I agree with you. I posted as I did on this because the GP sort-of indicated that climate changes would be a net-zero, with new agricultural areas gaining as much as old agricultural areas lost. I was simply thinking in best-case terms, that farmers would have to move their equipment. The big problems would come when that equipment (and especially) labor have to move across national boundaries. I wasn't even thinking in terms of soil formation, actually anticipating that the "gain" areas would have built soil in the geological past, that land was effectively "fallow" while it was permafrost, and it would be plow-ready. That is of course, once the territorial wars settled down, and assuming those wars don't damage the very land they're fighting over.
There will certainly be winners as well as losers in climate change. But there are 2 things to remember about this.
First, our current agricultural systems are "optimized" (for some definition of optimized, though not a very optimal one) around climate patterns as they exist. Even if climate change were to increase the arable land, it would most likely be different land that became arable, and at least some existing arable land will cease to be so. It will take time to adapt our agricultural usage to the new areas. In the short term, this adaptation will likely be uncomfortable.
Second, one of the predictions about a warmer climate is that things will become more extreme. Continental interiors are expected on average to get dryer, coastal areas on average to get wetter. And as some say, there will likely be more water evaporating, so the rainy areas may get a LOT more rain, while the dry areas may still get dryer.
Finally, making any predictions is dicey at best. Even, or especially the climate scientists are cagey about exact predictions, because they know how inexact the whole thing is. Which is odd, because one of the skeptics' prime complaints is that there are not exact, testable predictions, and they don't seem to understand that fuzzy statistical answers are also testable.
Ironically, there are those who credit the black death with the last 500 or so years of progress. The death of so many created a labor shortage, leading to higher pay and better conditions for workers. Then stack on top of that opportunities of the "New World" opening up.
In simplistic terms, feudalism was out-competed by the free market.
I didn't say feudalism would be completely non-meritocratic. You don't have to go all the way to impair the system. You just have to have a good sprinkling of people who wouldn't be there except by birth.
Plus it's not really fair comparing him to serfs, since part of the equation is proper opportunity when young. Of course the feudal lord will be a better military commander - having at least received some schooling and training. But had there been widespread education and better nutrition, who knows what some of the serfs might have become?
The "kid in rags who struck it rich" is the proverbial American success story, but one can bet that he at least received decent nutrition as an infant, and found the opportunity for a useful (not necessarily school) education.
There are many different dimensions for viewing society. (or other things) Meritocracy is one of them. When feudalism comes up, it's a rather obvious one.
> The interesting thing is that practically no-one has ever overthrown a bad system themselves, its always > left to external factors to make the change
Still, what it means is that that feudal system is not capable of meeting its challenges. Perhaps with more capable people at the helm, not necessarily those selected by heredity, they would have handled things better.
I'm suggesting that most human societies unfortunately tend toward "lack of meritocracy". I also suggest that most feudal systems have a head-start on that path, given that they frequently/usually have hereditary leadership. I certainly don't deny that the first few generations of such leadership would also pass a merit test - but just give it a few more generations.
In the science fiction world, I thought "Azad" was interesting, from Iain Bank's "Player of Games". It had many despotic aspects to it, but under all of that was a rather strict meritocracy.
Funny thing about the feudal system... From the historical perspective, rather than the feudal system failing, it has been implementations of the feudal system failing. In the words of The Who, "Meet the new Boss, same as the old Boss." One dynasty falls, another takes it's place. Even if the new dynasty begins with non-feudal hopes and aspirations, it generally falls into the feudal mold within a few generations. Then the new dynasty itself becomes the old dynasty, that falls to a newer dynasty.
It's really a failing of traditional human nature - we all want to do well by our family - or tribe. That is well and good, until it becomes barriers to the success of others. Like it or not, my family or tribe may not be the best-suited for a given role or position, but if they have that station due to dynastic or influences of oligopoly when others are more capable, then society suffers and becomes weaker.
That's only part of the story. When you talk about society's "attention span" you have to talk about what's being put front-and-center as "news" by the media.
One deeper cause is our current trend of calculating the financials on everything, cutting costs as much as possible and maximizing profits. In particular, if you decide that delivering the news is a financial matter rather than a sacred trust necessary to maintain our democracy, you start turning the news into infotainment.
Maybe it's our fault, for not demanding real news, particularly for not demanding news that we may disagree with, that we may find unpleasant. But there are 2 sides to every issue, (at least) 2 parties to every "agreement", and the media are certainly participating in this race-to-the-bottom.
Eventually the boy who cried "Wolf!" was correct. When people degrade crying wolf, they tend to forget that.
Plus people have completely left global warming out of the discussion. They have talked about how inefficient agriculture and distribution have been managed, and that's true. But today's agriculture and distribution, however inefficient they are, grew up around our historical climate. Changing climate is going to change all of that. Perhaps that change will be for the better - in the long run. In the short run, it could well be disruptive.
But then again, believing overpopulation and massive food shortages won't be a problem goes hand in hand with believing global warming won't be a problem.
Next apply that reasoning to other segments of the Indian budget.
Then the other argument, which I hadn't made, is that perhaps fallout from the space program could revitalize their economy, doing far more to lift the lot of the poor than 4 days of food.
This won't come for free. There are many parties involved in a funeral, they're all businesses to some extent or another, and they all have they're hand out, looking to meet their revenue needs. Since TFA talks about QR codes on headstones, this sounds localized to the cemetery/mausoleum. They have physical control, so they would be the managing party, even if they contracted the job out.
So the costs of this idea are a web server setup, possibly wireless access, etc. I would guess that they would be run on a "trust fund" kind of basis. Pay a fee at internment, and the interest pays for ongoing maintenance. I would imagine that pay-by-year would last until someone had a tight year, the a few years later someone else would ask/pay to resume service, hope the data still existed, and all of that other messy stuff.
Next complication, assuming it's contracted out, would the cemetery/mausoleum management insist on owning the data, even as they're contracting out pretty much the entire project? Otherwise, what happens to the data when either the IT contractor goes under, the relationship goes sour, or whatever?
Space exploration vs poverty relief always comes up, but IMHO it's a red herring. As big as space budgets sound, at the national scale they're generally a pittance - much smaller than is already spent on poverty assistance or any of a great range of things. Heck, in the US we spend less on the space program than we spend on oil exploration subsidies to highly profitable businesses.
Personally, I wonder if it's "convenient misdirection," holding up the space exploration budget as "potentially wasteful" in order to keep the general populace from looking in more wasteful places. In addition there doesn't tend to be a wealthy, powerful champion for the space program these days. The contractors who get rich on the space program also get rich on defense programs - one of those possibly more wasteful places - defense programs are easier to defend.
And I thought the rest of the world would want German speed laws in the US, US gun laws in the US. Plus there was a guy up-tree somewhere in this discussion who suggested that all speed limits, traffic signs, etc should be eliminated and simply hold drivers liable for the damage they cause. Add that "simplification" and there would be more sure-fire ways for eliminating US citizens.
But that comes from the impression that most of the rest of the world would rather see the US population plummet than see US deaths plummet.
But with recent events, it looks to me as if Apple may have crossed a line and become a company that trolls as well as produces. I'd feel far more lenient toward what they've done if the period were shorter, say 5 years instead of 17.
I know you meant this as a joke, but take it seriously for a moment.
Wouldn't it be spiffy if Valve took their hardware plaform and came up with a Steampunk option for it? Obviously the basic low-cost version will have to be basic and low-cost. But they're in an obvious position to sell a Steampunk version for a premium.
Perhaps you've parsed it wrong. The "/" is supposed to be associated with the trailing "joke", not the leading "". Look at it as "/joke", as in not-a-joke.
There was a guy here at work who exercised, ran, biked like a son-of-a-gun. He died one day of a heart attack, biking to work, at the age of 73. Not a bad span, but not great.
But then again, he came from a long paternal line that died of heart attacks by 50 or so. He really did well, after all. I heard somewhere that the biggest factor in a long life is choosing the right parents. Lifestyle (diet, exercise) is second, modern medicine is fourth or a distant third, or some such.
A while back I read of someone doing the calorie restriction thing like you, with the same energy-level results. If the calorie restriction is stopping you from doing the things you enjoy and want to do, something is wrong. At the time, it seemed to me to be, "half a life, lived twice as long."
I'm glad you seem to have reached a happier operating point.
I wasn't saying it did. From what I read, afterburners were used to cross the sound barrier, I presume because transonic drag is higher than supersonic drag, then shut down.
I would also hazard that in most any metric, the YF22/YF23 engines are more efficient than the Concorde engines, simply because of a few decades of design progress. Obviously they are of much smaller size, but I'm sure we could design better engines for an SST today.
To answer the AC over here, the article I read didn't say that they were on equivalent flights - in fact it was comparing the Concorde taxiing for any flight with a smaller airliner making a complete flight from France to England. The other airliner was smaller also, not 777 class. But from a passenger perspective, the Concorde wasn't 777 class, either.
And on the defensive side, you know exactly where and when to look. And also, it actually isn't that easy to shoot something downward from orbit, especially if you want it to arrive in a non-molten, non-plasma state. True, it's only 3 minutes up, but it's also moving at 17,000 mph, and that's the hard part.
The problem is how to deliver a weapon to a target in your enemy's territory. A hypersonic craft is an attempt to do it so fast that your enemy can't react. Stealth is an attempt to get so close before your enemy detects you, that he can't react. There's a spectrum in between. For those who read, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", throwing big rocks is something your enemy can detect, but can't effectively react to - in volume.
I recently read that the Concorde, while taxiing into takeoff position, used as much fuel as a modern airliner uses getting all the way to its destination.
That said, Concorde comparisons are unfair. Sure, it was an SST, but these days it's ancient technology. One of the prime requirements for the YF22/YF23 was that the planes be able to supercruise - to reach supersonic speed without using afterburners. We could make a much better SST design, starting today. That said, physics still rules, and it would still use more fuel than current airliners. The question is then how much more fuel, and especially on long-haul flights, how much would people be willing to pay to make it shorter?
There are those who think that tidal forces are part of the reason complex and even intelligent life arose on Earth, and that without our highly-unlikely over-sized moon, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. We have temperature variations on the order of 20% (absolute) and call it "seasonal".
With that thought in mind, I've wondered if looking for a small rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone is the best way to look for life. I've wondered if a small rocky moon orbiting a gas giant might be a more likely place to find complex life. On the other hand it was disappointing to hear that there would never be colonies on Ganymede because of radiation near Jupiter, though I know nothing of the intensity, or whether a planetary magnetic field and atmosphere would shield it, etc.
> The only way Romney can win this is if the GOP makes an even more epic voter suppression > effort than they did in Ohio in 2004, coupled with crooked balloting (and counting) like they did in > Florida in 2000, and who knows what else.
They've been working really, really hard on voter suppression, in the name of stopping voter fraud. Let's say Romney wins. My question is what will they do in 2014/2016 to keep the offices?
My personal belief is that one of the fundamental broken aspects of the economy is that the 1% has too much money and the 99% not enough. Because the 99% don't have enough money to do the things they need to do, the economy is sluggish and barely moving. Because the 1% have too much, they keep looking for a place to invest, but investment needs a substantial base in the real world under it, and that substantial base is gone. Therefore every attempt to invest in real-world things (like fuel or mortgages) turns into a bubble. (I suppose I could use the "small-signal analogy" and suggest that too much investment money in too small a base/real economy violates operating point conditions.)
The universal strategy for Republicans is de-regulation and tax cuts, but neither of those will help the wealth inequality, and I don't even think that they perceive the wealth inequality as a problem. So I don't believe that the Republicans are capable of fielding any sort of economic plan that will fix things. In fact, they'll likely reflexively move move money from the 99% to the 1%, making things worse.
At the same time, they will likely focus heavily on their social agenda, which at some point is going to start bothering even conservative women.
IMHO it's a recipe for disaster for them in 2012/2016, unless they figure out how to suppress even more votes.
I'm not terribly bothered by Romney, personally. I don't particularly like him, and he is a silver-spooner, but he's also reasonably smart, and reasonably reasonable.
I'm worried and bothered by the people that will get dragged into the administration along with him. Remember James Watt?
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I agree with you. I posted as I did on this because the GP sort-of indicated that climate changes would be a net-zero, with new agricultural areas gaining as much as old agricultural areas lost. I was simply thinking in best-case terms, that farmers would have to move their equipment. The big problems would come when that equipment (and especially) labor have to move across national boundaries. I wasn't even thinking in terms of soil formation, actually anticipating that the "gain" areas would have built soil in the geological past, that land was effectively "fallow" while it was permafrost, and it would be plow-ready. That is of course, once the territorial wars settled down, and assuming those wars don't damage the very land they're fighting over.
There will certainly be winners as well as losers in climate change. But there are 2 things to remember about this.
First, our current agricultural systems are "optimized" (for some definition of optimized, though not a very optimal one) around climate patterns as they exist. Even if climate change were to increase the arable land, it would most likely be different land that became arable, and at least some existing arable land will cease to be so. It will take time to adapt our agricultural usage to the new areas. In the short term, this adaptation will likely be uncomfortable.
Second, one of the predictions about a warmer climate is that things will become more extreme. Continental interiors are expected on average to get dryer, coastal areas on average to get wetter. And as some say, there will likely be more water evaporating, so the rainy areas may get a LOT more rain, while the dry areas may still get dryer.
Finally, making any predictions is dicey at best. Even, or especially the climate scientists are cagey about exact predictions, because they know how inexact the whole thing is. Which is odd, because one of the skeptics' prime complaints is that there are not exact, testable predictions, and they don't seem to understand that fuzzy statistical answers are also testable.
Ironically, there are those who credit the black death with the last 500 or so years of progress. The death of so many created a labor shortage, leading to higher pay and better conditions for workers. Then stack on top of that opportunities of the "New World" opening up.
In simplistic terms, feudalism was out-competed by the free market.
I didn't say feudalism would be completely non-meritocratic. You don't have to go all the way to impair the system. You just have to have a good sprinkling of people who wouldn't be there except by birth.
Plus it's not really fair comparing him to serfs, since part of the equation is proper opportunity when young. Of course the feudal lord will be a better military commander - having at least received some schooling and training. But had there been widespread education and better nutrition, who knows what some of the serfs might have become?
The "kid in rags who struck it rich" is the proverbial American success story, but one can bet that he at least received decent nutrition as an infant, and found the opportunity for a useful (not necessarily school) education.
There are many different dimensions for viewing society. (or other things) Meritocracy is one of them. When feudalism comes up, it's a rather obvious one.
> The interesting thing is that practically no-one has ever overthrown a bad system themselves, its always
> left to external factors to make the change
Still, what it means is that that feudal system is not capable of meeting its challenges. Perhaps with more capable people at the helm, not necessarily those selected by heredity, they would have handled things better.
I'm suggesting that most human societies unfortunately tend toward "lack of meritocracy". I also suggest that most feudal systems have a head-start on that path, given that they frequently/usually have hereditary leadership. I certainly don't deny that the first few generations of such leadership would also pass a merit test - but just give it a few more generations.
In the science fiction world, I thought "Azad" was interesting, from Iain Bank's "Player of Games". It had many despotic aspects to it, but under all of that was a rather strict meritocracy.
Funny thing about the feudal system... From the historical perspective, rather than the feudal system failing, it has been implementations of the feudal system failing. In the words of The Who, "Meet the new Boss, same as the old Boss." One dynasty falls, another takes it's place. Even if the new dynasty begins with non-feudal hopes and aspirations, it generally falls into the feudal mold within a few generations. Then the new dynasty itself becomes the old dynasty, that falls to a newer dynasty.
It's really a failing of traditional human nature - we all want to do well by our family - or tribe. That is well and good, until it becomes barriers to the success of others. Like it or not, my family or tribe may not be the best-suited for a given role or position, but if they have that station due to dynastic or influences of oligopoly when others are more capable, then society suffers and becomes weaker.
> It's like a society without an attention span.
That's only part of the story. When you talk about society's "attention span" you have to talk about what's being put front-and-center as "news" by the media.
One deeper cause is our current trend of calculating the financials on everything, cutting costs as much as possible and maximizing profits. In particular, if you decide that delivering the news is a financial matter rather than a sacred trust necessary to maintain our democracy, you start turning the news into infotainment.
Maybe it's our fault, for not demanding real news, particularly for not demanding news that we may disagree with, that we may find unpleasant. But there are 2 sides to every issue, (at least) 2 parties to every "agreement", and the media are certainly participating in this race-to-the-bottom.
Eventually the boy who cried "Wolf!" was correct. When people degrade crying wolf, they tend to forget that.
Plus people have completely left global warming out of the discussion. They have talked about how inefficient agriculture and distribution have been managed, and that's true. But today's agriculture and distribution, however inefficient they are, grew up around our historical climate. Changing climate is going to change all of that. Perhaps that change will be for the better - in the long run. In the short run, it could well be disruptive.
But then again, believing overpopulation and massive food shortages won't be a problem goes hand in hand with believing global warming won't be a problem.
Next apply that reasoning to other segments of the Indian budget.
Then the other argument, which I hadn't made, is that perhaps fallout from the space program could revitalize their economy, doing far more to lift the lot of the poor than 4 days of food.
This won't come for free. There are many parties involved in a funeral, they're all businesses to some extent or another, and they all have they're hand out, looking to meet their revenue needs. Since TFA talks about QR codes on headstones, this sounds localized to the cemetery/mausoleum. They have physical control, so they would be the managing party, even if they contracted the job out.
So the costs of this idea are a web server setup, possibly wireless access, etc. I would guess that they would be run on a "trust fund" kind of basis. Pay a fee at internment, and the interest pays for ongoing maintenance. I would imagine that pay-by-year would last until someone had a tight year, the a few years later someone else would ask/pay to resume service, hope the data still existed, and all of that other messy stuff.
Next complication, assuming it's contracted out, would the cemetery/mausoleum management insist on owning the data, even as they're contracting out pretty much the entire project? Otherwise, what happens to the data when either the IT contractor goes under, the relationship goes sour, or whatever?
Space exploration vs poverty relief always comes up, but IMHO it's a red herring. As big as space budgets sound, at the national scale they're generally a pittance - much smaller than is already spent on poverty assistance or any of a great range of things. Heck, in the US we spend less on the space program than we spend on oil exploration subsidies to highly profitable businesses.
Personally, I wonder if it's "convenient misdirection," holding up the space exploration budget as "potentially wasteful" in order to keep the general populace from looking in more wasteful places. In addition there doesn't tend to be a wealthy, powerful champion for the space program these days. The contractors who get rich on the space program also get rich on defense programs - one of those possibly more wasteful places - defense programs are easier to defend.
And I thought the rest of the world would want German speed laws in the US, US gun laws in the US. Plus there was a guy up-tree somewhere in this discussion who suggested that all speed limits, traffic signs, etc should be eliminated and simply hold drivers liable for the damage they cause. Add that "simplification" and there would be more sure-fire ways for eliminating US citizens.
But that comes from the impression that most of the rest of the world would rather see the US population plummet than see US deaths plummet.
But with recent events, it looks to me as if Apple may have crossed a line and become a company that trolls as well as produces. I'd feel far more lenient toward what they've done if the period were shorter, say 5 years instead of 17.
I know you meant this as a joke, but take it seriously for a moment.
Wouldn't it be spiffy if Valve took their hardware plaform and came up with a Steampunk option for it? Obviously the basic low-cost version will have to be basic and low-cost. But they're in an obvious position to sell a Steampunk version for a premium.
Perhaps you've parsed it wrong. The "/" is supposed to be associated with the trailing "joke", not the leading "". Look at it as "/joke", as in not-a-joke.
There was a guy here at work who exercised, ran, biked like a son-of-a-gun. He died one day of a heart attack, biking to work, at the age of 73. Not a bad span, but not great.
But then again, he came from a long paternal line that died of heart attacks by 50 or so. He really did well, after all. I heard somewhere that the biggest factor in a long life is choosing the right parents. Lifestyle (diet, exercise) is second, modern medicine is fourth or a distant third, or some such.
A while back I read of someone doing the calorie restriction thing like you, with the same energy-level results. If the calorie restriction is stopping you from doing the things you enjoy and want to do, something is wrong. At the time, it seemed to me to be, "half a life, lived twice as long."
I'm glad you seem to have reached a happier operating point.
I wasn't saying it did. From what I read, afterburners were used to cross the sound barrier, I presume because transonic drag is higher than supersonic drag, then shut down.
I would also hazard that in most any metric, the YF22/YF23 engines are more efficient than the Concorde engines, simply because of a few decades of design progress. Obviously they are of much smaller size, but I'm sure we could design better engines for an SST today.
To answer the AC over here, the article I read didn't say that they were on equivalent flights - in fact it was comparing the Concorde taxiing for any flight with a smaller airliner making a complete flight from France to England. The other airliner was smaller also, not 777 class. But from a passenger perspective, the Concorde wasn't 777 class, either.
And on the defensive side, you know exactly where and when to look. And also, it actually isn't that easy to shoot something downward from orbit, especially if you want it to arrive in a non-molten, non-plasma state. True, it's only 3 minutes up, but it's also moving at 17,000 mph, and that's the hard part.
The problem is how to deliver a weapon to a target in your enemy's territory. A hypersonic craft is an attempt to do it so fast that your enemy can't react. Stealth is an attempt to get so close before your enemy detects you, that he can't react. There's a spectrum in between. For those who read, "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", throwing big rocks is something your enemy can detect, but can't effectively react to - in volume.
I recently read that the Concorde, while taxiing into takeoff position, used as much fuel as a modern airliner uses getting all the way to its destination.
That said, Concorde comparisons are unfair. Sure, it was an SST, but these days it's ancient technology. One of the prime requirements for the YF22/YF23 was that the planes be able to supercruise - to reach supersonic speed without using afterburners. We could make a much better SST design, starting today. That said, physics still rules, and it would still use more fuel than current airliners. The question is then how much more fuel, and especially on long-haul flights, how much would people be willing to pay to make it shorter?
There are those who think that tidal forces are part of the reason complex and even intelligent life arose on Earth, and that without our highly-unlikely over-sized moon, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. We have temperature variations on the order of 20% (absolute) and call it "seasonal".
With that thought in mind, I've wondered if looking for a small rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone is the best way to look for life. I've wondered if a small rocky moon orbiting a gas giant might be a more likely place to find complex life. On the other hand it was disappointing to hear that there would never be colonies on Ganymede because of radiation near Jupiter, though I know nothing of the intensity, or whether a planetary magnetic field and atmosphere would shield it, etc.
> The only way Romney can win this is if the GOP makes an even more epic voter suppression
> effort than they did in Ohio in 2004, coupled with crooked balloting (and counting) like they did in
> Florida in 2000, and who knows what else.
They've been working really, really hard on voter suppression, in the name of stopping voter fraud. Let's say Romney wins. My question is what will they do in 2014/2016 to keep the offices?
My personal belief is that one of the fundamental broken aspects of the economy is that the 1% has too much money and the 99% not enough. Because the 99% don't have enough money to do the things they need to do, the economy is sluggish and barely moving. Because the 1% have too much, they keep looking for a place to invest, but investment needs a substantial base in the real world under it, and that substantial base is gone. Therefore every attempt to invest in real-world things (like fuel or mortgages) turns into a bubble. (I suppose I could use the "small-signal analogy" and suggest that too much investment money in too small a base/real economy violates operating point conditions.)
The universal strategy for Republicans is de-regulation and tax cuts, but neither of those will help the wealth inequality, and I don't even think that they perceive the wealth inequality as a problem. So I don't believe that the Republicans are capable of fielding any sort of economic plan that will fix things. In fact, they'll likely reflexively move move money from the 99% to the 1%, making things worse.
At the same time, they will likely focus heavily on their social agenda, which at some point is going to start bothering even conservative women.
IMHO it's a recipe for disaster for them in 2012/2016, unless they figure out how to suppress even more votes.
I'm not terribly bothered by Romney, personally. I don't particularly like him, and he is a silver-spooner, but he's also reasonably smart, and reasonably reasonable.
I'm worried and bothered by the people that will get dragged into the administration along with him. Remember James Watt?