Early Retirement Extreme Forums

henrik wrote:

Chad wrote:Yes, that happens, but I wouldn't really classify it as mass migration. The number was barely above 20k last year. Europe could absorb that unnoticed every year forever.

I don't know what qualifies as mass migration, but the number of Mediterranean crossings alone was 60K last year and 100k+ into August this year. Your 20k is probably from 2012? This means successful arrivals only and it's not the only route from Africa to Europe. Not saying it changes your argument much, just shows how current events can change the numbers quite dramatically in a short time. http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21 ... -surge-sea

The information is right in the article I posted, it is not from 2012. I wasn't looking at total illegal immigration across the Med, but at the total from Africa. The rest are from the Middle East.

I'm not suggesting that it can't happen, just that geography makes it more difficult for Africans than most other people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_viru ... and_deaths
(The timeline is updated a couple of times per week. I follow this closely.)

There are currently 6405 reported cases. The DAILY growth rate is about 2.5% but Liberia's growth rate is closer to 3-3.5%. This means that Liberia will dominate the total rate pretty soon. A 3% growth rate implies that the case count doubles in about 3 weeks.

This also means that spending on treatments needs to grow faster than 3% per day. That's a lot to ask for. In particular, if waiting a couple of weeks means that costs just doubled!

The latest development is that there are now talks that Ebola could become endemic to West Africa. This would make containment costs permanent. If those costs are not paid, it will spread to other areas. This increases costs there too, etc.

This is an example how the cost of "pollution" rises with increasing population until it can no longer be afforded. At this point, pollution has a material impact on population numbers.

Limits to growth predicted this [not Ebola specifically, but that costs would get too high] would happen sometime in the 2015-2030 time period.

First case in the US: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/e ... 11499.html

This was predicted to happen before the end of September with a probability of 18%. So I guess it did. That's either unlucky or the model count is underestimating the actual base load for the probability.

Meanwhile: Total case count (9/25) is now 6805.. (quick estimate of 9/30 would be 7500--7800) and the cost projection has increased to $1 billion. These numbers will double every 20 days or so until the problem is contained or maxes out.

In other news, the State Department ordered 160000 hazmat suits two weeks ago. It might be that the bottleneck is not so much in writing checks as it is to increase capacity (materials and personnel) sufficiently fast. How long does it take to train a nurse again?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/lakela ... 9-12/print

Up to date BBC documentary on Ebola...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOAWiNP5xWE

That was fast.

The underestimation bothers me a little. What I find more disturbing is the assumption* that containing the case in Dallas will take care of the problem. It might end up being an isolated incident, but I doubt it. The US is the size of a continent. The situation in Dallas will probably be repeated numerous times around the country. They only have to mishandle one of them for the problem to escalate.

Do you think if it's here, it must be other places that we're not hearing about or haven't been detected yet? I was watching the coverage of the Occupy movement in HK this morning and thinking what a nightmare it would be if even one person in the crowd had the disease.

*I'm sure the CDC is not assuming that, but that's the spin they are giving the public right now.

jennypenny wrote: Do you think if it's here, it must be other places that we're not hearing about or haven't been detected yet? I was watching the coverage of the Occupy movement in HK this morning and thinking what a nightmare it would be if even one person in the crowd had the disease.

If so, we will probably know very shortly, as every US hospital will have a meeting to review symptoms and procedures. This will probably identify anyone that slipped through the system or is questionable.

There's no reason to believe that there aren't other cases that haven't been detected yet. After all, this one has been in the country for a while before developing symptoms. He was even admitted to the hospital, then released again, before being readmitted. Flights are still flying.

Preventing a runaway requires that each new patient infects less than 1 other person. This way the pipeline doesn't keep growing because each patient either dies or goes home and in both cases stop being a carrier. Hence, if the effort/surge happens quickly enough, isolated incidents can be contained. This is what happened in Nigeria. One person manages to infect 20 people but these were all tracked and the disease is stopped [for now].

However, as long as flights continue (and they have to in order to bring equipment in) and the epidemic is on, cases will pop up here and there. If ebola becomes endemic to West Africa, they will keep popping up risking epidemics elsewhere and in any case carrying the cost of being continuously prepared for such an outbreak.

From the newest 10/8/14 WHO report:

"It should be emphasized that the reported fall in the number of new cases in Liberia over the past three weeks is unlikely to be genuine. Rather, it reflects a deterioration in the ability of overwhelmed responders to record accurate epidemiological data."

That's what I suspected. In other words, the accountants are falling behind the curve. This means the daily case increase is HIGHER than 1.7%/day. It also means that the hospital capacity is now overwhelmed.

Mali joins the club.

Going back to potential deterrents to procreation:

How American Parenting is Killing the American Marriage

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29788754

I guess that leaves "affluence" and "technology" as the limiters.

"If China's much criticised one-child policy was implemented worldwide, the Earth's population in 2100 would still be between five and 10 billion, it says."

5 - 10 billion seems like a wide range for a projection.


So does that mean the focus should shift back to enforcing resource consumption limits?

I just finished Daniel Quinn's book, The Story of B, which basically concerns the BBC article. He said the same things about population control (published in 1996) and he proposes that we stop increasing food production. Maintain the food production levels= maintain population level. Population control through regulation treats the effect, not the cause.

theanimal wrote:I just finished Daniel Quinn's book, The Story of B, which basically concerns the BBC article. He said the same things about population control (published in 1996) and he proposes that we stop increasing food production. Maintain the food production levels= maintain population level. Population control through regulation treats the effect, not the cause.

The problem is that I'd be the first one to say I'm not giving up my food until other people give up their iThings and gold-plated schlock. I don't agree with limiting food production while wasting so many resources on junk.

theanimal wrote:I just finished Daniel Quinn's book, The Story of B, which basically concerns the BBC article. He said the same things about population control (published in 1996) and he proposes that we stop increasing food production. Maintain the food production levels= maintain population level. Population control through regulation treats the effect, not the cause.

I think it's more correct to say that population control treats the cause and food production treats the effect (if we agree that the effect is increasing population). It's also a lot more humane to not have many children than to let the poorest starve to death. Unfortunately a very large portion of the world is controlled by religious extremists so we'll probably end up with the starving solution, even if it won't be intentionally.

Scrubby wrote:I think it's more correct to say that population control treats the cause and food production treats the effect (if we agree that the effect is increasing population). It's also a lot more humane to not have many children than to let the poorest starve to death. Unfortunately a very large portion of the world is controlled by religious extremists so we'll probably end up with the starving solution, even if it won't be intentionally.

If you increase the amount of food available to any species, they will grow to match it. That is accepted as an ecological principle. So for example, let's say you have a lot of deer in one location. The deer overgraze the area and are now faced with a shortage in available food. Their population thus decreases. Daniel Quinn states in the book (quite humorously I might add. And his example was with mice) that the species doesn't go on strike, protest government or start riots, it just happens. Now with the deer population declining, their food source will in turn revitalize which leads to the deer population growing. The process repeats itself.

So what I'm saying is that you may try population control by contraceptive methods but it won't work because it'll still violate the ecological principle. When more food is made available, the population will increase.

In that manner, one can see how birth or population control is treating the effect and not the cause.

Regarding the starving children and others, I'll quote two paragraphs from the book here because he says it more succinctly than I could. (Note: the book was published in 1996.)

And of course I have to deal with the starving millions. Don't we have to continue to increase food production in order to feed the starving millions? There are two things to understand here. The first is that the excess that we produce each year does not go to feed the starving millions. It didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1995, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1994, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1993, it didn't go to feed the starving millions in 1992- and it won't go to feed the starving millions in 1996. Where did it go? It went to fuel our population explosion.

That's the first thing. The second thing is that everyone involved in the problem of world hunger knows that the problem is not a shortage of food. Producing more food does not solve the problem, because that's simply not the problem. Producing more food just produces more people.

If you were to look at the numbers. You would see that we already have enough to feed all the people in the world and we will have even more next year. If you maintain the current food levels, we will have around the same 7 billion people here next year, and the year after that and on and on and on. The number will slightly fluctuate up and down but it'll remain in the same area.

Now if the food available was to decrease, would we have even more starving children, famine or riots? No, the population would simply decrease as it does with all other species. The old die off and the population decreases to match the availability of food.

jennypenny wrote: The problem is that I'd be the first one to say I'm not giving up my food until other people give up their iThings and gold-plated schlock. I don't agree with limiting food production while wasting so many resources on junk.

You don't need to give up food. You won't notice the difference. See my post to Scubby above.