Your also see that it’s once you move beyond the bounds of the training data, it diverges into something useless.
This, right here.
A.I. is not some kind of magic bullet that solves all problems. Far from it, since all models depend deeply upon the set of training data that gets fed to it. In this simple sine wave example, it is trivial to come up with something outside of the training data, which shows quite clearly that not all problems are well-suited for machine learning.
In terms of Alpha Fold, the set of training data is almost certainly the set of solved structures, with appropriate management of redundant/overly similar structures. Now, how they manage to bin/aggregate/select portions of this data to work around the variable length of protein sequences is not clear without seeing a detailed publication. These are the very important details that make or break machine learning.
Taking a step back, however, this work isn't quite as groundbreaking as it may seem to a person unfamiliar with the field. From the brief descriptions on the AlphaFold blog, it looks like they are using the NN to predict contact maps and bond torsion angles, followed by some kind of minimizer. These techniques in general are well-established tools in the field of structural biology. The real innovation is using their custom deep NN framework.
Don't get me wrong, though. This problem is hella hard, and kudos for the authors for beating out the Zhang lab for the top spot. The Zhang lab has been working intensely on this problem for a long time. More than anything, that shows how powerful the deep NN approach can be.
a humongous house in a suburb (so big that some people get jealous of them and call them McMansions)
You think jealousy is why people call them that? Personally speaking, I would never want to live in such a place, even if you gave it to me for free.
The name is more because so many of them are more or less interchangeable, built to the same generic aesthetic, akin to a generic burger being rolled out. Combine that with neighborhoods that have poor walkability and no character, and I'll take a hard pass, thanks. I much prefer my 1920s era bungalow in town. 1200 square feet is more than enough space for our little family of four.
Obviously, there are a large number of people who feel differently than me, but I'll never be neighbors with them. *shrug*
Ok, what about giving up factory-farmed meat? I'm talking about that super-cheap, wrapped in plastic meat.
How about instead you continue to eat meat, but only meat that is sustainably raised? This requires more work from you as the consumer, but it is worth it. For example, I have some pork from a local producer that raises pigs on old farmland turned to pasture with the pigs spending the fall months fattening up on acorns from some adjacent woodland. It is more expensive than anything you can get at the Walmarts of the world, but it is way tastier - easily the best pork I've ever had.
If you are serious about changes to reduce CO2 AND you love good food, I highly suggest looking for locally sourced, sustainable meats.
the black equivalent of David Duke, Louis Farrakhan.
They are not equivalent, so please stop.
Yes, Farrakhan has said some crazy, stupid, hateful things, but that's about where the equivalence ends.
The KKK, an organization to which David Duke belongs, has a very long history of systemic violence, lynching, and intimidation. Trying to claim that Farrakhan is equivalent is like saying that yelling at someone is the equivalent to brutally murdering them.
Neither are good, but they are far from equivalent.
This has been the curse of my life. People assume that I'm an asshole because I'm simply right about most things.
Being correct does not preclude you from being an asshole. If people are always thinking you're an asshole, maybe that says something about your communication style?
In my personal experience, I actually find that the biggest, most toxic assholes are the ones who have the LEAST self-confidence. It can often by hard to see through the bluster, but a lot of that shouting down and putting on a strong display are covers for insecurity.
If you are *actually* self-confident, you don't need bluster and you don't need to put others down to feel good about yourself.
Women are more easily shamed into submission.... It's pure biology.
Citation needed.
While it is certainly *possible* that biological differences are why women are more easily shamed, ignoring centuries of patriarchal rule to claim that is "pure biology" seems naive at best. There is also a tremendous amount of cultural baggage around teaching women to defer to men and to be a meek "good girl." Think of the descriptions of a strong willed man vs. a strong willed woman. (Compare words to describe Hillary Clinton vs. Trump, both horrible human beings cut from the same cloth.)
Your example of "slut shaming" vs. "cad shaming" perfectly illustrate this point. Think of all the words that come to mind when describing a woman who has a lot of sexual partners. She will be labelled a whore, tramp, slut, etc. On the flip side, think of all the words to describe an equivalent male - stud, Don Juan, player, etc.
I suspect what's actually happening is that the real causative factor is that people in towns with high immigrant populations are getting fed up with the local immigrants and are taking to Facebook to complain about it
This is a very reasonable thing to suspect, yet it turns that it is more complicated. The TL:DR version is that anti-immigrant backlash really only gets up a head of steam once politicians start pointing fingers at the immigrants and labeling them as problems.
Then, once the the anti-immigrant memes start flowing, Facebook becomes their preferred breading grounds.
Leftists like yourself generally fail because they are actually poor listeners and are unwilling to hear beliefs of those who don't agree with their positions, when in fact people have rational decisions as to why they do what they do. Hearing and understanding allows for common ground to be found and thus deal making and progress, but the usual villainizing of conservatives by left-leaning people results in damaging a leftist's ability to implement change.
Point taken, but don't forget the conservatives can also be bad listeners and demonize the left.
Shoving your head up your ass and ignoring outside viewpoints is a trait the spans the political spectrum.
Hmmm... I hadn't heard of Yee, but a quick google search turns up his name often flanked by the word "Democrat". I also tried googling Anthony Weiner (no image search, please), who also often had the word Democrat associated with this name.
Can you provide some justification that the media "went out of their way to avoid labeling him [a Democrat]"?
I know that the Republicans always lament how victimized they are by the media, but that's a load of horseshit. The single largest, most influential media outlet these days is Fox News. It is well known that they have the ear of the president, and they have managed to earn the trust of most Republicans in the country.
You can also drive cross country and nearly always find Rush Limbaugh spouting his far-right views on the radio.
Are there liberal media? You bet, but can we please, please, please drop this nonsense about how all the media is out to get Republicans yet are in love with the Dems?
Repealing Obamacare will bring prices back into control, greatly reduce drug costs, and improve the quality of care all around. It's a good thing. You should be for it.
Bullshit. Health care costs were skyrocketing before this law passed, with widespread denial of care to anyone with a pre-existing condition. A full-on repeal will just return us to the even worse system that we had before the Obama and the Dems gave us the current horrible system.
Also, there's a whole class of arbitrarily complex problems - mostly political in nature and involving attention seeking and vocal minorities seeking more than their fair share of power - where ignoring is the proper and only solution.
For those kinds of problems, yes, ignoring them can lead to them going away.
The trouble is that the world is facing problems of a totally different nature. Aquifers are depleting, soil is being eroded, non-renewable resources are being squandered. Meanwhile, to go back to TFA, people are finding good jobs harder and harder to come by.
Ignoring those kinds of issues won't make them go away - they'll just come back in a worse form and hurt more. What happens when water no longer comes out of the tap (Cape Town will find out)? How about when climate change is ignored and all of Bangladesh goes underwater?
Do you guys care about reality at all? It doesn’t seem like you do.
Thanks for posting the correction. I hadn't heard the 500 million figure being tossed around, but it is good to know that the real number is a mere 175 million/day.
For the record, I'm a bit dumbfounded that the crappy stat is widespread, but can we all agree that 175 million is still a big number?
"I DON'T WANT A GOLF CART. THAT'S A GLORIFIED GOLF CART."
And the best way to convert people with that attitude is to expose them to EVs. I was at the Midwest Renewable Energy Association's annual energy fair this weekend, and (as you would expect), there were many EVs around.
Say what you like about Tesla - those are nice looking cars. Once people in ICE vehicles start getting routinely passed by them, they are going to stop worrying about driving a golf cart and start worrying about driving their old tractors....
To make any difference requires a drastic change in modern lifestyles. I mean massive and complete change in how modern man lives.
No.
Also, no.
This is a horrid straw man argument that is getting rather tiresome. Yes, there will have to be large-scale changes, but in the end, everybody can still have a nice, comfortable modern lifestyle. There will be changes, of course, but they are hardly "drastic" lifestyle changes.
You may not be able to eat beef 7 days a week for a pittance, but there will still be beef.
You're car won't go VROOM and emit a cloud of smoke, but you can still have a car powered by alternate energies.
Likewise industries, etc. will be powered differently, but you won't be able to tell by looking at them.
It also turns out that the best way to combat population growth is simple, cheap, and a good idea anyway - educate girls in developing countries and provide them with a higher standard of living.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that this is easy. Quite the contrary (especially with the current US political climate), but to just throw your hands up and say that it is impossible shows a remarkable lack of imagination.
No, no, no! You're right that there's not much parallax, but I'm not talking about that.
Think of it this way, using the classic time of clock for viewing positions. If I'm in a plane with a window directly to my right, I'm viewing the world at 3:00. If I lean forward and look out the same window, my view is now of the 4:00 position. If I look at a window a few rows head of me, I may be viewing at the 1:00 position.
In emirates system, it sounds like all the right-facing "windows" will just show the 3:00 view. That's crap. It won't look anything like a real window.
Multiple people can look out a window at the same time.
This.
I want to look out of not just the window immediately next to me. I want to be able to look out *any* window and see something reasonable. Further, if I change my viewing angle slightly, the picture should change - this is how actual, glass windows work.
Until these screens can show a different view depending on the viewing angle, I'm not interested. It won't look like a window - it will look like a screen.
Okay, so let's play with that one - how do we weigh feeding people and supporting population with possible desertification in specific regions?
This is not an easy question, and you are certainly right that going back to 1850 is not the answer. You are also right that part of sustainability is directly tied to efficiency, but efficient by what measure?
The free market is immensely powerful at optimizing, but it is largely just concerned with a single variable - short term, direct financial cost. Our food system is based partly on this variable and partly on the government efforts to avoid food shortages which take the form of food subsidies.
I once did the calculation - if you take the total government subsidies around corn, compare that to the bulk commodity prices, and divide by the total US population, you find that the US government buys every single person in the country about a ton of corn each year. The ripple effect of this policy is that there is a glut of corn, so there is cheap animal feed (and cheap meat), plus a lot of cheap raw material for the industrial food system. Corn syrup is the tip of the iceberg. Read some packaged food ingredients and many of the strange names (xanthan gum, maltose, dextrose, etc.) are made from corn.
I digress, though, one of the biggest issue around food and sustainability is really tied to meat production. This corn feed is brought to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAPO). Although efficient by a measure of money, these operations cause lots of secondary problems. The animal density is so high, diseases are common, hence the push for antibiotics, which then leads to antibiotic resistant microbes, which leads to human health issues. There is also a glut of manure from these operations, which easily turns into another health risk as it trickles downstream into the waterways.
Again, there is no magic bullet solution, but this current system is hugely wasteful. The manure, which is full of all kinds of nutrients, is allowed to just wash away while the original soils get depleted. A step in the right direction is capturing some of this manure and direct injecting it into the soil (to prevent runoff), and people are working on other approaches.
In the end, though, I think food prices are going to have to go up, especially for meat. This then brings us right back around to my original point - the issues of ecological sustainability are directly tied to issues of poverty and global equity.
The exact future system is not clear, but that doesn't mean we can't start working on it. I am lucky enough that I make enough money that I can afford to pay the premium for the local, more sustainably raised foods. It's also tastier. The pasture raised pork I get from a local farm is orders of magnitude tastier than what is sold in the chain grocery stores.
I'm not sure if it's clear what "ecologically sustainable" means in the context of an eternally changing ecological system.
You're right - those two scenarios are not reasonable.
Ecological sustainability is basically the question of whether or not a given practice could be done for a long time without causing damage. Think for example of the air we breath. A question of sustainability is a measure of how much pollution we are putting out. Is it little enough that it can break down at least as fast as we make it? What is washing into the various lakes, rivers, etc and what is the half life on all of those things? How does that rate compare to the rate of input? Another example is the rate of soil formation compared to the rate of soil loss with industrial agriculture. Too much of that leads to desertification. What is the rate of groundwater formation compared to aquifer extraction?
We are not doing well at most of these metrics right now, which is only going to bite us in the ass down the road. This is all without even mentioning climate change.
This balancing of the load we put on the rest of the planet with our own outputs is exactly what is meant by ecologically sustainable.
Now, to really screw with your head, compare world economics to world climate, and ask yourself which is the simpler problem to solve:)
Unfortunately, the two are intrinsically linked, so any solution will be complex.
I highly suggest reading the book Doughnut Economics on this topic. The essential argument the author makes is that ultimately our economies are based upon the systems of the earth. We can make things out of wood without trees, we can't grow food without soil, etc. Even things like mineral extraction and fossil fuel use are also ultimately rooted in earth systems.
If we want to have a robust world economy that creates opportunity for everybody, it *must* be ecologically sustainable. Anything else is just borrowing from future generations and will eventually collapse when resources run out.
The doughnut economics book also traces a lot of the history of economic theory to sets of mathematical models invented to describe things limited in scope that have now been taken grossly out of the original context.
There are also plenty of economic models that are just too damn simple. A number of these came about shortly after Newton wrote down the basic laws of planetary motion, which inspired other disciplines to describe the world with mathematics. Of course, the systems are radically different. Planetary systems are relatively simple when compared to economics, which can involve literally millions of people making independent decisions.
Those vast fields in the midwest mostly produce export crops, and corn for fuel ethanol which is grown continuously and with synthetic fertilizers that literally destroy topsoil and turn it into an inert hydroponic growth medium.
It isn't just export crops and ethanol fuel. These vast fields area also growing huge amounts of animal feed that is trucked around the country to concentrated animal feeding operations and converted into protein and waste manure.
There is also a lot of it that is shipped over to chemical processing plants to make all of your favorite food additives.
so the way I see it, trump is just giving congress their power back, which was usurped by the obama admin
LOL! Trump is not "giving congress their power". He's simply systematically undoing all that he possibly can of Obama's work, because he doesn't like Obama.
That said, presidential executive power is out of control. Trump is abusing it. Obama abused it. Bush abused it. And so on.
One of my hopes is that this whole Trump experiment pushes congress and the US to reign in the office of the presidency. That would be great, but it will never happen willingly under this administration.
But, as it turns out, many of the traits that feminists claim to despise in men are traits that are actually important for leadership positions.
Huh?
What about leadership that is able to inspire the best in others? What about leadership that allows for each team member to be respectful of the ideas of others? What about leadership that allows for frank and open discussions, including respective criticism of others ideas? What about leadership that lays out a unifying vision?
If we want to define leadership as simply a loud person brow-beating others into a particular point of view, I'll grant your statement. I'll also run as far way from that kind of "leader" as I possibly can.
Slashdot Mirror
This, right here.
A.I. is not some kind of magic bullet that solves all problems. Far from it, since all models depend deeply upon the set of training data that gets fed to it. In this simple sine wave example, it is trivial to come up with something outside of the training data, which shows quite clearly that not all problems are well-suited for machine learning.
In terms of Alpha Fold, the set of training data is almost certainly the set of solved structures, with appropriate management of redundant/overly similar structures. Now, how they manage to bin/aggregate/select portions of this data to work around the variable length of protein sequences is not clear without seeing a detailed publication. These are the very important details that make or break machine learning.
Taking a step back, however, this work isn't quite as groundbreaking as it may seem to a person unfamiliar with the field. From the brief descriptions on the AlphaFold blog, it looks like they are using the NN to predict contact maps and bond torsion angles, followed by some kind of minimizer. These techniques in general are well-established tools in the field of structural biology. The real innovation is using their custom deep NN framework.
Don't get me wrong, though. This problem is hella hard, and kudos for the authors for beating out the Zhang lab for the top spot. The Zhang lab has been working intensely on this problem for a long time. More than anything, that shows how powerful the deep NN approach can be.
You think jealousy is why people call them that? Personally speaking, I would never want to live in such a place, even if you gave it to me for free.
The name is more because so many of them are more or less interchangeable, built to the same generic aesthetic, akin to a generic burger being rolled out. Combine that with neighborhoods that have poor walkability and no character, and I'll take a hard pass, thanks. I much prefer my 1920s era bungalow in town. 1200 square feet is more than enough space for our little family of four.
Obviously, there are a large number of people who feel differently than me, but I'll never be neighbors with them. *shrug*
Ok, what about giving up factory-farmed meat? I'm talking about that super-cheap, wrapped in plastic meat.
How about instead you continue to eat meat, but only meat that is sustainably raised? This requires more work from you as the consumer, but it is worth it. For example, I have some pork from a local producer that raises pigs on old farmland turned to pasture with the pigs spending the fall months fattening up on acorns from some adjacent woodland. It is more expensive than anything you can get at the Walmarts of the world, but it is way tastier - easily the best pork I've ever had.
If you are serious about changes to reduce CO2 AND you love good food, I highly suggest looking for locally sourced, sustainable meats.
They are not equivalent, so please stop.
Yes, Farrakhan has said some crazy, stupid, hateful things, but that's about where the equivalence ends.
The KKK, an organization to which David Duke belongs, has a very long history of systemic violence, lynching, and intimidation. Trying to claim that Farrakhan is equivalent is like saying that yelling at someone is the equivalent to brutally murdering them.
Neither are good, but they are far from equivalent.
Being correct does not preclude you from being an asshole. If people are always thinking you're an asshole, maybe that says something about your communication style?
From the Dude himself: "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole."
In my personal experience, I actually find that the biggest, most toxic assholes are the ones who have the LEAST self-confidence. It can often by hard to see through the bluster, but a lot of that shouting down and putting on a strong display are covers for insecurity.
If you are *actually* self-confident, you don't need bluster and you don't need to put others down to feel good about yourself.
Citation needed.
While it is certainly *possible* that biological differences are why women are more easily shamed, ignoring centuries of patriarchal rule to claim that is "pure biology" seems naive at best. There is also a tremendous amount of cultural baggage around teaching women to defer to men and to be a meek "good girl." Think of the descriptions of a strong willed man vs. a strong willed woman. (Compare words to describe Hillary Clinton vs. Trump, both horrible human beings cut from the same cloth.)
Your example of "slut shaming" vs. "cad shaming" perfectly illustrate this point. Think of all the words that come to mind when describing a woman who has a lot of sexual partners. She will be labelled a whore, tramp, slut, etc. On the flip side, think of all the words to describe an equivalent male - stud, Don Juan, player, etc.
This is a very reasonable thing to suspect, yet it turns that it is more complicated. The TL:DR version is that anti-immigrant backlash really only gets up a head of steam once politicians start pointing fingers at the immigrants and labeling them as problems.
Then, once the the anti-immigrant memes start flowing, Facebook becomes their preferred breading grounds.
Point taken, but don't forget the conservatives can also be bad listeners and demonize the left.
Shoving your head up your ass and ignoring outside viewpoints is a trait the spans the political spectrum.
Hmmm... I hadn't heard of Yee, but a quick google search turns up his name often flanked by the word "Democrat". I also tried googling Anthony Weiner (no image search, please), who also often had the word Democrat associated with this name.
Can you provide some justification that the media "went out of their way to avoid labeling him [a Democrat]"?
I know that the Republicans always lament how victimized they are by the media, but that's a load of horseshit. The single largest, most influential media outlet these days is Fox News. It is well known that they have the ear of the president, and they have managed to earn the trust of most Republicans in the country.
You can also drive cross country and nearly always find Rush Limbaugh spouting his far-right views on the radio.
Are there liberal media? You bet, but can we please, please, please drop this nonsense about how all the media is out to get Republicans yet are in love with the Dems?
Bullshit. Health care costs were skyrocketing before this law passed, with widespread denial of care to anyone with a pre-existing condition. A full-on repeal will just return us to the even worse system that we had before the Obama and the Dems gave us the current horrible system.
For those kinds of problems, yes, ignoring them can lead to them going away.
The trouble is that the world is facing problems of a totally different nature. Aquifers are depleting, soil is being eroded, non-renewable resources are being squandered. Meanwhile, to go back to TFA, people are finding good jobs harder and harder to come by.
Ignoring those kinds of issues won't make them go away - they'll just come back in a worse form and hurt more. What happens when water no longer comes out of the tap (Cape Town will find out)? How about when climate change is ignored and all of Bangladesh goes underwater?
That false statistic was based on a phone survey conducted by a nine year old kid.
Do you guys care about reality at all? It doesn’t seem like you do.
Thanks for posting the correction. I hadn't heard the 500 million figure being tossed around, but it is good to know that the real number is a mere 175 million/day.
For the record, I'm a bit dumbfounded that the crappy stat is widespread, but can we all agree that 175 million is still a big number?
And the best way to convert people with that attitude is to expose them to EVs. I was at the Midwest Renewable Energy Association's annual energy fair this weekend, and (as you would expect), there were many EVs around.
Say what you like about Tesla - those are nice looking cars. Once people in ICE vehicles start getting routinely passed by them, they are going to stop worrying about driving a golf cart and start worrying about driving their old tractors....
No.
Also, no.
This is a horrid straw man argument that is getting rather tiresome. Yes, there will have to be large-scale changes, but in the end, everybody can still have a nice, comfortable modern lifestyle. There will be changes, of course, but they are hardly "drastic" lifestyle changes.
You may not be able to eat beef 7 days a week for a pittance, but there will still be beef.
You're car won't go VROOM and emit a cloud of smoke, but you can still have a car powered by alternate energies.
Likewise industries, etc. will be powered differently, but you won't be able to tell by looking at them.
It also turns out that the best way to combat population growth is simple, cheap, and a good idea anyway - educate girls in developing countries and provide them with a higher standard of living.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think that this is easy. Quite the contrary (especially with the current US political climate), but to just throw your hands up and say that it is impossible shows a remarkable lack of imagination.
No, no, no! You're right that there's not much parallax, but I'm not talking about that.
Think of it this way, using the classic time of clock for viewing positions. If I'm in a plane with a window directly to my right, I'm viewing the world at 3:00. If I lean forward and look out the same window, my view is now of the 4:00 position. If I look at a window a few rows head of me, I may be viewing at the 1:00 position.
In emirates system, it sounds like all the right-facing "windows" will just show the 3:00 view. That's crap. It won't look anything like a real window.
This.
I want to look out of not just the window immediately next to me. I want to be able to look out *any* window and see something reasonable. Further, if I change my viewing angle slightly, the picture should change - this is how actual, glass windows work.
Until these screens can show a different view depending on the viewing angle, I'm not interested. It won't look like a window - it will look like a screen.
This is not an easy question, and you are certainly right that going back to 1850 is not the answer. You are also right that part of sustainability is directly tied to efficiency, but efficient by what measure?
The free market is immensely powerful at optimizing, but it is largely just concerned with a single variable - short term, direct financial cost. Our food system is based partly on this variable and partly on the government efforts to avoid food shortages which take the form of food subsidies.
I once did the calculation - if you take the total government subsidies around corn, compare that to the bulk commodity prices, and divide by the total US population, you find that the US government buys every single person in the country about a ton of corn each year. The ripple effect of this policy is that there is a glut of corn, so there is cheap animal feed (and cheap meat), plus a lot of cheap raw material for the industrial food system. Corn syrup is the tip of the iceberg. Read some packaged food ingredients and many of the strange names (xanthan gum, maltose, dextrose, etc.) are made from corn.
I digress, though, one of the biggest issue around food and sustainability is really tied to meat production. This corn feed is brought to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAPO). Although efficient by a measure of money, these operations cause lots of secondary problems. The animal density is so high, diseases are common, hence the push for antibiotics, which then leads to antibiotic resistant microbes, which leads to human health issues. There is also a glut of manure from these operations, which easily turns into another health risk as it trickles downstream into the waterways.
Again, there is no magic bullet solution, but this current system is hugely wasteful. The manure, which is full of all kinds of nutrients, is allowed to just wash away while the original soils get depleted. A step in the right direction is capturing some of this manure and direct injecting it into the soil (to prevent runoff), and people are working on other approaches.
In the end, though, I think food prices are going to have to go up, especially for meat. This then brings us right back around to my original point - the issues of ecological sustainability are directly tied to issues of poverty and global equity.
The exact future system is not clear, but that doesn't mean we can't start working on it. I am lucky enough that I make enough money that I can afford to pay the premium for the local, more sustainably raised foods. It's also tastier. The pasture raised pork I get from a local farm is orders of magnitude tastier than what is sold in the chain grocery stores.
You're right - those two scenarios are not reasonable.
Ecological sustainability is basically the question of whether or not a given practice could be done for a long time without causing damage. Think for example of the air we breath. A question of sustainability is a measure of how much pollution we are putting out. Is it little enough that it can break down at least as fast as we make it? What is washing into the various lakes, rivers, etc and what is the half life on all of those things? How does that rate compare to the rate of input? Another example is the rate of soil formation compared to the rate of soil loss with industrial agriculture. Too much of that leads to desertification. What is the rate of groundwater formation compared to aquifer extraction?
We are not doing well at most of these metrics right now, which is only going to bite us in the ass down the road. This is all without even mentioning climate change.
This balancing of the load we put on the rest of the planet with our own outputs is exactly what is meant by ecologically sustainable.
Naturally, this will be ever evolving.
Unfortunately, the two are intrinsically linked, so any solution will be complex.
I highly suggest reading the book Doughnut Economics on this topic. The essential argument the author makes is that ultimately our economies are based upon the systems of the earth. We can make things out of wood without trees, we can't grow food without soil, etc. Even things like mineral extraction and fossil fuel use are also ultimately rooted in earth systems.
If we want to have a robust world economy that creates opportunity for everybody, it *must* be ecologically sustainable. Anything else is just borrowing from future generations and will eventually collapse when resources run out.
The doughnut economics book also traces a lot of the history of economic theory to sets of mathematical models invented to describe things limited in scope that have now been taken grossly out of the original context.
There are also plenty of economic models that are just too damn simple. A number of these came about shortly after Newton wrote down the basic laws of planetary motion, which inspired other disciplines to describe the world with mathematics. Of course, the systems are radically different. Planetary systems are relatively simple when compared to economics, which can involve literally millions of people making independent decisions.
It isn't just export crops and ethanol fuel. These vast fields area also growing huge amounts of animal feed that is trucked around the country to concentrated animal feeding operations and converted into protein and waste manure.
There is also a lot of it that is shipped over to chemical processing plants to make all of your favorite food additives.
The troubles with this kind of farming run deep.
LOL! Trump is not "giving congress their power". He's simply systematically undoing all that he possibly can of Obama's work, because he doesn't like Obama.
That said, presidential executive power is out of control. Trump is abusing it. Obama abused it. Bush abused it. And so on.
One of my hopes is that this whole Trump experiment pushes congress and the US to reign in the office of the presidency. That would be great, but it will never happen willingly under this administration.
Huh?
What about leadership that is able to inspire the best in others? What about leadership that allows for each team member to be respectful of the ideas of others? What about leadership that allows for frank and open discussions, including respective criticism of others ideas? What about leadership that lays out a unifying vision?
If we want to define leadership as simply a loud person brow-beating others into a particular point of view, I'll grant your statement. I'll also run as far way from that kind of "leader" as I possibly can.
Please mail the stool samples to: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500.
Be sure to include a return address!
Can you point me at the alternative models?
From my understanding of this paper, it seems like the alkaline vent is winning the debate.
I admit, though, that i may have sampling bias.