Tell me, does the wealth of society belong to the people who work, or to the people who own the workers?
I don't particularly care for the opinions of dear friends of Augusto Pinochet. Though if you read her actual positions on many issues, you will find Thatcher to the left of Obama, especially on the environment, much to your dismay.
This is a general falsehood about American politics that I find immensely entertaining. They will use self-criticism within democratic-socialist countries to push back on a similar plan, but fail to put the full article in discussion. Half of the highlights of government officials calling the Canadian or English social systems broken usually end up saying, "At least we're not as bad as the system in the US." Those bits are conveniently left out once it reaches our shores.
Yeah, I missed the thread. However, from reading your recent posts, I still think you're an idiot.
So, rehashing my numbers, the people who make over $109K paid 71% of all taxes, even though they comprise only 10% of the taxpayers. It's really not that hard. I am surprised you can't understand this.
You seem to not understand that the top 10% own a vast majority of assets in America. It makes sense for them to pay the vast majority of the taxes. The top 1% own about 50% of the assets. The top half percent own close to 40% if I remember correctly. And the solution is not to cut programs that help people, like schools or hospitals or welfare programs, but to cut warfare spending that's been bankrupting the empire since the 70s, to end exploitation of American infrastructure by international corporate sheltering schemes, and to start rebuilding infrastructure to restore the middle class that we've lost over the last 30 years of failed economic policy. Otherwise, the inequality will lead to violence.
These facts aren't surrounded by waving American flags or red white and blue ribbons or little pictures of puppy dogs. They aren't written in crayon. But there they are.
This would be the first time that the US would be acting in the interests of a democratic movement in Latin America rather than in direct opposition. I'm highly skeptical of any action taken by the State Department, but it seems that the Organization of American States support reinstatement of Zelaya with conditions before the elections, as well as the citizens of Honduras itself.
That's why there's no good press. Supporting democracy is protecting the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and overthrowing governments across the world which have any self-interest that is in opposition to American power. Supporting democracy is declaring war in the outdoor prison in Gaza when they don't vote the way you want them to. Supporting democracy is when you send in guerrilla forces to Latin American countries, where nuns are gang raped for 24 hours while CIA interrogators coach their students on how to get more information, where priests who oppose American sponsored violence are gunned down while they give Mass on Sunday mornings, and where decades of warfare, destruction, and misery are considered progress.
American businesses don't get to make any money when they don't control puppet governments or subsidize weapons to the "freedom fighters" with our tax dollars. So, I remain skeptical on why the State Department wants this guy back in office, but the fact the Fox News is against it gives me some hope.
This is the dumbest comment I've read by a non AC today, just one tick above comments with the word "nigger" in them.
A person who supports a democracy does not necessarily support socialism. A person who supports socialism almost certainly doesn't support communism. Unless you think China is just like France.
And as dumb as this statement is, that may be the case. Or he's just your average American, who can't have a reasonable conversation about politics if anyone left of John McCain has any input. The American political vocabulary might as well be written in crayon.
I'm sorry, you are not allowed to imply that science employs faith.
In fact, science is so skeptical of itself, it changes when the evidence presents itself. It's like comparing an adult who learns from their mistakes with a toddler who insists that he's always right, regardless of the facts.
Inherent in all of science is "as far as we know." So, as far as I know, someone who has studied medicine is aware of a majority of the maladies that can affect my child. Because he's using methodologies that have been, for the vast majority of them, proven in labs and in studies. They have been removed of anecdotal experience, and tested with repeatable, verifiable results that anyone else is free to question. This method of thinking has delivered to us the modern world. The mystical belief in the supernatural had some philosophical high points, but did not improve the lives of anyone but the top of the clergy. In tens of thousands of years, it gave us almost nothing. Only when we threw out the assumption that God existed, and that everything had a plan, and began to think for ourselves and stop trusting hearsay like miracles, did society evolve beyond the society that the Greeks had thousands of years ago.
Faith is when you read some nonsense like killing a bird on an alter and dipping it in other bird's blood can cure a man of leprosy. Faith is taking your daughter with acute diabetes to someone who has no medical training, watching her die a slow and painful death while they babble white noise to zero effect, and then claiming that it was God's will that they're such stupid fucks that they didn't take their daughter to a hospital.
I have run out of patience for the religious. It is time they take their fairy tale nonsense to their private homes, and stop inflicting it on the world just because they're afraid of dying.
Even if it was ammo, would you really listen to someone who believed that humans were formed from dust or a clot of blood and continue to believe the parlor tricks of old mystical texts?
Say anything you want to support the ID crowd, but the only argument they have is faith. Faith is meaningless for science.
When it comes down to it, the most faithful do not go to see their priest if their baby is sick. They take it to a doctor, because science and medicine work, and no matter how much they want to deny it, faith does not.
I've had more outages through power loss and the connection being physically severed to locations than I have through gmail, but I do live in the south and everything is above ground around here.
The report extensively footnotes publicly available data.
If you think that you can just write something and not submit it to peer review and somehow call that science, then we have nothing to argue about. You'll take data analysis about earth science from someone who has written no books about earth science, conducted no primary research of earth science, but whose entire canon include books that praise Ronald Reagan.
Or you could look at any poll you like of environmental scientists, who have no incentive to lie compared to someone funded by Chevron, and see where they stand on issues. You can't claim a single report, which has zero credentials, written by someone with zero credentials, has any merit whatsoever.
On it's own, a paper without peer review might as well be published in the Enquirer.
The Pacific Research Institute? Whose masters include: Altria, ChevronTexaco, Cypress Semiconductor, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Microsoft, Pfizer, AT&T, and Verizon?
In the paper they state that amazon deforestation has dropped considerably. But even at current fluctuations, using the data gathered from satellite information, 40% of the original forest will be gone by 2030, and we've destroyed close to 20% of it already. Is this progress?
Even in the numbers that are supposed to give a positive outlook for the future, there is no decline in actual pollution or environmental destruction. Just small declines in certain areas in the growth of pollution.
As I said, don't send me nonsense. I'm not gullible. Let's look at some "facts" in the "study."
The reasons for the higher U.S. per-capita GHG emissions are explored in this edition. These differences include the longer transportation distances and costs in the United States and larger homes in America (roughly twice the size of the average European dwelling). When these differences are normalized, American GHG emissions are in line with most European nations
So, as long as you don't pay attention to per capita numbers, America's just like Europe! I can't even believe the author had the will to sign his name to this document. I don't have the time to examine the entire paper in depth, but based on what I've skimmed through, it's the old bag of tricks. There is no mention of the loss of biodiversity. He uses the EPA figures to claim that wetlands actually increased, which is a complete lie. They went up because the Bush Administration decided that golf courses could be counted as wetland areas.
But it gets better: the person writing the paper isn't even a scientist. He's a "Fellow of Environmental Studies" who has not submitted the paper to any peer review journal. So basically, it's meaningless, because it hasn't been reviewed by anyone who is actually an environmental scientist. He's just a schmuck who works at a "think tank" who has also written books:
Steven Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He has been the author of PRI's annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators since its launch in 1994. He is also the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of AEI's Environmental Policy Outlook. He is the author of four books, including, most recently, Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders (CrownForum) and The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (PrimaForum), the first of a two-volume treatment of Reagan's place in American public life.
Just read towards the end of the document, where it turns into a diatribe about how impossible it is to meet the CO2 standards that are proposed, when he spent the entire paper glorifying the results of air quality and water quality improvements that were delivered by exactly the same kind of programs. My sensitive mind tells me he's a partisan hack who accepts pay for spreading false information to give people the illusion of authority when they say, "According to the Pacific Research Institute..."
I mean, really. This is the best you could come up with?
Right in the quote you provide, I explain that there are local cases of success. I would include such examples as cleaner air in some cities, or a river that has been rehabilitated, or a less damaged ozone. But on the whole, every year the earth supports less life naturally that did it before.
It's sort of like overworking a person. For a while you get excellent output, but when you keep demanding more more more, eventually the organism begins to underperform. We are seriously stressing every part of our biosphere. To go back to the savings analogy, instead of living off of the surplus or "natural interest" of our earth, we are now deep into spending the valued asset itself.
Just to take on example, we have destroyed the entire ecosystem for cod fisheries. After over a decade of waiting for the cod to come back, they still haven't.
"It's such an overfished system," Limburg said. "The big concern is that overexploitation is causing the fish to evolve. The finding that humans can actually cause evolution of fish populations, which in turn can drive their degradation, is relatively new and is drawing a lot of attention.
"Some fisheries, including that for cod, are now known to cause 'juvenescence,' or the evolution of younger, smaller adult fish. The ecological and economic consequences both appear to be negative," she said. http://www.esf.edu/communications/news/2008/08.27.balticcod.htm
When we start affecting the very evolution of a species, it's safe to say we have a very dire problem.
Randomly invoking "externality" is a bad policy. But when you look at oil, unless you are willing to be totally ignorant of modern history, you can see the cost of externalities are extraordinarily high.
How many governments have been overthrown? How much money has been spent in the middle east to secure access to oil or to prevent someone else from getting it? (Don't feed me any lines about freedom or security. I'm not as credulous as as that, thank you.) What has the environmental cost been? And all of this to go into a transportation system in the US that is the most inefficient user of energy probably in world history. (3% of the population using 25% of the world supply). To a consumer system that can't even be bothered to recycle what it's already dug out of the earth.
Now, to the second and more important point, you cannot show me a single study published in the last thirty years that demonstrates that any part of our ecosystem is healthier than it was the year before. Maybe in some extremely local cases there has been progress, but on the whole, every year the earth becomes less capable of supporting life.
If we were all on a spaceship, and every year our oxygen recycling system became less able to do it's job, you'd start to panic once it got below 90% of capacity. If we had 1% less food, and became less able to replenish our supply each year, you'd start to really think hard about that problem once we get to 70% of our original stock. At least I would hope.
Well here's the newsflash. This Earth is the only known spaceship in the universe that can support human life. Every year, it becomes less capable of doing so. Every year, it comes closer to switching it's equilibrium to a state that may or may not kill us off, as it has done for 98% of all the species that have come before us. And though our production is extraordinary right now, our entire way of life is based on the artificially low cost of energy in the form of oil. It's in our pesticides, we use it to produce electricity, transport all food, and the man hours required for agriculture without it is unimaginable. Imagine construction without hydraulic equipment powered by diesel. Imagine creating medical devices without plastic. It's even in every single device we manufacture, and it's not easy to replace. We're going to use the oil produced over 200 million years in 150. That's like saving money for 100 years and spending it in 40 minutes. So the real answer is that oil is very, very valuable, and shouldn't be wasted to make our generation the most comfortable in history, and the next generation the last to have electricity 24 hours a day.
What is the value of having a biosphere that supports human life? What sort of premium would you place on the price of oil to account for that external cost to the people who consume it and the people who drag it out of the earth? Even the staunchest and dumbest libertarian would have trouble answering "zero." At least I would hope so.
I can agree with a portion of your post. I would not give very much money to someone who claimed they had found a stone that could levitate any weight, and invest in building a bridge out of it. Since we spend 40 billion dollars a year on highway construction and maintenance, what is the harm in using even one billion of that for research and development? Do you think there's no chance of improving the way highways are built at all?
Your analogy is completely miscalculated. You can say that throughout the entirety of human history, no one has flapped their arms and raised themselves off the ground. However, it cannot be said that no one in history has ever produced a new material that could serve as a road. In fact, from stone, to gravel, to concrete, to asphalt, to steel bridges, many people have introduced new materials and methods of building roads. Exploring new options is not a bad thing, unless it's economically infeasible, or unless you hate progress. I do not think $100,000 of grant money is on the radar of economic malfeasance.
Who bought up mass transit systems across the united states and shut them down? Who has been lobbying for the prohibition of natural drugs, and profiting immensely off of the sales of their own derivatives? Who shut down their production electric vehicle line and sold the patents to an oil company once there was no state requirement to produce a zero emissions vehicle? No one's talking about imaginary carburetors except for you. I'm talking about the self-evident fact that unpoliced corporations will destroy anyone and everything in order to turn a profit, even if it means dooming their country to reliance on foreign resources or destroying local manufacturing by moving jobs overseas. Especially now that corporations are international, they will exploit anyone who allows them in, and if you think for a moment that Exxon or Microsoft or Bechtel care if there is a just and equitable society anywhere, you're just not paying attention.
The reason the market works sometimes is because there's competition. But there can't be competition without regulation. That's why the rest of the western world pays half of what we do for health care, transportation, and communications. That's also why they still have a middle class and less poverty, even in Germany, which absorbed it's communist half not even 30 years ago. In these countries, the rights and values of the society are more important than the private profits of corporations. This is due to active democratic action and unions, who are vilified by corporate culture for a very simple reason: they are the only check to corporate power, because they have the ability to influence the government and represent the will of people. (Not that they succeed in this goal all the time, or are innocent of corruption.)
I'm sure you're enamored with your quips, and at least the effort matches the quality, but you're failing to provide any interesting points. So provide me with the narrative. Show me where a corporation engaged in pure research, brought a product to market without government subsidy, and revolutionized the world. For bonus points, show me where they decided that the product was so beneficial they'd allow anyone to produce it for the betterment of mankind.
I'm sorry, I really have difficulty parsing these arguments sometimes, because one side is always lacking skepticism for whomever they're supporting.
I don't trust any politicians. Just like I don't trust any CEOs. But I can be swayed by rational argument.
Let's look at health care. On one side, you have politicians saying that we need regulation of health care to make sure people don't suffer. That's the claim - maybe it's populist, or naive, but there it is. The motivation for the politician is to get re-elected. As far as I know, the current Administration does not own industries that will benefit from this legislation. As far as I know, all the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and other organizations who are funding the hatred against single payer options are at risk of losing a lot of money. By default, whose position is more suspect?
There's snake oil out there called The War on Terrorism, and National Security, and the March of Freedom, and the War on Drugs, and so on. They cause a lot more damage and waste an incomparable sum compared to research on sustainable technology. So let's fix the dam break before we worry about puddles in the parking lot.
It depends on whether there's a profit it in or not.
So, if I hold a patent for an extremely efficient vehicle that never breaks down, am I going to sell the product and destroy the profitability of my company, or stick to the more inefficient products that already have a willing group of consumers?
The argument that the market leads to efficiency is exactly wrong. The unregulated market leads to monopolies, racketeering, and profit, usually at the expense of efficiency, because efficiency means less profit.
A well regulated market can lead to efficiency through genuine competition, but it's actually pretty rare. Take a look at the expenditure of energy for transportation across the world. Which market has led to massive inefficiency, and can only survive through colonial exploitation? It's not Finland.
Err, forgot to move a sentence. The post should begin with "There's nothing wrong..." and the second paragraph should be:
Because unless a public outfit pays for it, the knowledge gained will be lost for anyone else to benefit from it. Either to a corporation who privatizes the profit and sues anyone who even copies the idea, or to a corporation who would rather bury the technology than have to compete with it, or to the failed corporation who won't be allowed to release the patents because their shareholders are a bunch of dickheads.
Because unless a public outfit pays for it, the knowledge gained will be lost for anyone else to benefit from it. There's nothing wrong with a community pooling their money for investment for their own benefit, like there's nothing wrong with a family saving up for a new home. It should be decentralized and democratically controlled as much as is possible, but not eliminated for some ridiculous ideology that has no practical application. (I'm speaking of strict libertarianism.)
Either to a corporation who privatizes the profit and sues anyone who even copies the idea, or to a corporation who would rather bury the technology than have to compete with it, or to the failed corporation who won't be allowed to release the patents because their shareholders are a bunch of dickheads.
Do you think the internet would be here as quickly unless it had been freed from corporate shenanigans? It'd be just another version of a closed-off network, like AOL and CompuServe and Prodigy.
The reason America has all of this technology is because we pay hundreds of billions of dollars every year for it, under the cover of military research. Many projects are wasteful pipe dreams, but even those pipe dreams let us know where the dead ends are. Privatizing research is too expensive, not only for the raw costs involved, but because you end up duplicating too much work on very complicated problems. That's why no private corporations engage in pure research. Product research is the only thing they can justify to their shareholders.
There are multiple solutions to the problems you suggest, but I don't even have to mention them, because others have already.
The real problem is that you fail to understand that solutions can be found if you aren't too lazy to look for them. Yes, if the people who designed this system are absolute morons, they may have forgotten that trucks exist and are heavy. The difference between that group and you is that they are actually doing something instead of arriving at a problem, scratching their pits like their primate ancestors, and going back to throwing shit at a tree, or speculating on the NFL draft, or arguing with some lonely basement dwellers on a Friday night on the internet.
Am I doing anything particularly important or positive? No.
Am I therefore going to endlessly criticize those who are trying to solve it for me? Of course not. I'm glad they're working on the problem, and will be happy to benefit from it if they're successful. I'll even gladly give more money to projects like this out of my tax dollars, instead of wasting them to build F-22s at 3,000x the cost.
Fortunately for their team, real scientists and engineers will constructively examine his project and be very critical of it. Since they aren't like you, and will continue to look for a solution instead of giving up at each impasse, they will have a better product in the end. Even if the project totally fails, they may provide useful information to others who are also trying to come up with solutions to similar problems. This is the beauty of the scientific method. Please take your ape brain elsewhere.
Those companies aren't even pretending to be interested in rural network access now. The new FCC policy won't make a difference. In fact, the only interest they do show is when a local government decides to run their own local broadband network access. Then they are sued by the companies who refused to provide service for unfair competition.
In socialist countries where infrastructure is built by government or under massive regulation, they have better cell coverage, better broadband access and speed, and cheaper rates. But that's what you get when you choose the slow and dumb imperial government, which can only be trusted with nuclear weapons and secret armies and national defense, but not running twisted pairs or putting up cell towers.
In the early part of the 20th Century, you could not corner the market for pain relief. People had access to opiates and cannabis and coca products, which were cheap, natural, and if you weren't an addict, perfectly effective.
Since the prohibition of these drugs, there has been a network of businesses that have profited immensely. Pharmaceuticals, who effectively eliminated competition, profited early on. They get to sell pain relief with products which are still derived from the same natural source, but have the benefits of being riddled with horrible side effects and hundreds of times more expensive for the consumer.
Then the CIA discovered a fantastic way to fund their unconstitutional undercover operations. They could use the US military to transport the drugs they bought for peanuts in Columbia to fund all kinds of insane bullshit around the world, and they wouldn't have to consult any committee because they didn't need their money.
Now, private prisons are all over the country, and all of the sudden we have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the known world. (We also have the highest per capita health care cost in the world. Get the picture?) Prison guard unions, manufacturers of certain products, and I'll bet even commercial building lobbyists make damn sure the politicians deliver on promises to "clean up the streets," which is code for throw undesirably poor people in jail. Of course, we do need somewhere to throw our mentally ill citizens, why not mix in the schizophrenics with non-violent drug offenders and murderers and rapists and white collar criminals and see what happens?
So, the winners in the drug war are huge corporations that make a profit when someone is punished, when someone needs pain relief, and also the unconstitutional CIA.
As Plato said, "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
Colonial powers have always had some sort of excuse or pretext. It's not necessary for the victims of their empires - they usually know what's going on - it's so that their internal populations are on board with the operation.
The "because we want to" method hasn't worked well since the 60s, and it never hurts to have a more believable excuse for sending a generation of children to fight and die in a foreign land.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, now it's getting interesting.
Tell me, does the wealth of society belong to the people who work, or to the people who own the workers?
I don't particularly care for the opinions of dear friends of Augusto Pinochet. Though if you read her actual positions on many issues, you will find Thatcher to the left of Obama, especially on the environment, much to your dismay.
This is a general falsehood about American politics that I find immensely entertaining. They will use self-criticism within democratic-socialist countries to push back on a similar plan, but fail to put the full article in discussion. Half of the highlights of government officials calling the Canadian or English social systems broken usually end up saying, "At least we're not as bad as the system in the US." Those bits are conveniently left out once it reaches our shores.
Hah!
I just drew a picture of you in crayons! What were we talking about again?
After sipping from a glass full of Glenn Beck's crocodile tears,
In anticipation of becoming nosferatu and forever trolling the internet,
With care,
Crayons
Yeah, I missed the thread. However, from reading your recent posts, I still think you're an idiot.
So, rehashing my numbers, the people who make over $109K paid 71% of all taxes, even though they comprise only 10% of the taxpayers. It's really not that hard. I am surprised you can't understand this.
You seem to not understand that the top 10% own a vast majority of assets in America. It makes sense for them to pay the vast majority of the taxes. The top 1% own about 50% of the assets. The top half percent own close to 40% if I remember correctly. And the solution is not to cut programs that help people, like schools or hospitals or welfare programs, but to cut warfare spending that's been bankrupting the empire since the 70s, to end exploitation of American infrastructure by international corporate sheltering schemes, and to start rebuilding infrastructure to restore the middle class that we've lost over the last 30 years of failed economic policy. Otherwise, the inequality will lead to violence.
These facts aren't surrounded by waving American flags or red white and blue ribbons or little pictures of puppy dogs. They aren't written in crayon. But there they are.
Happy Friday!
Your Average American-Basher
This would be the first time that the US would be acting in the interests of a democratic movement in Latin America rather than in direct opposition. I'm highly skeptical of any action taken by the State Department, but it seems that the Organization of American States support reinstatement of Zelaya with conditions before the elections, as well as the citizens of Honduras itself.
That's why there's no good press. Supporting democracy is protecting the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and overthrowing governments across the world which have any self-interest that is in opposition to American power. Supporting democracy is declaring war in the outdoor prison in Gaza when they don't vote the way you want them to. Supporting democracy is when you send in guerrilla forces to Latin American countries, where nuns are gang raped for 24 hours while CIA interrogators coach their students on how to get more information, where priests who oppose American sponsored violence are gunned down while they give Mass on Sunday mornings, and where decades of warfare, destruction, and misery are considered progress.
American businesses don't get to make any money when they don't control puppet governments or subsidize weapons to the "freedom fighters" with our tax dollars. So, I remain skeptical on why the State Department wants this guy back in office, but the fact the Fox News is against it gives me some hope.
This is the dumbest comment I've read by a non AC today, just one tick above comments with the word "nigger" in them.
A person who supports a democracy does not necessarily support socialism. A person who supports socialism almost certainly doesn't support communism. Unless you think China is just like France.
And as dumb as this statement is, that may be the case. Or he's just your average American, who can't have a reasonable conversation about politics if anyone left of John McCain has any input. The American political vocabulary might as well be written in crayon.
I'm sorry, you are not allowed to imply that science employs faith.
In fact, science is so skeptical of itself, it changes when the evidence presents itself. It's like comparing an adult who learns from their mistakes with a toddler who insists that he's always right, regardless of the facts.
Inherent in all of science is "as far as we know." So, as far as I know, someone who has studied medicine is aware of a majority of the maladies that can affect my child. Because he's using methodologies that have been, for the vast majority of them, proven in labs and in studies. They have been removed of anecdotal experience, and tested with repeatable, verifiable results that anyone else is free to question. This method of thinking has delivered to us the modern world. The mystical belief in the supernatural had some philosophical high points, but did not improve the lives of anyone but the top of the clergy. In tens of thousands of years, it gave us almost nothing. Only when we threw out the assumption that God existed, and that everything had a plan, and began to think for ourselves and stop trusting hearsay like miracles, did society evolve beyond the society that the Greeks had thousands of years ago.
Faith is when you read some nonsense like killing a bird on an alter and dipping it in other bird's blood can cure a man of leprosy. Faith is taking your daughter with acute diabetes to someone who has no medical training, watching her die a slow and painful death while they babble white noise to zero effect, and then claiming that it was God's will that they're such stupid fucks that they didn't take their daughter to a hospital.
I have run out of patience for the religious. It is time they take their fairy tale nonsense to their private homes, and stop inflicting it on the world just because they're afraid of dying.
Even if it was ammo, would you really listen to someone who believed that humans were formed from dust or a clot of blood and continue to believe the parlor tricks of old mystical texts?
Say anything you want to support the ID crowd, but the only argument they have is faith. Faith is meaningless for science.
When it comes down to it, the most faithful do not go to see their priest if their baby is sick. They take it to a doctor, because science and medicine work, and no matter how much they want to deny it, faith does not.
I've had more outages through power loss and the connection being physically severed to locations than I have through gmail, but I do live in the south and everything is above ground around here.
The report extensively footnotes publicly available data.
If you think that you can just write something and not submit it to peer review and somehow call that science, then we have nothing to argue about. You'll take data analysis about earth science from someone who has written no books about earth science, conducted no primary research of earth science, but whose entire canon include books that praise Ronald Reagan.
Or you could look at any poll you like of environmental scientists, who have no incentive to lie compared to someone funded by Chevron, and see where they stand on issues. You can't claim a single report, which has zero credentials, written by someone with zero credentials, has any merit whatsoever.
On it's own, a paper without peer review might as well be published in the Enquirer.
The Pacific Research Institute? Whose masters include: Altria, ChevronTexaco, Cypress Semiconductor, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Microsoft, Pfizer, AT&T, and Verizon?
In the paper they state that amazon deforestation has dropped considerably. But even at current fluctuations, using the data gathered from satellite information, 40% of the original forest will be gone by 2030, and we've destroyed close to 20% of it already. Is this progress?
Even in the numbers that are supposed to give a positive outlook for the future, there is no decline in actual pollution or environmental destruction. Just small declines in certain areas in the growth of pollution.
As I said, don't send me nonsense. I'm not gullible. Let's look at some "facts" in the "study."
The reasons for the higher U.S. per-capita GHG emissions are explored in this edition. These differences include the longer transportation distances and costs in the United States and larger homes in America (roughly twice the size of the average European dwelling). When these differences are normalized, American GHG emissions are in line with most European nations
So, as long as you don't pay attention to per capita numbers, America's just like Europe! I can't even believe the author had the will to sign his name to this document. I don't have the time to examine the entire paper in depth, but based on what I've skimmed through, it's the old bag of tricks. There is no mention of the loss of biodiversity. He uses the EPA figures to claim that wetlands actually increased, which is a complete lie. They went up because the Bush Administration decided that golf courses could be counted as wetland areas.
But it gets better: the person writing the paper isn't even a scientist. He's a "Fellow of Environmental Studies" who has not submitted the paper to any peer review journal. So basically, it's meaningless, because it hasn't been reviewed by anyone who is actually an environmental scientist. He's just a schmuck who works at a "think tank" who has also written books:
Steven Hayward is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He has been the author of PRI's annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators since its launch in 1994. He is also the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of AEI's Environmental Policy Outlook. He is the author of four books, including, most recently, Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders (CrownForum) and The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (PrimaForum), the first of a two-volume treatment of Reagan's place in American public life.
Just read towards the end of the document, where it turns into a diatribe about how impossible it is to meet the CO2 standards that are proposed, when he spent the entire paper glorifying the results of air quality and water quality improvements that were delivered by exactly the same kind of programs. My sensitive mind tells me he's a partisan hack who accepts pay for spreading false information to give people the illusion of authority when they say, "According to the Pacific Research Institute..."
I mean, really. This is the best you could come up with?
Right in the quote you provide, I explain that there are local cases of success. I would include such examples as cleaner air in some cities, or a river that has been rehabilitated, or a less damaged ozone. But on the whole, every year the earth supports less life naturally that did it before.
It's sort of like overworking a person. For a while you get excellent output, but when you keep demanding more more more, eventually the organism begins to underperform. We are seriously stressing every part of our biosphere. To go back to the savings analogy, instead of living off of the surplus or "natural interest" of our earth, we are now deep into spending the valued asset itself.
Just to take on example, we have destroyed the entire ecosystem for cod fisheries. After over a decade of waiting for the cod to come back, they still haven't.
"It's such an overfished system," Limburg said. "The big concern is that overexploitation is causing the fish to evolve. The finding that humans can actually cause evolution of fish populations, which in turn can drive their degradation, is relatively new and is drawing a lot of attention.
"Some fisheries, including that for cod, are now known to cause 'juvenescence,' or the evolution of younger, smaller adult fish. The ecological and economic consequences both appear to be negative," she said.
http://www.esf.edu/communications/news/2008/08.27.balticcod.htm
When we start affecting the very evolution of a species, it's safe to say we have a very dire problem.
Randomly invoking "externality" is a bad policy. But when you look at oil, unless you are willing to be totally ignorant of modern history, you can see the cost of externalities are extraordinarily high.
How many governments have been overthrown? How much money has been spent in the middle east to secure access to oil or to prevent someone else from getting it? (Don't feed me any lines about freedom or security. I'm not as credulous as as that, thank you.) What has the environmental cost been? And all of this to go into a transportation system in the US that is the most inefficient user of energy probably in world history. (3% of the population using 25% of the world supply). To a consumer system that can't even be bothered to recycle what it's already dug out of the earth.
Now, to the second and more important point, you cannot show me a single study published in the last thirty years that demonstrates that any part of our ecosystem is healthier than it was the year before. Maybe in some extremely local cases there has been progress, but on the whole, every year the earth becomes less capable of supporting life.
If we were all on a spaceship, and every year our oxygen recycling system became less able to do it's job, you'd start to panic once it got below 90% of capacity. If we had 1% less food, and became less able to replenish our supply each year, you'd start to really think hard about that problem once we get to 70% of our original stock. At least I would hope.
Well here's the newsflash. This Earth is the only known spaceship in the universe that can support human life. Every year, it becomes less capable of doing so. Every year, it comes closer to switching it's equilibrium to a state that may or may not kill us off, as it has done for 98% of all the species that have come before us. And though our production is extraordinary right now, our entire way of life is based on the artificially low cost of energy in the form of oil. It's in our pesticides, we use it to produce electricity, transport all food, and the man hours required for agriculture without it is unimaginable. Imagine construction without hydraulic equipment powered by diesel. Imagine creating medical devices without plastic. It's even in every single device we manufacture, and it's not easy to replace. We're going to use the oil produced over 200 million years in 150. That's like saving money for 100 years and spending it in 40 minutes. So the real answer is that oil is very, very valuable, and shouldn't be wasted to make our generation the most comfortable in history, and the next generation the last to have electricity 24 hours a day.
What is the value of having a biosphere that supports human life? What sort of premium would you place on the price of oil to account for that external cost to the people who consume it and the people who drag it out of the earth? Even the staunchest and dumbest libertarian would have trouble answering "zero." At least I would hope so.
Do you mind if it's 0.333% ricin?
I can agree with a portion of your post. I would not give very much money to someone who claimed they had found a stone that could levitate any weight, and invest in building a bridge out of it. Since we spend 40 billion dollars a year on highway construction and maintenance, what is the harm in using even one billion of that for research and development? Do you think there's no chance of improving the way highways are built at all?
Your analogy is completely miscalculated. You can say that throughout the entirety of human history, no one has flapped their arms and raised themselves off the ground. However, it cannot be said that no one in history has ever produced a new material that could serve as a road. In fact, from stone, to gravel, to concrete, to asphalt, to steel bridges, many people have introduced new materials and methods of building roads. Exploring new options is not a bad thing, unless it's economically infeasible, or unless you hate progress. I do not think $100,000 of grant money is on the radar of economic malfeasance.
Who bought up mass transit systems across the united states and shut them down? Who has been lobbying for the prohibition of natural drugs, and profiting immensely off of the sales of their own derivatives? Who shut down their production electric vehicle line and sold the patents to an oil company once there was no state requirement to produce a zero emissions vehicle? No one's talking about imaginary carburetors except for you. I'm talking about the self-evident fact that unpoliced corporations will destroy anyone and everything in order to turn a profit, even if it means dooming their country to reliance on foreign resources or destroying local manufacturing by moving jobs overseas. Especially now that corporations are international, they will exploit anyone who allows them in, and if you think for a moment that Exxon or Microsoft or Bechtel care if there is a just and equitable society anywhere, you're just not paying attention.
The reason the market works sometimes is because there's competition. But there can't be competition without regulation. That's why the rest of the western world pays half of what we do for health care, transportation, and communications. That's also why they still have a middle class and less poverty, even in Germany, which absorbed it's communist half not even 30 years ago. In these countries, the rights and values of the society are more important than the private profits of corporations. This is due to active democratic action and unions, who are vilified by corporate culture for a very simple reason: they are the only check to corporate power, because they have the ability to influence the government and represent the will of people. (Not that they succeed in this goal all the time, or are innocent of corruption.)
I'm sure you're enamored with your quips, and at least the effort matches the quality, but you're failing to provide any interesting points. So provide me with the narrative. Show me where a corporation engaged in pure research, brought a product to market without government subsidy, and revolutionized the world. For bonus points, show me where they decided that the product was so beneficial they'd allow anyone to produce it for the betterment of mankind.
I'm sorry, I really have difficulty parsing these arguments sometimes, because one side is always lacking skepticism for whomever they're supporting.
I don't trust any politicians. Just like I don't trust any CEOs. But I can be swayed by rational argument.
Let's look at health care. On one side, you have politicians saying that we need regulation of health care to make sure people don't suffer. That's the claim - maybe it's populist, or naive, but there it is. The motivation for the politician is to get re-elected. As far as I know, the current Administration does not own industries that will benefit from this legislation. As far as I know, all the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and other organizations who are funding the hatred against single payer options are at risk of losing a lot of money. By default, whose position is more suspect?
There's snake oil out there called The War on Terrorism, and National Security, and the March of Freedom, and the War on Drugs, and so on. They cause a lot more damage and waste an incomparable sum compared to research on sustainable technology. So let's fix the dam break before we worry about puddles in the parking lot.
It depends on whether there's a profit it in or not.
So, if I hold a patent for an extremely efficient vehicle that never breaks down, am I going to sell the product and destroy the profitability of my company, or stick to the more inefficient products that already have a willing group of consumers?
The argument that the market leads to efficiency is exactly wrong. The unregulated market leads to monopolies, racketeering, and profit, usually at the expense of efficiency, because efficiency means less profit.
A well regulated market can lead to efficiency through genuine competition, but it's actually pretty rare. Take a look at the expenditure of energy for transportation across the world. Which market has led to massive inefficiency, and can only survive through colonial exploitation? It's not Finland.
Err, forgot to move a sentence. The post should begin with "There's nothing wrong..." and the second paragraph should be:
Because unless a public outfit pays for it, the knowledge gained will be lost for anyone else to benefit from it. Either to a corporation who privatizes the profit and sues anyone who even copies the idea, or to a corporation who would rather bury the technology than have to compete with it, or to the failed corporation who won't be allowed to release the patents because their shareholders are a bunch of dickheads.
Because unless a public outfit pays for it, the knowledge gained will be lost for anyone else to benefit from it. There's nothing wrong with a community pooling their money for investment for their own benefit, like there's nothing wrong with a family saving up for a new home. It should be decentralized and democratically controlled as much as is possible, but not eliminated for some ridiculous ideology that has no practical application. (I'm speaking of strict libertarianism.)
Either to a corporation who privatizes the profit and sues anyone who even copies the idea, or to a corporation who would rather bury the technology than have to compete with it, or to the failed corporation who won't be allowed to release the patents because their shareholders are a bunch of dickheads.
Do you think the internet would be here as quickly unless it had been freed from corporate shenanigans? It'd be just another version of a closed-off network, like AOL and CompuServe and Prodigy.
The reason America has all of this technology is because we pay hundreds of billions of dollars every year for it, under the cover of military research. Many projects are wasteful pipe dreams, but even those pipe dreams let us know where the dead ends are. Privatizing research is too expensive, not only for the raw costs involved, but because you end up duplicating too much work on very complicated problems. That's why no private corporations engage in pure research. Product research is the only thing they can justify to their shareholders.
There are multiple solutions to the problems you suggest, but I don't even have to mention them, because others have already.
The real problem is that you fail to understand that solutions can be found if you aren't too lazy to look for them. Yes, if the people who designed this system are absolute morons, they may have forgotten that trucks exist and are heavy. The difference between that group and you is that they are actually doing something instead of arriving at a problem, scratching their pits like their primate ancestors, and going back to throwing shit at a tree, or speculating on the NFL draft, or arguing with some lonely basement dwellers on a Friday night on the internet.
Am I doing anything particularly important or positive? No.
Am I therefore going to endlessly criticize those who are trying to solve it for me? Of course not. I'm glad they're working on the problem, and will be happy to benefit from it if they're successful. I'll even gladly give more money to projects like this out of my tax dollars, instead of wasting them to build F-22s at 3,000x the cost.
Fortunately for their team, real scientists and engineers will constructively examine his project and be very critical of it. Since they aren't like you, and will continue to look for a solution instead of giving up at each impasse, they will have a better product in the end. Even if the project totally fails, they may provide useful information to others who are also trying to come up with solutions to similar problems. This is the beauty of the scientific method. Please take your ape brain elsewhere.
Nope. Finland, Sweden, and Norway have similar population densities and much harsher climates, and have better cell coverage and broadband access.
Those companies aren't even pretending to be interested in rural network access now. The new FCC policy won't make a difference. In fact, the only interest they do show is when a local government decides to run their own local broadband network access. Then they are sued by the companies who refused to provide service for unfair competition.
In socialist countries where infrastructure is built by government or under massive regulation, they have better cell coverage, better broadband access and speed, and cheaper rates. But that's what you get when you choose the slow and dumb imperial government, which can only be trusted with nuclear weapons and secret armies and national defense, but not running twisted pairs or putting up cell towers.
In the early part of the 20th Century, you could not corner the market for pain relief. People had access to opiates and cannabis and coca products, which were cheap, natural, and if you weren't an addict, perfectly effective.
Since the prohibition of these drugs, there has been a network of businesses that have profited immensely. Pharmaceuticals, who effectively eliminated competition, profited early on. They get to sell pain relief with products which are still derived from the same natural source, but have the benefits of being riddled with horrible side effects and hundreds of times more expensive for the consumer.
Then the CIA discovered a fantastic way to fund their unconstitutional undercover operations. They could use the US military to transport the drugs they bought for peanuts in Columbia to fund all kinds of insane bullshit around the world, and they wouldn't have to consult any committee because they didn't need their money.
Now, private prisons are all over the country, and all of the sudden we have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the known world. (We also have the highest per capita health care cost in the world. Get the picture?) Prison guard unions, manufacturers of certain products, and I'll bet even commercial building lobbyists make damn sure the politicians deliver on promises to "clean up the streets," which is code for throw undesirably poor people in jail. Of course, we do need somewhere to throw our mentally ill citizens, why not mix in the schizophrenics with non-violent drug offenders and murderers and rapists and white collar criminals and see what happens?
So, the winners in the drug war are huge corporations that make a profit when someone is punished, when someone needs pain relief, and also the unconstitutional CIA.
As Plato said, "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
I know parts of the civilization have been around for that long, but from what I remember, the first Unified China was in 200 BC or so.
Colonial powers have always had some sort of excuse or pretext. It's not necessary for the victims of their empires - they usually know what's going on - it's so that their internal populations are on board with the operation.
The "because we want to" method hasn't worked well since the 60s, and it never hurts to have a more believable excuse for sending a generation of children to fight and die in a foreign land.