Packaging, Waste, and Malthusian Discussion

fyp

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Micro the theory you’re posting relies heavily on peak oil and Malthusian food shortage predictions. It didn’t account for how population growth in developed countries sharply declined.

That’s very different than the threat of agw.

You hadn’t heard of it and you didn’t read it. You have no idea what it relies heavily on.

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But, something you saw on a forum post years ago when someone else posted something they saw on Mises.org or in an article in Fortune Magazine sponsored by the Koch Brothers is more convincing to you than Yale’s Journal of Industrial Ecology.

What this incredibly snarky and dismissive and uninformed thing is saying is that natural resources are infinite. This is a product of you just swallowing neo-classical economics whole. (which is what most people have done because it’s presented as common sense in places like WSJ, Fortune, every business show on cable, etc)

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The model puts the maximum amount of natural resources at 1900 and then has it continually downtrending. That’s malthusian and peak oil nonsense. You also just cited a peak oil book when you copy/pasted from the ‘validation’ portion of the wiki page. Malthus and this book are linked on wikipedia.

No it doesn’t. It simply points out how literally every prediction of disaster based on Malthusian thought has been wrong since 1798. Maybe this one will be the one, but given it’s already failed to predict the gradual slowing of the world’s population because people are simply choosing to not have tons of babies that is happening right now, it seems super unlikely.

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saying that natural resources are finite is meaningless without context. like there are a lot of resources that are effectively limitless until population is a trillion, and there are many resources that are used wastefully, and relatively simple management and reuse would make them more than enough for populations upto 20b and more.

of course there are other resources which are not plentiful enough for even current industrial processes, and replacing such resources with other technology has been the focus of a lot of innovation.

let’s take another thought experiment. if we achieved 100% renewable energy in the next 10 years, the population ceiling is probably increased for humanity, based on climate change effects alone. but of course a renewables economy (i believe) would raise the real incomes for all populations which effects people to have fewer kids, so the population growth will slow down, perhaps not to zero globally, but somethere between current growth and zero. so, in my fake armchair “model”, not only the population ceiling will rise, but humanity will also take longer to approach the limit as well. longer as in not just past a few generations after out lifetimes, but also so far into the future that our models simply don’t account for future advances.

it’s not that we should ignore the doomsday analysis, we shouldn’t. think globally act locally still applies. the point is that a doomsday scenario with fuzzy math behind it reads just like doomsday scenarios with nothing but a religious text behind it. it’s vacuous.

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The model predicts peak industrial output in 2040, which may or may not be right, but morons have always ignored the forest and looked at a tree or two to justify continuing to roll coal. And, the mention of peak oil in what you read was this - right?:

In a 2009 article published in American Scientist entitled Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil, Hall and Day noted that “the values predicted by the limits-to-growth model and actual data for 2008 are very close.”[44] These findings are consistent with the 2008 CSIRO study which concluded: “The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features … [of the Limits to Growth ] “standard run” scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st Century.”[13]

An article in a reputable magazine (right?) that publishes mostly peer reviewed scientific and engineering works that shows that the predictions of the model you are dismissing (based on what?) have been accurate.

But, you know, Jim Cramer called something Malthusian that one time.

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You’re citing an article that declared peak oil had already happened in 2009.

Eventually someone is going to be right about this kind of thing. They were not.

That’s true. Maybe your knee shouldn’t jerk so hostilely about it then and you should think of things like DoorDash as something that might be bad for life on Earth rather than evaluating its impact on Venture Capitalists.

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lol what the fuck are you even talking about?

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You don’t even read posts. You don’t even follow conversations that you are taking part in.

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Maybe you should take a break so you don’t let your emotions get the best of you? That way you won’t post wild straw men about door dash and how I evaluate it. Whatever the hell you mean by that post, honestly.

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I’m not emotional. You’re puzzled by how I brought this back to DoorDash because you didn’t read my whole original post in this subthread and see what I was responding to. You saw something about how resources on Earth are being used up and you’ve been taught that that’s impossible, so you went nuts and started talking about Malthus.

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i’m old enough to remember when mb would lol at you for appealing to authority. ie the good old days

Uh, you were talking about vacuous fuzzy math and I was pointing out that it was something published in a respected journal. You think old mb didn’t believe in science or something? I expect that is what you think because everyone thinks that anyone they perceive to the left of themselves is a uninformed rainbow chasing flower child or something.

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Thomas Malthus did not really write about what most people think he did, and he wasn’t exactly worried about food running out, or anything else. He stated - correctly - that increased food production from technological innovation resulted in larger populations living effectively the same low quality of life as previous generations. The abundance wasn’t used to give people better lives, it was used to breed more people who still lived in poverty. This was roughly true for all known history up to Malthus’ time, and remained true until well after his death in 1834. It was only after the industrial revolution in the late 19th century that this stopped being true.

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And people found that they could dig up coal and oil and water and boost production dramatically and change the math for a while. And now, looking at the limits of that (whether from supply or environmental impacts), people either have blind faith in technology without any specific answer or talk about Mars or asteroids because “degrowth” or “steady-state economy” (something morons like Smith, Ricardo, Mills, and Keynes were talking about) means bad things for stonks.

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And yeah, rich people having fewer babies is good and understandable, but that’s not going to help that much if they are all ordering DoorDash all the time.