Hitler, Mussolin, Stalin and Hirohito were their parents. The EPA came under Nixon, and he was from the Greatest generation (born in 1914-1924). Baby boomers were born in the 1946–1964 period (a bit later in Europe).
And all those inventions came from the public research infrastructure put in place by said greatest generation. The same infrastructure that is being dismantled to pay for the coming retirees. No, really, I have little love for the baby boomers as a group . Your attitude, refusing to own up to the state of the World as it is is pretty characteristic: it wasn't me, it was the other guy. "Vietnam was bad", but Iraq and Afghanistan are fine I guess...
Let me be clear, the idiots who think growth/progress should be stopped are more than idiots, they are advocating genocide. I loath and despise them.
This is completely orthogonal to the civilisational risk from global warming. If there is a solution to it, it is through progress, research and growth (and nuclear plants;) ). But to deny the risk? Or to think that magically because solar is cheap coal plants will close? Or that the amount of carbon in the atmosphere cannot reach dangerous values because THE FREE MARKET, or because GOD WILL SAVE US? This is silly. Perhaps as silly and misguided as the rubbish from the fools who would have us go back to the 17th century.
Stringent environmental standards and much money poured into research/improve the energy infrastructure are a good idea no matter what. Global warming is an urgent reason for that to happen sooner than later. If we don't, bad things may happen.
No, an ebola epidemic is a small risk: very virulent, short incubation period. It does not pose the kind of risk global warming does. Not even comparable.
You asked me for a probability estimate, and I told you I cannot give you one. I am honest enough to say that. The risk does exist, however, and it is not negligible: this year's crop situation would have been unthinkable only ten years ago.
The risk of global warming is that: weather extremes disrupting the economy and making us lose the guaranteed access to food we have. Not nice. This is a risk aka "can happen". It has a probability > 0. It is easy enough to find academic papers which predict a complete collapse of crop yields by the end of the century from current trends. It is hard to find papers which predict improved or stable yields.
So yeah, you should worry too, based on data and actual models.
I don't know. I lack the data. The current bad crop in the US is going to have some significant effect on prices. How much, I do not know. How much margin do we have? I do not know.
I do know that the trend is not good, and that it had been a very long time since crop yields in America have been news. You should be worried: if large parts of the Midwest become unfit for growing crops, you will get Dust Bowl 2.0, and no big improvement in agriculture productivity forthcoming to compensate.
Look, you are libertarian and you don't believe in societies. I like living in one and so does most of my species.
I believe believe in public education, healthcare, unemployment and retirement. All these are fundamentally intergenerational transfers. The problem is not that they work or not, the problem is that they are necessary and have to be made to work. The alternative is living in Somalia.
No it is a case were a particular generation, due to demographic factors, always got its way, and upset the intergenerational transfers, where education must be balanced with retirements and unemployment. The baby boom passing through the system tilted it always towards them. They got their education cheap, they got inflation as wage earner which allowed them to buy property for cheap, and now that they retire, they force deflation and cuts to education to pay for their retirement.
Their parents, on the contrary constructed a society for their children rather than for themselves. Are they responsible for all the ills in the world? No. Are they responsible for being selfish arseholes (collectively) who caused a situation were education and research get sacrificed on the altar of retirement funds? you bet.
You know the greatest generation, who went through depression and war? Their kids, The Baby Boomers will be known to history as the Shittiest Generation.
They got everything, and they destroyed the future out of greed and selfishness.
We'va also had 5 majour extinxion events during those millions of years. And all of them had something to do with major shifts in climate, caused by external factors: the big meteorite did not kill the dinosaurs. The nuclear winter which followed did.
Large, fast changes in climate don't matter much to life. It'll recover. We may not. Or we may, but our civilisation is a goner. Or maybe, if we are extra-lucky, we get to only have a major economic crisis. Something like the industrial revolution in reverse.
Global warming is a serious threat. And we will --those of us below fifty -- have to face its consequences directly. We can only hope that it won't be as bad as the scientists think it'll be, and that it much, much worse than what you see in news.
The stats are not that there is no unemployment in general (there is, a lot of it), just that there is very little employments amongst folk with higher education degrees. This does not mean that they are doing a job corresponding to their degree or that they are well paid. I am not responsible for you not understanding what is written. Of course a bachelor of maths or a bachelor of education is going to have a hard time finding a job! Their degrees are worthless. That being said, their degrees still prove they can read, write and understand stuff to some degree, and therefore are in fact much more employable as starbucks baristas than someone just out of high school. And indeed, stats show that they do get those jobs at the expense of the uneducated.
So may have anecdotal evidence, but realise that this does not give you a good picture of the whole situation.
I should also remark on something else (this is a separate issue). What is wrong with you Americans to thing that a bachelor is "higher education"? Most bachelors are shit on this continent: you get taught tricks fast so that you can be "employable" after 3 years, whereas the fundamentals in any STEM field require at least 2-3 years. That is before anything "useful" can be taught. Worse than that, because of that system, it is too late for the masters to gain fundamental understanding in anything. And you pay crazy high amounts of money for that shit. You want to work in 3 years? Learn a craft.
Of course, great many things are done for the love of it. But as a company, if you rely on your employees to work for the sake of love, you are in for a big surprise.
The salaries are however low because of the pressure of outsourcing, competition with developing countries, and the general feeling of insecurity due to the high general unemployment rate. As the pressures of outsourcing and developing countries abate, benefits will have to go up. And in some companies, they will, and in some, they won't. To keep the same profitability, the money will have to come from somewhere, and the only preserved class is the CEO/higher management class.
Now they will never lower their salaries. But their companies will go bankrupt, and these will be replaced by more equal ones. Just because it works better. Now, this is not for today or next year. I expect the crisis to last another 4-5 years. And then changes in culture take a generation. But within 15 years we will see some change, and within 25, it is likely that the current balance will have been thoroughly changed.
I am optimistic about the long term. Of course, if all science funding goes and people give up on long term research, we might well be fucked for a couple generations. But hey, we must hope or despair.
Interestingly, this is already old thinking. Chinese manufacturing will form a dwindling part of their economy and service their own market more and more. Now of course they will keep doing manufacturing, but automation will increase the relative costs of transport, and Chinese workers cost (or will cost within 5 years) as much as Eastern Europeans.
So, although those manufacturing jobs are not coming back (they have evaporated due to robotics), the engineering jobs attendant to local (automated) plants are in fact coming. Also less people want to immigrate when their countries are doing good. So yes, there is a shortage of STEM people, and will grow, yes there will be jobs for them. But a lot of managers will just have to accept that you need to pay decent salaries to your employees, especially if you depend on them to think well on your behalf.
I suspect a lot of companies will in fact go under because of the need to keep paying management way more than they are worth and the pressure to try and underpay the engineers. This will be a slow process, but I guess that within 10-15 years it might be complete: those companies that value creativity and loyalty (through good benefits) will overtake the others. This is because as I said above, the opportunity for gains purely through arbitrage is gone. Women are now as much in the work force as men, developing countries have nearly caught up -- and the crisis helped -- and there are little to no free-trade agreements to sign any more.
The next years will be innovate or die. And innovation requires well-paid engineers and more horizontal hierarchies.
In case you are not trolling, know that we have observation for much longer periods than 30 years: ice cores give use data for hundreds of thousands of years, simply, the mesure is punctual extensive like the satellite data.
The problem with global warming is not with Florida going underwater. The risk of that is pretty low. Rather, the problem is more tornadoes, typhoons and floods causing massive disruption in theeconomic supply chains, as well as droughts causing widespread famine. It is a very serious, very real, civilisational threat. What will happen when we cannot grow enough food to feed the World?
What will happen when the US cannot grow enough food to feed itself? Invade Canada?
When all exceptional wheather events point in the same direction, it stops being "wheather" to be "climate".
If you were reporting news of the eastern front for a German newspaper after Stalingrad, you could well keep saying "sure, this battle was lost, but this other one was won. In any case, you can't call any particular battle to be an indication of how the war is going!". Except, of course, you can and should. OMany of these individual event are wheather, but the point that climatologists make is that they fall on a pattern: climate is changing, and the planet is becomming hotter. We also have a mechanism for that, the greenhouse effect, and human activities contribute to it significantly.
Frankly, that this be controversial is a huge mystery to me. But then people will believe the weirdest things if it helps them fit in a group, so...
But see, this cannot happen in the "free" market: choosing more pay vs more free time is not in fact an available option to you because the employers always prefer employees who pick the "more pay" branch of the alternative. Thus a minority of workaholics can force everyone to woork extra long hours.
In Europe, people get more holidays because these are mandated by the government. And this improves hourly productivity because not-completely-burnt-out people do work better (no shit). This is how the French, with their incredible number of days of holidays get to be nearly as productive as the 60-hours-a-week Americans.
This is a case were collective preference (most people would prefer more free time even at the cost of some salary) can only be obtained through regulation, or alternatively powerful unions.
If lend-lease had been in fvour of Germany instead of the UK, things might have turned very differently. Yes, the cost the US paid in blood in Europe was low, compared to that of the USSR, but the Pacific theatre was costly in terms of men.
All in all, I agree that the vision of the US marching into Europe as the brave liberator is simplistic, but in the end, free Europe owed to the US in large part its freedom.
This is Europe. You can wine and dine the MEPs, to an extent, but you need to corrupt them in so many languages that you might find the task daunting... Also unlike the US, outright buying of politicians is frowned upon.
Because make no mistakes, unlimited campaign donations via "superpacs" is just that, buying politicos.
All you whiners complaining that you should not have to subsidise somebody else's "poor lifestyle choices"? Well guess what, when an idiot decides not to get insurance, you are subsidising his "lifestyle choice", through higher premiums, notably. You can't get it both ways.
Why is national defence necessary? To protect you from bands of pillaging Canadians, raping and killing all in their wake (not necessarily in that order). Thus its essential function is protecting the health and property of citizens. The essential function of providing universal health care is to protect the health and property of citizens, notably through you not getting bankrupt because you breached your "lifetime cap".
There is no difference. Except that rampaging Canadians are clearly less of a menace than poor health.
Because you benefit from having society be richer, notably through an efficient and reliable (this also means safe) transport infrastructure. And no, the airlines do not have an interest in protecting the safety of their customers. They might have an interest in having customers not know the risk they take... In general, NDAs and settlements with the families might well be cheaper than regulation...
Basically, self-regulation is a bad idea: regulatory capture risk is not good, but it is better than no regulation.
You are an idiot. There can be competition amongst car manufacturers, not between train companies: they need to share the same tracks, FFS!
If you give the TSA function to a bunch of companies, you either end up with the overhead of a thousand boards of directors to feed and dealing with the interaction of all these companies. OR you get a massive oligopoly of a handful of private armies of goons mandated to stop and search you for profit.
Never mind that the government can be inefficient, at least it is not trying to harass you for money. Well, used to, until they privatised the prison system...
Imagine the profits if the police becomes private! and a subsidiary of your local friendly state prison!
Because remember this: when the government privatises critical services (and the TSA is most certainly deemed critical), the services still need to be "provided". With the extra overhead of making shareholders rich.
Because nothing will go wrong with private armies of people mandated to stop and search you...
Slashdot Mirror
Hitler, Mussolin, Stalin and Hirohito were their parents. The EPA came under Nixon, and he was from the Greatest generation (born in 1914-1924). Baby boomers were born in the 1946–1964 period (a bit later in Europe).
And all those inventions came from the public research infrastructure put in place by said greatest generation. The same infrastructure that is being dismantled to pay for the coming retirees. No, really, I have little love for the baby boomers as a group . Your attitude, refusing to own up to the state of the World as it is is pretty characteristic: it wasn't me, it was the other guy. "Vietnam was bad", but Iraq and Afghanistan are fine I guess...
see that bump in 1980-1990? That's them. The slump after? Their kids.
Typical.
Let me be clear, the idiots who think growth/progress should be stopped are more than idiots, they are advocating genocide. I loath and despise them.
This is completely orthogonal to the civilisational risk from global warming. If there is a solution to it, it is through progress, research and growth (and nuclear plants ;) ). But to deny the risk? Or to think that magically because solar is cheap coal plants will close? Or that the amount of carbon in the atmosphere cannot reach dangerous values because THE FREE MARKET, or because GOD WILL SAVE US? This is silly. Perhaps as silly and misguided as the rubbish from the fools who would have us go back to the 17th century.
Stringent environmental standards and much money poured into research/improve the energy infrastructure are a good idea no matter what. Global warming is an urgent reason for that to happen sooner than later. If we don't, bad things may happen.
No, an ebola epidemic is a small risk: very virulent, short incubation period. It does not pose the kind of risk global warming does. Not even comparable.
You asked me for a probability estimate, and I told you I cannot give you one. I am honest enough to say that. The risk does exist, however, and it is not negligible: this year's crop situation would have been unthinkable only ten years ago.
The risk of global warming is that: weather extremes disrupting the economy and making us lose the guaranteed access to food we have. Not nice. This is a risk aka "can happen". It has a probability > 0. It is easy enough to find academic papers which predict a complete collapse of crop yields by the end of the century from current trends. It is hard to find papers which predict improved or stable yields.
So yeah, you should worry too, based on data and actual models.
I don't know. I lack the data. The current bad crop in the US is going to have some significant effect on prices. How much, I do not know. How much margin do we have? I do not know.
I do know that the trend is not good, and that it had been a very long time since crop yields in America have been news. You should be worried: if large parts of the Midwest become unfit for growing crops, you will get Dust Bowl 2.0, and no big improvement in agriculture productivity forthcoming to compensate.
No. More like actual risks of famine and drought. In fucking developed countries.
Also, I don't like heat very much, but that is pretty minor ;)
Look, you are libertarian and you don't believe in societies. I like living in one and so does most of my species.
I believe believe in public education, healthcare, unemployment and retirement. All these are fundamentally intergenerational transfers. The problem is not that they work or not, the problem is that they are necessary and have to be made to work. The alternative is living in Somalia.
No it is a case were a particular generation, due to demographic factors, always got its way, and upset the intergenerational transfers, where education must be balanced with retirements and unemployment. The baby boom passing through the system tilted it always towards them. They got their education cheap, they got inflation as wage earner which allowed them to buy property for cheap, and now that they retire, they force deflation and cuts to education to pay for their retirement.
Their parents, on the contrary constructed a society for their children rather than for themselves. Are they responsible for all the ills in the world? No. Are they responsible for being selfish arseholes (collectively) who caused a situation were education and research get sacrificed on the altar of retirement funds? you bet.
And that is stealing the future.
You know the greatest generation, who went through depression and war? Their kids, The Baby Boomers will be known to history as the Shittiest Generation.
They got everything, and they destroyed the future out of greed and selfishness.
We'va also had 5 majour extinxion events during those millions of years. And all of them had something to do with major shifts in climate, caused by external factors: the big meteorite did not kill the dinosaurs. The nuclear winter which followed did.
Large, fast changes in climate don't matter much to life. It'll recover. We may not. Or we may, but our civilisation is a goner. Or maybe, if we are extra-lucky, we get to only have a major economic crisis. Something like the industrial revolution in reverse.
Global warming is a serious threat. And we will --those of us below fifty -- have to face its consequences directly. We can only hope that it won't be as bad as the scientists think it'll be, and that it much, much worse than what you see in news.
The stats are not that there is no unemployment in general (there is, a lot of it), just that there is very little employments amongst folk with higher education degrees. This does not mean that they are doing a job corresponding to their degree or that they are well paid. I am not responsible for you not understanding what is written. Of course a bachelor of maths or a bachelor of education is going to have a hard time finding a job! Their degrees are worthless. That being said, their degrees still prove they can read, write and understand stuff to some degree, and therefore are in fact much more employable as starbucks baristas than someone just out of high school. And indeed, stats show that they do get those jobs at the expense of the uneducated.
So may have anecdotal evidence, but realise that this does not give you a good picture of the whole situation.
I should also remark on something else (this is a separate issue). What is wrong with you Americans to thing that a bachelor is "higher education"? Most bachelors are shit on this continent: you get taught tricks fast so that you can be "employable" after 3 years, whereas the fundamentals in any STEM field require at least 2-3 years. That is before anything "useful" can be taught. Worse than that, because of that system, it is too late for the masters to gain fundamental understanding in anything. And you pay crazy high amounts of money for that shit. You want to work in 3 years? Learn a craft.
Of course, great many things are done for the love of it. But as a company, if you rely on your employees to work for the sake of love, you are in for a big surprise.
Good engineers are hard to come by. Good mathematicians, physicists are rare. Because not so many students get masters in technical and scientific fields. And indeed the unemployment figures are this... So there is in reality almost no unemployment for people with higher education degrees.
The salaries are however low because of the pressure of outsourcing, competition with developing countries, and the general feeling of insecurity due to the high general unemployment rate. As the pressures of outsourcing and developing countries abate, benefits will have to go up. And in some companies, they will, and in some, they won't. To keep the same profitability, the money will have to come from somewhere, and the only preserved class is the CEO/higher management class.
Now they will never lower their salaries. But their companies will go bankrupt, and these will be replaced by more equal ones. Just because it works better. Now, this is not for today or next year. I expect the crisis to last another 4-5 years. And then changes in culture take a generation. But within 15 years we will see some change, and within 25, it is likely that the current balance will have been thoroughly changed.
I am optimistic about the long term. Of course, if all science funding goes and people give up on long term research, we might well be fucked for a couple generations. But hey, we must hope or despair.
Interestingly, this is already old thinking. Chinese manufacturing will form a dwindling part of their economy and service their own market more and more. Now of course they will keep doing manufacturing, but automation will increase the relative costs of transport, and Chinese workers cost (or will cost within 5 years) as much as Eastern Europeans.
So, although those manufacturing jobs are not coming back (they have evaporated due to robotics), the engineering jobs attendant to local (automated) plants are in fact coming. Also less people want to immigrate when their countries are doing good. So yes, there is a shortage of STEM people, and will grow, yes there will be jobs for them. But a lot of managers will just have to accept that you need to pay decent salaries to your employees, especially if you depend on them to think well on your behalf.
I suspect a lot of companies will in fact go under because of the need to keep paying management way more than they are worth and the pressure to try and underpay the engineers. This will be a slow process, but I guess that within 10-15 years it might be complete: those companies that value creativity and loyalty (through good benefits) will overtake the others. This is because as I said above, the opportunity for gains purely through arbitrage is gone. Women are now as much in the work force as men, developing countries have nearly caught up -- and the crisis helped -- and there are little to no free-trade agreements to sign any more.
The next years will be innovate or die. And innovation requires well-paid engineers and more horizontal hierarchies.
In case you are not trolling, know that we have observation for much longer periods than 30 years: ice cores give use data for hundreds of thousands of years, simply, the mesure is punctual extensive like the satellite data.
The problem with global warming is not with Florida going underwater. The risk of that is pretty low. Rather, the problem is more tornadoes, typhoons and floods causing massive disruption in theeconomic supply chains, as well as droughts causing widespread famine. It is a very serious, very real, civilisational threat. What will happen when we cannot grow enough food to feed the World?
What will happen when the US cannot grow enough food to feed itself? Invade Canada?
When all exceptional wheather events point in the same direction, it stops being "wheather" to be "climate".
If you were reporting news of the eastern front for a German newspaper after Stalingrad, you could well keep saying "sure, this battle was lost, but this other one was won. In any case, you can't call any particular battle to be an indication of how the war is going!". Except, of course, you can and should. OMany of these individual event are wheather, but the point that climatologists make is that they fall on a pattern: climate is changing, and the planet is becomming hotter. We also have a mechanism for that, the greenhouse effect, and human activities contribute to it significantly.
Frankly, that this be controversial is a huge mystery to me. But then people will believe the weirdest things if it helps them fit in a group, so...
But see, this cannot happen in the "free" market: choosing more pay vs more free time is not in fact an available option to you because the employers always prefer employees who pick the "more pay" branch of the alternative. Thus a minority of workaholics can force everyone to woork extra long hours.
In Europe, people get more holidays because these are mandated by the government. And this improves hourly productivity because not-completely-burnt-out people do work better (no shit). This is how the French, with their incredible number of days of holidays get to be nearly as productive as the 60-hours-a-week Americans.
This is a case were collective preference (most people would prefer more free time even at the cost of some salary) can only be obtained through regulation, or alternatively powerful unions.
If lend-lease had been in fvour of Germany instead of the UK, things might have turned very differently. Yes, the cost the US paid in blood in Europe was low, compared to that of the USSR, but the Pacific theatre was costly in terms of men.
All in all, I agree that the vision of the US marching into Europe as the brave liberator is simplistic, but in the end, free Europe owed to the US in large part its freedom.
This is Europe. You can wine and dine the MEPs, to an extent, but you need to corrupt them in so many languages that you might find the task daunting... Also unlike the US, outright buying of politicians is frowned upon.
Because make no mistakes, unlimited campaign donations via "superpacs" is just that, buying politicos.
All you whiners complaining that you should not have to subsidise somebody else's "poor lifestyle choices"? Well guess what, when an idiot decides not to get insurance, you are subsidising his "lifestyle choice", through higher premiums, notably. You can't get it both ways.
Why is national defence necessary? To protect you from bands of pillaging Canadians, raping and killing all in their wake (not necessarily in that order). Thus its essential function is protecting the health and property of citizens. The essential function of providing universal health care is to protect the health and property of citizens, notably through you not getting bankrupt because you breached your "lifetime cap".
There is no difference. Except that rampaging Canadians are clearly less of a menace than poor health.
If you can't fucking afford it, there is a provision to subsidise you in the Act.
Because you benefit from having society be richer, notably through an efficient and reliable (this also means safe) transport infrastructure. And no, the airlines do not have an interest in protecting the safety of their customers. They might have an interest in having customers not know the risk they take... In general, NDAs and settlements with the families might well be cheaper than regulation...
Basically, self-regulation is a bad idea: regulatory capture risk is not good, but it is better than no regulation.
You don't understand passenger traffic (hint, timeslots need to be filled, not wagons).
Also, you don't understand the concept of tax collection.
What are you, a libertarian?
It would, if there were successful terrorist attacks at those airports. As there isn't, it proves that it is just (bad) theatre.
You are an idiot. There can be competition amongst car manufacturers, not between train companies: they need to share the same tracks, FFS!
If you give the TSA function to a bunch of companies, you either end up with the overhead of a thousand boards of directors to feed and dealing with the interaction of all these companies. OR you get a massive oligopoly of a handful of private armies of goons mandated to stop and search you for profit.
Never mind that the government can be inefficient, at least it is not trying to harass you for money. Well, used to, until they privatised the prison system...
Imagine the profits if the police becomes private! and a subsidiary of your local friendly state prison!
Yup. He's just generally morally bankrupt.
Because remember this: when the government privatises critical services (and the TSA is most certainly deemed critical), the services still need to be "provided". With the extra overhead of making shareholders rich.
Because nothing will go wrong with private armies of people mandated to stop and search you...