I love the Republican / conservative / libertarian adoption of the post modernist ethos that says there isn't one objective reality, but rather as many realities are there are opinion holders.
"You have your opinion on AGW and I have mine. So there."
There is ONE reality , not many. That reality is best known through an activity called science. Anyone who seriously wants to enact policies which deny this is a danger to society.
and give them zero government assistance when reality comes knocking.
The more ways society can construct for deniers to be separated out from the general population so they can be selectively forced to suffer the consequences of their decisions, the better.
Consider that he posted as AC and the post itself is little more than a boilerplate template of ideas libertarians have of the much hated "goobmint" with "fire department" and "mayor's office" and "police" and "government worker" filled in.
This exact same post could appear to blame the government for any failed project whatsoever across any domain.
There is no God given right for America to have a job done without us fucking America up the ass so far that whoever pulls it out will be crowned the fucking King of England. .
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job we gave to Americans after we talked Congress into letting us re-patriate the taxes we dodged by relocating our jobs overseas, and with which we promptly paid ourselves huge bonuses and made a huge stock buy-back.
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore, except mine.
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job for the 20,000 Americans we laid off so we could pay ourselves tens of millions in bonuses for that quarter...
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job for Americans at HP anymore because HP is going down like a crack whore in a housing project
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job that is America's God given right anymore.
I am not sure this is a great thing. Maybe it is. I am conflicted, I admit. I am not sure that direct democracy is not subject to intemperate and ignorant decision making on the part of , say, scientific illiterates.
OTOH clearly our current system is pathetically broken with WORSE than "average" decisions being made by venal, near idiots.
I admit I am stumped and seek the wise consul of people who are actual learned specialist - academics who study this or whose work in, say psychology , especially the psychology of crowds or extremely relevant specialty subjects like terror management theory:
Technically you're right but since these are political acts by anarchists who "oppose" fascism it's fit and right that I use it here to point up their hypocrisy .
IN the US we don't have much left wing terrorism to speak of, the actions of some Earth First!-ers excepted.
But in Europe actually, you have it on both sides of the political spectrum. Sorry but killing people is a form of fascism. If you want to make your point to your fellow citizens then you need to restrict yourself to civilized means that are available to you. This is effective.
Is nanotechnology really threatening civilization the way, say, global warming is? Is nuclear power threatening civilization? I don't see it. What's more I see in the EU and now Japan that process of engaging civil society has resulted in the turning back of nuclear power in favor of other alternative energy sources.
So what's your point? Your point is you're violent and you're looking for someone to act out that violence against. Just like the right wing in this country with their abortion clinic bombings. It's disgusting and it puts you squarely outside of civilization, that thing you think you are protecting.
Some people just can't get used to the fact that society does not accord them maximum unilateral freedom to do what they want. Libertarians in this country have this bend. They accept no compromises in order to have a functioning society, they're always harkening after some mythical freedom they think they've lost by submitting to the compromises society requires of all its citizens.
I can't stand those people, on the left or on the right.
Is this the most obvious consequence to outsourcing or what ? When you take seriously the notion that all that matters is the profitability of your largest campaign contributors, is not the inevitable result that Reality will teach you just how wrong you were?
For years some of us have been saying just this is exactly inevitable and before us, the previous generation were saying the same thing. All we got back was BS from the likes of Dan Griswold and the CATO Institute about what Luddites we were.
We don't make critical parts to our own weapon systems. We outsource to our most likely long term opponent. Why do we do that? So large campaign contributors can make obscene profits by advantaging themselves of cheap (but getting less cheap) labor.
Does this change anyone's mind about campaign finance reform? Is money still a form of speech? Anyone in Congress care to review Citizens United v FEC? Or do we have to wait until it's just too late?
Well who decides anything? How is any consensus achieved? There are some who will complain about doing anything as we all know. They're the naysayers and naysayers are never relevant, always proved wrong but they're never less relevant than when they oppose the inevitable and the world doing something about climate change is inevitable. Why? Because there's ONE reality , not as many as you want to spin into existence like the Post Modern loving Republicans would have it.
There is one reality and that reality is going to happen. People who act as though that were true are the people who matter in the end.
Doing something about climate change now doesn't mean we have to lower our standard of living in the west ; that's a canard. The Princeton wedges program clearly lays out a multi-prong approach that doesn't introduce any real shocks to the existing system . This is a doable thing.
As far as national security is concerned, no one takes global warming as seriously as the US armed forces and intelligence agencies and towards that end the Navy is going to have 50% of its energy come from alternative fuel sources:
www.navy.mil/features/Navy_EnergySecurity.pdf
It's overly cynical if understandable reaction to believe that the world is incapable of handling this threat. We've done this before and it looked just as bad just as late- our delayed entry into WWII comes to mind.. It's not much fun when you have to live through it and the outcome is not certain. That's especially true with this since no one can be sure that we won't unleash negative feedback loops that are beyond our control to stop.
How does that like Chinese curse go? - may you live in interesting times.....
I would say most people including most merchants the US Congress and the EU consider Master/Visa to be a duopoly as my links indicated, whatever else market distorting entities there may be at work also.
FirstData is a monopoly (75% of the market at least) but that fact doesn't imply that MC and VISA are not also at the same time a duopoly with the power to distort the market in their own right.
The alternative is that the western world subsidise the emerging world for not polluting so that we haven't gained an unfair advantage just because we were polluting before we knew the damage it did.
Perhaps it's not the only alternative . We could can set the acceptable pollution standards for each country a little differently taking into account all factors - historical political and environmental.
The overall *thing* we all need to do is start a worldwide effort to offset carbon and other GHG while funding R and D into alternative energy sources.
I think China knows that they can't pollute their way to prosperity and social stability the way the US did on account of the destabilizing effects of global warming.
This is one area where it really makes sense for us all to set aside our differences and just pull together. Even my Tea Party friends (yes, i have some of those) seem to be accepting the idea that humans are likely causing global warming and we need to do something about at the governmental level.
Uh, that would be that the ability of new players to enter into online commercial payment processing thanks to handheld devices and the internet, is having the effect of driving down prices from what MasterCharge and Visa (duopoly) have traditionally been able to inflict on merchants:
Getting the point of my post requires some awareness of what the world is like outside of the post and what current context the original story is implicitly embedded in.
The problem is that if you really have capitalism, then anyone can enter an industry if they see that the dominant one, two, or however many companies in it are pricing their goods or services too high. But we don't have that, we have corporatism, where those who are already in a market use relationships with the policy makers who oversee them for mutual advantage.
In other words, we already have something external that's supposed to do what you describe. The problem is that it usually stifles real competition rather than promoting it, because human nature is to act more from individual incentive rather than from altruism.
I could not agree with you more. Corporatism.. that's the world I was looking for in my above reply to Anonymous. Crony capitalism, where your personal connections to other business owners and to people in government determine your business success.
There is no system of laws that can't be abused. I completely agree that a large number of people are inherently motivated by their own greed and virtually nothing else . There are also people who are inherently motivated to be altruistic after their own needs are satisfied. They exist too and are just as natural as the greedheads.
All I can say with respect to the failures of the system we've created so far is - they are not nearly bad as what went down in the Dark and Middle Ages (yet) and , well, it's our turn to take a crack at making things better. Here's the map of history. You are here -->
Perhaps this is the difference between people who believe in a free market and those who believe the purpose of government is to foster an environment in which people and businesses have no limits on the amount of market power they can acquire irrespective of what effect it has on society at large..
A free market is not a natural state of man, just as a healthy functioning city sanitation system is not a state which arises naturally from people living together in cities. It has to be engineered, attended to , trouble shot and actively kept in good working order.
Some people misconstrue the free market with some sort of natural law or fundamental law of nature that is only contravened when Big Government steps in and ruins it, usually by trying to assure "equality" in some form. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The free market like every system of laws that seeks to regulate human interactions, is the result of heavy handed (as in, do THAT and we'll fine you , end your company and or throw you in jail) legislation the sum total of which represents the accumulated wisdom and hard won knowledge of previous generations. There is no concept of "less legislation is always better" because the whole edifice is an act of lawmaking first place.
In fact, even having the power to look over the behaviour of a monopoly to see if further action is needed to correct their behaviour is itself a form of regulatory authority. That is, the fact that Congress CAN do this at all is already regulatory and further, and the existence of that Congressional power has a definite effect on monopolies whether they are target for legislation or not..
As far as unintended consequences of legislation on business goes, in a nation of laws choosing to create a law is an affirmative act and choosing to refrain from creating a law is equally an affirmative act and both bear consequences, some of which will be unintended and some of which will sometimes be contrary to the actor's intentions. So "unintended consequences" is not the sole purview of legislation.
There is no magic path to knowing in advance what to do in any given circumstance. All we have in any field -and all we ever have - is the iterative and application of judgement and the accumulated knowledge of results in pursuit of pro-social outcomes.
There are other ways to encourage deep investment and provide low cost services - two alleged benefits of monopolies- other than permitting monopolies to reign with unchecked, unregulated power.
PayPal's service, known as PayPal Here, charges a fee of 2.7 percent of the purchase price for all types of credit and debit cards - including those issued by American Express Co.. Transaction fees for processing AmEx cards are often higher. Square charges 2.75 percent per swipe. Groupon's test service is charging a 1.8 percent transaction fee and 15 cents per transaction, Rocky Agrawal, an industry analyst, reported in a VentureBeat blog late Thursday."
OMIGOD Could it be that when barriers to entry into otherwise mono-duo-trio- opolisitc markets fall then competition drives down prices and consumers benefit?
I think the mere PRESENCE of such mono-duo-trio- opolisitic markets should AUTOMATICALLY invoke very tight regulatory structuring of those markets until such time as meaningful competition arrives.
Capitailsm can't survive it's own success if success always means the consolidation of markets. Something external has to step in and reset the game
It seems to me that people who love capitalism should all agree with me and the people who don't are just profiteers fundamentally unconcerned with the society they in or other people, at best paying some lip service to some "invisible hand" that justifies their selfish greed.
Putting down any alternative energy technology as permanently impractical is always a risky bet and one solar naysayers are going to lose sooner rather than later. The most damaging thing is when it gets turned into a political football because it discourages money being directed to research and development across the board.
We need to be going full moon-shot towards alternative energy, subsidizing early adopters and deficit spending all the way if need be. The real and widespread economic costs associated with global warming and also with peak oil in the very near future far far outweigh any cost associated with R and D into alternative energy.
Where are the substantive longitudinal studies that 1) define some quantitatively meaningful definition for "wiping out with women" and porn games being "basically the same thing" and such like that these guys are bandying about and 2) show an precipitous drop in clearly quantifiable social and sexual skills relative to other generations of same ?
Answer: no where. This is not science. It's story telling by scientists. It's a narrative people are sure to find enthralling. Especially at TED talks.
Here's what''s going on. It's a two parter, so pay attention. Part one is old people are always discomfited by the degenerative state of the younger generation and point to some new aspect of culture that's degrading the next generations. Always. Every generation. You should read what establishment psychologists had to say about about the Beatles , along with Christian fundies etc etc.
Q: "Last summer in San Francisco, a doctor said that the Beatles were instruments of the communist propaganda-- that you were softening up and corrupting America's youth. What did you say to that?"
JOHN: "I think he should see a doctor. that doctor. He must be mad. You know-- Doctor of what! I mean who was he, you know. So many nuts over here, they call themselves doctors... and Sergeants and things."
PAUL: "We're all capitalists, anyway. Don't worry. CAPITOL-ists! Get it?"
(laughter)
Second middle aged guys look at their lives and can too clearly see how much money they're ever going to have, feel disappointed and set out on some entrepreneurial scheme to better their financial standing . If you're an academic, this means you write a book and hope it's a best seller.
Oh man the war on drugs.. here's the whole problem with that- we're financing the worst people in the world by making these drugs illegal. What will the worst people in the world do with all their money? The worst things in the world. Ambition never sleeps. For now all their effort is tied up with being the biggest kingpin in Juarez Mexico.
But what happens when the wrong person comes along and starts thinking bigger, has bigger ambitions? Or has used enough of the drug he sells (or more likely his mother did it for him while he was in utereo) and is just demented , anti-social, psychotic Hitleresque? Then what? Think they will stay ignorant of the wonders of microbiology forever?
We need to pull their financial plug. We tied to do it by stopping people from wanting to do drugs. We gave it an honest run. The same honest run the ChiComs gave the "better people through indoctrination" approach to reducing greed and selfishness.
It didn't work. Just that,. It doesn't work.
We can rearrange the rules and incentives for society such that the born to be drug addict people can be just that until they kill themselves or save themselves and the rest of us can stop funding once and future terrorists.
With all the money we pour into enforcement we could be researching why some people are prone to addiction, developing alternatives for this class of society's unfortunates which are less expensive than the 60k a year we spend to incarcerate each one.
Don't get me wrong, I think stimulants are a direct and profound assault on the brain whose long term use results in fundamentally egomanical, paranoid, dangerous and violent people. Think OJ Simpson. But the death toll and cost from these induced lunatics' actions STILL won't be anything like the death toll and cost we are incurring now.
Slashdot Mirror
I love the Republican / conservative / libertarian adoption of the post modernist ethos that says there isn't one objective reality, but rather as many realities are there are opinion holders.
"You have your opinion on AGW and I have mine. So there."
There is ONE reality , not many. That reality is best known through an activity called science. Anyone who seriously wants to enact policies which deny this is a danger to society.
and give them zero government assistance when reality comes knocking.
The more ways society can construct for deniers to be separated out from the general population so they can be selectively forced to suffer the consequences of their decisions, the better.
Consider that he posted as AC and the post itself is little more than a boilerplate template of ideas libertarians have of the much hated "goobmint" with "fire department" and "mayor's office" and "police" and "government worker" filled in.
This exact same post could appear to blame the government for any failed project whatsoever across any domain.
There is no God given right for America to have a job done without us fucking America up the ass so far that whoever pulls it out will be crowned the fucking King of England. .
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job we gave to Americans after we talked Congress into letting us re-patriate the taxes we dodged by relocating our jobs overseas, and with which we promptly paid ourselves huge bonuses and made a huge stock buy-back.
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore, except mine.
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job for the 20,000 Americans we laid off so we could pay ourselves tens of millions in bonuses for that quarter...
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job for Americans at HP anymore because HP is going down like a crack whore in a housing project
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
There is no job that is America's God given right anymore.
Carly Fiorina HP CEO, June 14, 2010
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/carly-fiorina-election-about-economy-and-d
What are we waiting for? They should have been broken up when they were found guilty of monopolistic practices the first time.
Let's get this done. No fucking around the edges.
I am not sure this is a great thing. Maybe it is. I am conflicted, I admit. I am not sure that direct democracy is not subject to intemperate and ignorant decision making on the part of , say, scientific illiterates.
OTOH clearly our current system is pathetically broken with WORSE than "average" decisions being made by venal, near idiots.
I admit I am stumped and seek the wise consul of people who are actual learned specialist - academics who study this or whose work in, say psychology , especially the psychology of crowds or extremely relevant specialty subjects like terror management theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
I want to know what they think the hidden ramifications inherent in this type of political organization of society.
http://www.alternet.org/story/154252/the_republican_brain:_why_even_educated_conservatives_deny_science_--_and_reality/
Technically you're right but since these are political acts by anarchists who "oppose" fascism it's fit and right that I use it here to point up their hypocrisy .
Great post. Great rebuttal.
The real problem is what happens to society when large numbers of men are deprived of the chance for families and paternity.
I think this is known in the sociological literature as "tick.. tick... tick.. BOOM!!!!"
And syphilis wasn't a downside to heterosexual sex in the 19th century?
Fucking moron. Show your face, anonymous coward.
IN the US we don't have much left wing terrorism to speak of, the actions of some Earth First!-ers excepted.
But in Europe actually, you have it on both sides of the political spectrum. Sorry but killing people is a form of fascism. If you want to make your point to your fellow citizens then you need to restrict yourself to civilized means that are available to you. This is effective.
Is nanotechnology really threatening civilization the way, say, global warming is? Is nuclear power threatening civilization? I don't see it. What's more I see in the EU and now Japan that process of engaging civil society has resulted in the turning back of nuclear power in favor of other alternative energy sources.
So what's your point? Your point is you're violent and you're looking for someone to act out that violence against. Just like the right wing in this country with their abortion clinic bombings. It's disgusting and it puts you squarely outside of civilization, that thing you think you are protecting.
Some people just can't get used to the fact that society does not accord them maximum unilateral freedom to do what they want. Libertarians in this country have this bend. They accept no compromises in order to have a functioning society, they're always harkening after some mythical freedom they think they've lost by submitting to the compromises society requires of all its citizens.
I can't stand those people, on the left or on the right.
Oh okay you're right.
Is this the most obvious consequence to outsourcing or what ? When you take seriously the notion that all that matters is the profitability of your largest campaign contributors, is not the inevitable result that Reality will teach you just how wrong you were?
For years some of us have been saying just this is exactly inevitable and before us, the previous generation were saying the same thing. All we got back was BS from the likes of Dan Griswold and the CATO Institute about what Luddites we were.
We don't make critical parts to our own weapon systems. We outsource to our most likely long term opponent. Why do we do that? So large campaign contributors can make obscene profits by advantaging themselves of cheap (but getting less cheap) labor.
Does this change anyone's mind about campaign finance reform? Is money still a form of speech? Anyone in Congress care to review Citizens United v FEC? Or do we have to wait until it's just too late?
I agree with you about PHP btw
Well who decides anything? How is any consensus achieved? There are some who will complain about doing anything as we all know. They're the naysayers and naysayers are never relevant, always proved wrong but they're never less relevant than when they oppose the inevitable and the world doing something about climate change is inevitable. Why? Because there's ONE reality , not as many as you want to spin into existence like the Post Modern loving Republicans would have it.
There is one reality and that reality is going to happen. People who act as though that were true are the people who matter in the end.
Doing something about climate change now doesn't mean we have to lower our standard of living in the west ; that's a canard. The Princeton wedges program clearly lays out a multi-prong approach that doesn't introduce any real shocks to the existing system . This is a doable thing.
As far as national security is concerned, no one takes global warming as seriously as the US armed forces and intelligence agencies and towards that end the Navy is going to have 50% of its energy come from alternative fuel sources:
www.navy.mil/features/Navy_EnergySecurity.pdf
It's overly cynical if understandable reaction to believe that the world is incapable of handling this threat. We've done this before and it looked just as bad just as late- our delayed entry into WWII comes to mind.. It's not much fun when you have to live through it and the outcome is not certain. That's especially true with this since no one can be sure that we won't unleash negative feedback loops that are beyond our control to stop.
How does that like Chinese curse go? - may you live in interesting times. ....
I would say most people including most merchants the US Congress and the EU consider Master/Visa to be a duopoly as my links indicated, whatever else market distorting entities there may be at work also.
MC and Visa are a duopoly and they have quite a bit of power over their merchants including their fee structure which Congress has looked into : http://www.investorplace.com/2011/06/visa-stock-credit-cards-congress/
FirstData is a monopoly (75% of the market at least) but that fact doesn't imply that MC and VISA are not also at the same time a duopoly with the power to distort the market in their own right.
The alternative is that the western world subsidise the emerging world for not polluting so that we haven't gained an unfair advantage just because we were polluting before we knew the damage it did.
Perhaps it's not the only alternative . We could can set the acceptable pollution standards for each country a little differently taking into account all factors - historical political and environmental.
The overall *thing* we all need to do is start a worldwide effort to offset carbon and other GHG while funding R and D into alternative energy sources.
I think China knows that they can't pollute their way to prosperity and social stability the way the US did on account of the destabilizing effects of global warming.
This is one area where it really makes sense for us all to set aside our differences and just pull together. Even my Tea Party friends (yes, i have some of those) seem to be accepting the idea that humans are likely causing global warming and we need to do something about at the governmental level.
http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22662
Getting the point of my post requires some awareness of what the world is like outside of the post and what current context the original story is implicitly embedded in.
Clear that up for ya?
The problem is that if you really have capitalism, then anyone can enter an industry if they see that the dominant one, two, or however many companies in it are pricing their goods or services too high. But we don't have that, we have corporatism, where those who are already in a market use relationships with the policy makers who oversee them for mutual advantage. In other words, we already have something external that's supposed to do what you describe. The problem is that it usually stifles real competition rather than promoting it, because human nature is to act more from individual incentive rather than from altruism.
I could not agree with you more. Corporatism.. that's the world I was looking for in my above reply to Anonymous. Crony capitalism, where your personal connections to other business owners and to people in government determine your business success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
There is no system of laws that can't be abused. I completely agree that a large number of people are inherently motivated by their own greed and virtually nothing else . There are also people who are inherently motivated to be altruistic after their own needs are satisfied. They exist too and are just as natural as the greedheads.
All I can say with respect to the failures of the system we've created so far is - they are not nearly bad as what went down in the Dark and Middle Ages (yet) and , well, it's our turn to take a crack at making things better. Here's the map of history. You are here -->
Perhaps this is the difference between people who believe in a free market and those who believe the purpose of government is to foster an environment in which people and businesses have no limits on the amount of market power they can acquire irrespective of what effect it has on society at large. .
A free market is not a natural state of man, just as a healthy functioning city sanitation system is not a state which arises naturally from people living together in cities. It has to be engineered, attended to , trouble shot and actively kept in good working order.
Some people misconstrue the free market with some sort of natural law or fundamental law of nature that is only contravened when Big Government steps in and ruins it, usually by trying to assure "equality" in some form. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The free market like every system of laws that seeks to regulate human interactions, is the result of heavy handed (as in, do THAT and we'll fine you , end your company and or throw you in jail) legislation the sum total of which represents the accumulated wisdom and hard won knowledge of previous generations. There is no concept of "less legislation is always better" because the whole edifice is an act of lawmaking first place.
In fact, even having the power to look over the behaviour of a monopoly to see if further action is needed to correct their behaviour is itself a form of regulatory authority. That is, the fact that Congress CAN do this at all is already regulatory and further, and the existence of that Congressional power has a definite effect on monopolies whether they are target for legislation or not..
As far as unintended consequences of legislation on business goes, in a nation of laws choosing to create a law is an affirmative act and choosing to refrain from creating a law is equally an affirmative act and both bear consequences, some of which will be unintended and some of which will sometimes be contrary to the actor's intentions. So "unintended consequences" is not the sole purview of legislation .
There is no magic path to knowing in advance what to do in any given circumstance. All we have in any field -and all we ever have - is the iterative and application of judgement and the accumulated knowledge of results in pursuit of pro-social outcomes.
There are other ways to encourage deep investment and provide low cost services - two alleged benefits of monopolies- other than permitting monopolies to reign with unchecked, unregulated power.
PayPal's service, known as PayPal Here, charges a fee of 2.7 percent of the purchase price for all types of credit and debit cards - including those issued by American Express Co.. Transaction fees for processing AmEx cards are often higher. Square charges 2.75 percent per swipe. Groupon's test service is charging a 1.8 percent transaction fee and 15 cents per transaction, Rocky Agrawal, an industry analyst, reported in a VentureBeat blog late Thursday."
OMIGOD Could it be that when barriers to entry into otherwise mono-duo-trio- opolisitc markets fall then competition drives down prices and consumers benefit?
I think the mere PRESENCE of such mono-duo-trio- opolisitic markets should AUTOMATICALLY invoke very tight regulatory structuring of those markets until such time as meaningful competition arrives.
Capitailsm can't survive it's own success if success always means the consolidation of markets. Something external has to step in and reset the game
It seems to me that people who love capitalism should all agree with me and the people who don't are just profiteers fundamentally unconcerned with the society they in or other people, at best paying some lip service to some "invisible hand" that justifies their selfish greed.
A lot.
new solar technologies are able to harvest light from the infrared spectrum, which includes harvesting energy at night:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/scientists-harvest-solar-power-in-the-dark/4150
Putting down any alternative energy technology as permanently impractical is always a risky bet and one solar naysayers are going to lose sooner rather than later. The most damaging thing is when it gets turned into a political football because it discourages money being directed to research and development across the board.
We need to be going full moon-shot towards alternative energy, subsidizing early adopters and deficit spending all the way if need be. The real and widespread economic costs associated with global warming and also with peak oil in the very near future far far outweigh any cost associated with R and D into alternative energy.
Answer: no where. This is not science. It's story telling by scientists. It's a narrative people are sure to find enthralling. Especially at TED talks.
Here's what''s going on. It's a two parter, so pay attention. Part one is old people are always discomfited by the degenerative state of the younger generation and point to some new aspect of culture that's degrading the next generations. Always. Every generation. You should read what establishment psychologists had to say about about the Beatles , along with Christian fundies etc etc.
From http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/db1965.0829.beatles.html
Q: "Last summer in San Francisco, a doctor said that the Beatles were instruments of the communist propaganda-- that you were softening up and corrupting America's youth. What did you say to that?" JOHN: "I think he should see a doctor. that doctor. He must be mad. You know-- Doctor of what! I mean who was he, you know. So many nuts over here, they call themselves doctors... and Sergeants and things." PAUL: "We're all capitalists, anyway. Don't worry. CAPITOL-ists! Get it?" (laughter)
Second middle aged guys look at their lives and can too clearly see how much money they're ever going to have, feel disappointed and set out on some entrepreneurial scheme to better their financial standing . If you're an academic, this means you write a book and hope it's a best seller.
Oh man the war on drugs.. here's the whole problem with that- we're financing the worst people in the world by making these drugs illegal. What will the worst people in the world do with all their money? The worst things in the world. Ambition never sleeps. For now all their effort is tied up with being the biggest kingpin in Juarez Mexico.
But what happens when the wrong person comes along and starts thinking bigger, has bigger ambitions? Or has used enough of the drug he sells (or more likely his mother did it for him while he was in utereo) and is just demented , anti-social, psychotic Hitleresque? Then what? Think they will stay ignorant of the wonders of microbiology forever?
We need to pull their financial plug. We tied to do it by stopping people from wanting to do drugs. We gave it an honest run. The same honest run the ChiComs gave the "better people through indoctrination" approach to reducing greed and selfishness.
It didn't work. Just that,. It doesn't work.
We can rearrange the rules and incentives for society such that the born to be drug addict people can be just that until they kill themselves or save themselves and the rest of us can stop funding once and future terrorists.
With all the money we pour into enforcement we could be researching why some people are prone to addiction, developing alternatives for this class of society's unfortunates which are less expensive than the 60k a year we spend to incarcerate each one.
Don't get me wrong, I think stimulants are a direct and profound assault on the brain whose long term use results in fundamentally egomanical, paranoid, dangerous and violent people. Think OJ Simpson. But the death toll and cost from these induced lunatics' actions STILL won't be anything like the death toll and cost we are incurring now.
As we fund terrorists.