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My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

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Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#251

Post by anticodon »

inlikealamb wrote: post #162
School-Cotton wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was an attempted coup in the US No there wasn’t. A rowdy protest is not “an attempted coup”. All actual institutions behaved according to the law.

Just because they were bad at it doesn't mean they didn't try. Here's a list: * Breaking into congress * Carrying flags representing a rival (dead) government * While wearing tactical gear, some carrying blunt objects, handcuffs, mace * Stealing computers and documents * Searching for congresspeople * Killing a police officer, beating others Not to mention they were doing it while Congress was meant to be counting el…

It's funny considering how USA intensely finance and prepare coups and revolutions all over the world. I'm from one ex-USSR country and living in another ex-USSR country. It happened several times right in front of my eyes.

USA funds several media outlets so that they publish a precisely mixed mash of truth and lies. People mindlessly consume the mash and start to get a feeling they live in an imperfect society that can be very easily improved ("just get rid of your current president and you'll start living awesome life the same moment! it's so easy, folks! no other effort required").

Then they start publishing a real recipes for starting a turmoil (via figures like notoriously known Navalny).

Then, when the coup fails, USA start pressuring: "It's an agression against democracy! It was a peaceful protest! Sanctions! Sanctions! Sanctions!" (if the coup succeeds, the only result is that people start living in worse conditions - check Arab Spring countries or any other country where color revolution succeeded - they're doing much worse economically and in all other areas of life, including "democracy").

When the protest which was much milder happened in the US itself, it's suddenly "totally different thing".

BTW, just this week mercenaries from USA trained in USA killed president of Haiti.

What a bunch of hypocrites...

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#252

Post by cjfd »

bjornsing wrote: post #187
chestertn wrote: post #60

When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me. I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting…

> I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however. That sounds very much like what FA Hayek called “the presence of knowledge” and warned us of in his 1974 Nobel acceptance speech [1]. Maybe yo…

presence -> pretence

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#253

Post by s5300 »

adrianN wrote: post #249
s5300 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was heavily dependent on the administration. To my knowledge, recent past administration quite literally made a step by step "playbook on how to manage a pandemic" and the current administration quite literally completely ignored it, or something close to this.

I have a hard time coming up with examples of countries that handled the pandemic very well, so I would think that it's less dependent on the administration than it might appear.

I think like, Vietnam and South Korea did exceptionally well?

Think Vietnam eventually started getting hit though because of other countries lack of handling things, tourism, and the general fact that they're not by any means a rich country. So, they did surprisingly well given what they had, but eventually got dragged down by the rest of the bullshitters.

This is all off the top of my head in remembering things though, may be incorrect.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#254

Post by Joeri »

99_00 wrote: post #227
rewgs wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your intuition isn't flawed. People are both willfully dense, and typically unable to grasp extremely complex systems, and both are at play with regards to climate change and energy shortage. The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find? And the fact that we'll be d…

Why isn't nuclear power the answer to climate change and energy shortage?

We would need to build thousands of nuclear plants, adapting each plant for its location (so you can’t mass-produce a single design), and we don’t have the skilled people to do that. In addition, they will take decades to build, we lack enough fuel for those plants, and we still haven’t solved the disposal problem.

Solar panels, batteries, and wind mills are comparatively easy to produce at ridiculous volumes. They’re a cheaper, faster and cleaner solution.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#255

Post by jhoechtl »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #181
bmitc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does new technology help these things exactly? Isn't technology, along with the discovery of coal and oil, a major contributor to the scaling of the human population and the effects of that? The vast industrialization over the past 150 has not been good for humanity or the planet.

I think they generally mean: optimal and sustainable farming, abundant clean energy, and world leaders that can think more than two years ahead.

> and world leaders that can think more than two years ahead

They can do that. It's the electoral system which doesn't give an incentive to do so.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#256

Post by akmarinov »

swman wrote: post #230
cjohnson318 wrote: post #163

I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Another implicit assumption is that we'll be able to move forward unilaterally with such a solution, instead of it becoming a political football until it's too late to do anything, like climate change. A lot…

I think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow. Most of the problems today are caused by our greed. I’m no MIT scholar nor as educated as most of you here, but from a anecdotal ground level I have seen it really seems some people at various positions from a office manager all the way to the highest political offices are driven by greed. Their greed usually resul…

A big part is our greed to procreate, take out 3/4 of humanity and climate change is solved

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#257

Post by choeger »

adrianN wrote: post #244
99_00 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't nuclear power the answer to climate change and energy shortage?

Because it's pretty expensive and time consuming to build and people really don't like to have a nuclear power plant near them.

This. Even France is not able to double its nuclear power output and go completely climate-neutral this way. Let alone India, China, or Indonesia.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#258

Post by choeger »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #178
adnmcq999 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know man, the human race makes great technological leaps, or rather leaps in understanding that allow new technology. And nobody can really predict that. It’s almost like your Einsteins, Newtons, Boltzmanns, Maxwells Paulis and Plancks had some kind 2-way channel with divinity. Even though we all stand on the shoulders of giants, sometimes a new giant appears out of the ether. And there’s no doubt we’re done.…

I don't know either. We made giant steps in the 20th C, but I feel like we're seeing diminishing returns now. From 1950 to 1970 cars advanced a lot, but from 2000 to 2020, they're still largely the same. (Sure, there's Teslas with highway autonomy, and some systems can handle an on-ramp, but "Mexico City" autonomy seems really far off.) Unless someone breaks Moore's Law, figures out general quantum computing or gener…

I think everyone has said this in every decade of the last century.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#259

Post by choeger »

Xplune13 wrote: post #189
adnmcq999 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know man, the human race makes great technological leaps, or rather leaps in understanding that allow new technology. And nobody can really predict that. It’s almost like your Einsteins, Newtons, Boltzmanns, Maxwells Paulis and Plancks had some kind 2-way channel with divinity. Even though we all stand on the shoulders of giants, sometimes a new giant appears out of the ether. And there’s no doubt we’re done.…

That is true, but basing a prediction model on the assumption that "technology will fix things, and someone will save us" is bad in my opinion.

Huh? Solar power generation at scale is exactly such a thing. Wind power, too. Also hydroponics are a thing at the industrial scale now as is desalination of seawater. These are not magic bullets but they do fix a lot of things.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#260

Post by anticodon »

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #238
krrrh wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ll never know for sure, but this seems like revisionist history and motivated reasoning. Gore and his advisors supported regime change in Iraq when he was in office and intelligence failures didn’t suddenly start in early 2001, nor were they restricted to the United States.[0] It’s possible that the tone around climate change would have been different under a Gore administration, but the entire composition of Cong…

It was not intelligence failures that got us into Iraq. The politicians lied us into the war on purpose and hid, obstructed, and made up the intelligence as they saw fit. One of the biggest crimes in American history should be remembered correctly.

It was exactly what is stated in the article: shortage of energy. US consumes several times more energy per capita than even Europe. At the same time industrial output of US is small and diminishing with every year.

US needs more oil. Hence all the wars. Iraq - oil. Libya - oil. Syria - oil (US occupied all oil deposits in Syria where and extracts it without giving anything back to the people of Syria).

Afghanistan - I'm not sure, but considering that during US occupation, production of heroine in Afghanistan went up orders of magnitude, and many visitors to Afghanistan reported that US guarded poppy fields, probably it was due to drugs. Kill two birds with one stone: get rich from selling drugs, finance other wars and coups with drug money, and flood geopolitical enemies that happen to be located next to Afghanistan borders with the most powerful drug.

The next target will be also rich in oil, although it would be definitely said that it's only because of lack of democracy in the said country.

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