The thing about demographics is that it doesn't matter what your fertility rate is now, it matters what it was 20 years ago. The fact is that China's largest cohort turns 31 this year, while it's current military age cohorts are half its size, and shrinking. The cohort turning 18 this year is the smallest since the Great Leap Forward. The next cohort with 10 million males is currently 5 years old, and it is an anomalous blip with the most recent cohort being 20% smaller and near future cohorts undoubtedly to be smaller still due to the decreasing size of their parental cohorts.
Your population in their 20s are your soldiers, your baby makers, your first home buyers, your 80 hour a week workers, your pop culture consumers - a sharp drop in their numbers is catastrophic for a nation's geopolitical and economic health. Combined with China's baby boom about to enter their 60s, when their economic productivity will substantially decline and their medical costs will skyrocket, to be supported primarily by weak cohorts 20 years younger it is a terrible position to be in. On top of this, the People's Republic of China is currently 72 years old, for context Russia went 74 years from the abdication of the Tsar to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the average lifetime of China's 49 dynasties has been 70 years. 65 to 75 years is approximately how long the revolution remains in living memory, how long people are still alive who personally remember how bad the previous regime was and thus continue to excuse any faults of the current regime. Once it passes out of living memory, calls for reform become far more intense. This triple whammy is imminent and inescapable.
For China to survive, it will have to deal with a shortage of manpower, a dramatic increase in the cost of social services, severe economic contraction, and the reforging of a national identity all at the same time, with a reduced sized military, a large number of young unmarried males with poor prospects, all while under severe external pressure along all fronts. This will be a rough decade for China.
everything you described has been historic reasons to start a war, utilize extra male population(that has a great potential for revolt), give your people patriotic reasons to support your power, affirm control over population, force older generations to work more regardless of their health. And if a war campaign is successful geopolitically it can lead to expansion that will provide your nation with external sources of manpower and economic growth.
For example if China will successfully take over Taiwan, it can use that experience as a leverage in it's colonization of African and Asian countries that it's already actively attempts.
China was a provider of important bricks in the world economy growth in the past decades, if CCP manages to put themselves on top of someone elses economic growth the same way, they can manage to afford the very expensive management of demographic collapse and economy transformation.
It might be a good reason to start a war with a neighbor they can reach by land, but they need a win, not a protracted and costly fight, which is exactly what they'll get attempting a naval invasion.
Taiwan is not a source of manpower and economic growth, the only thing of value is a high tech industry that will be immediately destroyed by any sort of military action. Whatever minor gains could be hasd would be completely overshadowed by the immense cost of fighting the pro-taiwan coalition. China's economy is reliant on ocean going foreign trade, both for the import of raw materials and the export of its manufactured goods, but that trade is totally at the mercy of powers that aren't big fans of China to begin with and would openly oppose it in the case of war. You can't maintain the world's second largest economy running freighters through a blockade in the hopes of selling a fraction of your wares in third world ports.
Saber rattling is often an effective strategy for galvanizing public support, but actually fighting a war typically proves disastrous. Even in the absolute best case scenario where the US and other western countries don't join the conflict, one need only too look at the Soviet Union in Afghanistan or the US in Vietnam to see how a superpower can be humiliated by a grossly inferior opponent and the severe internal strife caused by such boondoggles. Again, amphibious assaults are difficult under the best of circumstances, and Taiwan is an especially difficult target; China's huge advantage in population is useless as you're limited by the number of troops you can land on a beach, and China has zero experience in conducting such operations. The odds of such a war becoming a long and protracted conflict that destroys the Chinese economy and causing mass unrest is incredibly high. The idea that Taiwan is an easy practice target on the road to some second scramble for Africa is simply laughable.
- Access to negligible amounts of natural resources.
- A shit-ton of bad press and diplomatic conundrums.
- Needing to constantly fight islamist insurgents to stay in place.
- Not having to deal with a refugee crisis ten years down the line.
Macron has visited a few times, but considering he recently announced France would withdraw from Mali, I doubt he'll move towards any kind of re-establishment of the Lebanese protectorate any time soon.
The christian-aligned population is lukewarm to the idea at best, and the muslim-aligned population will fight it to the death, so it would have to be an active invasion. It's not a realistic prospect by any consideration.
A basket case, which people will blame France for when it can't be fixed. Plus a battle for influence with Iran.
If I were France, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-meter pole.
(Completely off topic: I have seen a literal 10-foot pole. It had a hypodermic needle on one end. It was used to tranquilize a skunk caught in a (humane) trap, without getting sprayed.)
In the 80's Lebanon was also a bit of a crazy place, I remember seeing pictures of American battleships firing into the mainland to attack enemy militias, which kinda reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and thinking that place will never be stable. Looks like I was wrong up until a few years ago though, it's a real shame for the people there.
However if you reference it a decade earlier you find female rock bands smoking hashish after a gig, etc. I’ll not be so simplistic as to blame a particular power, but the place was dismantled, and didn’t just fall apart. Regardless of Roman and Ottoman provincial divisions, it ended up an accidental buffer zone. Bear in mind which group legs are required for a consensus government there and bear witness to ground zero of where Shia Sunni and Copt meet etc. and yes, when you see Lebanese in Israel it is due to them having to flee during the war as they had sided against Hezbollah. The Middle East is a complicated place but the complications are largely the result of trying winner take all policies on all sides,not to mention a fair dose of”enemy of my enemy is my frenemy” compounded with colonialism in onion layers and a distinct lack of shanti shanti all around.
FSD is going to need more than just automakers - it will need roadbuilders.
Specifically, building the roads, signs, and traffic lights to be machine-readable, not just human readable.
Imagine if we could recreate the road network in software, with realtime status of traffic lights. There would be much less reliance on cameras and image recognition.
This probably already occurs in some control centre somewhere, it just needs to be made available over the air for vehicles to access.
Yeah. We should build lots of enhanced roads. Add in automatic signaling so that the cars know all of the intersections and crossings. Oh, and let's have some bars that come down so that pedestrians don't walk around the path of the cars. And maybe even add little walls around done edges so the cars can't veer off to where there isn't any smart road infrastructure. And since all of this is expensive, let's try and recoup the costs by making the cars much, much bigger and carry lots of people.
Like railways, but that need to be built all around the place, disturbing (or well, continuing the disturbance) of the landscape, having us build our lifestyles around them (like hour+ long commutes and suburbs with no communal center), and for vehicles that need expensive battery infrastructure from non-renewable materials, and that usually catter to 1 person.
Roads, signs, and traffic lights are all pretty standardized. They're not the hard part.
The hard part is road conditions, which can't be standardized unless you completely separate them from humanity. No human drivers, no people walking in the street. Also no trees, no weather, and no potholes.
The hard problems are all AI-hard. Compared to those, deciphering the standardized parts with machine vision is already long since solved.
I personally think that humans are already intensely bad drivers, easily distracted and unreliable. I'd replace them with AI drivers right now, using existing tech, and the net number of deaths would go down. (It's tens of thousands per year in the US, and that's been falling only because the passengers have become better protected.)
The pension systems across the West are fundamentally broken. If we're going to talk about ponzi schemes, pensions are the ultimate.
We need to privatise pensions completely, and encourage people to work later into life. Corporations and governments should have no responsibility for pensions - if someone can physically work, but doesn't have the money to independently retire, then they should continue to work.
Retirement is one of those things where it goes beyond raw economics into quality of life issues.
It feels like we've broken the social contract when we say to the prior generation "okay, you did your best and sacrificed to try to build a better world for us, now keep working til you're 80 in spite of failing health and diminishing capacity."
The problem with pensions isn't that the underlying math product was faulty. There are a bunch of assumed components in it-- expected retirement lifespan, rates of return on investments. There's no reason you couldn't build a robust and self-financing pension program by using conservative assumptions, but somehow the industry managed to consistently generate overly rosy models for decades. So who pays for the failure in due diligence and risk management?
(I am assuming we want to actually make good for the people who contributed to these programs in good faith. It seems that most charges to fix pensions are about replacing defined benefit pensions with something lesser that demands a much higher degree of risk tolerance to have any chance of the originally promised return.
I also wonder if there's some business benefits from retirement-motivated churn. At the top of the market, how much of high management is filled with people in their 60s who haven't had a fresh idea in years, but have reached a position of undisruptability? Having a low expected retirement age helps to cycle in fresh blood. Conversely, we've got a lot of seniors with cash crunches due to failed or insufficient retirement funding, stuck in low-skill jobs in a way that's likely depressing wages. The 72-year-old grocery cashier doesn't want to be earning $12 an hour, she wants to be at a rest home in Boca Raton. Send her there and the market wage rises to $15.
A country that can generate a trillion dollar bookseller can find a non-house-of-cards way to care for its elderly.
And that's at an industrial scale - residential scale would be even more expensive. Not all of the CO2 in the air has to be removed though and humans are not at home all the time.
It would cost, at the very highest range, $50t to stop climate change over 20 years. That's $2.5t per year, or $2,500 per middle class person for 20 years. Plus, we get a whole lot of benefits from a cleaner environment without oil and coal.
Its cheaper and more effective to just... deal with oil and coal usage as a collective, rather than all of these ad-hoc individual amelioration measures.
California voters approved such a law, 1963 Prop 14, but the supreme court struck it down.
But don't lose hope for direct democracy yet! A few years later Prop 13, which is arguably worse on minorities https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/..., passed by a wide margin and continues to see strong support from voting demographics today.
All of these schemes about CO2 capture don't make sense atmospherically (we're physically digging out too much carbon to put it back into the ground economically) -
But CO2 capture makes sense inside buildings.
Of course, all of this is just an extra burden on the individual - buying air filters, CO2 capture, expensive ventilation, CO2 monitors - when we could just restrict our coal and oil usage in the first place, much more economically.
These higher CO2 levels (890ppm) are already a problem indoors. Ventilation systems become less effective as outdoor CO2 levels increase. Many houses and apartments around the world have no ventilation systems at all.
Its... mind boggling, or collectively insane, that we are doing so little. We risk stupefying ourselves into inaction since CO2 also has negative cognitive impacts.
For starters we need to shut down all coal plants and thermal coal mines (physically occupy them if necessary), cease manufacturing new ICE vehicles, and tariff any countries that don't impose carbon prices.
I highly recommend that everyone reading this buy an air quality monitor (CO2 + Pm2.5) so that you can at least monitor your own indoor CO2 levels.
I agree. Many people essentially live in sealed boxes that only receive ventilation through cracks and the occasionally opened door or window. My home averages around 800 ppm and that is with a fresh air ventilation system that is constantly running to exchange the air. If I turn off the ventilation system, I measure CO2 levels over 1300 ppm within a matter of hours. CO2 levels above 950 ppm are associated with significant impairments to cognitive function.[1]
Not sure why this was downvoted: it's an entirely correct [0] and a very relevant take on the OP study. If you're drawing inferences on future human health impacts from the OP, you should be drawing similar inferences about indoor air pollution, today.
> For starters we need to shut down all coal plants and thermal coal mines (physically occupy them if necessary), cease manufacturing new ICE vehicles, and tariff any countries that don't impose carbon prices.
Fortunately we already have a cheaper alternative to coal, and are making the factories to deploy this solution as fast as we can.
This is especially important given we need to reduce global emissions by at least 99% and keep it that low for the next thousand years or so.
If we didn’t have better cheaper options, you simply wouldn’t be able to convince enough foreign governments to shut down their plants and mines with any level of tariffs at all (look at North Korea or Cuba for the effectiveness of the harshest trade restrictions the USA can pursue), never mind sustaining that economic pressure for the millennium-long atmospheric lifetime of CO2, and even doing so unilaterally would just make you poorer and industry relocate.
Good thing PV and batteries are cheaper than coal or gasoline, and are still getting cheaper. The combination should be cheaper than natural gas in a few years, PV by itself already is.
I don't know. I'm imagining a parallel dimension where coal is cheaper and solar is growing exponentially at 20% per year. And someone is using that exponential growth to argue they're making solar panels factories "as fast as they can" even though they're completely wrong.
Is there anything you can buy to reduce indoor CO2 levels without exchanging outdoor air? Is bubbling air through a tank of algae the only solution available to consumers? I'd love some product recommendations from HN, if anyone has one.
Air exchange is the most economical solution. You can’t stuff enough plants in a typical home to make a measurable difference and there are other pollutants such as VOCs that air exchange will address. Here are the two least expensive options I know of:
1) Get a CO2 monitor and partially open a couple windows whenever the level is above 800 ppm. Cost: $60.
2) Get a good air filter such as an IQAir HealthPro+ and pair it with a ducting adapter such as https://www2.iqair.com/sites/default/files/documents/InFlowW.... This will allow you to constantly exchange your indoor air with filtered fresh air. If you don’t want to install a wall intake for the duct, you can connect it to a window adapter like what is used for portable A/C units. Cost: $1,500.
Ive been very happy with this one. Bought it mainly for fire season out here in California but seems good for monitoring the collapse of human civilization too.
It doesn’t track co2. You can have 0 pm2.5 and still be in a stuffy room with too much carbon dioxide (which is quite common in Poland in Winter for example. Air cleaners remove pm2.5, people keep windows shut to keep pollution and cold air from getting in, and they get crazy amounts of co2 indoors).
Just talking about CO2 has negative cognitive impacts, as this thread demonstrates. People will apply any stretch of the mind they can to avoid having to face the problem.
The remarkable collective insanity is that we can't be sane collectively. It takes only a minority to make collective action impossible and individual action pointless.
So you can buy an air monitor but all it's going to do is affirm that the inevitable is actually happening.
I don't think what you describe as 'insanity' is at all confined to climate change though. It actually seems weird to me to be surprised that we find it hard to take collective action on this.
We're talking about a (in relation to a human lifetime) gradual process, with costs relatively far in the future. Experimental evidence shows all sorts of costs are exponentially discounted over time — so why should this be any different, for people taking individual actions or deciding whether to elect pro-environmental governments? Other problems are just more pressing: what to feed your kids without them whining about vegetarian food; how to pay the rent; how to get promoted if this requires long distance travel; enjoying time with friends and family if they live at a distance.
Most people, in most places, at least acknowledge the issue. It doesn't mean they're jumping up to pay the costs, but it's an ordinary discussion about responsibility and economics rather than an assault on science.
The delusions are largely limited to one country, for whom this is not merely about the difficulty of collective action but a paranoid belief that it's a massive global hoax. That's a whole new level of delusion.
If people aren’t going to combat climate change on the bases of mass extinction and threat to all advanced civilization as we know it, I don’t expect they will be persuaded by ill health effects.
I wouldn't count on that necessarily. Mass extinction and threat to all advanced civilization seems abstract, your own ill health seems more personal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences) You often see news stories with a personal frame to drive them home, rather than a situational frame.
Though I don't know, indeed, you might have it right, it might make no difference.
Hundreds of millions ignore the obesity impact on their health. And that’s something you can feel right away. I seriously doubt people are going to pay attention to something so intangible.
I doubt they ignore it. People that are obese and fine with it are a minority. That doesn't mean it's easy to stop being obese. Compared to obesity, CO2 doesn't have genetic factors, the science on it is clear, there are easy solutions to monitor it. You could also do something like make people do a test in a CO2-heavy room and in a CO2-light room. On the other hand, you can't show obese people what it's like to not be obese, or non obese people what it's like to be. The two situations are very different.
False. It’s not that hard to fool yourself into thinking that you will be able to navigate the societal disruption that will be caused by climate change, especially if you have money. If you have the resources you can move north, pay more for food, hide behind the security services. But no one wants to imagine living inside a literal bubble or seeing their grandkids crippled by CO2 poisoning. Escaping the heat and its effects is one thing—it’s entirely a different thing to have to escape the atmosphere.
Water pollution like this is a localized phenomenon. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is not. What the study is saying is that there may be no environmentally safe outdoor spaces anywhere in the world at the end of the century. This has never been the case previously, even when environmental pollution has gotten out of control in certain places.
It’s not about it being local(which I bet it’s not anyway). The point is that we can witness an example of people literally drinking mud. And they still continue polluting what’s left of the water.
I thought the same thing then I saw how people freaked out over COVID and it gave me some hope. I thought masks would never catch on as much as they did. So perhaps there’s room for manipulating people into effective action if we can find the right triggers.
I frequently try to express this to people and I don't know how to get it across sometimes. Our representative republic has been so clogged up by corporate interests that we can't even pass infrastructure that would benefit most of those same corporate interests at this point. I have basically zero faith that we will be able to address climate change in any meaningful way.
'Advanced civilization' is the reason the human animal is deeply sick; if we saw any other animal population with 15% requiring psychiatric medication, [1], 40% obese [2], with fertility rates plummeting below replacement rate [3], we would conclude that this animal species was deeply distressed and experiencing a social collapse reminiscent of those observed in Calhoun's rat utopias. [4] But because we evolved a highly capable rationalization mechanism, people are able to convince themselves that things are OK even as various trends worsen. (A common justification is 'we're not animals, we can ignore out instincts - meanwhile, everything we do is driven by instinct.)
Even from an environmental perspective, sure, burning fossil fuels isn't sustainable and has disastrous ecological impacts. I agree. So does battery production, microchip production, industrialized farming, etc. We are polluting and destroying the ecosphere with all of our 'advanced' civilization, not just climate change. The air and water are filled with all kinds of man-made poisons, not just fossil fuels, and we're inventing more every day.
This is not a problem that can be solved with more technology.
That's why I don't worry too much about climate change. If it gives us a systemic collapse sooner rather than an even worse one later, that's a good thing. More people will survive at a higher level of culture. I don't see anything upsetting about this. People thrived most of the time for most of human history prior to the Industrial Revolution.
> For starters we need to shut down all coal plants and thermal coal mines (physically occupy them if necessary)
So are you personally enlisting in the marines or somewhere else? Also, who’s gonna pay for green energy for a billion Asians? Since it’s them who’s adding most new coal plants.
It’s easy to say “occupy if necessary” sitting on a couch. It’s ridiculous how people throw words like this. And statistically speaking, the majority of commentators here never even held an assault rifle in their lives.
Cryptocurrencies need to be banned to help stop these attacks. If corporations in the West cannot buy the coins legally, they will not be able to pay the ransoms, and the attack frequency and intensity will fall.
On top of that, we'll also reduce electricity and computer chip waste, since mining activity will decrease as the price plummets.
Its a lot harder to justify huge attacks when your payment is in gift cards, compared to semi-anonymous crypto that can be cashed out in your 2nd world country of choice.
It’s already of dubious legality in some situations, like in the instance that the criminal organization is sanctioned. But, corporations are often not paying these ransoms directly, they hire an intermediary to pay it for them. If the west bans crypto, those intermediaries will just fly an employee to wherever they can send it.
2020: 90 million (about 8 million rely on food aid to survive)
2100: 362 million
Europe and the West can feed themselves without cheap fertilizer, they have done so for 200 years (about the time since the last major famine in France).
Cheap fertilizer is just leading to unsustainable population explosions in the developing world, where the reproduction strategies of men (these are patriachal societies where women lack consistent access to education, contraception, abortion) will inevitably push the ecosystem to its limits.
We are essentially in violation of the Prime Directive in terms of the free food, goods, technology we are giving some of these countries.
By contrast, Taiwan is dreadful, at 1.07. Eventually, China will be able to just sail in.
The real threat to our chip supplies is that the world will run out of intelligent Taiwanese people to operate TSMC.