Perhaps you should ACTUALLY READ the article I linked to. That article, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A by Mike Lockwood of Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (ever heard of Rutherford?) discounts ANY significant solar influence on the warming that has occurred since 1980. The article gives data on both absolute energy output, and cosmic ray flux. All of the solar parameters, including cosmic ray flux trend in OPPOSITE DIRECTION NEEDED TO ACCOUNT FOR THE RECENT WARMING. Why don't you read the information I post before trying to unethically disseminate your misinformation.
Brace yourself for a propaganda deluge from climate change denialists now that solar activity IS actually increasing (at least as part of its usual cycle). Never mind that solar activity has trended downwards since 1980, and yet we have experienced the most significant GLOBAL warming since then, including the shocking drop in arctic sea ice this fall. Climate change denialists know no shame.
What's wrong with TV news? They have to sell commercial time, so they air only the most sensational stories. Or the spice real news up to be sensational in order to sell commercial time. What's wrong is they claim to be in the business of providing news when they're really in the business of selling commercial time to advertisers. And the need for many viewers to watch these commercials are the reason for the sensational news.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that our current model for funding TV news by commercials is a commandment written in stone. It is not. If funding TV news by commercials has led to a debasement in the quality of news, then we need to change the funding model. The function of the News Media is to serve the public good by providing the public with an accurate view of reality. Perhaps these media giants should be forced by law, as a condition of their use of the public airwaves to set aside a fixed amount of money to fund the news; that funding should go to a separate and independent organization/department that will gather and report the news. This type of "separation of powers" would almost certainly reduce the kind of corruption I read about in the article.
From this, it seems like there is a growing demand for small scale tablet PC's, like Nokia's model. I wonder how Apple's new oft-rumored ultra-portable will do in this market.
I doubt Vista can thrive on such devices in the near future, because it is such a resource hog, and will thus tend to drain small batteries too quickly. Flexible Unix OS's seem more suitable for these devices. Windows mobile is simply horrendous, and I doubt Microsoft is quick footed enough to adapt its newer generation OS's in time. These small computers are an interesting trend that could perhaps change the playing field for computers.
Personally, I think that the Aptera looks bloody cool, like an airplane. And from what I have read, it is very safe in accidents, thanks to a Formula 1 style cage, and airbags. Has anybody ever seen the kind of crashes that Formula 1 drivers walk away from?
And as the article states, cars to a large extent have not been designed around function, but rather around fashion and fad. The Aptera has been designed first to be aerodynamic, while allowing enough passenger and luggage space. Given the fact that climate change is a serious issue, perhaps we should change our perceptions of what is ugly and what is fashionable to reflect aerodynamics and performance.
Yes. There have been warmer periods in the past, millions of years ago. There have been mass extinction events (some that were possibly caused by volcanic CO2 induced greenhouse warming). There is good evidence that the Permian/Triassic extinction event, about 250 million years ago was caused by carbon dioxide emitted when magma heated a huge coal bed. That event resulted in the extinction of 90%+ marine species...truly apocolyptic. For that matter, 2 billion years ago there was little free oxygen in the atmosphere. About 4.2 billion years ago, the entire Earth's surface was molten.
Human civilization has been existence for less than 10000 years, and homo sapiens have been existence for about 150000 years. It is doubtful that civilization could survive a mass extinction event, much less homo sapiens as a species. Those who put forward the idea that since the past climate has had extremes, our current climate variations are nothing to worry about, really don't have a clue about what the Earth's climate can become. Human civilization has thrived for the last 10000 years because we have been living in a relatively stable climate. We would do well not do disturb that which has made our current civilization possible.
Same here. I've had no problems of any significance. Time Machine is pretty cool. This commentator is completely over the top. I'm sure that there are some problems, but this is not unprecedented in Apple's history. And I seriously doubt that they are widespread.
When Vista first came out, I remember going into the computer store to look at a Vista computer. It was hilarious; there was an ATI error icon in the corner, which when clicked on complained of a critical driver error. This was on a brand new display machine. Several months later, I observed in another computer store that two Vista display laptops were completely frozen. Given that I've only ever examined a small number of Vista machines, the fact that I've seen three faulty ones would, from a statistical point of view indicate an extremely large proportion of crashing Vista systems.
I disagree with you about the narration. I've always thought that the original narration made the movie sound like a cheesy 50's show. You know...queue sound of a rainy city at night..."It rains hard in the city, hard enough to scrub the scum off the broken down sidewalks..." Getting rid of the narration made it far more contemplative, meditative, entrancing.
And as for the "happy ending" shot of them driving through the mountains, it seemed to me that it didn't really belong...it was a Hollywood ending for an otherwise ground breaking film. Good films should leave you thinking. They should not fill in the blanks for you.
Blade Runner has a way of taking me to a different place in they way that few films ever do. I am happy about the plot revisions.
If we want to restrict the emissions of carbon, we need to put a price on it. Period. The price need not be onerous. Say that we went the route of taxing carbon emissions. The tax could be small in the beginning, but there would be a clear promise that the tax would rise in the future (along with a corresponding decrease in income tax). It is the expectation of a higher future price that will cause individuals to buy more efficient cars and houses. If they invest in an efficient car, and in devices to make household heating more efficient, then they will not pay the higher tax rate in the future, because their emissions will have fallen.
If you knew that gasoline prices would rise significantly in the future, would you buy a 10mpg suv? Would you buy a huge suburban house 50 miles from your workplace if you knew that the price of daily commuting would double in 10 years? If you knew heating costs would rise significantly in the future, wouldn't you want to put forth the effort to build an efficient home? Ground-source geothermal heating systems cost $10000 to $20000, and can save 30% or more in heating/cooling costs. Having a tightly sealed/well insulated home with an outside air heat exchanger can also save huge amounts too. In the grand scheme of things, the investments needed to reduce individual carbon emissions are not huge. All we need are the economic incentives to cause such products to become mainstream.
This weapon is designed to work not against invading armies, but against angry citizens. Through most of recent history, governments have been wary of angering their own populations for fear of triggering citizen revolutions. A government cannot effectively use lethal weapons on its own population in any widespread way, because those citizens make the state function. Thus, there are some things that governments simply will not do, because of the risk of a popular uprising.
With weapons like this pain gun, the balance of power is tipped sharply in favor of governments. Governments will be able to use weapons like this against their own people, without creating rebel martyrs. The immediate effects of this gun on an individual are horrible, but temporary. No disfiguring injuries to point to as proof of the government's inhumanity. Just a fleeting moment of pain, that will continue to exist only in a person's memory. These pain guns are a far more effective tool of subjugation than machine guns.
I teach AP Calc, and I bring my Macbook Pro to class. I find the Grapher Utility included with OS X to be really cool. I use it as a quick way to show graphs (one of my favorites is y=xe^(1/x)...slant asymptote and interesting behavior at x=0). I can drag the graphs around, and zoom in and out. This is really useful for showing asymptotic behavior for example. You can also create quick pdf versions of the graphs that can be easily be pasted into other word processing software...this makes test creation a lot easier. The output is quite high quality...far better, and easier than using Excel to graph...yech!
But if you don't have a mac, I have seen some really cool looking software that works with tablet pc's (I've forgotten what it is called). You can write all your notes by hand on the tablet, and they show up just as they would on a white board. But then you can save all of your class notes. This is extremely useful if you have some student come to you and say that they need the class notes because they were sick. I haven't personally used it, so I can't totally vouch for its usability, but it seemed pretty neat at first glance. Be prepared to shell out big bucks for light bulb replacements if you use the projector every day.
I don't have the time to respond in detail, but one thing does stand out for me at first glance. You wrote:
As for the rich getting richer, money does not breed in and of itself. A million dollars left in a bank vault does not become two by black magic. Wealth is only obtained by the production of value, by the application of the mind, and the values produced by those demonized as "the rich" have enriched the lives of the rest of us many times over.
Fair enough, this is often true, but not always. If a son is rich because his father made a fortune and he inherited it, then the son really didn't do much or anything himself to enrich society. He might invest it wisely and perhaps it might double again, but this may largely be a result of him having the ability to pay for an effective investment counselor. Did the son really double the money because of his special abilities. Or did he double the money because he already was already rich. Wouldn't some of the money that the son inherits be better spent educating a brilliant but poor student, who may someday become a successful engineer or scientist?
And also, neoconservatism is about self-interest...the self interest of the rich and powerful.
I believe that the core of neo-conservative ideology is self interest. If you look at the writings of neo-conservative/neo-liberal economists such as Milton Friedman, you will see what I mean. The gist of what they say is that if all individuals are left to make the best decisions for their own self interest, then society will be better off. It is argued that since individuals know their own circumstances best, then they will make the best economic decisions; ideally, it is argued that government should not be making economic decisions for individuals, because government will often make bad decisions. When individuals act to maximize their own personal wealth, the wealth of society will be maximized. Thus, the public interest is best served by individuals acting primarily in their own self-interest (assuming that the public interest != GDP).
And so, they argue that taxes should be minimized/eliminated. Individuals with great talents and abilities should gain all of the benefits of their skills, and not have them taxed away to support weaker segments of society. In other words, the strong should not support the weak, as this weakens society.
As with most ideologies that gain wide following, their is some truth to the above statements. Certain economic decisions are best left to individuals. I would hate to have the government dictating all of my individual consumption...we would have, in essence a totalitarian state. And we should not be aiming for a society where all incomes are the same, as this will encourage rampant mediocrity. However, neoconservatives tend to take the above ideas to extremes. Individual entities in society pursuing their own self interest may seem harmless, but what if an individual person/corporation gains too much power. If there is little or no constraint on individuals or corporations to enrich themselves, then who will ensure that their actions are actually benefiting society? When someone becomes sufficiently rich and powerful, one can use that money and power to bend the rules to enrich oneself further. This is called a monopoly or an oligarchy. And in the end, it seldom serves the public interest
In the ideal neoconservative world, everything will have an individual owner, and there will be little public property. In this world, the power of money will increase. Those who are extremely rich (and there will be few and fewer of such people) will be able to own more and more things. Imagine a world where is little or no public property...private road systems, private parks and rivers. In such a world, the difference between rich and poor will likely increase to pre 1920's levels...think Oliver Twist. The rich will have far more control over the lives of individuals, because the consequences of losing your job will be so high. Imagine being fired and blacklisted for your political views or affiliations. What I am describing here is already happening! And it will continue to happen until the citizenry get sufficiently angry. Democracy is always under threat.
The defining feature of the Bush/Cheney administration, and of neoconservatives in general is the worship of self-interest over the public good. Neoconservatives go through intellectual contortions to delude themselves that self-interest equals the common good. Their entire philosophy seems little more than an excuse to practice selfishness without limits. They preach "small government", when their actual goal is to co-opt government to serve the interests of a small minority of rich and powerful individuals. Neoconservatives are deluded ideologues, focussed too narrowly on questionable economic theories, while becoming completely unaware of the way civilizations actually operate. They are harmful to the public good, and are enemies of democracy itself.
Good riddance to Gonzales. Bush and Cheney should be impeached.
Extreme right wing followers argue that the pure free market will solve "all" of our problems, by increasing the wealth of society. Followers of the extreme left (communism) argue that market forces are evil and should be banished, since they lead to an uneven distribution of wealth in society. Both of these positions are extremist ideologies that have little to do with what happens in the real world.
An ideology is a set of ideas which purports to define how the world works. Examples might include pure free market capitalism, communism, and extremist religious ideologies. They tend to be simplifications, focusing on a limited set of characteristics of the world. They usually outline a series of steps to follow to achieve "salvation"; if we follow the "steps", there might be a period of painful adjustment, but in the end our society will show great improvements.
The problem with ideologies is that their simplistic prescriptions ignore the true complexity of the world. Pure free market capitalism is extremely useful in ensuring that goods and services are properly distributed in a society. However, it does not form the basis for managing a civilization. Free market ideologues promised that in Iraq, the free market would free the suppressed economic potential of the country. These promises ignored the true complexities, the history and culture of Iraq. We see the result today. Soviet communists also ignored complex reality, and their system failed.
Our civilization tends to have a weakness for ideologies. They are seductive and simple prescriptions, promising solutions to our problems. Perhaps it is our laziness, our unwillingness to look the world as it actually is: complex, and difficult to understand. We tend to pick ideologies like we pick sports teams to watch. We root for our own ideologies and boo the opposing ones, without any real thought as to the implications of what we believe. We ignore complexity because it is uncomfortable, because it reminds us of our own limitations in understanding the world. Ideologies promise certainty, while the real world is uncertain. As Voltaire said, "Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd".
So are you saying that people aren't going bankrupt to pay for heart bypass operations or cancer treatments? Are you saying that individuals aren't denied employment because they or someone in their family have an expensive medical condition? Does your not having seen it make it not exist?
The American health care system is hugely inefficient, in part because it devotes huge resources to deciding who to cover and who to deny coverage. Spending large amounts of money to figure out who is likely to get sick makes sense to improve the bottom line of individual companies, but overall it lowers the quality of care for patients by reducing available resources.
I live in Canada. I have quite a bit of experience with our health care system, having an elderly family member with cancer. I can only describe his care as excellent. I spent days in the hospital, and I got to observe in detail what went on there, and I cannot think of anything that could have significantly been improved.
That said, the quality of care has been declining recently. However, this is primarily due to cutbacks instituted by neoconservative leaning governments. They are deliberately starving the public health care system with the eventual goal of creating a parallel private system. The reasons they are doing this are largely ideological, in that they believe the private sector can do no wrong. It also seems likely to me that our government has been bought and paid for by private health care interests.
That said, our system is still quite good. Someone else I know is currently going through cancer treatment, and there isn't much I can see wrong with her care. Because her treatment was urgent, she didn't have to wait very long for her chemotherapy. But what is perhaps more important is that the treatment was received without fear of bankruptcy. We don't fear losing our coverage here. We don't wonder whether or not our claim will go through. We simply show up to the doctor or hospital and receive our care.
With the release of Sicko, be prepared to be deluged by propaganda against public health care. There is just too much money to be lost by the private health care industry for them to give up in this battle. Although Michael Moore tends towards bombast and exaggeration, his basic thesis is correct. The American health care system is deeply flawed, and other countries do a far better job of caring for their citizens.
Neo-conservatives drove America into Iraq in the hope that they would create a new democracy in Iraq that would inspire other Arab citizens in the region to overthrow their tyrannical governments and establish western style democracies with western style "free markets". I think that most neo-conservatives, including Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Feith actually believed this. I really do. And if they did believe these things, then it shows something truly scary about them, that they are profoundly detached from reality.
I remember hearing numerous neo-conservative opinion pieces before the war that promised that Americans would be welcomed in Iraq, and that the power of the free market would unlock Iraq's economy and change it into a modern democracy. However, any reasonably intelligent citizen with some knowledge of Iraq would realize that it was a repressive regime run by the Sunnis (20% of the population) which ruled over the Shiites and the Kurds (80% of the population). If you remove the Sunnis from power, then it is likely that the Shiites and Kurds would seek revenge. And it is easy to predict that the Sunnis, who have little oil in their normal territory, would be fearful of losing power, and would use their considerable military might to prevent the Shiites and the Kurds from gaining power in a stable country. This really should have been obvious to any informed person. Why then was it not obvious to the neo-conservatives?
I would argue that these "oversights" indicate that the neo-conservatives are like members of a cult, obsessed with their groups set of ideas to the exclusion of reality. They truly believe that market forces will solve the worlds problems, while at the same time making them wealthy. They believe that being selfish also serves the interests of society best. While there is some amount of truth to this assumption, overall it is not true.
Neo-conservatives live in their own isolated world, where they only hear the opinions of other neo-conservatives. They reinforce each others' views, increasing their certainties of their own world views. They live in a world of balance sheets, of profits and losses, of money. They rely more on profit margins than on real world facts to make their decisions. They ascribe almost mystical meaning to profits, believing that increasing profits always increase the well-being of society. They are extremists who take academic fields like econometrics from being merely utilitarian to being the sole means of managing a society. God help us if they gain complete power.
I've had similar problems with build 3188 on my Macbook Pro. For a while it was fine, but then the VM became flaky, and I was getting spooky memory access errors in XP. I went back to an earlier build, and it seems to work fine. It seemed like the company was adding features at an extremely rapid rate. I wonder if this was the cause of the instability that I experienced.
I wonder if one day there will be higher level tools to help programmers accomplish this. Programmers seldom work in assembler code, because such low level tasks are taken care of by the compiler. Why can we not have similar tools for optimizing parallel programming? It seems to me that this kind of complexity is best handled by a computer.
Selfishness seems to have become the core value of America right now. The measure of all actions is self interest. Individuals and corporations are encouraged to act solely in their own self interest, for that, we are told is the best way to ensure the common interest. While there is some truth to this, overall it is dangerous delusion. We are all part of a larger civilization, and the fate of that civilization effects all of us.
Climate change is an issue that will effect all of us. And no matter how many deluded denials there are, no matter how loud those deluded denials are shouted, no matter much we look away from the unpleasant truth, the laws of physics remain. No matter the slippery and reassuring words of oil industry funded public relations people, the landslide of data supporting the predictions of climate scientists will remain.
Reducing carbon emissions is highly likely to cause great harm to corporations whose main income comes from oil extraction. Thus we see many of these oil interests working hard to prevent any effective reduction in carbon emissions. After all, it's just self interest. If you were facing the loss of billions and billions of dollars, wouldn't you be fighting it? Except that the oil companies' profits are coming at the expense of the future of our civilization. I believe that unless we as a society overcome our obsession with pure self interest, our civilization will enter a period of profound decline. Is that really in our best interest?
I would make the argument that significant change in an ecosystem will usually be bad for the dominant species that have adapted to live in that ecosystem. Change can of course give opportunities to other species that have struggled to live in an ecosystem. The obvious examples are the past mass extinctions, especially the one that gave rise to the dinosaurs, as well as the one that destroyed the dinosaurs and gave rise to mammals.
Significant change destroys. It destroys existing systems. It plays havoc on most species. It creates starvation for species that have grown to need the existing systems that are being swept away. Of course, this allows new species to rise and fill the vacuum. Change is the prime driver of evolution. Evolution works at its fastest when there is mass death and destruction.
And today, we are the dominant species on the Earth. The agricultural systems that we rely on are built on our current climatic conditions. Farms are located in certain places that have the perfect combinations of good soil, and good weather. Too much rain, or too little, or rain at the wrong time can destroy crops. If the rain moves from an area with good soil to an area with bad soil, then this will reduce crop yields, even if our farmers follow the rain. Moving the water by canal or pipeline is an option, but it is expensive (how much did the Panama Canal cost to build?).
I can think of no better an example of the problems of climate change than the Australian drought. Australia has already lost 1% of its GDP due to drought conditions. And without significant rain in the coming weeks, the country faces draconian water restrictions: Brisbane is at stage 5 water restrictions right now, which effectively means flushing the toilet every 7 uses and keeping shower water in a bucket for later use. Agriculture along the Murray Darling River (the main agricultural river system) faces a complete cutoff of irrigation. That means the death of the many grape vines that form the basis for Australia's wine industry.
Here is a map that shows how rainfall patterns have changed. The interior (where no one lives) is receiving more rain. The coasts (where almost everyone lives) are receiving less rain. The rainfall patterns have changed, and the Australians are struggling to adapt to the new conditions.
I think it is quite likely that carbon fiber could become an affordable building material. What we need is to create mass production techniques for the material. Currently, high end carbon fiber race cars are built by hand. I believe that there has already been progress on this front.
Boeing is building its new 787 out of carbon fiber, using a type of mass production technique. Also, I recently heard of a company named Fiberforge that seems to have the beginnings of viable mass production techniques. Their method is to first lay the fibers in the proper directions using something akin to ink-jet printing, and then apply the resins. Once they have made the sheet, they use heat and pressure to form the sheets into various shapes. I saw a sample object, with the shape of a hollow hemisphere. When you tapped on the hemisphere, it made a sound like a metal bell.
Carbon fiber cars have the potential to be far safer than steel cars. With the right engineering, we should be able to make cars that crumple in the optimal way during a crash. With the above production techniques, we should be able to modulate the thickness and strength over different areas of various car components to achieve a high level of occupant protection. It is simply a matter of good engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should ACTUALLY READ the article I linked to. That article, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A by Mike Lockwood of Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (ever heard of Rutherford?) discounts ANY significant solar influence on the warming that has occurred since 1980. The article gives data on both absolute energy output, and cosmic ray flux. All of the solar parameters, including cosmic ray flux trend in OPPOSITE DIRECTION NEEDED TO ACCOUNT FOR THE RECENT WARMING. Why don't you read the information I post before trying to unethically disseminate your misinformation.
Brace yourself for a propaganda deluge from climate change denialists now that solar activity IS actually increasing (at least as part of its usual cycle). Never mind that solar activity has trended downwards since 1980, and yet we have experienced the most significant GLOBAL warming since then, including the shocking drop in arctic sea ice this fall. Climate change denialists know no shame.
Wasn't that a Simpsons Halloween episode a few years ago?
You seem to be operating under the assumption that our current model for funding TV news by commercials is a commandment written in stone. It is not. If funding TV news by commercials has led to a debasement in the quality of news, then we need to change the funding model. The function of the News Media is to serve the public good by providing the public with an accurate view of reality. Perhaps these media giants should be forced by law, as a condition of their use of the public airwaves to set aside a fixed amount of money to fund the news; that funding should go to a separate and independent organization/department that will gather and report the news. This type of "separation of powers" would almost certainly reduce the kind of corruption I read about in the article.
From this, it seems like there is a growing demand for small scale tablet PC's, like Nokia's model. I wonder how Apple's new oft-rumored ultra-portable will do in this market.
I doubt Vista can thrive on such devices in the near future, because it is such a resource hog, and will thus tend to drain small batteries too quickly. Flexible Unix OS's seem more suitable for these devices. Windows mobile is simply horrendous, and I doubt Microsoft is quick footed enough to adapt its newer generation OS's in time. These small computers are an interesting trend that could perhaps change the playing field for computers.
Alexander Graham Bell was the Bill Gates of his time.
Personally, I think that the Aptera looks bloody cool, like an airplane. And from what I have read, it is very safe in accidents, thanks to a Formula 1 style cage, and airbags. Has anybody ever seen the kind of crashes that Formula 1 drivers walk away from?
And as the article states, cars to a large extent have not been designed around function, but rather around fashion and fad. The Aptera has been designed first to be aerodynamic, while allowing enough passenger and luggage space. Given the fact that climate change is a serious issue, perhaps we should change our perceptions of what is ugly and what is fashionable to reflect aerodynamics and performance.
Yes. There have been warmer periods in the past, millions of years ago. There have been mass extinction events (some that were possibly caused by volcanic CO2 induced greenhouse warming). There is good evidence that the Permian/Triassic extinction event, about 250 million years ago was caused by carbon dioxide emitted when magma heated a huge coal bed. That event resulted in the extinction of 90%+ marine species...truly apocolyptic. For that matter, 2 billion years ago there was little free oxygen in the atmosphere. About 4.2 billion years ago, the entire Earth's surface was molten.
Human civilization has been existence for less than 10000 years, and homo sapiens have been existence for about 150000 years. It is doubtful that civilization could survive a mass extinction event, much less homo sapiens as a species. Those who put forward the idea that since the past climate has had extremes, our current climate variations are nothing to worry about, really don't have a clue about what the Earth's climate can become. Human civilization has thrived for the last 10000 years because we have been living in a relatively stable climate. We would do well not do disturb that which has made our current civilization possible.
Same here. I've had no problems of any significance. Time Machine is pretty cool. This commentator is completely over the top. I'm sure that there are some problems, but this is not unprecedented in Apple's history. And I seriously doubt that they are widespread.
When Vista first came out, I remember going into the computer store to look at a Vista computer. It was hilarious; there was an ATI error icon in the corner, which when clicked on complained of a critical driver error. This was on a brand new display machine. Several months later, I observed in another computer store that two Vista display laptops were completely frozen. Given that I've only ever examined a small number of Vista machines, the fact that I've seen three faulty ones would, from a statistical point of view indicate an extremely large proportion of crashing Vista systems.
I disagree with you about the narration. I've always thought that the original narration made the movie sound like a cheesy 50's show. You know...queue sound of a rainy city at night..."It rains hard in the city, hard enough to scrub the scum off the broken down sidewalks..." Getting rid of the narration made it far more contemplative, meditative, entrancing.
And as for the "happy ending" shot of them driving through the mountains, it seemed to me that it didn't really belong...it was a Hollywood ending for an otherwise ground breaking film. Good films should leave you thinking. They should not fill in the blanks for you.
Blade Runner has a way of taking me to a different place in they way that few films ever do. I am happy about the plot revisions.
If we want to restrict the emissions of carbon, we need to put a price on it. Period. The price need not be onerous. Say that we went the route of taxing carbon emissions. The tax could be small in the beginning, but there would be a clear promise that the tax would rise in the future (along with a corresponding decrease in income tax). It is the expectation of a higher future price that will cause individuals to buy more efficient cars and houses. If they invest in an efficient car, and in devices to make household heating more efficient, then they will not pay the higher tax rate in the future, because their emissions will have fallen.
If you knew that gasoline prices would rise significantly in the future, would you buy a 10mpg suv? Would you buy a huge suburban house 50 miles from your workplace if you knew that the price of daily commuting would double in 10 years? If you knew heating costs would rise significantly in the future, wouldn't you want to put forth the effort to build an efficient home? Ground-source geothermal heating systems cost $10000 to $20000, and can save 30% or more in heating/cooling costs. Having a tightly sealed/well insulated home with an outside air heat exchanger can also save huge amounts too. In the grand scheme of things, the investments needed to reduce individual carbon emissions are not huge. All we need are the economic incentives to cause such products to become mainstream.
This weapon is designed to work not against invading armies, but against angry citizens. Through most of recent history, governments have been wary of angering their own populations for fear of triggering citizen revolutions. A government cannot effectively use lethal weapons on its own population in any widespread way, because those citizens make the state function. Thus, there are some things that governments simply will not do, because of the risk of a popular uprising.
With weapons like this pain gun, the balance of power is tipped sharply in favor of governments. Governments will be able to use weapons like this against their own people, without creating rebel martyrs. The immediate effects of this gun on an individual are horrible, but temporary. No disfiguring injuries to point to as proof of the government's inhumanity. Just a fleeting moment of pain, that will continue to exist only in a person's memory. These pain guns are a far more effective tool of subjugation than machine guns.
I teach AP Calc, and I bring my Macbook Pro to class. I find the Grapher Utility included with OS X to be really cool. I use it as a quick way to show graphs (one of my favorites is y=xe^(1/x)...slant asymptote and interesting behavior at x=0). I can drag the graphs around, and zoom in and out. This is really useful for showing asymptotic behavior for example. You can also create quick pdf versions of the graphs that can be easily be pasted into other word processing software...this makes test creation a lot easier. The output is quite high quality...far better, and easier than using Excel to graph...yech!
But if you don't have a mac, I have seen some really cool looking software that works with tablet pc's (I've forgotten what it is called). You can write all your notes by hand on the tablet, and they show up just as they would on a white board. But then you can save all of your class notes. This is extremely useful if you have some student come to you and say that they need the class notes because they were sick. I haven't personally used it, so I can't totally vouch for its usability, but it seemed pretty neat at first glance. Be prepared to shell out big bucks for light bulb replacements if you use the projector every day.
I don't have the time to respond in detail, but one thing does stand out for me at first glance. You wrote:
Fair enough, this is often true, but not always. If a son is rich because his father made a fortune and he inherited it, then the son really didn't do much or anything himself to enrich society. He might invest it wisely and perhaps it might double again, but this may largely be a result of him having the ability to pay for an effective investment counselor. Did the son really double the money because of his special abilities. Or did he double the money because he already was already rich. Wouldn't some of the money that the son inherits be better spent educating a brilliant but poor student, who may someday become a successful engineer or scientist?
And also, neoconservatism is about self-interest...the self interest of the rich and powerful.
I believe that the core of neo-conservative ideology is self interest. If you look at the writings of neo-conservative/neo-liberal economists such as Milton Friedman, you will see what I mean. The gist of what they say is that if all individuals are left to make the best decisions for their own self interest, then society will be better off. It is argued that since individuals know their own circumstances best, then they will make the best economic decisions; ideally, it is argued that government should not be making economic decisions for individuals, because government will often make bad decisions. When individuals act to maximize their own personal wealth, the wealth of society will be maximized. Thus, the public interest is best served by individuals acting primarily in their own self-interest (assuming that the public interest != GDP).
And so, they argue that taxes should be minimized/eliminated. Individuals with great talents and abilities should gain all of the benefits of their skills, and not have them taxed away to support weaker segments of society. In other words, the strong should not support the weak, as this weakens society.
As with most ideologies that gain wide following, their is some truth to the above statements. Certain economic decisions are best left to individuals. I would hate to have the government dictating all of my individual consumption...we would have, in essence a totalitarian state. And we should not be aiming for a society where all incomes are the same, as this will encourage rampant mediocrity. However, neoconservatives tend to take the above ideas to extremes. Individual entities in society pursuing their own self interest may seem harmless, but what if an individual person/corporation gains too much power. If there is little or no constraint on individuals or corporations to enrich themselves, then who will ensure that their actions are actually benefiting society? When someone becomes sufficiently rich and powerful, one can use that money and power to bend the rules to enrich oneself further. This is called a monopoly or an oligarchy. And in the end, it seldom serves the public interest
In the ideal neoconservative world, everything will have an individual owner, and there will be little public property. In this world, the power of money will increase. Those who are extremely rich (and there will be few and fewer of such people) will be able to own more and more things. Imagine a world where is little or no public property...private road systems, private parks and rivers. In such a world, the difference between rich and poor will likely increase to pre 1920's levels...think Oliver Twist. The rich will have far more control over the lives of individuals, because the consequences of losing your job will be so high. Imagine being fired and blacklisted for your political views or affiliations. What I am describing here is already happening! And it will continue to happen until the citizenry get sufficiently angry. Democracy is always under threat.
The defining feature of the Bush/Cheney administration, and of neoconservatives in general is the worship of self-interest over the public good. Neoconservatives go through intellectual contortions to delude themselves that self-interest equals the common good. Their entire philosophy seems little more than an excuse to practice selfishness without limits. They preach "small government", when their actual goal is to co-opt government to serve the interests of a small minority of rich and powerful individuals. Neoconservatives are deluded ideologues, focussed too narrowly on questionable economic theories, while becoming completely unaware of the way civilizations actually operate. They are harmful to the public good, and are enemies of democracy itself.
Good riddance to Gonzales. Bush and Cheney should be impeached.
Extreme right wing followers argue that the pure free market will solve "all" of our problems, by increasing the wealth of society. Followers of the extreme left (communism) argue that market forces are evil and should be banished, since they lead to an uneven distribution of wealth in society. Both of these positions are extremist ideologies that have little to do with what happens in the real world.
An ideology is a set of ideas which purports to define how the world works. Examples might include pure free market capitalism, communism, and extremist religious ideologies. They tend to be simplifications, focusing on a limited set of characteristics of the world. They usually outline a series of steps to follow to achieve "salvation"; if we follow the "steps", there might be a period of painful adjustment, but in the end our society will show great improvements.
The problem with ideologies is that their simplistic prescriptions ignore the true complexity of the world. Pure free market capitalism is extremely useful in ensuring that goods and services are properly distributed in a society. However, it does not form the basis for managing a civilization. Free market ideologues promised that in Iraq, the free market would free the suppressed economic potential of the country. These promises ignored the true complexities, the history and culture of Iraq. We see the result today. Soviet communists also ignored complex reality, and their system failed.
Our civilization tends to have a weakness for ideologies. They are seductive and simple prescriptions, promising solutions to our problems. Perhaps it is our laziness, our unwillingness to look the world as it actually is: complex, and difficult to understand. We tend to pick ideologies like we pick sports teams to watch. We root for our own ideologies and boo the opposing ones, without any real thought as to the implications of what we believe. We ignore complexity because it is uncomfortable, because it reminds us of our own limitations in understanding the world. Ideologies promise certainty, while the real world is uncertain. As Voltaire said, "Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd".
So are you saying that people aren't going bankrupt to pay for heart bypass operations or cancer treatments? Are you saying that individuals aren't denied employment because they or someone in their family have an expensive medical condition? Does your not having seen it make it not exist?
The American health care system is hugely inefficient, in part because it devotes huge resources to deciding who to cover and who to deny coverage. Spending large amounts of money to figure out who is likely to get sick makes sense to improve the bottom line of individual companies, but overall it lowers the quality of care for patients by reducing available resources.
I live in Canada. I have quite a bit of experience with our health care system, having an elderly family member with cancer. I can only describe his care as excellent. I spent days in the hospital, and I got to observe in detail what went on there, and I cannot think of anything that could have significantly been improved.
That said, the quality of care has been declining recently. However, this is primarily due to cutbacks instituted by neoconservative leaning governments. They are deliberately starving the public health care system with the eventual goal of creating a parallel private system. The reasons they are doing this are largely ideological, in that they believe the private sector can do no wrong. It also seems likely to me that our government has been bought and paid for by private health care interests.
That said, our system is still quite good. Someone else I know is currently going through cancer treatment, and there isn't much I can see wrong with her care. Because her treatment was urgent, she didn't have to wait very long for her chemotherapy. But what is perhaps more important is that the treatment was received without fear of bankruptcy. We don't fear losing our coverage here. We don't wonder whether or not our claim will go through. We simply show up to the doctor or hospital and receive our care.
With the release of Sicko, be prepared to be deluged by propaganda against public health care. There is just too much money to be lost by the private health care industry for them to give up in this battle. Although Michael Moore tends towards bombast and exaggeration, his basic thesis is correct. The American health care system is deeply flawed, and other countries do a far better job of caring for their citizens.
Neo-conservatives drove America into Iraq in the hope that they would create a new democracy in Iraq that would inspire other Arab citizens in the region to overthrow their tyrannical governments and establish western style democracies with western style "free markets". I think that most neo-conservatives, including Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Feith actually believed this. I really do. And if they did believe these things, then it shows something truly scary about them, that they are profoundly detached from reality.
I remember hearing numerous neo-conservative opinion pieces before the war that promised that Americans would be welcomed in Iraq, and that the power of the free market would unlock Iraq's economy and change it into a modern democracy. However, any reasonably intelligent citizen with some knowledge of Iraq would realize that it was a repressive regime run by the Sunnis (20% of the population) which ruled over the Shiites and the Kurds (80% of the population). If you remove the Sunnis from power, then it is likely that the Shiites and Kurds would seek revenge. And it is easy to predict that the Sunnis, who have little oil in their normal territory, would be fearful of losing power, and would use their considerable military might to prevent the Shiites and the Kurds from gaining power in a stable country. This really should have been obvious to any informed person. Why then was it not obvious to the neo-conservatives?
I would argue that these "oversights" indicate that the neo-conservatives are like members of a cult, obsessed with their groups set of ideas to the exclusion of reality. They truly believe that market forces will solve the worlds problems, while at the same time making them wealthy. They believe that being selfish also serves the interests of society best. While there is some amount of truth to this assumption, overall it is not true.
Neo-conservatives live in their own isolated world, where they only hear the opinions of other neo-conservatives. They reinforce each others' views, increasing their certainties of their own world views. They live in a world of balance sheets, of profits and losses, of money. They rely more on profit margins than on real world facts to make their decisions. They ascribe almost mystical meaning to profits, believing that increasing profits always increase the well-being of society. They are extremists who take academic fields like econometrics from being merely utilitarian to being the sole means of managing a society. God help us if they gain complete power.
I've had similar problems with build 3188 on my Macbook Pro. For a while it was fine, but then the VM became flaky, and I was getting spooky memory access errors in XP. I went back to an earlier build, and it seems to work fine. It seemed like the company was adding features at an extremely rapid rate. I wonder if this was the cause of the instability that I experienced.
I wonder if one day there will be higher level tools to help programmers accomplish this. Programmers seldom work in assembler code, because such low level tasks are taken care of by the compiler. Why can we not have similar tools for optimizing parallel programming? It seems to me that this kind of complexity is best handled by a computer.
Selfishness seems to have become the core value of America right now. The measure of all actions is self interest. Individuals and corporations are encouraged to act solely in their own self interest, for that, we are told is the best way to ensure the common interest. While there is some truth to this, overall it is dangerous delusion. We are all part of a larger civilization, and the fate of that civilization effects all of us.
Climate change is an issue that will effect all of us. And no matter how many deluded denials there are, no matter how loud those deluded denials are shouted, no matter much we look away from the unpleasant truth, the laws of physics remain. No matter the slippery and reassuring words of oil industry funded public relations people, the landslide of data supporting the predictions of climate scientists will remain.
Reducing carbon emissions is highly likely to cause great harm to corporations whose main income comes from oil extraction. Thus we see many of these oil interests working hard to prevent any effective reduction in carbon emissions. After all, it's just self interest. If you were facing the loss of billions and billions of dollars, wouldn't you be fighting it? Except that the oil companies' profits are coming at the expense of the future of our civilization. I believe that unless we as a society overcome our obsession with pure self interest, our civilization will enter a period of profound decline. Is that really in our best interest?
I would make the argument that significant change in an ecosystem will usually be bad for the dominant species that have adapted to live in that ecosystem. Change can of course give opportunities to other species that have struggled to live in an ecosystem. The obvious examples are the past mass extinctions, especially the one that gave rise to the dinosaurs, as well as the one that destroyed the dinosaurs and gave rise to mammals.
Significant change destroys. It destroys existing systems. It plays havoc on most species. It creates starvation for species that have grown to need the existing systems that are being swept away. Of course, this allows new species to rise and fill the vacuum. Change is the prime driver of evolution. Evolution works at its fastest when there is mass death and destruction.
And today, we are the dominant species on the Earth. The agricultural systems that we rely on are built on our current climatic conditions. Farms are located in certain places that have the perfect combinations of good soil, and good weather. Too much rain, or too little, or rain at the wrong time can destroy crops. If the rain moves from an area with good soil to an area with bad soil, then this will reduce crop yields, even if our farmers follow the rain. Moving the water by canal or pipeline is an option, but it is expensive (how much did the Panama Canal cost to build?).
I can think of no better an example of the problems of climate change than the Australian drought. Australia has already lost 1% of its GDP due to drought conditions. And without significant rain in the coming weeks, the country faces draconian water restrictions: Brisbane is at stage 5 water restrictions right now, which effectively means flushing the toilet every 7 uses and keeping shower water in a bucket for later use. Agriculture along the Murray Darling River (the main agricultural river system) faces a complete cutoff of irrigation. That means the death of the many grape vines that form the basis for Australia's wine industry.
Here is a map that shows how rainfall patterns have changed. The interior (where no one lives) is receiving more rain. The coasts (where almost everyone lives) are receiving less rain. The rainfall patterns have changed, and the Australians are struggling to adapt to the new conditions.
I think it is quite likely that carbon fiber could become an affordable building material. What we need is to create mass production techniques for the material. Currently, high end carbon fiber race cars are built by hand. I believe that there has already been progress on this front.
Boeing is building its new 787 out of carbon fiber, using a type of mass production technique. Also, I recently heard of a company named Fiberforge that seems to have the beginnings of viable mass production techniques. Their method is to first lay the fibers in the proper directions using something akin to ink-jet printing, and then apply the resins. Once they have made the sheet, they use heat and pressure to form the sheets into various shapes. I saw a sample object, with the shape of a hollow hemisphere. When you tapped on the hemisphere, it made a sound like a metal bell.
Carbon fiber cars have the potential to be far safer than steel cars. With the right engineering, we should be able to make cars that crumple in the optimal way during a crash. With the above production techniques, we should be able to modulate the thickness and strength over different areas of various car components to achieve a high level of occupant protection. It is simply a matter of good engineering.