Pascal strings - historically and why people even remember this being an issue - were up to 255 chars in size, if not you had to use different string type.

You might still want raw pointers for all sorts of low level stuff, but you almost never want to have null-terminated strings for anything but back-compat, one of the worst things ever, even on memory constrained systems.

Fundamentally incapable of distilling the substance of the argument, and always latching onto any opportunity to misunderstand and nitpick some irrelevant semantics instead.

Textbook.

Yes, for a lot of people it is like this.

When I was young, I couldn't understand why people went on 1-2 week short, extremely expensive vacations where they blow multiple months worth of their savings (ie. multiple months of their income after expensives) in what is extremely short amount of time. It seemed mind-bogglingly stupid.

Now I understand. Being part of the system and doing 9-to-5 wageslavery is inescapable fact of their life.

So when they get 2 weeks off - 2 weeks to actually go and live freely, they just go all out on having a good time. Because no matter what - they are going back to 9-to-5 system.

And however wastefully they "consume" whatever is left after basic expenses, doesn't really matter in grand scheme of things and won't free them from slavery.

It's a distraction. "Whatever hours of free time I get after work, I'm gonna indulge consoom however I want"

Now software engineers are a bit different, where it's possible to retire after 10 years of work if you plan and live frugally, this is simply not an option for vast majority of people.

> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more

If he wanted to say masses work, because they have to pay rent and meet basic necessities (ie. under threat of homelessness and starvation), he would have clearly said so.

The way this is worded very clearly refers to conspicuous consumption and consumerism - ie working as means to buying ever more funkopops and ever pokemon cards, ever larger houses to put ever more stuff in them, garage with ever more cars, a vacation house, a pool, a yacht and then a bigger one. And this being the primary motivator (rather than base survival)

Thus no matter what your productive output is per hour of labour, you will always work as much as you can, because you are - presumably - insatiably driven to always consume ever more with no end to it.

And frankly, he certainly is right, but only to an extent, as there definitely are people that operate like this, however them being majority? I don't think so.

Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to.

It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off.

People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff.

Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you.

Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.

(maybe even Pentium 100)

Yes, really, it ran on potato feature phones you've never even heard of. That can only happen if you really bend backwards to make it happen.

Massive userbase with very tiny team.

There's a point where caping even natively growing population is actually the right move.

There's plenty of overpopulated shitholes (Mumbai, Dhaka, Cairo, Bangladesh, etc) where it would have been an absolute blessing if government was controlling reproduction or put a population cap in place.

If you think capping population is wrong, go visit Dhaka, I highly recommend it.

If you're still on the fence after visiting Dhaka, you're beyond saving.

And the absolutely horrid framerate is the thing that I remember most about the game. It absolutely ruined the experience for me and made me stop 'trying' to play it.

And no, it isn't me a primarily a PC gamer complaining about 30fps. It was like 15-20fps. It's was absolute ass, bordering on unplayable.

It's like you weren't grappling with a colossus, instead you're constantly fighting the laggy 15fps framerate.

And I don't mean it just by the standards of today, I mean by standards of the day.

God of War games hit 50-60fps pretty well on PS2 and had all the epic bosses and set pieces

On the internet you can learn from and sometimes interact with the best of the best, so the barrier of entry for what constitutes an "expert" is rised much higher.

It's simply the case that the supply of "experts" wanting to share "expertise" vastly eclipses the demand by several orders of magnitude.

I think there's a business somewhere, where you get paid to listen to "experts" and they get to feel better about themselves. It's a win-win.

So if people don't perceive you as an "expert" and dont go to you for answers, you simply do not register as one or they have a rather high bar which requires observable undeniable artifacts (and I don't mean credentials, I mean software) and competition is rather fierce - there's simply overproduction of people who think they are "experts" and thus you have to give unmistakable symptoms of being one to register.

I doubt most people wouldn't even think that this is a thing they can wish for or that this is even within realm of possibility.

It has to be explicitly named as an option - as, I'm afraid, people have forgotten that you can have "nice things".

Also I feel rather uncomfortable every time somebody purports to be representitive of or know that "most people" want.

It constitutes something to the tune of 9% of Earths land mass.

And it's already inhabited by millions if not billions of people? Really? Is Sahara-Desert habitable also?

Not the tiny parcels next to an Oasis, not people that live next to Nile.

But actual-effin-desert habitable? And billions live there - right chock in the middle of desert?

Interesting, very interesting indeed!

> And I still have no idea why you think oil running out has any role in your argument at all.

Oddly enough, your argument that earth isn't overpopulated, because there's still "a lot of room left in the desert, look at Saudis, UAE, Quatar!" hinges on Oil!

Your proof that deserts are habitable is basically - taking Saudis, UAE, Qatar - as an example.

Which is true, if you have infinite-money-hack, you abso-effin-lutely can man make it rain in the middle of desert (or middle of the ocean on a megayacht), ACs, green-patios, lambos, pools, artificial islands, giga-turbo-mega-towers and the most opulent displays of wealth!

Except it's not infinite money hack at all. It's very much 47years of partying left type of finite.

> And now you're adding child-like strawmen on top, which is once again - arguing in bad faith.

Dude, your whole opening statement was how few people on earth there are or how large the earth is by comparing it to a mass grave.

Your whole argumentation is childish-wishfull thinking or an indoctrinated adult who just isn't very bright, saying you're arguing in bad faith would be putting it very kindly.

That being said, this conversation is obviously over.

134m is a distance you can walk in a minute and a half. And you're already in somebody elses land. The only way you can present this as some sort of large plot of land is if you take some already overpopulated suburban area as a reference point where houses are lined up like boxes right next to another. And that's your only point of reference and you can't even fathom anything else.

Subtracting the uninhabitable land from it, you basically get less than a mere hectare.

Accusing others of acting in bad faith is game everyone can play.

And it's very easy to do so since you're arguing how easily deserts, oceans or permafrost are habitable "if you really want to" (its just basic technology!) - when in truth it's achieved by pissing away one-time generational oil money to make it rain in the middle of the desert - no less.

Party which will most likely wrap up with mass starvation (globally) when the pumps run dry (47 more years of this! give or take!)

No sane person arguing in good faith would make arguments like this:

"Well, planet isn't overpopulated, there's still a lot of room in the desert! oh, you can inhabit the oceans and permafrsot too! You could live on top of the Himalayas (you don't, but you could!) Oh, the sky is the limit! Oh, yes!"

You aren't actually interested in truth, you're simply really, really want to and are programmed to multiply, and are working backwards (rationalizing) how actually planet isn't at all overpopulated or resource constrained, etc. That's what's actually happening. It's textbook.

I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.

I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m. Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".

Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly. And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.

This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually. And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.

> And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.

And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert? Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...

Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.

Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.

Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert. At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.

Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours. And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.

Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.

Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.

It emphasizes neither!

What you've described is a mass grave.

Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed!

Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with.

This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them into a tightly packed cube)

For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person) it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times.

Now this actually says something about size of the earth!

If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly uninhabitable lands!)

Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still!

If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is very much stretching of what is sustainable.

Does that make those 47 years irrelevant - just because they will end?

There's no contradiction there. It just makes these last-remaining fossil fuels even more valuable.

Moreover oil use hasn't ramped down, nor is it getting replaced in any substantial way. I suspect people have no slightest clue just how reliant the modern world is on fossil fuels outside of it's use in cars.

Whether what's going to happen will be whatever it is you're imagining is completely different story entirely.

Needless to say, If you have a largely deindustrialized country you can't really make any sort of transition happen yourself anyway, not at the grand scale and speed necessary for this endeavour.

Expect fireworks.

Top reserves by country, historical data on consumption (including by country).

These basic data points explain US foreign policy better than anything.

There is no data or trends that supports the notion that oil is becoming irrelevant, much less quickly.

US with it's current reserves and oil consumption rate would last roughly 12 years, btw.

The only failing here is that America has decaying, hallowed out industrial base where it can't just cheaply mass produce and replenish hi-end rockets and tech to take care of business-as-usual quickly, because everything down to raw materials is just so expensive.