It's important to be clear that El Nino-induced fires can account for short-term variations (interannual, or so). However, the things that burn only have carbon to emit because they extracted it from the atmosphere, so this result has no effect on the interpretation of CO2 trends over longer time scales.
In other words, if I think that poverty in developing nations contributes to terrorism and political instability, then I should buy from Delphi in order to support the kind of economic growth that will bring democracy, stability, and peace to the developing world.
the message about media was pretty clear to me. Like a hammer in the face.
I'm afraid the hammer seems to have stunned you. Sure there was the message about the media, but that's not what the movie was about. The movie was about Oliver Stone indulging his taste for graphic brutality and making a pile of money. The "message" about the media was just put in so he could be politically correct.
If you got the message, did Stone make you feel deep sorrow for Mickey and Mallory's innocent victims? Or did Stone shoot the movie in a way that hardened the audience's heart against sympathy for the characters who were not evil?
If Stone was serious about his concern that the media glorify and encourage violence, then he would have provided some reflection of the fact that NBK itself glorified and encouraged such violence, but Stone was afraid to do that.
If you want a good example of what it could have been if Stone were serious about the "message about the media" bit, you might check out C'est arrive pres de chez vous"
Claiming to watch NBK for the message about the media is a lot like claiming to read Hustler for its incisive political commentary.
Let's see... One country helped the US win its independence from Britain. The other attacked us in the most dastardly fashion at Pearl Harbor. Which one should we support?
No, it is naive to think that it has an effect based on superstition when there is no evidence that there is any effect.
What do you mean, "no evidence," pardner? Historically (e.g., throughout the late Pleistocene), every time there has been a significant decrease in CO2 concentrations, global temperatures fell significantly (think ice ages) and every time CO2 concentrations rose significantly, global temperatures rose (end of ice ages).
The tight correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature does not prove causality (in fact, the relation between temperature and CO2 seems to be a loop, with causation going in both directions), but even without being 100% conclusive, this is certainly powerful evidence for believing that increasing CO2 levels beyond anything the world has seen in the last 500,000 years will indeed have a significant effect on climate.
As many economists have pointed out, a major problem with tradable emissions permits is that the government is still trying to set limits on emissions. There are two problems:
How would you enforce CO2 emissions limits on things like individual automobiles (which emit about 30% of the anthropogenic CO2 produced in the US) and home heating/air conditioning, etc?
How would you trust the government to come up with the optimal CO2 emissions limits and how would the government achieve the flexibility to revise these limits as new information became available?
Carbon taxes, set to the value of the social cost of climate change, offer a way for the market to achieve optimal emission levels and keep the government out of the central planning business.
Actually that's a pretty facile excuse. The real point of NBK was to show as much brutal violence as possible while pretending not to take prurient pleasure in it.
If the point was to illustrate the media's fascination with violence in any critical way, Stone would not have taken such obvious pleasure in the brutality.
Re:Kind of emphasizes a major point.
on
Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
True, there's no accurate model, but the focus on accurate models misses the big picture:
Real-time sampline, supplemented with ice-core data indicates that the CO2 levels are higher than they've been in the last half-million years. Almost all the increase over the last 10,000 years occurred since 1950.
Ice-core data comparing hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios with carbon dioxide levels indicates that for the past half-million years, every time the CO2 level in the atmosphere went up, the temperature rose too; every time CO2 decreased, the temperature decreased.
So we have a basic phenomenon of greenhouse warming, which is universally acknowledged. The theory of how this warming may be modified by anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and other gases is not complete. But we do have lots of historical data over many ice-age cycles that shows a strong correlation between greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature. Why, then, would you conclude that concerns over this are merely political? Is it your idea that we can't draw any useful inferences from empirical data unless they're backed up by theory?
Platoon for the 8-bit Nintendo completely missed Oliver Stone's anti-war message
I'm still trying to figure out what Oliver Stone is about. Was he saying that we should not have been in Vietnam so that all those Natural Born Killers could practice their trade in the good old USA instead of doing it to My Lai?
I can see the further parallels to Prohibition, with entry to speakeasies controlled by passwords like "John said to tell you I'm OK" whispered through a hole in the door.
Let's say I'm making cheap USB drives. If I want to do much business selling devices at that price point, I should be selling over a million units per year to stay in the hardware business. At that rate, I will quickly hit the $250,000 cap on Microsoft's license and I won't have to pay any per-unit royalties after the first year. Remember that the royalty cap is per manufacturer, not per product.
Meanwhile from the consumer's point of view, the difference between a $50.00 drive and a $50.50 drive is 1%. If consumers were strongly motivated by 1% price differences, we'd see stores advertising 1% off sales.
Scientists are not united on almost anything. There are still scientists who believe that people aren't warming the atmosphere. There are scientists who don't believe in evolution. There are scientists who believe that cold nuclear fusion has been demonstrated in the laboratory.
What's interesting with the idea that the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere come from volcanoes is that it's pretty hard to get past Ockham's razor with the idea that volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide were flat over the last 10,000 years and then suddenly demonstrated exponential growth in the last century, in direct proportion to human use of fossil fuels. It's possible, but it strains the general mode of scientific inference.
Similarly, it's hard to explain the cycle of Pleistocene ice ages if you don't include modulation of greenhouse warming caused by changing CO2 and CH4 levels as an amplifier of Milankovich forcing. It would be possible to invoke volcanoes and solar fluctuations, but there is hard data that demonstrates the variation of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 in synch with the Milankovich cycles and there's no evidence that volcanoes and solar brightness were similarly synchronized, nor any plausible reason why they should have been.
I don't get your reasoning. It's not the manufacturer who has to eat the cost of the license. It's the consumer. If the mfg. pays $0.25 for the license, tacks $0.50 onto what he charges the distributor, he's selling the license at a 100% markup. How does this lose money?
The distributor in turn pays $0.50 extra to the mfg to cover license fees and raises the price to the consumer by $1.00, so the consumer pays $1.00, the distributor pockets a $0.50 markup and the manufacturer pockets a $0.25 markup on the license fee. Neither eats any loss because they pass their costs on to the consumer.
About that $50,000 the distributor pays for license fees on 100,000 units, which retail for $400 and thus wholesale for around $200, this represents only 0.25% of the total distribution costs. Since the distributor raises his price to the consumer, he gets $100,000 more from the end sales. All has to do is make sure that he doesn't pay more than $50,000 in finance charges on the $50,000 licensing fees while waiting to sell the units. At standard interest rates, this means that he needs to unload his inventory in less than 14 years.
The retail price is something like 3X the build price.
Then raise the price by $0.75. Go whole hog and raise it a dollar. I still don't see raising the price of a memory card by a dollar would affect sales a lot. Raising the price of a digital camera, MP3 player, or PDA by a dollar would have even less impact.
25 cents is a huge cost delta for the build price of a piece of hardware
So raise the selling price of a CF card from $50.00 to $50.25 and raise the price of a digital camera from $500.00 to $500.25. Will this price increase really affect demand in a measurable way?
Where do you get "hundreds of dollars to make?" I have a much nicer HP camera than that, which I bought for $75.00 (2 megapixel with an LCD screen, movie capability, and a CF card slot so I can take many pictures.
Now standard retail economics says that the wholesale price was probably half of what I paid, or about $40.00. Presuming that the manufacturer makes some profit, the cost to make my camera was probably around $15-20.
So the cost of manufacturing the Ritz dispo-digital is probably abount $5-10.
When you assemble them, it tells you a lot about most of Europe. This fits nicely with proxy data of the sort the paper disputes.
The paper discusses Northern Hemisphere climate much more than Southern hemisphere and restricts many of its claims to the NH, so European data is quite relevant. Moreover, the paper takes on European data explicitly in a number of places (charts claim to show errors regarding Paris, Greenland, and Central Europe.
I don't get any sense from the review whether the changes make it worth buying the new edition if I already own (and have committed to memory) the first edition.
The data presented by the researchers indicate that the late 15th century was warmer than the 20th. This is a bit strange, given that historical records from that period (e.g., diocesan annals, crop records, etc.) report sudden and significant cooling and glaciation starting around 1450. This is reflected in the "erroneous" record in Fig. 8 of the paper, but has been "corrected" out.
So were all the 15th century records of cold weather and advancing ice phony? Was the world really warmer and milder than today? Was there a vast conspiracy in the late 1400s to record phony accounts of the weather in order that 20th century environmentalists would believe in Global Warming? I don't think so!
Most modern nanotech is fixed, a.k.a. it comes with batteries that cannot be replaced. Once the device runs out of power, it dies.
Actually, most modern nanotech doesn't need power. The largest nanotech markets are not for bots or other active devices, but for monodispersed crystals or ceramic dust. The cosmetics industry buys large quantities of nanotech for use in makeup and skin creams.
The article has nothing to do with gray goo and nanorobots. It's talking about the toxicity of buckyballs, nanotubes, and nanocrystalline ceramics.
It quotes a scientist at DuPont saying that he's never seen anything as deadly as inhaled nanotubes and quotes some biotech VCs saying that there are real problems with buckyball-based pharmaceuticals because nobody knows how to assess the toxicity.
this is very similar to the petagon papers, except it is against a private company
More like the Brown & Williamson tobacco papers. In May 1994, someone (probably a B&W paralegal) photocopied 4000 pages of internal documents and anonymously mailed them to Shelton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, with the return address "Mr. Butts."
Glantz put the papers in the university library, where they were available to researchers. B&W sued for the return of the papers on the ground that the papers were protected by attorney-client privilege, but the California Supreme Court ruled in June 1995 that the university had first-amendment rights to make the papers available to the public, so they scanned them and published on the web.
The legal reasoning was that "there is... a very strong public interest in permitting this particular information, judging from what has been shown in the papers, as to what it concerns, permitting this information to remain available for use by the university or by others who may obtain it from the university."
Damn, that's nice. I take back what I said. I haven't been able to do exposures with a Nikon DSLR like the ones you point to, but clearly Canon cameras can manage it. Cool!
Slashdot Mirror
It's important to be clear that El Nino-induced fires can account for short-term variations (interannual, or so). However, the things that burn only have carbon to emit because they extracted it from the atmosphere, so this result has no effect on the interpretation of CO2 trends over longer time scales.
In other words, if I think that poverty in developing nations contributes to terrorism and political instability, then I should buy from Delphi in order to support the kind of economic growth that will bring democracy, stability, and peace to the developing world.
I'm afraid the hammer seems to have stunned you. Sure there was the message about the media, but that's not what the movie was about. The movie was about Oliver Stone indulging his taste for graphic brutality and making a pile of money. The "message" about the media was just put in so he could be politically correct.
If you got the message, did Stone make you feel deep sorrow for Mickey and Mallory's innocent victims? Or did Stone shoot the movie in a way that hardened the audience's heart against sympathy for the characters who were not evil?
If Stone was serious about his concern that the media glorify and encourage violence, then he would have provided some reflection of the fact that NBK itself glorified and encouraged such violence, but Stone was afraid to do that.
If you want a good example of what it could have been if Stone were serious about the "message about the media" bit, you might check out C'est arrive pres de chez vous"
Claiming to watch NBK for the message about the media is a lot like claiming to read Hustler for its incisive political commentary.
Let's see... One country helped the US win its independence from Britain. The other attacked us in the most dastardly fashion at Pearl Harbor. Which one should we support?
What do you mean, "no evidence," pardner? Historically (e.g., throughout the late Pleistocene), every time there has been a significant decrease in CO2 concentrations, global temperatures fell significantly (think ice ages) and every time CO2 concentrations rose significantly, global temperatures rose (end of ice ages).
The tight correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature does not prove causality (in fact, the relation between temperature and CO2 seems to be a loop, with causation going in both directions), but even without being 100% conclusive, this is certainly powerful evidence for believing that increasing CO2 levels beyond anything the world has seen in the last 500,000 years will indeed have a significant effect on climate.
-
How would you enforce CO2 emissions limits on things like individual automobiles (which emit about 30% of the anthropogenic CO2 produced in the US) and home heating/air conditioning, etc?
-
How would you trust the government to come up with the optimal CO2 emissions limits and how would the government achieve the flexibility to revise these limits as new information became available?
Carbon taxes, set to the value of the social cost of climate change, offer a way for the market to achieve optimal emission levels and keep the government out of the central planning business.Actually that's a pretty facile excuse. The real point of NBK was to show as much brutal violence as possible while pretending not to take prurient pleasure in it. If the point was to illustrate the media's fascination with violence in any critical way, Stone would not have taken such obvious pleasure in the brutality.
- Real-time sampline, supplemented with ice-core data indicates that the CO2 levels are higher than they've been in the last half-million years. Almost all the increase over the last 10,000 years occurred since 1950.
- Ice-core data comparing hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios with carbon dioxide levels indicates that for the past half-million years, every time the CO2 level in the atmosphere went up, the temperature rose too; every time CO2 decreased, the temperature decreased.
So we have a basic phenomenon of greenhouse warming, which is universally acknowledged. The theory of how this warming may be modified by anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and other gases is not complete. But we do have lots of historical data over many ice-age cycles that shows a strong correlation between greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature. Why, then, would you conclude that concerns over this are merely political? Is it your idea that we can't draw any useful inferences from empirical data unless they're backed up by theory?I'm still trying to figure out what Oliver Stone is about. Was he saying that we should not have been in Vietnam so that all those Natural Born Killers could practice their trade in the good old USA instead of doing it to My Lai?
Swordfish
Meanwhile from the consumer's point of view, the difference between a $50.00 drive and a $50.50 drive is 1%. If consumers were strongly motivated by 1% price differences, we'd see stores advertising 1% off sales.
What's interesting with the idea that the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere come from volcanoes is that it's pretty hard to get past Ockham's razor with the idea that volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide were flat over the last 10,000 years and then suddenly demonstrated exponential growth in the last century, in direct proportion to human use of fossil fuels. It's possible, but it strains the general mode of scientific inference.
Similarly, it's hard to explain the cycle of Pleistocene ice ages if you don't include modulation of greenhouse warming caused by changing CO2 and CH4 levels as an amplifier of Milankovich forcing. It would be possible to invoke volcanoes and solar fluctuations, but there is hard data that demonstrates the variation of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 in synch with the Milankovich cycles and there's no evidence that volcanoes and solar brightness were similarly synchronized, nor any plausible reason why they should have been.
The distributor in turn pays $0.50 extra to the mfg to cover license fees and raises the price to the consumer by $1.00, so the consumer pays $1.00, the distributor pockets a $0.50 markup and the manufacturer pockets a $0.25 markup on the license fee. Neither eats any loss because they pass their costs on to the consumer.
About that $50,000 the distributor pays for license fees on 100,000 units, which retail for $400 and thus wholesale for around $200, this represents only 0.25% of the total distribution costs. Since the distributor raises his price to the consumer, he gets $100,000 more from the end sales. All has to do is make sure that he doesn't pay more than $50,000 in finance charges on the $50,000 licensing fees while waiting to sell the units. At standard interest rates, this means that he needs to unload his inventory in less than 14 years.
Then raise the price by $0.75. Go whole hog and raise it a dollar. I still don't see raising the price of a memory card by a dollar would affect sales a lot. Raising the price of a digital camera, MP3 player, or PDA by a dollar would have even less impact.
Interesting view of the market: it costs $0.25 for the license, but we'll jack up the price by $10.00 and blame Microsoft!
So raise the selling price of a CF card from $50.00 to $50.25 and raise the price of a digital camera from $500.00 to $500.25. Will this price increase really affect demand in a measurable way?
Where do you get "hundreds of dollars to make?" I have a much nicer HP camera than that, which I bought for $75.00 (2 megapixel with an LCD screen, movie capability, and a CF card slot so I can take many pictures. Now standard retail economics says that the wholesale price was probably half of what I paid, or about $40.00. Presuming that the manufacturer makes some profit, the cost to make my camera was probably around $15-20. So the cost of manufacturing the Ritz dispo-digital is probably abount $5-10.
The paper discusses Northern Hemisphere climate much more than Southern hemisphere and restricts many of its claims to the NH, so European data is quite relevant. Moreover, the paper takes on European data explicitly in a number of places (charts claim to show errors regarding Paris, Greenland, and Central Europe.
I don't get any sense from the review whether the changes make it worth buying the new edition if I already own (and have committed to memory) the first edition.
So were all the 15th century records of cold weather and advancing ice phony? Was the world really warmer and milder than today? Was there a vast conspiracy in the late 1400s to record phony accounts of the weather in order that 20th century environmentalists would believe in Global Warming? I don't think so!
Actually, most modern nanotech doesn't need power. The largest nanotech markets are not for bots or other active devices, but for monodispersed crystals or ceramic dust. The cosmetics industry buys large quantities of nanotech for use in makeup and skin creams.
It quotes a scientist at DuPont saying that he's never seen anything as deadly as inhaled nanotubes and quotes some biotech VCs saying that there are real problems with buckyball-based pharmaceuticals because nobody knows how to assess the toxicity.
More like the Brown & Williamson tobacco papers. In May 1994, someone (probably a B&W paralegal) photocopied 4000 pages of internal documents and anonymously mailed them to Shelton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, with the return address "Mr. Butts."
Glantz put the papers in the university library, where they were available to researchers. B&W sued for the return of the papers on the ground that the papers were protected by attorney-client privilege, but the California Supreme Court ruled in June 1995 that the university had first-amendment rights to make the papers available to the public, so they scanned them and published on the web.
The legal reasoning was that "there is ... a very strong public interest in permitting this particular information, judging from what has been shown in the papers, as to what it concerns, permitting this information to remain available for use by the university or by others who may obtain it from the university."
Damn, that's nice. I take back what I said. I haven't been able to do exposures with a Nikon DSLR like the ones you point to, but clearly Canon cameras can manage it. Cool!