The world has probably passed peak pollution

If you have any amount of energy storage then the time delay doesn't matter. You turn on the alternate generation method when the storage is starting to run down. It doesn't matter if it takes an hour to come up to temperature because you still have two hours of storage left.

The actual problem is that "shortfall" is a relative concept. Do you have to burn coal because it's cloudy all week, or just because you spent a lot of resources building coal-fired power plants instead of solar panels or wind turbines or nuclear reactors? How often are you going to run the things?

The economics of building and maintaining an entire fleet of coal power plants to use only in a demand emergency is extremely poor. Like you're better off spending half the money on nuclear reactors you can run 100% of the time and the other half on electrifying transportation so you can have a huge demand buffer in the form of vehicle batteries and then get people who only drive a few miles per day to delay their charging by a few days through pricing because a full charge lasts them three weeks anyway.

If allele A causes increased desire to reproduce than allele B, then in a society in which reproduction is viewed as an optional extra, all else being equal, allele A is likely to predominate allele B over time. Conversely, in a more traditional society in which everyone is subject to a strong social expectation to reproduce, allele A would have far less of an advantage over allele B.

An allele might lead to increased reproduction indirectly rather than directly. For example, if an allele makes a person more likely to be religious, and if religious people are more likely to have kids, then even though that allele does not directly impact desire to reproduce, it may be selected for due to its indirect impact on reproduction.

That's genetics; coming to culture: if subculture A puts higher emphasis on reproduction than subculture B, then all else being equal, in the long-run subculture A is likely to outnumber subculture B, irrespective of any genetic factors. However, defections from subculture A to subculture B may erase much of its innate demographic advantage. This suggests in the long-run, the most demographically successful subcultures will be those which combine sustained high fertility with sustained insularity (social barriers to defection to other subcultures)–which is exactly what we observe with groups like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

1000 years ago some subset of people chose not to have children, and humanity did just fine, and that same group of so-called "non-breeders" still exists today. Therefore we can conclude it's not purely a matter of genetics. There are a huge number of reasons people make that choice. People even change their minds during their life. It's not just a YES/NO switch in your genetic code somewhere.

The only exception I can think of is if you have some mutation they didn't. But in that case if you're aware of the mutation the consequences are likely to be awful, which is a great case for not having biological children.

Were they? High-achiever families routinely demonize having relationships at 16 but then turn it around VERY QUICKLY after getting that college degree and want their children to get married and have kids before 30.

(That said many high achievers themselves don't actually want to have kids, despite family pressure to have kids at 30.)

You could almost call that a genocide... if the originator of that messaging authored it to cause a birth collapse. Throw in every public policy decision made to economically destroy single-earner households and it really almost starts looking like genocide (or democide?)...

Also, I'm not one to complain about downvotes - I can take my knocks, but I'm a bit surprised that my comment is rather disliked; it's just my thought at that moment.

People assume that technology necessarily encourages secularism, but it doesn't inevitably do so. Technology also makes possible new methods of social control which can be used to suppress secularism.

That said, there is a subgroup of the Mennonites, the Old Order Mennonites, who have fertility and retention much closer to that of the Old Order Amish. The Wenger Mennonites, in particular, are rather similar in those measures. But only around a third of Old Order Mennonites are Wenger, and only around 15% of Mennonites in the US are Old Order.

Everybody who gets up in the morning and behaves in the ways they honestly believe are right has religion, including the non-spiritual.

Seeing it from the side of a Woman, it's no wonder birth rates are declining.

Whoa that reads almost as loaded as my reply:

I suspect collapse of nativity is why Feminism(tm) kills civilizations throughout antiquity.

Personally, I'd rather have fewer kids and be able to give them more attention and resources.

TBH if I never existed by definition I would be fine with it, you know, since I don't exist and was never born. I don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate utilitarian POV, since the optimal solution seems relentless expansionism like a virus.

And it is very, very ,very clear this is a horribly stupid and shortsighted thing to do. It is simply impossible to have constant growth, clearly it is unsustainable.

The system HAS to change. It might be from a slow and steady decline, or it might be a very abrupt change, but it's going to change one way or another.

Further, people alive in 2300 will be decedents of people who chose to have kids generation after generation despite living in an industrialized environment. That self selection both in terms of DNA and culture means a population bounce back becomes increasingly likely over time especially as fewer people means less pollution and less competition for resources.

Humanity might even end up cycling through industrialization, collapse, hunter gatherers, agriculture, industrialization, multiple times before settling on some stable equilibrium. You just can’t extrapolate exponential curves indefinitely when they depend on the population size.

The "debate" for many people is whether this simplistic economic model can be used at all. They say that value is multi-dimensional, and those value dimensions are not fungible. Concretely, if making a medicine factory results in the extinction of a specie, you can't say that it is okay, because the benefit of the former is incomparable to the loss of the latter.

Coming to population, more humans mean more destruction of ecosystems. And it is not clear whether destroying ecosystems can be fungibly compared to the additional human economic value those extra humans create. It's not about more or less, it the incomparability of the two.

[1] but not necessarily what you meant

[2] Just to be clear, the economics discipline already has a wealth of research that humans cannot in fact consistently assign absolute or relative dollar values to the same thing. Yet our political-economy and popular conceptions have this as a central assumption.

And we went from 1 billion to 2 billion to 8 billion very very fast. The burdens are really piling up.

That said, even when there's evidently plenty of malice around, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that enough cooperators can figure out how to coordinate despite all the damned defectors!

so the macro view, that some technologies have actually lowered our standard of living, is difficult, because it's not the technology's fault! it's only when you have to deal with other people that there are problems. throw in 7 billion other people and of course things are bad .

To wit, the negative effects of technology are simply an increasing function of how advanced it is. There is no need to think in terms of "pre" or "post" good technology. As it becomes more powerful, we need greater wisdom to control it. And of course, we completely lack that wisdom.

Interesting to note that this is what the Amish actually do.

The popular depiction is of people who blindly live as if they're in the 1790s, but it is not that simple. The various Amish communities all do things slightly different from one another, and the technology allowed in different communities is not homogenous.

For ex., the Amish family just down the road from me has a solar panel on one of their barns, and a small forklift, I think diesel-powered (might be battery). But on the occasional Sunday when the meeting is at their house, there's not a car to be seen.

I've read of Amish carpenters who actually use a computer to run their business. It's usually kept in the workshop, away from the family home, though, and IIRC none of them had an internet connection.

No, it was created by the Russian Federation invading Ukraine in 2014.

It was exacerbated by the Russian Federation launching a larger scale, broader invasion in 2022.

> It’s incredibly naive to assume that Russia was the sole malicious actor here.

Whether or not there is some standard by which some other actor is “malicious”, Russia is, in fact, the aggressor in the war.

> I wonder how we would react if the soviet union was tipped to expand into Mexico.

Mostly wondering where the Soviet Union hid out for the last 33 years.

People are always talking about a “post-scarcity” world, but isn’t that in some sense globally true while locally false today? The US (which I appreciate is not the whole world but a signal example of having just passed the knee in the hockey-stick on Gini) burns something like 30-40% of key agricultural outputs as ethanol representing a net disaster on emissions.

At what point do we acknowledge that we actively choose a governing/managing/ruling class that has no upper bound on conspicuous consumption? Yachts don’t cut it anymore, now you’re not a player until you’ve got a fucking private space program.

I did very well in my career once and might again, and I remember feeling outright guilty when I had a house with “his and hers” sinks in the bathroom, that felt really opulent (because it is).

Bezos has “his and hers” custom private jets that fly more often than many people drive or train (this is public record), a huge airplane carrying one passenger sometimes daily.

I hear a lot of hot air about universal basic income and stuff, but what’s stopping our leaders? Corporate profits shatter record after record, rank and file workers are choosing between basic necessity A or necessity B, you could have lower margins and pay people Universal Basic Income in the form of a living wage. Then it’s not even big government or “welfare” or some other boogeyman.

They’re just dark triad liars, it’s just nonsense, the elite are not trying to change the world for the better: they’re trying to dig deeper moats and build higher walls around consumption that’s gone from conspicuous to fucking genocidal.