http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report-1.16523

I don't know what to make of it, it just seems like a pathetic way for our species to end itself. Maybe in 2100 we should schedule a nuclear war and go out with a bang. Boom!

If I had more time to think about it I might come up with a better answer.. but I gotta go with A.I. or some form of our technical achievements with be our demise. One can dream, can't he?

It's a ****ing disaster and being a naturalist (even an amateur one) makes it even worse. I specialise in insect identification so I have a bit of an idea of the diversity of life out there in that class at least. I live on a naturally species-depauperate post-glacial island with massive long-term human pressures, predominant winds coming from across a large ocean and generally cool summers that block a lot of species from maturing. Nonetheless, in beetles alone we have ~4000 species, I think it's c. 20,000 species of insect nationwide. Many of those are already status unknown with no new records in the last 20-50+ years. While part of the problem is the dearth of people with the skills and knowledge to even start looking for them, I can think of two species off the top of my head that are meant to be local to me and are probably extinct at either the national or global level. Now imagine the stuff we're losing and never even seeing when we clear-fell massive chunks of continental rainforest.

And that's not even starting on the marine environment which we know even less about, is stupendously diverse and we continue to acidify and use as a wild food source (in the year 2014 ffs) using incredibly destructive and indiscriminate methods.

Not enough people care enough to do anything about it. The prevailing ideology is built on infinite growth on a finite planet and the responses to arguments pointing this out tend to rely on accusations of Malthusianism and technology magically saving us from this situation indefinitely. It's going to take a major perturbation to make us change our ways and whether we can survive whatever ecologies evolve from that situation is a crapshoot as far as I can tell.

Yeah, SkyNet or the Matrix are more romantic dystopian futures. We'll see where A.I. leads us. I'm skeptical, though, that this will be our demise. Nuclear weapons seem to be the only viable tool for the job, but those would suck too.



And who knows what potential genetics we are losing with them. ****, we are still learning fascinating things about the species we do know about.

Are you aware of any endangered species on your island that were not endangered in the recent past?


The "technology magic" crap pisses me off too. As far as I can tell, technology has historically had the effect of increasing the demand for power and increasing population. Humans are incredibly bad at long-term, sustained care of an environment. But anyway, what do people think technology can do?

We don't know how to clean up oil spills

It's a massive, incomprehensibly challenging technological mess to send people even to Mars, forget extra-solar planets

We can't produce power cheaply

Computing technology has produced a huge amount of waste, we could probably estimate that about 0.1-1% of it is being used for any intellectual end

People treat technology like a deus ex machina to the story of humans, that this big magic thing will come save us from ourselves. It's not going to happen that way.

And you're absolutely right. Humans depend the ecosystems of earth. Drastic shifts in these ecosystems, a collapse in that order, will likely cause massive death in humans. The full effects are grave, but incalculable.

My island is Great Britain I was just trying to put into context how much of a minnow the UK is in terms of biodiversity.

A few examples of recently endangered species and their causes where known (admittedly these are species that aren't endangered on a global scale):

• European Crayfish - has declined precipitously since the introduction of the American Signal Crayfish in the '70s
• Water Vole - a mixture of habitat loss due to changes in farming and predation by the introduced American Mink
• Willow Tit - About 95% loss in numbers of pairs since the mid '90s. No one's really sure why yet.

For most of the invertebrates they're too difficult to identify to have a lot of records to be able to say with certainty how rare they are in the first place; let alone whether they've recently declined. Hence occasionally species are found after massive absences or found significantly outside of their known range. The cases where we have truly endangered species tend to be island endemic plants and invertebrates that were naturally scarce anyway and thus that much more vulnerable to extinction.

Cotoneaster cambricus is a good example of what a "typical" extinction might be like for the majority of threatened or endangered species. This is a species of Cotoneaster plant endemic to a particular corner of Wales. It grows on the Great Orme which is a large outcrop of rock jutting out into the sea and connected to the mainland by a narrow spit. This plant used to cover much of this headland. The species is typical - a member of a speciose group (there's loads of cotoneasters) and likely not particularly ecologically distinct from other cotoneasters. The location is typical - a marginal spot, undeveloped and so containing various relict species that might otherwise have gone a long time ago. And the causes are not unusual either - a mixture of over-collection by zealous Victorian naturalists, human agricultural impact in the form of grazing which started in the 19th century and competition with introduced cotoneasters. There's now just 6 wild plants left. When they die off, it will probably have a very minor effect on the local ecology as other cotoneasters fill the niche and almost nobody will notice. Not every species has the same impact upon their ecosystem and many of them have competitors which will fulfil the same function. It's when these extinctions get compounded that the resilience of the system fails and you start to see ecological cascades. The complexity of these systems is such that we don't know if or when we're near these tipping points or what the outcomes might be. Look up "sequential megafaunal collapse" and killer whales for a well-studied (and slightly controversial) American example.

If you are to believe some, we're not doing this quickly enough.

This a small beach, I mean small, called the Children's Pool here in San Diego. It's located in the community of La Jolla. All I have to say it that this community is the 1%. This year, the City has closed this very small portion of beach so that sea lions can pup from December to May without the harassment of humans. I'm a-ok with this because 1) San Diego County has close to 70 mi of coastline in which your children can frolick in the 2) VERY ****ING COLD WATER!

However, people have suggested that CA fish and game give tags out to hunters so that they can revel in their manly ways and shoot these sea lions within city grounds so that they can have their precious beach.

Humans really should be the species on the brink of extinction. We're such a vile, and reprehensible species.

*rich people

The problem is, always has been, and always will be the rich. As long as we suffer a subculture of coddled and segregated degenerates we will always have these sorts of problems. They are vermin and they must be exterminated.

Don't be wasteful. Eat the rich.

Yes, a select subgroup of people are all evil and bad, the solution is simple, and I proved that by reading a bunch of books that agree with my ideology in a soft field with very little consensus on anything. Hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, anarcho-capitalists on Facebook.

Or, you know, social problems are very complex, and any model that assumes one subgroup is the cause of all problems due an inherently evil nature that is unique to that group is probably just indulging masturbatory bitterness.




What does this even mean? The only reason this is happening is that humans, like every other organism ever, act to maximize their flourishing. We just got really good at it really fast, and that's been very disruptive. We didn't decide to suddenly become really smart and ecologically disruptive, it just happened for reasons we can't control. It's happened before with bacteria, and algae, with similar effects. Were those organisms evil for disrupting the environment?

I'd go a step further and say *greed* Because I don't believe all rich people are greedy. There are plenty of greedy "poor" people.

The difference between a greedy rich person and a greedy poor person is several orders of magnitude of harm. That, and only one of them can get punished for it.

Oh look, a temporarily embarrassed billionaire has paid our humble Internet a visit.


Saying that rich people aren't the problem is a lot like saying the civil war wasn't about slavery. i.e. yes, it's more complicated, but it's ultimately the same thing. The root of the problem is accelerating economic inequality, which demands greater and greater effort in order to extract the same economic rents. These are efforts which, by the way, are entirely inaccessible to ordinary people, as the wealthy are able to buy permission for harmful extractive practices from compliant governments. The rich also have surprisingly poor access to good education about economics and science, as their education and media skews hard toward leadership, social intelligence, neoclassical economics and the modern fad of metrics-based business administration.

I'd actually be quite happy to have a long, nuanced, and in-depth discussion about all of this, but in the end the problem is always going to turn out to be "the rich people [we have] are horrible" and the solution is always going to be "take all of their money and power away and redistribute it". Just like how the Civil War was about slavery and the solution was to free the slaves.

Unfortunately this is in response to an Obi_Kwiet airdrop, so I won't get to have this conversation. Looking forward to his unrelated reply on page 4 tho!!

How would redistribution work if the majority of the masses are complacent with their situation, despite it worsening?

Phonepostin', but I'll comment

Redistribution would make environmentally harmful and unpopular practices inaccessible. Capital destruction would do the same thing, but why destroy something you can confiscate?

Negative externalities are highly unpopular and only currently work because the beneficiaries are the rich, and they're mostly able to isolate the short term consequences to poor people who politically don't matter. Compare e.g. Silicon Valley superfund sites to dioxin pollution of the Everglades or tetraethyl lead pollution of inner cities. It's clear when we act to solve a problem the rich create and when we don't, and it just happens to correlate with local property values.

Even without redistribution, many of the worst offenders today would fold if the government subsidies and rebates they depend upon vanished. Our governments are so stacked in favour of rich people right now that some companies in Canada have been given a >100% labor subsidy just for "creating jobs", whatever that means. This is money that would be far better spent on literally anything else.

If you give the poor person a lot of money I don't see the difference

"Money" is an abstraction for scarcity. The value of money is relative to the amount of money everyone else has. This is what economic inequality means and why it is socially and environmentally destructive.

Taking all of the wealth from the rich and powerful and redistributing it won't create formerly homeless robber barons any more than burning it would.

It would just create some formerly-embarrassed thousandaires.

Um, sure but I'm not implying we should redistribute wealth.. It's a rhetorical, put the poor man in the shoes of the rich man and he would make the same mistakes. That's the point, Jon'c. you make it sound like the problem is all rich people. So why don't you tell us how bad Bill Gates is. I'm saying it's not money that makes people greedy. We are all wired up to be that way.

I never claimed that you did, I implied that you don't understand what money signifies or how it works.

Agreed. I don't think this observation is at all contentious.

Second+ generation rich are stupid and worthless people, for the educational and cultural reasons I briefly outlined above. However, if you simply made different people rich you would eventually have the same problems.

Perhaps the solution is... for nobody to get that rich??? :O

You really want the lynchpin of your argument to be an anti-competitive monopolist who built a trillion dollar corporate rentier on a trust fund and government granted monopolies, who retired into a full-time career cornering the market on vaccines and extorting third world countries into buying Office?

Agreed.

What does money signify and how does it work. I have no idea, you're right, lol. Except that I work for it, and turn it into things? What else is there? (No i'm curious what you have to say I'm not trying to come off as a dick if I did come off that way)

My stance is that it doesn't matter. Nature spawned humanity from itself, and humanity is doing what humanity does. Nature has no moralistic will that somehow cares that species are unable to survive here. Mars is your answer to how much nature cares about that.

You can get all bent out of shape about humans doing what humans do, but guess what? We'll still drive our cars all over kingdom come. We'll keep burning coal. We'll keep paving over habitats to build more strip malls. So save yourself some stress and stop caring so much.

Note: I used to care. The idealist inside me is dead. Long dead.

"caring" is also something that humans do. I'm not say you personally should, or anything, but recognizing what we might consider excessive or destructive behavior and trying to curb it also fits within the 'humanity doing what humanity does' category.

Extinction events are the norm on Earth. The convoluted way that our species brings about this process is fascinating, but in the end, we're still no different from other chemical reactions that run amok, ultimately resulting in a correction. Take a look at that graph.

The fact that we have the intelligence to even feel guilt about this (or anything at all) is an incredible gift. It's probably not good enough to prolong our species' existence on Earth before we destroy our own habitat, but it's worth not being cynical so long as there's a chance.

No, you're right, but that's exactly my point. Humans won't 'consider excessive or destructive behavior and try to curb it.' So your choices are:

• Be a deluded idealist
• Be a nihilistic realist
• Be an alcoholic

I strongly prefer to stay away from delusion and alcohol, so I don't have the luxury of caring.

You're most of the way there already. Money's how we decide who gets the things that not everyone can get. At the extremes of wealth, these sort of things include "a senator's vote" and "a place to put my money that will make it turn into more money faster than anyone else's money can turn into more money" and "death squads, and also factories in countries where the American courts can't find my death squads." The more money you have, the more access you have to means of making more of it, because it turns out one of the scarce things that everyone wants to buy is more money. If you already have more money, you get the first bite at the things not everyone can get.

This is all relevant to this thread in particular because another of the things you can buy is "a license to pollute or otherwise ecologically destabilize land with sufficiently low property value." You might accomplish this by paying to get a former industry lobbyist confirmed as the head of the EPA, or by keeping that same agency tied up in litigation for years while you continue your operations, or (with enough foresight) by making sure the congressman you've bought drafts legislation in a way that's favorable to you. (These are the most drastic measures I can imagine being necessary, and they're all achievable.) The result's the same in the end. Given that "we're all wired to be (greedy)", it should be clear first that we ought to deny everyone the opportunity to buy that license, and second that a rich enough person will pay someone to find him a way to get it. The solution, like Jon says, is to prevent everyone from getting rich enough.

The problem isn't that any particular group of people happen to be rich. Any group of people would eventually produce the same result. The problem isn't "the rich," it's that there is a "the rich." And that's why we need to take their money away, and stay taking it away.

I think capitalism needs some amount of inequality to work*. A smarter, more knowledgeable, and more connected person needs the power to command others to bring her or his ideas to fruition. Allocating capital to those who have earned it through experience in the workforce is not a bad way to do this, since it's possible to learn a lot about a field by participating in it. (Of course, this isn't true for most jobs, which are mind-numbingly routine. Automation and minimum wage had a chance of saving the working force from this, at least until business leaders decided they'd rather export jobs to countries they could find workers at essentially slave wages.)

Ideally, it would be possible to mitigate the negative effects of inequality. However, in practice, this seems mathematically impossible, basically because of the principle that says the "rich get richer", and the negative aspects of inequality become unbearable amplified.

That's not to say that there aren't other possibilities. Obviously what we have now is far from optimal. Efficient market hypothesis--LOL. And I'm not saying this with Soviet style communism in mind for comparison; just look at the debt that Silicon Valley has to project Project ARPA, Project MAC, SRI, etc, all of which were funded in large part (to my knowledge) by a government agency connected to the U.S. military, and some university campus like MIT, Stanford, University of Illinois, etc.

Also, I'm surely biased, since I'm focusing on what is most familiar to me (software). I'm sure that the extent to which any amount of inequality is desirable depends on the sector.

Finally, I'll be the first to admit that in all of this half century of software entrepreneurship, we still haven't realized the vision of the people at the AI labs of the early `70s. Just compare the web to Engelbart's "Mother of all Demos"--the web is a joke in comparison. What we have now is incremental improvement on a half-century old idea, but with the wrong people getting (ridiculously) rich from old ideas in the process. Take Google, for example: Pagerank essentially made sense of the tangled mess that was the early web. Does it make sense that the web was implemented in a way that required a private individual to recognize this, and create a solution by his own wherewithal and connections? In the early days of Google, bandwidth used by the site consumed a considerable amount of bandwidth from Stanford's campus internet. In the end, Stanford benefits from alumni like Brin and Page, who ultimately pay back the university handsomely in direct contributions, and indirectly in all sorts of ways. Does it make much of a difference that Google, rather than a government lab or university, is doing a lot of the cutting edge research in computing today? Perhaps, because, although I'm sure Google employees carry a lot of the knowledge and experience gained there in their heads, the majority of it doesn't get released to the public. And the chance to be a Page or a Brin is more or less a function of inherited wealth and academic lineage. It sucks that 99.9999% of people are denied this by birth, but the laws of the physical universe aren't based on human ideas of morality and fairness. OTOH, if you happen to have a really high IQ and get into Harvard, you have a shot at meeting the classmate with whom you'll start the next Facebook, but if you can do this, then it means you've either inherited that IQ, or benefited from the high IQ of your parents in other (probably more important) ways. So, inequality also extends to the genetic level.

* Another example: the more wealthy consumers who purchase high-end products push forward technology, and (potentially) increase employment of researchers working on cutting-edge products. Of course, the same process could take place in a university or government lab. In addition, there is always the scourge of patents.

There's a difference between 10X or even 100X for an especially talented and hard working person and the 100000X for the idle rich which is typical today and growing more tomorrow.

If 100X the wealth of an average person isn't enough to motivate you, it's a mental illness.

Oh, for sure. I totally agree.

It seems to be an inherent feature of capitalism that eventually you end up with this kind of ridiculous, extreme inequality.

What even is "capitalism"?

According to Marx, capitalism is the market failure which results from the progressive accumulation of surplus by the owners of capital.

u sure it doesn't mean the invisible hand where everything works well if you just stop questioning things?

if you haven't stopped questioning things it's because the invisible hand hasn't *****slapped you hard enough yet

I hope ur parents are leaving you a house with clear title, because sooner or later capital ownership becomes inaccessible to all but the super rich.

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzM8nip5BEQ

Of course, if you are capable of reading and writing English and played JK as a kid, the chances are you are probably ****ing an offshore factory worker harder than any banker is ****ing you.

Capitalism is great, just so long as you're a member of the global 1%. Which probably includes a lot of people who claim to be part of the 99%.

At least, for now. When a non-Anglo-American power starts to seriously challenge the Wall St. / D.C. establishment, well, we're all going to start to pay the price of letting business leaders and politicians allow our manufacturing base to slip away.

Or, you are a working-class conservative. :downs:

Edit: wait, what am I replying to? Isn't that backwards? Wouldn't you start questioning things after getting slapped? Unless that's when the conservationism kicks in.

I would say Marx has a clear understanding here, but capitalism is a slippery word in casual conversation


obrok, of course america is slowly arming it's police state as we move to mimic chinese totalitarian command capitalism, because the october revolution must never happen again

pretty soon for-profit prisons will charge prisoners for letting them stay


capitalism gives me plenty of material things, which is cool because i have plenty of material things.


reminder that adam smith only ever used the phrase "invisible hand" to refer specifically to a phenomenon he completely made up where people would keep capital in their home communities

I'm pretty sure you're trying to smugly imply something here. What, I can't quite decide. And FYI, I'm not being sarcastic or smug here.

i'm being earnest in what the phrase literally says, and ambiguous about what it doesn't. being able to buy a jim carrey movie 3-pack at walmart does not lead to a fulfilling life. i'd be much more content getting rid of quite a few material possessions if it meant i could have more stable housing and economic stability in my life

Wouldn't we all?