Correct, water scarcity is in fact the PRIMARY bottleneck.
The main "innovation" in this solution isn't "we must plant massive forests," it's that clean (solar-powered) desalination is now possible at very large scales, so we are able to provide the volumes of freshwater necessary for large-scale reforestation and conversion of deserts.
Forestry people have known for decades that trees were the best solution to CO2 in the atmosphere, but there wasn't enough forestable land. And while we can reclaim deserts, we couldn't do it at scale unless we irrigate. And we couldn't do it unless we could affordably create a new source of freshwater that wasn't already needed for humans and agriculture.
Should also mention that water requirements are generally much higher than needed to sustain an existing equivalent forest, as most desert soils have a high salt content near the surface, due to evapotranspiration drawing salts up and concentrating them, and lack of precipitation to ever flush/dilute them.
Not sure if any of these proposals plan to attempt to actively reduce soil (or aquifer) salt content, but for basins without sufficient excess water for an outflow, salt build up is a big problem. Managing the salinity requires more fresh water than what is needed to sustain the plane life.
I agree and would say the same thing, but slightly less dismissively. :)
The key here is that we're out of time. This coming decade is probably the last one we will have where the problem can be solved at a cost less than 10% of world GDP. If we wait another 10 years, I suspect all solutions will require a significant fraction of global GDP and authoritarian-style interventions.
As a technologist, I'd love a magical new technology. But I'm also an engineer, and I want to execute the most efficient and low-risk solution in the smallest possible timeframe. After taking all factors into account, that's massive reforestation.
If new technologies are developed in the meantime, that's GOOD. Every bit of help that's put into play helps us. It's not a competition, it's a collective race against time, and we can all contribute.
This comment is correct. My intention is not to prioritize tools over thinking about anything else. If you read the essay linked from it, I said "your most talented engineers should be working on your tools." So when I say "highest priority," I mean development priority, i.e. you shouldn't have your best people working on features and your second-tier people doing tool work, like many organizations do.
You might like to short-circuit a lot of this learning.
There was a fighter pilot who studied this for 40 years named John Boyd. He architected the f15, 16, 18, A-10 and the first iraq invasion. His academic work short circuits what all the dotcoms (including facebook) are slowly learning through trial and error.
If you want a starting place Robert corams book on boyd is excellent, while Frans Osinga's thesis Science, strategy and war is essential reading for the hard subject matter.
Sorry I responded too quickly.
People,
Ideas,
Hardware (technology)
In that order are what you should focus. Near 100% of managements time should be spent on people and ideas. Get that right and the people will take care of the technology.
One tool to implement that is a mission order (No civilian counterpart), which is where you define an intent to be achieved and operating parameters to be met but not how that intent is to be carried out. parameters are mutually agreed on - and the subordinate has the right to refuse. Usually you leave most of the definition of the intent up to the subordinate. Like "build a database useful for storing graph data" or "Find a way to improve ads customer acquisition".
EFAS culture - An implementation of blitzkrieg for business gleaned from interviews done in the 70's implements this nicely.
Hi, I'm the author. Someone alerted me that this showed up on HN, so I figured I should come by to clarify.
I believe my statement might be clear. What I mean by that is "it's [everyone's] job to say no-hire," as opposed to anyone feeling like "well, I'm not sure about this candidate, but I'll let someone else reject them because I don't want to be perceived as mean." One problem with hiring is that everyone must be willing to uphold the standard - if you have too many people who are never willing to be the one to say no-hire, the standard will fall - everyone has to be willing to take the responsibility for saying no.
That said, systemic bias is an orthogonal (and real) issue. Being "not sure" should be applied to "does this candidate measure up" not "is this candidate a lot like me?"
Saying "no hire" can be hard for some people, but becomes easier if your team adopts the attitude that "maybe means no". It's probably better for the team to miss out hiring some promising "maybe" candidates than later trying to fire a bad one.
Good to know. Does Facebook collect data about how they're doing internally to avoid these systemic biases? Is this tracked?
Although it appears orthogonal, if everyone starts making hiring decisions without any checks and balances that an HR person would put in, I'd assume more bias to creep in. At the very least, I'd want the "standard" to be clearly defined.
Thanks Gary and Michael for emailing me about the broken links.
Gotcha: It turns out that quoting links using """ (say, if you had previously run a script to do a bunch of search/replaces) works in Safari, which apparently just fixes it for you, but does not work in Firefox (and presumably other browsers).
