But you are ignoring the placebo effect...intentionally, given that you mention "double blind studies". Magic magnetic bracelets WORK (to an extent), because people believe that they are being treated.
FWIW, many currently FDA approved drugs have an effect weaker than the placebo effect as measured in double blind studies, and also come with significant side effects. Of course, in actual use their effect is compounded with the placebo effect, so they're better than the first statement would indicate, but the side effects can be crippling, so they are also often worse.
I think the basic problem is a mixing of the levels.
Ghosts clearly exist, but I believe them to be features of the human mind. Saying they don't exist is like saying that software doesn't exist.
Telepathy is believed in with certainty because before people are able to talk, they observe older folk around them transfering thoughts from one to another. Remember that the older name for telepathy is "thought transferrence".
Etc. You literally can't prove these things wrong, because at their roots they aren't wrong. They only become wrong when they get turned into words and talked about in a social context.
OTOH, I've had a bit of success with dowsing, (two out of two, when I was seriously trying...not statistically significant) and a bit of success with gambling (1 out of 1 when I was seriously trying against a slot machine...I wone $7 starting with a quarter). And I can't explain those, except that they aren't statistically significant. But I wonder. So I'm not unbiased.
But the real thing is that I don't believe that the current schools CAN teach how to apply the methods of science even to ordinary phenomena. They should tackle something that is at once more basic and more useful: Critical thinking.
Actually, MS has a worse reputation for abusing its customers than do most other companies. So being tied hand and foot to MS is worse. It's just that the proposed alternative isn't that much better.
The reason to switch is to gain control of the software that runs your business.
Switching to Linux would, indeed, be more difficult. But after you've made the switch, you are no longer locked into proprietary file formats, and this means that you aren't locked into any particular version of any particular software. Even if you're using a product that is closed source (bad idea) you have tools available to parse the files. For most purposes you are NOT locked into something that is closed source, and multiple applications can handle the same file type. In that case, even if everyone else decides to drop the project, you can spin up a virtual machine with an old version of the OS and run the version that you are familiar with...or hire someone else to reverse engineer the code.
P.S.: The same is true of the BSDs, but the number of applications isn't quite as large. Still, there are a few BSDUnix applications that nobody has ported to Linux.
No, the stars are not out of reach. You just need to change your planet-centric bias and have a VERY large ship. You may also need fusion power, but fission might work, depending on the composition of free bodies. (I.e., asteroids, planets, etc. not bound to any star.) You also need a very long trip time, as you don't want there to be an unreasonable delta-V when you send out mining parties while on the way.
The problem, if such it is, with this approach is that by the time the party reaches the next star system, they'll see no reason to bother with the planets, and just build another ship or so to allow population growth...and then head off for parts unknown.
OTOH, you will need a large population, and robots, etc. The machines will need to be maintained, redesigned, rebuilt, etc. And this means a full range of highly technical skills.
The problem with this approach is that there is no economic payoff to the society that sends off the starship. It can be done, but the motivation for doing it will need to be either political or religious. (One mode has mobile societies develop to mine the Oort clouds, etc. and then get into a political disagreement with the home planet.)
Disagree. The can be multiple users or a global name-space, but only one has priority. It would be perfectly reasonable for systemd to look at the line and say (to itself) "O, the kernel is in debug mode". This is quite distinct from it saying "I guess I'll print out all my debug messages to the kernel log too", which is what it was doing.
FWIW, the kernel thread is talking about putting process-specific rate limits on writing to the kernel log to avoid this cropping up in another context. With some discussion as to what are valid use cases where other processes should be allowed to write to the kernel log. (One case mentioned was a series of messages saying things like "Now starting debug test # 93 of this-n-that", so if things hang, you'll know what test was running when it hung.) Note that if this is adopted, the systemd messages would just get written to/dev/null when the (small) limit had been exceeded.
I dual boot Debian stable and Debian testing. Currently Debian testing is causing my computer to periodically reboot, so I'm spending most of my time in stable.
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Wikipedia reports:
The campaigns for and against Proposition 8 raised $39.0 million ($11.3 million or 29.1% from outside California) and $44.1 million ($13.2 million or 30.0% from outside California), respectively.[47]... 47. ^ "Proposition 8: Who gave in the gay marriage battle?". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 30, 2012.
So using the Los Angelas Times as a source, the main funding was against the proposition. Approximately equal proportions of funding came from outside for each side of the proposition. And the funding did not count the door-to-door campaign by the missionaries from the Mormon church. And that political intervention that was publically promoted and enjoined upon the members of the Mormon church should have caused the church to loose it's tax exempt status if the laws were followed.
I thought the answer was "We fill it up with cement, and them bury it in cement.". It may not be government approved, but I think I've heard of it being done elsewhere, and it actually doesn't sound like that bad an approach, once you get the fuel out. Any leaks should be quite slow.
SourceForge did not in the past cause you to download advertisements with your software. I understand that's current practice. (If I'm wrong, please advise.)
Even so, that figure was obtained after an intense "pro-prop 8" campaign that was well financed by a couple of religions and certain wealthy individuals. Line the new CEO of Mozilla.
The "anti-prop 8" cause didn't have anywhere near as much money to campaign with. So I don't think I believe that's an accurate analysis of even the feelings of the voters at that time. (Except in a very temporary sense.)
FWIW, for me the main result is that I now think much more poorly of the Mormon Church, and believe that they hold their tax exemption on a fraudulent basis.
Unfortunately, this story is true. I have decided that this policy means I will not be renewing my subscriptions to their magazines. (Well, not Nature, as I am not currently a subscripter, but to others of their magazines.) Their response is not an acceptable explanation.
There's a lot to be said for wooden building, but they do tend to lead to destructive city fires. Also hard wood takes a long time to grow. So yes, I agree. But we need to ameliorate the problems that come with wooden buildings. Termites and fire are two of the considerations. There are many wooden buildings around here, and they are pleasant to look at. However, I prefer stucco covered wood frame buildings...probably with ceramic tile roofs. Both features decrease the ease with which fire spreads. Termites are a more difficult problem. Possibly all wood used in the lower 6 feet of the building should be chemically treated to be indigestible.
OTOH, this is just a refinement of common current practice, and probably won't increase the amount of wood used. (If logs were used, this wouldn't be true, but I have difficulty thinking of logs used for internal walls.)
Too expensive meaning people operating the plants will be allowed to wiggle out of doing it. Coal is NOT the only option, and in our current situation it's a bad option. Probably worse than widespread nuclear, if reasonable oversight could be provided to the nuclear. Definitely worse than solar, even though solar requires some intermediate storage.
For the really long term I'm in favor of Solar Space Power Sattelites, but that's not something that we can reach by heading directly for it, and careful tests will be needed to ensure that it's not itself a terrible choice. (E.g., proper selection of wavelengths for downwards transmission of power. Probably some microwave wavelength is best, but you want a wavelength that's not too adversely affected by atmospheric moisture, and you also want a reception antenna that's smaller than 10 miles in radius. But you probably DON'T want a wavelength that can be focused sharply, as that's too dangerous a toy.
P.S.: Paper doesn't require that much processing to be rendered durable. It does if most of your production is aimed at cheap pulp, but even that has a pretty good lifetime. It becomes birttle after, say, 40 years (judging from 1940's science fiction that I used to collect) but even then it remains pretty much intact. There are several different processes that can be used to preserve it. I'm sure several are less harmful than what you're thinking of. Remember, the goal isn't that they should be permanently legible, but rather that they not decay into CO2. (So you want to termite-proof them, e.g.) And the chemicals that you do use can be largely recycled.
While it's true that without human modification of the environment we would probably be living in an ice age, there HAS been human modification of the environment, dating back at least to the first rice paddy.
I don't know who said that trees were giving way to grasses because of low CO2 levels. I suspect you misheard what was said. That's more likely to be due to levels of rain decreasing. (Levels of CO2 have been increasing all over the globe throughout at least the last two centuries. To be more specific I'd need to look up studies.)
Unfortunately, it's a lot more extreme that you are considering. The heat that has been stored in the oceans will take a long time to be lost.
OTOH, it's quite plausible that it's only our current civilization that is doomed, and that may well take 50 years or so. This may be long enough for a realtively reasonable transition to whatever will follow. The real problem is that there is as yet not even a acceptance that we're going to need radical change, much less an agreement of "change into what?" So we do lots of play-acting pretense that we say will let us keep things the same, or at least not much different.
Actions we have already taken have committed us to a drastic change. They haven't determined what form that change will take. Every year that we let pass without acknowledging that some change will be necessary removes some options. Every technological advance offers options, some of which may open new possibilities. I don't know where the best balance is. If we wait too long, the only option will be collapse into a new stone age civilization, with over a 90% die-off of the population in the process...and likely over 99%. We could also get into a war with a mix of advanced technologies and kill off considerably more, perhaps 99.99% or 99.999%. Then the survivors need to stabilize the remaining population, this will probably lead to a further decline over the succeeding 50 years. Then any surviving population may being to grow.
But this coulld be avoided by proper action, if we only knew what proper action was. We don't. We do know that what we're doing is only satisfying short term goals, and that in the long term it's disasterous. But the short term is where we live, so we tend to overly discount both long term gains and losses.
They are already becoming more difficult to irrigate. Some of the "land pre-empted by the government for ecological preserves" in the San Joquin Valley that the farm lobbies are complaining about was already selected by the agribusinesses that sold it to the government as land that they would need to stop using because of salinity increase. (This happens when you irrigate dry land over a long time. Exact timing depends on lots of things. Periodic really wet years prolong the usefulness, e.g., and water heavy with minerals decreases the useful life.)
It is a report written by climatologists, but in prior reports from the same body reasonable projections have been excluded from consideration for being too extreme, so it's also a political report. Which way they are bending the studies this time I don't know. I may find out, but probably not for a month or so.
N.B.: There are a LOT of studies. You can't include all of them, not even all the ones that don't have obvious errors, and deciding which to exclude is a political decision when done under governmental supervision. Last time they excluded the extreme reports in an attempt to not appear to be crepe-hangers, and get taken seriously. It didn't work. Perhaps this time they've decided to bend the other way...or perhaps not, because I've seen reports of studies that were a LOT worse. Some of them project >6 C before the end of the century. But they were making assumptions about particulate emmissions and CO2 emmissions that CANNOT be validated, because they depend on political choices that have not yet been made. OTOH, they are right in line with the choices that have been made in the past.
P.S.: I'm quite skeptical about sequestration of CO2. I don't think it will work, and if it does work, I think it will be too expensive to use. The BEST form of sequestration is to grow forests, turn them into paper, and print books on them, with chemically treated paper so it won't decay. This doesn't add in exogenous energy costs, and storage is not a major issue. If it is, just build more libraries...and fund them to retain books. Burying CO2 can expect to have undetected leakages over a period of time, and to add significantly to the cost of generating energy. To me it looks like a boondoggle created to justify continuing to burn coal.
P.P.S.: I am not a climatologist. There are likely several studies that I've never heard of, and there may well be flaws in some of the studies that I have heard of that I didn't hear about.
I don't think they're a problem, I just don't like them. There *is* a difference. They don't become a problem until their footage is made available to non-local observers. I don't want uninvolved people to be able to say "OK, at this time of day he's not home." That's setting yourself up for a break-in. So I'd have a problem with it if, e.g., they posted the footage on the internet. As it is I just don't like it...and not really that strongly, but strongly enough that if it was just as easy to get merchandise of equal quality at about the same price from another store, I probably would.
By your argument you are noticing that there never has existed "true capitalism" in the entire history of the world. Your position is even more extreme than mine, and yet even for my milder positioon (the government must not raise any artificial barriers to the entry of competition) there are no historical examples.
I *believe* that actual capitalism would only tend towards monopoly in areas where the natrue of the business caused significant barriers to entry, but there are no historical examples to test my belief against.
You are oversimplifying. What you describe happens where there are high barriers to entry. Not all barriers to entry are imposed by regulatioon. Many of them are natural.
OTOH, where there are high barriers to entry, either natural, or created by government regulation, then monopoly will be the final state, unless there are higher bariers to monopoly. Please note, any line of business where there are fewer than around 10 significant competitors is tending towards monopoly. If there are more than around 10, then it is plausible that new competition is entering faster than old competition is being eliminated.... But "significant" is tricky to define. Even "competition" can be difficult to define in the face of secret agreements and patent pools, etc.
To put at it's most simple, neither the free market nor unfettered capitalism nor totalitarian control has ever existed in the historical record. We find many examples of societies tending in one direction or another. however. E.g., classical Greek civilization had an essentially unregulated marketplace. They were not notably successful economically, though they did do slightly better than did the Germans of the same time period (about which I know little), and extremely poorly compared to either the Egyptians or the Persians. OTOH, this may have been due to their tendency to invest heavily in their military...and to get into lots of fights with their natural enemies, the Greeks. (Athens and Sparta eventually wore each other into insolvency.)
The only places I normally shop that "check at the door" are Frys and Costco. Both carry expensive items. I don't really like being checked, even there, but they don't know me, and even if they did, allowing me to pass without checking would be unfair to those they didn't know.
So in both cases I understand why they do it. I may not like it, but I understand. The world is not an ideal place.
OTOH, even most stores that don't check have security cameras. Generally at least one is focused on the til. I only thought it was focused on me while you were being checked out. When I checked it out, I found otherwise. (Yeah, I'm uncomfortable about being spied on, even if I can be accepting if I see the need.)
Actually, that won't work, because they will still need to cross municipal property, and the city has an exclusive deal with someone else. I suppose they might be able to put up optical links wherever they need to cross municipal property, but that will usually be about once/block. And you'll need a variance to erect a tower tall enough that a parked truck won't cut the link.
The "negotiate with each individual property owner" is a standard argument as to why natural monopolies exist, but it isgnificantly understates the problems.
Term limits haven't really improved things around here. Granted they are allowed to be re-elected.
#1 is a valid concern, but even that's not the main problem with the US election system. The main problem is that it's a plurality wins system rather than a majority wins system (like Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet Voting). This, in and of itself, tends to separate all arguments into either "my side supports it" or "my side rejects it" where each side has a constellation of different positions. This, in turn, leads to just two plausible candidates, and THAT leads to both plausible candidates being bought off by the same powerful interests before the election even happens.
Notice that there are lots of minor effects contributing to this. The changes in the rules that took place around the time of the Civil War that allowed the existence of lobbyists, e.g. This increased the relative power of corporations and the wealthy (and they were already dominant). Electronic communications and fast transport have made literal lobbyists much less important, so the term has been extended to cover a much wider set of actions, but originally they were people paid to loiter in the lobby of the Capitol building to importune legislators. That was originally illegal, but around the time of the Civil War it was legalized. And I'm considering THIS to be a minor problem compared to the design of the election system.
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But you are ignoring the placebo effect...intentionally, given that you mention "double blind studies". Magic magnetic bracelets WORK (to an extent), because people believe that they are being treated.
FWIW, many currently FDA approved drugs have an effect weaker than the placebo effect as measured in double blind studies, and also come with significant side effects. Of course, in actual use their effect is compounded with the placebo effect, so they're better than the first statement would indicate, but the side effects can be crippling, so they are also often worse.
I think the basic problem is a mixing of the levels.
Ghosts clearly exist, but I believe them to be features of the human mind. Saying they don't exist is like saying that software doesn't exist.
Telepathy is believed in with certainty because before people are able to talk, they observe older folk around them transfering thoughts from one to another. Remember that the older name for telepathy is "thought transferrence".
Etc. You literally can't prove these things wrong, because at their roots they aren't wrong. They only become wrong when they get turned into words and talked about in a social context.
OTOH, I've had a bit of success with dowsing, (two out of two, when I was seriously trying...not statistically significant) and a bit of success with gambling (1 out of 1 when I was seriously trying against a slot machine...I wone $7 starting with a quarter). And I can't explain those, except that they aren't statistically significant. But I wonder. So I'm not unbiased.
But the real thing is that I don't believe that the current schools CAN teach how to apply the methods of science even to ordinary phenomena. They should tackle something that is at once more basic and more useful: Critical thinking.
Actually, MS has a worse reputation for abusing its customers than do most other companies. So being tied hand and foot to MS is worse. It's just that the proposed alternative isn't that much better.
The reason to switch is to gain control of the software that runs your business.
Switching to Linux would, indeed, be more difficult. But after you've made the switch, you are no longer locked into proprietary file formats, and this means that you aren't locked into any particular version of any particular software. Even if you're using a product that is closed source (bad idea) you have tools available to parse the files. For most purposes you are NOT locked into something that is closed source, and multiple applications can handle the same file type. In that case, even if everyone else decides to drop the project, you can spin up a virtual machine with an old version of the OS and run the version that you are familiar with...or hire someone else to reverse engineer the code.
P.S.: The same is true of the BSDs, but the number of applications isn't quite as large. Still, there are a few BSDUnix applications that nobody has ported to Linux.
The space is clearly NOT smooth and continuous. Many possibilities are lethal.
No, the stars are not out of reach. You just need to change your planet-centric bias and have a VERY large ship. You may also need fusion power, but fission might work, depending on the composition of free bodies. (I.e., asteroids, planets, etc. not bound to any star.) You also need a very long trip time, as you don't want there to be an unreasonable delta-V when you send out mining parties while on the way.
The problem, if such it is, with this approach is that by the time the party reaches the next star system, they'll see no reason to bother with the planets, and just build another ship or so to allow population growth...and then head off for parts unknown.
OTOH, you will need a large population, and robots, etc. The machines will need to be maintained, redesigned, rebuilt, etc. And this means a full range of highly technical skills.
The problem with this approach is that there is no economic payoff to the society that sends off the starship. It can be done, but the motivation for doing it will need to be either political or religious. (One mode has mobile societies develop to mine the Oort clouds, etc. and then get into a political disagreement with the home planet.)
Disagree. The can be multiple users or a global name-space, but only one has priority. It would be perfectly reasonable for systemd to look at the line and say (to itself) "O, the kernel is in debug mode". This is quite distinct from it saying "I guess I'll print out all my debug messages to the kernel log too", which is what it was doing.
FWIW, the kernel thread is talking about putting process-specific rate limits on writing to the kernel log to avoid this cropping up in another context. With some discussion as to what are valid use cases where other processes should be allowed to write to the kernel log. (One case mentioned was a series of messages saying things like "Now starting debug test # 93 of this-n-that", so if things hang, you'll know what test was running when it hung.) /dev/null when the (small) limit had been exceeded.
Note that if this is adopted, the systemd messages would just get written to
I dual boot Debian stable and Debian testing. Currently Debian testing is causing my computer to periodically reboot, so I'm spending most of my time in stable.
According to your link:
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Wikipedia reports:
The campaigns for and against Proposition 8 raised $39.0 million ($11.3 million or 29.1% from outside California) and $44.1 million ($13.2 million or 30.0% from outside California), respectively.[47] ...
47. ^ "Proposition 8: Who gave in the gay marriage battle?". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 30, 2012.
So using the Los Angelas Times as a source, the main funding was against the proposition. Approximately equal proportions of funding came from outside for each side of the proposition. And the funding did not count the door-to-door campaign by the missionaries from the Mormon church. And that political intervention that was publically promoted and enjoined upon the members of the Mormon church should have caused the church to loose it's tax exempt status if the laws were followed.
I thought the answer was "We fill it up with cement, and them bury it in cement.". It may not be government approved, but I think I've heard of it being done elsewhere, and it actually doesn't sound like that bad an approach, once you get the fuel out. Any leaks should be quite slow.
SourceForge did not in the past cause you to download advertisements with your software. I understand that's current practice. (If I'm wrong, please advise.)
Even so, that figure was obtained after an intense "pro-prop 8" campaign that was well financed by a couple of religions and certain wealthy individuals. Line the new CEO of Mozilla.
The "anti-prop 8" cause didn't have anywhere near as much money to campaign with. So I don't think I believe that's an accurate analysis of even the feelings of the voters at that time. (Except in a very temporary sense.)
FWIW, for me the main result is that I now think much more poorly of the Mormon Church, and believe that they hold their tax exemption on a fraudulent basis.
Unfortunately, this story is true. I have decided that this policy means I will not be renewing my subscriptions to their magazines. (Well, not Nature, as I am not currently a subscripter, but to others of their magazines.) Their response is not an acceptable explanation.
There's a lot to be said for wooden building, but they do tend to lead to destructive city fires. Also hard wood takes a long time to grow. So yes, I agree. But we need to ameliorate the problems that come with wooden buildings. Termites and fire are two of the considerations. There are many wooden buildings around here, and they are pleasant to look at. However, I prefer stucco covered wood frame buildings...probably with ceramic tile roofs. Both features decrease the ease with which fire spreads. Termites are a more difficult problem. Possibly all wood used in the lower 6 feet of the building should be chemically treated to be indigestible.
OTOH, this is just a refinement of common current practice, and probably won't increase the amount of wood used. (If logs were used, this wouldn't be true, but I have difficulty thinking of logs used for internal walls.)
Too expensive meaning people operating the plants will be allowed to wiggle out of doing it. Coal is NOT the only option, and in our current situation it's a bad option. Probably worse than widespread nuclear, if reasonable oversight could be provided to the nuclear. Definitely worse than solar, even though solar requires some intermediate storage.
For the really long term I'm in favor of Solar Space Power Sattelites, but that's not something that we can reach by heading directly for it, and careful tests will be needed to ensure that it's not itself a terrible choice. (E.g., proper selection of wavelengths for downwards transmission of power. Probably some microwave wavelength is best, but you want a wavelength that's not too adversely affected by atmospheric moisture, and you also want a reception antenna that's smaller than 10 miles in radius. But you probably DON'T want a wavelength that can be focused sharply, as that's too dangerous a toy.
P.S.: Paper doesn't require that much processing to be rendered durable. It does if most of your production is aimed at cheap pulp, but even that has a pretty good lifetime. It becomes birttle after, say, 40 years (judging from 1940's science fiction that I used to collect) but even then it remains pretty much intact. There are several different processes that can be used to preserve it. I'm sure several are less harmful than what you're thinking of. Remember, the goal isn't that they should be permanently legible, but rather that they not decay into CO2. (So you want to termite-proof them, e.g.) And the chemicals that you do use can be largely recycled.
While it's true that without human modification of the environment we would probably be living in an ice age, there HAS been human modification of the environment, dating back at least to the first rice paddy.
I don't know who said that trees were giving way to grasses because of low CO2 levels. I suspect you misheard what was said. That's more likely to be due to levels of rain decreasing. (Levels of CO2 have been increasing all over the globe throughout at least the last two centuries. To be more specific I'd need to look up studies.)
Unfortunately, it's a lot more extreme that you are considering. The heat that has been stored in the oceans will take a long time to be lost.
OTOH, it's quite plausible that it's only our current civilization that is doomed, and that may well take 50 years or so. This may be long enough for a realtively reasonable transition to whatever will follow. The real problem is that there is as yet not even a acceptance that we're going to need radical change, much less an agreement of "change into what?" So we do lots of play-acting pretense that we say will let us keep things the same, or at least not much different.
Actions we have already taken have committed us to a drastic change. They haven't determined what form that change will take. Every year that we let pass without acknowledging that some change will be necessary removes some options. Every technological advance offers options, some of which may open new possibilities. I don't know where the best balance is. If we wait too long, the only option will be collapse into a new stone age civilization, with over a 90% die-off of the population in the process...and likely over 99%. We could also get into a war with a mix of advanced technologies and kill off considerably more, perhaps 99.99% or 99.999%. Then the survivors need to stabilize the remaining population, this will probably lead to a further decline over the succeeding 50 years. Then any surviving population may being to grow.
But this coulld be avoided by proper action, if we only knew what proper action was. We don't. We do know that what we're doing is only satisfying short term goals, and that in the long term it's disasterous. But the short term is where we live, so we tend to overly discount both long term gains and losses.
They are already becoming more difficult to irrigate. Some of the "land pre-empted by the government for ecological preserves" in the San Joquin Valley that the farm lobbies are complaining about was already selected by the agribusinesses that sold it to the government as land that they would need to stop using because of salinity increase. (This happens when you irrigate dry land over a long time. Exact timing depends on lots of things. Periodic really wet years prolong the usefulness, e.g., and water heavy with minerals decreases the useful life.)
It is a report written by climatologists, but in prior reports from the same body reasonable projections have been excluded from consideration for being too extreme, so it's also a political report. Which way they are bending the studies this time I don't know. I may find out, but probably not for a month or so.
N.B.: There are a LOT of studies. You can't include all of them, not even all the ones that don't have obvious errors, and deciding which to exclude is a political decision when done under governmental supervision. Last time they excluded the extreme reports in an attempt to not appear to be crepe-hangers, and get taken seriously. It didn't work. Perhaps this time they've decided to bend the other way...or perhaps not, because I've seen reports of studies that were a LOT worse. Some of them project >6 C before the end of the century. But they were making assumptions about particulate emmissions and CO2 emmissions that CANNOT be validated, because they depend on political choices that have not yet been made. OTOH, they are right in line with the choices that have been made in the past.
P.S.: I'm quite skeptical about sequestration of CO2. I don't think it will work, and if it does work, I think it will be too expensive to use. The BEST form of sequestration is to grow forests, turn them into paper, and print books on them, with chemically treated paper so it won't decay. This doesn't add in exogenous energy costs, and storage is not a major issue. If it is, just build more libraries...and fund them to retain books. Burying CO2 can expect to have undetected leakages over a period of time, and to add significantly to the cost of generating energy. To me it looks like a boondoggle created to justify continuing to burn coal.
P.P.S.: I am not a climatologist. There are likely several studies that I've never heard of, and there may well be flaws in some of the studies that I have heard of that I didn't hear about.
I don't think they're a problem, I just don't like them. There *is* a difference. They don't become a problem until their footage is made available to non-local observers. I don't want uninvolved people to be able to say "OK, at this time of day he's not home." That's setting yourself up for a break-in. So I'd have a problem with it if, e.g., they posted the footage on the internet. As it is I just don't like it...and not really that strongly, but strongly enough that if it was just as easy to get merchandise of equal quality at about the same price from another store, I probably would.
By your argument you are noticing that there never has existed "true capitalism" in the entire history of the world. Your position is even more extreme than mine, and yet even for my milder positioon (the government must not raise any artificial barriers to the entry of competition) there are no historical examples.
I *believe* that actual capitalism would only tend towards monopoly in areas where the natrue of the business caused significant barriers to entry, but there are no historical examples to test my belief against.
You are oversimplifying. What you describe happens where there are high barriers to entry. Not all barriers to entry are imposed by regulatioon. Many of them are natural.
OTOH, where there are high barriers to entry, either natural, or created by government regulation, then monopoly will be the final state, unless there are higher bariers to monopoly. Please note, any line of business where there are fewer than around 10 significant competitors is tending towards monopoly. If there are more than around 10, then it is plausible that new competition is entering faster than old competition is being eliminated. ... But "significant" is tricky to define. Even "competition" can be difficult to define in the face of secret agreements and patent pools, etc.
To put at it's most simple, neither the free market nor unfettered capitalism nor totalitarian control has ever existed in the historical record. We find many examples of societies tending in one direction or another. however. E.g., classical Greek civilization had an essentially unregulated marketplace. They were not notably successful economically, though they did do slightly better than did the Germans of the same time period (about which I know little), and extremely poorly compared to either the Egyptians or the Persians. OTOH, this may have been due to their tendency to invest heavily in their military...and to get into lots of fights with their natural enemies, the Greeks. (Athens and Sparta eventually wore each other into insolvency.)
The only places I normally shop that "check at the door" are Frys and Costco. Both carry expensive items. I don't really like being checked, even there, but they don't know me, and even if they did, allowing me to pass without checking would be unfair to those they didn't know.
So in both cases I understand why they do it. I may not like it, but I understand. The world is not an ideal place.
OTOH, even most stores that don't check have security cameras. Generally at least one is focused on the til. I only thought it was focused on me while you were being checked out. When I checked it out, I found otherwise. (Yeah, I'm uncomfortable about being spied on, even if I can be accepting if I see the need.)
Actually, that won't work, because they will still need to cross municipal property, and the city has an exclusive deal with someone else. I suppose they might be able to put up optical links wherever they need to cross municipal property, but that will usually be about once/block. And you'll need a variance to erect a tower tall enough that a parked truck won't cut the link.
The "negotiate with each individual property owner" is a standard argument as to why natural monopolies exist, but it isgnificantly understates the problems.
Term limits haven't really improved things around here. Granted they are allowed to be re-elected.
#1 is a valid concern, but even that's not the main problem with the US election system. The main problem is that it's a plurality wins system rather than a majority wins system (like Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet Voting). This, in and of itself, tends to separate all arguments into either "my side supports it" or "my side rejects it" where each side has a constellation of different positions. This, in turn, leads to just two plausible candidates, and THAT leads to both plausible candidates being bought off by the same powerful interests before the election even happens.
Notice that there are lots of minor effects contributing to this. The changes in the rules that took place around the time of the Civil War that allowed the existence of lobbyists, e.g. This increased the relative power of corporations and the wealthy (and they were already dominant). Electronic communications and fast transport have made literal lobbyists much less important, so the term has been extended to cover a much wider set of actions, but originally they were people paid to loiter in the lobby of the Capitol building to importune legislators. That was originally illegal, but around the time of the Civil War it was legalized. And I'm considering THIS to be a minor problem compared to the design of the election system.