The Gold standard wouldn't help very much, actually it would have made things worse.
Since at least for 100 years, the amount of gold added each year to the available gold reserves doesn't keep pace with the productivity increases, which means that there is less and less gold available to distribute between the creators of wealth. With the Gold standard, there wouldn't be any incentive to increase productivity at all, as the available wealth increase is limited by the amount of gold mined, not by the available productivity.
Until the First World War, there was an accepted way to get out of the Gold trap: War against someone who has gold and get hold of his gold to distribute between your local creators of productivity. Since then, conquering other countries and robbing their gold has been frowned upon. Thus there is simply not enough gold available to pay for the possible productivity increases, and keeping the gold standard would just strangle any economy.
You can get pretty good data for instance from Austria. The country has collected daily weather data since the mid 18th century, for more than 250 years. And you can easily tell that this data is not tampered with as you can still view the original sheets. And yes, this data shows a positive slope - an increase in temperature of about two degrees Celsius. Same is valid for Germany, where the observatory in Potsdam likewise has collected data since 250 years. And yes, also there you can see a two degrees Celsius increase in temperature.
The same is valid for about any place that has a long history of collecting weather data, be it Greenwich or Boston: Everywhere you can look at the actual manual recordings of the time. So your claim that the data was generally tampered with looks quite suspicious to me.
Whenever this claim comes up, and some people try to back it up by digging through the raw data, the end of story is that they come up with the same results than the climate scientists.
At least if they are honest. Then you get something like the Berkeley Project.
I've seen graphs floating around which claim to show different, and whenever you look at the data set they claim to be based on, you see that they were creatively manipulated to show the foregone conclusion. So the blame goes in the opposite direction. The non-AGW graphs are mostly fabricated by sometimes cleverly, but mostly bluntly manipulating the raw data.
Isn't that how it is supposed to be? Someone invests in something to get the money back due to increased revenue? I don't see the problem. Please elaborate!
It was the same with Germany at the beginning of the 19th century, with the U.S. at the end of the 19th century, with Japan in the 1950ies and Taiwan in the 1970ies. It always takes some time for a society to learn all aspects of a trade, and until then, it it is mostly trying to copy the perceived leaders. What else is there except asking: How did they do it? and then trying to figure it out by trying it yourself. And if there is not much of intellectual property to protect inside a country, there is no incentive to even have this protection. And even more: the U.S. needed decades after introducing protections for domestic works and inventions, to expand that protection to those of foreign origin. You can read the letters of complaints Charles Dickens wrote when he learned that in the U.S., his novels were reprinted and sold cheaply, and he wasn't able to do anything about it. Only when cheap rip-offs of their own products started to flood the export markets of the U.S., it agreed to allow similar protections to foreigners.
I would rather guess that the NSA knew about their own backdoor, and thus they suspected China of doing the same. It's a rule of thumb for me: If one side in a conflict warns about shenanigans from the other side which are not provable yet, you can safely assume that a) the first side thought about it themself and b) has already implemented it.
This is not about breaking cryptography. Ever governmental agency can legally force domestic companies to include a backdoor and keep their mouth shut about it. China was publicly suspected of shipping one with Huawei products, probably in an attempt to twart Huawei's success in selling them to U.S. customers and customers in their allied countries.
This is about deliberately sell defective products to about anyone.
I would applaud the NSA if they managed to include their backdoor in Huawei products. That would have been quite a stunt.
Neo-Conservativism is very strong on social Darwinism, and Adolf Hitler was very into social Darwinism. Bang! Parallels!
Libertarianism is very strong on selfdefense against whatever you perceive as a threat. Adolf Hitler was very into strong selfdefense against everything he perceived as a threat. Bang! Parallels.
As I said: If you want to spot parallels to blame an ideology, you will find one.
And also not so different from any other ideology, you find similarities to Ayn Rand and to Neo-Conservatives, to Bible Belt Christians and to the NRA, to the Black Power Movement and to whatever ideology you want to blame.
Microsoft Word rose to prominence while at first, it was able to read many of the document formats out there. If you had an early Word version, you could be quite sure that you could open most of the documents anyone else sent you, quite different to the competition, which focussed on their own format. In lieu of a standard document format, Word was a standard document processor, one that could process Ami Pro and WordStar, WordPerfect and DisplayWrite.
Excel rose to prominence because it was the first usable spreadsheet program running under Windows, and it was able to read Lotus 1-2-3 files created in DOS. Lotus was slow with porting 1-2-3 to Windows, hence the timing advantage for Excel. And Excel in itself, some versions old on Macintosh and released already for Windows 2.0, by the time Windows became more widespread, was a very solid and capable program.
Actually, the most profitable and larges products have all been products that followed lots of standards. You know how many standards a car has to comply with? Or a television set?
We tend to ignore how many standards products follow even if we call then "proprietary".
Standards make sense. Standards allow for cooperation. Standards allow for modularization. Standards make complexity manageable and provide clear interfaces. Standards reduce the risk of the unexpected. And standards actually spur innovation, because they reduce the depth of product design necessary. If you had to design everything from your power generators, cables, distribution systems, sockets, plugs, screws, nuts, batteries, power supplies, down to mobile phone standards, antennas, receivers, phone number routing, RAM and ROM modules to make a mobile phone, how many innovation would be out there? Luckily there are some standards where you can just expect things to work[tm], and you can concentrate to innovate exactly the part you have some interesting ideas for. As long as you don't decide for a certain mobile phone because of the power supply it comes with, it makes no sense to have a proprietary power supply. Use a standard one! There is only one field were standardization creates unwanted problems: In the fields where the actual innovation happens. If you really want to design the better power supply or the better socket-and-plug system, that yields advantages for its users, having a standard for sockets and plugs hamper you. But for as long as I am using mobile phones, the way to charge them has been always the same for me. There was no innovation that was visible to me in the design of power supplies.
Yes. Because we are talking mountains here. 1K temperatur change means the permafrost limit moves up 1000 feet. Slopes that have been locked into permafrost 100 years ago are now thawing and 1000 feet of rocks can turn into mudslides.
We had that "let innovation run and the market will decide" for two decades, and the result was that we had new formats for charger, plugs and phone sockets twice a year, and none of them actually got more functionality. But instead we had cars full of 12 V plug-ins, we went frantically to the next store when we found out that the one charger we just need was broken or left at home. Our drawers filled with cables and converters and plugs, and we couldn't remember which device belongs to which.
Now I have exactly one plug in my car, it features two USB ports, and I can charge about everything, camera, each phone of my family, the tablets, and even my shaver. And I have three chargers, and they are sufficient to power all the devices too, and they will fit to each of them.
Sorry, mate. Chargers, plugs and cables were the sign of a big market failure. It was like the old times in the U.S. rail before the Great Pacific Railway, when going from Philadelphia to Charleston required seven changes of trains because of different gauges.
If you a member of a union in Germany, of course you have to pay a due. And of course the unions are closely associated with a party. Moreso, each party has their own union, and the leading union members are also high ranking party officials. For instance, in Germany, there is one teacher's union, the GEW, which is associated with the Social Democrats, and another one, the Philologenverband, which has close connections to the right leaning CDU (the party of Chancellor Merkel).
The main negative effects around here are more rockslides because of the mountaintops coming out of permafrost and dry spells because the glaciers don't provide any water buffer anymore.
Actually, Mickey Mouse was not an original character. Walt Disney together with Ub Iwerks created Oscar the Lucky Rabbit before, which looks exactly like Mickey Mouse with the exception of the ears. Later, when Walt Disney founded his own company, he just redesigned Oscar into a mouse.
No, society is not the government (except in some libertarian fantasyland of people who never experienced living in a non-societal environment).
You could actually go and try to buy all the services a society (and that includes much more than just a government) provides at market rates. And then you would find out that no one except the super rich can afford to live.
But here lies the first roadblock: "buying" is a concept only a certain type of society provides. Many tribal communities for instance don't know the concept of buying. Remembering the words we give to things and rules how to arrange words to transport meaning is a service a society provides, and it works perfectly well without a government. Remembering how to write and transfer this knowledge to the next generation is a concept a society provides, and no, it doesn't need a government for that. Transferring all knowledge written down to the next generation is a concept a society provides, and even then you don't need a government for that. And yes, the family is part of a society, and it can provide the basic services a society provides. But the scope of a family is limited. Most people you know are not family. But they are still society.
The need of a government arises when the number of people increases, so we more often meet people we don't know than those we know. Then one concept society provides, mutual trust coming out of knowing each other, is no longer working well. We have to organize the meeting of other people in a way that it pays in most cases not to harm them and that we have a good idea beforehand how they will behave. Organizing a society means rules, laws and persons tasked with keeping track of the rules and laws and enforcing them by deliberately harming people who don't stay within the rules - bang! government.
Small businesses hire FAR more employees and put FAR more back into the local economy than large companies who have the political clout to win abatements.
To be fair: A large share of the higher hiring numbers for small businesses is a statistical fluke. You put the limit between small and large businesses arbitrarily at some number (lets say: 100 employees). Businesses will grow and shrink all the time, and there will be always businesses that cross the line between small and large. Whenever a business adds employes and thus becomes larger than 100 employees, it's a small business hiring. If the same business goes bust or has to fire employees, and thus shrinks back below 100 employes, it's a large business reducing workforce. But it's the same business, just crossing the boundary from different directions and thus classified differently.
This effect will occur at any limit you set between small businesses and large businesses. It could be 10 people, 100, 250, 500 or 1000. You will always have businesses growing, and if they cross the line, it's a small business growing. And you will always have businesses shrinking, and if they cross the line, it's a large business shrinking.
On the contrary: Income tax is very moral. It's the laws and rules and protections and education of a society that allows you to generate an income in the first place. And thus, you should reward the society with a share of your income.
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Since at least for 100 years, the amount of gold added each year to the available gold reserves doesn't keep pace with the productivity increases, which means that there is less and less gold available to distribute between the creators of wealth. With the Gold standard, there wouldn't be any incentive to increase productivity at all, as the available wealth increase is limited by the amount of gold mined, not by the available productivity.
Until the First World War, there was an accepted way to get out of the Gold trap: War against someone who has gold and get hold of his gold to distribute between your local creators of productivity. Since then, conquering other countries and robbing their gold has been frowned upon. Thus there is simply not enough gold available to pay for the possible productivity increases, and keeping the gold standard would just strangle any economy.
The same is valid for about any place that has a long history of collecting weather data, be it Greenwich or Boston: Everywhere you can look at the actual manual recordings of the time. So your claim that the data was generally tampered with looks quite suspicious to me.
At least if they are honest. Then you get something like the Berkeley Project.
I've seen graphs floating around which claim to show different, and whenever you look at the data set they claim to be based on, you see that they were creatively manipulated to show the foregone conclusion. So the blame goes in the opposite direction. The non-AGW graphs are mostly fabricated by sometimes cleverly, but mostly bluntly manipulating the raw data.
Isn't that how it is supposed to be? Someone invests in something to get the money back due to increased revenue? I don't see the problem. Please elaborate!
It was the same with Germany at the beginning of the 19th century, with the U.S. at the end of the 19th century, with Japan in the 1950ies and Taiwan in the 1970ies. It always takes some time for a society to learn all aspects of a trade, and until then, it it is mostly trying to copy the perceived leaders. What else is there except asking: How did they do it? and then trying to figure it out by trying it yourself. And if there is not much of intellectual property to protect inside a country, there is no incentive to even have this protection. And even more: the U.S. needed decades after introducing protections for domestic works and inventions, to expand that protection to those of foreign origin. You can read the letters of complaints Charles Dickens wrote when he learned that in the U.S., his novels were reprinted and sold cheaply, and he wasn't able to do anything about it. Only when cheap rip-offs of their own products started to flood the export markets of the U.S., it agreed to allow similar protections to foreigners.
I would rather guess that the NSA knew about their own backdoor, and thus they suspected China of doing the same. It's a rule of thumb for me: If one side in a conflict warns about shenanigans from the other side which are not provable yet, you can safely assume that a) the first side thought about it themself and b) has already implemented it.
This is about deliberately sell defective products to about anyone.
I would applaud the NSA if they managed to include their backdoor in Huawei products. That would have been quite a stunt.
Libertarianism is very strong on selfdefense against whatever you perceive as a threat. Adolf Hitler was very into strong selfdefense against everything he perceived as a threat. Bang! Parallels.
As I said: If you want to spot parallels to blame an ideology, you will find one.
And also not so different from any other ideology, you find similarities to Ayn Rand and to Neo-Conservatives, to Bible Belt Christians and to the NRA, to the Black Power Movement and to whatever ideology you want to blame.
Excel rose to prominence because it was the first usable spreadsheet program running under Windows, and it was able to read Lotus 1-2-3 files created in DOS. Lotus was slow with porting 1-2-3 to Windows, hence the timing advantage for Excel. And Excel in itself, some versions old on Macintosh and released already for Windows 2.0, by the time Windows became more widespread, was a very solid and capable program.
We tend to ignore how many standards products follow even if we call then "proprietary".
Standards make sense. Standards allow for cooperation. Standards allow for modularization. Standards make complexity manageable and provide clear interfaces. Standards reduce the risk of the unexpected. And standards actually spur innovation, because they reduce the depth of product design necessary. If you had to design everything from your power generators, cables, distribution systems, sockets, plugs, screws, nuts, batteries, power supplies, down to mobile phone standards, antennas, receivers, phone number routing, RAM and ROM modules to make a mobile phone, how many innovation would be out there? Luckily there are some standards where you can just expect things to work[tm], and you can concentrate to innovate exactly the part you have some interesting ideas for. As long as you don't decide for a certain mobile phone because of the power supply it comes with, it makes no sense to have a proprietary power supply. Use a standard one! There is only one field were standardization creates unwanted problems: In the fields where the actual innovation happens. If you really want to design the better power supply or the better socket-and-plug system, that yields advantages for its users, having a standard for sockets and plugs hamper you. But for as long as I am using mobile phones, the way to charge them has been always the same for me. There was no innovation that was visible to me in the design of power supplies.
Until now, they weren't able to find the needle in the haystack. And now they have the solution: More hay!
According to Linking over controlled Interface this is not a problem, as long as the OpenJDK license allows linking via the OpenJDK API.
Yes. Because we are talking mountains here. 1K temperatur change means the permafrost limit moves up 1000 feet. Slopes that have been locked into permafrost 100 years ago are now thawing and 1000 feet of rocks can turn into mudslides.
Now I have exactly one plug in my car, it features two USB ports, and I can charge about everything, camera, each phone of my family, the tablets, and even my shaver. And I have three chargers, and they are sufficient to power all the devices too, and they will fit to each of them.
Sorry, mate. Chargers, plugs and cables were the sign of a big market failure. It was like the old times in the U.S. rail before the Great Pacific Railway, when going from Philadelphia to Charleston required seven changes of trains because of different gauges.
If you a member of a union in Germany, of course you have to pay a due. And of course the unions are closely associated with a party. Moreso, each party has their own union, and the leading union members are also high ranking party officials. For instance, in Germany, there is one teacher's union, the GEW, which is associated with the Social Democrats, and another one, the Philologenverband, which has close connections to the right leaning CDU (the party of Chancellor Merkel).
The main negative effects around here are more rockslides because of the mountaintops coming out of permafrost and dry spells because the glaciers don't provide any water buffer anymore.
Spain has 100% hispanics, but not the problem the U.S. has. Try again!
Most teachers in the other countries are union members too. Thus this can't be the problem. It's the scapegoat.
Actually, Mickey Mouse was not an original character. Walt Disney together with Ub Iwerks created Oscar the Lucky Rabbit before, which looks exactly like Mickey Mouse with the exception of the ears. Later, when Walt Disney founded his own company, he just redesigned Oscar into a mouse.
You could actually go and try to buy all the services a society (and that includes much more than just a government) provides at market rates. And then you would find out that no one except the super rich can afford to live.
But here lies the first roadblock: "buying" is a concept only a certain type of society provides. Many tribal communities for instance don't know the concept of buying. Remembering the words we give to things and rules how to arrange words to transport meaning is a service a society provides, and it works perfectly well without a government. Remembering how to write and transfer this knowledge to the next generation is a concept a society provides, and no, it doesn't need a government for that. Transferring all knowledge written down to the next generation is a concept a society provides, and even then you don't need a government for that. And yes, the family is part of a society, and it can provide the basic services a society provides. But the scope of a family is limited. Most people you know are not family. But they are still society.
The need of a government arises when the number of people increases, so we more often meet people we don't know than those we know. Then one concept society provides, mutual trust coming out of knowing each other, is no longer working well. We have to organize the meeting of other people in a way that it pays in most cases not to harm them and that we have a good idea beforehand how they will behave. Organizing a society means rules, laws and persons tasked with keeping track of the rules and laws and enforcing them by deliberately harming people who don't stay within the rules - bang! government.
Small businesses hire FAR more employees and put FAR more back into the local economy than large companies who have the political clout to win abatements.
To be fair: A large share of the higher hiring numbers for small businesses is a statistical fluke. You put the limit between small and large businesses arbitrarily at some number (lets say: 100 employees). Businesses will grow and shrink all the time, and there will be always businesses that cross the line between small and large. Whenever a business adds employes and thus becomes larger than 100 employees, it's a small business hiring. If the same business goes bust or has to fire employees, and thus shrinks back below 100 employes, it's a large business reducing workforce. But it's the same business, just crossing the boundary from different directions and thus classified differently.
This effect will occur at any limit you set between small businesses and large businesses. It could be 10 people, 100, 250, 500 or 1000. You will always have businesses growing, and if they cross the line, it's a small business growing. And you will always have businesses shrinking, and if they cross the line, it's a large business shrinking.
On the contrary: Income tax is very moral. It's the laws and rules and protections and education of a society that allows you to generate an income in the first place. And thus, you should reward the society with a share of your income.
Actually, the people who cheer to men being raped are mostly the same population that blame feminists for everything.
If there was an additional punishment, it would be unconstitutional.