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Tree3D Procedural Tree Add-On For Godot

Tree3D is a Godot Extension (implemented via GDExtension) for Godot Engine 4.1 or higher that is used to create procedural trees. If you do not wish to build the extension from source, there are precompiled Windows binaries available here. The project is open source, implemented in C++ and released under […]

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Game UI Database 2.0

We first covered the Game UI Database in April of 2023 and at the time it was one of the single best resources for game UI/UX designers, with a massive database of game user interface elements. Today, Game UI Database 2.0 has been released, a massive (ironically enough) user interface […]

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Unreal Engine and Unity Mega Bundle

The Unreal Engine and Unity Mega Bundle on Humble is a collection of 3D environments from Hivemind. While the assets are in both Unreal Engine and Unity formats, they can be exported to work in other game engines like Godot or in general 3D applications like Blender, check the guides […]

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Adobe Alternatives in 2024

Due to recent events there are a number of Adobe users currently looking for alternatives. Today we look at several alternatives to the following Adobe products: Photoshop, Illustrator, Substance Painter/Designer, Animate and Premiere/After Effects. Without further ado, here are several alternatives to Adobe products in 2024: Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator […]

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Epic Games Release 500+ Free AAA Quality Game Animations

Epic Games are the kings of free stuff, from their monthly giveaways to today’s announcement, 500+ game ready motion matched game engines for Unreal Engine 5.4. Back at GDC 2024 during the State of Unreal they announced they would be releasing this library of animations: Animation takes big strides forward […]

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25 Game Engines in 25 Minutes

Today we are going to take a look at 25 different game engines in 25 minutes (ok, 28 minutes…). The only criteria to show up on this list is the engine is primarily 3D and has a world or level editor. If there is interest we may do a similar […]

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If you're looking for further evidence that the world is recovering from the disruptions of pandemic policy, the Simon Abundance Index provides just that. After a brief retreat, the index once again portrays a world of cheaper commodities that contribute to human prosperity. Born from a famous 1980 bet between economist Julian Simon and doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, the index stands as testimony for Simon's belief that the greatest resource is human ingenuity—although government intervention is perfectly capable of screwing up a good thing.

"After a sharp downturn between 2021 and 2022, which was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, government lockdowns and accompanying monetary expansion, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the SAI is making a strong recovery," according to Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute. "Since 1980, resource abundance has been increasing at a much faster rate than population."

A Contrast to the Fears of Doomsayers

The index was born in the days of worries over population growth and the strain more people would place on the world's resources. The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 1972, famously predicted that nonrenewable natural resources including copper and aluminum would start running out in a matter of years, hiking prices and curtailing availability. "Population growth and the law of increasing costs could rapidly drive the system to the point where all available resources were devoted to producing food," insisted the authors.

"In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," warned Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968).

Policymakers took the doomsayers' warnings seriously. China implemented a one-child policy that was coercively enforced and hobbles the country to this day, even after its repeal. Governments from India to Mexico imposed forced sterilization policies.

"'The Population Bomb' made dire predictions—and triggered a wave of repression around the world," Charles Mann noted in 2018 for Smithsonian magazine.

Innovation Is the Greatest Resource

Simon initially agreed with Ehrlich and friends that population was a problem. But he researched the issue and dramatically changed his mind on the relationship between people and prosperity.

"Humankind has evolved into creators and problem-solvers to an extent that people's constructive behavior has outweighed their destructive behavior, as evidenced by our increasing life expectancy and richness of consumption," Simon wrote in 1984 for Reason. "And in recent centuries and decades, this positive net balance has been increasing rather than decreasing."

That's because, he continued, "humankind has evolved culturally (and perhaps also genetically) in such a manner that our patterns of behavior—social rules and customs being a crucial part of these patterns—predispose us to deal successfully with resource scarcity. That is, over the centuries, these evolved patterns have given us greater rather than less command over resources."

Gambling on Abundance

The result of his changed views was a challenge issued to and accepted by Paul Ehrlich. In October 1980, they drew up a futures contract by which Simon agreed to sell Ehrlich, in 1990, the same quantities that could be purchased for $1,000 in 1980 of five metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. If the combined value was above $1,000 at the end of the bet, Simon would pay the difference. If it was below $1,000, Ehrlich would make up the difference to Simon. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check; the price of the metals, which were selected by Ehrlich, had fallen by more than a third after inflation.

Of course, resource prices and innovation evolve naturally, not in straight lines. Different time periods might have produced different results for that bet. But Simon's main contention—that humans tend to innovate their way around resource constraints—continues to hold, as documented by the Simon Abundance Index, which tracks the availability and cost of many more commodities than the five included in the original 1980 bet.

"The Simon Abundance Index (SAI) quantifies and measures the relationship between resources and population," notes the 2024 edition of the index. "The SAI converts the relative abundance of 50 basic commodities and the global population into a single value. The index started in 1980 with a base value of 100. In 2023, the SAI stood at 609.4, indicating that resources have become 509.4 percent more abundant over the past 43 years. All 50 commodities were more abundant in 2023 than in 1980."

Policy-Driven Backsliding

Growth in abundance is occasionally interrupted. There was major backsliding (increased commodity costs) during the Great Recession, which was largely caused by federal efforts to encourage mortgage issuance no matter what, and in response to the economic disruptions of pandemic lockdowns. Tracked commodities are 509.4 percent more abundant now than in 1980, but they were 518.98 percent more abundant in 2019, before any of us had heard of COVID-19 or suffered a stay-at-home order.

As it turns out, even the blessings of human innovation can be kneecapped by the mandates and intrusions of government officials. It should come as no surprise that the brief retreat in resource abundance coincides with an interruption of the decades-long global march away from crushing poverty and towards prosperity. More people lived below the poverty line in 2022 (712 million) than in 2019 (689 million), even as "resource abundance fell by 3.55 percent in 2022."

But we appear to have turned the corner, with abundance once again increasing. "For the time required to earn the money to buy one unit of this commodity basket in 1980, you would get 3.38 units in 2023," according to index authors Tupy and Gale Pooley of Brigham Young University-Hawaii. And contrary to the doomsayers, that happened as the human population increased from 4.4 billion to more than 8 billion. That represents improved access to everything from food to energy, with lamb increasing in abundance by a whopping 675.1 percent since 1980 (the most in the basket of commodities), while coal became 30.7 percent more abundant (the least improvement over that time).

A world of greater abundance in resources means a world in which people are better nourished, better clothed, warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer, and more prosperous. It's a world in which human ingenuity is set free to make the human race happier, healthier, and wealthier.

Well, it's a world of abundance and prosperity unless politicians screw it up. Again.

The post Julian Simon Was Right: Ingenuity Leads to Abundance appeared first on Reason.com.

Going way, way back, we’ve talked about the need for protection of journalistic sources, in particular the need for a federal journalism shield law. I can find stories going back about 15 years of us talking about it here on Techdirt. The issue might not come up that often, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

On Thursday, a judge held former CBS journalist Catherine Herridge in contempt for refusing to reveal her sources regarding stories she wrote about scientist Yanping Chen.

The ruling, from U.S. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper, will be stayed for 30 days or until Herridge can appeal the ruling.

Cooper ruled that Herridge violated his Aug. 1 order demanding that Herridge reveal how she learned about a federal probe into Chen, who operated a graduate program in Virginia. Herridge, who was recently laid off from CBS News, wrote the stories in question when she worked for Fox News in 2017.

In his ruling, Judge Cooper claims that he’s at least somewhat reluctant about this result, but he still goes forward with it arguing (I believe incorrectly) that he needs to balance the rights of Chen with Herridge’s First Amendment rights.

The Court does not reach this result lightly. It recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge. Yet the Court also has its own role to play in upholding the law and safeguarding judicial authority. Applying binding precedent in this Circuit, the Court resolved that Chen’s need for the requested information to vindicate her rights under the Privacy Act overcame Herridge’s qualified First Amendment reporter’s privilege in this case. Herridge and many of her colleagues in the journalism community may disagree with that decision and prefer that a different balance be struck, but she is not permitted to flout a federal court’s order with impunity. Civil contempt is the proper and time-tested remedy to ensure that the Court’s order, and the law underpinning it, are not rendered meaningless.

But the First Amendment is not a balancing test. And if subpoenas or other attempts to reveal sources can be used in this manner, the harm to journalism will be vast. Journalism only works properly when journalists can legitimately promise confidentiality to sources. And that’s even more true for whistleblowers.

Admittedly, this case is a bit of a mess. It appears that the FBI falsely believed that Chen was a Chinese spy and investigated her, but let it go when they couldn’t support that claim. However, someone (likely in the FBI) leaked the info to Herridge, who reported on it. Chen sued the FBI, who won’t reveal who leaked the info. She’s now using lawful discovery to find out who leaked the info as part of the lawsuit. You can understand that Chen has been wronged in this situation, and it’s likely someone in the FBI who did so. And, in theory, there should be a remedy for that.

But, the problem is that this goes beyond just that situation and gets to the heart of what journalism is and why journalists need to be able to protect sources.

If a ruling like this stands, it means that no journalist can promise confidentiality, when a rush to court can force the journalist to cough up the details. And the end result is that fewer whistleblowers will be willing to speak to media, allowing more cover-ups and more corruption. The impact of a ruling like this is immensely problematic.

There’s a reason that, for years, we’ve argued for a federal shield law to make it clear that journalists should never be forced to give up sources. In the past, attempts to pass such laws have often broken down over debates concerning who they should apply to and how to identify “legitimate” journalists vs. those pretending to be journalists to avoid coughing up info.

But there is a simple solution to that: don’t have it protect “journalists,” have the law protect such information if it is obtained in the course of engaging in journalism. That is, if someone wants to make use of the shield law, they need to show that the contact and information obtained from the source was part of a legitimate effort to report a story to the public in some form, and they can present the steps they were taking to do so.

At the very least, the court recognizes that the contempt fees should be immediately stayed so that Herridge can appeal the decision:

The Court will stay that contempt sanction, however, to afford Herridge an opportunity to appeal this decision. Courts in this district and beyond have routinely stayed contempt sanctions to provide journalists ample room to litigate their assertions of privilege fully in the court of appeals before being coerced into compliance….

Hopefully, the appeals court recognizes how problematic this is. But, still, Congress can and should act to get a real shield law in place.