One or two is "all of them"?
Back to general trolling I see. Wasn't your vacation long enough?
Predictions of Environmental Doom
- Thread starter madanthonywayne
- Start date
Back to general trolling I see. Wasn't your vacation long enough?
You dont have to respond.
Its hard to just say all of them. Too many are just opinion or even part of one reason, given that one reason does not omit other reasons or the fact that something would have occurred anyway. That is the issue with some of the borderline ones.
You managed it.
Yet, as usual, despite a request to do so, you fail completely to support your contention...
There are two distinct lists. Which one are you referring to? Quinn can pick the issue to discuss.
What do you mean which one am I referring to?
I quoted your comments.
YOU stated "all of them".
All of them in the second list and some of them in the first list. As i already explained:
Too many are just opinion or even part of one reason, given that one reason does not omit other reasons or the fact that something would have occurred anyway. That is the issue with some of the borderline ones.
An opinion (the post in question and in the lists) is difficult to debate, so in my opinion all of them.
Thanks for finally clarifying that.
And all you've done, again, is avoid supporting your claim...
The list (items) is what is being debated, should be obvious...no?
Do you make a special effort to be incoherent?
Correct. Fraggle's post. It contains two lists.
You claimed, originally, that "only one or two are accurate", and THEN stated "all of them" were inaccurate.
Without specifying that you were treating the lists separately.
Do you get it now?
And still you don't justify your claims...
Maybe you should get up in the afternoon!
OK.
Perhaps you can pick one.
I may log off for awhile, a day or so. Maybe.
OK.
Perhaps you can pick one.
I may log off for awhile, a day or so. Maybe.
First one in the second list regarding surplus capital.
So? It's the rate of deceleration that matters, not the fact of it. Are these populations slowing down fast enough to avoid disaster? Can they?fraggle said:
So? To extrapolate from that recent feature of Western industrial economics to a vision of the human population leveling off on its own, short of disaster, is completely unwarranted.fraggle said:
You are the one extrapolating from the features of a doomed existing paradigm - the Western industrial wealth boom is not repeatable or adequately expandable, and to assume its features will even characterize the new ways (let alone prove mysteriously adequate to the coming difficulties) is naive.fraggle said:
And yet, all of the available data supports fraggles assertions. The second derivative in India is negative, the first derivative in mainland china is negative, even in Africa, the second derivative is showing signs of levelling off, or having levelled off.
It's actually not prosperity as much as it is women's rights and ability to earn an income that brings down the birthrate.
Icy's right, we're not sustainable ATM
And just because the population will decline doesn't mean it'll happen fast enough.
Also doesn't mean we're not already overcrowded and burning up our resources.
Icy's right, we're not sustainable ATM
And just because the population will decline doesn't mean it'll happen fast enough.
Also doesn't mean we're not already overcrowded and burning up our resources.
Which would be just swell if I mentioned the second derivative at the global scale, wouldn't it.
But I didn't, not in the post you're responding to anyway. I gave specific examples of the first and second derivatives in developing regions, and stated that they were behaving in the same way they had in developed regions.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Good grief! If you're interested in this stuff, don't you read the business pages of your newspaper? Look at Borders [correction: I wrote Barnes & Noble originally], a perfect example of a once-mighty corporation that didn't see the Paradigm Shift coming. Just a day or two ago it was announced that more books are now sold in digital media than on dead trees. Keep your eyes open and some other company will soon buy B&N for a fraction of its book value, and find a way to make a profit by selling off or repurposing its physical plant, trademarks, inventory, etc. The same thing happened to venerable old Tower Records a while back. Target Stores is now a conglomerate that grows by scavenging the corpses of its competitors, such as Mervyn's, FedMart and GemCo.
It's not easy since it's impossible to predict the details of a Paradigm Shift with any accuracy. If you haven't read Toffler, Naisbitt and the other futurists, that would be a good place to start. Many people are still making disastrous mistakes because they're not familiar with the predictions Toffler made in Future Shock forty years ago, which are now well underway and bonehead obvious. In my line of work I can't help but have one line from that book replay in my head every day: "As once-efficient bureaucracies sputter and fail..." Whether you're talking about General Motors or the United States government, they're all sputtering and failing.
I start by assuming that almost all large corporations will disappear. Sure, a few of them comprise or maintain the infrastructure of the Information Age, such as Microsoft and FedEx. But with CAD/CAM making the "manufacture" of short runs or even single objects economically viable, in general bigger is no longer better.
I assume that work will become decentralized. Not only will people spend more time at home, or perhaps in shared satellite workspaces if they don't want to be bothered by their own children, but without the need to "go to work" every day they'll be able to live wherever they want. Some of us love cities and will continue to make them viable, but others would rather live in smaller towns or the middle of nowhere. One day there will be no reason for an employee of an American firm not to live in Belarus, the Philippines or Ecuador if he likes it there. As a corollary of this prediction, we will eventually reduce our dependence on petroleum, more than one-fourth of which is wasted on commuting.
I assume that the world will become more peaceful. Not only are we old folks less interested in making war, but the internet itself is a powerful force for collegiality and tolerance. Remember Americans weeping over the real-time cell phone video of Neda dying in the street in Tehran. I don't think any American president would be dumb enough to suggest bombing Iran any more. People on the other side of the planet are no longer statistical abstractions: they have names, faces, families, hopes and dreams just like us. As soon as places like Afghanistan, Palestine and Burma become more "wired," their people will become part of our virtual family too.
I assume that the new commodity will be information, and the work that most people do will be concerned with it, as other forms of work become almost completely automated. As I mentioned, this, in combination with the halting of population growth and the greying of the population, will turn economics upside down.
The only suggestion I can offer is to be on your toes. Don't stake your livelihood on an obsolescent technology. Don't assume that the country you now live in will be a nice place to live when your children grow up.
Hardly. People listened to him.
China certainly did. India is doing so as well, without the draconian government measures. That's about one-third of the world's population right there.
U.N. agencies have discovered that the world poverty rate is falling twice as fast as they predicted fifteen years ago. It's already reached their thirty-year target: less than one billion people in poverty. In Africa, for the first time since anyone's been keeping score, less than half the people live in poverty. In Latin America they've had to redefine the word "poor," from a dollar a day to $100 a month, in order to have a significant number of poor people to count.
Tell that to the experts. Absolutely everyone who is in the demographic business predicts population to stabilize in just about one hundred years and then start dropping. The old "doubling every thirty years" was a model of the mid-twentieth century, when the Third World had been given enough vaccines and antibiotics to keep their twelve-child families alive, but no incentive to have fewer children. By 1980 the doubling rate had dropped to sixty years and today it's more like a hundred.
You're still thinking inside the box. Wealth in the old paradigm was tangible. Cars, jewelry, toys, bigger houses. Wealth today is increasingly virtual. Most of the things I treasure, like my music and photo libraries, are digital. I use a cheap electronic keyboard to compose my own music, and when my band develops a professional rendition of it we put it on our website and everyone can listen to it. The dollar-cost of this kind of wealth is negligible.
My wife is a writer. She hasn't quite made the transition to full-time career yet, but people who have can sell their books in e-format for a couple of dollars--a price point at which a large number of people will buy them--a significant portion of which is paid to them. Some of them are making six-figure incomes without a publisher.
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