Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is this we? If people in Africa want to exploit their natural resources to develop and improve their lives, they should be free to do so. Everybody else has. It's a little hypocritical for Westerners who have already reaped the benefits and costs of development to pull the ladder up after themselves for the rest of the world. I'm not of the persuasion that colonialism was the worst thing ever since the start of t…
Maybe the Westerners who exploited these lands should pay reparations to Africa and fast-track their development past industrialization. Or just offer Africans resettlement in Europe and the United States, thereby preserving African wilderness.
New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the unfixable problems that prevent manufacturing in India?
1. High Govt regulation, permission, licensing, red tape, labor laws, politics 2. Irregular power and water supply 3. Poor infrastructure/Logistics- Roads, Bridges, Rails, Ports
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it the slippery slope you're worried about? Nobody is really talking about killing people in this thread. What is being said is that the unnecessary development of Africa will lead to a population explosion and vast increase in consumption of resources that will hurt animals. We should not be encouraging development, and should focus on curating the African wilderness.
Who is this we? If people in Africa want to exploit their natural resources to develop and improve their lives, they should be free to do so. Everybody else has. It's a little hypocritical for Westerners who have already reaped the benefits and costs of development to pull the ladder up after themselves for the rest of the world. I'm not of the persuasion that colonialism was the worst thing ever since the start of t…
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is sort of horrible, once you think about it. Africa is the last continent on earth to have abundant wildlife. Development in Africa would mean we lose a large portion of wildlife on earth, forever.
This is not even correct. Endangered species are much safer in the US than Africa, because nobody is eating them for survival or poaching them to sell to the Chinese. Strong institutions and better-than-sustenance jobs are how to protect wildlife.
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not even correct. Endangered species are much safer in the US than Africa, because nobody is eating them for survival or poaching them to sell to the Chinese. Strong institutions and better-than-sustenance jobs are how to protect wildlife.
How many white rhino live in America? America annihilated nearly every large animal species, as part of Manifest Destiny.
Also, as far as I can tell from the limited research I care to do, there has never been a rhino species native to the New World.
So to answer your question - there were probably never any white rhinos in America to begin with, and had there been, the Americans who would have killed them are not the Americans you seem to be referring to.
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#66Helpful to keep in mind that India recently changed the way it calculates GDP by updating its base year and moving from a cost-of-input calculation to an expenditure calculation. This will give it a nominal boost as many currently non-market activities (cooking, cleaning, child rearing) enter the realm of the market as paid-for services, and are thus counted in the GDP calculation. More on that in this previous artic…
GDP should be depreciated.
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because one of them is sentient.
Both lions and humans (like most, or all, animals) are sentient. You may be referring to some concept of intelligent self-awareness, but you need to be more clear as to what it is to evaluate whether its a real difference between humans and lions; lots of animals have demonstrable self-awareness of various forms. I agree that the human condition is more important, but I don't think your explanation of why holds up.
I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the ability to experience.
It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having consciousness.
However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing with a sort of sentience Turing test that we project onto animals. They _seem_ to have experience, because they react to stimuli. But the same is true of the computer.
We know that creatures with basically nothing in the way of a brain, take earthworms or severed octopus tentacles, will react to pain, hide from it.
We also know that pain has two parts -- a conscious experience, and an animal aversion. This is made clear by the existence of Pain asymbolia, where a person gets damage to the insular cortex (a lower part of the brain), and is no longer averse to pain, despite reporting that they still experience the pain just as they did before the injury.
I believe it quite likely that consciousness exists in the human brain alone, and is of very recent evolutionary vintage, evolving in conjunction with language. That when humans project sentience on their pets they are basically falling in love with a biological automaton, no different from a person falling in love with a chat-bot.
Unless we find a reason to believe that mere programming couldn't account for the behavior of animals (which seems increasingly unlikely, as our own rather rudimentary robots advance), it seems much more likely that evolution would have evolved the simple instinct system first -- only adding consciousness later on when it became an evolutionary necessity, as could have been the case for complex communication about qualia.
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the unfixable problems that prevent manufacturing in India?
1. High Govt regulation, permission, licensing, red tape, labor laws, politics 2. Irregular power and water supply 3. Poor infrastructure/Logistics- Roads, Bridges, Rails, Ports
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? The implicit end of that sentence is "equally important to the hundreds of millions of Africans living there." And to that, emphatically no. People are more important. Full stop. I am no anti-environmental activist. I want to see renewable energy take over fossil fuels, I want to see conscientious business taking environmental factors into account at all steps…
Why is the life of a Zimbabwean citizen more important than the life of a Zimbabwean lion?
The fact that that's a question that was even asked is shocking, and honestly disgusting. Yes, people are more important than animals. To imply otherwise is downright idiotic.
Re: New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both lions and humans (like most, or all, animals) are sentient. You may be referring to some concept of intelligent self-awareness, but you need to be more clear as to what it is to evaluate whether its a real difference between humans and lions; lots of animals have demonstrable self-awareness of various forms. I agree that the human condition is more important, but I don't think your explanation of why holds up.
One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions. I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the ability to experience. It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having consciousness. However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing with a…
This speciest emphasis on human-like features as criterion for value shouldn't be dominant in the first place.