Not sure in what way high poverty levels invalidate the idea of the economy growing beyond expectations. Rwanda's economy is growing quite fast while we here in Canada are experiencing at best zero growth. That isn't really related to how our poverty levels compare.
Isn't that the whole trickle down unsubstantiated bullshit used to sell all sorts of non working measures to the masses?
So, the whole problem is pretty obvious: you cannot save enough to invest. Banks are not interested in savings, they're interested in extraction of cheap labor and resources - which requires owning.
Investment as well is only provided under bad rates, under such speculation.
And when it's not the locals owning anything, they remain poor and cannot save.
Economic growth is a wrong measure of wealth: one needs to look at who grows.
yep, companies thrive when they can steal as much surplus labor value as possible. you don't have to give them anything more that what you agreed to give them
You don’t understand the enormous immediate risk of climate change if you think that AGI is a comparable risk. Climate change is now and is killing people every day
Nature is out to kill us. We’re doing a far better job in this fight than we ever have. I’d rather deal with problem of climate change than the problems of our ancestors.
That's not true at all. Remember CFCs and the ozone layer? That was a comparable problem, except people actually stopped that one, by no longer emitting the gasses causing the issue.
I don't know that's it's comparable. The ozone required manufacturing changes, it didn't require an upheaval on how we live. Sure, it's "don't emit the bad gas", but the gases come from different sources.
The primary difference was that the ozone depletion didn't gain much traction as a political wedge and world leaders were able to take the threat seriously. 14 years after scientists published basic research warning of potential risk, the Montreal Protocol was signed. 25 years later there was a 98% reduction in release of ozone depleting substances and the ozone layer has begun to heal. Throughout all of that, DuPont lobbied and testified that ozone depletion was a hoax / fake news / scientists making stuff up / etc.
Contrast that to today, where the entertainment news outlets have people, who don’t even cook, up in arms that someone will take away their god-given right to a gas range, and who in turn view it all as a hoax and conspiracy for corrupt politicians to profit.
I’m not sure the world would be able to pull off the Montreal protocol today, even if largely manufacturing changes and having to find a new hairspray brand.
I have the sense that people back in the 60-80s had a bit of an innate trust for scientists born out of the rapid technological progress that preceded that time period, but that has since gone away.
Things like CFCs were taken seriously. Things like radiation were taken seriously (for better or worse, yielding our insane regulatory landscape around building new nuclear power plants).
The last major thing that scientists warned about that was really taken seriously (in the sense that something was done about it before it had/would have had massive negative effects) was world overpopulation, with the publication of things like "The Population Bomb" and China's one-child policy, etc.
Unfortunately, that one was gotten wrong; we now know that without any intervention, world population will tend to moderate itself and we won't actually see mass starvation due purely to too many people. I think that error was the first major blow resulting in people no longer really trusting catastrophic predictions.
I wonder what the world would be like if instead climate change was put forth as a catastrophic issue with the same fervor back then.
With the ozone layer, we already had alternatives to CFCs that were viable. A handful of companies lost out on product lines, but they're all still doing fine today. Individuals didn't have to do anything.
With the problem of CO2 emissions, lifestyle changes are required to fundamentally solve the issue, and people aren't willing to make them. Yes, it's possible that geoengineering can buy us some time. It's possible there will be a battery revolution. Renewable energy is increasingly widespread. But there's nothing right now that's a drop-in replacement. The only sure-fire solution that we have right now is a widespread reduction of consumption and mobility, and very few people are on board with that.
AI doomers don’t even care about its harms today such as being used for automated American death panel decision-making, something that the Victims of Capitalism Memorial Foundation will recognize someday
Here's another source using data from the "EM-DAT International Disaster Database"[0]. Excerpt from the article[1]:
> As we see, over the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant decline to less than 100,000 – at least five times lower than these peaks. This decline is even more impressive when we consider the rate of population growth over this period. When we correct for population – showing this data in terms of death rates (measured per 100,000 people) – then we see a more than 10-fold decline over the past century.
Well, for starters, the graph lopped off the first twenty years from the data set so that it could "start" from the massive peak in the 20s and 1930. The top reply to your original tweet is a retweet of two videos that rebut the graph.[0]
It's further skewed by the use of decadal averages, which hid the fact that the greatest peaks included deaths that were either the direct result of--or greatly worsened by, conflict and/or a handful of specific policy decisions--food production failures during and conflicts such as the Zhili-Anhui War in 1920-21[1], floods that occurred during the Chinese civil war which dramatically worsened responses and recovery, the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-33 and the Soviet famine of 1930-33 more broadly, the 1938 Yellow River Flood[2] following the intentional destruction of dikes in an attempt to slow the Japanese Army's advance, World War 2 more broadly in the 40s where you had both the food production interruptions of war on a massive scale and explicit acts of mass starvation, the Great Chinese Famine in 1959-61 which is considered to be one of the largest man-made disaster in history,[3] etc.
The graph falsely suggests that we've we've somehow stumbled upon a viable adaptation strategy that makes climate change nothing to worry about. Since 1900, we've seen massive medical advancements, improved early warning systems for at least some types of disasters, transportation networks and technology that helps move people away from disaster zones both before some disasters and in their aftermath, the ability to rapidly move large amounts of food to disaster areas, and more.
Those are all great achievements, but the largest factor in the decline your chart suggests (albeit through data misrepresentation) is the fact that we don't have massive conflicts on the scale we saw in the first half of the 20th century, genocidal dictators looking to quickly wipe out millions of people through starvation, or political ideology driving inane agricultural policies that killed tens of millions of people because the autocratic dictators of some of the most populous nations on Earth read some pseudoscientific drivel (Lysenko and others managed to inspire not only the Soviet Famine in the 30s but also the Great Chinese Famine in the late 50s) and decided it sounded pretty ideologically reliable. We still have conflict and famine, but nothing on the same scale.
Trying to take that and spin it as climate adaptation is, well, absurd. Even by climate skeptic standards, that argument's a real stinker.
No matter how you want to spin it, there are relatively few climate related deaths today compared to the past. Climate change is not causing a rise in climate related deaths, which is what OP was essentially claiming.
Fundamentally just because the current value is at a low point doesn't make something not a threat.
The easy way to think about it by handwaving half-lives of an element. You start with 100 and end up with 50 for a 50% survival rate but also a raw loss of 50. Each of those remaining 50 still are going to have a 50% survival rate despite that the next raw loss is ~25.
But yeah; you can challenge the source of the argument as invalid as opposed to just challenging the argument as invalid.
yea, we don't want or need this kind of "magic" - because it's hardly magic to begin with, and it's more socially and environmentally destructive than anything else.
Speak for yourself, my workflow and live has been significantly improved with these things. Having easier access to information that I sorta know but want to verify/clarify rather than going into forums/SO is extremely handy.
Not having to write boilerplate code itself also is very handy.
So yes, I absolutely do want this "magic." "I don't like it so no one should use it" is a pretty narrow POV.
You should be worried because this stuff needs to make sense financially. Otherwise we'll be stuck with it in an enshittification cycle, kind of like Reddit or image hosting websites.
Problem is that by that time there would be open source models (the ones that already exist are getting good) that I can run locally. I honestly don't need _THAT_ much.
Fair enough, if we get there. The problem for this stuff, where do we get the data to get good quality results? I imagine everything decent will be super licensed within 5-10 years, when everyone wakes up.
people like you are the problem. the people who join a website cause it to be shitty, then leave and start the process at a new website. Reddit didnt become shit because of Reddit it became shit because of people going on there commenting as if they themselves are an LLM repeating enshittification over and over and trying to say the big buzzword first so they get to the top denying any real conversation.
I've been on Reddit for more than a decade and I didn't make them create crappy mobile apps, crappy new web apps as well a policy of selling the data to anyone with a pulse.
Do you even know what "enshittification" means? It has nothing to do with the users. It's driven by corporate greed.
Reddit should be a public service managed by a non profit.
Edit: Also LOL at the 6 month old account making that comment against me :-)
EE here - he technically has to comply with FCC Part B since he's selling in the US. That said, the hobbyist keyboard community has been pulling this for a while for small group orders without issues. Pre-certified modules are helpful, but stuff gets weird when it's on a board, so no guarantees. The fact that it's on a single layer board doesn't instill confidence since that typically means less than ideal return paths that can cause problems.
I see that the first book reviewed is "Rich dad poor dad" by Robert Kiyosaki. He's a known grifter that has been wrong on nearly everything over the last 15 years. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877126
