Indeed, the interface looks nice, but can I do anything with it? I search for fish, it suggests venezuelan fish-eating owl. I search for fox, it only offers my flying foxes.

Unless I'm doing it all wrong, then you'd need to know the scientific name of every animal that can be found where you live, in order to search in the first place. You'd be much better off just going outside for a look.

Thanks, but slashcode ate your <

<3

With regards to the fridge knowing what's in it ... how does that even work, without being a major nuisance? Now if they have a small robot climb around inside the fridge overnight, scanning barcodes & weighing the milk, then that's great. Otherwise, how is this not just a hassle for the user? e.g.

• Dammit, I forgot to scan milk when putting it back in the fridge!
• Dammit, I didn't align the milk exactly on the milk sensor, and the fridge ordered more!
• Dammit, I put the milk on the cheese sensor, and the fridge didn't order more!

The cheapest solution would probably be to have a small camera inside the fridge, and get someone on Mechanical Turk to fill out an inventory for you. And that's just sad.

Orly?

True, but I think the parent was implying that uneducated people can be tempted to vote for what's bad for themselves, and everyone else, in the short and long term. However, I disagree with their either-or approach. Uneducated democracies are bad, and two party democracies are also bad. Look at what's happening in France right now. Sarkozy's losing to a socialist rival, so instead of trying to appear more centrist to increase his appeal to everyone, he specifically tries to increase his appeal to the far right, effectively cutting his losses among the left. A binary choice inevitably leads to extreme polarisation. See also: American's Republican Presidential Primaries.

Sounds like a description of a Beta level personality in Alastair Reynaulds's Revelation Space Universe. Linky

If his "solution" is a free market coupled to endless scientific advance, and that endless scientific advance doesn't deliver, then the market suffers distortion. Perhaps I should have said "Or market distortions caused by people not being able ..."

Some folk take an interest in events that will happen beyond their own lifespan, and others don't. There appears to be little reconciling these groups.
Incidentally, do you care about history, beyond how modern lessons can be learned from it?

But that also increases their demand for resources, per capita. Who consumes more resources globally, 4 starving kids in a refugee camp, or 1 well-off western kid? There's an infographic somewhere (can find it if required) of the number of Earths-worth of resources we'd need if the whole global population were to have western standards of living. Unfortunately, that's way higher even than what we currently consume.

You may mock Roosevelt, but perhaps he was aware, as you seemingly aren't, of how many past civilisations have collapsed due to timber crises... Easter Island being one of the most dramatic. What if someone hadn't invented creosote coatings? Sure, technology provided a solution that time, and many other times in recent history, but there are plenty of other times it hasn't.

Our modern global/western civilisation is big and impressive, I'll give it that. But if you take the historical perspective, the number of civilisations that have collapsed is quite a long list, and some of them were quite big and impressive, too.

So yeah, we've got lots of scientists. You think we're the first civilisation to have lots of scientists? Sure, we're more advanced than our predecessors, but do you really think that our civilisation's size, or even technology like the internet makes us so different from all other civilisations to come before us, that we're immune to collapse? On the contrary, our current civilisation is so big that most efforts to make significant changes seem almost completely ineffectual. And that oil is going to run out.

I've certainly not abandoned hope, but I'd like to think I've got beyond the mindset of thinking that people in history were so radically different from us. Technology may well provide a solution to all our problems, but it also might not. Isn't it wise to prepare, at least slightly, for that eventuality? Isn't believing otherwise just placing blind faith in a deus ex machina?

Or market distortions like people not being able to produce enough energy, due to demand outpacing technological progress. Sure, the system will still "self-correct," but in that scenario, self-correction can include drastic reduction in the number of people.

Yeah the UN hates the US? Rofl.