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Mozi posted:Quite frankly we're all going to die one way or the other; more food now just means that more will starve later. They've been saying that since Malthus. Not that I disagree that Earth's overpopulated for our current technological level, but I suspect in the near term (next 20 to 30 years) pollution's going to be more of an issue than starvation. E: And even then, the issue will be inequities in food distribution rather than actually not having enough to feed everyone in absolute terms. CottonWolf fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Nov 27, 2017 |
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Nov 27, 2017 21:42
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CottonWolf posted:They've been saying that since Malthus. Not that I disagree that Earth's overpopulated for our current technological level, but I suspect in the near term (next 20 to 30 years) pollution's going to be more of an issue than starvation.
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Nov 27, 2017 21:48
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Sure, but that's because pollution is going to be causing the starvation. Touche. But I was thinking more like air pollution and water contamination causing "direct" damage rather than, for example, climate change causing vast swathes of India to be inhospitable for growing crops, though that'll certainly happen too.
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Nov 27, 2017 21:53
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Ogmius815 posted:"If it were up to me, I'd just cause a famine that would bring the world to its knees". The idea that you need to spray several billion tons of poisons to be able to feed people is a complete lie, by the way. Nevertheless Europe produces too much foodstuff and tons are wasted. We have thousands of farmers -- farmers who do use pesticides and fertilizers by the way; not hippy weirdos who grow organic food -- who are driven to suicide because they cannot pay their debt because they are forced to sell below their production cost. We have thousands upon thousands of hectares of arable land that are turned into suburbia. Why? Because we don't loving need them. We destroy farmland to build McMansions on it because we don't loving need to grow that much food. We pay farmers like poo poo because there's so much food available that the offer far exceeds the demand. Famine is never going to be caused by lack of production. Poor logistics, meaning that the food produced isn't brought to the people who need it? Yes. Horrible capitalist system, meaning that the people who are starving are simply not able to buy the food? Yes. But lack of produced food? No. By the way, permaculture is the system that has the highest yield per area. You'll grow a lot more food with permaculture than with intensive monoculture. Cat Mattress fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Nov 27, 2017 |
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Nov 27, 2017 22:01
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Everything causes cancer
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Nov 27, 2017 22:47
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Cat Mattress posted:
Cool genocide. Also permaculture doesn't work when the vast majority of the food produced will be shipped out to where people actually live, and all their piss and poo poo isn't being shipped right back so, good luck with that. Cat Mattress posted:By the way, permaculture is the system that has the highest yield per area. You'll grow a lot more food with permaculture than with intensive monoculture. This isn't true at all either. Part of the whole point of permaculture is that you are growing a lot less food in order that you do not need to bring in outside materials or send materials you already have out.
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Nov 27, 2017 23:48
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You don't know what permaculture is.
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Nov 27, 2017 23:59
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Cat Mattress posted:Is glyphosate carcinogenic? Here, we have a study from Monsanto that says it totally isn't. Here we have an independent study that says it actually is. Here we have an independent study that says it isn't, but it only looked at pure glyphosate, instead of looking at the actual chemical mix that is actually used in actual products that are actually sold. Note: 1) the IARC people have not exactly been squeaky clean either and if your attitude when evaluating study results is "follow the shillbux" then organic food (largely anti glyphosate) is an industry with more money than Monsanto, and it's just as corrupt 2) the "probably carcinogenic" category of IARC that everyone keeps freaking out about is somewhat meaningless, given that besides glyphosate it also includes eating red meat, taking chloramphenicol (a popular antibiotic), working uneven shifts, and drinking moderately hot (>65°C) beverages 3) "ban glyphosate" is not actually reducing harm, because glyphosate replaced really loving toxic herbicides that would cause much greater health (and likely environmental) problems if re-introduced in response to a glyphosate ban, instead of having a LD50 comparable to table salt and maybe being slightly unhealthy in small amounts Cat Mattress posted:By the way, permaculture is the system that has the highest yield per area. You'll grow a lot more food with permaculture than with intensive monoculture. [citation needed], generally minmaxing intensive high yield farming vs CO2 output and land use is the best point to start when making farming suck less suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 00:15
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:[citation needed], generally minmaxing intensive high yield farming vs CO2 output and land use is the best point to start when making farming suck less The entire point of permaculture is that you grow several different but complementary crops at the same place. You make that smartly and you get quasi-symbiotic relationships between them, which allow you to greatly reduce the need for fertilizers and pesticides. So you get several harvests instead of just one.
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Nov 28, 2017 00:23
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Cat Mattress posted:The entire point of permaculture is that you grow several different but complementary crops at the same place. You make that smartly and you get quasi-symbiotic relationships between them, which allow you to greatly reduce the need for fertilizers and pesticides. Yeah but I want to know the actual tons/ha for all the crops you're trying to grow together, because "complementary crops" and "multiple harvests" can mean everything from "multiple almost optimal yield crops synergise to give us the best agriculture ever" to "it's merely a slightly less blatant failure than trying to grow each crop at minimum intensity on its own". Like, I think it's plausible that permaculture could be a good idea in some cases like say fruit trees and shade crops and a nitrogen fixer (but still want to see numbers to back that up), but it's definitely [citation loving needed] for staple crops that make up the bulk of land use. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 00:31
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Cat Mattress posted:You don't know what permaculture is. Yes I do. Permaculture is a concept of living and farming that relies on keeping things sustainable within a close-knit environment. You may implement it on various scales from single family households up to small villages, but what you do is have differing gradations in "human-touched" environment around the central living and cultivation zone, with progressively less human intervention and cultivation until the outer edges, at which point you leave room between the next permaculture installation for nature to do as it must. This is what is behind it being the permanent in perma-culture - you are building as much of a self-sustaining ecosystem as you can, which is also why it doesn't operate if most of the food is being sent off. You would then need to import supplies to replace what's being taken away. Cat Mattress posted:The entire point of permaculture is that you grow several different but complementary crops at the same place. You make that smartly and you get quasi-symbiotic relationships between them, which allow you to greatly reduce the need for fertilizers and pesticides. That is not permaculture, although it is something within permaculture. It's also something in a whole bunch of different farming styles.
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Nov 28, 2017 01:29
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MiddleOne posted:Well it's not like they could have predicted that the UK would actually be stupid enough to leave the EU. IIRC, article 50 was written so that there would be some sort of procedure regulating the exit process just in case a member state transformed into a dictatorship, but in such a way that nobody in their right minds would want to put their country through the exit process.
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Nov 28, 2017 07:38
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Pluskut Tukker posted:IIRC, article 50 was written so that there would be some sort of procedure regulating the exit process just in case a member state transformed into a dictatorship, but in such a way that nobody in their right minds would want to put their country through the exit process. Uhhhhhh. The UK isn't quite a full-on dictatorship but that sounds about right 
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Nov 28, 2017 08:47
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blowfish posted:Uhhhhhh. The UK isn't quite a full-on dictatorship but that sounds about right Debatable
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Nov 28, 2017 08:59
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blowfish posted:Uhhhhhh. The UK isn't quite a full-on dictatorship but that sounds about right The UK never really was a democracy. De Gaulle knew.
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Nov 28, 2017 09:30
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blowfish posted:Uhhhhhh. The UK isn't quite a full-on dictatorship but that sounds about right I think the fashionable phrase is an 'elective dictatorship'.
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Nov 28, 2017 11:30
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Isn't that France?
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Nov 28, 2017 11:48
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CottonWolf posted:They've been saying that since Malthus. Not that I disagree that Earth's overpopulated for our current technological level, but I suspect in the near term (next 20 to 30 years) pollution's going to be more of an issue than starvation. E: And even then, the issue will be inequities in food distribution rather than actually not having enough to feed everyone in absolute terms. What do you mean, "will be"? We already have that problem, and have had it for decades. The 20 year trend for undernourishment is downwards, however. So using it as proof of overpopulation is a bit problematic. Let me get to my main point without dancing around it: I'm pretty sick of edgy nerds jerking eachother off over supposed overpopulation and we really should have a few billion less people in order to achieve a stable equilibrium or whatever bullshit. Often I encounter this with subtexts about exactly which kinds of people we could do with a few billion less of (hint: they mainly mean brown, black and yelow people in Africa and Asia). Except just a few decades ago we had a few billion less people on the planet, and we didn't achieve this mythical stable equilibrium. In fact we mostly had the same problems we have now, just with less time having passed to make them worse (for example, climate change and pollution). And we can look at a whole bunch of metrics for serious global issues and see that actually they either are and have been getting better or very plausible could get a whole lot better than the current situation. I'm talking greenhouse gas emissions, other pollution, food insecurity, poverty, (women's) education levels and I can go on. If it is within our power (with the current level of technology I will add) to so significantly improve these metrics, then the problem can not be the amount of people on this planet. We can sustainably live on this planet without a massive culling or whatever your version of an American gunowners home invasion jerkoff fantasy is. The problem isn't, as it's never been, the mass of poor people. The problem is a small bunch of wealthy motherfuckers at the top loving it up for the rest of us. Take food insecurity. We produce plenty. We have plenty of logistical capacity. A private entity just can't make any profit off of solving this issue and private entities have hijacked our public entities to stop us from solving this poo poo forever because it would interfere with the profits they make on the rest of the food market. That's the issue. That's always been the issue. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 12:42
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Kassad posted:Isn't that France? France's electoral system is what we in political science like to call chaotic incompetent.
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Nov 28, 2017 12:59
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Orange Devil posted:And we can look at a whole bunch of metrics for serious global issues and see that actually they either are and have been getting better or very plausible could get a whole lot better than the current situation. I'm talking greenhouse gas emissions No sorry you lost me. MiddleOne fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 13:05
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MiddleOne posted:France's electoral system is what we in political science like to call chaotic incompetent. Well, yeah, but that's not necessarily mutually exclusive with it being an "elective dictatorship".
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Nov 28, 2017 13:23
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France has a semi-presidential system because power is shared between the president and the prime minister. Just imagine how horrible it would be if it were a full presidential system! I don't think any country like this could be considered democratic.
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Nov 28, 2017 13:35
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Orange Devil posted:What do you mean, "will be"? We already have that problem, and have had it for decades. The 20 year trend for undernourishment is downwards, however. So using it as proof of overpopulation is a bit problematic. Firstly, I did not in any sense claim anyone should be "culled", which is quite frankly an insane thing to suggest, so put that strawman away. I don't deny that there are already massive inequities in food distribution. That's self-evident. My point is that they're going to get much worse. This isn't an issue of blame, it's just the way that the global system is set up. Do I think that's good? No. Can I personally change it? Also, no. And I take your second point too. Again, you're right issue isn't the absolute technological level, it's inequities in the distribution of the technology. A lot of the problems could be solved by giving India and China (as well as African countries, but in the near term from a climatic perspective China and India are probably more pressing through sheer force of numbers) access to the technologies that are common in the West, things like expansion of their nuclear programmes, GM crops (which, as far as I know, in India at least, are still being held up by lawsuits), as well as changing traditional farming practices. But that's not happening at the rate at which it would to make the required difference, and even under perfect conditions some of the effects of climate change on food production are are baked in. So here we are. It's not any specific person's fault. The system's hosed. E: It is a fixable problem. But on current trajectory it's not a problem that's going to get fixed, are rich countries going to consume less and give money for food to poor people elsewhere. Spoiler: the answer's no. But maybe I'm overly pessimistic. E2: Not that we're really disagreeing. Apart from the fact that I think the problem is exactly the mass of poor people, it's just not their fault in any sense. CottonWolf fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 13:41
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Ogmius815 posted:"If it were up to me, I'd just cause a famine that would bring the world to its knees". Since Stalin Socialists know, that a famine that kills the right people, is cool and good.
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Nov 28, 2017 15:34
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Cat Mattress posted:France has a semi-presidential system because power is shared between the president and the prime minister. Just imagine how horrible it would be if it were a full presidential system! I don't think any country like this could be considered democratic. Doesn't France have a much weaker legislative branch, de facto if not de jure?
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Nov 28, 2017 21:13
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France is a Jupiterian Republic headed by the presidential stupiderian who sometimes casual racism
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Nov 28, 2017 21:23
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Orange Devil posted:What do you mean, "will be"? We already have that problem, and have had it for decades. The 20 year trend for undernourishment is downwards, however. So using it as proof of overpopulation is a bit problematic. Meanwhile the current population level is the number one contributor to global warming. We aren't even close to being able to decouple standard of living from GHG emissions, like not even in the same universe as being able to do that. When you say wealthy people are the real problem, do you realize you are referring to basically all of the west, yourself included? I don't think you do! And that the global poor people of today aren't like the global poor people of the 50s or 1900s, and that in fact due to their sheer number and increases in standard of living that their carbon emissions are going through the loving roof? The world today isn't poor dirt farmers riding bicyles, it's poor factory workers that are eating more beef than wealthy people did 50 years ago and driving cars. Those things inevitably create greenhouse gases (beef especially) and you can't magic away by "being cleaner and more efficient" or whatever the gently caress you think; it just doesn't work that way in reality. Flat out: yes poor people are absolutely a massive contributor to climate change because there's a lot of them and their consumption has been going up by many orders in the last half century. A perfect example of this is China: that they aren't the worst on a per capita basis is utterly irrelevant because the earth doesn't give a gently caress about per capita- it cares about the absolute amount of carbon that is going into the atmosphere. We went for 99.999999999999% of humanity floating between 0 and a billion people and now we have close to 7.6 billion. Most of our parents were born on a planet with < 3 billion, even you loving 90s babbies lived on a sub 5.5 billion person planet. That level of growth relative to the timeframe it happened in is utterly insane and you'd have to be a blind moron to not see how damaging that has been to the world. All malthus did was get the timing and the resource wrong, he was absolutely correct that the sort of growth that has been happening is far faster than our ability to manage the results and damage from that growth. No, we can't live sustainably at the current population and literally every metric we have on that has been screaming that for the last 50 years. You can wave your hands that it's technically possible but that's loving stupid because we don't live in magic fairy land where you just wave your loving wand and everything converts to sustainable green technology tomorrow. And time is running out. And it's not like I'm saying depopulation is a feasible strategy for stopping CC, I'm just pointing out how obviously and laughably wrong your claims are here. CottonWolf posted:A lot of the problems could be solved by giving India and China (as well as African countries, but in the near term from a climatic perspective China and India are probably more pressing through sheer force of numbers) access to the technologies that are common in the West, things like expansion of their nuclear programmes, GM crops (which, as far as I know, in India at least, are still being held up by lawsuits), as well as changing traditional farming practices. Actually that would make the problem of climate change much much worse, the best thing for the planet would be for India and China to go back to being incredibly poor, because carbon emissions and GHG production have near a 100% correlation with standards of living. The increases in beef consumption that go along with increases in living standards alone would blow apart any minuscule gains you made from replacing dirty tech with clean tech. This is ignoring that often times 'going greener' doesn't actually lead to less carbon emissions because people just use more of the thing. A perfect example of this is increases in fuel efficiency in US cars (people just drove more). It's kinda like how working out is tends to be pretty bad at causing weight loss because people will work out for a half hour than eat a piece of pie that has 2x the amount of calories they just burned because they are 'rewarding themselves'. tsa fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Nov 29, 2017 |
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Nov 29, 2017 02:20
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Deltasquid posted:The UK never really was a democracy. De Gaulle knew. As a pro EU Briton (not just pro status-quo EU, but pro ever closer union, pro Britain in the Euro, pro EU army, anti British rebate. etc), it saddens me to see De Gaulle's views on the UK vindicated. I often wonder whether he would have been sympathetic to those of us in the 48% about to be unjustifiably stripped of our birth right as EU citizens (and in my case, my job that has increasingly come to rely on EU funding and contract bidding)?
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Nov 29, 2017 02:48
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Lord_Adonis posted:As a pro EU Briton (not just pro status-quo EU, but pro ever closer union, pro Britain in the Euro, pro EU army, anti British rebate. etc), it saddens me to see De Gaulle's views on the UK vindicated. I often wonder whether he would have been sympathetic to those of us in the 48% about to be unjustifiably stripped of our birth right as EU citizens (and in my case, my job that has increasingly come to rely on EU funding and contract bidding)? I don't think he was much of an integrationist, but Paul-Henri Spaak and Robert Schuman certainly feel for you
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Nov 29, 2017 09:09
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Lord_Adonis posted:As a pro EU Briton (not just pro status-quo EU, but pro ever closer union, pro Britain in the Euro, pro EU army, anti British rebate. etc), it saddens me to see De Gaulle's views on the UK vindicated. I often wonder whether he would have been sympathetic to those of us in the 48% about to be unjustifiably stripped of our birth right as EU citizens (and in my case, my job that has increasingly come to rely on EU funding and contract bidding)? İ doubt De Gaulle (or Spaak, or Delors,or Schuman) could have imagined the rise of Cambridge Analitica and its ilk. :-\ so İ ain't sure he has been vindicated.
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Nov 29, 2017 09:37
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good analysis on the rise of populism in eastern europe, despite overall good economic performance: http://www.cer.eu/publications/archive/bulletin-article/2017/all-not-well-visegrad-economies
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Nov 30, 2017 10:16
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double nine posted:good analysis on the rise of populism in eastern europe, despite overall good economic performance: quote:Growth in consumption across the Visegrad countries has lagged behind growth in GDP, resulting in a sharp fall in consumption as a share of overall spending. This has happened in nearly all developed economies over the last decade, but the scale of the decline in all four Visegrad economies has been much greater. Average households have not seen enough of the fruits of economic growth. Those rewards have gone disproportionately to the owners of capital... I had to chuckle over that part.
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Nov 30, 2017 12:21
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it's almost as if this is a global trend...
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Nov 30, 2017 13:22
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Lord_Adonis posted:I often wonder whether he would have been sympathetic to those of us in the 48% about to be unjustifiably stripped of our birth right as EU citizens (and in my case, my job that has increasingly come to rely on EU funding and contract bidding)? hey man, sometimes you have to force people to be free. tell yourself its for the greater good
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Nov 30, 2017 13:46
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double nine posted:it's almost as if this is a global trend... Nah, it is too complicated to ever piece together, it makes a lot more sense to do nothing.
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Nov 30, 2017 14:37
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trickle down any time now
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Nov 30, 2017 14:41
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Fun for a few minutes: See how far you can drive the Brexit bus without crashing!
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Nov 30, 2017 15:41
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Made it to the end in 113 seconds.
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Nov 30, 2017 16:05
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That's a second faster than me  .
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Nov 30, 2017 16:07
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Pluskut Tukker posted:Fun for a few minutes: See how far you can drive the Brexit bus without crashing! Moral of the game, when poo poo's looking bad just gun it full throttle and do a somersault midair to keep truckin'.
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