Move to another country where privacy means more than a door on a commode stall.
Tonight in a dream I received a mysterious message from the future "treasure the door on your commode stall while it's still legal". Now it makes sense!
We're talking past each other, I think, but there's certainly a tension between police discretion and rule of law.
I'm focused on how our rulers are ignoring the laws about how laws are made, and becoming autocratic - a special case of the more general problem you describe, but an important special case.
The rule of law still exists, and is only applied to the poor and minorit
You keep using that phrase... "Rule of law implies that every citizen is subject to the law, including law makers themselves. In this sense, it stands in contrast to an autocracy, collective leadership, dictatorship, or oligarchy where the rulers are held above the law (which is not necessary by definition but which is typical). "
Checks and balances between the branches of government somewhat depend on each jealously guarding what power it has - and that has worked pretty well throughout US history. But in the most recent generation, congress has been complicit with the President taking new powers unto himself even when he's from an opposing party.
Rule of law still exists, even if only for the poor an minorities
The whole point of "rules of law" over "rule of man" is that it protects the poor and minorities from the whims of the rulers. When we insist the ruler work within the system, even though we like what he's trying to do, we protect everyone. When we let everything slide as long as it's our guy doing it, it just gets worse over time.
We may never punish the powerful for their mis-deeds, but we have managed for some time to keep the rulers within the rails of the Constitution. We're all pretty screwed if that fails.
Anarchy? The powerful are shielded in any form of government ever tried, from tribal warlords to kings and popes to dictators-for-life. That's what it means to be powerful - you get your way, over the protests of others. Power is fairly dilute in the US vs most systems in history, though the gradual accumulation of power in the executive over the past few decades really worries me in that regard.
I'd worry about magnetic energy storage for any non-industrial use. Aside from the fun one could have with immense magnetic fields, if some fault happens in the system the magnet will quench very quickly - explosively fast - releasing all the stored energy. That made a Hell of a mess when it happened in the LHC (admittedly, a big magnet), but since it was effectively in an underground concrete bunker, no one was hurt. I certainly wouldn't want one that could store a day's power for my house sitting next to my house (and the potential to release the power stored in a tank of gas explosively is no fun for a car either - especially a system that requires active cooling).
MS has had a fully-supported "no GUI" server option since Server 2012, but has been possible to admin CLI-only, without 3rd part add-ins, since 2008 (though the GUI would still be running, if you don't provide remote access to it, it might as well not be), and with 3rd-prty add-ins since 2003.
However, managing multiple Windows servers is more about group policy than logging into any servers, GUI, CLI, or carrier pigeon. I've worked with management systems for 1000s of Windows servers, and the only reason you'd ever log into a server is to recover if something went horribly with a new deployment, and you wanted to find out why (to debug your deployment - just recovering the server was automatic).
don't know his exact situation, but it's possible that the company he works at has an app that only works with IE6. There used to be many apps like this.
That's no excuse! IE6 belongs in a VM used only for internal sites and strictly firewalled off from the outside world. But even if you're stuck with IE6, at least run the latest FF or something beside it.
I always wonder why they limit their magic wand to a "basic" income. Why not instead pay everyone a billion dollars a year? I mean, if there's no downside to the Fed creating all this money, why be cheap?
Creating more dollars without creating more goods and services improves nothing - why do people have a hard time with that idea?
The DoJ hit Sony with a fine large enough to make Sony miss its earnings significantly for the year, which lead tot the CEO leaving. There is a criminal justice system for corporations: gross negligence awards, and other eye-watering fines.
But of course, Sony is an example of problems with Japanese corporate culture and legal system more than our own. I do wonder whether the DoJ would have been so aggressive if a US company had done that.
Sony's CEO resigned over the rootkit thing, and the DoJ basically told them that if it happened again, there would be no Sony in America. That's what powerful incentives look like! Sony took that quite seriously.
DoJ found that it wasn't the case that Sony execs set out to break the law here, but added that if this sort of thing happened again, they'd assume it was intentional.
If humans have one glaring flaw in their ability to act rationally, it's this. Avoidable risks are no more risky than any other kind of risk! Life will never be safe, and each and every price we pay to reduce risk needs to consider both the cost and benefit. If a given risk poses less than a 1-in-a-million chance of hurting the average person, there had better be no meaningful downside to prevention.
We freak out over all kinds of not-actually-important risks, often throwing liberty over the side in pursuit of meaningless safety, simply because the risk is avoidable. Well, fine but avoidable at what cost?.
All private use of drones is going to end up getting outlawed over something like this, because we seem immune to rational consideration of risk.
Less than Nevada? Not likely. Tesla certainly pays it's geeks competitively in Silly Valley, though I hear the hours are long. They make a high-margin product anyhow, and need quality more than 1% cheaper wages.
Texas is a great legal climate for business, which is one reason so many people are moving there. But state and local politics anywhere is hugely influenced by car dealers, as they have larger advertising budgets and more name recognition than state senators. Tesla can't even bribe/contribute their way to victory here, because an owner of a large dealership chain can so easily oust a state rep. OTOH, bringing a ton of new jobs, or even finally offering a car for sale that wasn't a rich boy's toy, could change things - give the Texas voter a reason to actually care.
The interesting thing to me is that Spencer seems to be missing the point. Direct radiative heating of the Earth's surface by CO2 in the atmosphere is a Lie-to-children in the first place, and people who defend it based on religious faith really make themselves look silly.
The point people should get about global warming is that it's quite a complex process, not easily modeled, and all current hypotheses about it could well be seriously wrong (as is normal for a young science). But you can't build religious faith around that, can you?
You'd have to shut down significant parts of south-eastern China and South Korea to be able to effectively cut off internet to North Korea.
China could give or deny N Korea access through China - but if China isn't backing them, then it's easy enough to cut off the rest.
From the non-China direction, you do realize the most heavily militarized border in the world, 4km across, separates N and S Korea right? This is one DMZ that's not a metaphor! A cantenna can only do so much, and N Korea just doesn't have much going for it, connection wise, that doesn't depend on China. The might have some loyal followers out-country, but it seems unlikely they'd have more than a handful.
There are two way in which CO2 interacts with IR radiation:
1) It can absorb IR, becoming warmer, and in turn emit IR as a blackbody.
2) It can reflect IR.
The energy transferred by effect 1 depends on the temp of the CO2. The energy transferred by effect 2 depends instead on the temp of what's being reflected. As these are "4th power of temp" effects, the difference is critical. Effect 2 is important to Venus's climate, and is irrelevant to Earth's climate, because CO2 does not meaningfully reflect IR at low temperature.
Saying "but what about Venus" gets the physics wrong (and also implies that the Earth could somehow one day become like Venus, when there's no mechanism for that).
As far as the Earth: 1) Most of the heat transfer away from the surface of the Earth is by convection - radiative heat loss is a small effect by comparison.
2) Most of the IR energy that is radiated from the surface escapes, and the primary way in which the radiated heat interacts with the atmosphere to warm the Earth instead of escaping is by reflection of the IR - from water vapor, CO2 isn't in play here (and, BTW, this reflective property of clouds has a net cooling effect globally, since it works both ways, but still has a quite noticeable warming effect locally on a winter day, when you're the one under the clouds).
3) CO2 plays a role in absorbing a small percentage of the IR that is not reflected (which is itself a small percentage of the heat loss from the surface), and becoming warmer.
4) The increase in blackbody radiation from the warmer CO2 is trivial. Thinking of this as "look, simple physics at work here" gets it wrong.
5) The effect that does matter is this: a warmer upper atmosphere means less energetic convection (that's right: less extreme weather), which can have a significant effect in making the surface warmer!
If you think the process is simple and obvious, that just means you don't understand it. If you believe it without understanding it, you're acting on faith, not reason, regardless of your choice in high priests. Don't do that - either study the subject, or admit it's not important to you.
Yes, because corporate-funded (cyber-)terrorism against a soveriegn nation has *no* potential down sides, right? (:
Being a "sovereign nation" doesn't make you more powerful. Only power makes you powerful: manpower, materials, and moral strength. North Korea (if they're the aggressors here) has no meaningful way to project military power, and in a purely "cyber" war, a corporation with a larger budget than N Korea has an advantage. OTOH, Sony hasn't had it's shit together since the founder left, and likely can't act effectively in its own defense.
N Korea could be completely shut down here by simply isolating them from the internet, which really isn't that hard unless China decides to defend them.
You're only making yourself look foolish here, by oversimplifying the issue so much that you're actually wrong.
Put in the simplest terms: if CO2 in Venus's atmosphere acted like it does in Earth's atmosphere, Venus would be quite a bit cooler. If the direct blackbody effect of CO2 being warmed by IR, and in term warming the Earth via IR, was the primary warming concern in Earth's atmosphere it would not be a concern.
These High School Physics explanations of why CO2 causes warming of the Earth's surface are wrong, because the simple effect supports the "nothing to worry about" argument. The truth is more complex, vastly harder to model, and the results are not so obvious as you seem to think.
But the CO2 atmosphere only has such dramatic effect because it's so hot. Why is all that CO2 in Venus's atmosphere in the first place? Does the entire surface of Venus melt several times every billion years? Why doesn't the surface rotate? It's not tide-locked to the Sun, it actually rotates slower than that, which makes no kind of sense. Is the slow rotation dominant in producing Venus's climate? The geology of the surface? It's a rich field for study, and I hope we'll be sending more probes soon, but its largely irrelevant to conversations about Earth.
FYI, The tempuratures on Venus are kept so high by a different effect of CO2, one not at all relevant to Earth's atmosphere. At combustion-chamber temperatures, CO2 actually reflects infrared, vs absorbing it, which is a much more dramatic effect. (Winter days are noticeably warmer when skies are overcast because of this effect from the clouds.)
Venus has about as much carbon in the air as Earth has in it's rock cycle (all the carbon in the air, oceans, and all known fossil fues combined is a rounding error by comparison). The Earth's geological-scale carbon cycle is reasonably well understood, and quite powerfully self-regulating. There's a whole sub-field studying why Venus is different - what we learned 15-20 years ago from probes was completely unexpected (the surface of Venus has almost 0 angular momentum, and no features look older than ~100 M years - WTF?).
In any case, it's a bit silly to use as an example - it only really highlights how much we don't know about Earth's climate.
How would you prove that something going on TODAY is going to cause massive harm in 50-100 years?
With science! But climate science isn't yet mature enough to make any sort of useful prediction (even the vaguest, like average world temperature, they only get right when the prediction overlaps the null hypothesis). It's hypothetically possible to have climate models so good that we can predict "sea levels will rise 10 cm by DATE given N_TONS of new CO2", and economic models good enough to predict "a sea level rise of 10 cm will cost $X, reducing emissions by N_TONS will cost $Y, X-Y=Z".
Z tells us whether we should change anything (or rather, whether China and India should change, likely meaning a war to enforce that). We're a long way from science that mature. But it's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Move to another country where privacy means more than a door on a commode stall.
Tonight in a dream I received a mysterious message from the future "treasure the door on your commode stall while it's still legal". Now it makes sense!
A gallon of gasoline has the same energy as 8 kg of TNT! It's all about how fast the energy is released.
We're talking past each other, I think, but there's certainly a tension between police discretion and rule of law.
I'm focused on how our rulers are ignoring the laws about how laws are made, and becoming autocratic - a special case of the more general problem you describe, but an important special case.
The rule of law still exists, and is only applied to the poor and minorit
You keep using that phrase ... "Rule of law implies that every citizen is subject to the law, including law makers themselves. In this sense, it stands in contrast to an autocracy, collective leadership, dictatorship, or oligarchy where the rulers are held above the law (which is not necessary by definition but which is typical). "
Checks and balances between the branches of government somewhat depend on each jealously guarding what power it has - and that has worked pretty well throughout US history. But in the most recent generation, congress has been complicit with the President taking new powers unto himself even when he's from an opposing party.
Rule of law still exists, even if only for the poor an minorities
The whole point of "rules of law" over "rule of man" is that it protects the poor and minorities from the whims of the rulers. When we insist the ruler work within the system, even though we like what he's trying to do, we protect everyone. When we let everything slide as long as it's our guy doing it, it just gets worse over time.
We may never punish the powerful for their mis-deeds, but we have managed for some time to keep the rulers within the rails of the Constitution. We're all pretty screwed if that fails.
Anarchy? The powerful are shielded in any form of government ever tried, from tribal warlords to kings and popes to dictators-for-life. That's what it means to be powerful - you get your way, over the protests of others. Power is fairly dilute in the US vs most systems in history, though the gradual accumulation of power in the executive over the past few decades really worries me in that regard.
I'd worry about magnetic energy storage for any non-industrial use. Aside from the fun one could have with immense magnetic fields, if some fault happens in the system the magnet will quench very quickly - explosively fast - releasing all the stored energy. That made a Hell of a mess when it happened in the LHC (admittedly, a big magnet), but since it was effectively in an underground concrete bunker, no one was hurt. I certainly wouldn't want one that could store a day's power for my house sitting next to my house (and the potential to release the power stored in a tank of gas explosively is no fun for a car either - especially a system that requires active cooling).
MS has had a fully-supported "no GUI" server option since Server 2012, but has been possible to admin CLI-only, without 3rd part add-ins, since 2008 (though the GUI would still be running, if you don't provide remote access to it, it might as well not be), and with 3rd-prty add-ins since 2003.
However, managing multiple Windows servers is more about group policy than logging into any servers, GUI, CLI, or carrier pigeon. I've worked with management systems for 1000s of Windows servers, and the only reason you'd ever log into a server is to recover if something went horribly with a new deployment, and you wanted to find out why (to debug your deployment - just recovering the server was automatic).
don't know his exact situation, but it's possible that the company he works at has an app that only works with IE6. There used to be many apps like this.
That's no excuse! IE6 belongs in a VM used only for internal sites and strictly firewalled off from the outside world. But even if you're stuck with IE6, at least run the latest FF or something beside it.
I always wonder why they limit their magic wand to a "basic" income. Why not instead pay everyone a billion dollars a year? I mean, if there's no downside to the Fed creating all this money, why be cheap?
Creating more dollars without creating more goods and services improves nothing - why do people have a hard time with that idea?
The DoJ hit Sony with a fine large enough to make Sony miss its earnings significantly for the year, which lead tot the CEO leaving. There is a criminal justice system for corporations: gross negligence awards, and other eye-watering fines.
But of course, Sony is an example of problems with Japanese corporate culture and legal system more than our own. I do wonder whether the DoJ would have been so aggressive if a US company had done that.
Sony's CEO resigned over the rootkit thing, and the DoJ basically told them that if it happened again, there would be no Sony in America. That's what powerful incentives look like! Sony took that quite seriously.
DoJ found that it wasn't the case that Sony execs set out to break the law here, but added that if this sort of thing happened again, they'd assume it was intentional.
It is an avoidable risk
If humans have one glaring flaw in their ability to act rationally, it's this. Avoidable risks are no more risky than any other kind of risk! Life will never be safe, and each and every price we pay to reduce risk needs to consider both the cost and benefit. If a given risk poses less than a 1-in-a-million chance of hurting the average person, there had better be no meaningful downside to prevention.
We freak out over all kinds of not-actually-important risks, often throwing liberty over the side in pursuit of meaningless safety, simply because the risk is avoidable. Well, fine but avoidable at what cost?.
All private use of drones is going to end up getting outlawed over something like this, because we seem immune to rational consideration of risk.
Namely paying the workers less.
Less than Nevada? Not likely. Tesla certainly pays it's geeks competitively in Silly Valley, though I hear the hours are long. They make a high-margin product anyhow, and need quality more than 1% cheaper wages.
Texas is a great legal climate for business, which is one reason so many people are moving there. But state and local politics anywhere is hugely influenced by car dealers, as they have larger advertising budgets and more name recognition than state senators. Tesla can't even bribe/contribute their way to victory here, because an owner of a large dealership chain can so easily oust a state rep. OTOH, bringing a ton of new jobs, or even finally offering a car for sale that wasn't a rich boy's toy, could change things - give the Texas voter a reason to actually care.
Yep, the guy's at least 800 milli-Timecubes!
The interesting thing to me is that Spencer seems to be missing the point. Direct radiative heating of the Earth's surface by CO2 in the atmosphere is a Lie-to-children in the first place, and people who defend it based on religious faith really make themselves look silly.
The point people should get about global warming is that it's quite a complex process, not easily modeled, and all current hypotheses about it could well be seriously wrong (as is normal for a young science). But you can't build religious faith around that, can you?
Have fun beating some strawman to death - you're certainly not arguing against anything I've posted.
You simply aren't reading my posts.
It's not "CO2 emissions aren't a concern"; it's "CO2 emissions aren't a concern if all you use is high school physics". It's all explained above.
You'd have to shut down significant parts of south-eastern China and South Korea to be able to effectively cut off internet to North Korea.
China could give or deny N Korea access through China - but if China isn't backing them, then it's easy enough to cut off the rest.
From the non-China direction, you do realize the most heavily militarized border in the world, 4km across, separates N and S Korea right? This is one DMZ that's not a metaphor! A cantenna can only do so much, and N Korea just doesn't have much going for it, connection wise, that doesn't depend on China. The might have some loyal followers out-country, but it seems unlikely they'd have more than a handful.
There are two way in which CO2 interacts with IR radiation:
1) It can absorb IR, becoming warmer, and in turn emit IR as a blackbody.
2) It can reflect IR.
The energy transferred by effect 1 depends on the temp of the CO2. The energy transferred by effect 2 depends instead on the temp of what's being reflected. As these are "4th power of temp" effects, the difference is critical. Effect 2 is important to Venus's climate, and is irrelevant to Earth's climate, because CO2 does not meaningfully reflect IR at low temperature.
Saying "but what about Venus" gets the physics wrong (and also implies that the Earth could somehow one day become like Venus, when there's no mechanism for that).
As far as the Earth:
1) Most of the heat transfer away from the surface of the Earth is by convection - radiative heat loss is a small effect by comparison.
2) Most of the IR energy that is radiated from the surface escapes, and the primary way in which the radiated heat interacts with the atmosphere to warm the Earth instead of escaping is by reflection of the IR - from water vapor, CO2 isn't in play here (and, BTW, this reflective property of clouds has a net cooling effect globally, since it works both ways, but still has a quite noticeable warming effect locally on a winter day, when you're the one under the clouds).
3) CO2 plays a role in absorbing a small percentage of the IR that is not reflected (which is itself a small percentage of the heat loss from the surface), and becoming warmer.
4) The increase in blackbody radiation from the warmer CO2 is trivial. Thinking of this as "look, simple physics at work here" gets it wrong.
5) The effect that does matter is this: a warmer upper atmosphere means less energetic convection (that's right: less extreme weather), which can have a significant effect in making the surface warmer!
If you think the process is simple and obvious, that just means you don't understand it. If you believe it without understanding it, you're acting on faith, not reason, regardless of your choice in high priests. Don't do that - either study the subject, or admit it's not important to you.
Yes, because corporate-funded (cyber-)terrorism against a soveriegn nation has *no* potential down sides, right? ( :
Being a "sovereign nation" doesn't make you more powerful. Only power makes you powerful: manpower, materials, and moral strength. North Korea (if they're the aggressors here) has no meaningful way to project military power, and in a purely "cyber" war, a corporation with a larger budget than N Korea has an advantage. OTOH, Sony hasn't had it's shit together since the founder left, and likely can't act effectively in its own defense.
N Korea could be completely shut down here by simply isolating them from the internet, which really isn't that hard unless China decides to defend them.
You're only making yourself look foolish here, by oversimplifying the issue so much that you're actually wrong.
Put in the simplest terms: if CO2 in Venus's atmosphere acted like it does in Earth's atmosphere, Venus would be quite a bit cooler. If the direct blackbody effect of CO2 being warmed by IR, and in term warming the Earth via IR, was the primary warming concern in Earth's atmosphere it would not be a concern.
These High School Physics explanations of why CO2 causes warming of the Earth's surface are wrong, because the simple effect supports the "nothing to worry about" argument. The truth is more complex, vastly harder to model, and the results are not so obvious as you seem to think.
But the CO2 atmosphere only has such dramatic effect because it's so hot. Why is all that CO2 in Venus's atmosphere in the first place? Does the entire surface of Venus melt several times every billion years? Why doesn't the surface rotate? It's not tide-locked to the Sun, it actually rotates slower than that, which makes no kind of sense. Is the slow rotation dominant in producing Venus's climate? The geology of the surface? It's a rich field for study, and I hope we'll be sending more probes soon, but its largely irrelevant to conversations about Earth.
FYI, The tempuratures on Venus are kept so high by a different effect of CO2, one not at all relevant to Earth's atmosphere. At combustion-chamber temperatures, CO2 actually reflects infrared, vs absorbing it, which is a much more dramatic effect. (Winter days are noticeably warmer when skies are overcast because of this effect from the clouds.)
Venus has about as much carbon in the air as Earth has in it's rock cycle (all the carbon in the air, oceans, and all known fossil fues combined is a rounding error by comparison). The Earth's geological-scale carbon cycle is reasonably well understood, and quite powerfully self-regulating. There's a whole sub-field studying why Venus is different - what we learned 15-20 years ago from probes was completely unexpected (the surface of Venus has almost 0 angular momentum, and no features look older than ~100 M years - WTF?).
In any case, it's a bit silly to use as an example - it only really highlights how much we don't know about Earth's climate.
How would you prove that something going on TODAY is going to cause massive harm in 50-100 years?
With science! But climate science isn't yet mature enough to make any sort of useful prediction (even the vaguest, like average world temperature, they only get right when the prediction overlaps the null hypothesis). It's hypothetically possible to have climate models so good that we can predict "sea levels will rise 10 cm by DATE given N_TONS of new CO2", and economic models good enough to predict "a sea level rise of 10 cm will cost $X, reducing emissions by N_TONS will cost $Y, X-Y=Z".
Z tells us whether we should change anything (or rather, whether China and India should change, likely meaning a war to enforce that). We're a long way from science that mature. But it's possible.
Ah, thanks for the background! I hadn't heard of the 10 mythical species, but it's good to know creativity is alive and well.