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[wierd]

NOOPE.  Only so much energy shines onto the earth as an expression of rate x time.

Even if you consider the absurd case where the sun and earth can exist forever (and thus, sunlight is indeed an infinite resource), the rate that energy can land on the earth is still finite, meaning there is a peak sunlight.


The features that economic growth are based on, are all finite or rate limited systems.  As such, there are still bounds that enclose that growth.

[Il Palazzo]

Yeah, using up all of the incident sunlight is an absurd extreme that we're nowhere close to, so why are you bothered by it?

[wierd]

Because the thinking you are espousing, is how the passenger pigeon went extinct.  Given sufficient time, humans WILL reach it.  The time to think about it, is BEFORE it's a problem, because there will be too much invested to change the system by the time it does become one.

[Naturegirl1999]

I'm with Relya here. Naturegirl was more interested in what she had to say than what the teacher did. It's disruptive and egoistic.

I paid attention in class, I learned. I just had questions which I waited until after class and waited for other students to ask their questions and get answers to their questions before asking mine to limit disruptions. How is it egoistic to mention that resources and people are finite? How is it egoistic to ask about a possible economic system that takes finiteness into account?

[Il Palazzo]

Because the thinking you are espousing, is how the passenger pigeon went extinct.  Given sufficient time, humans WILL reach it.  The time to think about it, is BEFORE it's a problem, because there will be too much invested to change the system by the time it does become one.

I really don't think you should or can work now on problems that might appear hundreds or thousands generations from now. Not without a reeeally good horoscope. Why, let's begin voting for parties that promise to work on escaping from Earth due to the solar death in five billion years.
Running out of resources to fuel economic growth is closer to the dying sun category, rather than the passenger pigeon one, is all I'm saying.

I paid attention in class, I learned. I just had questions which I waited until after class and waited for other students to ask their questions and get answers to their questions before asking mine to limit disruptions. How is it egoistic to mention that resources and people are finite? How is it egoistic to ask about a possible economic system that takes finiteness into account?

Because it's implying that the teacher shouldn't be teaching what he does and instead teach what you think is right. At least that's how I understood your attitude to the teacher's disinterest in your ideas, as presented in your posts here.

[wierd]

Because the thinking you are espousing, is how the passenger pigeon went extinct.  Given sufficient time, humans WILL reach it.  The time to think about it, is BEFORE it's a problem, because there will be too much invested to change the system by the time it does become one.

I really don't think you should or can work now on problems that might appear hundreds or thousands generations from now. Not without a reeeally good horoscope. Why, let's begin voting for parties that promise to work on escaping from Earth due to the solar death in five billion years.
Running out of resources to fuel economic growth is closer to the dying sun category, rather than the passenger pigeon one, is all I'm saying.

I paid attention in class, I learned. I just had questions which I waited until after class and waited for other students to ask their questions and get answers to their questions before asking mine to limit disruptions. How is it egoistic to mention that resources and people are finite? How is it egoistic to ask about a possible economic system that takes finiteness into account?

Because it's implying that the teacher shouldn't be teaching what he does and instead teach what you think is right. At least that's how I understood your attitude to the teacher's disinterest in your ideas, as presented in your posts here.

Perhaps, but that very same kind of argument was also tendered in the 60s and 70s-- Even as far back as the 1910s, when the greenhouse effect was discovered to be a feature of CO2.  People that realized that it was so, realized there was an upper permissible boundary on atmospheric concentration before climate would be so adversely affected that human life would be imperiled.  People with your mindset said it would be soo far in the future that nobody needed to worry about it.

Now is the future, and we need to worry about it.  But we cant, because our society depends on that energy, and the ease and flexibility of fossil fuels as both energy source and storage.


My point still stands; This has recurred many times in human history, and as long as we keep adhering to the mindset you are holding, we will keep hitting these catastrophes.

[Naturegirl1999]

Because the thinking you are espousing, is how the passenger pigeon went extinct.  Given sufficient time, humans WILL reach it.  The time to think about it, is BEFORE it's a problem, because there will be too much invested to change the system by the time it does become one.

I really don't think you should or can work now on problems that might appear hundreds or thousands generations from now. Not without a reeeally good horoscope. Why, let's begin voting for parties that promise to work on escaping from Earth due to the solar death in five billion years.
Running out of resources to fuel economic growth is closer to the dying sun category, rather than the passenger pigeon one, is all I'm saying.

I paid attention in class, I learned. I just had questions which I waited until after class and waited for other students to ask their questions and get answers to their questions before asking mine to limit disruptions. How is it egoistic to mention that resources and people are finite? How is it egoistic to ask about a possible economic system that takes finiteness into account?

Because it's implying that the teacher shouldn't be teaching what he does and instead teach what you think is right. At least that's how I understood your attitude to the teacher's disinterest in your ideas, as presented in your posts here.

Macroeconimics explains how the economy works at the scale of nations, and the world. I’m sorry if you think having thoughts of your own is considered disruptive

[Il Palazzo]

@weird: I think you're confusing 'we're running out of resources' with 'we can't use fossil fuels no more'. The argument is whether macroeconomics is still valid, not whether we should go off coal and oil.

@Naturegirl: having your own thoughts is great, but you're enrolled in a course to learn other people's thoughts. You can't think outside the box before you know where the box is, and all that.

[wierd]

More, the argument he is making is more

"You dont need to compute Pi to 500 places to do architecture, and certainly not to the infinity needed to fully and accurately capture the value."


EG, "treating things as being 'Functionally infinite', for the economic time domain you are trying to describe, results in a description that matches with reality sufficiently to make accurate predictions."


However, the truth of that statement is quickly vanishing.  We are sufficiently high up the utility curve that we can consume "infinite" resources in just a few generations.  See also, fossil fuels.



Pretending we are still near the 0 point on the log curve, so that you can continue to promulgate a "good enough for our needs" solution space, out of simplicity, when that solution space is very fast no longer being sufficient for your needs anymore, because accepting the realities of the more complex problem is just too hard, is how you end up making humanity extinct.


@palazzo

Energy consumption is still going up exponentially in the developed world, and the "undeveloped world" is not far behind.  Barring some other catastrophe that ruins growth, "peak solar" could very well happen in just a few generations, much like Peak Oil was hit a decade ago. People in 1910 did not fathom the degree of energy consumption we would be doing now.  And neither are you properly giving consideration to the levels of energy consumption society will be treating itself to 100 years from now.

[Il Palazzo]

But are we really nearing that point? What evidence is there to suggest that? I can see the world gradually switching towards renewables, and there's still plenty of sunlight to go around.

[Il Palazzo]

@palazzo

Energy consumption is still going up exponentially in the developed world

The last 50 years look rather linear to me (after Wiki).

[wierd]

@palazzo

Energy consumption is still going up exponentially in the developed world

The last 50 years look rather linear to me (after Wiki).

See that curve, where it stops being exponential? I dont know what's so special about 1950-1960, but I would hazard a guess that it was when we hit LOCAL peak oil (1960s energy crisis comes to mind)-- Then that dip at 2010 or so, is when we hit global peak oil.

A complete switch to solar energy will result in a return to exponential energy growth, because unit costs per watt will go down as economies of scale go into effect.

When you take that into account, you see a much more log like curve for global demand.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy

[Naturegirl1999]

@weird: I think you're confusing 'we're running out of resources' with 'we can't use fossil fuels no more'. The argument is whether macroeconomics is still valid, not whether we should go off coal and oil.

@Naturegirl: having your own thoughts is great, but you're enrolled in a course to learn other people's thoughts. You can't think outside the box before you know where the box is, and all that.

Again, I did pay attention in class and asked questions after The lecture. If my question involved something that would be later talked about, he said so, and I waited until then to learn that, if my question was answered, I didn’t ask it, if my question wasn’t answered, I’d ask after class. If I had new questions, I’d ask them, after classes. He seemed perfectly fine discussing these things with me, he said he liked my inquisitiveness, since it meant I was paying attention in class. I liked our discussions. We talked about the need for our current economy to be restructured since it currently relies on humans getting currency via working, and that AI and machines are doing more and more jobs, and how eventually we’d need a new way of getting currency, I think one of us mentioned UBI as a possibility, there were other topics too, like trying to think of a way to economically incentivize efforts to mitigate climate change...of course, these discussions were had after class. I do learn the edges of the box, and ask questions, have thoughts, if there is more of the box, the professor says as much and we eventually learn of those edges, sometimes the question is answered within the new edge, or it ends up still being out of the box. Just because I had discussions didn’t mean I didn’t pay attention

[Il Palazzo]

@Naturegirl: that's great and looks like a perfectly kosher interaction. Your earlier posts suggested something else, is all.

@weird: or, you know, by 1950 everyone in the US finally got a fridge, a car, a teevo, and an AC unit. And the dips are economic bubbles bursting. In any case, the fact remains that there hasn't been no exponential growth of energy consumption in the developed world in the last half a century. Kinda looks rather flat, tbh.

[wierd]

I'd say the US being the premium energy consumer makes our hitting local peak have a more pronounced effect, due to statistical skew.  More recent data should consider India and China, even though they are not considered "developed" for political reasons.