161–168 of 168 posts
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Sure it works... but now you need snakes or raccoons to keep bats in check. Next you need badgers to keep snakes and raccoons in check etc etc. Soon enough you will need elephants and lions and whatnots. Maybe easier to just live with mosquitoes.
Why do you need to keep bats in check?
Just some wishful thinking here... Is it possible that the local insect populations got wise to these malaise traps that the researchers were using in western germany? Apparently the way that a malaise trap works is that it waits for insects to fly into it's wall, hopes that they crawl up the wall, and then hopes that they crawl right into a bottle filled with ethanol. Now I do not know anything at all about insects…
> Am I crazy for thinking that might be the case? I don’t know; but I wish they would be able to adapt so rapidly. Think how after thousands of years they still don’t understand they can’t fly through transparent glass.
"Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall." Noted for its novelty, 1597.
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The human waste that contributed to the pollution of the river Ganga (or Ganges) was generated by a population that was supported by modern medicine and a whole lot of other modern inventions. It wasn't always this polluted, even though there have been cities on its banks for millennia. And of course industrial waste also added to the problem. You can't compare that population with the "mythical tribe" that is under…
My point is that mythical tribesmen don't scale. It makes absolutely no sense to "cargo cult worship" the mythical tribeman's lack of pollution, when our society is funadmentally built differently. There are some incredibly simple solutions available to us that the "Mythical Tribesman" doesn't have. IE: We can pass a law and regulate pollution in our country, if we can convince enough other people that the costs are…
I think nothing will change as long as economic growth is understood as economic Good . Current economy can't work if there's no economic growth. Banks are among the biggest culprits. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. A new, sustainable economy is needed. I think about it each time I see the Race for the Galaxy card. I've seen a radical example of this among…
Banks are among the biggest culprits. Oh come on. There were no investment banks in Soviet Russia yet the Soviets drove economic growth as hard as they could. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. So what? You can easily grow an economy without consuming more raw materials and a simple thought experiment will prove it: consider that you buy some paper and a pen a…
Consider an economy in which everyone is writing Harry Potters. What's the value?
Or, if that strikes you as too contrived, iPhone apps or YC starups.
What is wealth? Revenue? Value? Cost?
Are there no limits? Hard limits? Based on what?
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I'm repeating that argumentation after Marcin Popkiewicz, a Polish climate expert. He wrote a few fat books about it. No one forces you to take bank loans, but banks definitely foster geometric growth. They want geometric returns on investment. If you don't have constant business growth, borrowing money from bank is losing money. I don't know what would be the right answer. I know what human population is growing at…
Population growth is slowing down as more and more women have access to birth control and choose less children. The estimate is that we'll top out at 9.5 - 10 billion people around mid century.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/hT76d6ii...
I think nothing will change as long as economic growth is understood as economic Good . Current economy can't work if there's no economic growth. Banks are among the biggest culprits. If banks lend money at a 5% interest rate, their customers must grow their businesses by 5%. A new, sustainable economy is needed. I think about it each time I see the Race for the Galaxy card. I've seen a radical example of this among…
A problem that often gets overlooked are the (geo) political ramifications of differences in economic output. I’m not sure if this is an existing hypothesis, but it seems evident to me. If one actor grabs the bigger share of economic growth that puts it in a position of power over others. Nation states that can grow their population, resource extraction and have export surplus can use those things to exert political…
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The sun can supply an awful lot of power. Humans use something like 10 or 20 terawatts of power (constantly), the sun smacks the earth with ~100 petawatts of power.
Does your estimation take into account the energy absorbed by the plans we farm?
https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....