Worrying about what someone or something will think of you thirty years from now is very narcissistic. Worry about making society a better place for all our biological children and then maybe start worrying what our robot AI creations will think of us.
Solar, wind and hydro combined could easily replace all generation.
I think you and I have different definitions of "easily". Even with subsidies and a substantial government policy push the percentage of electricity generation by renewables has gone from 9% in 2008 to just under 13% in 2013. Even assuming that it would be a good thing... which I don't think we should assume that a 100% build out of solar and wind would be without great environmental costs, then we are talking about it taking the rest of the century to build out solar and wind infrastructure at this rate.
So, if you take Global Climate Change seriously. And I do. You have to include nuclear fission in the near term of 20 to 30 years if you are going to tackle CO2 emissions. Natural Gas is certainly better than oil and especially better than coal, so that is going to help, but we need nuclear to address the need to substantially cut CO2 sooner rather than later.
And even then we are only talking about mitigating Global Warming's effects on sea level rise... we are probably going to get a 1 to 3 meter rise by 2100 or 2200 that is going to happen even if we do succeed in making the switch away from fossil fuels eventually.
Doubling or tripling our nuclear power output in the next 30 years would be the only possible way to really limit the damage of sea level rise to something manageable with sea walls and minor dislocations.
Yes, but it is not either or, we should be pursuing all types of potentially promising research and development towards nuclear fusion or even safer and more sustainable nuclear fusion. We should be spending ten or twenty Billion dollars per year and not just $150 million.
And we should actually be building up to industrial scale some of the more promising nuclear fission designs that we have now. Solar and Wind are not likely going to be able to account for even the majority of our energy needs so we need nuclear fission or preferably nuclear fusion to provide for our industrial scale needs.
With the government it is the opposite... The Senate is probably looking to kill the project because they are afraid it might actually work. Working fusion power would usher in a new age of plentiful energy and boundless economic opportunities and freedom.... politicians need a little scarcity to keep people in line and make sure they stay on top. Better to be the king of hell on earth than just another angel in heaven...
On the cynical use of intelligence reciprocity with the UK to obtain sigint within the US I agree that is a clear violation of the constitution. A violation of the constitution by proxy is still a violation. But I think there has to be a legal ability for the US to monitor actual foreign communications, especially when there are active conflicts or real military and terrorist threats abroad. And I believe that the Federal Courts have usually upheld the ability of the US to ease drop on communications abroad... and I am not talking about just the secret and completely unaccountable FISA court which should be abolished... I am talking about real Federal Courts which have non-secret trials.
Yet we have a whole war going on in Afghanistan by applying American laws on foreign citizens.
By your definition the US has no need of its extradition treaties since American laws don't apply to "non-citizens".
That is a stretch argument. I didn't say that US Laws don't apply to non-citizens when they commit certain crimes, I was talking about Constitutional protections which restrain government action here in the US, but should only restrain US action if there is a treaty or other law restraining US action abroad.
The summary sounds more broad than just spying on foreign governments in foreign lands if it involves US companies and any communications "about" its "targets". That language would allow keyword interception of all communications about a particular government or about the "IMF" or talking about the "World Bank". Literally those are the types of keywords they would enter in to the program to return all the results. What it allows is actually very useful... like gauging the sentiment of a population for its government or for international institutions by analyzing the context of the communications and coming up with some Big Data analysis. People could then use that data to exploit underlying divisions or to target factions and exploit individuals.
As I have said before, I don't believe the US constitution applies outside the borders of this country for non-citizens... so it isn't the same level of constitutional crisis that we have here at home with a widespread, ongoing and wholesale violation of the fourth amendment threatening the very fabric of our society.
However, our leaders should be working towards bilateral international treaties with friendly, democratic republic and free countries around the world to not engage in or at least limit this type of spying.
After reading the Wikipedia entry for "Anarcho Capitalism" I am pretty sure that it isn't really a thing. Really. It is just putting together two opposite meaning words to mess with people.
Libertarianism fundamentally believes in government which is the opposite of anarchy.
That zero government force... The 0 got dropped there... You need some use of force to enforce laws that support Liberty... Anarchists would disagree with any need for government to enforce laws.
The difference is that libertarians want to minimize the use of force and maximize freedom which is different than anarchism which wants zero force and no enforcement of laws. Libertarians don't believe that government force will maximize liberty.
The purest form of libertarianism is anarchy, so a group of people can form a corporation and protect their collective property and wealth using force, as they see fit.
Not so. Libertarianism isn't about creating an anarchy, it is about creating and perfecting a constitutional republic based on Liberty. Libertarianism is about a free society under the rule of law which recognizes that the use of force by government is evil, but that it is still sometimes necessary in defense of that Liberty.
So put simply the difference is that libertarians seek to minimize the use of force by a government (or any collective association), while anarchists seek to eliminate the use of force by a government completely.
And what you describe isn't even anarchy which would be about having no enforceable rules. What you describe is simply creating a new government but calling it a corporation instead. As soon as you are talking about forming a corporation or association or any group of people with collective rules which can be enforced by the use of force, then you are not talking about anarchy.
Libertarianism is about some minimum set of laws which are meant to uphold individual freedom that a government may need to use force to enforce. The term "free market" refers to a market that operates by a set of rules which are collectively enforced through some government entity. The exercise of those rules and code of conduct are what make a market free or not.
So things like: you may not steel or commit theft through fraud, or threaten force to coerce someone into trading goods or services at a price that is not agreed upon fairly, those would all be legitimate things for a government to use force to counterbalance or try to prevent or punish.
Libertarianism is about minimizing the use of force by government to when it is absolutely necessary not eliminating it and certainly not privatizing the use of coercive force. Individual and collective self defense is part of living in a free society, but so is a well regulated free market which is a function of government. Without a set of enforced rules, you can have a market, but it most likely won't be a free market.
Police and common defense are usually cited by libertarians as the only legitimate functions of government power, so it is hard to see how anyone would be mistaken in believing that libertarian ideology is about creating an anarchy or would seek to allow the creation of private police forces outside the rule of law.
Libertarianism is not anarchism. The maintenance of personal Liberty and a free market relies on a government which uses its force to protect that liberty and freedom. Libertarianism is not about going to an extreme that eliminates government, it is about an minimization of the use of force in society which we can work towards.
There is a huge difference between seeking to minimize government and the use of force in society and anarchists who seek no government. Equating the two does a terrible disservice to a rational debate.
Yeah, it bugs me when people think libertarians love corporations. Libertarians love freedom. Fuck the goverment, and fuck corporations too.
Yes, I think in its purest form of libertarianism then there is no need for legal corporations at all, because corporations are a government legal invention to aggregate wealth under a legal fiction which the government then has to use force to bring into existence and protect its property and wealth.
In its purest ideological form, Libertarianism is about promoting Liberty and the limitation of the use of force by the government for police and common defense not the privatization of the use of force. "Privatizing" by merely contracting with corporations instead of individuals to act as police or government agents has nothing to do at all with libertarianism. Privatizing in this sense is just a form of contract with a group of individuals instead of individuals directly. Similarly to contracting with a labor union that represents public employees.
In this sense "privatizing" in general has nothing to do with libertarianism if it means that government is still paying with taxpayer money which is collected by the use of force. Police and Military are fundamentally the only legitimate use of government's taxing authority and even then taxes should be considered a necessary evil, but only necessary if the government can't collect sufficient money with a voluntary system.
In this case I think an important line would have been crossed if the SWAT team direction, oversight and management is coming from a private corporation. To abdicate the police powers of the government to a private corporation would be very much anti-libertarian. Very anti-libertarian. And regardless of ideology I hope people will recognize it as a bad idea that should be reconsidered.
I think liberty is a worthwhile ideal to work towards, but first you have to understand what it means.
Because those solar panels drop to 0% of their maximum rate over the course of 1 day, right? Come on, man.
There's nothing special about the number 50%, except that it's easily recognizable as a sizable amount for a large economy. It's not unreasonable to expect a mixture of energy technologies, but a changing mixture is news.
Funny, it very likely did drop to 0% over the course of one 24 hour day. Nachtzeit.
Bottom line is that German CO2 emissions are rising because of a switch to coal that solar and wind can't keep up with. So far, even with remarkable solar adoption in a short period of time this is a failed experiment.
Germany is replacing nuclear with cheap high polluting coal. The solar is a PR stunt to distract from an unmitigated environmental disaster being perpetrated in the name of environmentalism. Is climate change a bad thing or not, because if it is then they need to start those nuclear power plants back up.
Germany has shifted from Nuclear to Coal and turned the environmental clock back to the Coal age. 50% solar for a few minutes one afternoon is a politically motivated red herring.
More than just misleading unless the headline was written at the moment it was true. 50% for a few moments when the sun was at its peak is great, don't mean to rain on the solar parade, so to speak. But if it was 50% for a few minutes on a cloudless day in Summer when the Sun was at its highest in the sky... then the stories are lacking a critical piece of information to judge the overall progress towards greener energy... Like what is the actual percentage of power over a realistic period of time? So, what was the percentage over the past month or last month for instance?
All I've heard so far is that they have primarily replaced nuclear power with coal which is a terrible situation for the environment and health. And it appears that Merkel is basically covering up the fact that the knee jerk reaction to eliminate nuclear power has been an environmental disaster with very real negative health, environmental and Climate change effects all to eliminate an energy source with very little risk and a huge environmental benefit compared to all other energy sources.
If we wanted to go back to AOL's gated network of the 1990s we would invent a time machine and cover it with AOL CDs.
We the customers are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth to the Internet and we have long since paid for the build out of the Fiber Optic network infrastructure through our monthly payments. It is simply fraudulent to be charging customers a fixed price for bandwidth and then effectively limiting peering to other networks so as to create an incentive for other networks and content providers to pay off the Telecoms to provide that telecoms customers their content as a service... these are services we as customers are already ostensibly paying for or are requesting. It isn't like a content provider can turn on your computer or tv and make you download their content... the Internet is primarily about end users initiating some communication and either the computer on the other end responds or not. Verizon or Comcast sitting in the middle and deciding which communications should get a fast lane based upon who has the most cash is just a bad way to run a communications network and a bad way to regulate a free market.
Sure transparency in what kind of peering arrangements telecoms have with other companies all contracts regarding quality of service or internet connections could be useful for regulators who might have the time to spend years sifting through all that paperwork to figure out what is good for the free market or not, but it is no substitution for net neutrality which would assure customers that they are actually getting the bandwidth and good faith service they are paying for rather than perniciously getting fleeced at both ends with service that the telecoms feel free to effectively throttle down whenever they feel like it despite apparent contracts with their customers to provide a certain level of service.
That is true, that's why campaign finance reform is not a magic bullet. Another necessary change is term limits for all of Congress, so that we can replace career politicians with civilian public servants, as it was meant to be.
I might agree with you if you also term limited other public officials and even low or mid level bureaucrats. The real power in Washington is the Bureaucracy which can outlast any single administration or any 8 years of Congress. The entrenched interests are not limited to the elected politicians, but all the individuals that make careers out of government money, government contracts and playing the system. It can take years or decades to fathom just part of the Federal Bureaucracy, let alone be in a position to make decisions over regulations, oversight and spending.
The problem to me seems that regular folks don't seem to understand or care (or think they can do anything about) creating a system of government where the rule of law prevails instead of the rule of committees, boards and commissions. There is a difference between the rule of law with people executing that law and a law that simply abdicates to the discretion of men and the corrupting influence that it has.
Slashdot Mirror
Worrying about what someone or something will think of you thirty years from now is very narcissistic. Worry about making society a better place for all our biological children and then maybe start worrying what our robot AI creations will think of us.
Solar, wind and hydro combined could easily replace all generation.
I think you and I have different definitions of "easily". Even with subsidies and a substantial government policy push the percentage of electricity generation by renewables has gone from 9% in 2008 to just under 13% in 2013. Even assuming that it would be a good thing... which I don't think we should assume that a 100% build out of solar and wind would be without great environmental costs, then we are talking about it taking the rest of the century to build out solar and wind infrastructure at this rate.
So, if you take Global Climate Change seriously. And I do. You have to include nuclear fission in the near term of 20 to 30 years if you are going to tackle CO2 emissions. Natural Gas is certainly better than oil and especially better than coal, so that is going to help, but we need nuclear to address the need to substantially cut CO2 sooner rather than later.
And even then we are only talking about mitigating Global Warming's effects on sea level rise... we are probably going to get a 1 to 3 meter rise by 2100 or 2200 that is going to happen even if we do succeed in making the switch away from fossil fuels eventually.
Doubling or tripling our nuclear power output in the next 30 years would be the only possible way to really limit the damage of sea level rise to something manageable with sea walls and minor dislocations.
Yes, but it is not either or, we should be pursuing all types of potentially promising research and development towards nuclear fusion or even safer and more sustainable nuclear fusion. We should be spending ten or twenty Billion dollars per year and not just $150 million.
And we should actually be building up to industrial scale some of the more promising nuclear fission designs that we have now. Solar and Wind are not likely going to be able to account for even the majority of our energy needs so we need nuclear fission or preferably nuclear fusion to provide for our industrial scale needs.
With the government it is the opposite... The Senate is probably looking to kill the project because they are afraid it might actually work. Working fusion power would usher in a new age of plentiful energy and boundless economic opportunities and freedom.... politicians need a little scarcity to keep people in line and make sure they stay on top. Better to be the king of hell on earth than just another angel in heaven...
On the cynical use of intelligence reciprocity with the UK to obtain sigint within the US I agree that is a clear violation of the constitution. A violation of the constitution by proxy is still a violation. But I think there has to be a legal ability for the US to monitor actual foreign communications, especially when there are active conflicts or real military and terrorist threats abroad. And I believe that the Federal Courts have usually upheld the ability of the US to ease drop on communications abroad... and I am not talking about just the secret and completely unaccountable FISA court which should be abolished... I am talking about real Federal Courts which have non-secret trials.
Yet we have a whole war going on in Afghanistan by applying American laws on foreign citizens.
By your definition the US has no need of its extradition treaties since American laws don't apply to "non-citizens".
That is a stretch argument. I didn't say that US Laws don't apply to non-citizens when they commit certain crimes, I was talking about Constitutional protections which restrain government action here in the US, but should only restrain US action if there is a treaty or other law restraining US action abroad.
The summary sounds more broad than just spying on foreign governments in foreign lands if it involves US companies and any communications "about" its "targets". That language would allow keyword interception of all communications about a particular government or about the "IMF" or talking about the "World Bank". Literally those are the types of keywords they would enter in to the program to return all the results. What it allows is actually very useful... like gauging the sentiment of a population for its government or for international institutions by analyzing the context of the communications and coming up with some Big Data analysis. People could then use that data to exploit underlying divisions or to target factions and exploit individuals.
As I have said before, I don't believe the US constitution applies outside the borders of this country for non-citizens... so it isn't the same level of constitutional crisis that we have here at home with a widespread, ongoing and wholesale violation of the fourth amendment threatening the very fabric of our society.
However, our leaders should be working towards bilateral international treaties with friendly, democratic republic and free countries around the world to not engage in or at least limit this type of spying.
After reading the Wikipedia entry for "Anarcho Capitalism" I am pretty sure that it isn't really a thing. Really. It is just putting together two opposite meaning words to mess with people. Libertarianism fundamentally believes in government which is the opposite of anarchy.
That zero government force... The 0 got dropped there... You need some use of force to enforce laws that support Liberty... Anarchists would disagree with any need for government to enforce laws.
The difference is that libertarians want to minimize the use of force and maximize freedom which is different than anarchism which wants zero force and no enforcement of laws. Libertarians don't believe that government force will maximize liberty.
"minimize"
The purest form of libertarianism is anarchy, so a group of people can form a corporation and protect their collective property and wealth using force, as they see fit.
Not so. Libertarianism isn't about creating an anarchy, it is about creating and perfecting a constitutional republic based on Liberty. Libertarianism is about a free society under the rule of law which recognizes that the use of force by government is evil, but that it is still sometimes necessary in defense of that Liberty.
So put simply the difference is that libertarians seek to minimize the use of force by a government (or any collective association), while anarchists seek to eliminate the use of force by a government completely.
And what you describe isn't even anarchy which would be about having no enforceable rules. What you describe is simply creating a new government but calling it a corporation instead. As soon as you are talking about forming a corporation or association or any group of people with collective rules which can be enforced by the use of force, then you are not talking about anarchy.
Libertarianism is about some minimum set of laws which are meant to uphold individual freedom that a government may need to use force to enforce. The term "free market" refers to a market that operates by a set of rules which are collectively enforced through some government entity. The exercise of those rules and code of conduct are what make a market free or not.
So things like: you may not steel or commit theft through fraud, or threaten force to coerce someone into trading goods or services at a price that is not agreed upon fairly, those would all be legitimate things for a government to use force to counterbalance or try to prevent or punish.
Libertarianism is about minimizing the use of force by government to when it is absolutely necessary not eliminating it and certainly not privatizing the use of coercive force. Individual and collective self defense is part of living in a free society, but so is a well regulated free market which is a function of government. Without a set of enforced rules, you can have a market, but it most likely won't be a free market.
Police and common defense are usually cited by libertarians as the only legitimate functions of government power, so it is hard to see how anyone would be mistaken in believing that libertarian ideology is about creating an anarchy or would seek to allow the creation of private police forces outside the rule of law.
Libertarianism is not anarchism. The maintenance of personal Liberty and a free market relies on a government which uses its force to protect that liberty and freedom. Libertarianism is not about going to an extreme that eliminates government, it is about an minimization of the use of force in society which we can work towards.
There is a huge difference between seeking to minimize government and the use of force in society and anarchists who seek no government. Equating the two does a terrible disservice to a rational debate.
Yeah, it bugs me when people think libertarians love corporations. Libertarians love freedom. Fuck the goverment, and fuck corporations too.
Yes, I think in its purest form of libertarianism then there is no need for legal corporations at all, because corporations are a government legal invention to aggregate wealth under a legal fiction which the government then has to use force to bring into existence and protect its property and wealth.
In its purest ideological form, Libertarianism is about promoting Liberty and the limitation of the use of force by the government for police and common defense not the privatization of the use of force. "Privatizing" by merely contracting with corporations instead of individuals to act as police or government agents has nothing to do at all with libertarianism. Privatizing in this sense is just a form of contract with a group of individuals instead of individuals directly. Similarly to contracting with a labor union that represents public employees.
In this sense "privatizing" in general has nothing to do with libertarianism if it means that government is still paying with taxpayer money which is collected by the use of force. Police and Military are fundamentally the only legitimate use of government's taxing authority and even then taxes should be considered a necessary evil, but only necessary if the government can't collect sufficient money with a voluntary system.
In this case I think an important line would have been crossed if the SWAT team direction, oversight and management is coming from a private corporation. To abdicate the police powers of the government to a private corporation would be very much anti-libertarian. Very anti-libertarian. And regardless of ideology I hope people will recognize it as a bad idea that should be reconsidered.
I think liberty is a worthwhile ideal to work towards, but first you have to understand what it means.
Molten core? All the large scale solar in Germany appears to be flat panel PV which means 0% at night.
Because those solar panels drop to 0% of their maximum rate over the course of 1 day, right? Come on, man.
There's nothing special about the number 50%, except that it's easily recognizable as a sizable amount for a large economy. It's not unreasonable to expect a mixture of energy technologies, but a changing mixture is news.
Funny, it very likely did drop to 0% over the course of one 24 hour day. Nachtzeit.
The changing mixture is news or it really should be making more headlines: Rising German Coal Use Imperils European Emissions Deal
Bottom line is that German CO2 emissions are rising because of a switch to coal that solar and wind can't keep up with. So far, even with remarkable solar adoption in a short period of time this is a failed experiment.
Germany is replacing nuclear with cheap high polluting coal. The solar is a PR stunt to distract from an unmitigated environmental disaster being perpetrated in the name of environmentalism. Is climate change a bad thing or not, because if it is then they need to start those nuclear power plants back up.
solar for 24 hours, eh?... just wish I had some mod points for "funny".
Germany has shifted from Nuclear to Coal and turned the environmental clock back to the Coal age. 50% solar for a few minutes one afternoon is a politically motivated red herring.
"Now" is misleading in that context.
More than just misleading unless the headline was written at the moment it was true. 50% for a few moments when the sun was at its peak is great, don't mean to rain on the solar parade, so to speak. But if it was 50% for a few minutes on a cloudless day in Summer when the Sun was at its highest in the sky... then the stories are lacking a critical piece of information to judge the overall progress towards greener energy... Like what is the actual percentage of power over a realistic period of time? So, what was the percentage over the past month or last month for instance?
All I've heard so far is that they have primarily replaced nuclear power with coal which is a terrible situation for the environment and health. And it appears that Merkel is basically covering up the fact that the knee jerk reaction to eliminate nuclear power has been an environmental disaster with very real negative health, environmental and Climate change effects all to eliminate an energy source with very little risk and a huge environmental benefit compared to all other energy sources.
If we wanted to go back to AOL's gated network of the 1990s we would invent a time machine and cover it with AOL CDs.
We the customers are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth to the Internet and we have long since paid for the build out of the Fiber Optic network infrastructure through our monthly payments. It is simply fraudulent to be charging customers a fixed price for bandwidth and then effectively limiting peering to other networks so as to create an incentive for other networks and content providers to pay off the Telecoms to provide that telecoms customers their content as a service... these are services we as customers are already ostensibly paying for or are requesting. It isn't like a content provider can turn on your computer or tv and make you download their content... the Internet is primarily about end users initiating some communication and either the computer on the other end responds or not. Verizon or Comcast sitting in the middle and deciding which communications should get a fast lane based upon who has the most cash is just a bad way to run a communications network and a bad way to regulate a free market.
Sure transparency in what kind of peering arrangements telecoms have with other companies all contracts regarding quality of service or internet connections could be useful for regulators who might have the time to spend years sifting through all that paperwork to figure out what is good for the free market or not, but it is no substitution for net neutrality which would assure customers that they are actually getting the bandwidth and good faith service they are paying for rather than perniciously getting fleeced at both ends with service that the telecoms feel free to effectively throttle down whenever they feel like it despite apparent contracts with their customers to provide a certain level of service.
Oh and don't forget the political parties (limited to just the established ones) that will be exempted.
That is true, that's why campaign finance reform is not a magic bullet. Another necessary change is term limits for all of Congress, so that we can replace career politicians with civilian public servants, as it was meant to be.
I might agree with you if you also term limited other public officials and even low or mid level bureaucrats. The real power in Washington is the Bureaucracy which can outlast any single administration or any 8 years of Congress. The entrenched interests are not limited to the elected politicians, but all the individuals that make careers out of government money, government contracts and playing the system. It can take years or decades to fathom just part of the Federal Bureaucracy, let alone be in a position to make decisions over regulations, oversight and spending.
The problem to me seems that regular folks don't seem to understand or care (or think they can do anything about) creating a system of government where the rule of law prevails instead of the rule of committees, boards and commissions. There is a difference between the rule of law with people executing that law and a law that simply abdicates to the discretion of men and the corrupting influence that it has.