Ask HN: Problems for the next decade? Environment, people, technology are changing rapidly. What are some worthwhile problems or ideas that you think would be important to solve or work on by end of the decade. |
Ask HN: Problems for the next decade? Environment, people, technology are changing rapidly. What are some worthwhile problems or ideas that you think would be important to solve or work on by end of the decade. |
I think we are going to see additional polarization in online discussion and we will continue to see this spill into the physical world as violence. This level of division has not been seen at this level in modern western societies. More people have taken on their political sports team as the very thing they identify with and their opposing team(s) have been painted as conspiratorial psychopaths, preventing discussion across the aisle from even happening at a meaningful level. In the US, we will see a clear bifurcation of states where any remaining purple states will solidify their leaning during the 2024 election and we won’t see this shift again in a meaningful way for at least a few election cycles.
We are going to see massive, non-collateralized debt defaults and financial companies will attempt to claw back that money, with those who continued to borrow above their means and were hit with variable APR that doubled or tripled interest on their accounts, minimum payments go up, and it becomes unsustainable. We will see a 50% rise in bankruptcies over the next 18 months and a 100-200% increase over the next 5 years. Student loan default will be rampant as payment of these loans will become due again in October, destroying any hope of credit access in the near future to these people. Banks will foreclose but not be have the bandwidth to repossess all the property, leaving empty shells of neighborhoods. The labor market will sharply flip in favor of the employers and labor will lose a lot of bargaining power or other gains received over the last few years. Rent will go up, private equity will buy houses for cheap, mortgage rates will stay just under 10%.
China’s one child policy that began 40 years ago is starting to be felt, with only half as many people at their full earning potential (30s-40s) trying to support an aging population. The bottom has fallen out of their labor force, the CCP’s grip on the people is becoming tighter, but one day they are going to flip the light switch in their home and will be without power. Their strong, centralized government will falter and diminish or outright just fail, the north China plateau will revert to its wasteland type state, formerly propped up by will of the government. Tianjin will be the only city to survive and will receive the majority of refugees from the northern areas. Tianjin, Shanghai and Hong Kong/Shenzhen will revert to city states and will self-govern. Fragmented China will become a huge consumer of global food as they will be incapable of growing their own, with the supply of nitrogen fertilizer and potash being clinched by the Russo-Ukraine war and reserves dwindling, global food shortages will be occur within the next two years.
Russia will continue sending every able bodied man into the nato-powered meat grinder of Ukraine until a proper overthrow of Putin occurs or they run out of people. This will create an absence of men in this generation which will be worse than their losses sustained during WWII. The vacuum of power within the hollowed-out Russia will not last long and I worry to think who will rise up as the next leader. Ukraine east of the Dnieper river will be mostly leveled by then, further exacerbating the food shortages. Ukraine will eventually join NATO, Russia will attempt to create the USSR 2.0 from mainly the west Asian countries.
We may be see a collapse of generalized globalization if the US Navy decides it’s not in its best interest to keep peace on the high seas causing insurance rates to skyrocket and shipping via international waters becomes a dangerous prospect. A lot of our production will move to Mexico where there is an educated and motivated population that is already producing goods of higher quality than China. Trade between the US-Canada-Mexico will become increasingly important due to access to both resources and labor that all 3 bring proped up by agreed upon free trade. This transition will be long and will come with challenges.
The EU will lose more membership and if Germany is unable to fully replace its energy needs, the EU as a whole will diminish. The Anglosphere may create its own free trade agreement, maybe even going so far to allow for free travel amongst the group (but this will be symbolic as very few counties share land boarders). This will create tensions with N. American free trade and Mexico, perhaps prompting Latin America counties into creating its own Schengen-type zone. America-Mexico relations will sour but the trade relations will be to solidified to do anything.
> I think we are going to see additional polarization in online discussion and we will continue to see this spill into the physical world as violence
I wonder whether online discussion is at the source of this, but I doubt it. Perhaps this is something for sociologists to ponder over. We have have access to more information than at any point in history, but it seems like our knowledge (and empathy) haven't grown by the same amount.
> Russia will continue sending every able bodied man into the nato-powered meat grinder of Ukraine until a proper overthrow of Putin occurs or they run out of people.
The idea of a Russia without Putin frightens me. Not because I'm a fan, but because it seems like every likely alternative is even worse. A politically unstable (nay, volatile!) country with a huge stockpile of nukes ought to worry everyone. I hope humanity can find a way out of this shitty situation.
> The EU will lose more membership
Probably. And this ties in nicely with your first paragraph, polarization is a big contributor to this. By and large, Europe has never been as safe or as prosperous as it is today, yet everywhere extremism is on the rise. The EU (or at least the Commission) has a reputation of being a busybody everywhere except for where it matters. Political reform seems needed, so that people at least feel represented, but that's unlikely to happen when so many Europeans are devolving into an "us vs them" mindset.
I agree, there it likely a lot more here that I’ve overlooked. I certainly believe that online echo chambers are part of it, but I do acknowledge it’s only part of the story.
As for a Putin-free Russia, this terrifies me because of the fact that in a dictatorship-like regime, higher level people who push back or don’t exclusively give good news and information to the ruling parties are often ousted or happen to fall out of windows at a most inconvenient time, which creates a class of yes-men/women who are either puppets or vultures that will swoop in and attempt taking control if their leader falls. Further, the brain-drain they have been experiencing over the years has now that had been accelerated by this war, leaving not a lot people left (proportionally) in the class of educated citizens. This hallowed out Russia will become a husk where the propaganda machine will continue to spew absolute garbage for years to come rotting whatever is left of its population’s minds. A developing theory I have is that Lukashenko’s diplomacy with Wagner and Russia is simply an attempt to position him to be able to take over Moscow when he senses its fractured enough but I also think he’s lacks the stones to do so.
2030 4 high-NA EUV fabs will have 1.4 nano RiscV chips; rollable microLED; solid state battery. That's still not paper thin all day phones.
1 passenger, only autopilot drones should transport snakebite victims in dangerous countries.
It's just a really strange thing to ping as a "big problem to solve", and such a bizarrely expensive solution to the problem, too. I think that a much better solution would be improving development and access to antivenin
Dangerous in terms of crime rate, false arrests that human pilots won't accept hazard pay for. Rural people have either no clinic or poorly trained nurse with limited supplies. Urgently going to nearest hospital, refrigerated pharmacy. Also other medical emergencies such as heart attack or moving into a city lacking roads.
I've been prescribed Xanax since 2004 and at worst used low dose 3 times a day when around negative strangers, the rest of the time none. Certainly alcohol's worse.
I'm sincerely doubtful that being able to target their impact more tomorrow the brain alone makes a reasonable difference.
Getting at the mental health crisis might take a multipronged approach but I'm not sure this is an essential prong but I'm open to arguments to the contrary.
These are harmful drugs if not taken with care. In the long run they can very easily have the opposite effect, like cause or accelerate depression.
This is serious, other causes of death more so, e.g:
The Global status report on road safety 2018, launched by WHO in December 2018, highlights that the number of annual road traffic deaths has reached 1.35 million. Road traffic injuries are now the leading killer of people aged 5-29 years.
It's certainly possible for both to be addressed and it's certain there are parts of the world with more snake caused deaths than road fatalities.
If we do not take action on climate _now_ then _nothing_ is going to matter.
We will enter into an irreversible feedback loop that causes human extinction, yet it won't be apparent until it is literally on the doorstep for people to realize.
If you are not quitting your job and working to advance the existential threat of climate change and the main driver of the catastrophe (capitalism and perpetual growth) then you are wasting your (and your children's) time.
An excellent book on what needs to be done is Less is More by Jason Hickel [2]. This is the only problem that matters since literally existence depends on solving it. The time for deep concern is over. Action is needed and it is needed now. Education, degrowth, reuse, technology. So put everything else aside or you are laboring (and living) for nothing.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01157-x
1: https://tenor.com/view/truck-crash-test-pole-doesnt-reach-gi...
Well, maybe you don't care that 2/3 of animal populations have disappeared in the last few decades, but I guess for many it counts as a big problem.
Anyway don't be sad, we are starting to actually feel the consequences of climate change, so stay tuned: famines and global instability might still come in your lifetime, or at least in your children lifetime!
(I assume you are at least 50 if you've been aware of this for 40 years)
We know what needs to be done. Build nuclear! But unfortunately anti-growth “green” parties and activists (like you I presume) have been pushing anti-nuclear propaganda for decades, stopping progress.
Nothing can be done on an individual level, so quitting your job or not having kids is completely pointless. Only top-down action (less regulation) can solve the problem. So vote!
My alarmist talking points it to actually engage people like you and who have similar thoughts that think they can't do anything. You absolutely can. And it is time to be alarmist. Not being so is not working.
My point is to work to restructure society at any level you can, to educate, and to stop this myth of perpetual growth GDP as the only indicator of success. It is killing everything.
> E.g. Siberia becoming fertile. Maybe even Sahara becoming green again!
We have a perfectly good world as is, and you want to gamble everything on this?
Eventually, maybe. For most species, humanity collapsing is definitely a good thing.
Now in your lifetime... I would rather bet for mass migrations, famines, wars and global instability.
But yeah, voting is important, because given how most people vote, they are not aware of the problem.
Good regulation, is quite effective. Just hard.
> If you are not quitting your job and working to advance the existential threat of climate change and the main driver of the catastrophe (capitalism and perpetual growth) then you are wasting your (and your children's) time.
Or did you decide to waste your time (and possibly the time of your children?)
I have transitioned to veganism, raise the AC of my house to a very high level to where I am spending $7 per week, bought a bike to commute around the city, have stopped buying clothes and am now buying only through thrift stores, reading (and trying to educate) everyone I can on this subject.
- General artificial intelligence - being able to effectively model how the world works, and search for solutions in that model.
- Energy - nuclear fusion, cheap artificial photosynthesis, cheap solar such that we can have solar on almost every surface facing the sun.
- Molecular assembly - figure out how to custom program DNA from scratch to build what we need. Imagine building more efficient trees where it captures CO2 and sunlight into gasoline, or strong timber directly.
Each of these can go quite wrong if not developed with safety in mind.
I call it the Mind (intelligence), Body (molecular assembly), Energy (putting energy to work) problems.
A pandemic brought a ton of global infrastructure to it's knees, and it could have been so much worse.
What if that happened again?
- Novel food sources (we just had the four hottest days on record, in succession)
- Adversarial health care (e.g. getting an abortion in a dominionist state)
I think people think "AI is overhyped" etc, but there is a difference between there being too many low value AI startups right now (a bubble) and whether a few top labs will produce an AI that threatens humanity.
Even if it's a ten percent chance, it's a huge problem that we need to address.
* (real) war
eg. "large" ones between superpowers ... not decimating goat-herders equipped with not much more than ak47 & towels around their heads somewhere in the lesser developed areas of the planet.
* climate-change
eg. taming the resource-hunger of capitalism.
Emphasizing metabolic (mitochondrial) holistic health approaches in medicine.
Technology is not going to "save" humanity. It raised standards of living, and it created problems where previously there were none. This crowd has a habit of saying that technology is neutral, that the positive and negative consequences that come from it are people problems. Technology is a people problem, but besides that, they take the hypocritical stance of taking credit for the positive consequences of technology yet pushing the responsibility for negative consequences of technology onto individuals - individuals who react to emerging technology, not create it. Parents are supposed to limit a teen's phone time to prevent addiction but only lip service is paid to disincentivizing the psyops that Big Tech use to create the addiction in the first place.
Swap your stats, trade a little intelligence for wisdom. How many times here have people brought out the could-vs-should quote, completely oblivious to the fact that they were the scientist fools, I've lost count.
The fascination with technological solutions and the marrow-deep, if well-hidden abhorrence of nature will kill us all, and sooner than many here think. How hot are the waters off Florida? How long is Arizona's record breaking heatwave? How many floods did we have this week? You. Won't. TeChNoLoGy. Your. Way. Out. Of. These. "Problems".
Patterns hold, until they don't. Population isn't going to keep growing forever just because Malthus was wrong in his time. Progress isn't guaranteed just because you wished really hard to santa that the singularity would happen in your lifetime. "Humanity has never suffered an extinction event, so it never will" is an abysmally stupid sentence that anyone here should be ashamed of unironically spewing from their mouths. Humanity also couldn't harness nuclear power, until suddenly it could. On the existential threats humanity faces - as many here are so fond of sneering at AI-doomers, reality isn't fiction, so we're NOT guaranteed a plucky hero who clutches victory from the jaws of defeat, as the media that brought us Skynet would have you believe.
Making money the be-all end-all of business and then making business encroah on every other sphere of life is why standards of living are dropping, and every time you feed the beast with rent-based economies you make life worse. When you maximize profit, it comes at the cost of everything else, up to and including your life.
Growth isn't infinite, except for the stupidity of hopium smokers here. Please explain how a planet made of finite mass and energy can keep GDP going up, up, up forever? Based in reality, please.
Limits - they're okay to have. The obsession with breaking all limits, with optimizing for maximum efficiency, are biological edicts taken to an extreme too far to walk back from.
"One of the more annoying and least explicable features of life in the 21st Century is our hubris in glibly assuming that because we have better technology, we are smarter, wiser, and more virtuous than our ancestors." (and also immune to the things that brought down civilizations in the past. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.)
The other side of this increasing pollution - this dramatically reduces the amount of potable water available.
THIS (m'thinks) is / will be a key reason for conflicts, for the continuation and accelleration of the ongoing extinction event...
If we must survive, this is one problem that needs to be solved.
There are others too: handling/processing/disposing pollution/garbage at scale and sustainable power generation but they are currently the next priority.
1 https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-water-the-history-behind-...
2 https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/02/colorado-rive...
Your line of questioning is disingenuous and utterly lowbrow. Do better.
No solution that requires degrowth, less energy, lower GDP or lower human quality of life, is acceptable to me. Degrowth means less food, less medicine, less power, less transport, more death.
Alarmism and promoting degrowth and/or stupid policies (paper straws, anyone?) just further increase the public backlash against “green” movement, so I guess it’s a good thing?!
You don't get it. We are heading towards a world where, on a very big part of the planet (around the equator), it will not be possible for humans to survive outdoors (at some temperature and humidity, sweating does not work anymore, you don't regulate your temperature, and so you die).
> Degrowth means less food, less medicine, less power, less transport, more death.
You are describing "forced" degrowth (what will happen if we don't prepare our society to handle it). The idea is to plan it, and have priorities (so that maybe you can't take the plane every two weeks, but you can still eat and survive, hopefully without a civil war).
Nothing else is working. Alarmism is supposed to get people to actually act, because otherwise they take your (ignorant) positions on sitting back and keep growing. The next idea you have for a great startup, a way to make money, something for your individual advancement, please go back to imperative #1 -- nothing is going to matter as we kill everything on this planet.
People become really defensive when they hear they have to change due to climate catastrophe. I get it. It's not fair. But it is necessary. If people read the alarmist language (not just from posters like me, but alarmist language from scientists who tend to use neutral language in their reports), then they will have to deal with the fact that the have a direct causal link to our children's and the next generation's death due to their inaction. At that point, the person is not just ignorant, but sociopathic. If we continue on this path, it will be humanity's ruin.
Sure, there's a few things that we need to figure out - like stopping fossil C release into the atmosphere, and how to spread good agritech to poor, non-democratic countries (hint: Europe produces tons of food sustainably using minimal resources, and is actually regrowing forests!).
But I'd bet on further technological development and economic growth any time, my own life and that of my child(ren), rather than embrace degrowth and the associated (19th century) poverty, hunger, child mortality, etc. that comes with it.
Degrowth is literally murder.
Unfortunately during the decades I lost my faith even in this. Apparently to have this kind of experience on a psychedelic it's not enough to just dose someone. Of 1000 people taking psychedelics, maybe 1 gets such an experience. And although the scientists at Johns Hopkins try to figure out how to increase that percentage, it's still not enough.
Nowadays I tend to think that all of this is a God's dream and this God for some reason does not want to wake up too soon from its dream.
Just check how it goes with fossil fuels :-). Spoiler: definitely not unlimited, definitely becoming a problem (that Europe can feel economically since 2008).
> Sure, there's a few things that we need to figure out - like stopping fossil C release into the atmosphere
Yep, "just a thing" that makes the difference between life and death of hundreds of millions of humans. And we don't have any serious technological solution right now (if you don't believe it, ask yourself: are you an expert in such a solution, or do you just have faith that "someone else" will find it?). Degrowth is the only solution when you don't have that kind of faith.
So I am confused by the meaning of degrowth you are referencing because the definition I am using is the antithesis of murder. We want to save the planet, and hence all life that exists within it. So I hope that comes across, because degrowth does not mean collapse of materials needed to sustain life, but it does re-imagigening the profit above all mindset that is de facto in our economies.
But it’s not complicated. GDP is literally ”the total sum of what humans value” (per year). GDP growth is “creating more of what humans value”, and profit is “reward for those who create value”. You can split what humans value into essentials (food, sex, medicine, security, …) and non-essentials (nice car, nice house, nice vacations, nice nature, …). The basic premise of Western civilisation (i.e. the most well-functioning society we’ve invented so far) is to satisfy the essentials of almost everyone and allow many people to satisfy many of their non-essentials.
> More products, more material extraction, more profits, more reinvestment - all to grow.
Sounds like a good thing! More people getting their needs met.
As it turns out, people do value nature etc but only after their basic needs are fulfilled. So the best way to protect nature is to create companies that make profit satisfying essential needs and higher-priority non-essential needs, so people start valuing nature etc.
Which isn’t to say capitalism is without problems - e.g. tragedy of the commons, principal-agent problem, negative externalities - but they should be solved within capitalism (maybe with better regulation or more aligned market incentives).
But if you support “degrowth” you literally support people living worse lives (less non-essentials) and dying (less essentials). And if you don’t, well, your movement needs better marketing.
I think the problem is that you don't realize how bad the situation is, given the state of science today (which is pretty good, to be honest).
I don't care about capitalism. I'd say I care about living in peace and having food. Where we are going now, I am not sure I will have that.
I don't support living worse lives, I actually support living a better life. But I still have quite a few years to live (hopefully), and with most people thinking like you, it seems like my life will gradually get worse.
Degrowth doesn't mean ending capitalism, it just means living a little bit more communal, you need to check out items from the local community garage which there'd be one every two blocks.
With less material possessions also comes the need for less space in homes, so we can build homes just big enough, saving resources, etc. We can also use new building techniques life binishell homes that cost under 20k and are earthquake proof and very well insulated.
Nothing I've said ends capitalism, it just tapers materialism a bit
> Sounds like a good thing! More people getting their needs met.
And less of everything else getting their needs met. It seems like you have a very dualistic view that humans are somehow outside the realm of ecology. Infinite growth is literally impossible in a finite system. And is a core tenet of capitalism. I really don't know what else to tell you at this point.
You are basing all of your arguments on capitalism being the solution to itself, which is the problem.
> As it turns out, people do value nature etc but only after their basic needs are fulfilled.
The problem with capitalism is that once basic needs are met, companies need won't be met - the growth imperative. Profit means taking more than what you give. It is the sole idea of what capitalism is built on. And it has appropriated nature as a means to this end. So what happens then? Artificial scarcity, more manipulation, more marketing all to sell people what they don't need.
It seems to me that you have latched onto an idea, and you will argue anything to fit that narrative. I have no idea where these arguments are coming from that degrowth means that people are not getting their needs met. Do you have sources to back up any of what you are saying? It just seems so synthetic to me.
Degrowth is removing the profit motive for the sole benefit of reinvestment and accumulation to continue growing. It does not mean that the market economy goes away. It does not mean that people do not have their needs met. It means that capitalism as a religion is finally put to an end. That we are able to subsist on finite resources instead of eliminating everything that we depend on for survival. And to use your beloved's terminology, a (positive) market externality would allow species to thrive without the material extraction of their habitat that you have placed a positive value on for some reason (eg. "Sounds like a good thing!").
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism#Enclosur...
The obvious problem, of course, is that 99% of people won't willingly choose lower quality of life (as described in your post, and as most "green" solutions end up being) voluntarily. So ultimately degrowthers end up trying to coerce others.
As in, you create a non-profit (rule of law), buy tools under this non-profit (private property / capitalism), maybe put some specific language in the non-profit's charter to specify what rules members must abide by (contract law), etc.
There's plenty of existing examples of this (such as cooperatives, e.g. Waitrose/John Lewis in the UK and Mondragon in Spain).
The beauty of free market capitalism is that it supports all these!
Instead, communism / degrowth want to trample on several of these principles, starting with "private property":
1. steal stuff from other people
2. ...
3. run out of stuff to steal
4. collapse
Getting rid of capitalism also wouldn't require getting rid of the concept of private property. Capitalism is simply the concept that wealth can generate revenue through investment. It's a way of allocating money by way of a ruling class of the most wealthy. This isn't the only way, or in my opinion the best way, to decide what resources are allocated where.
I think coops, nonprofits, and even open source software all show the limits to capitalism. They are examples of people rejecting capitalism in order to persue higher goals than the ever increasing profit margins capitalism demands. I think our economic system should reward them.
Who will care for these people? How will we deal with the consequences of flat population growth? How will we deal with the stock market's expectations of perpetual growth when the underlying population itself is not growing (and especially since productivity has also been relatively flat)?
is a collection of essays published in 1973 by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher.
The title *Small Is Beautiful* came from a principle espoused by Schumacher's teacher Leopold Kohr (1909–1994) advancing small, appropriate technologies, policies, and polities as a superior alternative to the mainstream ethos of "bigger is better".
Overlapping environmental, social, and economic forces such as the 1973 energy crisis and popularisation of the concept of globalisation helped bring Schumacher's *Small Is Beautiful* critiques of mainstream economics to a wider audience during the 1970s.
In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked *Small Is Beautiful* among the 100 most influential books published since World War II.
The top 10% who hold essentially all the wealth in the world have very little interest in that goal.
I'm hoping that we start to see an increase in pro-family policies. A couple rough ideas to look into would be decreasing taxation (or giving refunds/payments) based on how many children a productive family has, providing financial support so families can buy homes, and promoting wage increases so a single income can support a family to allow one to work and the other to focus on raising the children.
The problem is, when you build more homes, the price of homes go down.
Great for people that want homes and people who are just joining the workforce. Not great for grandma and her retirement planning.
If you frame your housing policy around anything but building more, then housing is fundamentally zero sum. If it is zero sum, that means those couples with a children are being subsidized at the cost of that 20 year old new grad or people who earn minimum wage without a family. Those people look at their finances or their mental health and make decisions about their future. So if people new to the work force are subsidizing those with children you could be harming their mental health to the point where they don't want children.
Why would any sane person bring children into a world that is almost guaranteed to be worse for their children than it is for them? I wouldn't.
So from a systems thinking point of view, the only cogent housing policy is to build more homes.
You mean building more homes. If there's X homes, and Y families get 10% subsidy, they're all still buying the same X homes for 10% more. (roughly)
Women who choose to have a child put their careers back several years at the age when they are making the most important advancements in their careers. They choose not to have children because doing so doesn't just mean they have to pay a bunch of money in childcare costs, it means they will likely never achieve the dreams and goals they set for themselves. It will become much harder for them to travel, climb the corporate ladder, create things, and be someone. Many women want to achieve all these things and then have children later in life, but it becomes biologically infeasible for them to do so.
This is harder to solve. We can force maternity policies with hiring mandates, but that would be VERY expensive for smaller businesses (having to pay 2 salaries to get the work of 1 for a year or more).
I'm just not sure what other policies exist to solve the opportunity cost issue. You can give people as much cash as you want but government can't give away free self-actualization
In the U.S. (and broadly, the western world) we seem to have a really hard time using economic incentives to encourage certain behaviors. I think it's partially because we don't want to implicitly judge a given lifestyle choice as better than another.
However, I think there is much we can learn from a place like Singapore. Singapore simply does not stick to any single political dogma - they choose a mishmash of policies based on the outcome they want to achieve.
Remove taxation on young and productive people instead if you want to help them create families.
By adjusting which price to earnings multiple we want to tolerate, just like we always do
Or take a bearish position if it happens to match your risk tolerance at the time
The stock market will be fine, people will trade shares, who cares if the market price is greater or less than today’s
If you check the recordings, some sessions were directly focused on connecting problem experts, data access, computing resources and people with skills or idea or passion. The opportunities span from students or researchers, up to what will take innovative companies or bigtech to solve, or government and international organizations.
It was also the place were a lot of discussions about AI regulation took place. The discussions and the decisions that will follow from that meeting will shape the world to come IMHO.
Do they have measurement in the goals over time?
Every physicist and engineer in the world should probably try dedicating at least one or two month of their life to figuring out fusion.
If humanity could pay a trillion dollars to instantly unlock fusion it would still be considered a bargain. And yet we don't treat research into that field as something with such a potentially massive impact.
The US produces large amounts of oil via fracking, which requires more resources to drill and produce than previous methods. At the same time, the wells tend to decline at 40% per year. These wells are making up a larger percentage of our fossil fuel production as time goes by. At some point the energy and resources required to drill a well will match the possible production, and new wells won't make sense, leading to collapse.
Without fossil fuels for transportation, and especially as chemical feedstock to creating fertilizers, food shortages would quickly appear world-wide.
We need to transition away from fossil fuels to avoid this fate. In doing so, we'll also help reduce, and perhaps eliminate the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which is a far more immediate concern in the minds of many.
This causes a host of problems, and almost nobody is aware of them, or incorrectly assigns them to other causes. This results in a patchwork of "solutions" like virus scanners, signatures on executables, and a need for users to be exceedingly cautious about what they do with their computers. Because of this need for caution, users don't feel free to experiment with novel programs or web sites, lest their computer be infected with malware, etc.
Imagine your house without circuit breakers, or fuses. Imagine that there were no widespread use of them. The first shorted cord could potentially take down the power grid, and plunge millions into darkness. We can generally agree that circuit protection is a good idea.
When you run a program, you could explicitly specify the resources it is to have access to, instead of giving access to all of your files and folders. In fact, it doesn't even have to work differently in many cases, just replace the calls to file selection dialogs with equivalent calls to "power boxes" which return file access capabilities for the calling program. This allows the user to quickly and easily work in the manner to which they are accustomed, while simultaneously preventing malicious or just buggy code from accessing anything outside of the wishes of the user, no matter how evil the code is.
Spreading awareness of such systems, incorporating capability based security, is a worthy pursuit over the next decade.
This is a win-win opportunity, accelerate renewables and wean off of fossil fuels. I'm working with middle/high school kids on improving charging: HOA managed parks (a LOT of them), parks, schools, utility poles, apartment garages, all new construction ready for EVs (residential, retail and commercial).
curtailment is the deliberate reduction in output below what could have been produced in order to balance energy supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtailment_(electricity)
But a big part of it isn't just the engineering but the human and consumer psychology. You can build all the infra, but convincing households to abide by your time of use schedule is challenging unless you force them into it (which many utilities do). People want to use their stuff whenever they want, not when it's most efficient for the grid.
That's where the storage is nice, letting the utility manage those fluctuations, but we can't produce enough battery capacity at a good cost right now. And there's geopolitics too, China controls a lot of the raw materials, and production of the downstream products are often limited by the Japanese and Korean battery manufacturers.
It's a multi faceted problem, not just something we can throw an infinite amount of EVs at.
The company, of course, needs to employ highly efficient, least-invasive, fastest ways to lay cable. But it's a serious power cable, it can't be easily snuck together with other existing cables or pipes, like it's done usually with fiber cables. Some technical innovation can belong here.
Someone threw in the rise of authoritarianism. The issue is much broader. It's one of efficiency; understanding and respect of technology and science (past, current and potential); influence of religions, mobs and fads (including scientific fads and mobs); understanding and respect for economics (mostly taken as a joke and molded to other obsessions); understanding and respect for time scale including the power of engineering at scale (as opposed to the next election or coup).
In general humanity has tremendous resources and potential power - and makes sad and shitty use of it. Yes, different people have different ideas on what is the right thing to do, but that's where the problem is. We need to become more effective at sorting that out. It's hopefully not simply a question of "enlightened authoritarianism can do it". This all deserves work and progress and our systems are dated and don't seem to be progressing currently (I mean over the past 20 years).
And corruption (in broad terms, not just money), and alignment, etc, etc.
I think this is the threat that will be largely ignored, and because it is purposely ignored it will keep growing in the background until it takes us all down as a storm of natural disasters.
If companies can own the genetic code of the animals they protect, as long as those animals are alive, will the companies create the necessary structures to protect their animals?
There’s no simple solution when we’ve become such an atomized society and so hyper individualistic. It’s a problem that we rarely care about as well. As soon as someone is no longer alone, they no longer care about this problem that society is going through. As long as the majority of people are getting together (even if it’s a slim majority), nothing will be done.
I think the fall of romantic relationships is a contributor to society becoming more individualistic. I’m not worried about birth rates like everyone else. I’m worried about our happiness.
Being single and alone and without any intimacy is a very unenjoyable existence for most people - and I don’t think there’s ever going to be a cure for it other than to be with someone who loves you.
you can do a Wardley map that shows the needs of those people, then you can move down the chain of needs, until you find something you're apt to solve.
Personally I'm working on reducing eWaste by providing a global solution to carrying multiple mobile phones as many people do this for work.
Bret Victor did a good subdivision into sub-problems for a technologist here - which probably suits this audience:
1. Exist
2. Actively making us not noticing their existance by shitting us with some fake problems like gays, drugs, foreigners, terrorists, etc (different set of fake problems per country).
1. Food: Current farming practices emit a lot of CO2, hurts local ecosystems (nitrogen runoff), and consumes a lot of water/fertilizer. Currently proven methods could fix many of these problems.
2. Housing: Bringing modern technology to the construction of homes/apartments could dramatically lower costs. Kit homes are an example where only focusing on the tech and not the zoning/social issues doesn't improve the issues. I think realistically we could build a lot of high efficient, safe (much safer than codes require), and comfortable housing and drive down rental prices substantially while turning a huge profit (if you can sort out zoning).
3. Programming: Working in a large monorepo is amazing. Many people who work at a big tech company which has one will tell you about the amazing stuff you can do in this environment. Open source does not have one and most developers only ever see the multi-repo approach to software development. Building a parallel SWE-tooling stack which was "the monorepo of $FAANG but open source" would allow OSS devs to collaborate and build really cool things.
4. Compute: Non-profit compute infra for common good. Right now everyone is focused on decentralized apps and it's possible these are just too complicated for end users (I certainly am confused but I don't know if I'm just too old). If there was a not-profit-focused compute infra which gave out free compute/bandwidth/storage to open source public commons software that might be a good thing.
Our economic growth is based on a growing productive population.
Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
Different parts of the world are dealing with population collapse.
Look at Japan, a xenophobic country facing population collapse. The total GDP has remain stagnant over the past 20 years.
Look at UAE, a country facing population collapse and acknowledging reality by handing our long-term residency permits to affulent immigrants, mostly Indian Hindus. They are even building the first Hindu temple in Islamic middle-east in Dubai!
Look at Africa, where the population growth combined with sectarian warfare is making for a troublesome living - https://pudding.cool/2018/07/airports/ South Africa is even regresssing. Rich businessman of Asian Indian origin who have lived for generations are already heading for UK/Canada. And with them tax base would collapse like Uganda (90% tax revenue came from Asian Indians in Uganda in 1972 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-36132151).
Look at USA/Canada/Australia, all of them have low birth rate but compensate by being genuinely immigration friendly. They will grow while sucking even more productive population out of rest of the world.
The Europe would keep importing cheap labour (by choice) and welfare-loving immigrants from middle-east & Africa (by virtue of proximity). And they would transform Europe, how they tranformed Lebanon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubIe3c5NGc, further imagine how the voting blocks would look like when whites are rich & old while non-whites are poor & young. Why would they not demand higher taxation and lower welfare policies?
China would have same fate as Japan. Xenophobia with a collapsing population. China would appear a lot of more timid.
12,000 years ago, when sea levels rose, Tasmania lost connection to mainland Australia, and this lead to decline of knowledge and tools over time.
We might see the same in our world.
So, I believe population collapse is a huge problem.
“Can’t pay” is a sliding scale - without going into a detailed discussion it’s hard to say what a product is worth, but i get your point.
There needs to be some cost to cover operations of the business.
Problems will not stop to appear while that is not solved. The whole system becomes fragile, and minor disturbances will become major ones.
Why would this be the likely outcome?
Report they're summarizing: https://www.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/ams/publications/bulletin-...
It appears to be the case that heatwaves and extreme storms are becoming more likely.
This post will fade away in a day or two. However, there could be a place where the answers are condensed into targets to which all available information is added. Structures could form that provide education, information and resources which lead to answers and implementations.
1. An organization that addresses antimicrobial resistance by advocating for better (pull) funding mechanisms to drive the development and responsible use of new antimicrobials.
2. An advocacy organization that promotes academic guidelines to restrict potentially harmful “dual-use” research.
3. A charity that rolls out dual HIV/syphilis rapid diagnostic tests, penicillin, and training to antenatal clinics, to effectively tackle congenital syphilis at scale in low-and middle-income countries.
4. An organization that distributes Oral Rehydration Solution and zinc co-packages to effectively treat life-threatening diarrhea in under five year olds in low-and middle-income countries.
5. A charity that builds healthcare capacity to provide “Kangaroo Care”, an exceptionally simple and cost-effective treatment, to avert hundreds of thousands of newborn deaths each year in low-and middle-income countries.
6. An organization that aims to reduce stock-outs of contraceptives and other essential medicines by improving the way they are delivered and managed within public health facilities.
Source: https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/post/announcing-our-...
Soil scouts, with patches for an acre that sequestors x amount units of carbon, or another that rewards those that have y ppms of living microbes.
If someone could recruit, deploy messaging, and enable long term action, at a minimum it'd be symbolic. In tandem it could be hopeful, and with success could be valuable.
Part biology, part humint.
See: JADAM and Korean natural farming.
The next decade is decisive for China's future. She must make her moves soon or is very likely to be shut out of any path to hegemony for the century. What will be the response of the NATO+ countries to Chinese moves? Essentially, are we finally, for really-real-reals this time, going to see the 'end of history'?
Fusion would be great to finish making life on Earth look like surviving on Mars. Is that what you want?
What we need (and will most likely face anyway) is to do less with less. Organise society to live the forced degrowth that is coming, and survive the climate changes that we started and cannot possibly change anymore.
Whereas solar power is cheaper than coal now. Also on the horizon is thorium reactors.
D-T fusion is not as clean as is touted, and the economics just aren't ever going to make it viable compared to ever-cheaper solar, wind, batteries/energy storage, etc.
Better fission designs OTOH are worth pursuing, and also deep geothermal, and maybe one or two of the CCS options though they seem a bit greenwashy.
My understanding is that that raw materials are a low % of total cost for fission, waste disposal is not that hard, and that it's technically more complicated and expensive to build a fusion plan than a fission plant.
I found this pretty interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tYlXY19I3c
Based on your requirements, this is already solved. Pull more oil out of the ground. Burn more trees.
AND, throwing money at a problem will definitely solve fusion.
Give people cheap energy and people will use it up. Just look at cryptomining. Then you are back to needing more energy. People will do just fine with expensive energy. They will adapt.
proven reserves/consumption = 47 years left
> We need to transition away from fossil fuels to avoid this fate.
Yes, IMHO that involves degrowth: do less with less. Doesn't mean living like in the Middle Age, but make technology that helps degrowth. That's a big technical challenge that is not in fashion (because we love to jump on ChatGPT APIs and feel like we are productive making prototypes using it).
Source?
The world thought this around 2005 or so and then fracing technology changed everything. Every year new tech is being invented that makes previously uneconomic wells profitable to drill.
Further, there is still so much oil out there.
You are right about society collapsing and everyone dying without oil though, but I don’t think that will happen.
Your comment also hints at the repostes by Engels (technological progress) or Ricardo (pricing out, or alternative).
To a united communist-capitalist solution! And a worthy path for OP.
For instance, on platforms such as Android that are meant to be secure in this way, I can't block an app from accessing the internet anytime it wants. Of course, the reason for that is that blocking internet access would also allow blocking ads, which Google has a negative incentive for.
Large corporations always take advantage of the sandboxing for anti-user features as well. In many apps I can download videos on desktop whether they want me to or not using inspect element etc, but this is often tricky or impossible on Android. Again, corporate incentives are aligned against the user.
If we use the popup approach for 20+ permissions when users download an app, they'll likely say yes to everything, no to everything or be frustrated at how much time they spend setting up their new app. None of these seem like good outcomes.
This embedded computer system has access to all your memory devices.
Disabling it? Not convenient.
We have yet to discover a system of government that both allows for a generally high standard of living yet at the same time prevents billionaires. Every variant that has been tried so far has inevitably led to total misery for the entire population.
I think the solution is not to prevent billionaires, but to prevent their ability to affect politicians, being very strict about anti-trust and so on.
By no means easy but I think preventing billionaires from even existing is a dystopian nightmare in any scenario.
Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality . There are lots of countries there with a very high standard of living AND a low economic inequality, mostly in Europe.
I think your reasoning is an example of modern Stockholm syndrome, where people get absolutely furious at anybody shining a light on a problem, instead of getting furious at the actual problem.
How about 999,999,999? Still bad?
How about 900,000,000? No?
Hm. How much is too much, and why?
Examples: mining materials from Earth is important, but the revenues should belong to all who live on the planet being mined. Slavery situation (I mean Nestle corporation and most of Cobalt production) is a pure shame. Proprietary software is a shame as well because it effectively converts users into digital slaves, effectively this is a branch of Mathematics which is forbidden (and obfuscated) to learn.
It's climbed from 2.6 billion in 1950 to 7.8 billion in 2020.
If world poulation halved we'd still be at 1975 population levels .. a time when the world functioned.
> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
We live on a finite planet with limited resources, the notion of unlimited growth being essential for continued status quo is flawed thinking.
Our greatest challenge as a species on this planet is to learn how to live well within our means.
1. Age distribution would look like an inverted pyramid instead of a pyramid
2. The geographical, racial/ethnical and cultural demographics would also look like the totally different. The share of global population of the global south, which is currently highly dysfunctional, would be drastically more important, especially in the younger age groups.
Note that the increase of wealth of the “third world” is mainly due to China / India, followed a bit by Indonesia / Bangladesh / Vietnam. Nearly all of them have already a TFR < 2.1
Other countries’ economies even lost complexity and the share of their economies that are basically commodity exports increased
The prosperity was much lower than. The scientific advancement even lower.
Yet a growing productive population, in modern societies, relies on cheap (usually fossil) energy, which brings two problems: 1- fossil energy is not unlimited, and we're soon at peak production. 2- fossil energy brings climate change, which is very very bad for our survival at large.
I think the refusal to marry and have kids (regardless of it being necessary or by choice) is basically the ultimate worker’s strike. So far capitalists have relied upon the fact that there will always be workers to exploit, since they consider any care work necessary to raise families (for the next batch of exploited workers) as simply just given. Now that this is going away (people can actually choose to not bear the burden of reproduction!) first in Japan and South Korea but also in China and the rest of the developed world, the ultimate factor that has propelled economic growth so far is withering away…
Maybe the second derivative of world popultion is collapsing but not the "world" population (at least if you mean world as a whole and not "developed world" only, because population of "developed world" maybe getting there).
>> Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.
If by prosperity you mean key economic indicators like GDP, then yes. But those economic models are so primitive that I question they usefulness and validity. The nature of work changed so much for last 100 years due to technology that it amazes me that we still belive that it can be summed up with few simple agregate numbers. Even the most important domains such as Agriculture, despite growing population, are needing less and less people to produce almost enough (if we include the food waste it's more than enough, but lacking fair distribution). At this moment about 800 milion people are working in or around farming - that's only 10% of overall population. In year 2000 agriculture was employeeing more than 1 billion, that is - 16 % of population.
This is the real reason of production growth - technology advancements and popularisation, not population growth.
I’m happy to see population numbers decrease and I’m ok with the stock market getting hit or having to make some sacrifices on lifestyle if that means a more sustainable way of living.
We keep hearing of food production issues caused by climate change. Why would we need more people? To starve them? To give them busywork? To have to figure out welfare?
I’m ok with going through shrinking pains, it should be a lesson that the fake reality we built for ourselves was not sustainable.
I think policies that encourage families from passing their property down to their children rather than being used as an investment vehicle should definitely be considered. The strategy of buying a home young and dumping it later seems to cause bad behaviors that result in families spreading out which prevents a healthy familial support network to form.
I was wondering about OP's suggestion (that is very common around these parts from time to time) that everything online should be paid and the ad supported internet economy is the worst thing in the world.
The knowledge gains of recent decades did not ride on the back of population growth.
It's not about scale, it's about balance. You can run a small an beautiful country with zero economy growth and zero decline, all in a perfect balance, and 70% of population younger than 65. Everything works out.
But when 50% of the population is older than 60, the picture changes a lot; the percentage of economically productive population is much lower, and the need to care for people who can't sustain themselves any more grows. Take a look at how Japan fares today.
It's relavant to this Ask HN question at large as we very much need to move away from blind pursuit of unlimited growth in population, resource consumption, waste byproducts, etc. and address the question of how to live well within our means.
Aging population demographics is a challenge, but one that we must address and then move beyond to a move persistent and sustainable low term distribution.
As for the current situation, I am 60, my father was born in 1935 and lives here in the same town as I do. He takes meals on wheels to the older folks who aren't all that mobile (yes, he's almost 88, walks 10km per day, and maintains a 15 km long section of a 1,000 km long walking trail) which is indicative of the entire community which has the highest median age in this country.
There is scope to employ able older people to look after less able older people which gives provides purpose, companionship, and reduces the demand for younger pople in care roles, etc.
This is not a full solution but it is a partial path forward.
At the start of the 1900s the world was set for a population boom and overshoot. We went from families having 6-12 children to 2ish children in a few generations. This is going to lead to those 'boom' generations having a far older population and there is not really anything that can be done about this unless you want your population to continue growing forever.
A decent fraction would need to become nurses, and frankly, with less pay/worse conditions than they currently get. A small fraction will need to study a lot more so more treatments can be provided, which requires doctors and researchers. And we'll all have to do with less (much less) because this will cost a lot even disregarding wages.
Additionally, the energy required to recover a barrel of oil from shale, etc. is far more than from traditional sources.[2]
[1] https://data.oecd.org/energy/crude-oil-production.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
I used to work in the shale industry so I know how it works. Yes it’s more intensive but breakevens for fracked wells are down to what breakevens for conventional wells were 20-30 years ago. They have superior technology and processes now that are only getting better, more efficient, and cheaper. There is a lot of money at stake and a ton of very smart people working on this stuff.
Capability based security is more like cash(an economic capability) in your wallet. You take out $5 to buy something, you can't risk more than $5 in the transaction.
With a phone, it's like you enable access to ALL of your money, effectively forever, in a binary manner. (Unless you remember to turn it off later, or the OS does after 3 months of non-use)
Edit/Append - Capability based security dates back to the 1970s. It's perfectly possible to do it with modern hardware. You just need to protect the OS from applications, which anything with an MMU can do. (Or, if you don't have an MMU, you could just run WebAssembly, which is capabilities based)
The key is that instead of giving file names to programs, you give handles (capabilities) at run time, when the user wants to open a file, save, etc. Otherwise the program has NO access to anything by default. (Thus it can't cause unwanted changes anywhere else)
Incentivization of family formation would push people to get married, it would not make family formation less likely. The entire point of incentivizing a behavior through providing benefits is to make it easier for people who partake in that behavior, therefore drawing people to it.
> They're turned to a literal slave caste to provide for other people's families.
I'm single, and due to various factors it's unlikely I'll be getting married in the immediate future. I'm one of the people who would be "punished" by my "down-right evil idea" but I still think it's good. Economic pressure would definitely make me more invested, not less, in getting married sooner. Calling this a creation of a "literal slave caste" is an extreme emotional exaggeration since I'm definitely not calling for myself to be enslaved by any meaningful usage of the term.
Down-right evil is what the consequences would be, but I retract that comment regarding the idea itself, because I don't think any malice is intended.
Economic incentivizing by the government often have awful side effects. Let me make a comparison: Business is good for the economy and nation. Therefore the government should incentivize people to have businesses. Let's therefore give a million dollars to every successful business owner. We take the money by taxing those who don't have businesses.
I think most do not like that idea, but it's basically the same thing.
Let's not pit young people against each other furthermore.
First, let me say that I usually start by mentioning the mass extinction, because technical people (myself included) have a tendency to believe that "the problem is CO2 emissions, and we can find new technology to reduce that". So I find it important to note that we humans are already responsible for the loss of essentially 2/3 of trees, 2/3 of animals and 2/3 of insects on Earth, and this is before the consequences of climate change. It is easy to say "if we had more energy, we would grow crop vertically and leave biodiversity alone", but sadly I don't think it works like this. Crops are not the only factor (population raises because of cheap energy, so we transform more wild spaces, also for tourism, and I am not even talking about hunting and industrial fishing, etc). But even for crops, we already know a simple way to use them more efficiently: eat crops, not meat. But we don't do that, because with cheap energy (and ignoring the fact that we are killing the planet) we don't need to. If you think about it, we used to eat the crops (and not the meat) in the past, when we did not have access to cheap energy :-). Why would we suddenly avoid rebound effects with fusion, when history shows that it has never happened for any technology before?
Then, if we put the biodiversity problem aside, there is the energy problem. Modern society fundamentally relies on fossil energy, which is limited by definition (this is very important to realize!). We passed the production peak for conventional oil in ~2008 (Europe has been feeling it since then), the global peak is predicted to be around now (I remember the predictions for the peak of conventional oil from when I was studying in 2004, and retrospectively they were very accurate, so I could imagine that the new ones may be reasonable as well), and for natural gas it may be in the next decade. So fossil energy will become a problem in the next few decades. Building a nuclear plant today, with technology we know (i.e. fission) takes what... 15 years? Fusion is most likely already too late for the party (and anyway it is not clear to me that it fundamentally solves the problem better than fission, except that people are afraid of fission for some reason). But nuclear plants make electricity, and that's only part of our society. Planes don't fly with electricity, plastic is not made of electricity, and we can't store electricity in big jars like we do with oil. So we are facing an energy problem, and we don't know technology today that could remotely solve it (I know, it's hard to accept for engineers, but please try to seriously think about it and don't stop at "many VCs put a ton of money on startups that try to find solutions, it will work out in the end").
Finally, and on top of all that, climate change is coming (again in Europe we have been feeling it strongly every summer in the last few years, and it won't go back to "normal" ever again). From what we can observe, it seems like the IPCC predictions are systematically optimistic; in other words, it seems like climate change is going faster than predicted. So it's not that we can count on 60-80 years to solve the energy problem anymore: now it seems like we may be playing the "survivability" (if that is a word in English? :-)) on many places on Earth in the next 10-20 years (maybe less). As a reminder, 10-20 years is the time we need to build a nuclear plant. If we continue in the next two decades the way we have in the last two decades (which we are clearly doing, if not worse), it is very likely that we will have screwed up many places on Earth for the next centuries. That means mass immigration, famines, wars, general world instability... not very good conditions to develop new non-military tech to solve a problem we haven't solved in decades of peace (globally).
Those are all problems with huge inertia (i.e. once you realize it is very bad, then there is no coming back), each with major consequences if they were taken individually. But they are not happening individually, they are happening together! Essentially for the same reason: our society is based on abundant energy. So the solution is not to "make a small step in one of those problems with a major technological change (like fusion)", because (and ignoring rebound effects with new technologies) even if we solve one of them, the other two problems will screw us big time.
All that not to say that we are already screwed anyway: maybe it's too late already (that's possible), but maybe not. And in case it is not, the highest chances of survival IMHO come from degrowth. Degrowth is a huge technological challenge. It's maybe not as fun as throwing Python scripts using ChatGPT in piles of docker containers running on hundreds of machines on the cloud, but it is not less challenging: how do we do less with less, while keeping our society from collapsing?
Energy is not an evil. We are not “screwed already” as you put it. But thinking we’re past some fundamental point that makes any progress futile absolutely negates the possibility of improvement by keeping us from searching and exploring options. It’s saying we can’t row ashore because we refuse to row the boat despite being fully capable of rowing the boat.
All the rest of us not convinced of the futility need from those people unwilling to figuratively row is for those unwilling to simply let the rest of us row, figuratively, instead of them. That’s all your side needs to do-stop obstructing the rest of us.
I did not mean to say that. My intention was to say that our society fundamentally relies on fossil energy, and it seems more and more clear that we won't manage to solve that without degrowth before our society collapses.
> But thinking we’re past some fundamental point that makes any progress futile
Who said progress is futile? I say infinite growth is bad. I find it much more elegant to build a sustainable society with clever use of technology than to rush for productivity. Since we're on HN, look at software: we as an industry mostly write bad software, because all we care about is growth. We could probably write better, more sustainable software, for more sustainable products. To keep with the software comparison, my feeling is that I am saying "guys, please stop piling up crap code and hacks just to release a bad product tomorrow; let's go slower, but write good code that solves actual problems". And you're telling me "stop obstructing the rest of us, we like piling up hacks and releasing crappy software, and it makes good money".
Degrowth does not mean "go back to how people lived 300 years ago", but rather "be clever and do sustainable stuff". Or "instead of optimizing for productivity (which is killing us), what about trying to optimize for something that would be sustainable?". I, for one, would call that progress.
It is not at all what I meant.
What I meant is that there is a need to go past that, and it is not clear that we are capable of doing it. It's great to say "wooooow, photovoltaic increased 1000% last year, McKinsey estimates (with the dumb uninformed extrapolations they love to do) that in 10 years it will have replaced all energy", but if you are serious, you should acknowledge that it is still the easy part.
I am not saying "it is not possible", just "think about it: it may be harder than expected".
Why is this a problem?
The basic assumption that the two situations are similar is just… false
Today, in my state, we extract and move more raw iron ore for steel production per year by a considerable factor more than the US ever achieved, and with far fewer people per tonne - largely due to better techniques and automation.
If you look about the world as it is you will realise that we are capable of having greater production and better lifestyles across the globe with a lower population and less by product from consumption than we do today.
The means and levels of consumption today are problematic to say the least.
If you want Jeff Bezos to pay taxes on the value of Amazon (which is the measure by which he is a billionaire) you basically force him to sell Amazon. How else can he pay the taxes?
In such a system, where you will be forced to sell your success, Bezos (or anyone else) would never have created Amazon.
It's worth keeping in mind that Amazon generates several billions of dollars in taxes every year. Every one of the million plus employees of Amazon pays taxes, every transaction is taxed, every service Amazon buys from other companies is taxed and so on. If you kill Amazon by going after Bezos, you have caused society a net loss, even if you get all his money.
Economic equality is a different topic IMO. If a teacher makes 10% the money of a doctor you get problems in society since teachers can't buy houses priced for doctors and so on, but the difference in wages between workers has nothing to do with billionaires. Nobody became a billionaire from earning wages.
This has to be solved from the bottom up, not from the top down. Increase minimum wages, dictate working conditions and so on. You don't have to target billionaires to do that. Most countries in Europe has at least one billionaire, in fact lately the wealthiest person in the world is French.
What each individual billionaire pays (or not) in taxes, depends on his nationality, current residence and the specifics of his income. But avoinding taxes happens at every level: avoid company profit taxes, avoid company VAT (or even do VAT returns fraud), avoid import taxes, avoid individual income taxes, avoid VAT on goods that the billionaire buys, avoid property taxes (both individual and company property), avoid luxury taxes, get income from non-taxed sources, etc. There are probably hundreds more ways to avoid taxes than an ordinary person like me can imagine.
> If you want Jeff Bezos to pay taxes on the value of Amazon (which is the measure by which he is a billionaire) you basically force him to sell Amazon. How else can he pay the taxes?
So? Don't we all sell our work to pay taxes? I live in east-Eurpean country. Currently, aprox. half of my work value (as eval'd by my employer) goes to taxes and mandatory services provided by the state (health, pension fund, etc.). How much did he pay?
Taxes vs declared income don't make much sense for a billionaire. I wish we could know the value of the goods and services he got (paid or free, as in "this is the company's car, not mine") in a year, vs. his taxes.
> pay taxes on the value of Amazon
AFAIK, there are no taxes on the value of a company, except maybe property taxes in some places.
> This has to be solved from the bottom up, not from the top down.
Mostly true, but not enough. Creating extremely wealthy individuals should be avoided, because money brings power and power influences politics/policy, including (or especially) bottom-up reforms. To take Amazon as an example: I suspect the management would do anything to avoid a minimum wage increase or improving working conditions.
> In such a system, where you will be forced to sell your success, Bezos (or anyone else) would never have created Amazon.
This is simply conjecture and is not provable in any way. In fact, there are plenty of centi-millionaires and billionaires outside of America (in countries that require them to pay their fair share of taxes) that are doing just fine.
You are commenting in a thread that started with a statement that the very existence of billionaires is a problem, and a followup claimed that billionaires exist because they don't pay taxes.
My point is that the mechanism that creates billionaires in western societies is beneficial since the same mechanism generates a higher standard of living for everyone, not just the billionaires. It also generates way more taxes than the billionaires can pay even if you forced them.
I don't see how you can remove the billionaires without killing the mechanism. It has been tried, and has never worked out.
To be clear, Im not talking about people becoming billionaires in dictatorships or by owning the natural resources of entire nations. That's a different matter entirely.
I completely agree that one of the actual problems is that corporations are incentivized to treat workers as poorly as possible btw, and that is a problem that is actually fixable.
Whether billionaires pay a "fair share" or not depends on what you consider fair. I don't think basing tax on a market valuation of something you own is fair and I am not aware of it being done in any western nation. You get taxed when you sell shares, not by simply owning them.
The only example I can think of where it kind of happened is Jack Ma in China.
A low amount of economic inequality among the lower class, absolutely. European rich are absolutely as extravagantly wealthy as any American or Asian moguls. Their assets are nowhere close to where Wikipedia can account for them.
At least in America there is an impression that an industrialist or tech genius can become a billionaire. In Europe you need to belong to banking families or have deep tentacles into government.
Still not exactly the same scale, I would think.
As for us, we’ve already emitted too much. If we merely stop it’s still going to be a bad century.
If you don't, good for you. Don't think everybody has that chance.
> As for us, we’ve already emitted too much. If we merely stop it’s still going to be a bad century.
If we stop, it's going to be complicated times. If we don't... well we will have more conflicts for land (those that remain where humans can survive) and famines.
You are implicitly claiming that if you write the tax laws in such a way that every dollar of income past $999,999,999 will be taxed 100%, then that kills the mechanism. And you say it as if it's self-evident that it's true. From here, it seems to be self-evidently untrue. So what gives—why do we disagree on this? Why am I wrong?