The effects are not just the ton of fish, or even the job lost, it's equivalent to scorching the earth and polluting the groundwater of land based farming affecting generations into the future.
We also leave the future with all the infrastructure we build, and you may provide your children with some direct inheritance if you manage to save instead of wasting capital on trinkets.
It does not look like our numbers are increasing anymore, so I don't see how the latter is applicable. Middle East and Africa are booming and this is not ending well, but I just don't see what can be done about it.
You misunderstand population momentum. While fertility rates are rapidly declining, the global population still increases, and is projected to peak at ~10-11B people around 2100 (up from ~8B today). India will surpass China in total population around 2027, while already experiencing wet bulb temperatures beyond what the human body can survive.
Wet bulb temperatures are about as relevant as hypothermia temperatures. We just invented the technology for heating long before air conditioning so uninformed people like to trot it out like it’s some relevant barrier where people will die in mass.
They will just move to colder climates or generate some electricity to use air conditioning.
Global expert on heat stress indicates wet bulb temperatures are relevant as recently as August of 2023. Please feel free to share data your assertion is based on, and how you’re going to relocate or provide AC for billions of people in the developing world.
How did people in Europe and North America avoid dying from the cold?
I’m not saying it’s not a problem people need to deal with. I’m saying it’s a problem there is already a solution for.
Elderly people die in temperatures down in 90F as well. For some reason it’s considered acceptable to “chalk it up to climate” when we allow that to happen but we go to pretty great lengths to provide shelters to prevent people from freezing to death in completely inhospitable places like New York, Detroit, Minneapolis, etc.
Billions of people in the developing world will need food and water. They will also need shelter. News at 10
What is not sustainable about it? I hope you know that international trade in food is a thing? As long as they can make stuff that the people who can make food want, it's all fine.
(And you also know that Egypt is just about the oldest country on the planet? They always had their population concentrated in a narrow strip along the Nile; even if, like in the rest of the world, population numbers have obviously gone up a lot since eg the industrial revolution.)
I love the idea of leaving infrastructure to our kids. But that doesn't even exist anymore. We're leaving the maintenance of poorly build infrastructure to our kids.
We, and our kids will only reap reward from the infrastructure created over 100 years ago. The rest they will reap the maintenance required on the current stuff.
Old things were built for us and our future, now we build for ourselves (barely).
> We're leaving the maintenance of poorly build infrastructure to our kids
That's standard practice by the book though.
No generation has ever left anything better than that to the future ones. [1]
Also: future does not exist, it's been invented by old men thinking of themselves as future reborn children (or whatever their beliefs told them to believe).
But the future generations, not knowing better, will assume that whatever we are leaving behind it's how it is supposed to be.
A trivial example: young people now don't complain about the ad infested internet or the addiction driven social networks, it's how it is supposed to work for them.
But also: if you don't give them something, they won't (can't) miss it.
Will they miss the rotary phone or the walkman? No, they won't.
In the same way I never missed washing clothes in a river, like my grandma did. I was born with the washing machine and I'm thankful for that.
[1] imagine that the Colosseum's name comes from people seeing a colossal statue in front of it, the statue was nicknamed "The Colossus" (nobody knew who that was) so obviously the building in front of it became "The Colosseum".
Little did they know the statue was of Nero, the Roman Emperor, and the building was an amphitheatre built in a different period.
They did not know about Nero, about Vespasian, the Flavian dynasty, the gladiators or the naumachia, but they thought it was good enough to use it as a market...
>No generation has ever left anything better than that to the future ones.
???
We were leaving some of the best products of our labour in the 1800s and early 1900s (for some parts of the world).
I think you're misunderstanding the point of tech fading but infrastructure staying.
For innovation, sure, it's going to fade, but there are thousands of things we know that do not fade that we could be building today to leave our next generations. That is what they did. We do not do it, not even slightly... AND it's easier for us to do so, yet still we don't.
> We were leaving some of the best products of our labour in the 1800s and early 1900s
And also all of the mistakes of the industrial revolution...
Including pollution, horrible living and working conditions, deadly workplaces, child labour, exploitation and oppression of the workers, unfair distribution of wealth etc etc
See the construction of the Paris underground or the grim consequences of using asbestos in buildings.
> I think you're misunderstanding the point of tech fading but infrastructure staying.
I think you are moving the goalpost
"We're leaving the maintenance of poorly build infrastructure to our kids" like we always did.
Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers, only a handful of them survived to this day.
Because they were poorly built and even worse maintained.
> Do you know the difference between infrastructure and ideas?
Do you?
Can you make an example of "We were leaving some of the best products of our labour in the 1800s and early 1900s"?
Have you ever read Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution?
Are you aware of the Williams Thesis?
I would like to discuss the matter and not read your ad hominem, because it's honestly the least interesting thing in the World and you are not even good at it.
Anyway, what you really don't understand is how much the context changed.
Nowadays "leaving it to the kids" means grandparents living something to their grandkids.
In the past it meant a 30 year old man leaving something behind for their 12 years old children.
Some of the infrastructures we are leaving behind was already in place when my mother was being born (in the late 1940s). It is still functioning. I wouldn't call it poor built, it is probably poorly maintained, but it's understandable when the only people willing to maintain it are old folks or immigrants with no other option and the knowledge about the inner workings are lost or degraded.
But my generation and the generation before me are leaving to our descendants the f*ing internet which is an unprecedented marvel if you ask me, comparable to the agricultural revolution, the steam engine, the printing press and the electricity.
This seems to be an issue with USA where the only infrastructural things seems to be mounting debt.
China was building roads, rail and metros like crazy in the last 20 years. Moscow has got second metro ring and some highways are finally materializing. India probably has it all in the future as it is not satiated capital-wise.
Buying a spare apartment for your children does not seem out of reach for many people, so their children do not have to ever cope with debt trap or face possibility of eviction.
The West does indeed seem to be in a spending ideology crisis but it is not that relevant anymore.
Singapore for example is doing just fine in that regard, and is definitely part of the 'west'.
Russia is currently in a big war that destroys a lot of accumulated capital. So I wouldn't exactly take them as a prime example of good stewardship.
And even the much maligned US is doing just fine. It's just that their public infrastructure isn't doing as well as they should (for various governance reasons), but most private investment is holding up well. Their private sector is still the envy of the world; their public stock markets are still about as valuable as the rest of the world's combined.
Singapore is firmly embedded in global markets, follows western models of rule of law and market economics, western culture, etc. The whole point of Singapore's model is to be a deliberate outpost of the west in South East Asia.
(And if you want to talk about geography: Australia is further east and south than Singapore, but is typically counted as part of 'the west', too.)
Because they are a country of majority non-European decent and proliferation? Their population is made up of Chinese, Malay, Indian and other. None of these are Western nations by the definition.
Japan isn't Western either, although it is probably the most "the West" nation in all of Asia.
>The whole point of Singapore's model is to be a deliberate outpost of the west in South East Asia.
Not since handover from the British... The whole point of Singapore is to be a country founded on good execution with little resources and amazing cohesion.
> Because they are a country of majority non-European decent and proliferation? Their population is made up of Chinese, Malay, Indian and other. None of these are Western nations by the definition.
Hmm, ok.. But then your earlier comment seemed to count Russia as no-western, despite them being European?
Yeah I think there is some problem with the scaling of democratic processes combined with capitalism.
Either that or we just all lost our sense of belonging through something like globalisation and it's showing by our lack of incentive to build for each other.
It's a real shame but it's definitely, like you said, something that seems to only be affecting the new me-first culture of the West.
We are humans. We are the smartest and most capable things on the planet. As far as we know we're the smartest and most capable things in the universe. That capability affords us a lot of privileges, including a much more comfortable life than we would otherwise have. I believe it also comes with some responsibilities, not particularly onerous ones, but just to do our best to leave the world in a not-worse state than we found it.
The weird thing about salmon (and other fish farms) is that the fish they produce aren't necessarily more tasty than the fish they consume. I live in Denmark, we have some really delicious small fish but they are hard to sell, so they are generally used to feed fish farms instead. With the soybeans mentioned earlier I at least get why it's fed to livestock that are then fed to people. I'm not going to say it's the right thing to do but at least there is a difference between soy and pork. With fish it's literally taking one delicious fish and putting it into another (objectively less delicious) fish.
You can eat salmon in sushi rolls or just cut it into pieces and put on the bread.
With other fish, you typically have to fry them first, which is a complex affair. The result is also much less predictable. There are also bones and fish skin which doesn't contribute to overall experience positively.
I can eat salmon several times a week whereas cooking fish would be an once per month affair best case. Perhaps once a week if I didn't have to work for a living.
I know this will vary a lot based on where you live, but here in Denmark you can get sushi with a lot of our local smaller fish. Mackerel, herring and smelt are quite popular. I think a lot of it is because "sustainability" as a "brand" is just good market value here, but it's also just as good as salmon or tuna. Very few places actually use farmed salmon, though I'm not sure the Alaskan salmon are really that much better than Norwegian farmed salmon from a sustainability point of view.
This must be cultural because for me it's much easier to buy e.g. some mackerels and fry them than to make sushi.
In fact, in my family grilling fish is literally one of the things we do when it's near dinner time and we haven't anything prepared (go to supermarket, buy some fish, grill it, eat). While sushi is something I haven't even tried to make because it seems to take a lot of time and effort (I do love to order it when I eat out).
