The world population is increasing exponentially.

No it isn't.

The rate of growth has been slowing for decades. It's not only sub-exponential, it's been sub-linear for 20 years - the world's population was growing at 83M/yr in the 80s, and will end this decade with an average growth of less than 80M/yr, despite a larger population.

the most likely scenario is that we will simply continue growing our consumption until we run out of the resources

Why do you believe that's the most likely outcome? Entire nations have behaved in exactly the opposite manner as you suggest they would; for example, Germany's energy consumption hasn't changed in 20 years, despite a strong economy and substantial population growth. Now that the population of the country is shrinking, its overall energy consumption will most likely also fall.

It is an enormous and fallacious oversimplification to suggest that humans are the same as yeast, for both theoretical reasons (we're able to reason about our situation) and evidential ones (e.g., Germany).

You're right. Your one paragraph assessment is far more detailed and comprehensive than a national auto company's research and publications.

His one paragraph is certainly far more detailed and comprehensive than the zero paragraphs we've seen to back up the original claim.

All of the numbers in the grandparent post are sourced from fairly authoritative sites, and the math he does on them is simple, so anyone can check his results rather than simply believing his conclusions. If you think he's wrong, then how about you say where he's wrong, and provide evidence for that claim, rather than simply waving your hands about some alleged analysis that may or may not even say what it was claimed to?

Evidence beats assertion. If someone doesn't back up their claims, why should we believe them?

The internet is just a way for people to talk to each other. If you censor "the internet", it is the same as censoring what you can speak to another person.

You're confusing the communication technology (internet, ink-on-paper) with the communication technique (email vs. webpage, letter vs. newspaper).

Censoring private communication is arguably quite different from censoring publication, a fact which is already reflected in law. Whispering "fire" in a friend's ear while at the theatre will have very different effects - and almost certainly has very different legal ramifications - than shouting "Fire!!" at the top of your lungs. Private and public communication serves different purposes, so it is not unreasonable to consider whether it should have different rules.

If a parent doesnt want their child on the internet, they shouldn't allow them on it. Case by case. It is the same reason why you don't bring your kid with you to a sex shop. The material should be allowed to be there, and the parents should choose whether it is appropriate for their child or not.

You do realize that zoning laws are the sex shop equivalent of censorship, don't you?

In most places, there are restrictions on where certain types of businesses (sex shops, liquor stores, brothels, etc.) can be located, in part so people can choose to avoid being exposed to those stores. It would substantially interfere with the right of people to choose what was appropriate for themselves and their children if every toy store in the city had a sex toy store - with a big window display - open up right beside it.

As it is, zoning laws create neighbourhoods where certain types of businesses (such as sex shops) cannot be found, so children for whom those businesses are not appropriate can move around without a constant (and unreasonable) level of supervision. At the same time, those businesses are still permitted to exist, so people for whom those businesses are desirable can still access them. The tradeoff between the two groups (sometimes longer travel to a sex shop but some appropriate neighbourhoods for children) is (hopefully carefully) carefully judged and set according to local needs.

The idea is to apply that reasonable tradeoff to the web, and that's not innately a bad idea.

The problem, as usual, is implementation details. With no real equivalent to physical neighbourhoods on the web, how can it be made difficult for children to access inappropriate content without making it unreasonably hard for adults to access that content? Making the entire web a "child-safe zone" is unreasonable, but is it reasonable to make the entire web a "red-light district"? Is it a good idea to make the web a resource which children cannot use without constant, over-the-shoulder supervision?

Neither one of those seem like reasonable extremes, meaning that people will keep looking for some kind of middle ground.

If no such middle ground exists, then you're probably right that "no restrictions for anyone" is better than "harsh restrictions for everyone". Don't fault people for trying to find that reasonable middle ground, though, and keep in mind that while it's selfish for parents to want a no-sex-shop area around their elementary school, it's even more selfish to complain that that would mean you'd have to drive 20 minutes to find a sex shop instead of only 15. Living in communities means making fair and reasonable compromises.

Oh please! Did you not hear his slogan "Change you can believe in"? The entire foundation of that slogan was an attempt to convince people he wasn't a Washington insider.

That you interpreted it as such doesn't mean that's what it meant.

Indeed, I don't see how you could reasonably have believed it meant that. How can a federal senator and a many-term federal senator possibly base their campaign on the idea that they're "outsiders" to the federal government?

"Change" doesn't mean "outsider", no matter how often McCain tried to say otherwise.

He'd look pretty ridiculous saying "Vote for change by voting for a Washington insider", now wouldn't he?

He'd look pretty ridiculous if he believed that change could only come from the outside.

There's no difference between modern western politics and autocratic regimes such as monarchy or even dictatorships.

From which I can only conclude that you know very little of dictatorships, or of democracy.

Major parties will tend to cluster around the centre in their country's political spectrum. This isn't due to some exciting "conspiracy" by "The Man", it's simply due to the fact that most people in most modern western nations don't want their countries to change too much too quickly. (For obvious reasons - times of rapid change tend to be stressful and difficult, and most people have more than enough stress and difficulty in their personal lives without the government adding more.)

Roughly speaking, if most people want no more than C amount of change in a governmental term, then any party which positions itself outside the interval [-C,+C] (centre=0) is inherently saying that it does not intend to reflect the will of the majority, and consequently will not be considered a major party.

It's not a conspiracy; it's just social dynamics.

without the vastly dumbed down population being any the wiser

I have yet to see any reference to "the dumbed down population" or "the sheeple" be anything other than a straw man used to bolster a crackpot argument.

Perhaps you'd like to offer some data to support the notion that today's population is "dumbed down"? In particular, you may wish to focus on demonstrating that today's population is more compliant than the population of McCarthy's era, or the population which would forcibly and repeatedly shock a screaming man at the request of an authority figure.

To the best of my knowledge, there's no evidence today's population is any more dumbed down than the populations of every other generation. Feel free to provide evidence to the contrary; note, however, that "why, when I was a boy..." does not constitute evidence.

all this reporting on online attacks by the Chinese is an example of the media reporting bias.

Or attentional biases on your part - this is the first media report which mentions it that I've seen in quite some time, and it's not actually a report on Chinese hacking, but rather a report on the current activities of the US government.

Not, of course, that seeing vastly more reporting on China-vs-US hacks than US-vs-China hacks should be at all surprising, since
  - (a) information is much more available in the US, so news media is simply more likely to hear about an event,
  - (b) information in the US is predominantly in English, so those of us reading in English are much more likely to hear of it,
  - (c) the US is either the country of or a treaty ally of most readers of English-language news media, and attacks on entities we are legally obligated to defend are naturally of rather more interest than attacks on other entities,
  - (d) the US is militarily more technologically advanced than China, meaning that China has vastly more to gain from this kind of espionage.

And so on. The simple fact of the matter is that we're more likely to hear of a Chinese hack on the US for a great many reasons which have nothing to do with any purported "media bias". Such a bias may or may not exist, but it's a sign of intellectual laziness and/or dishonesty to simply invoke "teh MSM iz bias!1!" rather than actually thinking about the underlying factors.

Not that intellectual laziness and dishonesty is surprising to find in an argument equating democracy with dictatorship.

There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil. All the alternatives are considerably more expensive, and have a lower return on energy invested vs. energy out.

Your conclusion does not follow from your premises. Even if it were true that alternative energy sources were more expensive and had a lower EROEI, that does not mean they cannot effectively replace oil. At $60/bbl, world spending on oil is about $1.8T/yr, or about 3% of world GDP, meaning that there's a great deal of scope for an alternative to get "more expensive" before it actually gets too expensive.

More importantly, though, your premises aren't correct.

Wind power has an EROEI of about 25:1, comparable to oil, and costs about $2500/kWp (including pumped storage), or about $1/kWh/yr. By contrast, a barrel of oil contains 1,700kWh; at $60/bbl, that's about $0.035/kWh, or a net present value of about $0.50/kWh/yr. However, oil provides heat energy, which is of lower quality than electrical energy, in the sense that it can provide less useful work (lower exergy). The discount factor varies; a common one is about 3:1 (e.g., heat pump for heating your home), but perhaps the most relevant one here is the 8:1 factor between cars with electric drivetrains and cars with internal combustion ones.

And that's not even considering externalities. Taking everything into account, oil simply isn't a cheap wonder-fuel. Since it isn't, it'll be replaceable.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of work to do to replace it. Almost all of that work is in retooling infrastructure, though (electrified rail, hybrid/electric cars, heat pumps, etc.); the challenge of replacing the actual useful work delivered by oil is relatively minor (30Gb/yr x 1700kWh/bbl = 50T kWh/yr / 8:1 exergy ratio = 6T kWh/yr / 2500 productive hrs/yr = 2.5B kW/hr wind = 2.5TWp * $2.5T/TWp = $6.5T = 10% of world GDP, or about 4 months of world manufacturing capacity).

What can anyone do about it? Nothing. What COULD everyone do? Ignore the game. Don't pirate it. Don't purchase it. Don't talk about it on forums. But that won't happen. Most will happily take whatever the game publisher does to them just so they can have that shiny new version of their favorite game.

Some people do exactly what you suggest. I personally have gone from talking excitedly about a game to literally saying "I guess I'm not getting that, then" in a matter of seconds after finding out that it would install invasive copyright software on my machine. Never played it - plenty of other things to do. A guaranteed sale that was permanently lost for the sole reason of overly-burdensome security measures.

How many people do that? How many times has that happened? I don't know. It does happen, though, which means that it's a very real question whether onerous security measures will help or hurt sales.