Quote from: smooth on February 08, 2016, 09:39:49 PM

I have to say on this point your logic is atrocious. If we have synthetic hamburgers and synthetic fish, then it indeed does not matter from the point of view of Malthusian population limits with respect to food that the majority of life in the ocean is wiped out. It may matter for other reasons, but you haven't stated them.

I feel this is one of those Smooth moments questioning what the definition of "is" is.

If literally all food is synthetic, that indicates it's become entangled into an increasingly complex chain of specialization of labor, so even if you worked in that industry, you would probably not be able to produce it yourself. That would be an extreme far left viewpoint where individuals are all required to fully integrate with the state to exist at all or you just instantly die. As I tried to tell the Anonymizer, technology solely for the sake of technology is useless because it's not a net gain, it creates a dependency to enslave you at the same time.

The ability to become self sufficient, even if you don't exercise it, is far better than piling on endless amounts of unneeded complications into people's lives to entrap them. Am I the only one that doesn't think Ted Kaczynski was completely insane?

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 08, 2016, 08:57:49 PM

Spoken like a true Malthusian tree hugger who hates man-made fish ponds (especially those that recycle chicken dung as the fish food).

Sorry r0ach I can't listen to your marketing advice any more because you are one of those guys who is fighting the future.

I interpret MA says the danger of a Dark Age is if people like myself don't go innovate to enable the people to express their political will economically.

I think it's more to do with the fact I don't see a quantitative gain in the quality of life or quality of people between gains in technology from the 1980's to now. People are just more disconnected from reality, and technology-wise, all we really got out of it is bigger TVs, the first stages of technological unemployment through automation, and infrastructure to create bigger, more powerful government. We don't even have electric cars yet (that don't catch on fire and explode). Ok, we got the internet, but for most people, the internet is just a giant entertainment box time waster to occupy all your free time.

For quality of life, first you needed a high school diploma to survive, then you needed a bachelor's degree. Next you'll need a master's degree, then a few years later, you'll either need to have a PhD or inherit money or you'll be living like some type of peasant in a mud hut. For most people, things will probably be getting a lot worse over time. If you're going to have an increasing population with accelerating technological unemployment at the same time, that really just makes no sense and would force full blown, top down controlled socialism or constant civil war.