Kriek's blog

Yes, the world can't sustain the current level of growth of population forever if everything else continued to be done in the same way. The reality is, everything else doesn't continue to be done in the same way. If we kept on using wood like we did 100 years ago, we would have run out long ago. It's not because we suddenly came to this realisation, it's because we ended up in a position that other materials are better and cheaper to use and used more of that instead. You know, economics.  Population growth through birth is also subject to the same economics, these things adjust themselves, it's beautiful. Starvation is not an issue of a lack of resources today, it's because of the lack of efficiency and distribution and horrible economic atrocities committed by the governments of some third world countries.  We produce more food than we consume, and waste some, yet people go hungry in other places. Just because the problem in these areas woul...

I grew up in South Africa as a white boy and saw the whole end of apartheid thing. Because of the previous regime a town would generally consist of white suburban neighbourhoods not unlike you'd expect in the US with a commercial centre with malls and whatever, and then just outside of town would be a black 'township' that had dirt roads and most people lived in metal and wooden shacks and basic brick houses and would take the bus or minibus taxi into the main white town if they had work. The town I lived in had a public swimming pool, and as facilities were being opened to all races this was opened too. The white population of the main town was about 8,000 people and the township had about 25,000 people in it. The black kids from the townships were obviously very keen to try out this swimming thing, especially since they had no pool up in the townships. The pool became very busy with lots of black people. None of them had any swimming experience but the...

I'm noticing some interesting parallels between two very controversial topics normally supported by very different camps. The one is invading, or liberating Iraq, the other is action over climate change. The case for invading Iraq was put forward by politicians. They portrayed it as if they were acting based on information from the experts in intelligence and military employed by various government funded institutions. The threat was Saddam Hussein and the notion that he had weapons of mass destruction. This threat had been established by the experts based on evidence. The evidence wasn't open to the public eyes for various reasons. One reason was the fact that it's sensitive information that could compromise the security and intelligence sources of many nations. Another reason is that it's not necessary to release it, since various experts in the field of intelligence, military and politics have had a look at it and they are the experts who are better qualifi...

I'm getting a bit concerned over this whole net neutrality issue. People campaign for net neutrality legislation as if it's needed in order to save the internet. What worries me is that people don't know what they're asking for. The public is being put under the impression that without net neutrality legislation, broadband users will be restricted by their access providers on what content they can access and practically hold them at ransom to force them to pay extra for popular services (e.g. Google, Wikipedia, YouTube etc.), and when that happens it will destroy the internet as we know it. If that was really the case, we would certainly have something worth campaigning for. The internet is wonderful and standing up against the big evil corporations who are intent on destroying it for profit seems like a noble effort. Unfortunately campaigning to regulate net neutrality isn't, and it shows a lack of understanding of so much of the history and the nature of the ...

I'm starting to form a set of rules of how to pretend you're a useful government, while effectively not doing much, but also not harming anything that much either. The first and most important stunt is to look at an industry where competition is unrestricted, then make an accurate prediction as to what the outcome on a component of it would eventually be as a result of competition, and make sure it's a popular matter. Or even better, look at all popular matters and determine which ones would be satisfied by the market eventually. Then introduce laws to tell the market to do what it would have done anyway. Where this works better is where such things are delayed because it deals with issues between different competitors, where the best outcome would be if they all collaborate to a certain degree, since competitors normally take an awfully long time to come to agreement. Examples of these are: data and voice peer/routing, mobile roaming and inter-bank transfers. Thes...

We often see graphs from various places predicting how the world is going to warm up over the next 100 years. Weather prediction is a complex matter since weather is a complex system and a lot of work has been done to make these predictions. A big part of this work includes the use of super computers that simulate entire climate systems and everything affecting it, including the sea, clouds, air and sun. Source: globalwarmingart.com Scientists have a fairly good understanding of the physical mechanisms that contribute to the weather, and fairly accurate models to predict how a particular component of this system will react to specific influences. What makes it extremely complex is how all these work together, down to each molecule around the surface of the earth. Chaos Theory describes that small differences in an initial dynamic system can contribute to serious unpredictability later on. This theory came about during work on weather modeling because this is where the effects of it ...