Why, it’s really good?
I was going to make the same suggestion, but to compete with Paperspace they should offer an image that comes with all the course dependencies preinstalled.
That’s what happens when you have this many people. For the kind of population growth, it’s either we stop having so many people, or the animals die. It’s us or them. Why is this so hard to understand? No amount of talking points and musing on environmentalism will take away those facts of human existence.
How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it? Get real about human development and the necessities of human development.
It's a function of lingering ingorance and misaligned incentives. We have the technology and the institutions that can prevent the majority of this damage, despite our large numbers.
I am genuinely curious. Clean energy systems exist, but they are either expensive, restricted and dangerous to proliferate or expensive, inefficient and inconvenient.
What institutions exist that can make clean energy palatable to all the human societies that require it for their survival—at-scale, that they are all ignoring?
Leaving energy aside, what other powerful means of doing good to ecosystems as a whole, are they simply ignoring? Is there any quantification of the damage?
I am most certainly not trying to attack your position. I pretty much believe the same things you said. But we should have these answers documented. Is there a single source for these things on the web?
He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.
He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group activities, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.
Five culture types based on food getting technology: 1 Foraging; 2 Hunter-gatherer; 3 Agricultural (cities); 5 Pastoral (Animal herding); 5 Industrial
Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up, "Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."
(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be trouble...
Holmgrin's scenarios:
1 Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't solve the problem, only postpones it.)
2 Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.
3 Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have gone.
4 "Atlantis" - i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.
"Peak Wood" - no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a close. Wow.
Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.
The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in these subjects.
> 2 Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.
Ok, we have something like 450 nuclear reactors globally. IIRC bumping that number up 10 times would give us roughly two times our current global energy usage (ie fuels and electricity).
That's a margin that could reasonably address energy requirements for synthetic fuel production & delivery, sustain the additional energy we want to use for cleaner but energy demanding electrical processes in industry, and arguably put us on footing to end global poverty. Atomic process heat is wicked-good for desalination, critical to avoid water-related wars. "Next gen" tech (from the 70s...), conceivably could let us think about replenishing continental aquifers, and all round have enough energy to continue exploring space. All without any social engineering or major lifestyle or geopolitical reshaping.
I'm a big fan of solar, but our global solar energy budget has some tricky hurdles before we get to 200% current global energy usage. And I'm not enthused about anything that requires a centrally managed government (that doesn't exist today), managing life and death. It sounds scary and ripe for dystopian outcomes.
It seems that all these points assume naturally unlimited and indefinite population growth, but it is projected that the world population will reach a certain point and then level off (see https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth for some charts).
The basic argument is that increasing the education of women leads to fewer children. You can already see this in developed countries which are actually starting to exhibit negative population growth (e.g. Japan).
Sorry it's been a long day, so I don't have the energy to write much.
One simple place to start is placing large taxes on the most harfmul activities (e.g. generating co2). This should incentive increased investment in safer energy sources.
Ideally, this should be a multi-national effort led by all the wealthy countries. They should also create investment funds to help more quickly developing nations move past lower tech, harfmul energy sources (need a lot oversight here to make sure there isn't any economic exploitation).
I'm not super well-researched, but there does seem to be a lot of effective, actionable solutions that we can start today. The above are just a small sample.
One simple place to start is placing large taxes on the most harfmul activities (e.g. generating co2). This should incentive increased investment in safer energy sources.
This was the basis for the Kyoto Protocol [1] in 1997, which sought to limit greenhouse gas emissions by making organizations pay for a license to emit greenhouse gases. It even put most of the burden on developed nations, as you suggest.
Now, you may argue that the costs for licenses were not steep enough, or that the resulting emissions trading market diluted the effectiveness of the regulation, or that the US' refusal to ratify it makes effectively a failed attempt -- but what you propose has been tried before.
Understand. Thanks for stating some options - but like you said, it’s not 100% in the hands of the currently developing economies... but it would appear that a lot of commentary hates on them for being the polluters right now.
> How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it? Get real about human development and the necessities of human development.
Not all of that environmental and human damage was necessary. Much of it was out of ignorance, and more was out greed, combined with a callous disregard for human life.
I’m saying enough with these lamentations about the environment, would these people rather be living in the woods? It’s complete nonsense. Destroying the environment has been a necessary step to human evolution.
This feels brittle. Does that include lamentations about global warming? If so: I’m afraid I disagree. If not: that’s a bit arbitrary.
I understand the sentiment, but sometimes, a complaint is valid. And making it over and over and over again is also valid. It is the first step towards fixing it. If we stop acknowledging this problem we lose all hope for ever finding a way out.
I would say the litany of woeful clamouring is already driving SOME people to consciously consume , buy electric cars, (or we can focus on conscientious vegetarians, if you don’t like the global warming analogy) etc. Sure , it could be a lot better, but it could also be a lot worse.
If nobody ever complained , I bet there would be a lot fewer vegetarians.
Are you legit saying, "I don't know if extinct-ing most of the species on the planet will wipe us out. It might. That seems like a worthwhile hypothesis to test empirically!"?
When the dice are that loaded, you throw them at your own peril.
When they're that loaded, you keep throwing them because it's more profitable at everyone's peril.
Sounds like you agree it's not certain but you're exaggerating the risk to scare people who don't understand risks. It might be appropriate to yell during a Greenpeace march but I would rather have intelligent discussions than just yell slogans at each other. It's like a parent telling their teen "If you don't wear a seat belt, you'll die in a car crash." It's obviously not true but dying in a car crash is so bad that it's worth telling a lie to increase the chance of saving their life. That's what the parent would desperately yell at them as they run off with the car keys, but not if they want to develop an independent person who can make complex decisions for themselves.
There's a very good reason we don't run experiments to test, e.g., the hypothesis that a certain chemical might cause birth defects: the consequences of the hypothesis being accurate are morally abhorrent.
You don't do something that might kill or maim people to test whether or not doing the thing does kill or maim people — unless you're Mengele or something.
Is it really that hard to extrapolate from the specific case to the general? If we get this one wrong, we're dead. Even the possibility makes it incumbent upon us to tread exceptionally carefully.
EDIT: This, "Hey, now. Let's have a rational, skeptical discussion about this" is a disingenuous tactic, in the first place. If we played that game, we'd still be debating whether or not rising CO₂ levels are dangerous, as they crossed the 500ppm threshold. We know, for practical purposes, that this is coming, unless we change course. We know the consequences of its happening. But we're still somehow dithering, apparently in order to convince trenchant outliers who have identity-level investments in being trenchant outliers, that they're wrong. That ship will never sail.
"Oops. Yeah, I guess that was a bad idea after all," is not an reasonable response to an existential threat.
"You don't do something that might kill or maim people to test whether or not doing the thing does kill or maim people — unless you're Mengele or something."
Have you checked out the self-driving car threads recently?
Nope. That's not what they're testing. They're testing whether or not the thing even works — which necessarily includes "doesn't kill people", sure. But that's not the specific thing being measured; it's a consequence of the system not being ready yet.
Your argument is more like, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent to see how many people it kills", versus, "We're testing this new chemotherapy agent for safety and efficacy" (phase I and II, respectively). We aren't specifically screening for deadliness; we're trying to determine the therapeutic index of the agent, and get a baseline on its side effects (which, yes, may include death).
It's a subtle distinction, but it's a critical one.
All that aside, it's fundamentally disanalogous, anyway, because the populations in chemo clinical trials are already sick, and have given informed consent. Dude walking down the street getting smoked by a Tesla that thought he was a wall, not so much.
> There's a very good reason we don't run experiments to test, e.g., the hypothesis that a certain chemical might cause birth defects: the
consequences of the hypothesis being accurate are morally abhorrent.
Just because we don't know if it causes birth defects doesn't mean every untested chemical certainly does cause birth defects. In fact it's obvious that since we don't know, we don't know! You might save people by telling them that lie but it's still a lie and won't help anyone understand nature.
You're really confusing "We don't know if ignoring the environment will wipe us out" with "Let's ignore the environment and see what happens.". I'm not proposing we conduct that experiment, just pointing out that we don't know what the outcome will be.
Since you can't see the fault in your analogy, I'll tell you. People have already tried that and we have biology that tells us what would happen without those things. So we know the answer without having to test it again. It's not comparable to continuing to change the environment the way we are, which is something we don't know the effects of.
Ecosystems are massively interdependent. There is necessarily an inflection point where an ecosystem is so depleted that it can't carry itself any more, let alone us. That's called "collapse" and it tends to be permanent.
Species are currently going extinct at a rate we've previously only seen in the fossil record — from which we've estimated that the current rate of species extinction to be on the order of 10-100 times that of any previous extinction event.
Then, consider that there are key roles in an ecosystem, without which its collapse is more or less a certainty. One of those roles is pollinating.
The collapse of bee and butterfly populations, and our having to resort to commercial pollination (because something on the order of 3/4 of the world's food plants require pollinators, and many of the essential nutrients — things the body can't synthesize itself, and must obtain through diet — come from plants which critically depend on pollinators, while wild bee populations have fallen to alarming levels) is a dangerous leading indicator.
We're well on the path towards a collapse. If we don't avert it, things will not go well for us. When the things we eat all die, they aren't there for us to eat any more. When that happens, we die.
Life on Earth has never been wiped out, no matter how bad it got. And we're not even talking about glaciers over every continent bad (humans survived that), just less fish and some other things. Not even always making them extinct, just less of each species. You're assuming that if we carry on without worrying about it, we will make important species extinct. That's only an assumption and not obvious.
How can you destroy water? It literally falls out of the sky. Israel makes drinking water from sea water. How can you destroy all food? There's no way we can wipe out all plants and animals, and we can eat lots of them, even if they're not our favorite food today. You can even eat cockroaches.
You're confusing actually destroying the things we depend on with carelessly using them and not trying to make sure they survive. An obvious counterexample - we do our best to eat as many cows as we can, yet the species is thriving! Maybe fish farms will do that to desirable fish species too. We didn't even wipe out sperm whales despite whalers doing their best to find all they could and having no concern for conservation.
I agree there's a _risk_ of that happening though. We just don't know for sure. My concern is with people who claim to know for sure when actually they're taking a dishonest extreme position to make their political point stronger. Of course we should be careful not to destroy the environment because if we don't, the downside to being wrong is terrible. Somehow most of the people arguing about this seem to be victims of their own extremism and unable to distinguish risk from certainty.
Water is doable as long as you have enough energy to decontaminate it, which is not really a given. Food, I'm not nearly so confident as you. Cows thrive partly because of what we do with them and partly because of all the natural stuff we can use to do so. Sperm whales weren't wiped out because that particular act of environmental destruction was checked before the species disappeared. You can find plenty of examples of species that were hunted to extinction, that just happens to not be one of them.
To say that unchecked destruction of the environment won't necessarily destroy us is the same as saying that we'll be able to create closed-loop life support systems that can operate indefinitely without any outside organic input, and that we'll be able to do it fast enough to save ourselves. I'm highly dubious of that.
You're assuming that 'unchecked destruction of the environment" means all important species will be made extinct. That's not true. We do our best to destroy various pests but they keep surviving. Many species have been wiped out and everything's still going fine. How much damage do we have to do to cause important ecosystems to collapse? I'll bet nobody knows because it's too complicated. Again, it might happen but nobody's certain so it's a lie to say that it's certain.
Something I'm pretty sure of though is that we can never destroy all food-producing life on earth by just eating everything till it's gone. Whatever's left will thrive and can be used to make food. Maybe not as tasty or as cheap, but we won't need a fully artificial life support system. Even in an extreme case of desertification, we can still grow plants indoors, and rain will still fall on our "deserts". And that's the very extreme! In reality, maybe the price of beef will go up a little as farmers have to spend more on feeding them.
I was nodding along with you--yes, the population explosion is destroying the environment--until I realized, with mixed bemusement and horror, that you were in favor of this.
Just for starters: Why is "the Industrial Revolution happened" an argument against trying to do better in the future?
It points to a hard fact about what kind of things cause environmental destruction but are also massive improvements for humanity. The picture painted where environmental destruction is superfluous is completely wrong and disingenuous.
It may be that the Industrial Revolution couldn't have happened without massive pollution, sure. The Industrial Revolution is long over. Why should we recapitulate the past when we have radically more advanced technology and a far better understanding of its effects? If you're in favor of progress, it should be obvious that we can do better than the Industrial Revolution.
Don't forget the plants! They're dying as well through the effects of agriculture, draining swamps for new subdivisions, and such. And from the few invasive species that thrive to the detriment of many native species.
Although I suppose the animals are getting the worst of it since we actively go after many of them.
>How could the industrial boom in China or the USA in the late 1800s and early 1900s have happened without emvironmental destruction? How can growth happen in China now without it?
Possibly if they had used solar-thermal power generation and focused on battery tech instead of exploiting petroleum so heavily.
I'm reading "The Progress of Invention in the 19th Century"[0] right now, and it's at least partly dissuading me of the whole "We couldn't possibly have developed without fossil fuels" idea, along with the similar "If we collapse now we'll never build back up without abundant surface fossil fuels."
Worthwhile electric generators really weren't that far behind worthwhile steam engines. Without any fossil fuels, I think we would've just built lots of hydro and wind.
There was already heavy investment in steam technology. Using the sun the boil water instead of coal or wood is much less resource intensive and completely eliminates external supply chains.
Did they have enough tech by that point to even begin to figure out mass manufacturing of solar cells to focus enough energy into water to make steam? Burning something that burns well is a much more intuitive and scalable process...
Also, mining the easy stocks (at that point) is a low tech affair too. Which was powered by... combustion of fuel and human labor.
We still can’t make solar panels with 100% efficiency, what hope did they have?
Good points. But lens building is a complex endeavour that requires tooling at the manufacturing level (especially computing power!) - no matter the choice of available material, yes? Doing it with high precision at a civilisation-powering scale seems like an impossible ask of a species that was still considering much of their Home planet to be “new” (Americas).
This is propaganda. China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation. Articles like this are great for clicks on a website.
Edit: which Chinese tech companies are actually dominant? All of them are copies of American tech companies propped up by their government. Where is the market penetration into the USA? Where is the competition? There is none.
Author is Sequoia's Michael Moritz who has a decent amount of credibility here. I think his last few articles on China have been more around warning US tech companies not to get complacent, rather than trying to convince people that China is a tech holy land.
As for the part about being an uneducated factory nation, the latest PISA findings from 2015 would have China scoring higher than the US on math (10th vs. 25th) and science (6th vs. 40th), but slightly lower than the US on reading (27th vs. 24th).
> Sequoia's Michael Moritz who has a decent amount of credibility
but you have to also think whether he's biased in wanting to push the view that the next big tech hub is in China, because he's invested in the region. Making the hype machine so that when time comes to exit, there's plenty of doofus who will believe the hype and buy into the market.
it's very hard to know what to believe, and even more effort to do research. Most people won't be doing it, so it's an effective method to generate hype.
> but you have to also think whether he's biased in wanting to push the view that the next big tech hub is in China, because he's invested in the region.
He puts his money where his mouth is. I made another comment here that it was refreshing as it didn't predict the collapse of China which has been peddled for the past few decades by so-called experts - they could peddle any view they want with no financial repercussion.
Secondly, even if Moritz was biased and published this article for his own gains, it's not as if we (foreigners) have easy access to invest in the region.
> it's very hard to know what to believe, and even more effort to do research. Most people won't be doing it, so it's an effective method to generate hype.
I heartily agree with you here, but you have to admit for every article like this, there are 10x more about the imminent demise of China, so I don't buy the argument that this article's hype will override 'collapse' articles which generate much more clicks.
>This is propaganda. China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation
LOL.
First, that's the same argument they were making back in the day for Japan (the "uneducated factory nation", the "copy cats", the "cheap knockoffs" etc). Funny how that turned out.
Second, labor costs are not the relevant factor, so automation wont matter much to bring factory jobs back. It's all about the supply chain:
Oh, and as sibling says: "the latest PISA findings from 2015 would have China scoring higher than the US on math (10th vs. 25th) and science (6th vs. 40th), but slightly lower than the US on reading (27th vs. 24th)."
It's easy to make fun of previously underdeveloped nations that started from an uneducated and less advance point 30 and 60 years ago, but the problem is that they can catch up (like Japan and South Korea, an insignificant economic wasteland after WWII, did). Especially if their rivals are on the decline themselves. Rome didn't last forever.
Look at Japan, their economy has been stagnant since the 80s, propped up by government market manipulation. They are almost completely irrelevant. Which innovative companies does China have that aren’t complete rip offs of American ones? Where is the penetration by those companies into the USA?
>Look at Japan, their economy has been stagnant since the 80s, propped up by government market manipulation. They are almost completely irrelevant.
They're still "the third-largest in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). and is the world's second largest developed economy".
I'd take that level of irrelevance any day.
Besides that, Japan's situation doesn't tell us much.
>Which innovative companies does China have that aren’t complete rip offs of American ones?
DJI would be a good example. They're the Apple of drones, and are doing great in the gimbal business as well. No American company comes even close.
There are others of course, and more will emerge. Already they make phones on par with the best of the Android world.
Besides, which innovative companies did Japan have before the 70s that weren't complete rip offs of American ones? And which innovative companies did the US have (before the mid-19th century) that weren't complete rip offs of European ones? And yet here we are now...
Over Half of the Japanese stock market is owned by the government bank. The whole economy is a shell propped up by quantitative easing financial policies.
Great drones. We have google, they have cheap manufacture produced drones.
I keep hearing “China is coming”, “they will have more”, ....
It never comes to fruition. That have a massive population supported by manufacturing wages that will all lose jobs when automation takes over.
In a number of gaming sectors, it's already done. Steam is majority Chinese players, mobile gaming revenue has been from China. Steel (until the tariffs) has been dominated by cheap Chinese offerings, killing off a bunch of suppliers in the last 15 years. I dunno what you're talking about, but reality doesn't care what you think anyway.
>Over Half of the Japanese stock market is owned by the government bank. The whole economy is a shell propped up by quantitative easing financial policies.
Well, different countries use different strategies. Half of the US economy is based upon the country's military might, and (through it) imposing favorable deals, bullying, controlling oil and trade routes, IP laws and so on (plus "quantitative easing financial policies" and trillion dollar bailouts, subsidies and handouts to Detroit and co). I'll take Japan's "quantitative easing financial policies" any day...
>Great drones. We have google, they have cheap manufacture produced drones.
Well, they also have their own Google: Baidu.
Heck even Google's page-rank style concept was pioneered by a Chinese (the founder of Baidu) before Google was a thing:
"A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[18] The technology in RankDex was patented by 1999[19] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[20][21] Larry Page referenced Li's work in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank." (Wikipedia)
>That have a massive population supported by manufacturing wages that will all lose jobs when automation takes over.
They have a massive internal market, 4 times the US in population, strong growth, have been the world's largest economy back before (for many centuries), have a much older and more resilient culture, have the tech and the factories, and they will own the future, as the tired Europe and US give up the spirit.
Rome didn't last forever either...
>I keep hearing “China is coming”, “they will have more”, ....
Well, I don't know for how long you "keep hearing that", but if you hear it for e.g. the last 2-3 decades, then it's also accompanied by massive Chinese growth those last 2-3 decades.
So it's not like you merely hear it without anything coming out of it. On the contrary, it's one of the most well supported statements.
If you mean why they haven't already taken over the lead, well, it took US nearly a century, plus two whole world wars that torn and beat Europe up, to get to be the world player that it has been the last 70-80 years.
The world economy is not like the tech market, to expect something to go from start to domination in a few years...
> Half of the US economy is based upon the country's military might, and (through it) imposing favorable deals, bullying, controlling oil and trade routes, IP laws and so on (plus "quantitative easing financial policies" and trillion dollar bailouts, subsidies and handouts to Detroit and co). I'll take Japan's "quantitative easing financial policies" any day...
Bluntly, this is BS. A bit of the US economy, yes. Half? Not even close. But you seem to have an ax you want to grind with respect to the US, and reality would not serve you as well as hyperbole.
>Bluntly, this is BS. A bit of the US economy, yes. Half? Not even close.
I'm not talking directly -- like the arms industry and the oil industry and so on. I'm talking about the cascading effect that pumps up and propels the rest.
> China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation.
I'm not sure we've travelled to the same China. The country is capable, talented and very driven. If you ignore the surveillance state it has a lot of same characteristics that once made America exceptional.
Even if this wasn't written by someone with the Sequoia Capital brand behind him Ive seen enough anecdotally to believe it.
> Articles like this are great for clicks on a website.
That may be true, but I do find it refreshing over the thousands of articles claiming that China would collapse over the past few decades (and yet, somehow these experts failed to predict the AFC, GFC, dot-com bubble,...). Surely you consider those click-bait as well.
Not true. Look at places like shenzhen which is like the silicon valley of china. Theyre inventing new technologies just like here in the usa. It isnt the same in terms of amount but theyre on their way for sure.
I feel that the rise of populism like Trump and Brexit, and the breakdown of the liberal world order, and democracy itself, are fundamentally important issues.
That said, they're so important that they could very easily 'crowd out' all the other news here, and there are many other places to discuss these things, so despite - or rather because of - their importance, these issues should probably be kept off of HN.
And truth be told, it's time to stop chatting and start getting personally involved to counter this crap.
