Apple did setup an Engineering center in Bangalore last year. Also with those 25000 employees Apple also employs another 15000 contractors in SCV mostly from Infosys, Wipro, CTSH, IBM and Exilant all of which have another 15000 offshore in India. Jobs was opposed to having Engineering in India (He just didnt like India. Something to do with his trip to India to find himself Go Figure) but Cook is open to it. Since a majority of Apple employees in Engineering are already Indians many are happy to relocate back to India on expatriate salaries and bring up the offshore center. An Easy way is to absorb the existing Contractor engineering workforce as Apple Employees of Apple India. Apple will still stay headquartered in the US as the Indian govt will not let them play the Irish sandwich trick but that doesnt preven them from moving Engineering to India just like they have move manufacturing to China, Japan,Korea,Taiwan. Apple also has Engineering setups in UK and Singapore and Apple Call centers are spread all over the world. I dont have the exact numbers but wouldnt be surprised to know that a majority of Apple Employees are already based outside the US. Eventually only the hardcore engineering and the marketing would stay in SCV and the rest could move. However the move will not be because of costs. Indian salaries are already at 1/3rd of US salaries and with the overhead of outsourcing and/or remote teams cost is a justufcation only till the difference is 1/3. its more about getting away from a regulatory environment as well as go where there is an overabundance of engineers so you can pick and choose the best.
a big assembly plant has a lot of influence. If the assembly plant is in the US and the assembler lets it be known that they will preferntially take parts from plants down the road the subcomponent manufacturers will also set up plants in the same city. This is why govts give subsidies to setup the big assembler as the resulting ecosystem pays back in increased taxes what they gave as subsidies
Actually its very easy to get the Chinese to pay for stuff in the US. They hold a huge amount of dollars. Just start the printing presses and devalue the dollar and the Chinese holding just went down in value and you used the printed dollars for what you wanted to do. In effect the Chinese paid for it.
No one in China gets paid a dollar a day. Chinese minimum wage is 4 dollars an hour so around 35 dollars a 8.5 hour day. 1 and 35 is a big difference.
Labor costs are only 10% of the 200 dollar cost of a phone (so 20 dollars) . So if instead of 4 dollars you paid 8 dollars an hour your cost would go from 200 to 220 dollars per phone. You could still sell it for 600 dollars and have a 390% profit instead of a 400% profit.
What is more problematic is that the most number of iPhones are sold in China so manufacturing them in USA will lead to high transport costs to transport them to China. What could work is having factories in both countries manufacturing the phones to be sold in each country.
Actually Foxconn is going for robots in a big way in China. India govt has provided free land to Foxconn and lobbying hard to move production to India where workers are cheaper but Foxconn would rather put in robots in China than move the production to India. And China is taking the lead in robotics as most factories are in China so when it is time to automate they are being automated in China rather than moving them somewhere else and then automating them.
Or put a 30% tariff on iPhones manufactured in China and change the rules so that a Phone on the container from China is invoiced at or close to retail not some ridiculously low value. A 600 dollar iphone cost 200 dollar to manufacture in China and would cost 400 ollars to manufacture in the US. A 30% tax on the 600 dollar value means a 200 dollar phone becomes 380 dollars . Apple can eat the other 20 dollars and move production to US and get some good publicity.
You can do so by having the government subsidize the workers through medicare for all, food stamps and matching salary grants for interns. Germany is a high income society but it manages to keep manufacturing at home because the corporations do not pay a living wage to apprentices. Instead the govt covers them with free medical care, free college, matching grants during apprenticeship and low rents (Germany keeps rents low via forced renting. You are not allowed to keep a house empty in Germany and high transfer taxes. This makes sure Real estate stays cheap). With low rent, no college debt, on the job training paid partly by the employer and partly by the govt, free medicare and subsidized food people can live on lower salaries. Yes this needs higher taxes on profits but it makes sure the profits are made in Germany instead of abroad.
Corporations are not natural entities. They are created by law and they let the shareholders hide behind the corporations and not have any personal liability for anything they do in the name of the corporation. This is expensive for society. Still society allows it in return for the money they get from corporations as corporate taxes. I would support 0 tax for corporations if directors of corporations become personally liable for all decisions made by a corporation including bankruptcy so if a corporation like Trump Hotels declares bankruptcy then Donald Trump loses his right to vote and right to stand for elections. Also any consumer lawsuits against a corporation gets paid out of the personal wealth of the corporation's directors. If you dont want this then pay up for the immunity you buy using corporate taxes. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
The wealthy dont use apps. They have assistants (Trump doesnt tweet himself. He has 2 assistants to whom he shouts out his tweets and they tweet it). Its the assistants who are probably young interns making less than minimum wage, living in crappy shared apartments, surrounded by loads of money at work but having negative net-worths who spend their credit card limits on buying iPhones. Its the one thing in their lives which makes them feel in control. They are willing to skip buying groceries and mooch off fake dates for their dinner rather than give up their iPhones.
Far more than 20 billion is being spent on Cancer research. Its not a issue of money. Its just a difficult problem to solve. And by the way Cancer is not one disease. its a symptom of a disease like fever and many differnt things can cause cancer so cancer probably will never have one cure. You will need a cure each for all the thousands of things that can cause cancer
Apple may be on the cutting edge but never on the bleeding edge. They always let the competitors go first to market, make mistakes , bleed and once the expectations have been lowered come in with a more polished version of the same and capture the market. The reason that all the Android manufacturers don't make as much money as Apple is thy spend more on R&D while Apple spends more on marketing. And the number of people who make their spending decisions based on image rather than facts vastly outnumbers the number who spend their money based on facts. Apple is a Marketeer driven company. The CEO was a marketing man and he set the culture. For comparison see Google where the founders were techies and set the culture of the company as where Engineers come first even though its a freaking advertising firm when you come down to it.
Apple owes its success to the 2008 crash when lots of smart engineers were out of work and were willing to bet thousands of hours on writing apps instead of full time jobs. This created the App economy where Apple gets 30% of the cut but more importantly the apps drive the demand for the phones. People dont want to switch to Android as iOS still has the most and best apps and app developers dont want to switch as the paying public is on iPhones. Android users are more sophisticated and more likely to use a freeware version than pay for something. This is an accident of timing rather than anything special Apple did. As they say its Smarter to be Lucky than lucky to be Smart. Jobs was Lucky. He got a special kind of economy to play in and he ran with it. There are well know studies that people buy the luxury item they can afford. Those who can afford luxury houses buy them but those who cant,buy a livable house and a luxury car. Those who cant afford that ; rent, buy a usable car and buy a luxury phone. The recession helped the sales of iPhones as being one of the few luxuries people could still afford. As things get better and people can buy luxury cars they will probably just not replace their phones. Still Apple has used the last 8 years of a crappy recovery (Thanks Obama) to cement their place in the app economy. They can probably last another 10 years if they dont do anything really stupid.(Like trying to get into cars a notoriously capital intensive and unprofitable business)
Apple keeps its costs down by burning out its engineers. Its a very abusive work environment. Also it uses Foxconn and other very abusive contract manufacturers to do its manufacturing. All the time charging a a high price premium by pretending to be a premium product while they are using the tech industry equivalent of sweatshops. Its a model well executed by luxury brands like Gucci who pay a child laborer 5 doallars to make a bag and then sell it for 500 dollars.
Whether that is sustainable or not in the long term depends on how much Apple's manufacturing processes and Engineering processes come under scrutiny. At some point the economy will recover fully from the 2008 tech crash (we still havnt gone back to 2007 levels of tech employment) and Apple will start having problems as they wont have quality people. Problems will start appearing in the phones. (Already the innovativeness is gone and now we are getting execution defects as well . Till now the marketing has covered up for it but for how long). When the inflection point comes and people stop looking at Apple products as premium products the change away from Apple will be drastic. Think Sun Microsystems. Just like Sun a company which made its money selling premium workstations when people stopped wanting them the company went belly up. Apple has shown the same kind of hubris by expanding into Hardware design (always a capital intensive and tough business) as well as trying to get Swift to be the next Java (I would say Sun would have survived if they had not spent so many resources on Java). Apple is walking a very thin rope. yes it has 200 billion in offshore tax havens but since it doesnt want to bring the money back it also has billions in US loans to pay for all the expansion. If things go south Apple could survive on the cash pile if they retrench but what is likely is that they will blow the cash pile on newer and newer projects trying to get the next iPhone but by that time the smart engineers would have seen the writing on the wall and left and only the political animals would be around and the political animals while great at claiming credit cant innovate even if they have cash thrown at them.
You know why Commercial software is now better than military software? Security clearances. Citizens who cant cut it in the commercial space against H1Bs go to the defense space as there a security clearance and being a citizen is more important than being able to do the work.
In remote areas where there is no existing grid infrastructure Solar is already cost competitive. Many parts of India which are off the grid are running on a mix of Solar and Biogas plants(basically farm waste and cow shit in a sealed tank with a pipe to draw out the methane). An Island where fuel needs to be shipped in is ideal for Solar and wind as it gets rid of the uncertainty of the fuel ship being delayed by a storm. However the locals need to be trained to fix the solar panels and batteries themselves (as in swap in replacements) and enough replacemnts need to be kept on the island otherwise you are swapping one set of dependencies for another. Interestingly renewables may have a brighter future in areas which are fast industrializing like China and India than in already industrialized nations like USA. In the newly industrializing countries there are fewer sunk costs in an infratructure based on fossil fuels so there is less resistance to leapfrogging fossil fuels and going directly to renewables. Its like how India had mobile phones take off blindingly fast because the fixed line infrastructure was way underdeveloped while USA is still behind in mobile commerce or mobile payments (Apple Pay is 1990s technology from Japan but seems so futuristic int he US) As India and China are both industrializing and need huge amounts of power they are not going to choose between clean coal, gas and renewables. They are going to develop everything at full speed and in certain areas solar is going to win based upon the local geography. This means their is a clear cut future for solar which is not dependent on subsidies making it cheaper than conventioanl power plants. China is already the world leader in Solar panels and India's Suzlon is one of the world leaders in Wind Turbines. While Global Warming may or may not be a bad thing;( Russians and Canadians would definitely welcome a warmer world); the move to renewables still makes sense for a country like India which has little oil and imports most of it. In fact if not for Oil and Gold imports India has a positive balance of trade with the world.
The trees are fine. All this talk about trees is because the Califronia taxpayers will not build new infrastructure for farmers. Now they are trying to convince us (using the trees) that its not really not their fault for farming water intensive cash crops like Almonds and that rather nature is doing them a bad one and we should feel sorry for them . Well we are not going to fall for it. The trees will survive or not survive - natural selection. If there are mega forest fires then the folks living on acres of beatifull land subsidized by the city folks will just have to move to the cities and deal with the traffic and the aggravation. We are not going to pay more taxes to fund their year round vacation lifestyle (tell me again what does a farmer do that a well trained chimp cant do in 40 days a year?)
100% of water is never utilized. A natural flow has to be kept or the river dies. When discussing use we should be discussing the water taken out of the river not the bare minimum left in it. Farmers in California have had a free ride for too long due their Sacramento lobbyists and they have begin to think its a birthright that city people will subsidize mega projects so that they can keep growing cash crops. City people are fed up. We will just build desalination plants for our drinking water and let the rest of the state go to hell
Nobody is talking of using desalination to save trees. The trees are just an excuse to build more mega irrigation infrastructure. But city people are tired of paying huge taxes to build expensive irrigation infrastructure so that mega rich farming corporations can get cheap water to grow export crops. And they justify all this spending by saying the cities may run out of drinking water. The cities are saying f u to the farm lobbyists in Sacramento. We are not paying for anymore mega irrigation infrastructure. If the drinking water situation gets bad we will desalinate for drinking water and let the farming corporations go to hell.
Keeping rivers flowing is not just scenic. It keeps the ecosystem healthy. If you want to see what happens when you dont let a river have enough water to keep itself clean go see the Yamuna in Delhi which dries up each Summer as all the water is sucked out for irrigation. The entire city stinks from the drying waste in the river bed.
I did not say one kind of plant. I said one individual plant. What I am saying is the number of individual plants of each species will increase so that no one individual will be closing its pores. Canada and Siberia are very fertile as they have never been intensively farmed like the US. Siberia even more so as they have not had a glacializition like Canada which scraped the top soil away. I am not saying that there wont be loosers from Global Warming. All I am saying is even today we have loosers and winners climatically and level of development wise. Its unfair to ask the loosers today to continue in their losing position (by giving up Carbon based rapid industrialization) so that the Winners of today - USA and Western Europe can continue to enjoy their good fortune. Whats in it for Russia, India or Africa? Why should they slow down their development (In the case of India and Africa) or continue with unprodcutive land (In the case of Russia and Canada) so that USA and Western Europe can continue to be rich? A deal has to be good for both parties otherwise its extortion. Yes USA an point a gun(economic sanctions) at the head of many countries to make them go along with measures which are not good for their people but for only so long. Every chance they get they would cheat. If I was Russia or Canada I would be giving tax credits to Coal and Gas plants and putting heavy taxes on solar and wind.
Japan and Korea are much smaller than USA in population so they were never going to be a bigger market than USA even if they were just as rich as USA. China and India on the other hand because of their population can become larger markets if their level of prosperity matches the US
Your logic is flawed. You reason as if there is only one plant in the world. There are trillions of individual plants. If one plant has met its needs and closes its pores, there is still CO2 left for more plants. The total number of plants increases and the green cover increases. Many parts of the sub sahara have become noticeably (as in satellite pictures) greener over the last 30 years. Increased temperature and CO2 levels bring the world back to a more fertile state like in earlier eons. Its during these eons that the CO2 from the atmosphere was fixed into organics which at the end of these eons became fossil fuels hence reducing the carbon in the atmosphere and cooling it artificially. Sending this carbon back into the atmosphere is part of a natural cycle. (I consider humans to be part of nature so any human actions are also natural)
Also a higher temperature if it happens will make Canada and Siberia prime cropland. Increase rainfall in the Sahara and India. There are some minor effects like sea level rise which can be dealt with dikes like in Netherland. Some low lying pacific ocean countries will either build dikes or reclaim land like China is doing in the South China Sea or if they are economically non-feasible the people will migrate to the mainland. Not enough damage and a lot of potential benefits with a greener world which can support a larger population. With a 2 degree warmer world a world population of 10 billion is easily sustainable.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple did setup an Engineering center in Bangalore last year. Also with those 25000 employees Apple also employs another 15000 contractors in SCV mostly from Infosys, Wipro, CTSH, IBM and Exilant all of which have another 15000 offshore in India. Jobs was opposed to having Engineering in India (He just didnt like India. Something to do with his trip to India to find himself Go Figure) but Cook is open to it. Since a majority of Apple employees in Engineering are already Indians many are happy to relocate back to India on expatriate salaries and bring up the offshore center. An Easy way is to absorb the existing Contractor engineering workforce as Apple Employees of Apple India.
Apple will still stay headquartered in the US as the Indian govt will not let them play the Irish sandwich trick but that doesnt preven them from moving Engineering to India just like they have move manufacturing to China, Japan,Korea,Taiwan. Apple also has Engineering setups in UK and Singapore and Apple Call centers are spread all over the world.
I dont have the exact numbers but wouldnt be surprised to know that a majority of Apple Employees are already based outside the US.
Eventually only the hardcore engineering and the marketing would stay in SCV and the rest could move. However the move will not be because of costs. Indian salaries are already at 1/3rd of US salaries and with the overhead of outsourcing and/or remote teams cost is a justufcation only till the difference is 1/3. its more about getting away from a regulatory environment as well as go where there is an overabundance of engineers so you can pick and choose the best.
a big assembly plant has a lot of influence. If the assembly plant is in the US and the assembler lets it be known that they will preferntially take parts from plants down the road the subcomponent manufacturers will also set up plants in the same city. This is why govts give subsidies to setup the big assembler as the resulting ecosystem pays back in increased taxes what they gave as subsidies
Actually its very easy to get the Chinese to pay for stuff in the US. They hold a huge amount of dollars. Just start the printing presses and devalue the dollar and the Chinese holding just went down in value and you used the printed dollars for what you wanted to do. In effect the Chinese paid for it.
No one in China gets paid a dollar a day. Chinese minimum wage is 4 dollars an hour so around 35 dollars a 8.5 hour day. 1 and 35 is a big difference.
Labor costs are only 10% of the 200 dollar cost of a phone (so 20 dollars) . So if instead of 4 dollars you paid 8 dollars an hour your cost would go from 200 to 220 dollars per phone. You could still sell it for 600 dollars and have a 390% profit instead of a 400% profit.
What is more problematic is that the most number of iPhones are sold in China so manufacturing them in USA will lead to high transport costs to transport them to China. What could work is having factories in both countries manufacturing the phones to be sold in each country.
Actually Foxconn is going for robots in a big way in China. India govt has provided free land to Foxconn and lobbying hard to move production to India where workers are cheaper but Foxconn would rather put in robots in China than move the production to India. And China is taking the lead in robotics as most factories are in China so when it is time to automate they are being automated in China rather than moving them somewhere else and then automating them.
Or put a 30% tariff on iPhones manufactured in China and change the rules so that a Phone on the container from China is invoiced at or close to retail not some ridiculously low value. A 600 dollar iphone cost 200 dollar to manufacture in China and would cost 400 ollars to manufacture in the US. A 30% tax on the 600 dollar value means a 200 dollar phone becomes 380 dollars . Apple can eat the other 20 dollars and move production to US and get some good publicity.
You can do so by having the government subsidize the workers through medicare for all, food stamps and matching salary grants for interns. Germany is a high income society but it manages to keep manufacturing at home because the corporations do not pay a living wage to apprentices. Instead the govt covers them with free medical care, free college, matching grants during apprenticeship and low rents (Germany keeps rents low via forced renting. You are not allowed to keep a house empty in Germany and high transfer taxes. This makes sure Real estate stays cheap). With low rent, no college debt, on the job training paid partly by the employer and partly by the govt, free medicare and subsidized food people can live on lower salaries. Yes this needs higher taxes on profits but it makes sure the profits are made in Germany instead of abroad.
Corporations are not natural entities. They are created by law and they let the shareholders hide behind the corporations and not have any personal liability for anything they do in the name of the corporation. This is expensive for society. Still society allows it in return for the money they get from corporations as corporate taxes. I would support 0 tax for corporations if directors of corporations become personally liable for all decisions made by a corporation including bankruptcy so if a corporation like Trump Hotels declares bankruptcy then Donald Trump loses his right to vote and right to stand for elections. Also any consumer lawsuits against a corporation gets paid out of the personal wealth of the corporation's directors. If you dont want this then pay up for the immunity you buy using corporate taxes. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
The wealthy dont use apps. They have assistants (Trump doesnt tweet himself. He has 2 assistants to whom he shouts out his tweets and they tweet it). Its the assistants who are probably young interns making less than minimum wage, living in crappy shared apartments, surrounded by loads of money at work but having negative net-worths who spend their credit card limits on buying iPhones. Its the one thing in their lives which makes them feel in control. They are willing to skip buying groceries and mooch off fake dates for their dinner rather than give up their iPhones.
Far more than 20 billion is being spent on Cancer research. Its not a issue of money. Its just a difficult problem to solve. And by the way Cancer is not one disease. its a symptom of a disease like fever and many differnt things can cause cancer so cancer probably will never have one cure. You will need a cure each for all the thousands of things that can cause cancer
Apple may be on the cutting edge but never on the bleeding edge. They always let the competitors go first to market, make mistakes , bleed and once the expectations have been lowered come in with a more polished version of the same and capture the market. The reason that all the Android manufacturers don't make as much money as Apple is thy spend more on R&D while Apple spends more on marketing. And the number of people who make their spending decisions based on image rather than facts vastly outnumbers the number who spend their money based on facts. Apple is a Marketeer driven company. The CEO was a marketing man and he set the culture. For comparison see Google where the founders were techies and set the culture of the company as where Engineers come first even though its a freaking advertising firm when you come down to it.
Apple owes its success to the 2008 crash when lots of smart engineers were out of work and were willing to bet thousands of hours on writing apps instead of full time jobs. This created the App economy where Apple gets 30% of the cut but more importantly the apps drive the demand for the phones. People dont want to switch to Android as iOS still has the most and best apps and app developers dont want to switch as the paying public is on iPhones. Android users are more sophisticated and more likely to use a freeware version than pay for something. This is an accident of timing rather than anything special Apple did. As they say its Smarter to be Lucky than lucky to be Smart. Jobs was Lucky. He got a special kind of economy to play in and he ran with it. There are well know studies that people buy the luxury item they can afford. Those who can afford luxury houses buy them but those who cant ,buy a livable house and a luxury car. Those who cant afford that ; rent, buy a usable car and buy a luxury phone. The recession helped the sales of iPhones as being one of the few luxuries people could still afford. As things get better and people can buy luxury cars they will probably just not replace their phones. Still Apple has used the last 8 years of a crappy recovery (Thanks Obama) to cement their place in the app economy. They can probably last another 10 years if they dont do anything really stupid.(Like trying to get into cars a notoriously capital intensive and unprofitable business)
Apple keeps its costs down by burning out its engineers. Its a very abusive work environment. Also it uses Foxconn and other very abusive contract manufacturers to do its manufacturing. All the time charging a a high price premium by pretending to be a premium product while they are using the tech industry equivalent of sweatshops. Its a model well executed by luxury brands like Gucci who pay a child laborer 5 doallars to make a bag and then sell it for 500 dollars.
Whether that is sustainable or not in the long term depends on how much Apple's manufacturing processes and Engineering processes come under scrutiny. At some point the economy will recover fully from the 2008 tech crash (we still havnt gone back to 2007 levels of tech employment) and Apple will start having problems as they wont have quality people. Problems will start appearing in the phones. (Already the innovativeness is gone and now we are getting execution defects as well . Till now the marketing has covered up for it but for how long). When the inflection point comes and people stop looking at Apple products as premium products the change away from Apple will be drastic. Think Sun Microsystems. Just like Sun a company which made its money selling premium workstations when people stopped wanting them the company went belly up. Apple has shown the same kind of hubris by expanding into Hardware design (always a capital intensive and tough business) as well as trying to get Swift to be the next Java (I would say Sun would have survived if they had not spent so many resources on Java). Apple is walking a very thin rope. yes it has 200 billion in offshore tax havens but since it doesnt want to bring the money back it also has billions in US loans to pay for all the expansion. If things go south Apple could survive on the cash pile if they retrench but what is likely is that they will blow the cash pile on newer and newer projects trying to get the next iPhone but by that time the smart engineers would have seen the writing on the wall and left and only the political animals would be around and the political animals while great at claiming credit cant innovate even if they have cash thrown at them.
You know why Commercial software is now better than military software? Security clearances. Citizens who cant cut it in the commercial space against H1Bs go to the defense space as there a security clearance and being a citizen is more important than being able to do the work.
In remote areas where there is no existing grid infrastructure Solar is already cost competitive. Many parts of India which are off the grid are running on a mix of Solar and Biogas plants(basically farm waste and cow shit in a sealed tank with a pipe to draw out the methane). An Island where fuel needs to be shipped in is ideal for Solar and wind as it gets rid of the uncertainty of the fuel ship being delayed by a storm. However the locals need to be trained to fix the solar panels and batteries themselves (as in swap in replacements) and enough replacemnts need to be kept on the island otherwise you are swapping one set of dependencies for another.
Interestingly renewables may have a brighter future in areas which are fast industrializing like China and India than in already industrialized nations like USA. In the newly industrializing countries there are fewer sunk costs in an infratructure based on fossil fuels so there is less resistance to leapfrogging fossil fuels and going directly to renewables. Its like how India had mobile phones take off blindingly fast because the fixed line infrastructure was way underdeveloped while USA is still behind in mobile commerce or mobile payments (Apple Pay is 1990s technology from Japan but seems so futuristic int he US)
As India and China are both industrializing and need huge amounts of power they are not going to choose between clean coal, gas and renewables. They are going to develop everything at full speed and in certain areas solar is going to win based upon the local geography. This means their is a clear cut future for solar which is not dependent on subsidies making it cheaper than conventioanl power plants. China is already the world leader in Solar panels and India's Suzlon is one of the world leaders in Wind Turbines.
While Global Warming may or may not be a bad thing;( Russians and Canadians would definitely welcome a warmer world); the move to renewables still makes sense for a country like India which has little oil and imports most of it. In fact if not for Oil and Gold imports India has a positive balance of trade with the world.
Foxconn is a Taiwanese company with factories in China assembling iPhones. Businessmen dont let politics come in the way of profit
The trees are fine. All this talk about trees is because the Califronia taxpayers will not build new infrastructure for farmers. Now they are trying to convince us (using the trees) that its not really not their fault for farming water intensive cash crops like Almonds and that rather nature is doing them a bad one and we should feel sorry for them . Well we are not going to fall for it. The trees will survive or not survive - natural selection. If there are mega forest fires then the folks living on acres of beatifull land subsidized by the city folks will just have to move to the cities and deal with the traffic and the aggravation. We are not going to pay more taxes to fund their year round vacation lifestyle (tell me again what does a farmer do that a well trained chimp cant do in 40 days a year?)
How about a gopro camera and videos of riding rollercoasters uploaded to youtube?
100% of water is never utilized. A natural flow has to be kept or the river dies. When discussing use we should be discussing the water taken out of the river not the bare minimum left in it. Farmers in California have had a free ride for too long due their Sacramento lobbyists and they have begin to think its a birthright that city people will subsidize mega projects so that they can keep growing cash crops. City people are fed up. We will just build desalination plants for our drinking water and let the rest of the state go to hell
Nobody is talking of using desalination to save trees. The trees are just an excuse to build more mega irrigation infrastructure. But city people are tired of paying huge taxes to build expensive irrigation infrastructure so that mega rich farming corporations can get cheap water to grow export crops. And they justify all this spending by saying the cities may run out of drinking water. The cities are saying f u to the farm lobbyists in Sacramento. We are not paying for anymore mega irrigation infrastructure. If the drinking water situation gets bad we will desalinate for drinking water and let the farming corporations go to hell.
Keeping rivers flowing is not just scenic. It keeps the ecosystem healthy. If you want to see what happens when you dont let a river have enough water to keep itself clean go see the Yamuna in Delhi which dries up each Summer as all the water is sucked out for irrigation. The entire city stinks from the drying waste in the river bed.
I did not say one kind of plant. I said one individual plant. What I am saying is the number of individual plants of each species will increase so that no one individual will be closing its pores.
Canada and Siberia are very fertile as they have never been intensively farmed like the US. Siberia even more so as they have not had a glacializition like Canada which scraped the top soil away.
I am not saying that there wont be loosers from Global Warming. All I am saying is even today we have loosers and winners climatically and level of development wise. Its unfair to ask the loosers today to continue in their losing position (by giving up Carbon based rapid industrialization) so that the Winners of today - USA and Western Europe can continue to enjoy their good fortune. Whats in it for Russia, India or Africa? Why should they slow down their development (In the case of India and Africa) or continue with unprodcutive land (In the case of Russia and Canada) so that USA and Western Europe can continue to be rich? A deal has to be good for both parties otherwise its extortion. Yes USA an point a gun(economic sanctions) at the head of many countries to make them go along with measures which are not good for their people but for only so long. Every chance they get they would cheat. If I was Russia or Canada I would be giving tax credits to Coal and Gas plants and putting heavy taxes on solar and wind.
Japan and Korea are much smaller than USA in population so they were never going to be a bigger market than USA even if they were just as rich as USA. China and India on the other hand because of their population can become larger markets if their level of prosperity matches the US
Your logic is flawed. You reason as if there is only one plant in the world. There are trillions of individual plants. If one plant has met its needs and closes its pores, there is still CO2 left for more plants. The total number of plants increases and the green cover increases. Many parts of the sub sahara have become noticeably (as in satellite pictures) greener over the last 30 years. Increased temperature and CO2 levels bring the world back to a more fertile state like in earlier eons. Its during these eons that the CO2 from the atmosphere was fixed into organics which at the end of these eons became fossil fuels hence reducing the carbon in the atmosphere and cooling it artificially. Sending this carbon back into the atmosphere is part of a natural cycle. (I consider humans to be part of nature so any human actions are also natural)
Also a higher temperature if it happens will make Canada and Siberia prime cropland. Increase rainfall in the Sahara and India. There are some minor effects like sea level rise which can be dealt with dikes like in Netherland. Some low lying pacific ocean countries will either build dikes or reclaim land like China is doing in the South China Sea or if they are economically non-feasible the people will migrate to the mainland. Not enough damage and a lot of potential benefits with a greener world which can support a larger population. With a 2 degree warmer world a world population of 10 billion is easily sustainable.
No one says the status quo needs to be maintained. Californians can emigrate to Canada.