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Comment Re: People don't change (Score 2) 478

by kwack (#58072356) Attached to: 'The World Might Actually Run Out of People'

The Greeks and Romans weren't destroying entire ecosystems

Yes they were. North Africa was known as "the breadbasket of the Roman Empire". Today it is the Sahara Desert. Destructive farming practices destroyed millions of tonnes of topsoil. They also exterminated many species, including the North African Elephant.

Sahara oscillates between desert and savanna due to solar forcing with a period of 41,000 years (Ref.)
I can find no support whatsoever of any Roman influence in the wikipedia article.

In fact, whether human activity is a factor at all is debated
If it was a factor, then earlier than the Roman empire.

Submission + - The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With (schneier.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: One of the effects of GDPR — the new EU General Data Protection Regulation — is that we're all going to be learning a lot more about who collects our data and what they do with it. Consider PayPal, that just released a list of over 600 companies they share customer data with. Here's a good visualization of that data.

Is 600 companies unusual? Is it more than average? Less? We'll soon know.

Comment Not evidence (Score 1) 125

This is a highly speculative interpretation of existing data. Other speculative interpretations are possible. The scientific method would dictate proceeding by designing clever experiments whose outcomes could rule out various alternative interpretations. I'm not convinced this is possible here, and not persuaded that this is true science. Certainly it's not "evidence".

Submission + - The aliens are silent because they are extinct (anu.edu.au) 1

Submitted by turkeydance
turkeydance writes: Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, say astrobiologists from the Research School of Earth Sciences.

In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

"The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," said Dr Aditya Chopra, lead author on the paper, which is published in Astrobiology.

"Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive."

"Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable."

Submission + - Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: MIT economist David H Autor has written an article entitled "Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation". His article is a good read to understand the best of emerging mainstream economics thinking on technology and employment.

I feel his article leaves out some fundamental political aspects of the situation like I brought together in "Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"). His article of course assumes consumer demand is infinite (despite Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggesting people more to more low-cost self-actualization activities over time). It assumes that the business benefits of employing a human will always outweigh the costs for many jobs (despite strikes, lawsuits, quality, illness, turnover). It assumes humans will always have special advantages over AIs and robots. It ignores whether some aspects of the economy (like long pipelines to become a professor) are really needed or are just protectionism. It ignores the social impact of rich/poor divides on working conditions and the operation of a capitalist economy itself. It ignores the value to the worker of the intrinsic nature of the work (i.e. some people may just be less happy in service jobs compared to agriculture or manufacturing). It ignores deeper issues of rethinking work as play (like Bob Black wrote about). It also ignores (incidentally, in relation to humans vs. robots) that "comparative advantage" only applies theoretically when you have "full employment". The article jumps between proving some points with numbers and then making other points as "strong hunches" or by quoting suggestions about technological unemployment from fifty years ago (quoting Herbert Simon). His prescription is of course mostly just more "education" — which is nice job security for a professor. :-) But, within those sorts of limits, it's an excellent article which makes many good points, especially about the dynamics of economic networks as different parts of them are automated. The article has many interesting facts and figures. His points on how jobs are a mix of tasks which different near-term prospects for automation is excellent. And his point about human jobs changing as people work together with automation is well made. So, his article provides a good base for further study and/or rebuttal of the mainstream position. His article could be a good starting point for anyone writing an economic simulation, to see what really happens to economic networks based on distributing the right to consume based on perceived contribution to production as such networks undergo severe stress from automation.

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