XKCD: It's more than a comic

Insects would outweigh all of that...

I wonder where bison go in there? There are ranchers that have bison, but then there are the herds in places like National Parks, but those are still managed by the Park.

I wonder if cattle encompasses all bovines ED It: huh, the four horned and spiral horned antelopes are bovine

edited 5th Mar '14 10:14:39 AM by Xopher001

Yeah, it's worth noting that that's only land mammals. I think the picture would look pretty different if we included birds and reptiles, to say nothing of marine life and insects.

Not to mention every other kind of organism

It certainly demonstrates that dogs are attempting to take over the world...

Wow. It makes you realize how little land mass there is that we haven't converted to our own use yet, and how much there is that we have. There's so few wild animals.

Which is why I didn't like it.

There's about 6 billion more of us than therewas fir most of history, it should be really. Not advocating mass killing, but if everyone just had 1 kid for a few generations that'd really help the whole sustainability thing.

edited 5th Mar '14 6:52:41 PM by joesolo

The problem is that however much you know that one kid per couple is a good idea, getting other people to do it without crossing any ethical lines... well, our track record's not very good so far.

Especially when religions get in the way.

The more affluent a nation gets, the fewer babies it has. Right now most of our population growth is coming from poor countries, which is why the rich ones are mainly growing via immigration. Probably our best bet to keep population down is, ironically, to make all the poor countries rich.

Wouldn't it hurt their economies if we threw money at them? Man I'm confused about this

There would be concerns over saturating them with dollars and displacing their own currencies, but that's a fairly complex economic question. In general, you want to set a goal of raising the prosperity of the poorer nations so they can compete fairly on the world economic stage. But when each of those nations has its own economy, currency, and so forth, intervention gets tricky.

edited 6th Mar '14 8:17:38 AM by Fighteer

The reasons for the disparate growth rates between different economic classes probably has to do with the availability of jobs, and what kinds of jobs they're willing to work. If jobs are mostly hard labor with less training requirements, then people will want to have lots of kids to help out around the house. Every set of hands is equivalent to more income and productivity. By contrast, those who expect their children to have higher education and accompanying higher prestige jobs need to invest a lot of money in their children, which won't necessarily pay off within their lifetime. Children are an economic burden, rather than a boon.

I realize that looking at everything through an economic lens is a common fallacy because people rarely behave rationally, but I don't think it's a bad starting place. The fact that rich people have children at all shows the existence of other values, because it makes no economic sense.

Wealthy people have children so they can pass on their wealth: keep it in the family, so to speak. There is a strong biological urge to see your genetic line (and, almost as important, your values system) get and stay ahead.

edited 6th Mar '14 10:12:27 AM by Fighteer

I see at least two problems with this strip. One, no matter who assumed both parties are asses and the expression has an implied or dropped 'do' at the start, meaning it's not an assertion. At least not how I've always heard it stressed anyway.

Clearly this means xkcd is now terrible.

By "this strip", I assume you mean this one?

I've taken to responding to it with some variant on "You make an educated guess based on the limited information available to you?" But then, when you're an adult the only people who ever say that to you in the first place are joking around.

Sorry - I wasn't saying we should just throw money at poor countries, but to help them build up their standard of living until they counted as "rich". Obviously that's a long process, but in developing countries like India, I believe the growth rate is slowing as affluence increases.

Fundamentally, what needs to be addressed is inequality, whether it's within a nation, within a particular part of a nation, or on a global scale.

New comic. The overt joke aside, I do find it interesting to imagine that one day we'll need five digit years, and all our computer systems will have to be rebuilt to accommodate them. That is, if we haven't passed The Singularity by then.

If the IT folks of the future will have anything from the Y2K kerfluffle, they'll have adapted the system long before it was needed.

Any sane system these days tracks time by seconds-past-the-epoch (TAI for the really sane ones, most prefer UTC) rather than fixed-width textual character fields, so five-digit years is mainly an issue for legacy parsers & popular log-filename formatting.

The more pressing rollover date is 2038, when we'll have reached ~2 billion seconds since 1970 and a signed 32-bit number will overflow, wrapping around to 1901. 64-bit systems that use 64 bits for time values will not be affected.

Yeah, that epoch issue is a big deal, since it requires conversion of date values from 32 bits to 64 bits, or at a minimum from signed to unsigned integers (if you're willing to discard any data from before 1970), and that's a very significant architectural problem.

Of course, any information system that uses future dates (or sub-second resolutions for that matter) will have had to deal with it long before 2038.

edited 10th Mar '14 9:20:39 AM by Fighteer

I liked it. :)