stargeek
running to stand stillrunning to stand stillrunning to stand still 02/05/2005 09:48 PM Sketch's vet told me that his lungs are clear, he's bright and active, and he's looking strong . . . but his kidney levels are still elevated from the lasix, and he isn't eating. It really worries me that he's not eating, but I hope it's just
because he's tired of being in the hospital, and he wants to come home
and sleep on They told me that I should come down and visit him, because maybe he'll eat for me. Sketch has always been a stubborn cat, but he's extremely affectionate, and I'm hoping that when I get down there and give him some love, and tell him how excited we all are for him to come home, he'll perk up and chow down. I'm scared. I don't like it that he's not eating. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)running to stand stillGrok Headline matches for running to stand still"The standard rap against us
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 When I was researching the article One Billion Americans?, I got thinking about the implications of the wildly conservative Census Bureau projections of US population, and the embarrassing drastic upward revisions that have been made to them, for global population projections. What made the US projections so wrong (US population peaking at 295 million was predicted as recently as fifteen years ago) was the compound error of underestimating the extent of immigration and overestimating the rate at which immigrants adjust their family size to the average of their new country, or the global average. It's an understandable error -- there's lots of evidence that population growth rates in the developing world are falling quickly. But that's not because third world countries are evolving to two-child-or-less families as infant mortality drops. Rather, it's because those countries are simply unable to sustain more children, so parents are reluctantly, temporarily reducing family size as a result. Give them the option to emigrate to a developed country, and cultural preference, religious dictates, and improved health care will jump their family size (and life expectancy) back up again. And as inevitable ecological and humanitarian catastrophes arise in the 21st century in dozens of third world countries, compounded by the scourges of new diseases, horrendous shortages of clean water, and desertification and crop flooding due to global warming, the pressure to increase immigration quotas by orders of magnitude will be fierce. Back in 1990 when the pundits were predicting US population would peak at 295 million (it passed that level last year and is now expected to peak at between 550 million and 1.2 billion, if it peaks at all), they were saying global population would peak at around 9-11 billion in 2100. But for that to happen with a US population of, say, 900 million instead of 300 million, would mean average third world family size would be much smaller than average US family size. The UN projections, for example, assume annual average growth rate for Africa, Asia and Latin America of 0.5% in the latter half of this century, compared to a current growth rate in those areas (even including China with its already-low birth rate) of 2.1%, and compared to a current US growth rate of 0.9%, which is trending back up to a projected 1.3% rate for most of the current century, thanks to immigration. So the 9-11 billion global peak population just doesn't add up. While it doesn't make sense to get Malthusian and project population will grow indefinitely at current rates (1.3%, i.e. a doubling every 50 years to 24 billion by 2100), it's equally illogical and irresponsible to suggest that the whole world will start immediately radically reducing its fertility rate to achieve in just two generations the low fertility rate that Europe took one hundred generations to reach. If you assume that the levels of immigration now projected by the US Census Bureau will prevail throughout the developed world, that first- and second-generation citizens of developed countries will continue to have considerably larger-than-replacement level families in their new adopted countries, that the prevailing pro-fertility population dogmas of organized world religions will not suddenly be changed, that population pressure in the third world will be eased somewhat by immigration and that modest drops in family size in those countries will be largely offset by longer life expectancy, as has been observably the case in almost every third world country except China, then instead of the 9-11 billion peak the UN is currently talking about, you end up with population soaring past 14 billion in 2100, with no end in sight (left chart above). The curved red line shows the carrying capacity of Earth, assuming a modest annual increase in productivity from the current 30 billion acres (productive-capacity adjusted), assuming average footprint per capita continues to increase by a modest 1% per year, and assuming no land on the planet is reserved for wilderness or natural space for the rest of Earth's creatures. It shows in 2000 that the world could sustain 5 billion humans at the then-prevailing level of consumption. That's a billion humans less than actually inhabited the planet then, possible only by depriving much of the world of a subsistence level of resources, and by taking more from the Earth (in non-renewable resources) than we replaced, essentially stealing the excess from future generations. At the expected global level of per-capita consumption in 2100 (still well below today's North American consumption levels), carrying capacity drops to 2 billion humans. That number is substantiated by a recent C ornell study that says the choice in 2100 is between 2 billion people living a comfortable but not lavish life (achieved by a drastic population reduction) or 12 billion "struggling in misery". And if you want to allow 50% of the planet's surface for other life forms, you need to achieve double that reduction (green line), to one billion people, the level both Jim Merkel and Bill McKibben think we should strive for. That's only achievable, short of coercion, by an average one child family worldwide for the next century. The right chart shows that the increasing average footprint, driven both by North American excess and the surging resource use of China's billion plus people, will drive the aggregate human footprint up even more sharply than aggregate population, from 37 billion acres today (20% more than Earth's carrying capacity) to 210 billion acres in 2100 (six times Earth's carrying capacity). Now remember, these assumptions are much closer to the wildly optimistic assumptions of population levelling that the UN and other global agencies optimistically hope for, than to the Malthusian no-change projections that would see nearly double these numbers. Nevertheless, train wreck ahead. We simply have no choice. We must immediately and aggressively reduce our family sizes worldwide, and we must immediately and aggressively reduce per-capita resource consumption, waste and footprint. That means we must confront religions that don't actively encourage birth control and small families, and show those religions to be socially irresponsible. That means, too, we need to introduce ecological taxation measures to make excessive resource consumption and waste prohibitively expensive, and reward those who tread lightly on the Earth. |
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Like some other well-known bloggers before her, Chris Nolan is working on turning her blog into more of a revenue-generati ng business. I like Chris's stuff, even as I sometimes disagree with it, because it's sharp and unpredictable and rooted in her years of experience as a reporter, and so I wish her well in her efforts to sell ads and subscriptions.
Lord knows it's not an easy road. Reading Chris's manifesto for "Stand-Alone Journalism" -- she argues that's a better label for what she does than "blogging" -- brought me back to some distant memories from the dawn of the Web. After learning HTML and participating in the San Franciso Free Press experiment, I thought to myself, hey, there's nothing to stop me from starting my own publication on the Web!
So I did. In January 1995 I took a week's
vacation time from my job at the SF Examiner and published a site. I
focused on what was then quaintly known as "multimedia"; I called it
Kludge, as a nod to its essential clumsiness and improvised nature,
and I posted an issue. This was years before personal content
management software, needless to say; it's all just cruddy hand-coded
HTML and crude self-designed graphics. But the articles weren't so bad
(hey, here's an interview with Marc
Canter! Here's a satirical take on
the CD-ROM explosion/implosion!).
What I quickly realized was that, as much fun as writing, editing and designing all that material was -- bringing me back as it did to my teenage roots in mimeograph publishing -- it was just the beginning of getting a Web site going. If I was serious about making it something more than a labor of love -- if I wasn't going to do all that work on my vacation days -- I'd need to figure out how to get people to visit the site, and how to sell ads, and so forth. My best efforts involved dumping a pile of flyers in the lobby of a multimedia conference at Moscone Center. (While I was doing that, a couple of guys named Jerry Yang and Dave Filo stood at a booth under a big Yahoo banner, giving away T-shirts.)
After briefly toying with the notion of applying to AOL's Greenhouse program for funding, I thought, nah. When David Talbot started talking about a new publication he wanted to create, I helped persuade him that he should do it on the Web instead of in print. Salon turned out to be a great place for me to write and edit and build Web sites without having to wear all the hats myself (though there have certainly been times during the last decade when my pate has felt a little crowded).
Today, would-be "Stand-Alone Journalists" can rely on much better software tools to create and publish their work. They can plug into far better organized online networks to spread the word of their activities. And they can even turn to simple plug-in approaches to advertising, like AdWords or BlogAds, to try to bring in some cash. But being a "Stand-Alone Journalist" still requires a combination of journalistic and entrepreneurial traits that's rare. Being a good journalist requires the ability to not mind pissing people off sometimes (Nolan, whose career has had its share of controversy, is no shirker in this regard); being a good entrepreneur demands the ability to charm people as often as possible. Both pursuits, of course, demand persistence, patience, and, in the face of indifference, a stubborn belief in the value of one's undertaking.
When I read Nolan's proposed label for the solo-blogger-journalist, the first thing that popped into my mind was the famous quote from Ibsen's Dr. Stockman in "Enemy of the People": "The strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone." Standing alone has many wonderful advantages -- it's a stirring posture. But remember what happens to old Dr. Stockman: He is right to blow the whistle about the polluting of his town's waters, but he's dreadfully naive about the world around him, he's ultimately ineffective, and he fails to accomplish much besides his own martyrdom.
So I'm not sure the "Stand-Alone Journalist" label is one that will
stick. The linked nature of the Web is ultimately even more important
than the independence of the blogger. Standing alone is useless
without being connected.
[Scott
Rosenberg]
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