kw to extract.
Then all of it is priced at 55 cents/kw in short term contracts and various prices closer to 55 cents/kw for long term contracts.
Sooooo
When solar wipes out 20% of demand.. All the coal needed only costs 25 cents/kw and the more expensive mines are shut down. Some can be reopened later and some will fill with water/go bad in various ways and be essentially lost.
So suddenly, solar that was kicking ass competing with 55 cent/kw prices is over priced compared to 25 cents/kw prices. And the early adopters find themselves paying more than the going rate for power and feel like they made a mistake (when actually they just created the lower prices by reducing demand).
Solar continues to drop but batteries and inverters do not (and as demand rises, prices for batteries and inverters will probably go up unlike solar cells which have a strong downward bias). So grid tied is more likely to continue to be the preferred model over battery and inverter.
Meanwhile, over on the utility side... they previously may have paid 50 million to set up the lines but they charged people in hourly rates. So as electrical usage drops, expect to the see the fixed line costs and maintenance costs to be broken out. Which will also impact the case for grid tied solar power. (instead of paying $50 to $175, you might pay $50 to $125-- with a base charge of $50/month for lines in there instead of $15/month).
I own one solar panel. It appears to save me about $40 per year. at that rate, it will pay for itself in 25 years if it doesn't break first (which is likely). But it was sort of a hobby purchase. It has it's own microinverter and plugs in to a normal socket and runs the meter backwards/slows it down.
Those prices are reasonable without government subsidies (in fact, the price is often $45,000 to $50,000 with inverters and batteries).
$30,000 is probably grid tied, no inverters or batteries.
But it is getting cheaper rapidly- the problem is that german utilities have bought up all the cheap supply for multiple years in the future.
The funny thing is they are allegedly libertarian yet show time and again they are willing to take in millions of dollars from the government and in this case, prevent individuals from becoming independent.
This is my favorite non dimmable lightbulb.
http://www.amazon.com/G7-Power...
It goes in and out of availability tho.
It's reasonably priced when available ($12).
Did some searching and ....
It looks like it's been replaced by this
http://g7power.com/g7-power-tr...
which is now dimmable dimmable.
The thing that is unique about these bulbs is that they are *indistinguishable* from traditional incandescent bulbs. The original bulbs were 65 watt which was noticably better for my older eyes. Sadly the newer bulbs are 820 lumens (about 62 watts) so they probably won't be as bright.
I use my older non-dimmable bulbs in open fixtures which face up and the bulbs have lasted several years but many complain that used in closed face down fixtures the bulbs die quickly.