Why are these fire crews needed at all? Surely towns in areas that burn should expect major fires to come. Houses in remote areas of the west should expect to burn to the ground periodically.
I understand that we have a temporary problem of over-accumulation of dead wood and brush because of the last hundred years of fire suppression. Does this mean that we need logging roads through every bit of vegetated land in the west?
I've been using NetBSD 1.5.X for my workstation for about 18 months, and it's been great. Other than lpd, everything has been bulletproof. Previously, I ran Debian, and had periodic troubles with NFS and with ypbind, particularly when the LAN was flaky. No such problems with NetBSD.
While I'm at it, I'll plug gmane as well -- it's a lurker's delight!
Public buses are dirty, uncomfortable, take too long, and are filled with people you don't want to be around.
When you see people on the bus, it is harder to pretend they don't exist. I think having everyone driving around in their own car is a barrier to empathy.
Instead of fixing up the car, modify your life by getting rid of it entirely. You will learn patience and calm as you wait for the bus. Seriously! You will also be able to read more. Less stress, more thought, all good! No simulation needed!
I think a better example is threads, where Linux has has a rather odd implementation, and NetBSD has no kernel support. When SA lands, it'll be good, and in the meantime . . . well . . . nobody is forcing you to use the system.:)
I think it's also good to point out that many people seem to do fine running -current, which releases as often as you want.
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as ``piracy.'' In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnaping and murdering the people on them.
If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnaping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word ``piracy'' to describe it. Neutral terms such as ``prohibited copying'' or ``unauthorized copying'' are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as ``sharing information with your neighbor.''
Do you actually care about other people at all? I'm just trying to figure out where you're coming from here.
About my education -- I am quite well educated, thank you. Unlike many people, however, I don't accept mainstream economics uncritically.
About redistribution schemes -- if you haven't noticed, societies with *no* redistribution schemes, and private capitalism, tend to extreme inequality, which breeds revolution. The 19th century has plenty of examples of this in Europe. And FDR's New Deal was a (somewhat successful) attempt to ameliorate the Depression so that the starving masses would not simply overthrow the government.
I don't at all see how a welfare state is doomed. The people who predict the collapse of SS ignore the fact that allocating a bit more money to SS would close up the projected funding gap. Those people are also the same people who advocate dumping the SS funds into the stock market, so that their friends can make lots of money on the commissions.
As far as what has worked in the past, I don't see how you addressed my point. I did not defend command economies (they have obviously failed), nor did I attack the existence of money or prices. The possibility I raise is that production could be controlled democratically, from the bottom up, rather than from the top down (the top being either the state or the private owners). You reject out of hand any possibility that we could build something better than the current situation. I ask again that you read a bit about the Spanish Revolution. For a brief time at least (~2 years), the workers really did control the whole apparatus of the economy, and from what I've read it worked quite well. Again, I'm not suggesting that I have all the answers -- just that something better than the current situation may be possible.
Also, when considering what has worked in the past, you also need to keep in mind the context that various nasty people (the Fascists w.r.t Spain, the CIA w.r.t. Chile in 1973 and democracies all over the Third World over the last 50 years, the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution) have been working to destroy anything that looked like bottom-up control of the system.
About the climate -- yes, the question is how stable the system is. We don't know. We have good reason to believe it is not stable, given its erratic behavior in the past. For instance, the Little Ice Age in Europe -- the theory is that it was caused by a change in the Gulf Stream, so that northern Europe was temporarily not warmed by the ocean as much. Given that these things happen spontaneously, I think it's a dubious assertion that the system is stable.
But, like you said, we can't know for sure how stable the system is. So what do we do? Hope for the best, full steam ahead? Or be careful?
But the global warming movement is predicated on the position that we *do* understand the system.
The idea that humans may be affecting the climate is based on the imperfect knowledge we have about the world. The question is how to act in the presence of uncertainty: to plunge blindly ahead with our experiment, or to back off? To plunge ahead with possibly horrid results seems very irresponsible to me.
why would we ever lower production when we have people dying for the lack of production?
The problem is not with production. The world produces enough food for everyone; the problem is that much of it goes to feed animals which are later eaten by overfed first-worlders. That step of the process loses about a factor of ten in food energy. The reason people are dying is that those who *have* food just don't care about those who *don't* -- mostly because there is no money to be made in feeding them. Likewise with medicine. It doesn't cost that much to manufacture most medicines after they have been developed. The US is pushing every country in the world to honor US drug patents so that Merck & co. will have ever-increasing margins, and never you mind all those dying people. Public sanitation (clean water systems, proper sewage management, etc.) is more expensive to set up, but hardly beyond the means of our technology. All that is lacking is will. The current economic/political system is building weapons, cars, action figures, etc. instead.
From your comments on equal distribution it's clear that you haven't studied the real, practical, and very destructive effects of government monkeying around with distribution systems.
Ah, you must be referring to Social Security, unemployment benefits, progressive taxation, and so on.
Traditional food exporters tend to become food importers when markets are destroyed and replaced by 'equal distribution' via government.
I am not arguing for a command (aka state capitalist) economy a la the USSR. I have no more desire to go to the gulag than you do. Besides, such systems didn't really lead to equality, because control of the system is still in the hands of an elite. Perhaps you are not familiar with what happened in Catalonia in the late 30's: the farmers collectivized themselves, and got along spendidly. They produced plenty of food -- unfortunately, much of it went to feed the militiamen who were fighting the Fascists.
Private control of the means of production and distribution via contract, not ration coupon, lead to abundance.
Abundance for some, definitely. I'm getting along quite well. Unfortunately, those less highly valued by those Private Controllers end up in bad shape.
The problem is where governments steal so much that the people have no money and that is something that doesn't get solved by abolishing the free market.
You really believe that people are evil enough to have no desire to help their fellow humans? Even if you think that is so, must it be so? Or could it be that there is something self-fulfilling about the "humans as selfish automatons" economists' model?
What I'm suggesting is that greater equality of distribution is possible without the coercion of an all-powerful state.
Until we, as a society, figure out how to make a functioning market in pollution rights...
Why the obsession with markets? Do you really think it is always appropriate for the richest person to get his way? Could it be that people in poor areas are just as deserving of healthy surroundings as people in rich areas?
If we were to deploy machines to remove 100% of the CO2 from the atmosphere, we would have huge plant kills downwind of the facilities.
Which is exactly the sort of thing I'm arguing against. I would prefer that we avoid a crisis situation that would require technological "fixes." Plunging ahead with risky alterations of natural systems implies either: a) total disregard for future events, or b) faith that people in the future will be able to fix anything that goes wrong because of our current actions.
The easy pollution gains have largely been made. In the 1st world, we're spending more and more to get incrementally less gain. That's not a very good use of resources.
This is the first thing you've said that sounds at all sensible to me. I agree that there is an important tactical issue w.r.t. fixing problems in the first world or in the third world. Keep in mind, though, that *everyone* will need to eventually adopt the conservative approach if we are to avoid natural crises later. Who will figure out how to do this, if not the richest areas?
As for the business cycle, the free market maybe gets production levels right 60% of the time.
Right according to whose measurement? From what I see, it looks like rampant overproduction for my entire lifetime. Why else would we need to be constantly bombarded by adverts imploring us to consume ever more? The soda companies are trying to get everyone to stop drinking tap water so that they can make a few more bucks -- but all that soda is just wasted productive capacity!
But government led alternative systems get it right maybe 20% of the time.
I assume here you are referring to command economies. Where did you get your 20% number from? The USSR glorified production over all else, mangling their land even worse than US-aligned countries. Of course the *nature* of the production was largely military, and so didn't help provide people with the comforts that those in the US enjoyed.
So should we sacrifice the not so good for the truly pathetic?
Not at all. We should avoid totalitarian governments at all costs. If you haven't noticed, the US and China are sort of converging on a private capitalist/repressive police state arrangement that, as far as I can see, combines the worst of both systems.
What I hope for is not either of the options you have presented, but instead for real democratic control of the economic/political system. I think there is much to learn from the Spanish Revolution. How to apply those ideas to the more complex and far-flung economic arrangements of today is a difficult question, but I think an important one.
Given that we don't understand the system, we should be careful with it. We do understand what goes into and comes out of a factory, and we do know how to do things in such a way that the factory blends in nicely with existing natural processes. We can simply avoid doing things that might or might not be dangerous, such as massively increasing the CO2 levels, or spewing dioxins into the water system, or nuking everything in sight with pesticides, nitrates, nad phosphates.
This sort of approach would involve much lower levels of production, but we can deal with that by distributing the results more equally, and by discouraging conspicuous consumption. Just think about all the stuff that gets produced that nobody really needs.
This is not a bad joke -- if anything, surely massively overproducing (notice the current recession) while poisoning our streams (witness collapsing amphibian populations) and pumping our aquifers dry (over much the midwest) is more of a tragic comedy.
I can't believe how many people have this attitude about environmental pollution! I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person can fail to see that preventative maintenance (i.e., reducing emissions at the source) is a fundamentally safer way to insure that we don't continue down the spiralling path of the gradual destruction of our planet's ecosystem.
EXACTLY! Thank you for being sane! dbrutus and friends put the burden of proof in the wrong place -- people who want to alter these systems that we depend on should be the ones proving those alterations safe.
That book sucks big time. My favorite bit was about how widespread ownership of mutual funds provides democratic control over the behavior of corporations. As if the majority of Americans were big-time stockholders! They are slowly drowning in credit card debt, not piling up the winnings on E*Trade.
Friedman has been doing more than his share of hate-mongering (remember his "World War Three" columns right after 9/11?), and been doing it from a position that many consider (foolishly) to be one of authority -- the front page of the NYT. The ability of individuals to communicate directly threatens his ability to mislead us.
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Why are these fire crews needed at all? Surely towns in areas that burn should expect major fires to come. Houses in remote areas of the west should expect to burn to the ground periodically.
I understand that we have a temporary problem of over-accumulation of dead wood and brush because of the last hundred years of fire suppression. Does this mean that we need logging roads through every bit of vegetated land in the west?
Probably better than building logging roads, though.
I've been using NetBSD 1.5.X for my workstation for about 18 months, and it's been great. Other than lpd, everything has been bulletproof. Previously, I ran Debian, and had periodic troubles with NFS and with ypbind, particularly when the LAN was flaky. No such problems with NetBSD.
While I'm at it, I'll plug gmane as well -- it's a lurker's delight!
wonderful post!
It is pretty hard to pretend they don't exist when they smell like shit or are incoherently rambling on and on about killing you.
Certainly. Might this contact with them prompt more people to try to find out *why* so many mentally unstable people are on the streets?
Would be a long, long wait in most of the UK... like until we get a change of government.
Or a change in society.
Public buses are dirty, uncomfortable, take too long, and are filled with people you don't want to be around.
When you see people on the bus, it is harder to pretend they don't exist. I think having everyone driving around in their own car is a barrier to empathy.
The problem with your logic is that you don't gain any new knowledge or experience by 'waiting for the bus'.
I disagree completely, but have no idea how to convince you. Do you never read, or think?
Instead of fixing up the car, modify your life by getting rid of it entirely. You will learn patience and calm as you wait for the bus. Seriously! You will also be able to read more. Less stress, more thought, all good! No simulation needed!
GOBBLES has produced a remote code execution exploit for OpenBSD (published on bugtraq on Thursday). This is serious stuff!
I think a better example is threads, where Linux has has a rather odd implementation, and NetBSD has no kernel support. When SA lands, it'll be good, and in the meantime . . . well . . . nobody is forcing you to use the system. :)
I think it's also good to point out that many people seem to do fine running -current, which releases as often as you want.
Wasabi Systems has made a viable capitalist business out of supporting people who are using embedded NetBSD in various devices.
I am invite?
To what, exactly?
Thanks -- it looks cool.
I'm still waiting for them to release it under a good license . . . but am very interested . . . .
My friend is such an elitest that linux is too mainstream for him.. He uses FreeBSD.
The truly elitist geek uses NetBSD. FreeBSD is so mainstream these days . . . .
From the GNU site:
Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as ``piracy.'' In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnaping and murdering the people on them.
If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnaping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word ``piracy'' to describe it. Neutral terms such as ``prohibited copying'' or ``unauthorized copying'' are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as ``sharing information with your neighbor.''
The US *did* bother to invade Grenada, after all.
still waiting for them to fix the license . . .
Do you actually care about other people at all? I'm just trying to figure out where you're coming from here.
About my education -- I am quite well educated, thank you. Unlike many people, however, I don't accept mainstream economics uncritically.
About redistribution schemes -- if you haven't noticed, societies with *no* redistribution schemes, and private capitalism, tend to extreme inequality, which breeds revolution. The 19th century has plenty of examples of this in Europe. And FDR's New Deal was a (somewhat successful) attempt to ameliorate the Depression so that the starving masses would not simply overthrow the government.
I don't at all see how a welfare state is doomed. The people who predict the collapse of SS ignore the fact that allocating a bit more money to SS would close up the projected funding gap. Those people are also the same people who advocate dumping the SS funds into the stock market, so that their friends can make lots of money on the commissions.
As far as what has worked in the past, I don't see how you addressed my point. I did not defend command economies (they have obviously failed), nor did I attack the existence of money or prices. The possibility I raise is that production could be controlled democratically, from the bottom up, rather than from the top down (the top being either the state or the private owners). You reject out of hand any possibility that we could build something better than the current situation. I ask again that you read a bit about the Spanish Revolution. For a brief time at least (~2 years), the workers really did control the whole apparatus of the economy, and from what I've read it worked quite well. Again, I'm not suggesting that I have all the answers -- just that something better than the current situation may be possible.
Also, when considering what has worked in the past, you also need to keep in mind the context that various nasty people (the Fascists w.r.t Spain, the CIA w.r.t. Chile in 1973 and democracies all over the Third World over the last 50 years, the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution) have been working to destroy anything that looked like bottom-up control of the system.
About the climate -- yes, the question is how stable the system is. We don't know. We have good reason to believe it is not stable, given its erratic behavior in the past. For instance, the Little Ice Age in Europe -- the theory is that it was caused by a change in the Gulf Stream, so that northern Europe was temporarily not warmed by the ocean as much. Given that these things happen spontaneously, I think it's a dubious assertion that the system is stable.
But, like you said, we can't know for sure how stable the system is. So what do we do? Hope for the best, full steam ahead? Or be careful?
But the global warming movement is predicated on the position that we *do* understand the system.
The idea that humans may be affecting the climate is based on the imperfect knowledge we have about the world. The question is how to act in the presence of uncertainty: to plunge blindly ahead with our experiment, or to back off? To plunge ahead with possibly horrid results seems very irresponsible to me.
why would we ever lower production when we have people dying for the lack of production?
The problem is not with production. The world produces enough food for everyone; the problem is that much of it goes to feed animals which are later eaten by overfed first-worlders. That step of the process loses about a factor of ten in food energy. The reason people are dying is that those who *have* food just don't care about those who *don't* -- mostly because there is no money to be made in feeding them. Likewise with medicine. It doesn't cost that much to manufacture most medicines after they have been developed. The US is pushing every country in the world to honor US drug patents so that Merck & co. will have ever-increasing margins, and never you mind all those dying people. Public sanitation (clean water systems, proper sewage management, etc.) is more expensive to set up, but hardly beyond the means of our technology. All that is lacking is will. The current economic/political system is building weapons, cars, action figures, etc. instead.
From your comments on equal distribution it's clear that you haven't studied the real, practical, and very destructive effects of government monkeying around with distribution systems.
Ah, you must be referring to Social Security, unemployment benefits, progressive taxation, and so on.
Traditional food exporters tend to become food importers when markets are destroyed and replaced by 'equal distribution' via government.
I am not arguing for a command (aka state capitalist) economy a la the USSR. I have no more desire to go to the gulag than you do. Besides, such systems didn't really lead to equality, because control of the system is still in the hands of an elite. Perhaps you are not familiar with what happened in Catalonia in the late 30's: the farmers collectivized themselves, and got along spendidly. They produced plenty of food -- unfortunately, much of it went to feed the militiamen who were fighting the Fascists.
Private control of the means of production and distribution via contract, not ration coupon, lead to abundance.
Abundance for some, definitely. I'm getting along quite well. Unfortunately, those less highly valued by those Private Controllers end up in bad shape.
The problem is where governments steal so much that the people have no money and that is something that doesn't get solved by abolishing the free market.
You really believe that people are evil enough to have no desire to help their fellow humans? Even if you think that is so, must it be so? Or could it be that there is something self-fulfilling about the "humans as selfish automatons" economists' model?
What I'm suggesting is that greater equality of distribution is possible without the coercion of an all-powerful state.
Until we, as a society, figure out how to make a functioning market in pollution rights...
Why the obsession with markets? Do you really think it is always appropriate for the richest person to get his way? Could it be that people in poor areas are just as deserving of healthy surroundings as people in rich areas?
If we were to deploy machines to remove 100% of the CO2 from the atmosphere, we would have huge plant kills downwind of the facilities.
Which is exactly the sort of thing I'm arguing against. I would prefer that we avoid a crisis situation that would require technological "fixes." Plunging ahead with risky alterations of natural systems implies either: a) total disregard for future events, or b) faith that people in the future will be able to fix anything that goes wrong because of our current actions.
The easy pollution gains have largely been made. In the 1st world, we're spending more and more to get incrementally less gain. That's not a very good use of resources.
This is the first thing you've said that sounds at all sensible to me. I agree that there is an important tactical issue w.r.t. fixing problems in the first world or in the third world. Keep in mind, though, that *everyone* will need to eventually adopt the conservative approach if we are to avoid natural crises later. Who will figure out how to do this, if not the richest areas?
As for the business cycle, the free market maybe gets production levels right 60% of the time.
Right according to whose measurement? From what I see, it looks like rampant overproduction for my entire lifetime. Why else would we need to be constantly bombarded by adverts imploring us to consume ever more? The soda companies are trying to get everyone to stop drinking tap water so that they can make a few more bucks -- but all that soda is just wasted productive capacity!
But government led alternative systems get it right maybe 20% of the time.
I assume here you are referring to command economies. Where did you get your 20% number from? The USSR glorified production over all else, mangling their land even worse than US-aligned countries. Of course the *nature* of the production was largely military, and so didn't help provide people with the comforts that those in the US enjoyed.
So should we sacrifice the not so good for the truly pathetic?
Not at all. We should avoid totalitarian governments at all costs. If you haven't noticed, the US and China are sort of converging on a private capitalist/repressive police state arrangement that, as far as I can see, combines the worst of both systems.
What I hope for is not either of the options you have presented, but instead for real democratic control of the economic/political system. I think there is much to learn from the Spanish Revolution. How to apply those ideas to the more complex and far-flung economic arrangements of today is a difficult question, but I think an important one.
Given that we don't understand the system, we should be careful with it. We do understand what goes into and comes out of a factory, and we do know how to do things in such a way that the factory blends in nicely with existing natural processes. We can simply avoid doing things that might or might not be dangerous, such as massively increasing the CO2 levels, or spewing dioxins into the water system, or nuking everything in sight with pesticides, nitrates, nad phosphates.
This sort of approach would involve much lower levels of production, but we can deal with that by distributing the results more equally, and by discouraging conspicuous consumption. Just think about all the stuff that gets produced that nobody really needs.
This is not a bad joke -- if anything, surely massively overproducing (notice the current recession) while poisoning our streams (witness collapsing amphibian populations) and pumping our aquifers dry (over much the midwest) is more of a tragic comedy.
I can't believe how many people have this attitude about environmental pollution! I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person can fail to see that preventative maintenance (i.e., reducing emissions at the source) is a fundamentally safer way to insure that we don't continue down the spiralling path of the gradual destruction of our planet's ecosystem.
EXACTLY! Thank you for being sane! dbrutus and friends put the burden of proof in the wrong place -- people who want to alter these systems that we depend on should be the ones proving those alterations safe.
That should be, "All your soul are belong to us."
That book sucks big time. My favorite bit was about how widespread ownership of mutual funds provides democratic control over the behavior of corporations. As if the majority of Americans were big-time stockholders! They are slowly drowning in credit card debt, not piling up the winnings on E*Trade.
Friedman has been doing more than his share of hate-mongering (remember his "World War Three" columns right after 9/11?), and been doing it from a position that many consider (foolishly) to be one of authority -- the front page of the NYT. The ability of individuals to communicate directly threatens his ability to mislead us.