The government currently kills people as part of exercising its policing powers, which most people agree are overly aggressively used.
If this lowers that rate, it's possible that the difference in beatings, shootings, and home invasions will be basically even, because there isn't a large portion of the criminal element which is waiting for better encrypted cellphones to do these things (hint: other things about cellphones make these problematic, and most depend on other evidence anyway when prosecuted), where there is a reason to think that police being restrained in using illegal investigation methods will decrease the rate at which police use other illegal investigation methods.
These same people seem awfully shy when I ask to go through their photos, just to see if they have any using drugs.
But that's exactly it: if you leave a gaping hole for the feds to get through I (in the sense of a hypothetical attacker) can go through it too, especially with how easily most federal secrets leak out and the fact that rekeying is essentially impossible for this use.
Of course they're shy of you going through their photos. They know you personally, and you are a person, not an algorithm. Whilst it is possible that a person may go through their photos as part of mass surveillance operations, they believe it's unlikely to happen.
Your second point is true only if the access mechanism is reliant on weak security. It doesn't have to be.
I mean, there are other substantial factors that make this not an ideal free market:
- The time to set up certain kinds of facilities, eg, good physics labs or mechanical engineering labs, can be on the order of several years to a decade.
- There is a limited ability to scale up, as it relies on its own out put to keep functional (eg, professors and TAs).
- Non-responsive hiring managers whose cultural sense was normalized before many of these changes impacted colleges (eg, >20 years ago) haven't adjusted their hiring practices, and place an artificially high reward on college degrees.
> lists internet access as one of the boondoggles of the education system, to be slashed and feared, and veered away from as it detracts from our books! and our socialization!
> says that we should use more internet in our solution, because this is the future and clearly interconnectedness is the future in book! and socialization!
How am I supposed to take your opinion seriously, and what actually is your opinion, when you say such contrary things in such little time?
I think you're being a little harsh. S/he was listing things that are not essential to a college education. The second point is referring to a different type of college education - one that obviously needs the internet since it would exist on the internet.
Also, Wifi != internet access. You can get to the internet without Wifi.
I haven't felt any improvement in productivity at higher KLOC counts with statically typed languages in my coding. I've also worked at several large companies and have watched teams using both types of languages, and I have not seen more productivity from those using statically typed languages.
More importantly, there is no conclusive empirical evidence either way.
jshen: I feel your pain. I think there's been too much down-voting by the karma bullies on HN lately, and I think that's the number one reason there's been less comments on HN.
Of course, there are folks who will feel that even though there are less comments lately the level of discourse is higher.
We're watching a second family of mammals adapt and speciate a bunch of new winners in this domain of man, in in our own homes!
Even the human mass extinction has given life time to adapt, by way of crops, farm animals, pets, etc. We've even helped make sure that hundreds or thousands of species across many different kinds of life are 100% going to survive along with us if it's remotely in our power.
There are likely hundreds or thousands of other species like raccoons, pigeons, rats, jellyfish, various kinds of insects, etc that are going to thrive in our cities and continue to coevolve as parasites.
I'm not entirely convinced a human caused mass extinction is really all that much worse than other kinds, because we provide some guaranteed survival routes to animals that can coevolve with us, and be useful in some way.
I've never heard this apologetic argument for mass extinction, it's somewhat disheartening. Do you think domesticated animals and scavengers are going to make up for the lost in biodiversity and ecological damage? Basically whatever can survive in our concrete jungles and farms will be alright, screw the rest?
The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself.
> a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species
In what way?
The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior.
I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous.
Because we are all completely dependent on ecosystem services provided by those species, such as erosion control (without which your country erodes away to desert), rainwater buffering (without which you experience catastrophic flooding), and transpiration (without which you lose almost all inland rainfall[1]).
Loss of individual species is just the symptom. The real problem—and what this article discusses—is wholesale destruction of wilderness.
Don't imagine that just a handful of species can provide these services either. Since ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, a particular species' role is almost always subtle and interconnected. See: the services provided by wolves in Yellowstone, which were never fully understood until they were removed and then re-introduced[2].
So why is wilderness important? Fundamentally, wilderness is arranged (and so, it functions) in completely different ways than human-tended landscapes. Now it's obvious that a suburb is different from a forest, but what's less obvious is that the way wilderness works is much more efficient. It's not dependent on a constant stream of material extracted from "somewhere else", but on average it produces far more economic value when ecosystem services are accurately accounted for.
Surprise, surprise: economics seems to suggest that those living on a spaceship shouldn't take a sledgehammer to the life support system…
(of course, the ultimate trick would be to design human landscapes that also function like wilderness ecosystems)
I don't think your evaluation of human ability to cultivate environments realistic.
The vast majority of the external effects of forests and wildernesses is the effect of a few major species. In nature, those species are supported and interacted with by a complex network of other species. However, this established relationship isn't necessarily optimal for the few species of interest to us.
I find it likely that we're able to cultivate select main species of interest in forests if we set our minds to it, especially considering the large scale agriculture that we already do.
There's simply nothing to suggest that you can't construct an ecosystem with many fewer elements or the elements rearranged to, say, make room for houses, that has the same external effects as other ones. In fact, the success of many environments-in-a-bottle, indoor marijuana production, etc, suggests that we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive.
No one is suggesting that we do something silly like wipe out all the major predators while we let herd animals run free (which is the case with wiping out the wolves in Yellowstone), but rather that we can get away with a lot less moving parts and that we can tune the parts quite a bit to suite our fancy.
The only large scale human dependencies on plants relate to weather, oxygenation, water flow, and soil control. The last two we know we can do with intentionally seeded groves and other such constructs of plants we choose (using a reasonable selection), and don't need to replicate the full array of plants. In terms of oxygen, seeding the oceans with an algae would be far more efficient, but we really only need ferns, which are incredibly efficient at producing oxygen and are relatively hardy plants.
The final complexity is weather, which I must admit I know relatively little about, but am dubious there's any material reason it wouldn't work fine with planned forests.
Again, no one is saying "Fuck it, kill all the things". I just think we can get away with many fewer species - and sometimes who groups of species, where another can reasonably fill its role.
Or are you telling me we couldn't survive with 3,500 kinds of beetle... we really need all 350,000.
we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive.
Only with the inputs of massive amounts of energy and additives -- fertilizers, pesticides, and cultivation supplied directly by humans (or our machines).
The energy intensity of modern ag is many, many times higher than of natural environmentments. Food production in the US requires ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced, in Europe it's closer to a 5:1 ratio.
A sustainable agricultural system would require that the output energy be greater than the input.
We have only been at it for so long, and barely gotten started in earnest. Plus... energy and additives are not "external" to the system: they are provided by a natural species in the system, us.
Yes, we do need to get to a point where we are not relying on expendable reserves to run the system. But it certainly is possible that we will engineer a better ecosystem (robot cultivators and solar panels included) that results in a more efficient net benefit for us.
May I suggest Howard T. Odum's works, in particular Environment, Power, and Society and Energy Basis for Man and Nature.
In the former he argues strongly about the mechanisms by which humans have enhanced ag productivity in plants and animals.
Generally, there are the following methods:
Mechanical tillage, breaking up soil to make it easier for plants to grow and spread roots. This also, incidentally, increases topsoil loss to wind and water, such that many farms are effectively "mining" topsoil faster than it's being replaced.
Artificial irrigation. This varies from simply collecting and distributing water via gravity-flow reservoirs and irrigation ditches to transporting water and irrigation pumps and pipes to water mines which, again, deplete a resource faster than it is restored -- as is the case throughout the eastern Plains states in the US, much of China, and especially in the Sahara and Arabian penninsula where water tens of thousands of years old is used to irrigate crops, from underground reserves which aren't being replenished. Water availability itself is becoming a significant concern, with major droughts in the past 5 years disrupting crops in Russia, the United States, China, India, and of course, as is rather chronically the case, Africa.
Fertilizer. Nitrogen, fixed at great energy cost from the air using fossil fuels (mostly natural gas). Phosphorus, which is in extremely limited supply. Potash, rather more abundant, but still with only a century or three of reserves at present rates of use.
Selective breeding. Plants and animals have only so much metabolic budget. By diverting energy away from specific uses, especially immune response, physical activity, and foraging needs, more can be devoted to growth. This works to an extent, but is greatly facilitated by ...
Antibiotics and pesticides to reduce illness and parasites. Fun fact: the first virus identified wasn't a human illness but the tobacco mosaic virus. Antibiotics and pesticides mean that animals and plants need devote less of their own energy to competing in their environment. Unfortuately, both ultimately create resistance, a problem later to both the ag products themselves and quite possibly humans, especially in the case of antibiotics. Moreover, bred cultivars requiring such treatments don't compete where they're not available (similarly for fertilized crops, above).
Mechanical pest reduction. Removal of weeds, or native long-lasting plants which compete for ag lang productivity (e.g., natural plains, tropical rainforest).
Solar panels compete directly with plants for solar energy. At best you want to put them in regions plants cannot grow.
The history of ag enhancement is relatively brief, but it's all been accompanied either by vast investments of energy, or by the application of either materials or technologies themselves requiring or based on vast applications of energy. Even the father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, cautioned that he'd only provided at best a brief respite from hunger.
It's not so long ago that major famines still ruled the world, with major instances in the 19th century (Ireland 1845-52 killing 1.5 million, China 1850-73 with a population drop of 60 million), and 20th (1920s in Russia, 5 million, and China, 3 million, 1930s Ukrain Holdomor, 7-10 million and China, 5 million, and the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61, 15-43 million). And that's just a set of highlights, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
In many cases, 30% of regional populations died (or in some lucky cases, emigrated elsewhere, as in Ireland), in others historically 50-90% of populations were wiped out. I'd suggest you not think this cannot happen again.
I'll also advise you that this is a topic I studied, extensively, in school.
Some of your problem predictions are 100+ years in the future. I generally regard these as nonsense.
Looking at the relative rates of technical growth and computing power, it's incredibly unlikely that we'll be able to accurately pick out what the future is going to bring.
Examples of technologies that are expected in the next 50-100 years: 3D printable organs which can be transplanted, based on your own stem cells; the first smarter-than-human general purpose AI; fusion power; the ability for bioengineering to be done with a home lab kit. (We're actually at the cusp of the first and last of these now.)
That level of bioengineering, computing prowess, and cheap power will have an incredibly hard to predict effect on issues like food production, ecosystem maintenance, etc.
So which of your warnings are only problematic at 100+ years?
Some of your problem predictions are 100+ years in the future. I generally regard these as nonsense.
Why?
I don't.
Technology is a function of available energy (Tainter, White, Prigogine), not vice versa.
I find projections of viable sustained fusion nonsense given 62 years of failure to achieve it. Every last single other energy source tapped by humans, sustained nuclear fission included, had previous exemplars occurring on Earth, and was adapted by humans either before history, or (in the case of fission) within a matter of single-digit years of initial attempts.
> I find projections of viable sustained fusion nonsense given 62 years of failure to achieve it. Every last single other energy source tapped by humans, sustained nuclear fission included, had previous exemplars occurring on Earth, and was adapted by humans either before history, or (in the case of fission) within a matter of single-digit years of initial attempts.
We have a precious example occurring not on Earth, and within a few decades had figured out how to make large pulses out of it.
Your summary also does a great disservice to the history of using assorted biochemicals as fuel, from various plant and animal oils through initial study in refinements and use of various technologies to aid in their burning.
You can hardly claim, as your statement implied, that we had full mastery of burning hydrocarbons the first time we tried - or that it was anything like when we tried to scale that technology up.
Given 62 years, we have systems with controlled fusion and systems without energy reclaim that are energy positive. A lot of the lack of progress is due to the relatively low level of funding. (The entire cost of fusion research so far is about the same as one stealth bomber.)
I find it unlikely that over doubling the time, with better technology, won't let us solve the capture problem, especially since the facilities of many studies are actually using old technology which we already know how to do better than. (Example: the ignition laser could be purchased in reduced size and with more efficiency for much less than it cost to initially build the laser.)
Your argument seems to largely be "It's complicated to me compared to what I know about these other methods, so can't happen!"
> Technology is a function of available energy (Tainter, White, Prigogine), not vice versa.
This is super unrelated to what we're talking about, because not even you are arguing that we're going to run out of the ability to produce electricity in <100 years.
Mass agriculture works despite of our enormous ignorance of how the ecosystem works... you really shouldn't take our ability to manipulate corn or soybeans as indications that humans know how to create "relatively stable environments." We haven't and we don't.
>The other parts of this earth play an essential role in maintaining ecological balance on this planet, and a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species. Hopefully that's a good enough argument if you still don't think that mass extinction and habitat lose isn't a negative outcome in and of itself.
Why?
Humans don't even need animals. It's brutally cruel to enslave, torture, kill and eat animals the way we do. Humanity can be fine on its own.
Regardless of whether or not you like things like, say, hippos, or mosquitoes, or prairie voles, humanity does not need them.
Should we set half the earth aside for wildlife? I think it'd be better used by humans.
You can't be serious. First of all, wildlife and the rich biodiversity of nature has its own intrinsic value without needing to be "useful" to humans. Second, we're constantly learning from other species and I doubt we're even close to knowing everything there is to know about them. Some of our best tech was inspired by wildlife (sonar, swarm robotics, aviation, the list goes on).
> Let's be frank. I don't need you. So if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you?
Yes... you should unless is someone that you care enough to risk abandon every loved one that you have by dying for a stranger.
I'm an extremelly pragmatic a-hole when we are speaking about eco-nonsense.
We will not change on time. We will destroy the planet. This is fine as we are, acording to Darwin, the current fittest animal in the planet.
So... what's the worst that can happen? We will be extincted by ourselves (carring several "not-good-enough-for-evolution" species with us... but, they weren't good enough so, who cares?)... and this my friend, is also fine.
"The Planet" is just a big ball of rock. People are usually talking about the ecosystems that exist on the surface of the planet when they talk about "destroying the planet." The play on words to say "don't worry, this big ball of rock will keep spinning" is tired and played out.
I think you're misrepresenting my argument, which isn't "actively perpetuate harm on non-humans", but rather "let's build a world with mostly humans via the most humane way possible."
>if I see you being mugged/raped/beaten, should I just go on my merry way or should I help you?
Please avoid casually triggering rape survivors; 1/4 women has suffered sexual assault and using thought experiments that are triggering without any reason to (mugged/murdered would have sufficed) is a way to exclude women from spaces.
But as to your question, that depends. Do you think anything sentient has some sort of right not to suffer, or do you generally prefer a world without sentient suffering? If so, it'd be morally consistent to help me, and it'd also be morally inconsistent to eat meat or consume animal products in general.
As a vegan myself, I'm generally opposed to actions that perpetuate the suffering of sentient life. However, this only applies, critically, to life which exists. I have no moral obligation to perpetuate a species, because a species is a concept, not an actual thing, and it does not have the ability to suffer.
So, I'd be totally supportive of diffusing birth control for non-human species and just letting them go extinct. I'd honestly rather use that space and resources for humans than animals. I care about humans more and I generally think a world with more humans is more interesting and diverse (information-theoretically) than a world with more animals than humans.
We need oxygen, not trees. Algae makes most oxygen. As a matter of self-preservation I'm okay with algae; we can eat them anyway so it's a useful symbiosis.
> Please avoid casually triggering rape survivors; 1/4 women has suffered sexual assault and using thought experiments that are triggering without any reason to (mugged/murdered would have sufficed) is a way to exclude women from spaces.
Many men (or gender-fluid people) are raped/molested too. Why is your focus so intensely on women when talking about something that should be common all rape-survivors?
Also, first you say:
> I have no moral obligation to perpetuate a species, because a species is a concept, not an actual thing, and it does not have the ability to suffer.
Then you go on to say:
> So, I'd be totally supportive of diffusing birth control for non-human species and just letting them go extinct.
Having no moral obligation towards action (actively supporting a species) doesn't imply the a moral obligation towards the opposite action (actively 'destroying' a species).
>Many men (or gender-fluid people) are raped/molested too. Why is your focus so intensely on women when talking about something that should be common all rape-survivors?
Because women are excluded from tech communities more than men.
I'd like to sidestep the moral argument for a moment.
One major assumption in your argument is that there wouldn't be unintended consequences.
I think humanity should either stop increasing the population or should place a great emphasis on space colonies. Repurposing earth resources from animals to humans is just delaying the inevitable point where human consumption outstrips resources available.
In the next 200-300 years, I consider it highly likely that either A: humankind's population will shrink enough to satisfy all but the wildest econaut's dreams or B: biodiversity will incomprehensibly explode as we start tinkering with genes directly. We may fancy ourselves masters of the process and ecologists may decry it as being "unnatural", but in the end it really won't be. Evolution will be as functional as ever, even if the link between genes and reproduction becomes more complicated. Indeed if anything it threatens to become far too functional for our likings.
In the grand scheme of things, the idea that setting aside "half the planet" will somehow fix, well, anything is really quite a parochial viewpoint. We either won't need to because biodiversity will be getting along just fine, or we'll be setting aside a great deal more than "half"....
I always think it's useful to think of species, like humans, less as an individual organism, and more of a menagerie. The human menagerie stretches from gut bacteria all the way to elephants, with homo sapiens lodges somewhere in the middle of the bunch.
What, specifically, do you think is going to collapse in the ecosystem that not just kills billions of humans, but actually poses an existential threat to humanity?
To be an existential threat, there have to be less than 5 million humans left (in my mind, at least, and this is probably a really high figure to be 'existential'). This means whatever you propose has to be at least 99.9% deadly.
To put that in perspective, that's three viruses each as deadly as ebola at its worst (~90% deadly) striking humanity one after the other. /That/ would leave ~5-10 million humans alive.
So I'm actually sincerely curious: what do you think is going to happen that will wipe out all of humanity?
Here's a hint: 12 to 16 degrees of warming spaces out over 100 to 1000 years (why so unprecise? because we haven't got a good grasp of the incredibly complex machine with lots of explosive outcomes we're currently toying with - we can only infer from our best models, and the more precise they get, the worse the predictions become). That's 4 to 8 degrees because of our own greenhouse gases and an estimated additional 8 degrees from runaway warming effects that are getting triggered somewhere between +2 and +6.
Hint: That's 12 to 16 global average temperature increase. Ice age was only 4 degrees colder than now. 12 to 16 creates a desert planet. If I had to bet what brings humanity at least to the brink of extinction, it would be this.
There's basically one way out that's still realistic: Creating a more reflective atmosphere. But we only have one shot at this. I'm afraid that when +4 degrees already create utter chaos from rising sea levels, hurricanes, landslides and the following mass migration, the one shot won't be aimed well - it will be done by politicians pressured by screaming masses.
"Without additional efforts to reduce GHG emissions beyond those in place today, emissions growth is expected to persist driven by growth in global population and economic activities. Baseline scenarios, those without additional mitigation, result in global mean surface temperature increases in 2100 from 3.7 °C to 4.8 °C com- pared to pre-industrial levels10 (median values; the range is 2.5 °C to 7.8 °C when including climate uncertainty, see Table SPM.1)11 (high confidence). The emission scenarios collected for this assessment represent full radiative forcing including GHGs, tropospheric ozone, aerosols and albedo change. Baseline scenarios (scenarios without explicit additional efforts to constrain emissions) exceed 450 parts per million (ppm) CO2eq by 2030 and reach CO2eq concentration levels between 750 and more than 1300 ppm CO2eq by 2100. This is similar to the range in atmospheric concentration levels between the RCP 6.0 and RCP 8.5 pathways in 2100.12 For comparison, the CO2eq concentration in 2011 is estimated to be 430 ppm (uncertainty range 340 – 520 ppm)13. [6.3, Box TS.6; WGI Figure SPM.5, WGI 8.5, WGI 12.3]"
Didn't that number (which is the extreme upper end of the predicted range for the most extreme scenario the IPCC considered, and so not really the right number to quote anyway) get lowered in the AR5, to something like 4.8 degrees C?
I agree that we as a species can probably survive nearly anything.
Derailing, I think it's also pretty reasonable to worry about events that will only wipe out 99.9% of humanity. Statistically, I'm probably dead in such a case. Probably everyone I know is dead. My back-of-the-envelope calculation says that I probably can't expect more than a fifth cousin to survive if 99.9% of people are dead. I don't even know any of my fifth cousins.
"Existential risk to humans" tends to be at the outer range of my own fairly pessimistic set of scenarios, but several global warming situations could run that far out.
Yonatan Zunger posted an especially pessimisstic bit about global warming in April of 2013. In particular he noted:
_The last big spike like this was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago. Average temperatures rose by 6C over a period of 20,000 years -- which is enough to look like a giant, sharp spike on the history-of-the-entire-planet graph...._
_When the biota of a planet get rewritten, the creatures that require the most delicate maintenance die first. This tends to mean really big creatures, that rely on large supplies of their foods; apex predators, which rely on the entire food chain beneath them; and "canary" species like many frogs, which are very sensitive and tend to be the first to die when something is going wrong. Historically, the cutoff for "large creatures" (that tend to not survive extinction events) seems to be in the ballpark of 20 pounds; things bigger than that just require the ecosystem to be too healthy._
IPCC's estimates call for a global rise in temperatures of anywhere from 2-6°C, (3.6 - 10.8 °F). First thing to realize is that this is an average rise. Which means that in some areas (mostly over oceans, with higher albedo and greater thermal mass) it will be lower, and in others (mostly inland regions) it's likely to be much higher. Overland temperatures much over 49°C (about 120°F) are problematic as they tend to rule out much plant life. Above about 65°C (about 150°F), many forms of animal life cannot keep themselves cool, even in the shade. The result would be potentially large areas of land in which life would literally cook to death.
Even if we don't go that far, there are a number of other challenges humans face, all of which tie back to population, resource consumption, and overflowing pollution sinks.
If you think of systems layered on top of one another, you've got the global financial system, global, regional, national, and local economies, governmental systems, social systems, infrastructure, and more, layered on top of ecological, biological, meteorological, oceanographic, and other systems. Disruptions of lower systems will propogate through higher ones.
Disrupt enough human systems and things start to fall apart. The claim by numerous authorities in the Collapse space is that the collapse of Western Civilization isn't something that's going to happen, it's something that's happening, and likely will be for some time. There are definitely global trends which have been pointing downward for some time, many since the 1970s, some from before that.
Both the Arab Spring and the Ebola outbreak are examples people point to. Paul Mason's Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere gives a capsule summary of the dynamic of the wave of global revolutions which started in 2009. The original essay coves the basics:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/newsnight/paulmason/2011/0...
The Ebola outbreak is being exacerbated by numerous factors -- perversely, both lack of technology and its presence are playing a role. Many people, living close to their limits, with few resources, in crowded conditions, but with access to transportation (both ground and air) have created conditions for the disease and facilitated its spread. Lack of literacy, ineffective communications, and other factors are also at play. Airplanes could transfer the disease around the planet in under a day. Nightmare scenarios have it breaking out, not in New York or London, but in Kolkata, Manilla, Cairo, or Sao Paulo.
The CDC predicts as many as 500,000 cases (of a disease with 70-90% mortality), I've seen projections far above that, though from less credible sources. Much of this depends on how rapidly exponential growth takes off, and when, if ever, inhibitory effects start slowing the spread.
Where things get interesting though, for ... interesting values of interesting, is when you consider the systemic effects of disruption.
In her letter to President Obama, Liberia's President Sirleaf gives one small example of this:
With blanket travel bans, border closures and interactions on vessels berthing at our ports, this has become more than a humanitarian emergency. In a country that has barely emerged from a 30-year period of civil and political unrest, with the presence of a large youthful(mainly unemployed)population, some of whom were child soldiers-this health emergency threatens civil order. What is even more heartbreaking is that we are unable to reopen our basic and secondary health facilities because terrified health workers, who have watched colleagues die, are afraid to return to work.
That is: disease has disrupted transport, which means commerce, which means civil unrest.
At a global scale, breakdowns in one portion of a globalized system (finance, trade, energy, raw materials, gas, water, food) could lead to a domino effect in others. David Korowicz's "Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse" takes a look at this: http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Trade-Off1....
While it might not reduce the total population to 5 million or fewer, it could well disrupt systems to a level that modern industrialized economies simply could not function. Which might be a pretty big deal in some areas.
What data suggests that? The data I've seen (and I'll admit I have no relevant expertise and therefore little more than intuition on what sources to trust) seems to suggest that climate change will likely impose costs on humanity in the tens of billions, but that those costs are probably quite low in the grand scheme of things. I certainly haven't seen any data to suggest a credible threat of significant human population decline, much less human extinction.
If the infrastructure that we have collapses there will be mass starvation. Probably more so in 1st world countries than in places where people are basically hand-to-mouth.
I charged people with your opinions higher mark-up (effectively) by declining to give them discounts because I didn't like their entitled attitude. Sometimes I also threw them out because I just couldn't be bothered.
In general, they actually paid less (even not getting discounts) and took up more employee time than other customers, and we were better off without people like that.
I think the only people who actually tolerate them are large chain stores, and only because they can't be bothered trying to assess whether their drones are exercising good judgment.
Your reply is overly pedantic, when taken in the best light.