We’ve already lucked into a solution to the population boom, the numbers will level off around 10 billion. Given how intractable population control is, we’re very lucky we’ve found this without some dystopian shitshow.

In the developed world we are approaching the opposite problem, we’re currently dependant on immigration to maintain our societies, but as the rest of the world stops growing we’ll have more trouble getting that immigration and won’t have the local young population to care for our elderly.

Given that we should be trying to figure out how to encourage a sustainable population whilst we still have time to do so. If we can choose between 1.9->2.2 children per couple as needed then we’ll be in a healthy position to slowly reduce the population to a comfortable level.

Right now our natural population decline in the developed world is too fast, probably because our society has made being a parent quite an individual burden. Of course, totally moving the costs to a societal model would be a disaster, but presumably there’s a middle ground where people are comfortable keeping the society going at a healthy rate.

That’s exactly the answer given to you above - the line is murky and grey, there is no clear point that everyone agrees is the right point.

In such a circumstance, the right answer is open to interpretation, and the right solution for a society is to accept that the best person to make that decision is the person involved.

If you want my answer, it’s when brain cells develop enough to start looking like a functioning brain (somewhere around 16-20 weeks). Before that it’s just a brain dead mass of cells regardless of how it looks.

Clearly you have a different moment, and that’s fine, but you don’t get to ignore that the issue is open to interpretation. Otoh, I admit that both sides are guilty of trying to railroad a “simple” interpretation as the only right answer, it’s always tempting to force a simple answer and declare the problem solved, it’s harder to let people decide for themselves what the right answer is, but that’s the right thing to do when we as a society cannot reach a consensus, and we certainly don’t seem to have a consensus on this one.

I think your take is a bit extreme.

Currently their statement (regardless of the questionable justification) is largely correct, no major c++ projects have been written in a safe subset and no real work has really started yet. It isn’t practical.

I do agree with you that a safe form of c++, once fully implemented and not frustrating to use, could easily become viable, the feature can be added. But that’s still years away from practical usage in large project, and even when done, many projects will stick to the older forms, making the transition slow and frustrating.

The practical result is that he’s sort of right, if you just add the word “currently” to his statement.

Otoh, I do agree with you that rust cannot be the sole answer to this problem either, it’s almost as impractical to rewrite codebases in rust as an as-yet unfinished safe form of C++. Only time and lots of effort can fix this problem

Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.

Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.

As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.

Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.

I hope she doesn’t strain something pushing those anti woke talking points so hard.