Without taking sides in the more or less farmland argument, I just want to point out that the Sahara is very rich soil, so if we ever got water there, it would make for very good farmland, just like the desert in Israel proved fertile ground to grow crops.
These shortages assume no improvements over desalination technology. In fact full scale desalination is already feasible today though the price of water would go up by a factor of 10x. Given how much we waste today (we literally flush it down the toilet) this is not as bad as it sounds.
Add in efforts in water conservation such as deploying drip irrigation everywhere and better recycling (see Las Vegas and Singapore for leading efforts in that regard) and frankly the whole water shortages threat seems vastly overstated.
The oft neglected fact is that US aid to Israel must be spent on US products and services.
Correct, but is should be pointed out that this is true of most aid, to any country and from any country.
Whenever you hear that, say, Canada gave $100M in food aid to drought ravaged African country, it usually means that a credit of $100M against surplus Canadian food stuff was issued to that country, so a lot of that aid ends up in the hands of farmers that were having problem selling their produce. A win-win situation if you ask me. This is a fact that the Ron Paul types routinely leave out.
A government providing a service requiers it exercising practical control over the means of production of that service or good.
No more control that a large customer has over an independently owned supplier. Mistaking that influence for true ownership and control of the means of production is stretching the facts.
Medicare, like many elements of a modern mixed economy, is arguably socialist,
No it isn't. As I said elsewhere, governments provide services, with defense of the country and law enforcement being two of the more common ones. Merely providing a service to the population has nothing to do with socialism.
Calling medicare socialism is just an ideological driven lie by Fox to make people believe that any program that they don't like is socialist. In fact, the army which is directly contracted by the government with individual soldiers is more socialist than medicare yet Fox never calls the army socialist.
but merely having some socialist elements doesn't make a system socialism.
I agree with this, but in this case it is not relevant as Medicare is not socialist to begin with as it does not involve ownership (or even control) of the means of production (medical or otherwise).
I'm pretty sure that NHS is owned and run by England
He wasn't talking about the NHS, but medicare so this is irrelevant.
and that all these programs socialist in spirit.
No, governments provide services. That is what they do, be them socialist, capitalist or communist. Some countries provide very few services, some provide a lot. It is a Fox lie to confuse provisioning of services with socialism.
After all you would never hear Fox calling defense of the country a socialist program, even though just as with medicare it is a social program that benefits the entire population.
I also think this would be fairly obvious from your definition had you included the remainder of the wikipedia entry that you used but did not cite.
There is nothing in that entry that would call medicare or the department of defense socialism.
it's not a lie to call Medicare, "Socialized Medicine"
He didn't call it socialized medicine, he called it socialism.
By saying "We'll pay for this, but not that", they are influencing the practice of medicine
They are influencing the practice of medicine, this is not the same as ownership. Renaming influence into ownership is a lie.
Say, if you said Hertz owns Ford that is a lie, yet Hertz influences the production and design of Ford Fiestas, given the large amount of cars they purchase for their fleet. No one would confuse that with "Hertz owns Ford".
Don't ask me how you explain to them that medicare is socialism.
Sorry, but this is just a Fox News lie. Every capitalist society in the world, including all of Europe and Asia has some form of medicare program. A medical insurance program provided by the government but provisioned by private medical providers otherwise known as medicare has nothing in common with:
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production.
The bean counters will come, eventually and a price will be put on everything and the value stripped.
It's called an MBA degree. The focus used to be in how to bring efficiencies to an ongoing concern, it has slowly and subtly switched to stripping valuation from brands. It goes like this:
1) buy or get hired by a company that has a hard won reputation of quality 2) work huge financial incentives into your contract if profits double 3) cut quality by 50%, prices by 20%. 4) initially sales skyrocket due to lower prices 5) collect handsome bonus 6) work golden parachute into contract 7) brand collapses as people realize quality is no longer there 8) get fired, collect additional $50 million severance package
Welcome to XXI century American capitalism. This will appear in her epitaph.
And let's not pretend that nuclear weapons could turn the entire Vietnam peninsula into a sinking, smoking wreck in about two days.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
According to your argument the Soviet Union won the war in Afghanistan, as they could have nuked Afghanistan too, just like the USA could have nuked Vietnam.
Wars are rarely fought until there is a last man standing. Rather, they are fought until one side loses the will to fight, to take the next step, to lose the next man.
This is ANSI approved American chauvinism. It is standard practice to call anything American "the best in the world" without any data to back it up. Furthermore, if you dare question it you are considered "unpatriotic".
For example, traditionally people say that the USA armed forces are "the best fighting force in the world". While certainly the best equipped and nothing to sneer at, over the last 70 years the title "best fighting force" squarely belongs to the Viet Minh army which defeated, in sequence, the much superior armies of Japan and Vichy France (World War II), the French Republic (first Indochina war), the French Republic again (second Indochina war), the USA (Vietnam war) and the Chinese army (third Indochina war, admittedly considered a draw by some).
If you were to bring up that point at a bar, you might as well save time and ask for a wedgie to begin with.
It helps to have a set time for them, say 30 minutes in duration and hold fast to it. You will be surprised how many petty objections get dropped when people see there are ten minutes left and for items to go before we get to their pet issue.
and that they're going to keep having lots of kids who will expect to have more than their parents had.
Except that this is not happening anywhere in the world. In pretty much all countries every subsequent generation is having less kids than their parents had.
This will be a surprise to you, because it has become trendy for otherwise well informed people to assume that population explosion is still happening even though by all signs we turn that corner around 1990.
The world population is expected to peak sometime in 2040-2050 and start falling after that.
I agree that energy is a bigger issue. I'm not particularly worried about resources such as iron since there is a lot of room for recycling and substitution, which compounded with the population decrease should mean we'll be safe in that regard.
In terms of energy the population drop will come about 100 years too late, so we will have a crunch there, but less than people think. Right now we waste so much of it that it wouldn't be hard to drop our consumption to half without any true economic sacrifices.
For example we will see MacMansions with closed, unheated rooms within our lifetime. We will also see an emptying of the far away suburbs, in reverse fashion of the emptying of the downtown cores we saw in the 1960-1980 period. Once densities increase we will see a return to public mass transit. I can go on and on. The point is, there is a lot of fat to cut from.
I'm still wondering how you think we manage that rapid population decline.
Nearly all projections agree on this. For example look at page 2 (page 8 in acrobat count) in the the UN population report. For the case of the UN, the low scenario is usually the one that comes to pass: it predicts a population of 2 billion by 2300.
Also which economists are you exactly talking about.
More the other way around: which ones are you talking about? Almost all serious economist are non-Malthusian,
At 50%-75% recycling rate for some metals you won't make society last for some centuries.
If population drops demands for metals fall more rapidly than the recycling rate. For example there would be no more need for copper wiring for houses since there will be no new house construction.
The Roman empire example is pointless as we have only recently started making big efforts towards recycling. In less than a hundred years recycled iron has gone from a negligible percentage of production to 66% and still growing. And as I said, all the while net total demand will start falling as population falls.
Actually most economists do, particularly now that population is expected to start falling rapidly past 2050. Soon we will be able to survive on recycling alone. As for sources of energy, solar will be more than enough.
I'm missing something here. Why is it a terrible idea? This is not a rhetorical question. I fail to see the moral failing or social downside in this. Could you care to explain your objections?
They draw conclusions from single tests (those are called anecdotes).
You don't watch the show much do you? Every so often they say that for every test they show on TV they run several others off camera.
Nit pick: a single, reproducible test is a data point. An anecdote is non-reproducible/non-controlled situation. Hence the quip from Roger Brinner "the plural of anecdote is not data."** The plural of single tests is data.
**Even then Brinner overreached as famously shown by Roland Fryer (a MacArthur "genius" fellow) who showed that in some cases controls can be introduced post facto and thus valid logical conclusions can be gained from uncontrolled statistical data i.e. a collection of anecdotes.
It actually wouldn't take very much for the Mythbusters to introduce the idea of a standard error, and they've come tantalizingly close a few times.
I don't expect them to introduce the formal definitions. This show is meant to plant the thought of science in people. It is not meant to give them a degree in physics. That's what universities are for.
I've seen shows where they have introduced standard error as much as I would let them introduce standard error if I were the producer. I do agree to a certain extent that perhaps they could do this more often, but can you say with certainty that this wouldn't just confuse people more or make them tune out?
They are walking a fine balance and there aren't many other successful science shows watched by non-scientific minds.
For example, Jamie often runs back of the envelope calculations using physics but these are rarely shown, since they make for boring TV.
"This cannonball was supposed to go through several barrels of water and through a cinder block, and then ultimately into the side of the hill," said J.D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff's Department.
Instead the cannonball flew over the foothills surrounding Camp Parks Military Firing Reservation, before spiraling back toward Dublin like a cruise missile.
Slashdot Mirror
Without taking sides in the more or less farmland argument, I just want to point out that the Sahara is very rich soil, so if we ever got water there, it would make for very good farmland, just like the desert in Israel proved fertile ground to grow crops.
I
our projected water shortages
These shortages assume no improvements over desalination technology. In fact full scale desalination is already feasible today though the price of water would go up by a factor of 10x. Given how much we waste today (we literally flush it down the toilet) this is not as bad as it sounds.
Add in efforts in water conservation such as deploying drip irrigation everywhere and better recycling (see Las Vegas and Singapore for leading efforts in that regard) and frankly the whole water shortages threat seems vastly overstated.
The oft neglected fact is that US aid to Israel must be spent on US products and services.
Correct, but is should be pointed out that this is true of most aid, to any country and from any country.
Whenever you hear that, say, Canada gave $100M in food aid to drought ravaged African country, it usually means that a credit of $100M against surplus Canadian food stuff was issued to that country, so a lot of that aid ends up in the hands of farmers that were having problem selling their produce. A win-win situation if you ask me. This is a fact that the Ron Paul types routinely leave out.
A government providing a service requiers it exercising practical control over the means of production of that service or good.
No more control that a large customer has over an independently owned supplier. Mistaking that influence for true ownership and control of the means of production is stretching the facts.
Medicare, like many elements of a modern mixed economy, is arguably socialist,
No it isn't. As I said elsewhere, governments provide services, with defense of the country and law enforcement being two of the more common ones. Merely providing a service to the population has nothing to do with socialism.
Calling medicare socialism is just an ideological driven lie by Fox to make people believe that any program that they don't like is socialist. In fact, the army which is directly contracted by the government with individual soldiers is more socialist than medicare yet Fox never calls the army socialist.
but merely having some socialist elements doesn't make a system socialism.
I agree with this, but in this case it is not relevant as Medicare is not socialist to begin with as it does not involve ownership (or even control) of the means of production (medical or otherwise).
I'm pretty sure that NHS is owned and run by England
He wasn't talking about the NHS, but medicare so this is irrelevant.
and that all these programs socialist in spirit.
No, governments provide services. That is what they do, be them socialist, capitalist or communist. Some countries provide very few services, some provide a lot. It is a Fox lie to confuse provisioning of services with socialism.
After all you would never hear Fox calling defense of the country a socialist program, even though just as with medicare it is a social program that benefits the entire population.
I also think this would be fairly obvious from your definition had you included the remainder of the wikipedia entry that you used but did not cite.
There is nothing in that entry that would call medicare or the department of defense socialism.
it's not a lie to call Medicare, "Socialized Medicine"
He didn't call it socialized medicine, he called it socialism.
By saying "We'll pay for this, but not that", they are influencing the practice of medicine
They are influencing the practice of medicine, this is not the same as ownership. Renaming influence into ownership is a lie.
Say, if you said Hertz owns Ford that is a lie, yet Hertz influences the production and design of Ford Fiestas, given the large amount of cars they purchase for their fleet. No one would confuse that with "Hertz owns Ford".
Don't ask me how you explain to them that medicare is socialism.
Sorry, but this is just a Fox News lie. Every capitalist society in the world, including all of Europe and Asia has some form of medicare program. A medical insurance program provided by the government but provisioned by private medical providers otherwise known as medicare has nothing in common with:
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production.
The bean counters will come, eventually and a price will be put on everything and the value stripped.
It's called an MBA degree. The focus used to be in how to bring efficiencies to an ongoing concern, it has slowly and subtly switched to stripping valuation from brands. It goes like this:
1) buy or get hired by a company that has a hard won reputation of quality
2) work huge financial incentives into your contract if profits double
3) cut quality by 50%, prices by 20%.
4) initially sales skyrocket due to lower prices
5) collect handsome bonus
6) work golden parachute into contract
7) brand collapses as people realize quality is no longer there
8) get fired, collect additional $50 million severance package
Welcome to XXI century American capitalism. This will appear in her epitaph.
And let's not pretend that nuclear weapons could turn the entire Vietnam peninsula into a sinking, smoking wreck in about two days.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
According to your argument the Soviet Union won the war in Afghanistan, as they could have nuked Afghanistan too, just like the USA could have nuked Vietnam.
Wars are rarely fought until there is a last man standing. Rather, they are fought until one side loses the will to fight, to take the next step, to lose the next man.
This is ANSI approved American chauvinism. It is standard practice to call anything American "the best in the world" without any data to back it up. Furthermore, if you dare question it you are considered "unpatriotic".
For example, traditionally people say that the USA armed forces are "the best fighting force in the world". While certainly the best equipped and nothing to sneer at, over the last 70 years the title "best fighting force" squarely belongs to the Viet Minh army which defeated, in sequence, the much superior armies of Japan and Vichy France (World War II), the French Republic (first Indochina war), the French Republic again (second Indochina war), the USA (Vietnam war) and the Chinese army (third Indochina war, admittedly considered a draw by some).
If you were to bring up that point at a bar, you might as well save time and ask for a wedgie to begin with.
or "we do it all and do it badly" companies (Sony).
Plus we introduce an incompatible, inferior, more expensive, new format in the process.
Meetings. Endless. Bloody. Meetings.
It helps to have a set time for them, say 30 minutes in duration and hold fast to it. You will be surprised how many petty objections get dropped when people see there are ten minutes left and for items to go before we get to their pet issue.
and that they're going to keep having lots of kids who will expect to have more than their parents had.
Except that this is not happening anywhere in the world. In pretty much all countries every subsequent generation is having less kids than their parents had.
This will be a surprise to you, because it has become trendy for otherwise well informed people to assume that population explosion is still happening even though by all signs we turn that corner around 1990.
The world population is expected to peak sometime in 2040-2050 and start falling after that.
Obviously you haven't heard of gentrification.
I agree that energy is a bigger issue. I'm not particularly worried about resources such as iron since there is a lot of room for recycling and substitution, which compounded with the population decrease should mean we'll be safe in that regard.
In terms of energy the population drop will come about 100 years too late, so we will have a crunch there, but less than people think. Right now we waste so much of it that it wouldn't be hard to drop our consumption to half without any true economic sacrifices.
For example we will see MacMansions with closed, unheated rooms within our lifetime. We will also see an emptying of the far away suburbs, in reverse fashion of the emptying of the downtown cores we saw in the 1960-1980 period. Once densities increase we will see a return to public mass transit. I can go on and on. The point is, there is a lot of fat to cut from.
I'm still wondering how you think we manage that rapid population decline.
Nearly all projections agree on this. For example look at page 2 (page 8 in acrobat count) in the the UN population report. For the case of the UN, the low scenario is usually the one that comes to pass: it predicts a population of 2 billion by 2300.
Also which economists are you exactly talking about.
More the other way around: which ones are you talking about? Almost all serious economist are non-Malthusian,
At 50%-75% recycling rate for some metals you won't make society last for some centuries.
If population drops demands for metals fall more rapidly than the recycling rate. For example there would be no more need for copper wiring for houses since there will be no new house construction.
The Roman empire example is pointless as we have only recently started making big efforts towards recycling. In less than a hundred years recycled iron has gone from a negligible percentage of production to 66% and still growing. And as I said, all the while net total demand will start falling as population falls.
but nobody sees many centuries of resources left.
Actually most economists do, particularly now that population is expected to start falling rapidly past 2050. Soon we will be able to survive on recycling alone. As for sources of energy, solar will be more than enough.
The way things are now, Christmas is the holiday in which we celebrate the birth of Santa Claus.
Still sounds like a terrible idea
I'm missing something here. Why is it a terrible idea? This is not a rhetorical question. I fail to see the moral failing or social downside in this. Could you care to explain your objections?
A few years back Mac USB keys were much more likely to be carriers of Windows viruses since Macs did not scan for those.
They draw conclusions from single tests (those are called anecdotes).
You don't watch the show much do you? Every so often they say that for every test they show on TV they run several others off camera.
Nit pick: a single, reproducible test is a data point. An anecdote is non-reproducible/non-controlled situation. Hence the quip from Roger Brinner "the plural of anecdote is not data."** The plural of single tests is data.
**Even then Brinner overreached as famously shown by Roland Fryer (a MacArthur "genius" fellow) who showed that in some cases controls can be introduced post facto and thus valid logical conclusions can be gained from uncontrolled statistical data i.e. a collection of anecdotes.
It actually wouldn't take very much for the Mythbusters to introduce the idea of a standard error, and they've come tantalizingly close a few times.
I don't expect them to introduce the formal definitions. This show is meant to plant the thought of science in people. It is not meant to give them a degree in physics. That's what universities are for.
I've seen shows where they have introduced standard error as much as I would let them introduce standard error if I were the producer. I do agree to a certain extent that perhaps they could do this more often, but can you say with certainty that this wouldn't just confuse people more or make them tune out?
They are walking a fine balance and there aren't many other successful science shows watched by non-scientific minds.
For example, Jamie often runs back of the envelope calculations using physics but these are rarely shown, since they make for boring TV.
Actually it says it "...tore through a cinder-block wall..."
That is what the article from the SF says. I'm talking about the TV news report.
Here is what the TV news report says:
"This cannonball was supposed to go through several barrels of water and through a cinder block, and then ultimately into the side of the hill," said J.D. Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriff's Department.
Instead the cannonball flew over the foothills surrounding Camp Parks Military Firing Reservation, before spiraling back toward Dublin like a cruise missile.
What use is an experiment if your methodology is unsound
Their methodology is not any worse than that which was in use 110 years ago by lead scientists.
Damn, they are not trying to measure the speed of neutrinos, they are testing some basic facts that are a lot more robust to bad experimental design.
If you disagree, repeat the experiment under proper controls and obtain the opposite result. That's how science is done, after all.