Who in his right mind would lay down that much for an apartment when he only makes 100k? Yeah. If all the rentals go for 5500/mo, then San Fran is unaffordable. But if that's only the cruelty-free artisanal apartments that go for that much while the normal ones are under 3k, then not so much. Same thing in Boston. The "really upmarket" rentals do go for that much. And then there's the ones that go for 3k. And then there's the ones that go for under 2k. All depends on how nice of a view you want and how long of a commute you're willing to tolerate.
Yeah. That's my point. More of the same BS we have in our tax code already, except now "it's good for the environment" instead of "it's good for The Children." This right here is why I call bullshit on the entire global warming industry: it is the latest in a long line of excuses for more government and more control of people. And you are a willing participant. Shame. On. You.
The regulatory infrastructure necessary to levy such a tax does not come for free any more than enforcement mechanisms for collection of sales or income taxes. The latter two are riddled with cutouts and loopholes for lobbyists with connections, and they're based on the simplest metric of economic activity there is: gross receipts. Do you honestly believe that taxing something as debatable as carbon dioxide emissions will not open up a much worse can of worms in terms of regulatory burden and opportunities for corruption?
That's not a good thing. In fact, it's a form of theft that's much more dishonest than taxation. Taxes and budgets get voted on. Printing money is something that happens in smoke-filled back rooms by People Who Know Best. Disgusting. Wars have been fought over that sort of thing.
I personally like case or switch statements for my state machines. But that's just a prettified mess of goto spaghetti, especially if it looks like
while(1){
report_condition(condition);
switch(condition){
case CASE1:
condition = do_case1();
break; ...
}
Which it frequently will for complicated transition logic.
It ain't f'ing unnecessary. If it's a spaghetti or gotos it'll be a spaghetti of inheritances or a spaghetti of lambda's. At some point, the complexity of the task the program is executing requires complex code. Goto's can be done so that they're easy to understand. So can inheritance. So can lambda's. But you've got to be aware of the fact that some things are just plain hard to understand because they're hard, no matter how good of a communicator the programmer is.
but I'm skeptical about functional as the hammer for every nail. Generics and lambda expressions in C++ can make some niche problems disappear entirely by making the compiler do all the work for you, Scheme and Lisp and the like are useful for some very narrow and very academic use cases. As the go-to tool in the tool box? Not so much.
Economists, as a rule, don't know what they're talking about. They try to hide this by adopting the manner and style of scientists and engineers. This attempt fails because the following question, to which they have no answer, cuts through all of their BS: How should the tax on CO2 emissions be calculated and who will be injecting their own judgment calls into that calculation?
I'm keen on market-based solutions. Getting a pack of pointy-headed academics to come up with a statistical measure of "cost" that's laden with their own particular assumptions and calling it "paying their fair share" or "a level playing field" with a straight face and calling everyone who dares point out the places where human judgement factors into these policies a racist or a whatever does not fall into the category of a market-based solution.
You keep using that word. ">95% confidence" makes a statement about post-dictive power and no statement about predictive power. It is an assumption that you have made that the 150 years of good data that you have sufficiently samples both the short-period and long-period climate variations for you to be able to predict out into the future. That is the assumption that I am challenging.
You're making assertions without backing them up. Yeah, we can and should get rid of the corporate welfare. If my taxes go down 1000/year, and gasoline prices go up 1000/year, I'd be cool with that. Same for farm subsidies and Obamaphones and tax-payer funded PREP for indigent homosexual men who choose to sleep around. Will any of that change the cost of pumping oil out of the ground or making electrons flow by any other means? No.
Yeah. Coming up with a good model for a complex system is hard, and making it so that it doesn't only look right to you in your own head is even harder. Who knew?
Swing and a miss as always. You don't need to prove that there is global warming, and you don't even need to prove a nonzero human contribution to it. What you do need to prove is 1) that human contribution portion is in excess of long-term natural variation and 2) your models of climate AND the economy are sufficiently accurate to justify putting tens of millions of people out of work and reducing quality of life for hundreds of millions more by implementing a massive geoengineering project that costs money that could otherwise be used to feed and house people and pay for other things that employ the non-essential sector of the economy.
You seem awfully bent on "appeal to analogy" type arguments. Is that because you want to create unjustified confidence in one particular set of climate models and policy proposals?
And this is where the analogy between gravity and climate fails. Yeah, you can tell me how dead I'd be, but if the real question is what temperature the sole of my shoe is exactly one second before impact and to a precision of mili-Kelvins, you're in not in as good a shape as you think you are.
Paint mixing does not have 1367 W/m2 of energy being pumped into it with 1 year, 11 year, 400 year, and other semi-periodic signals modulated on top of it. Equilibria lend themselves to pencil-and-paper analyses of extraordinary accuracy. The Earth's climate is not a system in equilibrium.
Is MODTRAN sciency enough for ya? Run it once figure out how transparent the atmosphere is to visible and near IR. I do it for astronomy. You can do it to figure out how much heat the ground absorbs. Now run it again using a different set of equally valid assumptions about atmospheric conditions. You will get wildly different answers for integrated atmospheric transmittance over all the wavelengths where the sun puts out any noticeable energy. And by varying, I mean plus or minus 50 percent at certain wavelengths.
Slashdot Mirror
Who in his right mind would lay down that much for an apartment when he only makes 100k? Yeah. If all the rentals go for 5500/mo, then San Fran is unaffordable. But if that's only the cruelty-free artisanal apartments that go for that much while the normal ones are under 3k, then not so much. Same thing in Boston. The "really upmarket" rentals do go for that much. And then there's the ones that go for 3k. And then there's the ones that go for under 2k. All depends on how nice of a view you want and how long of a commute you're willing to tolerate.
You're joking right? You're telling me that replacing one tax with another is somehow reducing the tax burden?
Yeah. That's my point. More of the same BS we have in our tax code already, except now "it's good for the environment" instead of "it's good for The Children." This right here is why I call bullshit on the entire global warming industry: it is the latest in a long line of excuses for more government and more control of people. And you are a willing participant. Shame. On. You.
Yeah. Like getting their bank accounts emptied out and being told that it's for their own good.
Correct. In the US, and I suspect in Canada, there is no mechanism to keep it in bounds beyond "trust me."
The regulatory infrastructure necessary to levy such a tax does not come for free any more than enforcement mechanisms for collection of sales or income taxes. The latter two are riddled with cutouts and loopholes for lobbyists with connections, and they're based on the simplest metric of economic activity there is: gross receipts. Do you honestly believe that taxing something as debatable as carbon dioxide emissions will not open up a much worse can of worms in terms of regulatory burden and opportunities for corruption?
That's not a good thing. In fact, it's a form of theft that's much more dishonest than taxation. Taxes and budgets get voted on. Printing money is something that happens in smoke-filled back rooms by People Who Know Best. Disgusting. Wars have been fought over that sort of thing.
I personally like case or switch statements for my state machines. But that's just a prettified mess of goto spaghetti, especially if it looks like
...
while(1){
report_condition(condition);
switch(condition){
case CASE1:
condition = do_case1();
break;
} Which it frequently will for complicated transition logic.
I could say the same thing about OO. And frequently do. Touche, AC.
It ain't f'ing unnecessary. If it's a spaghetti or gotos it'll be a spaghetti of inheritances or a spaghetti of lambda's. At some point, the complexity of the task the program is executing requires complex code. Goto's can be done so that they're easy to understand. So can inheritance. So can lambda's. But you've got to be aware of the fact that some things are just plain hard to understand because they're hard, no matter how good of a communicator the programmer is.
but I'm skeptical about functional as the hammer for every nail. Generics and lambda expressions in C++ can make some niche problems disappear entirely by making the compiler do all the work for you, Scheme and Lisp and the like are useful for some very narrow and very academic use cases. As the go-to tool in the tool box? Not so much.
Economists, as a rule, don't know what they're talking about. They try to hide this by adopting the manner and style of scientists and engineers. This attempt fails because the following question, to which they have no answer, cuts through all of their BS: How should the tax on CO2 emissions be calculated and who will be injecting their own judgment calls into that calculation?
I'm keen on market-based solutions. Getting a pack of pointy-headed academics to come up with a statistical measure of "cost" that's laden with their own particular assumptions and calling it "paying their fair share" or "a level playing field" with a straight face and calling everyone who dares point out the places where human judgement factors into these policies a racist or a whatever does not fall into the category of a market-based solution.
You keep using that word. ">95% confidence" makes a statement about post-dictive power and no statement about predictive power. It is an assumption that you have made that the 150 years of good data that you have sufficiently samples both the short-period and long-period climate variations for you to be able to predict out into the future. That is the assumption that I am challenging.
No, dear boy. We all have to jump. Or give up modern civilization and live like animals in caves and trees.
Read it. And many more. What's your point?
You're making assertions without backing them up. Yeah, we can and should get rid of the corporate welfare. If my taxes go down 1000/year, and gasoline prices go up 1000/year, I'd be cool with that. Same for farm subsidies and Obamaphones and tax-payer funded PREP for indigent homosexual men who choose to sleep around. Will any of that change the cost of pumping oil out of the ground or making electrons flow by any other means? No.
Yeah. Coming up with a good model for a complex system is hard, and making it so that it doesn't only look right to you in your own head is even harder. Who knew?
Swing and a miss as always. You don't need to prove that there is global warming, and you don't even need to prove a nonzero human contribution to it. What you do need to prove is 1) that human contribution portion is in excess of long-term natural variation and 2) your models of climate AND the economy are sufficiently accurate to justify putting tens of millions of people out of work and reducing quality of life for hundreds of millions more by implementing a massive geoengineering project that costs money that could otherwise be used to feed and house people and pay for other things that employ the non-essential sector of the economy.
You seem awfully bent on "appeal to analogy" type arguments. Is that because you want to create unjustified confidence in one particular set of climate models and policy proposals?
And this is where the analogy between gravity and climate fails. Yeah, you can tell me how dead I'd be, but if the real question is what temperature the sole of my shoe is exactly one second before impact and to a precision of mili-Kelvins, you're in not in as good a shape as you think you are.
Paint mixing does not have 1367 W/m2 of energy being pumped into it with 1 year, 11 year, 400 year, and other semi-periodic signals modulated on top of it. Equilibria lend themselves to pencil-and-paper analyses of extraordinary accuracy. The Earth's climate is not a system in equilibrium.
Is MODTRAN sciency enough for ya? Run it once figure out how transparent the atmosphere is to visible and near IR. I do it for astronomy. You can do it to figure out how much heat the ground absorbs. Now run it again using a different set of equally valid assumptions about atmospheric conditions. You will get wildly different answers for integrated atmospheric transmittance over all the wavelengths where the sun puts out any noticeable energy. And by varying, I mean plus or minus 50 percent at certain wavelengths.
"Climate" is the integrated effect of "weather." If the former is chaotic, the latter has bigger error bars than you think it does.
In fact you can't. See Equation 4-26 of the following PDF: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/...