111–120 of 133 posts
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Which resource are we going to run out of that will halt all progress for which there are no adaptations? We're constantly finding gigantic reserves of resources. We are closer to being able to synthesize all the resources we want or need than we are to inflexibly running out of them.
Fossil fuels are quite finite.
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What it looks like is putting far more regulation in place surrounding hiring and employee protections. Layoffs have not hit Europe to the same extent largely because it's slower and more cumbersome to hire and fire, so employers are naturally more cautious. In the US you can hire and fire at will, so why be cautious? If companies were required to give 2 months notice like they are in many EU countries you bet your a…
The EU tech sector has been repeatedly reamed out by US and Chinese companies. They aren't a model to copy; something went badly wrong in Europe over the last few decades. Possibly they are too slow to hire when an opportunity presents. I went to have a look at what powerful and inspiring tech companies the Europeans have managed to put together [0] - they've got ASML (decent effort) and SAP (wouldn't want to hang my…
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Fossil fuels are quite finite.
There's plenty of them to go around and are plenty of adaptations for when there wont be anymore. You ignored 90% of what you replied to.
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You understand they don’t make laws, right?
You're saying the current or previous congress should decide what human growth should look like then? I don't see how thats much better
I find it hard not to fully agree with this article. Even without questioning the capitalist obsession for infinite growth (despite finite resources and markets), we should not have had the practice of hiring more than is essential to run the business. Who thought it was a good idea to make a success metric out of headcount? To comment on the writing: that title is genius.
>Even without questioning the capitalist obsession for infinite growth (despite finite resources and markets), Seeing how communist regimes aren't exactly practicing degrowth, I think it's more accurate to say it's a human obsession. >we should not have had the practice of hiring more than is essential to run the business. Who thought it was a good idea to make a success metric out of headcount? Ostensibly companies…
Most are building industrial capacity and modern infrastructure. Degrowth is something you do after growth.
Presenting degrowth as something those countries would randomly engage in now is a misunderstanding of what degrowth is and when/why you would do it, and/or complete ignorance of the developmental stage of those countries.
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> For example you may have deer keeping the population of grass in check and wolves keeping the population of deer in check in such a way that no population ever gets out of control. Both populations can get completely out of control in a wildly chaotic dance with some pretty standard conditions. You might enjoy reading up on the logistic map [0]. True equilibrium is quite rare in nature, usually situations are chaot…
As an example programmers can understand, machine learning is a better model for this than a logistic map. Natural selection is basically gradient descent with random walk as the "step" algorithm rather than back propagation. At each step, you randomly adjust the weights by a small amount. You do this with like 100 candidates and pick the best one that lowers the cost function the most. This is one generation, and yo…
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You're saying the current or previous congress should decide what human growth should look like then? I don't see how thats much better
It's easy to poke fun at government incompetency but like it or not they are who your country elected to make the sorts of decisions that shape its future. The only truly abysmal government is one that is paralysed into doing nothing at all.
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One should not confuse growth as in producing more and more stuff with growth as in progress. Of course you can't produce more stuff ad infinitum. A balance to reach net-zero stuff is necessary to be sustainable. But nothing prevents you from advancing technology ad infinitum. It can be sustainable to keep progressing. You just can't exhaust the resources around you, but you don't have to to keep progressing.
No. Technology production requires an energy input. It's fundamental physics. Reversing entropy requires an energy input, and technology is essentially entropy reversing. At the more scientific level you can see this occurring by simply correlating energy expenditure per country per capita with the technological achievements of the respective country. Western countries are among the top energy users and technology de…
I'd say you have seen nothing yet. And history is on my side here.
Besides, creating smarter things doesn't necessarily need more energy. We are pretty wasteful with energy at the moment. What you are talking about, entropy in the sense of progressing anywhere, is a ridiculously small fraction of what we are currently using energy for. Most of it goes to waste. There are generations of better energy efficiency to come before energy availability that can't be compensated with higher efficiency even becomes an issue. By then, nuclear fusion will be paramount and/or our use of the energy that comes from the sun will be magnitudes improved from what we do today. Just look back 100 years.
If we haven't bombed ourselves back into the stone age before that. Quite a possible outcome too.
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There's plenty of them to go around and are plenty of adaptations for when there wont be anymore. You ignored 90% of what you replied to.
It's simply taken on faith that we'll find such resources, in such great abundance that we'll never run out of them, that we're not decades away from cooking the planet beyond livability.
Why do you think this will suddenly change, without precedent? There is no reliable science behind 'cooking the planet beyond livability'. We already have adaptations (carbon extraction) for that even if it were true.
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It's simply taken on faith that we'll find such resources, in such great abundance that we'll never run out of them, that we're not decades away from cooking the planet beyond livability.
Its the same kind of faith as the sun rising tomorrow. The universal constant of human history is finding new resources to exploit and manipulating our environment, the scope of which grows exponentially by the century. Why do you think this will suddenly change, without precedent? There is no reliable science behind 'cooking the planet beyond livability'. We already have adaptations (carbon extraction) for that even…
Sudden change, without precedent... sounds like a black swan event, which ironically we have a term for. But there is precedent. Many civilizations before us have collapsed due to lack of resources, or mismanagement, or expanding so much they became unmanageable; this would just be the first time a globally connected civilization did so.
Exponential growth tends to become sigmoidal the further out you look, so you're taking it on faith that human history is the exception to the rule. You are convinced we are at the knee of an exponential curve and I am convinced we've already flattened into sigmoid.