Hey, Keynesian economics has plenty of evidence and economists suggesting it's wrong, but that doesn't stop both parties from pushing further away from free-market ideals...
Oh please. Don't bring economics into this debate. It is called the dismal science for a reason. Chicago School economics is based on the assumption that markets behave rationally (the Efficient Market Hypothesis)! Rationally! ROFL. Any field that purports to have mathematical models to reliably describe my behavior does not deserve much credence.
Bertrand Russell used to say that science was inductive, or merely probable. Even the statement that "the sun will rise again tomorrow" is based only on our knowledge that it has always risen in the past, and is thus only probable. Highly probable yes. But still only probable, and not certain. He used an example where a chicken, every day of its life, saw the farmer coming and was then fed. One day, the chicken saw the farmer coming and reasoned inductively that it was going to be fed. And then its neck was wrung. Russell believed that science was never perfectly certain, but he also wrote that science was our best way of understanding the physical world.
The statement that "the sun will rise again tomorrow" is an inductively strong statement. Its truth is highly probable. Physics is an inductively strong science; the truth of the predictions of Newton's models is highly probable, if we don't travel too quickly. I would argue that economics is inductively weak. Its predictions have some utility, and sometimes describe the behavior of market actors. But those predictions don't come close to the probability of the predictions of Physics. Economics is inductively weak. This is why economics is rightly called the "dismal science".
And as for the debate at hand, I believe that it is high time that many of us who are educated and have the time should pay more attention to the details of science, of reason. We should attempt to philosophically understand the underpinnings of science and reason. And we should more strongly call out those who show a reckless disregard for the truth. We are after all citizens in a democracy. It is our responsibility.
Actually, the phrase was "denial-bot", implying that (a) you deny, and (b) your assertions are repeated robotically, without any seeming to desire to understand the arguments you challenge. Your post is a series of talking points, hitting hot button words such as "politically driven", "scam". I doubt you have ANY real understanding of science, and the scientific process. If you want to prove me wrong, please describe the basic physics of the greenhouse effect. Describe, without reference to wikipedia, why different particles absorb different wavelengths. Describe the carbon cycle. Describe the details of your assertion that CO2 is not the dominant greenhouse gas. Describe the many many many rebuttals to that particular assertion and explain why exactly you think they are wrong, in real scientific terms.
However, I doubt you will reply to this in any satisfactory way. I suspect that you will respond with a series of canned slogans, focus group tested for their effects on the average person. I suspect your scientific knowledge is highly limited, and that you have robotically absorbed a series of base assertions and arguments without questioning them. Either that, or you are being paid to post.
Rubbish, the minute concentration of C02 in the atmosphere isn't poisonous to humans. C02 is essential to life at the base of our food chain, it's a building block of life. That's part of the stupidity of our US EPA, declaring a gas essential to life on Earth a poison. The dominant greenhouse gas on Earth is water vapor, that's scientific fact.
I see the denial-bots are out in force today. I've just read a large number of posts that dance around the idea of whether CO2 is poisonous or not. The posts seem to ignore the real scientific assertion, that the problem is: (a) that we are adding CO2 to the ecosystem by removing it from long term storage deep underground; and (b) that this increased CO2 in the atmosphere will cause an increase in temperature, which will in turn cause an increase in concentration of other greenhouse gases such as H2O and methane. There seems to be a full-court press of straw man attacks against science here. This is dangerous.
However, you seem to be talking about one group (perhaps the majority) forcing their priorities on everybody else.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that you are implying that the only way that I, as a citizen can have an impact on the broad way society is run is by spending or investing money. In other words, the state should play no real role in the operations of society.
I have yet to see any alternative technologies that show even a hint of making oil obsolete.
In the medium term, algae biofuels. Grow them in land based salt water tanks. The biggest challenge is to maintain a clean culture, without unwelcome interloping species. We already have found algae species that refine to gasoline very easily, including natural octanes.
Efficiency is also a large part of the puzzle. In terms of transportation, carbon fiber has great potential as a structural material. The barriers to carbon fiber being used, mainly manufacturing cost, can I believe be alleviated by newer manufacturing techniques. Specifically, encase the carbon fiber matte in a thermoplastic, that is a plastic that becomes pliable under heat. Then press the sheet into the required car part. Suddenly you have potential mass production. I've actually seen this done...it can work. Crash safety is a matter of engineering...in fact, carbon fiber cars could be more safe than our current generation of cars. I've seen footage of carbon fiber Formula 1 race car crashes in which the driver walks away from something that would at first seem utterly fatal.
If you reduce the mass of the body of the car, you don't need as big an engine, providing even more weight and fuel savings. 100mpg is well within reach, and probably 200mpg eventually, with good aerodynamics.
As far as houses and buildings, there are many ways of saving energy without substantially increasing the price of the building. Search "Passive House" and you will see examples of houses that consume 90% less energy than typical houses. Even if we adopted only a few techniques used in building passive houses, making new houses consume half the energy of current buildings is quite possible. Cost savings can be found by building house components in factories.
The best promise of alternative energy is to, maybe, provide a replacement for oil when there is no longer enough oil to meet demands.
Is there some law of nature I'm not aware of that states that we must burn all possible oil and coal available before moving to other energy sources? Are the laws of the market unavoidable laws of God, that must be obeyed? Or does human choice and free will play a role? Are we slaves to the laws of the market? Or are we conscious beings, who use the free market as a tool to improve our lives?
...Capitalism is the only system that attempts to harness that fact to promote the public good. All other economic systems fail to account for greed, or they allow those with power to exercise their greed with no negative consequences.
And yet without adequate competition, the activity of corporations can tend against the public good. The free market of Adam Smith is predicated on competition. No market actor should be powerful enough to prevent other market actors from supplying goods.
In the case of oil companies, they have made massive investments in oil technology. In order to remain financially viable, they need to see those investments pay a dividend, before they make investments in newer technologies. If upstart competitors come in with new technologies that make the investments of the oil companies obsolete, then these oil companies' financial structures will implode. They will have to write down their drilling rights, their refining facilities as obsolete. And they will have to then invest in the newer technologies. Simply put, it is in the interest of oil companies to do everything they can to push off the development of new competing technologies into the future, to delay technological progress as long as they can. And I don't want them to have that choice. I think they should pay for their bad investments by disappearing. I think that they shouldn't be able to hide from market forces by delaying the development of new technology. I think that they should be replaced by newer more innovative companies. Isn't that at the heart of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market?
...But it's still small potatoes compared to other sectors of the economy....
I should have been somewhat more specific with my wording. However, I do assert that economically, oil plays an outsize role in the economy. Without it, most economic activity ceases. The only other commodities that are more important in our economy are food and water. And yet if you quantified the dollar value of trade in food or water, it would likely not be high on your list either. But I suspect that if you halved the food and water supply, you would realize the flaw in ranking commodities only by their dollar value in terms of overall trade.
If there's a technology they have a patent on which is economically compelling enough that it could displace their core business in anyone else's hands,
And you are sidestepping my point. These oil companies have made massive investments in drilling rights, refining facilities, and transportation infrastructure. They want a return on those investments before the next generation of technology appears. And if they have the ability to delay the adoption of next-generation disruptive energy technologies until their existing investments have paid dividends, then they will. They do not want to have new companies with new technologies render their existing investments obsolete. It is in their interests to delay these changes, and our current regulatory systems apparently allow this. Yes, they will likely eventually implement the new technologies. But they will do it on their schedule according to their needs, as opposed to the needs of the public. If competition were real in this field, then the oil companies bad investments in bad polluting technologies would result in their financial disintegration, as newer players appeared to displace them. Instead the oil companies rig the rules of the game in their favor. And we the public suffer from a lack of choice in the market place.
...lacking any thought as to WHY they are evil, and thereby lacking any hope of ever reaching the means to change that.
Corporations aren't good. Corporations aren't evil. Corporations are machines to generate profit. That's it. If you expect any moral behavior from corporations, you might as well expect it from a building (that's from Milton Friedman, by the way). My arguments against these oil companies stems from a knowledge of market theory, from Adam Smith onwards. I have read Smith. I have read and have some knowledge about Friedman. I know that current market theory asserts that competition is essential to bending the activities of corporations to serve the public good. And I have good historical examples of what happens when competition is limited.
Take Standard Oil in the early 1900's. In order to limit the ability of their competitors to sell oil, Standard Oil actually bought up key rail lines in order to deny their competition the ability to ship their oil. To get around this, the competing oil companies started packing their oil in barrels that could be flexibly shipped. This is the origin of the barrel of oil, the unit of measurement we still use today. Standard Oil then attempted to foil this strategy by limiting supply of the compound used to seal those barrels. This activity continued until the government broke up the Standard Oil monopoly.
In the above example, the key thing to notice is that Standard Oil's activities to destroy its competition were clearly an attempt to limit the supply of oil to the public, eventually resulting in members of the public paying Standard Oil a price that Standard Oil decided, as opposed to a price that was determined by free and proper competition. This is clearly against the public interest. Only with competition will the activities of these companies ensure that goods will be provided for the lowest possible cost.
In the modern case, I as a consumer would like to buy machines and devices that use alternative energy sources. I know what is technically possible. And I do not want my choice limited because an oligarchy of oil companies decides that the best way to maximize their own short and medium term profits is to delay upgrading their current infrastructure by delaying the introduction of new technologies. These oil companies have invested billions, trillions in drilling rights, refining facilities and transportation infrastructure. They do NOT want to write those investments down as obsolete. They want a return on those investments before the next generation of energy technology appears. And if they have the ability to stop competitors from appearing with new technologies which would make their investments obsolete, then they will do so. They will act to maximize their own short term profits. And the public will be deprived of vital new technologies.
I don't think BP particularly cares about the public interest...
Nor do I. But the free market competitive system is supposed to ensure that companies like BP do act in the public interest. My point is that companies like BP are simply too large to experience anything like the theorized competition put forward by theorists from Adam Smith onwards. BP's caring about the public interest is irrelevant.
This is not Ford buying up the Los Angeles public transport company in order to shut it down and increase the demand for cars.
What the "greed is good" crowd seem to be missing here is that these energy companies are big. Really really big. And as a sector, the oil energy sector dwarfs all other economic sectors. If large players in that sector start to amass patents on technologies that could displace their core business, then will become increasingly able to stifle competition in this field. In other words, they will be increasingly able to decide to sit on those patents if it serves their immediate economic self interest. And the forces that are supposed to guarantee that the self interest of companies overlaps with the common interest of society, namely competitive forces, are made irrelevant by the huge size of these companies. They will become increasingly able to squash/buy-out smaller entrants to the market who might displace them. This is made even worse by the fact that many of these private interests seem to have captured the regulatory and governing systems, the very systems that are suppose to guarantee that the private activity of corporations overlaps with the public interest.
So please don't cry that the poor companies are only doing what they are supposed to do, namely making money, because you are sidestepping the arguments made by many of us who are skeptical of the overlap of the activities of companies like BP and the public interest. You statements sound less like arguments and more like advertising slogans.
Why is no one mentioning perhaps the most promising renewable fuel: Algae Biofuels. The idea is to grow photosynthetic algae in land based salt water tanks. We can engineer the types of algae to be easily refinable into fuel. And we won't need to use vast tracts of arable land since the tanks won't need good soil, nor will we need large amounts of fresh water. The difficulties lie in keeping the algae tanks growing the right organisms. Overall, this could be vastly scalable.
I've seen video of most other major smart phone with a similar "death grip". For example, this video shows a Blackberry Bold with a significant signal loss when held a certain way. Why the hysterics over the iPhone? It feels as if Slashdot is being gamed in a PR campaign.
The first time I remember seeing anti-virus software was on a 1988 Mac Plus (system 6). The software was called "Vaccine"...I remember the icon of it loading at boot up time looked like an hypodermic needle. Of course that was before Apple adopted BSD as the basis for OS X. Security has improved significantly since then.
Exactly. You can't say anything about about NeXT without framing it with OS X. That's because it didn't amount to much until Apple bought them and turned it into OS X. NeXT itself was little more than a tech demo. Cool, but not very useful in of itself.
Sad thing is a lot of the cool stuff NeXT did, like the resolution independence, was lost when Apple dropped the clunky Mac interface on top of it.
Resolution independence was removed to my knowledge because it was based on PostScript. Adobe was charging too much to license it, so Apple removed it.
The headline should read "A poll indicates that Bill Gates may be more admired than the Pope. Polls are based on the often ill-considered responses of a few randomly called individuals. The responders are phoned and then on the spot expected to give answers immediately; they usually haven't given any serious thought or consideration to their responses. Most responders probably respond on a whim. And then we read about those polls and pretend that they actually have serious meaning. I believe that this is deeply irrational.
There you go again talking about OS X. What about NeXT? It's pretty clear you don't know what you're talking about.
To quote Wikipedia (the easiest source to find), though definitely not the only one:
Apple Computer announced an intention to acquire NeXT on December 20, 1996.[2] Apple paid $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares which went to Steve Jobs. (Steve Jobs was deliberately not given cash for his part in the deal.)[2][44] The main purpose of the acquisition was to use NeXTSTEP as a foundation to replace the dated Mac OS operating system. Apple favoured this option over others which included continuing development of the Copland operating system, or purchasing the Be Operating System (BeOS).[45] Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant in 1997 and then after the 4 July weekend the same year became interim CEO.[46] In 2000 Jobs took the CEO position as a permanent assignment.[47]
Several NeXT executives replaced their Apple counterparts when Steve Jobs restructured the company board of directors. Over the next five years the NeXTSTEP operating system was ported to the PowerPC architecture, and the Intel port and the OpenStep Enterprise toolkit for Windows were kept in sync. The operating systems were code named Rhapsody,[48] while the toolkit for development on all platforms was called "Yellow Box". For backwards compatibility Apple added the "Blue Box" to the Macintosh, allowing existing Mac applications to be run in a self-contained cooperative multitasking environment.[49]
A server version of the new operating system was released as Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, and the first consumer version, Mac OS X 10.0, in 2001. The OpenStep developers toolkit was renamed Cocoa. Rhapsody's Blue Box was renamed Classic Environment. Apple included an updated version of the original Macintosh toolbox that allowed existing Mac applications access to the environment without the constraints of Blue Box called Carbon.[50][51] Some of NeXTSTEP's interface features were used in Mac OS X; these included the Dock, the Services menu, the Finder's 'browser' view, the text system NSText, and system-wide selectors for fonts and colors.
NeXTSTEP's processor-independent capabilities were retained in Mac OS X. Every version was compiled on both PowerPC and Intel x86 architectures, although only PowerPC versions were released to the public until 2006. Apple publicly announced on June 6, 2005 plans to base future systems on Intel processors.[52] The transition to Intel was completed by August 2006. In addition, the iPhone contains a specialized ARM version of OS X. OS X 10.6 does not support the PowerPC, although it will run PowerPC binaries through the Rosetta emulation subsystem.
To quote: "The OpenStep developers toolkit was renamed Cocoa.". To quote: "NeXTSTEP's processor-independent capabilities were retained in Mac OS X." This is a far more close relationship than say, Windows to OS/2. The core of OS X is at code level copied directly from the NeXT operating system.
NeXT IS OS X. Or at least most the important parts made it into OS X. Especially OpenStep. That's why they can drop OS X/iOS onto nearly any type of CPU they want. That's why the transition of OS X from the G4/G5 chips to Intel went so smoothly. The OS is nearly completely abstracted from the hardware. Tech demo indeed.
I always felt that NeXT was overhyped for what it was, and remember it more for Steve Jobs repeatedly asserting how awesome and ahead of its time it was than any actual technical accomplishments. (Which isn't to say it didn't have some technical accomplishments.) Your mileage may vary.
Why do you feel it is overhyped? List details. Give arguments.
Name a system that had a fully vector based display language (PostScript). Name a system that had such a bombproof middleware environment as OpenStep. OS S has been successfully ported to many different types of processor environments. It runs iPhones. It runs iPads. It runs Intel. It ran G4/G5. It runs their new A4 chip. It will run on the new A8 chip in the iPad2. iOS and OS X both come from NeXT. This platform agnostic system originates from OpenStep.
People keep repeating that, but it doesn't make it true. Take a close look at the technical ins and outs of NeXT computers, which became the basis for OS X, and then tell me that operating system wasn't a stroke of technical genius. It came out seven years before Windows 95, and is the basis for OS X and iOS. It has been ported to numerous types of processors, and runs seamlessly. Windows doesn't have a hope in hell of doing anything like that.
It's because Apple's not based on product, it's based on image. If anything seems like it could even start to threaten that image, people want out before it crashes.
Oh please. Any rational analysis of the history of computing will lead to the conclusion that Jobs is a visionary genius. NeXT created a computer in 1988 that had features that even today's computers don't have. The graphical system was vector based (PostScript), enabling resolution independence. It had an optical drive, years before CD-r existed. It was Unix based. It utilized a middleware framework called OpenStep that allowed an unprecedented degree of platform independence. This system became the basis for OS X. Microsoft didn't even come out with Windows 3.1 until 1992, four years later. Even today, no major OS has resolution independence, and Windows 7 is definitely NOT platform independent. I can think of no other example of a leader leaving such an indelible stamp on a company.
Indeed, the contrast of Mr. Jobs leadership with the rest of corporate America lays bare the fundamental faults of the latter. Corporate America has become beholden to visionless MBA bean counters, who think they can manage a company without underlying knowledge or insight into the business they direct. They treat management as a skill independent of the underlying businesses they manage. They put forward their management principles as unchallengeable "revealed truths". Contrast Mr. Job's leadership with that of Mr. Sculley who replaced him for a time. Sculley was the president of Pepsico before he took over at Apple. What made him think that his experience managing a soft drink company gave him the ability to lead a computer company I have no idea. But his tenure was an unmitigated disaster. Sculley simply had no vision of what computers should be. He had little insight into the difficulties of coding, the importance of good design, or the future developments in information technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, Keynesian economics has plenty of evidence and economists suggesting it's wrong, but that doesn't stop both parties from pushing further away from free-market ideals...
Oh please. Don't bring economics into this debate. It is called the dismal science for a reason. Chicago School economics is based on the assumption that markets behave rationally (the Efficient Market Hypothesis)! Rationally! ROFL. Any field that purports to have mathematical models to reliably describe my behavior does not deserve much credence.
Bertrand Russell used to say that science was inductive, or merely probable. Even the statement that "the sun will rise again tomorrow" is based only on our knowledge that it has always risen in the past, and is thus only probable. Highly probable yes. But still only probable, and not certain. He used an example where a chicken, every day of its life, saw the farmer coming and was then fed. One day, the chicken saw the farmer coming and reasoned inductively that it was going to be fed. And then its neck was wrung. Russell believed that science was never perfectly certain, but he also wrote that science was our best way of understanding the physical world.
The statement that "the sun will rise again tomorrow" is an inductively strong statement. Its truth is highly probable. Physics is an inductively strong science; the truth of the predictions of Newton's models is highly probable, if we don't travel too quickly. I would argue that economics is inductively weak. Its predictions have some utility, and sometimes describe the behavior of market actors. But those predictions don't come close to the probability of the predictions of Physics. Economics is inductively weak. This is why economics is rightly called the "dismal science".
And as for the debate at hand, I believe that it is high time that many of us who are educated and have the time should pay more attention to the details of science, of reason. We should attempt to philosophically understand the underpinnings of science and reason. And we should more strongly call out those who show a reckless disregard for the truth. We are after all citizens in a democracy. It is our responsibility.
Actually, the phrase was "denial-bot", implying that (a) you deny, and (b) your assertions are repeated robotically, without any seeming to desire to understand the arguments you challenge. Your post is a series of talking points, hitting hot button words such as "politically driven", "scam". I doubt you have ANY real understanding of science, and the scientific process. If you want to prove me wrong, please describe the basic physics of the greenhouse effect. Describe, without reference to wikipedia, why different particles absorb different wavelengths. Describe the carbon cycle. Describe the details of your assertion that CO2 is not the dominant greenhouse gas. Describe the many many many rebuttals to that particular assertion and explain why exactly you think they are wrong, in real scientific terms.
However, I doubt you will reply to this in any satisfactory way. I suspect that you will respond with a series of canned slogans, focus group tested for their effects on the average person. I suspect your scientific knowledge is highly limited, and that you have robotically absorbed a series of base assertions and arguments without questioning them. Either that, or you are being paid to post.
Rubbish, the minute concentration of C02 in the atmosphere isn't poisonous to humans. C02 is essential to life at the base of our food chain, it's a building block of life. That's part of the stupidity of our US EPA, declaring a gas essential to life on Earth a poison. The dominant greenhouse gas on Earth is water vapor, that's scientific fact.
I see the denial-bots are out in force today. I've just read a large number of posts that dance around the idea of whether CO2 is poisonous or not. The posts seem to ignore the real scientific assertion, that the problem is: (a) that we are adding CO2 to the ecosystem by removing it from long term storage deep underground; and (b) that this increased CO2 in the atmosphere will cause an increase in temperature, which will in turn cause an increase in concentration of other greenhouse gases such as H2O and methane. There seems to be a full-court press of straw man attacks against science here. This is dangerous.
The market is collective action.
However, you seem to be talking about one group (perhaps the majority) forcing their priorities on everybody else.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that you are implying that the only way that I, as a citizen can have an impact on the broad way society is run is by spending or investing money. In other words, the state should play no real role in the operations of society.
As to what role human choice and free will play, that is what sets the market.
Are there other ways that human choice and free will be expressed besides the market? What of collective action?
I have yet to see any alternative technologies that show even a hint of making oil obsolete.
In the medium term, algae biofuels. Grow them in land based salt water tanks. The biggest challenge is to maintain a clean culture, without unwelcome interloping species. We already have found algae species that refine to gasoline very easily, including natural octanes.
Efficiency is also a large part of the puzzle. In terms of transportation, carbon fiber has great potential as a structural material. The barriers to carbon fiber being used, mainly manufacturing cost, can I believe be alleviated by newer manufacturing techniques. Specifically, encase the carbon fiber matte in a thermoplastic, that is a plastic that becomes pliable under heat. Then press the sheet into the required car part. Suddenly you have potential mass production. I've actually seen this done...it can work. Crash safety is a matter of engineering...in fact, carbon fiber cars could be more safe than our current generation of cars. I've seen footage of carbon fiber Formula 1 race car crashes in which the driver walks away from something that would at first seem utterly fatal.
If you reduce the mass of the body of the car, you don't need as big an engine, providing even more weight and fuel savings. 100mpg is well within reach, and probably 200mpg eventually, with good aerodynamics.
As far as houses and buildings, there are many ways of saving energy without substantially increasing the price of the building. Search "Passive House" and you will see examples of houses that consume 90% less energy than typical houses. Even if we adopted only a few techniques used in building passive houses, making new houses consume half the energy of current buildings is quite possible. Cost savings can be found by building house components in factories.
The best promise of alternative energy is to, maybe, provide a replacement for oil when there is no longer enough oil to meet demands.
Is there some law of nature I'm not aware of that states that we must burn all possible oil and coal available before moving to other energy sources? Are the laws of the market unavoidable laws of God, that must be obeyed? Or does human choice and free will play a role? Are we slaves to the laws of the market? Or are we conscious beings, who use the free market as a tool to improve our lives?
One word: Oligarchy.
Are you saying that BP does not experience competition? If so, what exactly are Shell, Exxon and Lukoil?
Google "oligarchy". Read the definition.
...Capitalism is the only system that attempts to harness that fact to promote the public good. All other economic systems fail to account for greed, or they allow those with power to exercise their greed with no negative consequences.
And yet without adequate competition, the activity of corporations can tend against the public good. The free market of Adam Smith is predicated on competition. No market actor should be powerful enough to prevent other market actors from supplying goods.
In the case of oil companies, they have made massive investments in oil technology. In order to remain financially viable, they need to see those investments pay a dividend, before they make investments in newer technologies. If upstart competitors come in with new technologies that make the investments of the oil companies obsolete, then these oil companies' financial structures will implode. They will have to write down their drilling rights, their refining facilities as obsolete. And they will have to then invest in the newer technologies. Simply put, it is in the interest of oil companies to do everything they can to push off the development of new competing technologies into the future, to delay technological progress as long as they can. And I don't want them to have that choice. I think they should pay for their bad investments by disappearing. I think that they shouldn't be able to hide from market forces by delaying the development of new technology. I think that they should be replaced by newer more innovative companies. Isn't that at the heart of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market?
...But it's still small potatoes compared to other sectors of the economy....
I should have been somewhat more specific with my wording. However, I do assert that economically, oil plays an outsize role in the economy. Without it, most economic activity ceases. The only other commodities that are more important in our economy are food and water. And yet if you quantified the dollar value of trade in food or water, it would likely not be high on your list either. But I suspect that if you halved the food and water supply, you would realize the flaw in ranking commodities only by their dollar value in terms of overall trade.
If there's a technology they have a patent on which is economically compelling enough that it could displace their core business in anyone else's hands,
And you are sidestepping my point. These oil companies have made massive investments in drilling rights, refining facilities, and transportation infrastructure. They want a return on those investments before the next generation of technology appears. And if they have the ability to delay the adoption of next-generation disruptive energy technologies until their existing investments have paid dividends, then they will. They do not want to have new companies with new technologies render their existing investments obsolete. It is in their interests to delay these changes, and our current regulatory systems apparently allow this. Yes, they will likely eventually implement the new technologies. But they will do it on their schedule according to their needs, as opposed to the needs of the public. If competition were real in this field, then the oil companies bad investments in bad polluting technologies would result in their financial disintegration, as newer players appeared to displace them. Instead the oil companies rig the rules of the game in their favor. And we the public suffer from a lack of choice in the market place.
...lacking any thought as to WHY they are evil, and thereby lacking any hope of ever reaching the means to change that.
Corporations aren't good. Corporations aren't evil. Corporations are machines to generate profit. That's it. If you expect any moral behavior from corporations, you might as well expect it from a building (that's from Milton Friedman, by the way). My arguments against these oil companies stems from a knowledge of market theory, from Adam Smith onwards. I have read Smith. I have read and have some knowledge about Friedman. I know that current market theory asserts that competition is essential to bending the activities of corporations to serve the public good. And I have good historical examples of what happens when competition is limited.
Take Standard Oil in the early 1900's. In order to limit the ability of their competitors to sell oil, Standard Oil actually bought up key rail lines in order to deny their competition the ability to ship their oil. To get around this, the competing oil companies started packing their oil in barrels that could be flexibly shipped. This is the origin of the barrel of oil, the unit of measurement we still use today. Standard Oil then attempted to foil this strategy by limiting supply of the compound used to seal those barrels. This activity continued until the government broke up the Standard Oil monopoly.
In the above example, the key thing to notice is that Standard Oil's activities to destroy its competition were clearly an attempt to limit the supply of oil to the public, eventually resulting in members of the public paying Standard Oil a price that Standard Oil decided, as opposed to a price that was determined by free and proper competition. This is clearly against the public interest. Only with competition will the activities of these companies ensure that goods will be provided for the lowest possible cost.
In the modern case, I as a consumer would like to buy machines and devices that use alternative energy sources. I know what is technically possible. And I do not want my choice limited because an oligarchy of oil companies decides that the best way to maximize their own short and medium term profits is to delay upgrading their current infrastructure by delaying the introduction of new technologies. These oil companies have invested billions, trillions in drilling rights, refining facilities and transportation infrastructure. They do NOT want to write those investments down as obsolete. They want a return on those investments before the next generation of energy technology appears. And if they have the ability to stop competitors from appearing with new technologies which would make their investments obsolete, then they will do so. They will act to maximize their own short term profits. And the public will be deprived of vital new technologies.
I don't think BP particularly cares about the public interest...
Nor do I. But the free market competitive system is supposed to ensure that companies like BP do act in the public interest. My point is that companies like BP are simply too large to experience anything like the theorized competition put forward by theorists from Adam Smith onwards. BP's caring about the public interest is irrelevant.
This is not Ford buying up the Los Angeles public transport company in order to shut it down and increase the demand for cars.
What the "greed is good" crowd seem to be missing here is that these energy companies are big. Really really big. And as a sector, the oil energy sector dwarfs all other economic sectors. If large players in that sector start to amass patents on technologies that could displace their core business, then will become increasingly able to stifle competition in this field. In other words, they will be increasingly able to decide to sit on those patents if it serves their immediate economic self interest. And the forces that are supposed to guarantee that the self interest of companies overlaps with the common interest of society, namely competitive forces, are made irrelevant by the huge size of these companies. They will become increasingly able to squash/buy-out smaller entrants to the market who might displace them. This is made even worse by the fact that many of these private interests seem to have captured the regulatory and governing systems, the very systems that are suppose to guarantee that the private activity of corporations overlaps with the public interest.
So please don't cry that the poor companies are only doing what they are supposed to do, namely making money, because you are sidestepping the arguments made by many of us who are skeptical of the overlap of the activities of companies like BP and the public interest. You statements sound less like arguments and more like advertising slogans.
Why is no one mentioning perhaps the most promising renewable fuel: Algae Biofuels. The idea is to grow photosynthetic algae in land based salt water tanks. We can engineer the types of algae to be easily refinable into fuel. And we won't need to use vast tracts of arable land since the tanks won't need good soil, nor will we need large amounts of fresh water. The difficulties lie in keeping the algae tanks growing the right organisms. Overall, this could be vastly scalable.
I've seen video of most other major smart phone with a similar "death grip". For example, this video shows a Blackberry Bold with a significant signal loss when held a certain way. Why the hysterics over the iPhone? It feels as if Slashdot is being gamed in a PR campaign.
The first time I remember seeing anti-virus software was on a 1988 Mac Plus (system 6). The software was called "Vaccine"...I remember the icon of it loading at boot up time looked like an hypodermic needle. Of course that was before Apple adopted BSD as the basis for OS X. Security has improved significantly since then.
Exactly. You can't say anything about about NeXT without framing it with OS X. That's because it didn't amount to much until Apple bought them and turned it into OS X. NeXT itself was little more than a tech demo. Cool, but not very useful in of itself.
Sad thing is a lot of the cool stuff NeXT did, like the resolution independence, was lost when Apple dropped the clunky Mac interface on top of it.
Resolution independence was removed to my knowledge because it was based on PostScript. Adobe was charging too much to license it, so Apple removed it.
The headline should read "A poll indicates that Bill Gates may be more admired than the Pope. Polls are based on the often ill-considered responses of a few randomly called individuals. The responders are phoned and then on the spot expected to give answers immediately; they usually haven't given any serious thought or consideration to their responses. Most responders probably respond on a whim. And then we read about those polls and pretend that they actually have serious meaning. I believe that this is deeply irrational.
There you go again talking about OS X. What about NeXT? It's pretty clear you don't know what you're talking about.
To quote Wikipedia (the easiest source to find), though definitely not the only one:
Apple Computer announced an intention to acquire NeXT on December 20, 1996.[2] Apple paid $429 million in cash which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares which went to Steve Jobs. (Steve Jobs was deliberately not given cash for his part in the deal.)[2][44] The main purpose of the acquisition was to use NeXTSTEP as a foundation to replace the dated Mac OS operating system. Apple favoured this option over others which included continuing development of the Copland operating system, or purchasing the Be Operating System (BeOS).[45] Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant in 1997 and then after the 4 July weekend the same year became interim CEO.[46] In 2000 Jobs took the CEO position as a permanent assignment.[47]
Several NeXT executives replaced their Apple counterparts when Steve Jobs restructured the company board of directors. Over the next five years the NeXTSTEP operating system was ported to the PowerPC architecture, and the Intel port and the OpenStep Enterprise toolkit for Windows were kept in sync. The operating systems were code named Rhapsody,[48] while the toolkit for development on all platforms was called "Yellow Box". For backwards compatibility Apple added the "Blue Box" to the Macintosh, allowing existing Mac applications to be run in a self-contained cooperative multitasking environment.[49]
A server version of the new operating system was released as Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, and the first consumer version, Mac OS X 10.0, in 2001. The OpenStep developers toolkit was renamed Cocoa. Rhapsody's Blue Box was renamed Classic Environment. Apple included an updated version of the original Macintosh toolbox that allowed existing Mac applications access to the environment without the constraints of Blue Box called Carbon.[50][51] Some of NeXTSTEP's interface features were used in Mac OS X; these included the Dock, the Services menu, the Finder's 'browser' view, the text system NSText, and system-wide selectors for fonts and colors.
NeXTSTEP's processor-independent capabilities were retained in Mac OS X. Every version was compiled on both PowerPC and Intel x86 architectures, although only PowerPC versions were released to the public until 2006. Apple publicly announced on June 6, 2005 plans to base future systems on Intel processors.[52] The transition to Intel was completed by August 2006. In addition, the iPhone contains a specialized ARM version of OS X. OS X 10.6 does not support the PowerPC, although it will run PowerPC binaries through the Rosetta emulation subsystem.
To quote: "The OpenStep developers toolkit was renamed Cocoa.". To quote: "NeXTSTEP's processor-independent capabilities were retained in Mac OS X." This is a far more close relationship than say, Windows to OS/2. The core of OS X is at code level copied directly from the NeXT operating system.
NeXT IS OS X. Or at least most the important parts made it into OS X. Especially OpenStep. That's why they can drop OS X/iOS onto nearly any type of CPU they want. That's why the transition of OS X from the G4/G5 chips to Intel went so smoothly. The OS is nearly completely abstracted from the hardware. Tech demo indeed.
I always felt that NeXT was overhyped for what it was, and remember it more for Steve Jobs repeatedly asserting how awesome and ahead of its time it was than any actual technical accomplishments. (Which isn't to say it didn't have some technical accomplishments.) Your mileage may vary.
Why do you feel it is overhyped? List details. Give arguments.
Name a system that had a fully vector based display language (PostScript). Name a system that had such a bombproof middleware environment as OpenStep. OS S has been successfully ported to many different types of processor environments. It runs iPhones. It runs iPads. It runs Intel. It ran G4/G5. It runs their new A4 chip. It will run on the new A8 chip in the iPad2. iOS and OS X both come from NeXT. This platform agnostic system originates from OpenStep.
I'd be willing to concede marketing genius.
People keep repeating that, but it doesn't make it true. Take a close look at the technical ins and outs of NeXT computers, which became the basis for OS X, and then tell me that operating system wasn't a stroke of technical genius. It came out seven years before Windows 95, and is the basis for OS X and iOS. It has been ported to numerous types of processors, and runs seamlessly. Windows doesn't have a hope in hell of doing anything like that.
It's because Apple's not based on product, it's based on image. If anything seems like it could even start to threaten that image, people want out before it crashes.
Oh please. Any rational analysis of the history of computing will lead to the conclusion that Jobs is a visionary genius. NeXT created a computer in 1988 that had features that even today's computers don't have. The graphical system was vector based (PostScript), enabling resolution independence. It had an optical drive, years before CD-r existed. It was Unix based. It utilized a middleware framework called OpenStep that allowed an unprecedented degree of platform independence. This system became the basis for OS X. Microsoft didn't even come out with Windows 3.1 until 1992, four years later. Even today, no major OS has resolution independence, and Windows 7 is definitely NOT platform independent. I can think of no other example of a leader leaving such an indelible stamp on a company.
Indeed, the contrast of Mr. Jobs leadership with the rest of corporate America lays bare the fundamental faults of the latter. Corporate America has become beholden to visionless MBA bean counters, who think they can manage a company without underlying knowledge or insight into the business they direct. They treat management as a skill independent of the underlying businesses they manage. They put forward their management principles as unchallengeable "revealed truths". Contrast Mr. Job's leadership with that of Mr. Sculley who replaced him for a time. Sculley was the president of Pepsico before he took over at Apple. What made him think that his experience managing a soft drink company gave him the ability to lead a computer company I have no idea. But his tenure was an unmitigated disaster. Sculley simply had no vision of what computers should be. He had little insight into the difficulties of coding, the importance of good design, or the future developments in information technology.
John Donne, Meditations XVII
Thank you for posting this.