> Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process.[59] Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.[60]
Animals also eat. There was never an abundance of fertilizer before industrial processes.
I'm curious: what do you think they were eating?
Livestock was and is used to convert plants humans can't eat into milk and meat that we can. Even modern grass-finished beef is raised mostly eating grasses. Grains are really expensive compared to some grass growing in a field. I don't understand why people think it would be even close to economical for a rancher to raise an animal over 1000 pounds on grain alone. That beef would be more expensive than any wagyu.
I meant, "Even modern grain-finished beef is raised mostly eating grasses."
Using your example, it’d be like if we produced oxygen using process X and then saying “process X was necessary to save the species because we would have run out of natural oxygen.” And someone saying “Not necessarily because process X might not be the only way to produce oxygen.”
If your reply to my "prove it" is also "prove it" then it would seem we are at an impasse.
The statement is more-or-less obvious if you think about it from a capitalistic economic system. If there was a cheaper way to fix nitrogen, then someone would be using it to undercut Haber-Bosch produced nitrogen and capture the market. So we can conclude that, given scientific knowledge acquired by this point in time, Haber-Bosch is the cheapest way to produce nitrogen. Given that the amount of food that can be produced is a function of the price of the inputs, we couldn't produce as much food if nitrogen was more expensive. If we couldn't produce as much food, then we couldn't support the current population. So, on the balance of probabilities, the statement is self-evident.
this is the original statement referred to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34577458
Haber-Bosch is offered as an example of something needing megacorp scaling to that original statement, obviously from reading the foregoing I never said anything about a replacement for Haber-Bosch.
My admittedly vague statement just meant that hey you need to at least come with a theory as to why whatever allowed us to get to 8 billion could not happen without megacorp scaling. I don't think a linke to Haber-Bosch is an argument for that - the process was developed without megacorp financing as I understood it and then sold to a large corporation (not really megacorp either I think, by normal understanding)
quote: "The process was purchased by the German chemical company BASF, which assigned Carl Bosch the task of scaling up Haber's tabletop machine to industrial-level production"
I suppose the idea is that megacorp needed to run or develop scaling to industrial-level production.
I'm not that averse to the idea, just it seemed in the original form (linked above) quite a bold statement that should at least have some theoretical backing.
Without megacorp scaling, we'd need to spend more money on the same amount of food. Is that possible? Or would a different equilibrium point have been reached? Say, 7 billion instead of 8?
Unless parts of a capitalist economic system undermines competition in the interest of maximising profits for individual corporations or sectors. Thus there is a fork in this chain of reasoning -- it is not necessarily the case that no alternative method can be found (whether fixing nitrogen specifically or producing food generally), it could also be that such methods aren't developed because they threaten the short-term return on capital. One way to think of capitalism is as an engine optimised to generate and preserve short-term returns on capital.
'Cheapest' is defined in part by the required short-term return on capital. Nothing could be cheaper, from an operational perspective, than letting fields lie fallow. It only becomes expensive when fixed capital absolutely must have its short-term return before any other considerations are taken into account.
It's not.
It's like asking is there a different way for me to get to work. Either there is or isn't. It's not an infinite universe of probabilities.
What do you mean by that? Before the industrial revolution starvation was widespread in human populations.
What I mean is that you don't have to eat nice steaks and a full fish every day, sometimes twice a day.
It's not true, despite population increase number of people dying of starvation goes down https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/famine/ the reason of starvation in modern times is political, not production shortage.
How many farming fields and insects have been destroyed with chemicals and genetic modifications from that wonderfull revolution?
Humans have been destroying habitats for as long as we find ourselves in the fossil record.
Isn't the claim that decentralized free trade facilitated by delegation is more efficient? If not, I think we need a new theory of why the USSR failed as there seems to be a contradiction here.
Any system, bureaucracy, TTRPG ruleset, etc that prioritizes a single figure over the whole will inevitably erode the value the whole produces in favor of empowering the single figure. It's a matter of accountability. In a single figure system, the only accountability is to the single figure's personal whims.
I don't see how 1000 companies couldn't feed us but ten 100x-larger companies can. What you gain in economies of scale you lose on competitive edge.
Like in software: a 5 developer team is more efficient and has less overhead than Facebook, but a 5 dev team can't build a Facebook.
I'm confident that I could build a social network that scales with a 3 person team. In fact, I've done it before, but it relied on hosting and data providers and frontend frameworks and languages that I definitely could not have developed the entirety of as a 2-person team.
Do those factor into the count, or are we in the "if you do everything yourself, a cup of coffee actually costs $300,000?" At what point does labor specialization come into play? Because there's the guy who does everything "from scratch" and realizes exorbitant costs for small things, and on the other end of the spectrum is the guy who started a profitable coffee company with $1800 of seed capital, down to the practical reality of the median cup of drip coffee, brewed at home, costs approximately $0.30.
Similarly, sure a 5-dev team probably couldn't build and operate the full-scope of FB (unlike the clone someone could build in a weekend that doesn't take into account hundreds of small capabilities) - but maybe a 500-dev group could, rather than needing 5000-devs. Especially with a narrower focus on scope and outsourcing various problems (such as do they need to operate their own video hosting platform vs partnering).
There are advantages to scale, but also costs, and at a certain point scale tends to be horizontal rather than vertical. More products/features/adjacencies that now need to be coordinated, rather than a solid core and leverging the market for the rest.
Also I prefer my food coming from megacorps clean rooms. Food poisoning is no fun- as anyone who's ever been to India can tell you.
Those clean rooms exist because of government regulations - not because of the existence of megacorps.
There's another school of thought that believes in regulatory capture and says those regulations are there to make it harder for someone to compete in the market, and that safety is further down the list than making money is.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/africas-rapid-populat...
Are you suggesting that one's perspective cannot change in 20 years or that he should kill his kids?
Rules for thee, not for me. Money is privilege and they think this puts them above the standards they wish to impose on others.
Emissions rise because of demand, and for the past 20 years, that demand has been a result of rising economies (e.g. China), and to a lesser extent growth in the Western world (through immigration). Emissions will keep rising until that quells. Fortunately, it's projected to in 100 years or so, but ending that sooner is possible and warranted. We can achieve this with universal access to contraceptives, and by lifting countries out of poverty more rapidly.
I mean nobody creates the rules except us.
The "no rules" mindset is exactly what brought us in this position. We could be 30b actually, maybe more, there are no hard limits if you discard every variables...
The fantasy from the greens is that Westerners are "consuming more and more". Really, there are just more people consuming.
Because that is what it boils down to, either low class people from your society are chosen or some other people over there.
With the other people over there, good luck! because they sure as hell don't want to stop living.
As for your own lower class, good luck! because they already see that the people in charge are massive hypocrites(i.e. in order to stop climate change we need to reduce air travel! Oh but we all need to take private jets to the conference in Egypt...but our work there will more than make up for the carbon we use...)
People want to live in well built homes that are warm in winter and cool in summer. Do you know of a way to build that without concrete and steel? Assuming you don’t, where will you get your concrete and steel from? Your local steelsmith, forging one steel ingot at a time?
And fertiliser, concrete and steel - those can’t be made without fossil fuels. Where do you propose to get those? You’ll head down to the local coal mine whenever you need some?
Society cannot function without these materials. These materials are produced at scale, at high efficiency thanks to the megacorps mentioned previously. If there was an artificial limit on the size of corps, they would not be able to achieve the scale needed to make this economical. Food and housing would be scarce.
Lastly, calling someone a serf breaks HN guidelines. If you’re going to condescend to someone, at least don’t do it when your statement is so stunningly wrong.
You leave no room for small to medium sized businesses? Your position is that in order to have fertilizer, you have to have mega corporations?
> where will you get your concrete and steel from?
I get my concrete from a business down the street. They buy materials, mix it locally, and deliver it for me. No mega corporations needed.
Steel? In what context? Raw mineral? Refined ingots? Manufactured products? You're confusing an entire supply chain for a single entity.
> Where do you propose to get those?
The ground. Or, again, do you suppose that only three companies in the world can possibly do this? How do you account for the massive mergers and acquisitions in this space over the past few decades? Those were necessary to continue pumping liquid out of the ground?
> These materials are produced at scale, at high efficiency thanks to the megacorps mentioned previously.
Those materials will be produced at scale because there are enough mines to do it. You still haven't made a cogent case as to why megacorporations are more efficient or are required for this to happen.
> calling someone a serf breaks HN guidelines.
And you'll notice I didn't do that. I said it displays a certain type of mentality. Did you listen, or did you rush to be offended?
> at least don’t do it when your statement is so stunningly wrong.
Again.. it's a _very_ simple question: Can you make the case that mega corporations were necessary or that they actually are more efficient? You have completely failed to do that here.
Larger firms will benefit more from economies of scale than relatively smaller firms, meaning their products and services will be cheaper. For most of the major products I mentioned, scale matters. All of those are dominated by large corporations thanks to the economies of scale.
You seem to love the idea that a small firm can do anything. Great. Go out and do it, prove me wrong. Why don't you try to set up an artisanal semiconductor foundry? The day your company (or any small company) manages to compete with TSMC on price and process node, I'll eat my hat.
But if you can only talk the talk and not walk the walk, don't bother responding.
It is in such opposition to megacorp scaling and efficiency.