Comment by jnmandal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnmandal | Hacker News Reader

Climate change is only one of myriad problems mine and my children's generation need to address. Cleaning up microplastics could make decarbonization look like child's play. Phosphate and nitrate cycles also need to be addressed if we are to stabilize this planet. We are essentially awash in our own waste and global population is only beginning to flatten off. Not to mention a shrinking or flattening population brings along its own issues to solve. Probably some of the problems we will be working on in 30 years will be directly caused by near sighted solutions to climate change my generation is implementing today.

Growing up, I was fed lies about a future of a unified world, universally prosperous under American hegemony. It was a dogmatic fiction, and I am still bitter about it. It's better to be real with our kids. That does not mean telling them they will die but they need to be aware of the risks and the scale of the work ahead.

Infinite growth on a finite Earth is not possible. We can basically either change patterns/behavior drastically or settle other planets fast. Either option entails hardship that the postwar generation simply never had to face.

So the future will be quite different than what my generation experienced thus far. In some ways it will be worse and in some better. Being honest about that is crucial.

* Infinite growth on a finite Earth is not possible *

Yet our whole economic systems are predicated on infinite growth. If a country's population were to decline it would and does cause structural problems in their society.

I wonder on climate change just how many people this clip alienated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tkDK2mZlOo

You have a political figure making it a political issue, and at the same time not doing it well, basically lying to get his correct point across. Manipulating the scale and using theatrics because he assumes his base is too dumb to understand it any other way.

How are our economic systems predicated on infinite growth? I see this “fact” parroted a lot, but always with very little detail. Japan didn’t grow economically for decades, and, as far as I can tell, continues to exist without collapsing.

The basic measure of a countries "success" is GDP. You never hear any language (and yes the language is import here) about a country reaching GDP stasis, our current economic theory is it can always improve and grow. We even assume that the best interest rate target is not 0% preventing inflation but somewhere close to our nominal rate of GDP increase relative to our actual GDP potential. We assume that even "backwards" nations like Papua New Guinea should aspire to increase their GDP to "grow" into being a developed nation. "Developing" nations alone is the type of language that shows we won't take you seriously until you have grown your GDP to be per capita like that of the good and mighty nations.

Just by the fact alone that we assume the human population is growing, and that everyone should have at least the standard of living of their predecessors, we assume economic growth will occur. Of course this cannot happen forever I recommend reading this tidbit (https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...).

What decades are you referring to with Japan? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2... . Japan's GDP slowed down for sure but it has certainly been growing. I think you are confusing the value of Japan's stock market which was overvalued drastically at one time.

I agree that if the population grows, than GDP should also grow to account for that person. But nothing about our economic system says that the population must grow. Regarding Japan, GDP per capita was basically flat from the late 80s to the early 2010s: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CN?end=2020...

Also, people don’t suggest that Papua New Guinea grow the economy for the sake of growth or the sake of the broader economic system. People think Papua New Guinea should grow because the quality of life of the population would be improved. This is not a convincing argument that our economic system is predicated on continuous growth.

Population growth is assumed to be necessary so that more workers will pick up the burden of paying for elders. Japan is treated as a cautionary tale.

I'm curious what you mean about Gore lying? I was quite young at that time so I didnt have informed opinion on the matter then, but these days I feel if anything he was maybe not pessimistic enough in his predictions. Everything in that clip has basically been corroborated by NASA and NOAA measurements now. I think they may have failed to highlight the risk of feedback loops and the importance of limiting methane emission...

>We are essentially awash in our own waste

Way worse than that, but I expect you know.

>Growing up, I was fed lies about a future of a unified world, universally prosperous under American hegemony.

Interesting, I'm Canadian and we certainly didn't learn this. We certainly have learnt about embracing the multiple cultures around us. How we dont need to melting pot the cultures and we can peacefully coexist. We don't need to 'unify', the more we embrace each other's differences the better.

>It was a dogmatic fiction, and I am still bitter about it. It's better to be real with our kids. That does not mean telling them they will die but they need to be aware of the risks and the scale of the work ahead.

There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, -MIB

It's virtually impossible for human extinction. It becomes 15 degrees c warmer and we have full collapse of everything alive on earth. The new thing you can make lots of money do is building domes and robotics. Your new home will be completely self-contained ecosystem. Robots deliver all your needs, you never quite really leave your house. Doesnt sound good, but if for some reason outside was just completely uninhabitable.

>Infinite growth on a finite Earth is not possible. We can basically either change patterns/behavior drastically or settle other planets fast. Either option entails hardship that the postwar generation simply never had to face.

Infinite growth is impossible, but the limit is so far beyond where we are now. I guarantee real gdp will be ridiculously higher 30 years from now. We certainly have a pollution problem, but interestingly cleaning that pollution will be gdp growth.

Everyone seems to think I am making a statement about GDP or economic systems when I say infinite growth but I am just speaking in broad strokes about human activity. Capitalism may be the only viable model for a world with serious scarcity, as I expect ours is to become in the mid to near term. GDP is a made up number. When adjusted for externalities, there's a possibility that GDP per capita in the OECD has been negative for multiple decades.

>Everyone seems to think I am making a statement about GDP or economic systems when I say infinite growth but I am just speaking in broad strokes about human activity.

The saying you said is specifically about economic and GDP. Fair enough though if you didn't mean it.

>apitalism may be the only viable model for a world with serious scarcity, as I expect ours is to become in the mid to near term.

This is a pretty depthy subject. The failure of communism in 1989 has left many people, most of which who haven't lived under communism, to be quite upset. Many of these folks are now proposing some mixed system. This will ultimately fail as well. Capitalism is just the system in which works the best even despite its many drawbacks.

I think fundamentally when the gold standard was dropped. What everyone is yearning for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit It's a right-wing economic system but I bet with a ton of work we could make it work. The left wing often call this UBI.

>When adjusted for externalities, there's a possibility that GDP per capita in the OECD has been negative for multiple decades.

Debt adjust it as well and I bet it's in some serious trouble in many countries. Such is the debt cycle. Which is what social credit is designed around. Debt = money. It inherently is going to be managed in social credit.

> Interesting, I'm Canadian and we certainly didn't learn this. We certainly have learnt about embracing the multiple cultures around us. How we dont need to melting pot the cultures and we can peacefully coexist. We don't need to 'unify', the more we embrace each other's differences the better.

I wonder how much of that is simply for short term political gains. "Multi-Culturalism" is pretty new (and accompanied by increasingly out of control immigration quotas) and seems to be aimed at pandering to multiple ethnic enclaves.

I mean not that long ago wasn't the official policy to discriminate against anyone not deemed Canadian enough (the French or Natives for instance)?

>I wonder how much of that is simply for short term political gains.

I think it has happened long enough ~150 years to prove it's not short term. Every single major immigration event in north america has benefitted us greatly.

New orleans and french culture is still there from 1700s immigration

1850 famines brought tons of irish to the east coast producing places like notre dame. Germans went to midwest producing the auto industry and general huge success of detroit.

filipino and jewish immigrants practically built the west coast in the 1930-1950s.

That's kind of the thing. In the short term the new immigrants are often living in poverty and are hated, but long term immigration is super beneficial.

In fact the arab spring was intentionally done to drive arabic immigrants to the developed world. We need them for the 2030 worker shortage.

>"Multi-Culturalism" is pretty new (and accompanied by increasingly out of control immigration quotas) and seems to be aimed at pandering to multiple ethnic enclaves.

Oh yes, north america has very bad identity politics since Obama. It has gone beyond pandering and leading into civil war for the usa. It's far worse in Canada because we actually removed our freedom of speech in place of 'hate speech'. So every politician now is a racist etc. Every single conservative leader has been called a racist or worse.

Though there's also a more hidden agenda of mitigating our 2030 worker shortage issue. Canada is essentially bringing in a province worth of people every year in an attempt to mitigate. This has to be done from countries that were affected by WW1 but not WW2.

>I mean not that long ago wasn't the official policy to discriminate against anyone not deemed Canadian enough (the French or Natives for instance)?

~10% of Canada's GDP is going toward building expensive housing. One of the highest in the world. Housing prices are skyrocketing because mortgages are being issued in illegitimate basis, but also because we're adding a province worth of people every year. That's a ton of housing being built.

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