This statement has had the opposite effect intended, I believe.
We're preparing an experiment where we're going to release a special particulate into the air that will basically do the opposite of a greenhouse effect, we're going to intentionally try to create a pollution based cooling effect.
What intended effect?
You're not trying to convert your opponent to your side in a debate.
Splash damage my friend, splash damage.
Only a small fraction. Lighten up, dude!
People have suffered and died throughout history -- thus the "miserable, brutal, and short" quotation -- and some fraction always will. But as much as I hate to do it, I have to agree with Fleshgrinder on one major point: on a per-capita statistical basis, this IS the best time to be alive as a human in history, if you use the metrics of life expectancy and annual percent chance of being raped/murdered/mutilated/ravaged by disease. The trend lines go up and down, of course, but the NET trends have been towards improvement in all of those areas over the span of human history. See Steve Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature for a detailed discussion of how we can tally these things, why the trends are moving that way, and what the ramifications are.
I don't believe in FG's imminent Utopia -- there's always a point of diminishing returns, and most improving trends, in real life, eventually become asymptotic. However, empirically-speaking from only the metrics listed above, I'm forced to reject the doom-and-gloom scenarios used as counters because they don't fit the data.
I should also hasten to add that, using other metrics, things will appear differently. For example, I personally would rather live on a planet of 1,000,000,000 people than the current 7,000,000,000+, because I personally value space, solitude, and privacy more than I do longevity or freedom from violence. But that's an idiosyncratic view, not a general one. Likewise, if a person for some reason places a high value on preservation of species, vs. allowing them to evolve or die out, then the industrial age is a bad time by that specific metric.
We have the resources and capability to feed and clothe the entire world and have all of us living at a level North Americans would consider "upper middle class".
We have that ability today.
We simply need to do it.
We are the only ones preventing ourselves from living in paradise, that's the sad part.
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I am unaware of which starvation blockade you're speaking of. Do you mean Israel and Palestine?
Between the two wars.
After looking at some articles, I must say, Iraq is one fertile place.
Hence, the Fertile Crescent.
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Hence, the Fertile Crescent.I am unaware of which starvation blockade you're speaking of. Do you mean Israel and Palestine?
Between the two wars.
After looking at some articles, I must say, Iraq is one fertile place.
Linkified.
<slow golf clap>
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This statement has had the opposite effect intended, I believe.
We're preparing an experiment where we're going to release a special particulate into the air that will basically do the opposite of a greenhouse effect, we're going to intentionally try to create a pollution based cooling effect.What intended effect?
You're not trying to convert your opponent to your side in a debate.
Splash damage my friend, splash damage.
The idea of us messing with our climate intentionaly without fully understanding how we may be accidentally be effecting it already seems like a hugely bad idea.
Like Ghostbusters bad.
Linkified.
I find this picture a little disturbing, actually. All those baby croissants, they look like poo.
Do you realise that the United States with a population of less than 10 percent of the human race utilises 80 percent of the world's resources? Do you realise that we are in an impending resource crisis?
Respectfully, you need to remember that FG is a big pro-science guy... and if science, rather than socioeconomic forces, shaped resource-use policy, we'd be in a far different situation. Fossil fuels would be eschewed in favor of renewables, for example, and recycling would be very strictly mandated. Food prices might be scaled according to resource use required for production. Etc.
I don't think that will ever happen -- the plutocrats will always dictate policy, and ignore science except where it aligns with their short-term goals -- but what he's saying isn't physically or technologically impossible; it's barred by human nature.
We have the resources and capability to feed and clothe the entire world and have all of us living at a level North Americans would consider "upper middle class".
We have that ability today.
We simply need to do it.
We are the only ones preventing ourselves from living in paradise, that's the sad part.
You're out of your fleeping mind. You're steeped in denial. Do you realise that the United States with a population of less than 10 percent of the human race utilises 80 percent of the world's resources? Do you realise that we are in an impending resource crisis?
Where do you get off saying that we can bring the rest of the planet up to our resource hogging standards?
I think he means that we can achieve that equivalent life quality with the available resources, not that we can consume the same amount of resources an average US citizen does.
The biggest problem we face today is one of resource management, not resource scarcity. For example, according to the UN Food Agency, we're wasting about 1.3 billion tons of food per year world wide (the average US/Europe citizen throws away 300 kilograms of food per year, which is about 580 pounds). And about 50% of the energy produced in the US is wasted, according to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, mostly due to inefficient power generation and transportation.
Economics is a science as well.
It's just a branch of mathematics, as far as I'm concerned, but whatever.
As a possibly related side note, one thing I found interesting in reading Guns, Germs, and Steel is that, in pretty much all historical cases, less egalitarian societies conquered and/or absorbed their more egalitarian neighbors.* Having great vertical wealth differences allowed efficient leadership, standing armies of trained soldiers, and whole classes of people who do nothing but develop military technology. The more egalitarian societies couldn't marshal any of these resources to anywhere near the same degree, and got hosed by their neighbors who did. So I can't get on board with FG's dream of a single free society, as much as I'd like to.
* People will quibble and call out the U.S. in WWII, for example, but if you look at the total wealth gap among Allied powers vs. Axis ones, the truism may well still hold.
Economics is a science as well. It determines who ate, who starved, and who lived high on the hog.
Just had to fix this. Economics is pretty bad about predicting the future or future trends.
What I find most disturbing is that fleshgrinder sees everything as externalities in his pursuit of utopian godhood. You do realize you are just one species of animal which is waging the most destructive genocidal war ever on every other species of life on its home word?
It is not a good time to be any other creature but a human being.
What about a house cat?
Welcome, comrade!
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Just had to fix this. Economics is pretty bad about predicting the future or future trends.Only by those who study it poorly. Take a look at every conflict between nations in the history of the planet. Once you get past the rhetoric, you'll find that economics drove every single one of them. Japan did not become aggressive in the Pacific until the United States and Europe did their level best to corner the Pacific trading markets. Russia participated in the First World War because it wanted a warm water port.
Pretty sure he was saying that economics (the discipline) is good at understanding past conflicts. And then you cited a bunch of past conflicts, which we have since analysed?
Now, if you'd shown some 2001 predictions of the Iraq war . . .
Smash US imperialism!
Vive le Galt!
Those other oil rich nations however were being led by sheikhs we had in our pocket.
I suspect that we're in Saudi Arabia's pocket, not the other way around, but whatever.
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There's obviously a little more too it than that. There are plenty of oil rich nations we haven't invaded. And places we could put pipelines that we also haven't invaded.
Yet.
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A few summers ago I was reading Livy while working at the airport.
Time and again, the Romans would get in a tizzy about land reform, and just as the plebs were about to enact some legislation, all of a sudden war would break out with the Volscians or the whomever and all class conflicts would be forgotten in a surge of patriotism and bloodlust.
Frankly, it made me feel insulted. The plutocrats have been using the same bag of tricks for 2,000 years!