But the argument still stands if you want to raise the minimum in the US to 1,000$/month to account for hidden value and require shelter. 8 people sharing a 2BR apartment is very much a thing.

Relative wealth disparity increases as absolute wealth increases because below a minimum level of income people starve. IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.

Strip mining goes back thousands of years, it’s a simpler technology than making tunnels. And no it wasn’t limited to human power to crack rock several more powerful methods existed.

Roman mining literally destroyed a mountain, operating within an order of magnitude of the largest mines today. That’s what makes what you say false. It’s not some minor quibble over details you are simply speaking from ignorance.

The industrial revolution was from ~1760–1840, it was a major shift it doesn’t cover everything that happens between 1760 and now more did it overwhelm many existing trends.

Obviously we’re becoming better at extracting resources over time, but humans ran out of new land to exploit long before Europe's conquest of the Americas. Land only seemed empty because disease decimated native populations, people lived in San Francisco thousands of years ago.

> I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description

Very little of the world’s woodland was untouched at the time of the Industrial Revolution and forests in the Americas survived as long as they did largely due to disease drastically reducing native populations. But American forests were on the clock independent from industrial development. I’m not sure exactly your counter argument even is here.

We still can’t reasonably extract most resources from the ocean bottom. That’s ~70% of the world’s mineral wealth just off the table.

So sure we are very slightly better at extracting resources but on the absolute scale it really isn’t that significant pre vs post Industrial Revolution compared to the sum total of human history.

Both animals and water power go way back. The early steam engine was measured in horsepower because that’s what it was replacing in mines. It couldn’t compete with nearby water power which was already being moved relatively long distances through mechanical means at the time.

Hand waving this as unimportant really misunderstands just how limited the Industrial Revolution was.

This is just wildly incorrect. People started running out of trees during the early Iron Age. Woodlands have been a managed and often over exploited resource for a long time. Active agriculture vs passive woodlands vs animal grazing has been in constant tension for thousands of years across most of the globe.

We already use nuclear, if you mean fission as a primary energy source…

Batteries don’t consume lithium, battery recycling doesn’t consume lithium, we a literally use the same lithium for hundreds of billions of years. So the only way humans are going to be forced to use nuclear is when the stars die.

I don’t think humans will last that long, but if they do I’m unsure what technology they’ll be using. Theoretically dumping matter into black holes beats nuclear, but who knows.

The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.

Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.

Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.

You can only correct for missing entries by doing the same work you’d need to start from scratch. But after that you now have a second list to consider.

Of course it’s not the kind of question you can get an objectively correct answer for, but you could come up with the correct answer for a given methodology.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587662

So in practice clerical errors cause all kinds of long term havoc. Once declared dead it can be a monstrous effort to prove to various systems you are in fact alive.

Which could then become rather complicated if there are laws saying the sex assigned at birth has significant lifelong legal consequences.

“Because some animals hibernate, all animals hibernate” is just as flawed as saying “Because only a small percentage of hibernate, no animals hibernate.” Instead the relationship is “Because some animals exist that hibernate, there exist animals that hibernate.”

Go from the other direction suppose you had millions of cases. By your logic 1 cases is not evidence. Two cases is therefore 0 + 0 = 0 no evidence. Thus by induction 1 million cases is still not evidence. Instead 1 case is weak evidence because each individual cases adds up.

For more rigorous analysis see bayesian statistics.

Further the article isn’t referring to a single solidity case but instead multiple independent events.

Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.