The power of e.g. matlab for engineering disciplines is in the profound library. The optimized performance of the core language not withstanding, optimizing the library takes many people, often enough graduates, doctorates and professors.
That's a slippery slope to argue on because eventually everyone is going to die. Where do you draw the line? Your post is ironic, because macs are overpriced, by some measure, and so is the american healthcare, from what I heard. Apple is said to derive value from exclusiveness (price differentiation). I'm not going to draw the analogy for medicine, although medication is controversial enough.
Surely, nobody is going to die from not owning a macbook, that's indeed a strawman. A macbook is not a condition, but a property.
Living with a Macbook (insert any useful technology here) improves your life.
Living without disease/sickness/things medical care provides improves your life.
I don't think it's a straw man. As you said, no amount of medical care can stave off death indefinitely, so I'm not sure why it matters if "nobody is going to die" from not owning a MacBook if nobody is going to live forever from getting medical care. In fact, plenty of people die even after they've received cutting edge care / insanely expensive procedures.
This expression is more symbolic than to be taken at face value.
> meaningful enough - OP
this means there's an optimum
> Given more animals that produce sounds, the ones that can transmit more information - OP
This means animals below (a?) optimum threshold. Shannon called that threshold the bandwidth, I believe.
> [complex sounds] take more energy to recognize
So this is the other side of the equation. We have a signal to noise ratio that limits the bandwidth. Energy is Information and Energy conversion, ie. Information transmission is inherently lossy, because Entropy decreases in closed systems. The trick then is to use the information to expand the frame of reference, to grow as an individual and as a species. That gives a lower bound on what information has to be converted into the system - that's what OP is talking about.
> What specifically will kill you if you transmit less information
In the limit, not transmitting any information means heat death. So, OP was talking hyperbole, obviously. The question for a local optimum is obvious - birds proliferate and not in a small niche. A global optimum in the infinite, infinite bandwidth at some point, or infinitely increasing bandwidth in infinite time are obviously out of scope - even if we like to dream on cosmological scales. Hence, OP's leading statement is rather symbolic than to be taken at face value.
