Readit NewsThere are, IMO, very grave and very serious double standards at play here because I don't think we're going to see any of those.
I'm choosing to ignore a lot of the problems with people from disparate backgrounds living together, people not actually wanting to leave where they live, people not wanting to share freely available resources, etc. Those are very hard to solve problems.
I'm only saying that over-population is not the cause of resource problems. If we can solve the other problems then a lack of resources stops being a problem, which proves population size is not the root cause.
New York doesn't magically receive food. New York is a large net recipient of food imports. It produces value to society and exchanges some of that value for food farmed by others. The U.S. (and most of the West) is structured in such a way that productivity per capita is high, and it means everyone in the food supply chain can live a reasonable lifestyle with enough food. Most African nations do not structure their society this way. It's not an accident. This is the way they choose to live. I grew up in Africa and I'm happy to explain the many ways in which American and African cultures differ. For example, corruption isn't corruption in most of Africa. It's good manners. Gift giving has been happening in tribes for thousands of years. In business it is a common courtesy to provide a gift during negotiations. Of course the person with the largest gift is the most generous and the nicest person, so of course they get the contract. This is a fundamental difference in our cultural and social understanding of what is right and wrong.
What you appear to be exercising is a typical Western hubris: "if we can just get the savages to live with us, they would see the light and live like we do." This assumes that everyone want to adopt your values and way of living. They don't. The reason there isn't much food in Africa (relative to the population size) is not by chance. They live on some of the most fertile land in the world. Africa should be the breadbasket of the world. The issue is that they don't like the way you live and don't want to live that way. Any kind of mass migration strategy would merely result in lots of hungry people in America.
Gangs can only want so many machine tools and steel plates, if you don't use them they are just in the way. But people who do use them and learn how to do it well become immensely valuable and beneficial to all.
Gangs don't use the farm equipment. They steal it and sell it. They will steal any equipment they can and there is an unlimited appetite for equipment on the black market. Especially in China and Southeast Asia.
1. Corruption. I saw this first hand. For every $1M sent into Africa, a very large proportion is confiscated by tribes, gangs, militia, and the government. You can send all the excess food in the world, but there are thousands of people between production and the hungry person who is eager to violently steal it.
2. Africa's population is booming. Thanks, in part, to food aid. Half of Nigeria doesn't have access to toilets. 40% doesn't have electricity. 25% doesn't have running water. Their fertility rate is 5.2 children per woman. We are unintentionally propping up a future catastrophe.
3. Food aid has destroyed local farming and food production. Locals cannot compete with free.
4. Equitable allocation is impossible. There is no hunger score above each person's head. Even if there were, there is no supply chain anywhere in the world which can reliably and repeatedly deliver the necessary food aid to each person in the deepest African jungles. We rely on distribution hubs which are sparse, poorly run, intermittent, and subject to temperature and humidity extremes. This means food perishes fast unless it is ultra processed and packed for durability. Basically army rations. Even those expire after some time. Meaning we can't just take the Colombian bananas and send them around the world. Only certain foods work, and they need to undergo expensive and specialised processing. This entire supply chain is far more expensive than you can imagine.
I will close with my own opinion. While the world could sustain a higher population, it is clear to me that it will result in diminishing quality of life for everyone. Crowded conditions and increasing scarcity are not aspirational goals for humanity.
If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.
While unfortunate for consumers, it cleans up the offerings. For four years, I didn't buy FSD because Autopilot was good enough to cover highway driving and I couldn't justify $99/month for the "last mile". If you strip out Autopilot and given the latest FSD, I would 100% buy the FSD subscription.
Removing the lifetime purchase option also simplified my mental model. Before, I was always stressed that if I bought a few months, loved FSD, and then bought the lifetime, I would have "wasted" those few months. Plus, every month I owned the car yet didn't buy lifetime FSD made it worth "less" to me: I'd eventually sell the car, so I'd missed out on those few months of usage.
I do wish Tesla offered a price lock: so long as you maintain your FSD subscription, your price is guaranteed for 5 years. Otherwise, it does feel scary: I spend 50k on a car for its FSD and over time, they jack the price to $200 or $500/month. Also, if they jack up FSD prices and then lower base car prices, your Tesla's value decreases effectively, which feels even worse.
I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcomes? Are there medical boards that are sending PSAs to help doctors improve common mis-diagnosis? Whats the role of LLMs in all of this?
Too late for me. I have a similar story. ChatGPT helped me diagnose an issue which I had been suffering with my whole life. I'm a new person now. GPs don't have the time to spend hours investigating symptoms for patients. ChatGPT can provide accurate diagnoses in seconds. These tools should be in wide use today by GPs. Since they refuse, patients will take matters into their own hands.
FYI, there are now studies showing ChatGPT outperforms doctors in diagnosis. (https://www.uvahealth.com/news/does-ai-improve-doctors-diagn...) I can believe it.
That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationships through oral history as opposed to a big monolithic search engine entails a far more human element to IRC.