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World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

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Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#151

Post by marttt »

My grandfather (1931) has 7 grades of education and a lifetime history of building and repairing radios and television sets. He worked for the army and spent some time on submarines, instructing navy officers on how to use radio equipment -- with his 7 grades of formal schooling.

Once, during a autumn storm (we're in Estonia), I remember him stating on a business-as-usual tone: "I was 15, when I first got to know electricity."

Man, I thought. Here, in front of me, is a living person who spent the first 14 years (!) of his life completely off-grid. No electricity, period.

That was also the moment I realized that this same person -- my grandpa -- has accumulated all of his knowledge by first-hand, hit-and-miss experiments. The contemporary model of "theory first" was and is almost completely alien to him, along with book-knowledge of any kind. The result of this? Even at age 90, you can be 99% sure that everything my grandpa states is true -- simply because he only speaks or proposes things that he has tested out himself.

As a person with lots of "book knowledge", I find this absolutely fascinating. Obviously, all the technological solutions he has in his household are 1) rock solid and 2) dead simple.

It almost appears that if you somehow manage to maintain decent work ethic (and the ethic of being human), a modest amount of formal schooling may have its benefits.

Greetings to the grandparents of all HNers!

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#152

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

erklik wrote: post #87
jl6 wrote: post #76

Might as well say it: 8 billion is too many, and it’s a good thing that population growth is levelling off. A decline down to ~1 billion would be fine. If we have to change retirement planning, so be it. No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to…

Why? I don't genuinely understand this pessimism. More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means more Einstiens, Newtons, Da Vincis etc. I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not t…

We have enough brains. We don't invest in ~80% of the brains we have on this planet.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#153

Post by erklik »

luke2m wrote: post #148
erklik wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a very selfish view. Not sure how advocating for more people is selfish, but okay. > More people also means more energy need, more recourses use, more garbage too. There is not unlimited recourses to exploits. Energy can be practically infinite. Simply requires us to use nuclear power. Yes, Yes, there's issues of waste with that. It's overblown and a moral panic. More resources are used. Yes. However, thinki…

>More resources are used. Yes. However, thinking of it on a universal scale, even resources are "infinite". That's what people thought about oil, trees, etc. before.

and they were right? Resources are practically infinite on a universal scale. We just keep progressing and we will get there.

Trees are literally infinite. Just plant enough of them while you cut them down.

Oil is not, but oil is energy, and energy is also practically infinite as long as we do it cleanly, and we have the capability to do so that today.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#154

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

bojan wrote: post #88
jl6 wrote: post #76

Might as well say it: 8 billion is too many, and it’s a good thing that population growth is levelling off. A decline down to ~1 billion would be fine. If we have to change retirement planning, so be it. No other species can grow its population exponentially indefinitely. Population growth in every other species is kept in check by conflict and starvation. We have an opportunity to voluntarily limit our footprint to…

This makes no sense whatsoever. 8 billion is too many, for what, for whom? Next to 8 billion of us, we also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals, which is enormously expensive and horrible for the environment. Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow th…

So should we extinct all the animals we don't eat or that don't pollinate plants?

They're clearly wasting food an oxygen...

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#155

Post by pclmulqdq »

smallerfish wrote: post #143
pclmulqdq wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can discover new resources though. Look at the discussions around "peak oil." Every time people think we can't get more oil we find a way. It's going to be the same for every other resource.

We _can_, but will we? We're not fated to discover new resources to sustain ourselves. Fracking opened up new oil reserves, for sure, but that didn't mean that the concern wasn't valid. > It's going to be the same for every other resource. That's superstition / survivor bias. Is your statement that far off from "the house is on fire, but I'm not going to move from the couch because a fire crew will be here sooner or…

It is not remotely the same. Technologies in agriculture, energy production, and human health have all followed this path. By the way, it isn't just fracking that defeated calls of "peak oil" - deepwater drilling came the time before that, and offshore drilling the time before that, and so on. People have been crying "peak energy" and "peak food" reliably for the last 150 years, and we're still growing as a species.

This isn't just some hope, this is the way human history has run. To suggest otherwise is the lunacy here.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#156

Post by theplumber »

ThalesX wrote: post #19

My great-grandma was born in 1920 and died in 2020. She was lucid to her final breath. I spent a lot of time talking to her about the ‘before times’. She was a sucker for this new world. She loved it. Much more than her world from the 20s. However, she always reminisced about how empty of people and how natural everything was. We were 1.6 billion when she was born, almost 8 when she died. This is the lifespan of a si…

There are still a lot of "emtpy" places. It's just people don't enjoy living in empty places anymore

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#157

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

usrn wrote: post #94
V__ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, all these African people with their checks notes unsustainable lifestyle of nearly no co2 emissions compared to the rest of the world.

Heh. When the complaint is that the high birthrates of the world are unsustainable, it's the people with the high birthrates that are doing that. Also keep in mind that Africa relies heavily on aid from these countries with the high CO2 emissions. Cutting CO2 really means starving them.

CO2 emissions per capita includes your imports...

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#158

Post by phasersout »

aleksklarksr wrote: post #118
neals wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take, I believe you. What is your background on this?

>The new Soviet Census (1939) showed a population figure of 170.6 million people, manipulated so as to match exactly the numbers stated by Stalin in his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chi... Lots of sources question population data as well as all other officials statistics. Nobody care. It is not just numbers, it is political stat…

fun fact: if the Habsburgers - during the Thirty Years' War - would have known that the Swedish Kingdom only had around a million citizens at this time they could have marched on straight to Stockholm and called it a day.

But population numbers were highly confidential in those days and since Sweden was vast to the north they wrongly assumed it was populated much more densely.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#159

Post by Terry_Roll »

randomsearch wrote: post #83
nivenkos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we're reaching a point where we're hitting the limits of Physics in many areas. Like it's hard to imagine an even faster passenger aircraft than the Concorde for example.

Don’t think this is the problem. I think it’s an allocation of resources problem. Pre 80s a lot of the best and brightest worked in engineering. Post 80s they went into finance and then tech. The latter a mixed bag - brought us Google maps etc but sadly mostly focused on selling ads. That’s the risk I see. We either need to change incentives or change culture to get back to a focus on progress / exploration rather th…

>Pre 80s a lot of the best and brightest worked in engineering.

>Post 80s they went into finance and then tech. The latter a mixed bag - brought us Google maps etc but sadly mostly focused on selling ads.

So you havent been able to tell if search engines make or break a company, product or service with the results it delivers?

As weapons go, controlling the economy of other countries through search engine results would be novel and advantageous to the US military!

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#160

Post by lotsofpulp »

techdragon wrote: post #112
bigDinosaur wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn't actually regress in terms of supersonic flight though, it just got relegated to specialist uses such as military. The actual advantage of the Concorde specifically was less than imagined - basically: would you prefer 7 hours in business or first class on a slower but vastly more spacious jet, or 3.5 hours on a much more cramped one? The Concorde was very fast but ordinary passenger jets are also quite fast,…

But we don’t get 7 hours in a more spacious jet. First class may be getting roomier in the most luxurious of first class having airlines. But many airlines ditched first class and their business class didn’t get more room when they added bigger planes, they simply adjusted the row placements, maybe one or two rows more business class on their busy routes that could justify it. Airlines seating (minus first class) has…

> The airlines decided what they wanted.

Per your next sentence, customers decided what they wanted. Which was to pay less.

>For most of this time airline tickets weren’t as competitive a market either with more flag carriers and less budget airlines cutting the costs at the bottom of the market.

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