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New week is here, it is time for some culture war (and culture war by other means) news, news not concerning plebeian ball games, aspiring upper class winter games, or top elite human capital tropical island games.
1/ From Demography is Destiny files
It seems world's TFR as a whole is below replacement by now. It is just rough estimate from highly questionable data by anonymous xitter demography nerds, possibly the inflection point already happened few years ago.
What is certain that the exponential growth that began in early 1700's (due to potato, maize and wise leadership of European and Manchu statesmen of the time) is finally over. The line leveled up and will start going down.
Whether it is matter for mourning or celebration, is up to you.
2/ From Elite Human Capital files
Even the most elite human capital is made of flesh and blood(so far) and all flesh must perish.
How billionaires die?
TL;DR: The lessons are: if you are a billionaire, avoid choppers, it is not worth it. Also, do not be a woman.
3/ From Cold War geopolitics files
Cuba is on the ropes, strangled by intensified US blockade, and, unlike in the past, no help is coming.
It is clear now that Venezuelan operation was about regime change in Cuba.
Politically speaking, it can be Donald's crowning achievement.
Marco Rubio will have his revenge, Red tribe boomers get to enjoy one final triumph over dirty commies before they expire (imagine Donald Trump personally tearing down statues of Fidel and Che in Havana just before the midterms), the remaining old style leftists are humiliated one more time. Cuban people gain freedom and democracy (whether Mexico, Colombia or Haiti style is to be seen), ICE finally gets to round up Cubans and return them home. Everyone wins.
4/ From South Asia files
Resistance in Baluchistan embraces grandma power, and is on the roll.
One struggle against colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism and ageism.
Whether real or PR, it is interesting they think this particular PR is needed. It could be another case of provincials being slightly out of touch with Current Year(TM) zeitgeist, or it could be prescient vision that in negative population growth world, the elderly will be expendable and disposable meat (as we already see in East Europe).
5/ From Eastern European files
Most high-level assassination attempt of the current East European unpleasantness. The target was lieutenant general Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseyev
He seems to be IRL action movie hero, who successfully fought the assassin after being shot in the back twice (while the assassin seems to be boomer who was using gun for the first time in his life)
6/ Gamer affairs + more Eastern European current events files
Most oppressed people in the world, the gamers, are fighting back.
16 years old Muscovite Artem killed one Alexey Belyaev deputy head of Roskomnadzor, Russian media and internet censorship agency. There is severe media blackout about this issue, as if someone was worried.
Xitter anonymous shitposter reactions are overwhelmingly positive. Zoomer gamers are strongly Kulak pilled. As Kulak predicted.
From pure technical point of view, compared with previous event, the difference is palpable.
Lone Zoomer with knife and grudge >>>>> Boomer with gun working for big three letter organization for promise of big payoff. (only mistake Artem made was letting to be taken alive to be raped and tortured for the rest of his life, but no one is perfect)
The Age of Boomers is over. The Time of the Zoomer has come.
Barring some game-changing technology or disaster, it is nearly certain that the trend will reverse again and the population will explode. Right now is analogous to when you add the anti-biotic to the petri dish and select for bacteria which are immune. Because it's reasonable to expect that some small segment of the population, due to some combination of genetics and culture, will (1) think it's a great idea to have lots of children; and (2) think it's a great idea to pass (1) and (2) on to said children. And in fact I think we are already seeing this in ultra-religious communities.
I don't think this is true for a number of reasons. Firstly, declines in fertility are somewhat due to endocrine disruptors from microplastic pollution we've caused. That isn't going away for anyone any time soon. Secondly, there seems to be a deeper link between modernity and fertility that most want to admit. We may see high fertility as you say, but it won't be in the world we currently live in culturally, socially, or technologically. Finally, as many on this forum are loathe to admit, we have actually outrun the carrying capacity of this planet. There won't be another fertility explosion in this culture because the planet literally will not support it for much longer.
The only evolutionary pressure on humanity at the moment is to have more kids. We evolved our whole endocrine system; merely adapting to the presence of microplastics in the environment is utterly trivial in comparison. Similarly, our sexual instincts evolved; obviously the small tweaks necessary to encourage reproduction in spite of modernity can evolve. And it's not as though those adaptations aren't already latent in the population: there are plenty of high-fertility families. Population will drop until those alleles predominate, of course, but that's just the nature of the evolutionary process. That can (and likely will) cause a lot of short-term pain, but it certainly doesn't represent an extinction risk, and only extinction could prevent the population from eventually rebounding.
How can you tell? Exceeding carrying capacity generally manifests as mass death, not reduced fertility. What resource is the planet no longer able to supply?
Not space: there remain enormous tracts of undeveloped land, and far more underdeveloped land; people can live comfortably -- by revealed preference, prefer to live -- in cities with orders of magnitude higher population density than the world as a whole.
Not energy: known uranium reserves alone contain 100X the energy of all the fossil fuels humanity has ever burned, and that's most conservative possible estimate. Extracting uranium from seawater, for example, is another factor of 100X, and D-D fusion would outlast the sun at current consumption rates. And desalination makes water a question of energy. (Sea water actually contains enough dissolved uranium to power its own desalination ten times over.)
Not food: never in history has acquiring food taken a smaller fraction of human labor or a smaller amount of arable land per capita, and we're not particularly optimized for the latter -- substituting grains for meat would boost calories-per-acre by a factor of 10-30. And most 'sustainability' issues (nitrogen fertilizer production, water use) are trivially solved with sufficient energy too, and the rest with hydroponics and recycling.
I can't see any factor that dictates global carrying capacity is 8 billion -- I can hardly see any that suggests it's 80 billion.
You're missing one. Pollution! The most obvious aspect of this is climate change, where we are wrecking the climatic conditions that allow stable agriculture, but there are many other aspects of pollution including microplastics which I mentioned, and heavy metals that will heavily impact our fertility rate.
I don't believe we have unlimited energy resources like you seem to, but this is an argument for another time. In terms of space, we already use the vast majority of arable land on this planet.
Well do you agree that at the moment, ultra-religious groups are demographically exploding notwithstanding any pollution issues?
It seems to me that the most charitable interpretation of your post is that you are making a prediction about the future rather than a statement about the present.
So let me ask you this: In what year do you thing the ultra-orthodox Jewish population in Israel will experience a leveling off and/or decline of fertility due to pollution?
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Well, this is core to the disagreement. The chemical details of how precisely e.g. food is produced and waste is handled are important, but energy is the ultimate constraint on growth. Plentiful energy enables all sorts of tricks like desalination for fresh water or electrolysis to produce the hydrogen required for the Haber–Bosch process. But if you run out of energy, no trick is going to save you.
To clarify: the energy resources I'm describing are finite; they're just very, very large. The 100X number comes from employing mature technology (breeder reactors, developed in the US in the 50s and currently in commercial use in China (CFR-600) and Russia (BN-800)) on proven deposits-- there's not really much room to doubt the potential there. Hell, the US could get centuries of current usage just burning its accumulated 'waste'-- our exiting light water reactors only actually extract a tiny fraction of the nuclear potential energy in the uranium, while a breeder can get much more out of their 'spent' fuel.
It's comparatively expensive energy, but it's a guaranteed backstop if cheaper sources dry up for whatever reason. There's a working process for seawater extraction, too; it's just not economical when it's still so easy to dig uranium out of the ground. With essentially no required additional R&D, that's already enough to get you to the point where running out of energy is just not going to be a concern in the near future, though the price of energy could be.
Speculative technology ranging from molten salt thorium reactors (probably not that hard, but no one bothers because the uranium process is easier and cheaper) to D-T fusion (there are moderately promising prototypes, but it's a very hard problem) to D-D fusion (science fiction at present) increase those reserves massively, but they're not necessary to e.g. completely replace ground water usage with desalination.
I'm not suggesting we do that -- it's almost certainly way harder than just exercising reasonable ground water stewardship -- but the option exists if we screw everything else up and billions are going to die.
I'll admit upfront I'm not too knowledgeable about microplastics, but on other sorts of pollution: we're not yeast. Yeast arguably has a pollution-related carrying capacity, in that in a sealed container it will eventually poison itself with the alcohol that is the byproduct of it's anerobic respiration. Fortunately, out pollutants are technological, not physiological.
Only CO2 has proven both 1. genuinely dangerous and 2. truly hard to mitigate. Heavy metals are dangerous, for sure... but exposure to lead peaked decades ago. Mercury in practice is only an issue if you eat a lot of certain species of fish -- we could stop. It turned out to just not be that hard to limit human exposure. Ozone layer depletion was a real problem... with a very easy solution of banning a couple aerosols; I understand that modern refrigerants are as good as freon ever was. A century ago people made a lot of noise about smog, the price of industrialization; much less so these days. Even China's about past that stage now, if you think the first world got out of it just by offshoring manufacturing.
But that does leave climate change as a more stubborn problem. Not because solving it is impossible -- we've always had fission to fall back on, as soon as we decide it's actually important -- but because it's expensive to fix and presents a difficult international coordination problem... and because most people agree it's not that important. Ecological collapse rendering stable agriculture impossible is wildly out of line with even the most dire warnings offered by the IPCC out to the year 2100. The full-chud 'it's all fake' prediction is much closer to the scientific consensus than that scenario.
We are doing a lot to fight climate change -- co2 emissions per capita peaked around 2000 in the developed world -- and there's a lot more we could and probably should do. (I'm a fan of nuclear energy, you might have gathered.) But that's because the problems it will create are cheaper to mitigate now than they will be in the future, not because it poses a genuine existential threat. And if it turns out that, in spite of all predictions, it really is that bad, there's always stratospheric aerosol injection. I just don't see this being a serious impediment to population growth (once the demographic factors sort themselves out).
True, but we 1. don't use it very efficiently 2. we could supplement with hydroponics (at much greater expense) if necessary. There's also largely untapped options like aquaculture and mesopelagic fishing, though I can't say I'm terribly excited for either.
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