Bird populations declining fast across North America

I call your 'learned helplessness' and raise you 'rational acceptance'.

> No consideration is given to the many positives in modern life

One can see the many positives in life while also pointing out the hopeless state of affairs we've created.

> Everyone wants to wail in dismay at the perceived impending doom and do nothing, or they want to actively destroy modern society.

Everyone deals with grief differently. There's no shame in being a nothing-doer, a wailer, or a destructive rebuilder. There is room for all options. I think that if you look, you will find plenty of people who are attempting to build and do, if that's what you prefer to see. You might even be able to contribute, if that is your wish.

Here is a writeup[1] about one project you might be interested in, and that site will have other projects reviewed as well, I'm sure.

[1]: https://www.thecarbonic.com/post/harvard-researcher-leads-gr...

I mean information channels to and from the central computer.

> Wouldn't a factory mainly just need to communicate its inputs and outputs the computer or computer cluster doing the calculation?

If that's all it's doing, a free market does that fine. There is no need for any additional computation. Similarly for any other economic actor.

If the central computation is going to improve anything over what the individual economic actors would do on their own, it can only be by computing what the inputs and outputs should be for all economic actors, better than those actors can do themselves, and then dictating those inputs and outputs to the actors. Otherwise there's no point to it. And that is what it can't do based on the information argument I gave.

> I don't think the computation cost scales exponentially. If it did, the decentralized free market computer would not be able to accurately compute the economy.

Wrong. The decentralized free market computer's capacity scales exponentially, since each individual economic actor is computing their own actions. The centralized computer, however, has to compute everyone's actions. That's why it faces an insurmountable information problem that the individual actors doing their decentralized computing do not face.

> The government can help alleviate the failures of the market.

No, it can't. That is the lesson of history. Every time governments have done this, they have made things worse, not better. That is not to say that market failures do not exist, only that the failures of government are worse.

> the market is generally short-sighted, while governments can think more long-term.

You have this backwards. Government time horizons are the next election. Individual market actors can have time horizons going out decades--for example, individuals saving for retirement. Governments can't even keep their social security trust funds safe from being raided by the legislature when it wants to fund some white elephant.

> it is my understanding that the Chinese government has invested a lot in solar panel technology and implementation.

Quite possibly it has. That in no way means China might not be even better off if it were not centrally controlled by the government.

> You would probably agree this is a good thing, given the severity of the climate crisis.

No, I wouldn't, because I don't think climate change is a crisis. And as far as I can tell, neither do the Chinese. They are investing in those technologies not because they believe they need them themselves, but because they believe they can sell them at a substantial profit to Western countries who are much more worried about climate change than the Chinese themselves are.

>Habitat destruction, chemical pollution, mining, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, water depletion and contamination, farming practices and monocultures, human interference, etc., are all just horrific, are responsible for massive destruction and extinction of the environment, and aren't all suddenly going to get magic'ed away the instant we somehow get the GHG pollution thing under control (if we ever do).

is claiming broad relation to population being above some threshold, since the whole comment is about overpopulation.

I had this same question a couple years back when I read this stat, so I messaged the Cornell Lab Ornithology and one of their reps explained how these numbers make sense.

“We start with a population of breeding adult birds at the beginning of the year. They breed, and multiply, and then the population is "spent" throughout the year on deaths such as window strikes, pesticide poisoning, and cat kills. If the population could keep up with these deaths, we would see a net loss of zero. Unfortunately, instead, we are seeing less and less breeding adult birds at the beginning of each year.

So when we say "we've lost 2.9 Billion birds," what we really mean is, "We've seen a net loss of 2.9 billion breeding adult birds since the 1970's." Back in the 1970's, the breeding season started with about 13 billion adult birds. This year, we had about 10 billion. Throughout the year, they multiply to about 40 billion before they die back. Of that 40 billion, cats kill 2.5 billion.”