The arguments are interesting, but in particular claiming that it doesn't matter if the EU can no longer produce basic commodities like fertilizers or steel that it doesn't matter is pretty doubtful.
It's pretty hard to maintain the level of society that we enjoy having without the ability to build stuff, which does require steel to come from somewhere. But even more importantly, if you want to have your large population not starve to death, you need to be able to secure a food supply -- which is not possible without fertilizer.
Some of the other manufactured goods, sure, maybe. But I remember 2021, when it was nearly impossible to get almost everything that we used to think was super commonplace because global supply chains collapsed. Indeed, things haven't really recovered still. Intentionally dismantling supply chains again does seem like a poor strategy for prosperity.
trillions of kg/yr of anything will effect the environment in some way, since "the environment" is just the emergent properties of all of the things in the earth system and trillions of kg/yr of stuff is a lot of stuff. If you added (or removed) 10^12 kg of water (or literally anything else) to the planet, it would change the environment in detectable ways.
If we want to be charitable, then perhaps you’d see that my point was specifically about how the scale was important, and that averaging impact out over the entire globe was perhaps not the correct scale
Given our ever-expanding definition of "environmentally unfriendly" and our ever-contracting definition of "sustainable", I'm actually not sure that anything actually makes the cut in the long run.
Everything "effects the environment" in some way, after all.
This is more or less the argument of various population-reduction advocates. There's simply no way, with current or foreseeable technology, to sustain 8 billion humans AND still have a planet left a few centuries later.
If we want there to be humans in the far, far future, more of us need to start going childfree NOW, and encouraging others to do so, AND working on sustainable ways to have a decent standard of living without eviscerating the Earth.
The problem being that everybody always wants to force someone else to be the one to have no children and a crappy standard of living, while they get to be one of the people selected to remain.
Headline is clickbaity but it is an interesting set of coincidences. I'm not sure, though, how many people there are in the set of "crypto millionaires" that would warrant being included in this "trend" were they to die. As a result, it's hard to judge how suspicious this coincidence is.
The main reason that we don't have free filing on the US is not because we don't know how or it's too hard or requires study -- it's because a variety of different political actors across the spectrum desire that outcome for different reasons and they all effectively advocate for it.
Planet Money did a decent episode on the topic a few years ago, but the summary is this:
The companies that make tax prep software will spend ~any amount of money to fight free-file. It would destroy their business. That's one major faction.
Another major faction is that part of the Republican party which wants lower taxes. Their argument is basically that if we made tax filing too easy/automatic, it would be less visible. If you have to spend hours preparing your taxes, you're likely to notice how much you pay and therefore will be more resistant to policies which raise them. If it all just disappeared out of your paycheck transparently, you might not notice it as much.
A third major faction is very-wealthy businessmen, who benefit from the incredible complexity of our system since they can afford to spend large sums of money (and lots of accountants' time) to optimize for maximum avoidance of tax. A system which was simpler or more automated would likely be less game-able -- and even if it wasn't less game-able, the fact that the vast majority of people would have trivial automated filings would mean that limited enforcement resources would be more available to audit the most-complex cases.
And the final major faction is people who do not trust our institutions. They generally fear that it would be scarier and riskier for people to fight inaccurate automated returns, and that people would feel compelled to pay whatever the automated system said they owed for fear of what the enforcers would do to them if they complained about it.
Getting to simpler or automated filings is going to require addressing at least some of these.
You shouldn't be overly worried. Some companies are slowing or freezing hiring, some are doing layoffs, and a few are rescinding issued offers.
It is possible that you'll end up caught up in some of that. Not super likely, but possible for sure.
The availability of investment money has greatly decreased -- people are no longer willing to pledge huge sums of money to back companies with minimal revenues, no profits, and no plan on how they're going to eventually be profitable.
If the company that you're going to go work for is profitable, you'll probably be completely fine. If it's not profitable, the company might start to feel like all the free cash has disappeared, and things may get less awesome. If your company isn't profitable, doesn't have a lot of money left, and isn't going to be profitable soon, then you're probably going to end up looking for another job before this is all over.
But even if you end up without work for a time, engineers are still in demand. The problems that we can solve aren't going away, and companies will still figure out profitable ways to employ engineers.
Be aware -- pay attention to how your company is doing. But I wouldn't panic.
Over time, humans produce capital. Insofar as this capital is productively deployed, one should expect the total amount of capital stock to increase.
The stock market represents only a part of the total capital stock, as not all capital is owned by companies, and not all companies are public. But, on the whole, one should expect the stock market to rise over time so long as society is not dying.
> But, on the whole, one should expect the stock market to rise over time so long as society is not dying.
That's the rub, eh? Are there limits to the growth on a finite planet? Is climate change posing an existential threat? Has technology produced highly scalable and entirely altogether too interdependent international production systems?
>Are there limits to the growth on a finite planet?
Yes, but we are 4 orders of magnitude away from them. Adding the potential for space industry, this grows to 13 orders of magnitude. That's ~1000 years of 3% annual growth assuming no efficiency gains, but we still have about 8 orders of magnitude available in computation efficiency, which gives us about 1600 years of 3% growth until hitting 2 on the Kardashev scale. Only close to it limits to growth become a real consideration.
Anyone claiming we are hitting fundamental limits of growth now is a doomer. We may be hitting limits of growth given currently deployed technology, but that's a completely different statement.
It's pretty hard to maintain the level of society that we enjoy having without the ability to build stuff, which does require steel to come from somewhere. But even more importantly, if you want to have your large population not starve to death, you need to be able to secure a food supply -- which is not possible without fertilizer.
Some of the other manufactured goods, sure, maybe. But I remember 2021, when it was nearly impossible to get almost everything that we used to think was super commonplace because global supply chains collapsed. Indeed, things haven't really recovered still. Intentionally dismantling supply chains again does seem like a poor strategy for prosperity.