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Insect collapse

theguardian.com

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Re: Insect collapse

#201

Post by crispinb »

jyounker wrote: post #42
xupybd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way we’re going to get better at managing our environmental impact is going to be through technological improvement. As you say we are too many now. The only way that technology will improve is under good economic conditions. We have to weigh economic growth against its impact else we will only speed up the destruction. When people become poor environmental concerns come second place to the basics of life.

We have the technologies now. We're just failing at the political and societal organization.

The "just" is unmerited. That was always the difficult part, necessitating the most gargantuan act of exaptation in the history of life on our planet. It was never very likely to work.

Re: Insect collapse

#202

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

otikik wrote: post #113
astazangasta wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of reasoning is spurious. The people who consume the most resources also have the lowest fertility rates. What we can do other than despair and contemplate genocide is transition to a carbon neutral economy. It really only requires political will.

Sorry but your comment doesn't help me. I can not "transition my society to a carbon neutral economy". I don't know how I can "create political will". Can you be more concrete?

Blog, tweet, participate in tv, radio shows “, join a political party, join an activist group. Really pick any assembly of people and contribute to the agenda in with any means available. Be a leader.

Re: Insect collapse

#203

Post by open-source-ux »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #134
rollo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS is the most popular language. Thus most software is wasting orders of magnitude more energy than it should. The same functionality would require less than a tenth of processing power (and thus energy and physical hardware) if it were implemented properly.

Properly is like what, assembler? So lets spend 100x power on developers notebooks and 100x of their paid time and rewrite eveything in asm so it will work faster? Or what "implemented properly" means?

Properly is like what, assembler?

No-one is advocating that. There are dozens of fast, high-level programming languages to choose from.

Today, dynamic programming languages are the most popular - and often (not always) the least performant and least power efficient.

What does energy efficient mean? Here's one perspective explored in a paper:

Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How does energy, time, and memory relate?

https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages

Here's the related Hacker News discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15249289

Dynamic languages benefit too from attention to energy-efficiency and speed in their evolution.

When PHP 7 was released, Rasmurf Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, said the performance improvements meant fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity - all of which equalled less power or electricity consumed.

When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. You can watch a segment from his presentation where he talks about this here - and the calculations he made of potential CO2 savings:

https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s

Re: Insect collapse

#204

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

kamaal wrote: post #188
sethammons wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human populations grow slower the more advanced they are. Most of the first world, including the US, is below replacement fertility rate of 2.1. Without immigration and the like, the US would start contracting. Bringing the third world up to first world is what is needed. That and the other things you said. [EDIT] Links help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

>>Bringing the third world up to first world is what is needed. Again, the biggest hurdle to that is politics. There are deep geo political ramifications on any thing that causes change in economic equations at such massive levels. Mostly its also the will of the people. The world is indeed a giant stack ranking system, and people do indeed believe in ruining anything it takes to score the most points. Most people do…

Economy won’t go away, limited resources needs to be managed. A market economy, otoh, is just one approach.

I’m pretty sure the current configuration is just a temporary blind spot. Market economy as an optimization algorithm is pretty neat for a limited set of problems. As a means to handle social justice, collective planning, and a bunch of other problems perhaps not so much. While finding better models for that, we shouldn’t throw out the bayby with the bath water.

Re: Insect collapse

#205

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

ryanmercer wrote: post #60
titzer wrote: post #14

This planet will not support 7 billion humans. Certainly not 7 billion stupid-ass humans who swing massive sledgehammers into the pillars of the biosphere that support them in their hedonistic blunder in search of more "wealth". When I hear the words "economic growth", and then weigh it against the destruction of this magnitude, I often want to vomit. And how do I square the fact that I work on flipping bits in compu…

I've come to accept the fact that we've already lost the game. I have a friend that is extremely optimistic and thinks we will figure things out, like fusion, 'because we need to' but I'm far more pessimistic. This year, based on previous years, we will probably hit 35 gigatons of carbon emissions and it won't be long before we hit 40 gigatons. Even if a fleet of alien ships appeared in orbit today and was like "we'r…

As an optimist I can just note that your, probably, fully accurate description is all artificial. Everything you mentioned are incidental issues we’ve created for our selves, and are trivially solvable from a pure technical perspective.

Organizing people to that effect might look doomed to failure, but entire economies have been overturned in decades before.

Re: Insect collapse

#206

Post by pfisch »

chimprich wrote: post #88
pfisch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action. So your arguments about economic hardship and the associated problems are (if valid) really arguments for taking more drastic action against the problem.

> It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action.

Over what time period though? Projections are all over the place, and it is basically impossible to predict where our technology will be 20 years from now. Maybe moderate interdiction now on our part will stave off the worst of it until we discover technologies that will get us out of this jam.

Re: Insect collapse

#207

Post by pfisch »

yardie wrote: post #31
pfisch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So your solution is to simply do nothing. It might offend some voters’ sense of entitlement. That things aren’t the same as they were 30 years ago. We could do it the hard way. When ocean levels rise the coastal house market will collapse. Water will become scarce as aquifers get spoiled by salt. And climate patterns are certainly changing. Places that used to get an abundance of rain are already facing a drought. Bu…

> So your solution is to simply do nothing.

I never said that. I said implementing extreme solutions like a 95% cut to everyone's carbon footprint are a terrible idea.

Also we are most likely talking about like a 0.5-2 ft rise maybe over the next 30 years. That is not exactly a "day after tomorrow" panic situation. The coastal real estate economy can deflate over 30 years.

Re: Insect collapse

#208

Post by nopriorarrests »

rollo wrote: post #192
nopriorarrests wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Properly is like what, assembler? So lets spend 100x power on developers notebooks and 100x of their paid time and rewrite eveything in asm so it will work faster? Or what "implemented properly" means?

In a modern compiled language and without using ten layers of abstraction. It is very feasible and does not require significantly more development effort, at least not compared to the energy and material savings.

If it "would require less than a tenth of processing power" while being "very feasible and does not require significantly more development effort" I think you should get in touch with Google or Facebook with your suggestion.

You can solve two problems at once - you will lower their carbon footprint to 1/10 of their current one, and become a multi-millionaire or even billionaire. Sounds like a double win to me.

Re: Insect collapse

#209

Post by Simon_says »

sethammons wrote: post #64

Reminds me of my favorite demotivational poster: Responsibility: no single raindrop feels it is responsible for the flood.

That's a great quote. Very similar to: "The avalanche has has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zJsrjOytG8

Re: Insect collapse

#210

Post by ryanmercer »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #180
EGreg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tigers are nearly extinct. People don’t care.

Apparently there are more pet tigers in Texas than in the wild. (Source unknown to me) Tigers disappeared because of humans. Not the natural ebb and flow of the planets rhythms. Less humans = less impact.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/more-tigers-in-america...

>With an estimated 5,000 tigers, the U.S. captive tiger population exceeds the approximately 3,200 tigers in the wild.

While not just Texas that is still insane.

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