There are other alternatives beyond "spreading out" and "sitting on our hands".
Solving world hunger does not need expansion. Stopping climate change does not need expansion. Preventing the upcoming antibiotics crisis does not need expansion. To the contrary, expansion makes all those things worse or has even started them in the first place.
Stopping world hunger does not need more food, or even fewer people. Humans produce quite enough food to feed everyone already. The problem is distribution.
This problem is twofold. First is that much food is produced far from many poorly nourished people. This problem is totally solvable by modern transport. There are enough charity donations to prevent hunger everywhere.
Second, and most importantly, it's the social structure what prevents ending the hunger where the hunger still is. People prevent production and distribution of food in order to keep the social structures where they are on top, or are fighting to be on top. They themselves are not hungry, and don't care about the rest much.
I'm gobsmacked. Let's take what I consider the most indisputable claim:
> Humans are also exceptional in that they could extinguish themselves, either by choice on their own folly.
Could you imagine ants finding a method to annihilate themselves? I don't claim that animals are unintelligent, but we are unique in our ability to create technology to achieve almost any goal, no matter goal's 'sapience'.
> If tomorrow all ants disappear then most land-oriented ecosystems would just collapse.
I don't dispute this, but it's completely orthogonal to my claim. Humans have disrupted the biosphere in a manner that is unprecedented since when meteor strikes and seismic events were still shaping earth
I'm confused. Do you mean the millions of "long covid" cases which already exist today? Or the estimate that about 70% of all people who got the vaccine will be dead within 3 years?
post-infection syndromes are well established, and not unique to coronaviruses. It can occur after an infection with ANY pathogen, including covid-19.
after any critical illness, doesn't even have to be an infection, with an ICU stay where intubation was required, the odds are ~50% you will be left with a permanent injury for life. However even after relatively moderate infection a permanent lifelong injury may remain.
you could also end up alive, but in a wheelchair with oxygen for life.
There is a huge spectrum in between, anything from vague brainfog, properly known as executive dysfunction, to partial or total paralysis due to a neuropathy often requiring mechanical ventilation, narcolepsy, organ failures, autoimmune conditions, and so on and so on.
No doubt. I've posted this in several threads on HN already. But what I'm stating stands - people (mostly media) are starting to treat and report on "Long Covid" as if it's own disease. You are left with permanent long term issues from cold, flu, and all other infections.
Your parent comment was written in a way to discredit vaccinations as a concept and insinuate that it is cult-like. You may want to double-check your understanding of sarcasm. It works exactly the other way around.
If you consider enjoying nature as "reckless behavior" then the shared understanding needed as a basis for a conversation may be missing. Lying in the grass looking at sky and stars, running through the forest with your dog, go pick mushrooms. That's very natural behaviour, not "reckless". Of course you can sit indoors all day, but I prefer a vaccine and enjoy nature instead.
Not sure this is meaningful. It's similar to asking "I wonder if the stock market could cope with Elon Musk dumping all his Tesla shares at once. Do it!" Of course the stock would crash. Of course it would create a panic among not just Tesla shareholders but investors across the board. Of course the FTC would go and try countermeasures. And similarly, of course BTC would crash, at least temporarily. It's still a market with human actors in it.
Correct! But unlike the Tesla example, Bitcoin doesn’t have an FTC, with market-stabilizing abilities and procedures and tripwires. What does that mean in reality for large asset holders, for market stability, for relative safety of investment? What would Ethereum do in this scenario that Bitcoin cannot do? Is it irrelevant that Bitcoin can’t regulate these things and everything would be fine?
Gnome Shell anybody? I'm surprised nobody brought it up yet.
About 10 years ago I switched from Gnome 2 to 3. Because my distro did. It was a huge drop in features. Over the years I had tuned my desktop experience on Gnome 2 with different panel apps, layouts, some custom hacks. It worked great. Gnome 3 ended all this. It was really simple, so that it was almost dysfunctional. It was new so I thought the community would soon catch up. But it never did. The experience is still much worse that in the Gnome 2 days. Even a few extensions that try to mimic the Gnome 2 experience can't really compensate, and many of them break with every other update. It's such a shame.
Opposite point of view to yours here (yours is equally valid). I vastly prefer Gnome 3. Less rolly thing required.
Separate to that it's not such a great example here even if you hate the change as it's a major version. Gnome 2 didn't change much where you find things and how it works for many years. Gnome 3 has been going on in a similar vein of not having changed much from a UI perspective (at least that I've noticed) for what, 8 years or so? I don't even recall the last time I had to learn something new about using it. You're completely within your rights to dislike it. There's mate and xfce for you that might be more to your taste. And as an aside, isn't just seriously cool that we have good options and alternatives if we don't like the way something goes on the linux desktop? When Apple/MS change you go with them or dump everything you use and how you use it to shift to a competitor. Gnome to xfce is pretty straightforward and you use it to use all the same software applications.
Solving world hunger does not need expansion. Stopping climate change does not need expansion. Preventing the upcoming antibiotics crisis does not need expansion. To the contrary, expansion makes all those things worse or has even started them in the first place.