A lot of talk about younger men, but what about middle-aged men leaving the workforce? If I don't get married and have children within the next 5 years, I'm out too since I can retire early.
I don't get it. I mean this is the premise of many sci-fi stories, but humanity has made pretty steady civilized progress since its inferred inception. There isn't much of a reason to believe this pessimism.
Prior civilizations collapsed after over-exploiting their environment, and we're making the same mistake on a global scale. Our complex supply chains based on fossil fuels are rather fragile - we will likely survive a collapse at reduced quality of a life, however total recovery may be slow or impossible depending on remaining resources.
We can produce more food than ever with less energy. Knowledge transfer is always improving, and with computer programs it will be even easier to transfer knowledge.
You guys need to clarify what "a collapse" is. Not eating as much meat? Do you really think that we would not be able to power our computers or not be able to produce rice/wheat on any industrial scale?
The amount of FUD spread without any foundation for it is maddening.
Yes, but civilizations and empires are not representative of the progress of humanity as a whole. Besides, isn't Dark Ages a rejected term by historians now? In addition, what is 200-400 years in the history of civilization? Of course there will be volatility - just like life on an individual level, the stock market, annual crop yields, etc.
An abrupt, significant, and wide-spread regression in quality of life, coupled with cultural and technological stagnation. Something like the Late Bronze age collapse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse )
It is a reasonable low-probability high-risk concern, given (unordered):
* Depleting fossil fuel reserves: most obvious risk; dominant fuel source for transportation and agriculture, dominant energy source for industries, dominant material in many consumer goods.
* Climate change: threatens some regions' agricultural and ocean productivity, pressuring human migration, spreading diseases.
* Exhausted oceans: oceanic deadzones are spreading, loss of fishing as a food source is a serious risk for parts of Asia, which will put additional pressures on agriculture and motivate economic migration.
* Over-use of antibiotics and vaccines: risk of super-bacteria/virus plagues, mostly in agriculture and 3rd world nations.
* Depletion of aquifers: imminent risk amplified by climate change. America's food production is heavily reliant on effectively non-renewable aquifers, depletion or poisoning through fracking are serious risks.
* Globalized economy/supply chains: coupling economies improves efficiency but introduces the risk of cascade failures.
No one of these problems are an existential risk by themselves... but they are all interrelated and poorly understood, which impacts our ability to effectively preempt wide-spread impact.
Humanity will recover should the worst happen, but I think it's better to avoid the set back in the first place.
Mozilla as an organization makes me a bit uncomfortable. I still haven't forgotten the entire Brendan Eich fiasco. Who is to say that extremely politically motivated folks at Mozilla may consider it their duty to expose user(s) in a similar way? How can they purport to be a champion of user privacy after what they did to Brendan Eich?
What? His donation (of public record) specifically against same sex marriage--indicated that he was not a good culture fit. People (inside and outside the organization) chose to point that out when he was promoted.
This really doesn't have anything to do with user privacy in any way whatsoever--nothing about user privacy was surfaced or breached in any way. Nor is there any indication, in mozilla's extremely open source code, that Mozilla would be collecting any information like this.
The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it. Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument.
I'm not here to start conspiracies, I'm simply stating that the entire event left me feeling that there are some big players at Mozilla that will use ethically gray areas to achieve their goals, and the people who indulged in that gray area won and are still part of the organization.
Due to that, I am out. I should state that, politically speaking, I was not in solidarity with Eich's position. I am opposed to what people at Mozilla did.
>The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it.
How exactly is taking publicly available information about a (comparatively) high profile individual and sharing it doxing?
Political donations are public information[1]. As far as I can tell, (and according to Mozilla), the group that made public the information about Eich was The LA Times, in 2012. Two years before he was made CEO[2][3].
In what way is retweeting a two year old newspaper headline about the recently promoted CEO of your company remotely doxxing?
> Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic
That's a strange way of referring to having someone run an organization who actively works to curtail the human rights of some of his employees. And said employees and their supporters speaking out against that.
I don't know why you keep missing the mental leap here: Yeah, people at the company--and outside it--did not want a CEO willing to spend money to actively remove the rights of a group of people. That is the thing they did not want.
They didn't go digging to find something to hurt him: he took action, public and on the record, specifically taking away the rights of others.
It is true, people did not want that, and they did not hide that fact.
Signed,
a gay, now married, 2011 Mozilla intern who did not pick up a full time offer in part because some 2012 news of Eich's donation surfaced around the time I was considering pursuing it.
Doxing is publishing PII. Political donations are NOT PII and are in fact supposed to be public. It is completely legitimate for a CEO's political donations to be scrutinized.
> Mozilla as an organization makes me a bit uncomfortable
I thought you were going to mention the betrayal that caused a lot of ppl to switch (other than the slowness, inferior default tooling, etc). The deal with yahoo. Same thing that soured me on Java. If you're just going to sell out to maintain a company, because you can't support what you built, maybe you overbuilt. Or maybe it's just greed. Either way, never going back.
What did they do exactly? I'm reasonably familiar with the story, but wasn't aware of Mozilla breaching his privacy. Do you just mean the act of speaking out against him in a public way?
He made a publicly recorded donation of $1,000 to oppose same sex marriage. Mozilla employees spoke out against his fitness to run a diverse organization. He resigned.
The only real black eye for Mozilla in this story is that they promoted him at all. If he's just some dude that does his own work, doesn't manage people, and keeps his mouth shut, then, maybe you let his abhorrent opinion slide. But, he was literally the CEO and would make decisions that would impact lots of people.
Anecdotal, but I put off dating altogether when my salary was low and home prices were skyrocketing in my home town (San Diego). I left San Diego altogether two years ago, but I'm still suffering (perhaps too drastic of a word) from the affects of not even being in a relationship for over half a decade. Meaning, being with women used to come naturally to me, now it's generally awkward after being single for so long.
Speak for yourself. I'm petrified by the prospect of lack of growth. It is what our economy is built on, and a larger population could result in better science. There is plenty of land in the United States. Even our cities in the rust belt are underpopulated.
The growth-based economic model is flawed. Countries should be rewarded economically/politically by some sort of sustainability index where all of their positive/negative externalities are accounted for.
We do not need more people on this planet. It will only increase the likelihood of a major catastrophe like famine -> war -> nuclear war, which will then put scientific research back decades if not centuries.
> Countries should be rewarded economically/politically by some sort of sustainability index where all of their positive/negative externalities are accounted for.
From which growth-based economies will those rewards be taken? If not that way, then how?
The whole point is a paradigm shift where sustainability is rewarded instead of uncontrolled growth. The reward can probably be political clout, to drive the direction of things moving forward. Essentially that is what we reward uncontrolled growth with currently.
The whole point is that I am assuming there isn't enough incentive on a large scale to deal with environment problem BEFORE they occur. With global warming, once we go past the point of no return, it won't be a quick fix. We will throw the equilibrium out of whack. If we were to pragmatically balance things now/going back a few decades, we could avoid the big swing that will occur.
So basically, the population may fall from 8 billion to 3 billion because of famine/war, etc. Immensely painful things... Or we could just have pragmatic restraint through rewarding sustainability, and it would naturally level out to 5/6 billion or whatever that number is... but without the immense pain of billion fighting/dying.
Let those places grow feral again. We don't need to take up the entire damn planet as a species. Or at least the entire "fertile" bits of it.
I could not be more diametrically opposed to your position. It's clear to me we have far too many people as it is, and the only way out is through population decline. Anything else is ridiculous line noise to argue about. Once you solve the CO2 climate change problem you have about 10 other just-as-bad crises right behind it if population growth continues.
Sure, as you say there could be some more black swan events in science/technology that technically lets us expand in the short term much like modern agriculture has. I don't see that as a positive as it simply delays the inevitable and makes it even more impossible to recover from.
I suppose it's a matter of how much you appreciate human achievement. Detroit could become the realization of a new Metropolis. Hyperloop could be built between Detroit and Cleveland and other cities with much less regulatory constraint. The promise of these mid-western cities excites me much more than the west coast because we do not need to be bogged down by preservation of natural landscapes there. They are the areas that could have delivered millennials from their stagnation if momentum had taken hold.
There is no choice but to grow. People like to travel, conduct scientific research, and face and conquer new technical challenges. You cannot do this without more people and the productivity they provide. Period.
The value of general labor generally decreases with advancements in tools (automation).
There are enough people in the US now, enough children, that our education system could focus better on technological and scientific advances for those who show the aptitude (by increasing opportunity and decreasing inequal access to education and jobs).
Yeah, on this same forum we complain constantly about how automation is going to remove a bunch of jobs. Wouldn't having fewer kids solve that problem really nicely?
I agree with your conclusion, but I think it is due to a different pathway. Fewer developers will be necessary as code-sharing and packaging has improved and standardized. Trust me, people just entering development are still pretty terrible.
