Thoughts

@BC, I'm an optimist by nature and by no means a doom monger however the issues can't be brushed aside anymore.

About the predicted oil crisis: the crisis was delayed by finding new ways to make more amounts of oil available however the reserves are going to run out and the mobile vehicles still run on oil products for the most part.

Water war: fresh water isn't unlimited... This is where technology could become useful. Actually, earth possesses huge amounts of water but not in drinkable form. If we could find an efficient way to separate sweet water from salt in oceans the problem could be solved easily.

No technology is going to produce food out of nowhere though. If you don't give the earth enough time to regenerate no technology is going to help. You could increase the amount and the rate if production by genetic manipulation. In any case, the basis will run out.


Off to uni

TBH food and water shortage is not a matter of the Earth's potential, it's just a matter of time, money, and effort.

There are still huge fresh water reservoirs, even under many of the driest countries in sub-saharan Africa; you just have to squash the local warlords, so infrastructure can be built undisturbed, this takes political will, and military power.

Food is a non-issue either, the amount of nutrition you can get from rice, wheat, and corn plantations is stupendous, if people don't expect to eat meat more than once or twice a week (which I barely do already), we could easily feed 20 billion people, but this shit has to be planned properly. Little animal husbandry, lots of vegetarian diet, no monocultures, and, for f*cks sake, don't plant the crops where there's currently a rain forest. Use the plains.

Stop chopping down the Amazon to make space for cattle ranches, better get Americans to eat a salad every once in a while.

The real problem in the world is lack of cooperation, that's why I'm a huge fan of the European Union, which does a lot of ineffectual shit, but if it some day evolves into a political union, it will have shown the world that cooperation can work.

And back to the disparaty of the distribution of wealth between rich and poor: the argument was made, that people like Steve Jobs create, well, jobs, and wealth for the entire economy, sort of a trickle down logic.

And if you think purely within the frame of Capitalism, that is true. However, I still question whether this is actually such a huge f*cking deal. The system still is one, where one individual gets allocated a million times the resources of another individual. I know it makes sense within the capitalist free market, but if we forget for a second that we were all brought up in market economies, and step back, and look at this, it's pretty ridiculous.

Obviously I could've picked a better example, high-paid bankers are probably a better example, because they're not selling anything, or making anything, they just move shit around. And they get paid stupendous amounts of money for it, even though they contribute f*ckall to society.

Sure, I'm on board with college educated people earning more than people that didn't go to college, or nobody would go to college anymore. But come on. Not that much.

I agree with Viva on the issue of food and water. There needs to be a lot of corporation among countries to stabilize the issue of shortage.

In the case of oil, i am not completely abreast of the latest developments in the industry, but i did read that the US has enough shale oil reserves to produce as much as Saudi Arabia is producing right now by 2020. Although the current breakeven price is $70 per barrel, it is still a lot lower than the current oil price and it can be assumed to become lower as the shale oil supply increase, so, the situation is not as bad. But there has to be a lot of focus on alternative energy sources and energy companies will have to allocate enough research funds to bring down the costs of producing alternative energy.

On the distribution of wealth across the society, i agree with Viva that when we step back from a capitalist mind set, then the difference in resource allocation in quite steep.

But, i dont think we have evolved a system yet, which can incentivize people to produce value-added goods and at the same time limit the excess resources allocated to such people without affecting these incentives. And i, frankly, don't think it is possible to evolve such a system either, unless we are prepared to accept slower pace of innovations and other developments that make our lives easier.

Until someone can come up with such a system, i say, we swallow our pride, and let society do its job of promoting people who contribute heavily, however inefficient the process is. Sure, some undeserving people (like the bankers), get paid handsomely along the way and the extent of difference between the resource allocation is hardly natural, but we should just consider this as inefficiency which any system can have.

On water shortages: Water becomes unavailable --> price of water increases --> private firms see economic profit in the venture and invest into ways to efficiently separate sweet water from salt water. Within a couple of years you'll have some company that figured out the right way to do it on mass scale.

I trust that people looking out for their own interest would make the world better as a whole.

Also I'm a huge fan of Tesla Motors. I think they figured out the right way to go about the electric car: the car shouldn't be an electric car, but a great car that happens to be electric. With that business model their Model S won Motor Trend's car of the year award. They're now working into different models an SUV crossover is expected by 2014 and a BMW 3 series competitor for around 30k expected in 2015-16, a much more accessible price than the current 60k. They're currently working with the government to set up an infrastructure system for high-speed charges.