The explosive population growth in today's world is in Asia (China and India), and in the future it will be Africa, according to the WIRED article you cite. Think, and you'll see that this supports ceoyoyo's assertion. China and India are both working hard to educate their populations (limited by the deep corruption of their political systems.) I see no such hope for most of Africa.

The anomaly here is South America; why is the population not growing there also?

"transferring genes between species that could never procreate together isn't even remotely like evolution." -- never heard of viral DNA insertion in nature, have you?

There are a great number of plants that produce no value for humans or that make significant problems when intermixed with food plants. Consider milk thistle or poison ivy or hundreds of other thorny or poisonous plants growing alongside strawberries, which grow close to the ground and must be hand picked.

So it's telling us just what we already knew? Interesting.

For three or more decades. (Before that some of the classes of things they're comparing didn't exist, with enough deployment, to characterize.)

On the other hand, it's nice to have it confirmed with some rigor and measures.

Your science fiction imagination is sadly inadequate. Also on the horizon are the creation of new humans without the use of the bodies of either men or women, the creation non-human intelligent beings, and the creation of intelligent beings not based on life-as-we-know-it.

Why do you write "Fuck you", then write "can't wait till we figure out how to get pregnant without men" which indicates that you don't want him to fuck?

By the way, the word missing from your vocabulary is misogynist.

From the article you cited,

The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly known as potato blight

So, bad power politics combined with a disease striking a monoculture crop.

Fucking makes problems better.

Problems like syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, HPV, chlamydia, "crabs", scabies, hepatitis A and B, HIV, trichomoniasis, amebiasis, giardiasis, cryptosporidiosis, shigellosis, candidiasis, MCV, ebola and Marburg virus.

Hungry is a sensation that does not equal undernourished, malnourished, or starving. Stop using "hungry" when referring to the effects of inadequate food supplies. It makes you seem even stupider.

What the hell is wrong with "economic and social inequality"? I can understand complaining about increased poverty, but complaining about inequality is a character flaw known as jealousy. Honestly acquired wealth is something properly to strive for, it indicates that the wealthy man has produced great value for others and traded that for wealth.

Oops. Typoed $/watt to $/kW in part of the above and accidentally hit submit rather than preview. My bad.

A dollar capital cost per kW of generation (with a couple decades lifetime minimum) is the ballpark for the breakeven point between grid power and solar generation on mid-US-latitude sunny sites (5ish solar hours/day), with grid power available.

Being remote (so running grid is pricey) or having a small load (so basic connection fees aren't justified) shifts the point to higher dollars/watt, as does an increase in utility rates. Shade, dark weater, and high lattitude shifts it downward. (Forget about solar in Seattle, for instance.)

Solar panels are just starting to drop below $1/W, making them practical in far more places, and making the load size and associated system costs (mounting, inverters, storage) more of a factor.

Over $/W? It needs some exceptional situation to compete with cheap flat panels.

Ugh. You know, I understand the desire of an employer to try to "protect their investment" as it were, even though I generally hate it, as it seems like they try way, way too hard. The employment relationship is already lopsided enough as it is. It is almost to the point that it feels like they don't really want to pay for it, they just want to pretend they do to look good.

That said, one thing I cannot stand is the idea of trying to force someone to do training on their own time (or take PTO). For classes (conferences are a bit different, but can be similar), they are typically scheduled right smack dab in standard working hours. Its obvious they were set up with the expectation that employers are footing the bill (for both the class and the time).

Companies give precious little PTO as it is already (I think it should be around twice as much as what is typical these days, or at least go back to separate sick and vacation time and raise those banks a bit higher), and many aren't willing to negotiate on it if you want more in lieu of higher salary. Plus they tend to act like taking unpaid time is a cardinal sin or something they really should consider firing you for, not just a situation of you'd like/need a little more time off than their standard policy allows for. So yeah, some sort of cost sharing/prorated reimbursement? Not a fan, but at least I get it... charging PTO? Oh hell no...

I don't think Pan Am execs do much laughing, as Pan Am ceased to exist in 1991. Even the re-incarnations are gone.

The headline says farmers. The text says farm workers. Very much not the same thing. A farmer is the owner of the farm. A farm worker is generally a hired hand, often (though not always) a migrant, and if so typically from Mexico or farther south.

The story suggests that the multi-drug-resistant bacteria are the result of antibiotic treatment of the animals at the farm. This misses another possibility:

In Mexico, most antibiotics are over-the-counter, much like asprin here in the US. People who feel ill or have some infection often buy and take them. Typically they use them until they no longer show symptoms - then stop, rather than taking a full regimin and killing off all the bacteria. (Why take more of the non-free drug once the symptoms are gone? Waste of money, right?) This is a recipe for creating drug-resistant bacteria.

Of course if an infection is resistant to one antibiotic, a paitent is likely to try another, and another, and so on until they find one that works. THAT's a recipe for maintaining and improving the bug's resistance to the front line antibiotics while breeding resistance to others.

As a result, a substantial fraction of the workers arriving from south of the Mexican border are carriers of multi-drug-resistant baceria.

Meanwhile, a farming operation is likely to give a limited number of antibiotics continuously, so non-resistant infections are wiped out before they can develop resistance, and if they do develop resistance it will be to the particular drugs used, rather than the universe of antibiotics.

Of course, infected workers can infect livestock, just as livestock can infect workers. And infected workers can trade infections around, just as livestock can. (More so, since the livestock tends to be kept separated, to reduce both disease spread and breeding by unintended pairings, limitations that farmers can't impose on their workers - and would be unlikely to try even if they could.)

So it seems to me that responsible researchers would go a bit farther before reporting: Like by doing genetic testing on the strains of bug in the various workers and the livestock, and running models on the results to try to identfy whether the bugs are from the herd or the workers.

I don't see any such work alluded to in this popularized reporting. It seems to just assume that the bugs were developed on the farm and spread to the workers. I hope this is a disconnect between the actual research and the report, rather than an accurate characterization of the research.

Sorry, but El Nino isn't cooperating.

Actually, given the likely solar activity we're going to see for the next twenty years, I fully expect a cooling trend of some type.

The right policy prescription is pretty simple - ton of research should go into cheap, clean energy sources like LFTR. Displacing coal power with clean energy is a win regardless of climate issues.