No. My point was precisely what you are saying. Using sarcasm I implied that if the originator of the thread was right, than aeroplanes would not fly. And certainly we could not build them.
Because his original point was that you cannot solve things which involve differential equations, because then they become non-deterministic.
Which is silly, and wrong. To which you clearly agree.
BTW, yes, I also am a great fan of the relativistic magneto-hydro-dynamic version of the NS equations you use to model supernovae. But this is not relevant. Yes, NS is one of the most intriguing set of equations. Yes solving them numerically is absolutely a great research field. BUT THIS IS BESIDES THE POINT.
This is stupid. Reality is that you have plant A at the end of its operational life. Now you can a) replace A with a newer design, b) remove A and not replace it c) remove A and replace it by a different technology d) extend its life.
You can only pick a solution which is cost-effective and politically acceptable. Thus, you end with c) or d) which in practise means coal or increasingly unsafe plants (actually, I prefer d) to coal, but clearly it is not a good solution).
Now you can change this by making a) politically acceptable or by inventing a way of making alternate energies economical so c) means coal no more. Both are probably required. You cannot make b) politically acceptable, in practise.
These cases are numerous enough to justify guns only in your imagination. Also, knives can also do the trick. Baseball bats. Toasters wrapped in towels.
A benevolent God would not allow wholesale extinction of the Human race. Thus, if Mankind, through its actions can destroy itself, there is no benevolent God. Maybe he is hands-off, maybe he doesn't care, maybe he is a sadistic bastard. In no case is he benevolent, if he exists.
Parts of global warming are the collective result of the collective behaviour of humanity. Thus, yes, humanity, as a collective, is guilty. The point is that as a conservative, admitting to the existence of collective problems arising from collective behaviour is anathema. Is guilt equally distributed? no, but this is not, in fact relevant.
you will have to admit a gun is a pretty bad hammer, and a terrible screwdriver...
The costs are clear: some people will have successfully defended their possessions with their guns. This would not have happened without. Except that every time this occurred, an economic loss became a life and death situation. There simply are not enough rampaging murderers that conveniently give you time to aim for gun availability to be worthwhile. There are no defensible use cases for private usage of guns.
Other than recreational, that is, but why allow ammos outside the shooting range, then?
Except that it implies impossible things. For example, it is a global, systemic problem, requiring international cooperation. It is a problem _caused_ by markets and production. It implies that there is no benevolent God watching over us. It implies that we are collectively guilty of the bind we are in.
All those things are anathema to conservative. Who would rather go back to the middle ages than admit a single one of them. Which, luckily, is a solution to global warming. Probably the worse, but hey, you gotta work with what you've got:)
Also, planes don't fly. At least not in a deterministic fashion: Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Really, objects don't move, as this involves differential equations.
Clearly, thermodynamics are wrong, because it is as differential equations (or large numbers and probabilities, if you go the quantum route).
You have no clue what you are talking about: you assume that the solution must be steady state. You have no way of knowing that. In fact, you ought to know Sol cycles, so steady-state solutions are certainly wrong.
You have no clue what you are talking about: If I tell you that we are all going to die, with a certainty of.999 in 30 years, give or take 20, the proper reaction is not, in fact, to claim that as the error bounds are large, this must be bullshit.
The proper reaction is to say: oh, we'll prepare for the worst case, then.
Yes, but pitting real consequences against philosophical ones is inherently biased;)
Still, Obamacare is proof that sometimes, elected representative look long and hard at reality and go for the best politically admissible solution (which includes lobbies, special interests, potential for catch phrases, whatnot) -- which, you'll have to grant, is much better than going for the best political solution, never mind reality.
One of the big problem of democracy is that people do get what they want. However, most people are not trained as engineers or scientists and have no intuitive grasp of trade-offs (although, if slashdot is any indication, being technically minded is no panacea either). So they will only accept perfect solutions, which really means no solution at all. Which opens wide the field to pure rhetoric. A really good statesperson should be able to explain the outcomes and his choices. But somehow these (the good statespeople) do not seem to emerge in large enough quantities.
Your pie-in-the-sky solution is politically impossible, in the US. However, the Obama administration did the next best thing with Obamacare.
Indeed, the large, structural problem of America is the health care. The reason it is a large, structural problem is that health markets don't -- and cannot -- work. The reason they don't work is that insurances work on the premise that risks are shared out. But is your scheme is opt-in, only people obviously at risk want in, and premiums go up, pushing away people not obviously at risk. And the premiums go up in a death spiral.
So forcing everyone to get insurance _is_ the solution to that particular problem. With all the long-term benefits it has in terms of controlling costs and increasing the health of the public.
Also, read back your argument: if you accept that sometimes, "increasing government" is not morally abject, you are outlying why, in times of crisis, stimulus is necessary: more people stay employed, and thus consume, more businesses sell their products and services, and keep their employees. If you wait long enough, the (private) debt goes away (essentially replaced by government debt) and the economy goes on -- which allows taxes to be collected, and the government debt to be eliminated. This works because governments are not like corporations: they need not show a profit on the next quarter, so they can smooth out economic cycles for the rest of us.
Well, this is one thing where I agree with you. I would never have believed it.
No, seriously, programming (and the practical understanding of logic that it comes with) is a basic life skill in the XXI st century.
I think it also makes you understand something very important: trade-offs are required. At some point, you need to decide between exact and fast, or perfect and complete. If only a bit translates to the "real life", this makes for better, more adult, citizens.
Models tend to indicate that the consequence on the weather patterns are not good.
AGW says the climate is changing, the weather patterns are becoming more extreme, and the human hand is not innocent. It is wholly different from "we are all going to die! too many people! no more food!".
The consequences are not clear, but change is always costly, and it might be very costly. Meaning a big (and wholly unnecessary) drop in quality of life if corrective measures are not taken early enough. We, as a race, won't die, although a lot of people might, due to second order effects. But the cost-effective solution is probably an important reduction in carbon emissions.
Oh, but the plants should have been replaced. The problem is that there isn't a policy of replacing nuclear power plants after 40 years by the latest design. I mean, the guys who designed this thing must all be dead or retired. The salesman who sold it also. The board from the time of the sale has most certainly joined the choir invisible.
So hate GE all you want (they might deserve it) but for Fukushima, I blame the current energy company management.
The population growth meme has been with us forever, and although it is clearly true at the limit (there must be some upper bound of the number of people the Earth can carry) it has always been wrong in practise. www.gapminder.org has lots of wonderful data which shows clearly where we are going (in 2070, about 9-9.5B people, 2-3B rich, 1-3B poor, the rest in between, all in all a better place than now.).
Provided, of course, GW does not kill us. Food will not be the issue, if we can keep growing it. Water might run short but can be managed, although nuclear plants and desalinisation factories might become required. But if the average temperature really goes up by more than a couple degrees, yeah, we will have a problem.
In fact, they are the illustration that although we are not amazingly bright all the time, as a species we are pretty clever. I mean, we found a way to extract energy from the transmutation of atoms, and we have not killed ourselves with it. In fact, the worse accidents had pretty minor consequences, compared to the benefits.
1) Unless you think sex itself is an issue, your comment makes no sense 2) You mistake intelligence and rationality for knowledge and experience.
Fact: in Europe, where people accept that teenagers will have sex and expect them to enjoy it, condom use is higher, and abortions and STDs are less prevalent
Fact: you cannot frighten, train, coerce the average teenager in not having sex if he can.
Fact: it is my instinct to eat. You don't consider it bad that I do so, despite it being a grossly repugnant bodily function whose secondary characteristic is to give pleasure. As long, of course, as I do so responsibly and do not poison myself and do not end up obese. Why is protected sex different?
See, this is wrong: what part of "you cannot win against the collective sex drive of the world's teenagers" don't you understand? Much better that the teenagers have sex early and safely than slightly later, inhibitions lowered by alcohol, without protection.
Teenagers will have sex. Their attitude to sex will make them enjoy it more or less and be more or less responsible about it. And fear and (self-)loathing does not lead to responsible behaviour. A fearful human does not think straight. You cannot frighten someone against sex. Millenia of religious interdiction failed in that regard, what makes you think you will succeed?
No, the right policy is to actually encourage teens to have sex when they really feel like it. Inform them early and abundantly. That way, they'll turn into less frustrated adults, but also will bear less consequences of their actions -- because the only consequence will be mutual enjoyment.
BTW, I actually expect kids from the age of 7 to act rationally, as long as they are not overly stressed or fearful. It is not a question of legal responsibility, but rather of acting responsibly whilst doing something their ancestors have done in past millions of years.
if phi is the proportion of criminals, the crime rate c is
phi * r , where r is the rate of committing crime for the typical criminal.
d phi/ dt the rate of change in the proportion of criminal, a proxy measure for which is c is
d phi/dt = ( 1 - e (t) ) * phi + p * phi (t-delta) where e is the efficiency of capturing criminals (and the rate at which they retire) and p the number of new criminals you are creating from phi (there is a time delay effect)
This is in fact a chaotic system, because of the delay. But wait! where is the imprisonment rate? The rate is pretty much the number of criminals you catch -- which depends essentially of the number there were in the first place, for a given efficiency. So the crime rate is proportional to criminals, and so is the imprisonment rate. But the fraction of criminal can be affected only by affecting e, if your only lever is "tough on crime" policies -- and that only really forces retirement by not releasing criminals.
A sadly high number of people seem to think that. I blame prevention policies which try to get teenagers afraid of sex.
When a teenager is told sex is fine, and it's cool to have condoms, he probably will have some when sex will happen (and it will, no campaign in the world can fight the collective sex drive of teenagers). And that's cool.
Now if everything regarding sex is taboo, well, odds are no condom will be on hand, and unwanted pregnancies will occur (and the girl will not know about the "morning after pill"). I actually believe that abortion is the responsible course of action, there. But then the critical difference is that you are pretty much forced to abort, whereas you should have elected to put on a condom.
No, 17-24 years after (yet a bit later in fact, because of delays in implementation). It has been argued that the bump is due to the introduction of crack. Australian, Canadian and Romanian studied have all concluded to the same effect of abortion.
And these are a good control, because the legalisations happenned at different times.
If you are tough on crime, this means, presumably, that you are arresting more people. Now, this means that the people locked up do not commit any more crimes while locked up (after is a function of whether your prison system makes sense or is just a relic of medieval thinking).
The number of youth turning to crime, according to you, is a function of the number of criminals around them when they are growing up. Now if this were true, the crime rate would be significantly affected by the imprisonment rate, all over the world. But we find this to not be the case. Although locking people up does keep them off the street, it is a very costly and inefficient way of combating crime.
Which is why the most likely explanation for the drop remains legalised abortion. It is not growing up around criminals which matters in particular, but growing up in difficult circumstances. Abortion prevents births in bad circumstances and allows mothers to only carry their pregnancy to term when it makes sense to them.
Indeed, the drop would be observed not 12 years after the measures, but 17-18 (the human violence peak). Guess what happened at the end of the seventies?
Slashdot Mirror
No. My point was precisely what you are saying. Using sarcasm I implied that if the originator of the thread was right, than aeroplanes would not fly. And certainly we could not build them.
Because his original point was that you cannot solve things which involve differential equations, because then they become non-deterministic.
Which is silly, and wrong. To which you clearly agree.
BTW, yes, I also am a great fan of the relativistic magneto-hydro-dynamic version of the NS equations you use to model supernovae. But this is not relevant. Yes, NS is one of the most intriguing set of equations. Yes solving them numerically is absolutely a great research field. BUT THIS IS BESIDES THE POINT.
This is stupid. Reality is that you have plant A at the end of its operational life. Now you can a) replace A with a newer design, b) remove A and not replace it c) remove A and replace it by a different technology d) extend its life.
You can only pick a solution which is cost-effective and politically acceptable. Thus, you end with c) or d) which in practise means coal or increasingly unsafe plants (actually, I prefer d) to coal, but clearly it is not a good solution).
Now you can change this by making a) politically acceptable or by inventing a way of making alternate energies economical so c) means coal no more. Both are probably required. You cannot make b) politically acceptable, in practise.
I make point A. You reply no, look, it's A. Thus whoosh. See also sarcasm.
whoosh.
These cases are numerous enough to justify guns only in your imagination. Also, knives can also do the trick. Baseball bats. Toasters wrapped in towels.
A benevolent God would not allow wholesale extinction of the Human race. Thus, if Mankind, through its actions can destroy itself, there is no benevolent God. Maybe he is hands-off, maybe he doesn't care, maybe he is a sadistic bastard. In no case is he benevolent, if he exists.
Parts of global warming are the collective result of the collective behaviour of humanity. Thus, yes, humanity, as a collective, is guilty. The point is that as a conservative, admitting to the existence of collective problems arising from collective behaviour is anathema. Is guilt equally distributed? no, but this is not, in fact relevant.
you will have to admit a gun is a pretty bad hammer, and a terrible screwdriver...
The costs are clear: some people will have successfully defended their possessions with their guns. This would not have happened without. Except that every time this occurred, an economic loss became a life and death situation. There simply are not enough rampaging murderers that conveniently give you time to aim for gun availability to be worthwhile. There are no defensible use cases for private usage of guns.
Other than recreational, that is, but why allow ammos outside the shooting range, then?
Except that it implies impossible things. For example, it is a global, systemic problem, requiring international cooperation. It is a problem _caused_ by markets and production. It implies that there is no benevolent God watching over us. It implies that we are collectively guilty of the bind we are in.
All those things are anathema to conservative. Who would rather go back to the middle ages than admit a single one of them. Which, luckily, is a solution to global warming. Probably the worse, but hey, you gotta work with what you've got :)
Also, planes don't fly. At least not in a deterministic fashion: Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Really, objects don't move, as this involves differential equations.
Clearly, thermodynamics are wrong, because it is as differential equations (or large numbers and probabilities, if you go the quantum route).
You have no clue what you are talking about: you assume that the solution must be steady state. You have no way of knowing that. In fact, you ought to know Sol cycles, so steady-state solutions are certainly wrong.
You have no clue what you are talking about: If I tell you that we are all going to die, with a certainty of .999 in 30 years, give or take 20, the proper reaction is not, in fact, to claim that as the error bounds are large, this must be bullshit.
The proper reaction is to say: oh, we'll prepare for the worst case, then.
Yes, but pitting real consequences against philosophical ones is inherently biased ;)
Still, Obamacare is proof that sometimes, elected representative look long and hard at reality and go for the best politically admissible solution (which includes lobbies, special interests, potential for catch phrases, whatnot) -- which, you'll have to grant, is much better than going for the best political solution, never mind reality.
One of the big problem of democracy is that people do get what they want. However, most people are not trained as engineers or scientists and have no intuitive grasp of trade-offs (although, if slashdot is any indication, being technically minded is no panacea either). So they will only accept perfect solutions, which really means no solution at all. Which opens wide the field to pure rhetoric. A really good statesperson should be able to explain the outcomes and his choices. But somehow these (the good statespeople) do not seem to emerge in large enough quantities.
Your pie-in-the-sky solution is politically impossible, in the US. However, the Obama administration did the next best thing with Obamacare.
Indeed, the large, structural problem of America is the health care. The reason it is a large, structural problem is that health markets don't -- and cannot -- work. The reason they don't work is that insurances work on the premise that risks are shared out. But is your scheme is opt-in, only people obviously at risk want in, and premiums go up, pushing away people not obviously at risk. And the premiums go up in a death spiral.
So forcing everyone to get insurance _is_ the solution to that particular problem. With all the long-term benefits it has in terms of controlling costs and increasing the health of the public.
Also, read back your argument: if you accept that sometimes, "increasing government" is not morally abject, you are outlying why, in times of crisis, stimulus is necessary: more people stay employed, and thus consume, more businesses sell their products and services, and keep their employees. If you wait long enough, the (private) debt goes away (essentially replaced by government debt) and the economy goes on -- which allows taxes to be collected, and the government debt to be eliminated. This works because governments are not like corporations: they need not show a profit on the next quarter, so they can smooth out economic cycles for the rest of us.
Well, this is one thing where I agree with you. I would never have believed it.
No, seriously, programming (and the practical understanding of logic that it comes with) is a basic life skill in the XXI st century.
I think it also makes you understand something very important: trade-offs are required. At some point, you need to decide between exact and fast, or perfect and complete. If only a bit translates to the "real life", this makes for better, more adult, citizens.
Because as we all know, Germany is subject to frequent magnitude 9 earthquakes and tsunamis.
shorter: "we couldn't find a soundbite, so we gave up."
Models tend to indicate that the consequence on the weather patterns are not good.
AGW says the climate is changing, the weather patterns are becoming more extreme, and the human hand is not innocent. It is wholly different from "we are all going to die! too many people! no more food!".
The consequences are not clear, but change is always costly, and it might be very costly. Meaning a big (and wholly unnecessary) drop in quality of life if corrective measures are not taken early enough. We, as a race, won't die, although a lot of people might, due to second order effects. But the cost-effective solution is probably an important reduction in carbon emissions.
Oh, but the plants should have been replaced. The problem is that there isn't a policy of replacing nuclear power plants after 40 years by the latest design. I mean, the guys who designed this thing must all be dead or retired. The salesman who sold it also. The board from the time of the sale has most certainly joined the choir invisible.
So hate GE all you want (they might deserve it) but for Fukushima, I blame the current energy company management.
Except that AGW is grounded in fact.
The population growth meme has been with us forever, and although it is clearly true at the limit (there must be some upper bound of the number of people the Earth can carry) it has always been wrong in practise. www.gapminder.org has lots of wonderful data which shows clearly where we are going (in 2070, about 9-9.5B people, 2-3B rich, 1-3B poor, the rest in between, all in all a better place than now.).
Provided, of course, GW does not kill us. Food will not be the issue, if we can keep growing it. Water might run short but can be managed, although nuclear plants and desalinisation factories might become required. But if the average temperature really goes up by more than a couple degrees, yeah, we will have a problem.
In fact, they are the illustration that although we are not amazingly bright all the time, as a species we are pretty clever. I mean, we found a way to extract energy from the transmutation of atoms, and we have not killed ourselves with it. In fact, the worse accidents had pretty minor consequences, compared to the benefits.
1) Unless you think sex itself is an issue, your comment makes no sense
2) You mistake intelligence and rationality for knowledge and experience.
Fact: in Europe, where people accept that teenagers will have sex and expect them to enjoy it, condom use is higher, and abortions and STDs are less prevalent
Fact: you cannot frighten, train, coerce the average teenager in not having sex if he can.
Fact: it is my instinct to eat. You don't consider it bad that I do so, despite it being a grossly repugnant bodily function whose secondary characteristic is to give pleasure. As long, of course, as I do so responsibly and do not poison myself and do not end up obese. Why is protected sex different?
See, this is wrong: what part of "you cannot win against the collective sex drive of the world's teenagers" don't you understand? Much better that the teenagers have sex early and safely than slightly later, inhibitions lowered by alcohol, without protection.
Teenagers will have sex. Their attitude to sex will make them enjoy it more or less and be more or less responsible about it. And fear and (self-)loathing does not lead to responsible behaviour. A fearful human does not think straight. You cannot frighten someone against sex. Millenia of religious interdiction failed in that regard, what makes you think you will succeed?
No, the right policy is to actually encourage teens to have sex when they really feel like it. Inform them early and abundantly. That way, they'll turn into less frustrated adults, but also will bear less consequences of their actions -- because the only consequence will be mutual enjoyment.
BTW, I actually expect kids from the age of 7 to act rationally, as long as they are not overly stressed or fearful. It is not a question of legal responsibility, but rather of acting responsibly whilst doing something their ancestors have done in past millions of years.
Except for the fact that the abortion effect is not observed only in the US...
more complicated than that:
if phi is the proportion of criminals, the crime rate c is
phi * r , where r is the rate of committing crime for the typical criminal.
d phi/ dt the rate of change in the proportion of criminal, a proxy measure for which is c is
d phi/dt = ( 1 - e (t) ) * phi + p * phi (t-delta) where e is the efficiency of capturing criminals (and the rate at which they retire) and p the number of new criminals you are creating from phi (there is a time delay effect)
This is in fact a chaotic system, because of the delay. But wait! where is the imprisonment rate? The rate is pretty much the number of criminals you catch -- which depends essentially of the number there were in the first place, for a given efficiency. So the crime rate is proportional to criminals, and so is the imprisonment rate. But the fraction of criminal can be affected only by affecting e, if your only lever is "tough on crime" policies -- and that only really forces retirement by not releasing criminals.
Fair enough, but these don't show up in the crime statistics. Also, the "though on crime" crowd seems to think too easily that it "serves'em right".
A sadly high number of people seem to think that. I blame prevention policies which try to get teenagers afraid of sex.
When a teenager is told sex is fine, and it's cool to have condoms, he probably will have some when sex will happen (and it will, no campaign in the world can fight the collective sex drive of teenagers). And that's cool.
Now if everything regarding sex is taboo, well, odds are no condom will be on hand, and unwanted pregnancies will occur (and the girl will not know about the "morning after pill"). I actually believe that abortion is the responsible course of action, there. But then the critical difference is that you are pretty much forced to abort, whereas you should have elected to put on a condom.
No, 17-24 years after (yet a bit later in fact, because of delays in implementation). It has been argued that the bump is due to the introduction of crack. Australian, Canadian and Romanian studied have all concluded to the same effect of abortion.
And these are a good control, because the legalisations happenned at different times.
If you are tough on crime, this means, presumably, that you are arresting more people. Now, this means that the people locked up do not commit any more crimes while locked up (after is a function of whether your prison system makes sense or is just a relic of medieval thinking).
The number of youth turning to crime, according to you, is a function of the number of criminals around them when they are growing up. Now if this were true, the crime rate would be significantly affected by the imprisonment rate, all over the world. But we find this to not be the case. Although locking people up does keep them off the street, it is a very costly and inefficient way of combating crime.
Which is why the most likely explanation for the drop remains legalised abortion. It is not growing up around criminals which matters in particular, but growing up in difficult circumstances. Abortion prevents births in bad circumstances and allows mothers to only carry their pregnancy to term when it makes sense to them.
Indeed, the drop would be observed not 12 years after the measures, but 17-18 (the human violence peak). Guess what happened at the end of the seventies?