The perennial problem of common resource management. There is no agreed upon agent that rules earth orbit space. So there aren't any rules. Without rules, the market is just going to take the cheapest route. Most often this includes polluting common resources, because sustainability and responsibility are expensive. Bad for the bottom line.
So the earth people can make a choice: sell all of the corridors to the highest bidder, and hope that they take care of it. Or you tax the industries that want to use those resources in order to pay for a governmental body to keep an eye on them and make sure the rules are followed.
With the first option you just have to hope that the companies won't exploit the resource for short term gain and then leave anyone who uses the same resources with the bill for cleanup. In the second option, the government holds some of the profit back to clean up when the corporation inevitably does something stupid and leaves a mess. Back in the day, they even held company leaders criminally liable for their negligence. Imagine that.
You have proposed a solution to introduce more accountability, transparency, or ethical considerations into the free market. Wall Street will not accept your proposal because your solution:
(x) reduces profits gamed from the current flaws (x) introduces accountability (x) introduces transparency (x) introduces ethical considerations
I don't get this artificial distinction between "business" users and "non business" users.
Business user: I need fast push access to e-mail and critical documents wherever I go. I don't care about anything else.
Personal user: LOL i just want 2 play sum farmville and take sum pictures of my doggie and put it on fabo and omg twitter i liek dont care if it works all the time k just as long as its pretty pretty!!!!1111ONE00110001
You do believe the wikileaks documents, don't you?
I haven't shuffled through all of them, or seen a believable analysis of the whole enchilada. But according to one Guardian article, your simple assertion is probably bullshit. (Gotta love the patriotic mods. Any slop of bile will pass as fact if it's in favor of the home team...)
Remember, this is the same military that said, "We don't do body counts." There's a reason for that. Of course the military is going to claim there weren't any civilians, and the Taliban will claim only civilians died, but nonetheless, we apparently killed the same guy twice and then arrested him a few months later. And during the first assassination attempt, the US military stated that no civilians died, while villagers told Reuters that 300 civilians as well as Taliban fighters had died.
The special forces command claimed that Ikhlas was "conducting a major Shura" – a conference of top Taliban. After dropping six 2,000lb GBU-31 guided bombs on the meeting from a B1 jet, the coalition reported "effectively destroying the primary target location" and killing 50 "Taliban senior commanders, security and fighters". Lt Gen John Mulholland, of the special operations command, later claimed "over 150 Taliban fighters" had been killed.
It was later realised that despite "multiple forms of positive identification" Ikhlas had in fact probably never been there at all. The US was to claim to have killed him again in another air strike on 2 December 2007, and subsequently arrested a Mullah Ikhlas many months later, on 7 May 2008, in Garmsir, further south in Helmand.
A statement released from Bagram air base on the day of Operation Jang Baz said the bombs had been dropped "after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area".
Within 24 hours, however, villagers were telling a very different story from the one presented in the war logs. Locals told Reuters that up to 300 civilians – as well as a number of Taliban – were killed in the air strike after they had been rounded up to watch a Taliban-organised public hanging of two suspected spies. No mention of such a "Taliban court" appears in the official war logs , where it might have flagged up the prospect of civilian deaths.
You know, some day I'd like to be one of the outliers that pulls that number up.
It's far more likely that someone you know will suffer because of the inequality instead of gaining from it. The top 1% have had their income triple since 1980, while the bottom 80% have seen only marginal gains. I have no idea who thinks larger income inequality is better for society as a whole. Pretty much every revolution has been rooted in inequality, and I think a new American revolution would probably be as bad as the French Revolution or maybe even worse.
And no, I don't care about being rich. Buying shit simply to have it is the lowest form of living I can conceive of. Why anyone trades their waking life so they can commute to work in a nicer car and be unconscious in more expensive surroundings is beyond me.
One reason the U.S. does not spend as much on social welfare is that we spend a lot more on our military. This benefits the social welfare states of Western Europe, including Norway.
If one of your neighbors spent his money on a nuclear muslim fallout shelter and thousands of automatic weapons, and the other one sent his kids to college, which one made the right decision? You can't say that the guy who educated his kids was only able to make the decision because his neighbor's arsenal was available.
The NATO members in Europe have more GDP than the United States does now. There's no reason to continue pretending that we have to bankrupt ourselves on the military. It's a choice that's made because there's a huge incentive for our privatized military - over 70% of our defense budget gets paid to private contractors - to keep us at war.
If you'd compare them to the WASP fraction of US population
That genteel sort of racism never quite dies, does it? I'm sure if we look at the white poverty rate in apartheid South Africa the numbers are good too. Never mind that it's borne on the backs of poor people.
Oh, I forgot. You're probably just a follower of Hayek. All is well!
Let me give you a nice company analogy... That's like saying a company in charge of running a business with one corner office in Bumsville, Idaho and 12 employees would be equally fit to run a company with 1,000 employees and an office in every US state. It's just not that simple.
It's perfectly simple. Everyone in that corporation works to create wealth that stays inside of the corporation. As a nation, you can choose to keep the resources under the shared control of the government, or hand it out to political allies and friends so they can take it overseas or blow it on ten million dollar yachts. A corporation also has the same choice - the types of corporations the government just had to bail out, for instance.
Scaling well is a sign that your business model is good. The same thing that works for one Wal-Mart can work for 10,000 if your numbers are solid. Why do you think these corporations get so large in the first place? And how is it that we can design remote controlled death machines, supersonic spy planes, and smart bombs, but we can't figure out that providing basic services to the entire population is a hell of a lot cheaper than throwing them all in jail?
Numerous studies have shown that exposure to media violence increases aggression, though the mechanisms of this effect have remained elusive. One theory posits that repeated exposure to media violence desensitizes viewers to real world violence, increasing aggression by blunting aversive reactions to violence and removing normal inhibitions against aggression. Theoretically, violence desensitization should be reflected in the amplitude of the P300 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), which has been associated with activation of the aversive motivational system. In the current study, violent images elicited reduced P300 amplitudes among violent, as compared to nonviolent video game players. Additionally, this reduced brain response predicted increased aggressive behavior in a later task. Moreover, these effects held after controlling for individual differences in trait aggressiveness. These data are the first to link media violence exposure and aggressive behavior to brain processes hypothetically associated with desensitization.
Also note that we have 3.7 million square miles of real estate and resources, and Norway has 125,000.
I think the inability to effectively use a nation's resource because that nation has too much stuff is a pathetic way of defending that particular argument. In fact I think it's self-defeating. It's like arguing that your company is broke because it has too many assets.
The United States at one point in time was the world's largest producer of oil. Just because we blew through our inheritance in the 70s doesn't mean you get to penalize Norway for choosing not to. There are other states that have more oil per capita than Norway and don't have the same good statistics, so the "gold mine" doesn't seem to work as an excuse.
Well, that's sort of the whole point: why should Boeing be a private corporation if the DoE not only underwrites their in-house research, but also funds their top research universities (MIT, etc.)? Obviously I'd hope they'd just sell planes and research equipment, and keep a handy amount of "dual use" machinery around just in case.
Just imagine if wealth the United States created was going towards saving money, keeping the national debt low, and reinvesting in US technology firms for US jobs, instead of giving it to people who just buy more bourgeois bullshit with it. With the performance of Wall St boards in the past ten years, it seems like the less MBA graduates you have in your company, the better.
Norway has managed to keep their society relatively free and liberal, despite the fact that the government mostly owns one of their biggest industry players. I don't know why it's so shocking to think we couldn't do the same.
The difference is between effective government and ineffective government, not the ability of a government to provide a just society. Hang on, I'll put it simply: you need to learn more than what your daddy told you. It's a big, big world out there.
Let's look at two modern western nations and see what the results are:
USA vs Norway
GDP per Capita (World Bank) Norway: $55,000 USA: $46,000
It is not enough to recognize that 'social justice' is an empty phrase without determinable content. It has become a powerful incantation which serves to support deep-seated emotions that are threatening to destroy the Great Society. Unfortunately it is not true that if something cannot be achieved, it can do no harm to strive for it. Like chasing any mirage it is likely to produce results which one would have done much to avoid if one had foreseen them. Many desirable aims will be sacrificed in the vain hope of making possible what must forever elude our grasp.
-Friedrich Hayek "Law, Legislation and Liberty"
Hayek: the unoriginal "too hard; don't try" philosopher.
If the empires of the past sought to control physical resources for their own gain, I don't think it takes too much imagination to see what the future holds for the information economy.
Also, I'm looking forward to all of the sci-fi book recommendations. Can I get them on my Kindle?
What's a few Afghan families if wikileaks can make the U.S. look bad?
You've got the wrong end of the flag waving. The whole point of the leaks is the US Military's true attitude: What's a few Afghan families?
"They had a weapon" or "They may have been terrorists" is some pretty sad territory to wander into as justification for killing people. But I guess if the US government was in your neighborhood accidentally killing people for having a wedding party, or for having a gun, you'd have no problem with it, right?
See, it will all work out once the 'evil US empire' is out of the way and can't pull these shenanigans again.
You're right. Most of the nations that we have left alone lately are much closer to democracy than many of our allies. Turns out people do want democracy, as long as you're not trying to shove it down their throat with the butt of your rifle.
As everyone knows, before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he was a real sweetheart. Gassing Kurds, brutally oppressing any competing political parties, fighting the Iranians. And just how did he hold on to power for so long?
Back in the 60s, the Iraqi government was getting real friendly with the Soviet Union, which was bad news. Our installed dictator in Iran was keeping the oil flowing, but Iraq had a lot more of it and was right next door. So we supported a young man named Saddam Hussein and has Ba'athist Socialist party when the former government was coincidentally overthrown (wink wink). We liked Saddam, because he was a secular lawyer who liked Western culture, and in his 1970 Iraqi Constitution even mentioned things like equality for all religions, races, and genders. Even if it was an empty promise, that was some pretty radical stuff for an Arab state. But he also had stuff like, "Iraqi resources belong to the People," so we continued to favor the Shah in Iran. That is until 1979, when after decades of secret police torturing and killing Iranians so they could sell their oil more cheaply to Western powers, they overthrew their government and the Ayatollah came to power. From then on, Saddam became our primary political tool in the region, mostly for fighting the proxy war against Iran.
My favorite moment in US-Iraqi relations is when Reagan removed him from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list in 1982 so American firms and other international corporations could sell him biological agents and weapons. I'm sorry, I meant "dual use technology" and "farming equipment."
Or maybe it was when the Kuwaiti Ambassador's daughter got up in front of Congress and lied about Saddam's troops placing babies on the floors so they would die - which was an amazing piece of propaganda, and a total fabrication.
When he was following orders, we ignored his crimes. When he stopped following orders, we suddenly remembered them. Unfortunately for us, the rest of the world doesn't stop and start history at our whim. An Iraqi will not forget that Americans were training Saddam's men to torture in the 1980s. They won't forget being left to die after the first Gulf War when we decided taking Saddam out would cause too much instability, and our choice to let Saddam mow people down with helicopters while we were still in control of their airspace. They will not forget starving in the 90s due to our embargo. They also won't forget that Saddam was our man until 2003. They won't forget our choice to use American companies to rebuild their infrastructure instead of Iraqi companies, or our choice to let Western oil companies get their pick of the oil field contracts without any input from their own government. They also won't forget that "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" can be the same person, depending on our political strategy that day.
They will never forget that the Americans cannot be trusted to act on any set of principles, because we simply don't have any. And the moment the Iraqi people try to kick out our corporations, we won't be too shy about reminding them.
Just in case anyone is interested, this is the graph you can be looking at. It's from the same data set, and though it begins in 1880, the spike does not occur until 1950.
You can also look at reconstructed data here that shows that the current temperature spike lies outside of the Medieval Warming period. Claims that the Northwest Passage was open at that time are unverified. There isn't any archaeological evidence for any European seafaring past certain points in modern Canada.
This simply means that any species that can't adapt may die out(if a change that small even necessitates adaptation), but they will be replaced by species that can live in that environment. Why this is considered to be catastrophic or even bad I do not understand.
Because our current way of life is very dependent on the current food chain, and some of us don't want to have a toxic lifeless soup for an ocean. Oysters in particular serve as filters, and are necessary to keep tidal creeks functioning. Corals are also a vital part of the shallow ocean ecosystem.
You're confusing CO2-induced warming and CO2-induced health effects in that argument.
I was pointing out that too much of anything is pollution.
There's also a saying I heard somewhere: "Lack of food kills you in weeks, lack of water kills you in days, but lack of warmth can kill you in hours."
There's also a saying: this is the 21st Century, and very few people die of simple exposure. Humans that die in the winter are people whose immune systems fail to protect them from communicable diseases that are more prevalent when everyone's immune system is weakened. Any variation in weather will present the same seasonal death rate - that's why the curve is the same from Greece to Norway. So the equatorial states have little variation, but that's due to the lack of weather changes, not due to the heat.
There are no variations with water supply. If you don't have access to clean water and sanitation, you're going to be very sick, and probably dead.
Anyway, enough of reality. Go back to blogging against those evil scientists, whose plot to Destroy America will surely succeed if they aren't thwarted by your amazing intellect.
It's good that we agree on something. It should be noted, however, that there has been a flat line in global temperature for the last 10 or so years. While this is insignificant as an indicator of anything, it should be noted that the models that are used for all projections failed to predict this.
Careful... that line worked in 2008, but not in 2010. 1998 is a useful year for selection bias.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5951409.cms Following the release of global temperature data which revealed April of 2010 was the hottest April ever and that this year so far has been warmest on record, Nasa has said global temperatures have been steadily rising since the late 1970s with no significant let-up in the trend.
I'm sorry, what? I'd like to know how you link a few years of poor oyster harvesting to global warming, so please quote some kind of source.
Using google is really not that difficult. (Further down the article downplays the link, but that's business press for you.)
http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2010/06/28/story1.html Young oysters seem to be dying in their swimming larval stage because the slightly acidic seawater is dissolving their shells from the outside faster than they can grow, Kaufman said. The breeding cycle has failed for each of the past four years, he said.
Same goes for the coral statement. Ocean acidification is a scary-sounding theory, but whether it will have any major ill-effects is pretty much an open question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification Research has already found that corals, coccolithophore algae, coralline algae, foraminifera, shellfish and pteropods experience reduced calcification or enhanced dissolution when exposed to elevated CO2.
Heat waves are weather and are caused by natural variability. Same goes for blizzards, neither is proof of anything.
When the variability starts marching away from known records, then the climate is changing beyond it's known natural cycles. El Nino weather patterns and other variables of course come into play, but hey, you got to pretend you were thinking for a second.
As far as your claim about the Arctic, I believe the scariest guess so far has been ice-free by 2015. All of those "predictions"(guesses) are based on models that ignore significant aspects of the inner workings of Earth's climate, most notably changes in cloud cover.
The Northwest Passage has been navigable for the first time in history for two years in a row. The US military is already reorganizing itself to defend it as a new attack vector. Russia, Canada, and the US are already squabbling over the resources under the ice.
I'd also like to point out that any kind of catastrophic global warming that CO2 might cause requires some kind of significant positive feedback mechanism, but none have been identified as of yet. It has simply been assumed that there must be one without any speculation as to what that might be. Cloud cover for example is likely a significant negative feedback when temperatures get higher.
In this case, you're entirely full of shit.
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1331.full Ice-core records show that climate changes in the past have been large, rapid, and synchronous over broad areas extending into low latitudes, with less variability over historical times. These ice-core records come from high mountain glaciers and the polar regions, including small ice caps and the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
But the thing is, in order to justify creating the global socialist utopia which is the true goal of the "warmers", ALL the goalposts must be cleared. ALL of the following must be true:
a) warming is happening
Virtually all independent science confirms this.
b) it's a bad thing
The rising acidity of the oceans due to CO2 absorption and the upwelling in the Seattle, Washington area have prevented them from harvesting oysters for a few years now. The same thing is killing coral all over the world. Heat waves are straining the electrical grid. The Arctic will have ice free summers in a few decades, with unknown effects. Glaciers around the world are melting, threatening the entire water ecosystem. Probably pretty bad.
c) human activity contributes significantly
Again, virtually all independent science confirms this.
d) it's possible to do something about it
Oh, we can use dirty energy, but we can't reduce our use of dirty energy? Sounds like an addiction problem to me. You just don't want to pay more for your stuff. That's a pretty shitty deal for the rest of the planet.
e) the cure is better than the disease
Returning CO2 levels to what's known to support the only biosphere that sustains human life sounds better than possibly throwing it into an equilibrium that either starves much of the human population, or leads to resource wars than end it in other ways.
Unless every one of those things is true, then the "green" crusade against global warming falls apart. So yes, you do have a goalpost issue: it's that you have to get past (at least) five of them to even have a shot.
The "green" crusade only falls apart when your willingness to delude yourself for your own personal gain doesn't cause you directly measurable harm. Unfortunately, the next generation will probably bear the cost of your self-imposed ignorance. Maybe we can set up some sort of taxation program, so you can opt-out of "green" taxes today, as long as the money is attached to your estate in case you're wrong. That would probably cause some people to think a little bit more.
Slashdot Mirror
The perennial problem of common resource management. There is no agreed upon agent that rules earth orbit space. So there aren't any rules. Without rules, the market is just going to take the cheapest route. Most often this includes polluting common resources, because sustainability and responsibility are expensive. Bad for the bottom line.
So the earth people can make a choice: sell all of the corridors to the highest bidder, and hope that they take care of it. Or you tax the industries that want to use those resources in order to pay for a governmental body to keep an eye on them and make sure the rules are followed.
With the first option you just have to hope that the companies won't exploit the resource for short term gain and then leave anyone who uses the same resources with the bill for cleanup. In the second option, the government holds some of the profit back to clean up when the corporation inevitably does something stupid and leaves a mess. Back in the day, they even held company leaders criminally liable for their negligence. Imagine that.
You have proposed a solution to introduce more accountability, transparency, or ethical considerations into the free market. Wall Street will not accept your proposal because your solution:
(x) reduces profits gamed from the current flaws
(x) introduces accountability
(x) introduces transparency
(x) introduces ethical considerations
If you are having trouble with the homescreen, there's a new jailbreak using a youtube video that should work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg4u7ko333U
I don't get this artificial distinction between "business" users and "non business" users.
Business user: I need fast push access to e-mail and critical documents wherever I go. I don't care about anything else.
Personal user: LOL i just want 2 play sum farmville and take sum pictures of my doggie and put it on fabo and omg twitter i liek dont care if it works all the time k just as long as its pretty pretty!!!!1111ONE00110001
Seems like it's that holiday everyday...
You do believe the wikileaks documents, don't you?
I haven't shuffled through all of them, or seen a believable analysis of the whole enchilada. But according to one Guardian article, your simple assertion is probably bullshit. (Gotta love the patriotic mods. Any slop of bile will pass as fact if it's in favor of the home team...)
Remember, this is the same military that said, "We don't do body counts." There's a reason for that. Of course the military is going to claim there weren't any civilians, and the Taliban will claim only civilians died, but nonetheless, we apparently killed the same guy twice and then arrested him a few months later. And during the first assassination attempt, the US military stated that no civilians died, while villagers told Reuters that 300 civilians as well as Taliban fighters had died.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/afghanistan-war-logs-helmand-bombing
The special forces command claimed that Ikhlas was "conducting a major Shura" – a conference of top Taliban. After dropping six 2,000lb GBU-31 guided bombs on the meeting from a B1 jet, the coalition reported "effectively destroying the primary target location" and killing 50 "Taliban senior commanders, security and fighters". Lt Gen John Mulholland, of the special operations command, later claimed "over 150 Taliban fighters" had been killed.
It was later realised that despite "multiple forms of positive identification" Ikhlas had in fact probably never been there at all. The US was to claim to have killed him again in another air strike on 2 December 2007, and subsequently arrested a Mullah Ikhlas many months later, on 7 May 2008, in Garmsir, further south in Helmand.
A statement released from Bagram air base on the day of Operation Jang Baz said the bombs had been dropped "after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area".
Within 24 hours, however, villagers were telling a very different story from the one presented in the war logs. Locals told Reuters that up to 300 civilians – as well as a number of Taliban – were killed in the air strike after they had been rounded up to watch a Taliban-organised public hanging of two suspected spies. No mention of such a "Taliban court" appears in the official war logs , where it might have flagged up the prospect of civilian deaths.
You know, some day I'd like to be one of the outliers that pulls that number up.
It's far more likely that someone you know will suffer because of the inequality instead of gaining from it. The top 1% have had their income triple since 1980, while the bottom 80% have seen only marginal gains. I have no idea who thinks larger income inequality is better for society as a whole. Pretty much every revolution has been rooted in inequality, and I think a new American revolution would probably be as bad as the French Revolution or maybe even worse.
And no, I don't care about being rich. Buying shit simply to have it is the lowest form of living I can conceive of. Why anyone trades their waking life so they can commute to work in a nicer car and be unconscious in more expensive surroundings is beyond me.
One reason the U.S. does not spend as much on social welfare is that we spend a lot more on our military. This benefits the social welfare states of Western Europe, including Norway.
If one of your neighbors spent his money on a nuclear muslim fallout shelter and thousands of automatic weapons, and the other one sent his kids to college, which one made the right decision? You can't say that the guy who educated his kids was only able to make the decision because his neighbor's arsenal was available.
The NATO members in Europe have more GDP than the United States does now. There's no reason to continue pretending that we have to bankrupt ourselves on the military. It's a choice that's made because there's a huge incentive for our privatized military - over 70% of our defense budget gets paid to private contractors - to keep us at war.
If you'd compare them to the WASP fraction of US population
That genteel sort of racism never quite dies, does it? I'm sure if we look at the white poverty rate in apartheid South Africa the numbers are good too. Never mind that it's borne on the backs of poor people.
Oh, I forgot. You're probably just a follower of Hayek. All is well!
Let me give you a nice company analogy... That's like saying a company in charge of running a business with one corner office in Bumsville, Idaho and 12 employees would be equally fit to run a company with 1,000 employees and an office in every US state. It's just not that simple.
It's perfectly simple. Everyone in that corporation works to create wealth that stays inside of the corporation. As a nation, you can choose to keep the resources under the shared control of the government, or hand it out to political allies and friends so they can take it overseas or blow it on ten million dollar yachts. A corporation also has the same choice - the types of corporations the government just had to bail out, for instance.
Scaling well is a sign that your business model is good. The same thing that works for one Wal-Mart can work for 10,000 if your numbers are solid. Why do you think these corporations get so large in the first place? And how is it that we can design remote controlled death machines, supersonic spy planes, and smart bombs, but we can't figure out that providing basic services to the entire population is a hell of a lot cheaper than throwing them all in jail?
There is actual research on the subject, if you are interested.
Here's the abstract:
Numerous studies have shown that exposure to media violence increases aggression, though the mechanisms of this effect have remained elusive. One theory posits that repeated exposure to media violence desensitizes viewers to real world violence, increasing aggression by blunting aversive reactions to violence and removing normal inhibitions against aggression. Theoretically, violence desensitization should be reflected in the amplitude of the P300 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), which has been associated with activation of the aversive motivational system. In the current study, violent images elicited reduced P300 amplitudes among violent, as compared to nonviolent video game players. Additionally, this reduced brain response predicted increased aggressive behavior in a later task. Moreover, these effects held after controlling for individual differences in trait aggressiveness. These data are the first to link media violence exposure and aggressive behavior to brain processes hypothetically associated with desensitization.
Doesn't seem so far fetched.
Also note that we have 3.7 million square miles of real estate and resources, and Norway has 125,000.
I think the inability to effectively use a nation's resource because that nation has too much stuff is a pathetic way of defending that particular argument. In fact I think it's self-defeating. It's like arguing that your company is broke because it has too many assets.
The United States at one point in time was the world's largest producer of oil. Just because we blew through our inheritance in the 70s doesn't mean you get to penalize Norway for choosing not to. There are other states that have more oil per capita than Norway and don't have the same good statistics, so the "gold mine" doesn't seem to work as an excuse.
Well, that's sort of the whole point: why should Boeing be a private corporation if the DoE not only underwrites their in-house research, but also funds their top research universities (MIT, etc.)? Obviously I'd hope they'd just sell planes and research equipment, and keep a handy amount of "dual use" machinery around just in case.
Just imagine if wealth the United States created was going towards saving money, keeping the national debt low, and reinvesting in US technology firms for US jobs, instead of giving it to people who just buy more bourgeois bullshit with it. With the performance of Wall St boards in the past ten years, it seems like the less MBA graduates you have in your company, the better.
Norway has managed to keep their society relatively free and liberal, despite the fact that the government mostly owns one of their biggest industry players. I don't know why it's so shocking to think we couldn't do the same.
Bah. That should read unemployment rates.
The difference is between effective government and ineffective government, not the ability of a government to provide a just society. Hang on, I'll put it simply: you need to learn more than what your daddy told you. It's a big, big world out there.
Let's look at two modern western nations and see what the results are:
USA vs Norway
GDP per Capita (World Bank)
Norway: $55,000
USA: $46,000
Life Expectancy
Norway: 80 years
USA: 78.2 years
Poverty Rates
Norway: 7%
USA: 12%
Employment Rates:
Norway: 3.5% (April 2010)
USA: 8% (April 2010)
Income Inequality (Lower is Better)
Norway: 25.8
USA: 40.8
Vacation Time
Norway: 25 days
USA: 14 days
Awww boo. Reality is a bitch, ain't it?
Just because you disagree with the facts doesn't make the facts political. It makes you wrong.
It is not enough to recognize that 'social justice' is an empty phrase without determinable content. It has become a powerful incantation which serves to support deep-seated emotions that are threatening to destroy the Great Society. Unfortunately it is not true that if something cannot be achieved, it can do no harm to strive for it. Like chasing any mirage it is likely to produce results which one would have done much to avoid if one had foreseen them. Many desirable aims will be sacrificed in the vain hope of making possible what must forever elude our grasp.
-Friedrich Hayek
"Law, Legislation and Liberty"
Hayek: the unoriginal "too hard; don't try" philosopher.
If the empires of the past sought to control physical resources for their own gain, I don't think it takes too much imagination to see what the future holds for the information economy.
Also, I'm looking forward to all of the sci-fi book recommendations. Can I get them on my Kindle?
What's a few Afghan families if wikileaks can make the U.S. look bad?
You've got the wrong end of the flag waving. The whole point of the leaks is the US Military's true attitude: What's a few Afghan families?
"They had a weapon" or "They may have been terrorists" is some pretty sad territory to wander into as justification for killing people. But I guess if the US government was in your neighborhood accidentally killing people for having a wedding party, or for having a gun, you'd have no problem with it, right?
See, it will all work out once the 'evil US empire' is out of the way and can't pull these shenanigans again.
You're right. Most of the nations that we have left alone lately are much closer to democracy than many of our allies. Turns out people do want democracy, as long as you're not trying to shove it down their throat with the butt of your rifle.
As everyone knows, before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he was a real sweetheart. Gassing Kurds, brutally oppressing any competing political parties, fighting the Iranians. And just how did he hold on to power for so long?
Back in the 60s, the Iraqi government was getting real friendly with the Soviet Union, which was bad news. Our installed dictator in Iran was keeping the oil flowing, but Iraq had a lot more of it and was right next door. So we supported a young man named Saddam Hussein and has Ba'athist Socialist party when the former government was coincidentally overthrown (wink wink). We liked Saddam, because he was a secular lawyer who liked Western culture, and in his 1970 Iraqi Constitution even mentioned things like equality for all religions, races, and genders. Even if it was an empty promise, that was some pretty radical stuff for an Arab state. But he also had stuff like, "Iraqi resources belong to the People," so we continued to favor the Shah in Iran. That is until 1979, when after decades of secret police torturing and killing Iranians so they could sell their oil more cheaply to Western powers, they overthrew their government and the Ayatollah came to power. From then on, Saddam became our primary political tool in the region, mostly for fighting the proxy war against Iran.
My favorite moment in US-Iraqi relations is when Reagan removed him from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list in 1982 so American firms and other international corporations could sell him biological agents and weapons. I'm sorry, I meant "dual use technology" and "farming equipment."
Or maybe it was when Ambassador Gillespie told Saddam that the US didn't care about Arab-Arab border conflicts just days before he sent his troops in to take over Kuwait.
Or maybe it was when the Kuwaiti Ambassador's daughter got up in front of Congress and lied about Saddam's troops placing babies on the floors so they would die - which was an amazing piece of propaganda, and a total fabrication.
When he was following orders, we ignored his crimes. When he stopped following orders, we suddenly remembered them. Unfortunately for us, the rest of the world doesn't stop and start history at our whim. An Iraqi will not forget that Americans were training Saddam's men to torture in the 1980s. They won't forget being left to die after the first Gulf War when we decided taking Saddam out would cause too much instability, and our choice to let Saddam mow people down with helicopters while we were still in control of their airspace. They will not forget starving in the 90s due to our embargo. They also won't forget that Saddam was our man until 2003. They won't forget our choice to use American companies to rebuild their infrastructure instead of Iraqi companies, or our choice to let Western oil companies get their pick of the oil field contracts without any input from their own government. They also won't forget that "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" can be the same person, depending on our political strategy that day.
They will never forget that the Americans cannot be trusted to act on any set of principles, because we simply don't have any. And the moment the Iraqi people try to kick out our corporations, we won't be too shy about reminding them.
Just in case anyone is interested, this is the graph you can be looking at. It's from the same data set, and though it begins in 1880, the spike does not occur until 1950.
You can also look at reconstructed data here that shows that the current temperature spike lies outside of the Medieval Warming period. Claims that the Northwest Passage was open at that time are unverified. There isn't any archaeological evidence for any European seafaring past certain points in modern Canada.
This simply means that any species that can't adapt may die out(if a change that small even necessitates adaptation), but they will be replaced by species that can live in that environment. Why this is considered to be catastrophic or even bad I do not understand.
Because our current way of life is very dependent on the current food chain, and some of us don't want to have a toxic lifeless soup for an ocean. Oysters in particular serve as filters, and are necessary to keep tidal creeks functioning. Corals are also a vital part of the shallow ocean ecosystem.
You're confusing CO2-induced warming and CO2-induced health effects in that argument.
I was pointing out that too much of anything is pollution.
There's also a saying I heard somewhere: "Lack of food kills you in weeks, lack of water kills you in days, but lack of warmth can kill you in hours."
There's also a saying: this is the 21st Century, and very few people die of simple exposure. Humans that die in the winter are people whose immune systems fail to protect them from communicable diseases that are more prevalent when everyone's immune system is weakened. Any variation in weather will present the same seasonal death rate - that's why the curve is the same from Greece to Norway. So the equatorial states have little variation, but that's due to the lack of weather changes, not due to the heat.
There are no variations with water supply. If you don't have access to clean water and sanitation, you're going to be very sick, and probably dead.
Anyway, enough of reality. Go back to blogging against those evil scientists, whose plot to Destroy America will surely succeed if they aren't thwarted by your amazing intellect.
It's good that we agree on something. It should be noted, however, that there has been a flat line in global temperature for the last 10 or so years. While this is insignificant as an indicator of anything, it should be noted that the models that are used for all projections failed to predict this.
Careful... that line worked in 2008, but not in 2010. 1998 is a useful year for selection bias.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5951409.cms
Following the release of global temperature data which revealed April of 2010 was the hottest April ever and that this year so far has been warmest on record, Nasa has said global temperatures have been steadily rising since the late 1970s with no significant let-up in the trend.
I'm sorry, what? I'd like to know how you link a few years of poor oyster harvesting to global warming, so please quote some kind of source.
Using google is really not that difficult. (Further down the article downplays the link, but that's business press for you.)
http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2010/06/28/story1.html
Young oysters seem to be dying in their swimming larval stage because the slightly acidic seawater is dissolving their shells from the outside faster than they can grow, Kaufman said. The breeding cycle has failed for each of the past four years, he said.
Same goes for the coral statement. Ocean acidification is a scary-sounding theory, but whether it will have any major ill-effects is pretty much an open question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
Research has already found that corals, coccolithophore algae, coralline algae, foraminifera, shellfish and pteropods experience reduced calcification or enhanced dissolution when exposed to elevated CO2.
Heat waves are weather and are caused by natural variability. Same goes for blizzards, neither is proof of anything.
When the variability starts marching away from known records, then the climate is changing beyond it's known natural cycles. El Nino weather patterns and other variables of course come into play, but hey, you got to pretend you were thinking for a second.
As far as your claim about the Arctic, I believe the scariest guess so far has been ice-free by 2015. All of those "predictions"(guesses) are based on models that ignore significant aspects of the inner workings of Earth's climate, most notably changes in cloud cover.
The Northwest Passage has been navigable for the first time in history for two years in a row. The US military is already reorganizing itself to defend it as a new attack vector. Russia, Canada, and the US are already squabbling over the resources under the ice.
I'd also like to point out that any kind of catastrophic global warming that CO2 might cause requires some kind of significant positive feedback mechanism, but none have been identified as of yet. It has simply been assumed that there must be one without any speculation as to what that might be. Cloud cover for example is likely a significant negative feedback when temperatures get higher.
In this case, you're entirely full of shit.
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1331.full
Ice-core records show that climate changes in the past have been large, rapid, and synchronous over broad areas extending into low latitudes, with less variability over historical times. These ice-core records come from high mountain glaciers and the polar regions, including small ice caps and the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
As the world slid into and out of t
But the thing is, in order to justify creating the global socialist utopia which is the true goal of the "warmers", ALL the goalposts must be cleared. ALL of the following must be true:
a) warming is happening
Virtually all independent science confirms this.
b) it's a bad thing
The rising acidity of the oceans due to CO2 absorption and the upwelling in the Seattle, Washington area have prevented them from harvesting oysters for a few years now. The same thing is killing coral all over the world. Heat waves are straining the electrical grid. The Arctic will have ice free summers in a few decades, with unknown effects. Glaciers around the world are melting, threatening the entire water ecosystem. Probably pretty bad.
c) human activity contributes significantly
Again, virtually all independent science confirms this.
d) it's possible to do something about it
Oh, we can use dirty energy, but we can't reduce our use of dirty energy? Sounds like an addiction problem to me. You just don't want to pay more for your stuff. That's a pretty shitty deal for the rest of the planet.
e) the cure is better than the disease
Returning CO2 levels to what's known to support the only biosphere that sustains human life sounds better than possibly throwing it into an equilibrium that either starves much of the human population, or leads to resource wars than end it in other ways.
Unless every one of those things is true, then the "green" crusade against global warming falls apart. So yes, you do have a goalpost issue: it's that you have to get past (at least) five of them to even have a shot.
The "green" crusade only falls apart when your willingness to delude yourself for your own personal gain doesn't cause you directly measurable harm. Unfortunately, the next generation will probably bear the cost of your self-imposed ignorance. Maybe we can set up some sort of taxation program, so you can opt-out of "green" taxes today, as long as the money is attached to your estate in case you're wrong. That would probably cause some people to think a little bit more.
I am beating myself over the head... There is not a single programming culture left that I can identify with. :(
If you're into a self-harm, you should check out Java.