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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
It has been claimed that fish farming is a sustainable source of food that will help us feed the growing global human population while protecting wild fish populations – but this isn’t true.
“Fish farming is not a substitute for catching wild fish out of the ocean,” says Matthew Hayek at New York University. “In fact, it relies on catching wild fish out of the ocean.”
Hayek and his colleagues have shown that the amount of wild fish killed in order to feed farmed fish is between 27 and 307 per cent higher than previous estimates.
Farmed carnivorous fish eat multiple times more weight in wild fish caught from the ocean than is obtained by farming them, says Hayek. For instance, producing a kilogram of salmon may require 4 or 5 kilograms of wild fish.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @01:02PM (27 children)
>Farmed carnivorous fish
Tuna is a big one that has been tried in commercial farms, because... tuna brings insanely high prices in Japanese fish markets. Commercially, it could work because the money paid for the farm output is so ridiculously high that the farm can use basically whatever it wants for inputs.
It's the same old argument that applies against beef farming. People pay premium for meat, so it "works" economically to use all that land for pasture to produce beef, but if that same land were put toward producing human food directly, instead of for feed stock for animals, the more direct path from sunlight to people's gut is more efficient: cut out the middle processes.
Even 20+ years ago, fish farming, prawn farming, and pretty much all forms of aquaculture were called out for diverting large quantities of "low quality fish stocks" away from feeding (hungry) local people into feeding the aquaculture operations which are almost exclusively growing premium foods for global markets.
Step 1: Transparency - expose the actual inputs and outputs of the operations.
Step 2: Global population reduction - there's not going to ever be a practical way to feed any kind of quality food to 20 billion humans simultaneously from this one little mud ball. It's all well and good to say that "birth rates are falling in developed countries" - but while that is happening, immigration from underdeveloped countries keeps populations increasing in those developed countries - feeding the "infinite economic growth engines" that make your 401(k) numbers go up, instead of down. Local building regulation show it clearly: for every "premium" single family home we build, we require building a "high density" apartment unit to match it. If we don't do that, we won't have the low cost labor that makes the economy run. Who fills those low cost labor supported housing units? Around here: mostly immigrants - whether that's from "poorer" parts of the US, or international, our low end labor pool isn't just for local kids when they drop out of high school, anymore.
Meanwhile, the party rocks on. We clearly had the capability to overfish the oceans to dramatically reduced output 20+ years ago, some modicum of self control has kept wild fish stocks from collapsing completely. Farming was the answer to increase food output from the land, but in the oceans it's not working yet. Maybe if we start farming seaweed and plankton, instead of the premium top predators it might start working better. I don't see too many premium tiger meat farms operating around the globe, either.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Unixnut on Monday October 21 2024, @01:40PM (21 children)
Well, apparently global population growth is slowing as well, according to these stats [database.earth] population growth peaked in 1963 and is slowing since then. Around 2084 the net global population will start reducing. So while migration may make developed countries population grow (or remain stable) in the interim it looks unlikely that global population growth will be increasing in future.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @02:11PM (20 children)
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Yes, I'll grant the graph is accurate and consistent. I'll grant that percentage growth is "the way" to look at population trends.
What that graph underplays is the fact that numerically, we have been adding 75 million to 80 million living humans to global population annually, consistently for a long long time.
So, yes, growth has slowing on that percentage basis, but it isn't slowing on an absolute basis much at all. All the "science" looking at cultures in petri dishes says "focus on the percentage rates" - but in the real world: 80 million new mouths to feed every year, it's a different thing than some penicillin cultures reaching capacity and dying due to lack of growth media.
The "settled science" says to look at the percentages and take comfort in their downward trend. The math says: linear growth is much less scary than the exponential growth usually associated with population trends. The ground truth is: 2.3 additional human mouths to feed every second of every day, and a continuing growth in resource consumption per mouth, both through growth of the high consuming nations through immigration, and in economic development of the rest of the world.
My life experience says: all these trends are meaningless, unpredictable future events are more likely to render current trends irrelevant than it is likely that these trends continue on their current trajectory until we "soft land" at a controlled population decline.
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(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 21 2024, @02:26PM (13 children)
One solution: we need to outcompete the brown people who breed prolifically in order to save our heritage?
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @02:45PM
By out compete I guess you mean: kill, because more white mouths isn't a solution. At the scales we are talking about, that's genocide 10x larger than anything ever attempted before.
Hugo Drax tried to implement a similar solution in Moonraker - on movie theater screens in 1979. I agree with M and Q and James Bond: we don't want to handle it that way.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 21 2024, @03:49PM (10 children)
Unironically, we already are.
lost cause atomized urbanized generally atheist white folk with no heritage to lose, NPC types in summary, have a birth rate around 1.6 births per woman and its dropping fast.
Hispanic rate in the USA is around 1.87 per woman and its also dropping
Mormons, whom actually have heritage to save and a living culture to ... live in, are around 2.6 births per woman and not dropping as fast as anyone else. Nobody in the civilized world can keep up with that. Amish about the same situation.
Yes the exact numbers vary every year, but the order of the list doesn't change very much if at all.
The future of the USA is a white Christian theocracy in the long run. This makes many people very happy and it also super hyper triggers certain ethnic groups that hate white people or are anti-Christian. Regardless, it's the inevitable outcome of current trends and current political policies.
Looking at predictive maps, the cultural struggle of the 2100s in the USA is likely to be the overpopulated and under-precipitated west controlled by Mormons is going to have a lot of friction with the water-rich east of the Mississippi controlled by the Amish and likely future neo-Amish. The Amish are not a uniculture and they already have cultural issues with some being very medieval and trad while others being more flexible about technology, therefore I predict the east is going to end up dominated by "1950s Dieselpunk" neo-Amish folks. It'll be fine to run your sawmill with a three-phase electric motor connected to a nuclear power plant downstate, maybe even with a VFD drive, but they'll likely draw the line at having one hand on your cellphone app running the mill or using AI to generate optimal cut plans for sawmill logs.
The 1950s were a good time to be alive if you just kept to yourself and your people and did your own thing, although the subversives will endlessly complain it was a bad time to be a subversive, to which most people seem innoculated now to reply with mild pleasure at that situation LOL. Thats why I think Dieselpunk Amish is the way of the future in the east half of the USA.
The future belongs to those who bother to show up. Anti-natalists and anti-Christians are merely the modern Shakers, soon to be forgotten and looked back at with confusion if looked back at, at all.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 21 2024, @03:56PM (3 children)
By which I mean nation-scale projects, like should we build an irrigation canal from the Mississippi River to Salt Lake City in Utah. That kind of thing is going to be the big fight. I suspect a trade; a desert full of solar panels where it never rains with power lines running opposite direction of the irrigation canal. Someday, the lights will be on in NYC because of the solar panels around SLC, although it might take awhile.
I suspect they will team up on things like urban renewal of areas abandoned by hipster urbanites who don't breed so they disappeared eventually. However culturally unlikely it seems now, someday, San Francisco will be be 90+% Mormon, but the process of getting there will be some turmoil indeed given the current residents cultural demographics, and I suspect the west and east will cooperate across the river to encourage each other.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @04:07PM (2 children)
Perspective is an amazing thing. The Mormons may well culturally conquer the U.S.A. from their SLC stronghold, but it will be a very long process from here, and subject to so many challenges along the way that, from my perspective, it's unlikely to unfold as you predict.
The Chinese and Indians have already played the "show up for the future" cards, somehow in today's world I don't think that's all it's going to take.
Even if 500 years from now we all have ancestry traceable to the Indian sub-continent, and there's still curry restaurants in every major city of the world (there already are, for that matter), it's also a question of culture. Will the young men and women of the future be attending LDS services on a regular basis? From my perspective, I think that's unlikely. From my perspective, it's more likely that we will start seeing Holi celebrations of color, in SLC, first.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 21 2024, @04:24PM (1 child)
I think a key point of my argument is that those who don't, won't reproduce, and after a couple generations of that selection pressure...
I live in a megachurch dominated area, at least for people attending willingly. Some of the money I donate buys food and drink for the young adult singles group parties, and they have child care facilities better than most public or private schools. They know what side of their bread is buttered WRT the source of their future congregation members LOL they plan to grow their own and they're doing a pretty good job, but they're not organized as well as the national religions are organized so I think they can never compete in the long run. I suspect, in the long run, the megachurch that I'm loosely affiliated with is currently vaguely loosely associated with the Lutherans but as they disappear and are bred out, the megachurch will loosely associate themselves with the amish, given where I live.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @05:47PM
The megachurches around here seem to be thriving on the "wealth is Godly" message... DINKs abound in their pews.
Catholics have been shunning birth control and abortion since forever, and they're hanging on, but not exactly thriving in the USA. I live 1/2 mile from a big Catholic church, Choose Life license plates all over the streets, families with 4 and more children all around, and yet... in the long run their strategy seems to not be keeping up with the competition:
"The percentage of Americans who identify as Catholic has decreased from around 25% in 1960 to 22% in 2022. "
But, on the other side of that toast there is more than a little bit of butter:
"The number of Catholics in the United States has increased from 45 million to 72 million."
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 21 2024, @05:49PM
Keep in mind that they are feeder populations for those atomized urbanized generally atheist white folk. It replenishes the negative growth populations while providing an outlet for escape from the high population growth subpopulations.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Monday October 21 2024, @10:17PM (3 children)
Atheism has been gaining ground for decades, and will ultimately win out. The lies that are religions are self-defeating.
For instance, in the last 30 years or so, historians have been able to demonstrate that the foundations of Christianity are deliberately constructed fables.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 22 2024, @04:29PM
Does anyone at church care? Probably not.
The sermons I hear mostly seem to revolve around examples of how to be a better person, how to have a better more successful culture / civilization in general, how to make the world a better place, etc. Nobody at church seems to care if the scientific details of a very old book are correct in the decimal places; the topic never comes up and nobody joined because they're archeology fanboys. Mostly hear a lot about "meet great people" and "enjoy the volunteer work", they like the music, their friends are here, none of which has anything to do with archeology.
Another interesting comparison/contrast is its undeniable that history and legacy mass media are pure propaganda at this point, just complete outright fabrications most of the time, single party political rule, etc. Nobody cares, everyone gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, goes to work, ignores or passively nods at the lies, gets on with life. Sometimes the utter ineffectiveness of propaganda is surprising. You can't collapse civilization by "proving" that George Washington indeed never did chop down that cherry tree.
Another 3rd way to look at it, is you can't get people to stop investing money and time into fandoms like Star Wars, Trek, Hobbit/LOTR, or even capeshit by telling them its fictional. They like the stories, the stories resonate with their lives, some will invest huge amounts of effort and money into those stories they like. They just don't care if they're not true. On a personal note during some bad weather over the last few weeks a fun indoor activity was watching the entire Hobbit movie trilogy. Had a great time, hung out with family, ate junk food. Nobody cared that "The Hobbit" is fictional. "You can't enjoy this movie or spend money on fandom because I say its not true". Yeah, well, good luck with that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 23 2024, @12:19AM
>and will ultimately win out.
Yea team me! I am on the winning side!!!
I agree, as long as freedom of communication and reasonably accurate reporting of facts continue to increase the way they have for the past 50 years, Atheism is the logical end-game for society.
Now, as Florida and other states are succeeding in fragmenting public education into a lot of religious, charter and home schools, the students so raised learn intolerance for "others" stop speaking a common language of reason and logic... all it takes is a little clipping of the broadband connections and we're back to the 1700s in terms of social direction in the US...
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2024, @03:55PM
Doesn't seem so clear cut to me. How many children are the atheists having and how many children are the religious having?
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/chapter-3-demographic-profiles-of-religious-groups/pr_15-05-12_rls_chapter3-07-png/ [pewresearch.org]
The religious tend to have more hope and faith, and more children.
See also:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081227133251/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece [archive.org]
https://www.russellmoore.com/2019/12/16/atheists-dont-lie-to-your-children/ [russellmoore.com]
Of course, the flip side is more have children when they shouldn't. But prehistorically, from an evolutionary perspective just popping out kids and hoping for the best is a better strategy in the long term than not popping out kids because there isn't much hope. The former does lead to more suffering though, but the suffering is often more tolerable when you have religion... 😉
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 22 2024, @04:30PM
Oh wow, the mask is off.
My atheist white heritage is in fact the entirety of Western civilization. All the science, technology, rationality you benefit from were MY people, bro. Your white trash would still be burning old laddies alive and praying away hurricanes (updated to nuking them nowadays... with a hope and a prayer). How's that working out by the way?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 21 2024, @06:51PM
all food aid should come with a sterilization requirement. Negroids and beach-shitting Pajeets should only exist in numbers they can completely support themselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Monday October 21 2024, @03:48PM
In other words, Unixnut is right, but you have to use "lies, damn lies, and statistics" to downplay it.
The truth is that we are seeing population growth slow both in percent and absolute terms. It's time to think about why that happens rather than downplay it for ideological reasons.
You have no life experience to contribute here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DadaDoofy on Monday October 21 2024, @05:06PM (4 children)
"we have been adding 75 million to 80 million living humans to global population annually, consistently for a long long time."
Which is largely irrelevant if a mere 60 years from now world population is in decline. That also means that 75 to 80 million number will be decreasing each year from now until then.
"The 'settled science'"
Good grief. Science, by definition, is never "settled". Unless, of course, you are talking about political propaganda masquerading as science. In that case, it "settles" on whatever advances the political narrative and never varies, new contradictory evidence be damned. Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Galileo encountered the same "settled science" bullshit 400 years ago when he presented evidence the planets revolve around the sun instead of the earth.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-in-rome-for-inquisition [history.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @05:49PM (1 child)
If, in the future, you ever see me write "settled science" and I also forget to leave off the /s, " talking about political propaganda masquerading as science" is exactly what I'm doing.
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(Score: 1, Troll) by DadaDoofy on Monday October 21 2024, @09:41PM
My apologies. The /s tag does help.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @06:08PM (1 child)
Also: +80 million per year (average) over a span of 60 years = +4.8 billion, for a net close to 13 billion, or 60% more people in those 60 years, and to keep these birth rate trends "down" as low as we are, we have been increasing resource consumption per person steadily.
I was born in the 1960s, from that perspective 8 billion - 60%, or 3.2 billion total, seems like a much more rational number for total human population.
The Georgia Guidestones suggested a limit of 0.5 billion, and that got them blown up by Anonymous Cowards in the night.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 21 2024, @10:04PM
We don't have a reason to care what number the creator of that monument pulled out of their ass(es).
Credibility doesn't come from having crazy enemies.
The problem with inventing numbers about what the population of Earth should be, is that they ignore reality. There are over 8 billion people on Earth, and they aren't going away in the short term. My take remains that the best we can do for them is to create a global developed world civilization. That's probably the only way we will see 3.2 billion people again on Earth absent a die-off.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday October 21 2024, @03:45PM
OTOH, a lot of land can't be used for agriculture, but it can be used for pasture. So there is no direct path to human food directly for that land.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Monday October 21 2024, @10:33PM (1 child)
That low cost labor is required for the economy is an obvious fallacy. For instance in food production, doubling the wages of low-paid farm workers would raise the cost of raw foods about 15%, name brand processed foods much less. After a while, automation would reduce that number. Overall, monetary balances in the economy shift a bit, no big deal.
History shows that people who claim "We're indispensable" are wrong.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2024, @11:17PM
Realpolitik is: the business owners won't budge even 10% without shrill threats about the end of civilization as we know it, wild belly ache diatribe about how nobody will work anymore when they aren't even offering cost of living increases in their wages. Those apartments are keeping high supply of "affordable housing", which is itself a profit center for the "haves", and a way to keep home ownership further out of reach for the "have nots."
These building zoning regulations aren't developed by the working class, or for the best interest of the working class. They are worked out in joint discussions with government and "community leaders" who have the available time and resources to engage in the process.
Meanwhile, the local working class are holding down two jobs, 70+ hours per week, to afford rent, food and transportation to and from their jobs.
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(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 23 2024, @07:31AM (1 child)
Actually, crops are much more profitable, acre for acre, than even primo beef. That's why pretty much everywhere that can be reasonably farmed already is, and grazing is mostly marginal land that's either too poor of soil or too dry or too steep or some other no-go problem for modern tractors. That's also why we irrigate so much cropland that otherwise would only be good for grazing.(Like, close to 100% of California's crops.)
An awful lot of grazing land is several acres per cow-calf pair. That's about $500/year of gross income. If the same land could be put in, say, wheat, it would be about 5x more profitable.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 23 2024, @12:41PM
I have a skewed perspective on grazing land, here in Florida. Grazing land here is quite valuable for other purposes. It's interchangeable with citrus groves, suburban development, and many commercial crops.
The Lykes brothers' ranch around Fish eating creek was over 50,000 acres of highly valuable land that became embroiled in political wrangling for conservation and development. Many other old family ranches in Florida are similar, run as cow-calf operations by families more interested in preserving their rancher lifestyle/heritage than making profit, they already have more money than they need.
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