It's not implausible that large numbers of two-income households might have increased the level of competition for adequate housing in space constrained areas and pushed the prices out of reach of most of those without two incomes.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
How was it not 'capitalist'?
Because it's not control of production by those individuals who supplied the capital to it. (I'm obviously not counting governments who use tax revenues to establish industries, firstly because they're not individuals, and secondly because it would include typical and obvious communist economies). 'Capitalism' isn't 'favouring an economy with markets in it', nor 'favouring an economy in which some people control large commercial organizations and have a lot of power over the rest of society'. It has a specific meaning: a belief that the individuals who pay for the factory should get to control it, not those who work in it, not those in government, not those who supply it, not those who live near it and not those who buy from it. It doesn't mean that those individuals shouldn't be subject to all sorts of outside pressure, nor does it mean that they should have power outside of their factory. Those may or may not be true, but that's a different question and a different concept.
Naturally, no economy is pure capitalist because such an economy would both serve its purpose poorly and because it's practically impossible with corporations of any size, or with diverse ownership, or where investors haven't got enough time to manage all of their investments properly and have to rely on professional fund managers. The Nazi economy most certainly was not capitalist - those who supplied the capital (taxpayers, people who had property confiscated, people forced to work to create it, etc) had little control over the industry.
Actually it's the job of IT to support the employees who are designing the products that bring in the revenue. It isn't the role of IT to dictate what those employees can use.
IT departments can be given an impossible task. On the one hand their purpose is to be the servant of their users, to help them do their jobs. On the other they're given responsibilities which can only be achieved by being an enforcer which restricts their users and forces them to do things which make their jobs harder. (I'm particularly thinking of data security, but also of disaster recovery, continuity in the face of staff turnover and of legal liability and discovery). Doing one almost always increases the level of failure at the other....more convenient access to data reduces security and vice versa. This makes it almost impossible to present themselves to their users in the way that doesn't make them look inconsistent, attitudinally-challenged, useless, obstructive or incompetent.
Worse, security (and the rest) and ease of performing productive organizational functions have to be balanced. The incentives to get work done are put on the users, the incentives to keep things secure/recoverable/legal on the IT department. No-one is in a position to balance them properly because on-one close enough to them experiences both, and the outcome is that of a power struggle. Users won't demand security unless forced to because it's not their problem (until its too late, anyway, when they can at least know its not their fault). IT departments won't care about security getting in the way of work unless forced to, either, because its insecurity that gets them fired.
I've no idea how it'd work (my guess is 'badly in most environments'), but in theory you could do better by putting responsibility for security, disaster recovery, etc., on the users and having the IT department be their servant in providing it. I bet what would happen, though, is that users would want IT to give them a 'this is secure enough' indemnity when they supply something so that it goes back to being IT's fault when it goes wrong, and IT would hedge all their advice with caution and warnings. But at least that way IT might have to give a clear analysis of the risks to the users they are serving and ask that they accept them....at least then the risk will be more likely to be properly analyzed by someone who knows whether or not they should be taken.
tl;dr version - emissions will go down when it's cheaper to produce green energy than to burn coal, and not one moment before.
It's a little more complicated than that. The costs of those includes local pollution costs - disease, poorer quality of life from poorer air quality, damage to building and crops - and global pollution costs (from climate changes). These costs are ALREADY very likely to be high enough to make a big difference and to tip the balance in favour of reductions in emissions (and, if not, it's not worth trying to reduce global warming through political action anyway).
Emissions will be pushed lower when the PRICE of green energy is lower than coal energy (and oil, etc., eventually). The economic cost of producing energy includes costs which buyers do not pay - by which I mean that an individual buyer does not pay his own individual addition to the costs. The costs I listed are almost entirely in that category. In some countries there are further costs that buyers don't pay because energy is subsidized (in, eg, India and Iran). The are also elements of the price which buyers pay which are not part of the economic cost - taxes.
This leads to an obvious step to take - raise taxes on energy - or, better, CO2 and pollutants from all sources - until the price and cost match. Or are at least closer (there are many limits on our knowledge of the economic cost of the energy, and limits on how closely taxes can match the costs of an individual transaction). Governments generally tax labour income more than any other kind of income. Government should begin moving the burden of their taxation away from labour and on to pollution sources.
This is pretty much a textbook economic argument, and is unfortunately difficult to carry out in practice because taxes on energy are, for whatever stupid reason, more politically sensitive than taxes on labour incomes. I still believe it to be a good idea. Production will move around the world in response, of course, and limit its effectiveness, especially if China doesn't join in....but it already moves around in response to taxes on labour, and this shift would reduce those effects. Oil producing countries would be unhappy, though.....a likely side-effect of, say, higher petrol and diesel taxes is to move tax revenue from producer country governments to consumer country governments.
India and China will develop anyway. It's not like they don't have enough consumers, and it's not like all the knowledge and information required is not available to them. Ultimately, the only competition between India/China and the west is for natural resources. The west has been able to grab a large proportion of the world's natural resources because the west is much better at producing things - cars, aeroplanes, chemicals, drugs, software, services - which it can swap for them. (And as soon as India and China become as good at that resource prices will be enormously higher).
As The Economist pointed out recently, large numbers of people die in heatwaves in India but few in Texas. The differences is air conditioning. It's difficult to tell Indians they aren't allowed to have it. I would go on to say that it'll ultimately be politically impossible for the west to argue that everyone else is allowed a lower limit on emissions per person. China's emissions are approaching European levels, but India's are much lower and they're both a long long way from US levels (and, given self interest, it'll obviously be the US they'll compare themselves to). Reducing western levels of emissions to contemporary Chinese levels, especially in the US, is a political precondition to getting any action from China and India. And, of course, the same technology can be used there.
BTW, IIRC China have claimed to have done more than anyone else to reduce their CO2 emissions - via their one-child policy. I can't remember where or when, but whether they have or not they'd have a point.
What are the different competing mainstream political views in, ummm...., Malaysia? In China? What are the relative strengths of different opinions of the US among far-eastern Russians'? You probably don't know, most people in most countries probably don't know, and it's hardly surprising. I happen to have heard of Michele Bachmann, and of Fox News, and the tea partiers, and Sarah Palin and quite a few others and know a little of US politics.....but I'm an Economist-reading English speaker in a democratic country with a substantially free press and historical links to the US. I know more about US politics than politics in my neighbouring countries. Of course most people in most countries will have a simplified lumped-together view of the US, based on local and US media, the actions of its government, how US-associated products are advertised and perceived, and so on. He might be right, and remain right if he put any other country in that sentence instead of 'US'. Average citizens tend to have simplified views because there are many countries and foreign politics is just not that interesting...they have better things to do.
? You want a product more than the money, the publisher wants the money more than the product. Who's losing? Obviously, it gets more complicated with partially non-rival goods like books, but there's still no reason why it has to be harmful to consumers in principal. It might be, but you've failed to establish that.
It sounds like it was your boss that was the problem rather than the project. If you can't communicate properly to your boss why there is a problem, what it is, what the consequences are, what you will have to do to fix it, approximately how long it will take and which problems/systems have and have not been fixed (and therefore problems are all your responsibility) then it isn't going to work out. That's a lot of work, unlikely to be a lot of fun, and takes two people: you, to give the right information, and him, to actually listen and understand and honestly report it to the rest of the organization. If, after you've communicated properly, he STILL blames you for prior inadequacies he can see (but maybe not admit) are not your fault then you're probably going to have a problem no matter what state the systems are in.
Oh, and you don't say "I took a broken system and made it run like clockwork". You say something more like, if you can, "I specified, designed and deployed a whole new x/y/z system in a successful x month project which reduced support problems/reduced downtime/increased throughput/increased capacity from x to y within existing hardware and budgetary constraints". That demonstrates more than "I took a system which already works well and managed not to break it"
Or just carry plenty along, depending on which is the better choice for mass.
Good plan - the best thing to do is send along a catholic priest. Then, while he's busy transmuting wine in to the blood of christ and bread in to the body of christ, he can transmute stale CO2-ridden air in to the oxygen of christ.
As I've argued in another comment (here), redistributing the wealth of the sort of CEO who receives a $100m severance package won't necessarily have the impact on the consumption of the poor as you might expect. Some, of course, but redistributing $100m of wealth won't necessarily translate to ~$350 of extra consumption for everyone else, especially when the economic climate is more normal.
Secondly, you mention corporations. Corporations which own assets own them as proxies for their owners. Taxing corporations is equivalent to taxing the incomes of their owners. I'd argue it's better to target their owner's incomes (and employees) because then your tax rate will be appropriate to that person's income.....the non-wealthy retired granny living partly on the dividends from the stock she bought when she was younger doesn't then get hit by your tax. In short, I don't believe there to be a second big pot for you to go after for distribution.....not least because big chunks of those pots are also being counted in the wealth of the wealthy via the value of their stock holdings.
Finally, whatever process your favoured economic system uses to distribute or redistribute output will have two effects. It'll have the obvious one, that of causing a different distribution of consumption, but it'll have a secondary one of changing the incentives economic actors face. Redistribution almost always imposes a cost in the form of poorer economic decisions (less output, wrong output, under/over-employment for some individuals, etc.) caused by distorted incentives. Maybe it's vanishingly tiny for those with $100m, maybe that CEO will retire and be replaced with a corporate clone, but it's probably more important for those being paid $500k per year. The cost may be worth it, depending on your views, but it's there.
You haven't said how large you think the effect would be, but I think you may be naive about just how much redistributing the wealth of the wealthy can affect the lives of the poor without broadening your definition of 'wealthy' to include quite a lot of those you might think of as 'middle class'. I'd guess that a much bigger change would come from something else: there are millions who want to consume more, there are millions un/under-employed willing to produce more...join them up.
There's an interesting aspect to this, at least as far as the very very wealthy are concerned (not the top 1%, but maybe the top 0.001%). The share of both wealth and income that, say, Bill Gates has are unlikely to represent the share of economic output he actually consumes.
If your Revolutionary Guard were to execute him and redistribute everything he owns, earns and consumes then mostly what your comrades would receive would be Microsoft stock and other such assets. They'd get some food, cars, energy, land, coach class air travel and so on which they could consume, but mostly what they'd get is control over corporations. They could sell that to someone else, thus further moving around consumption, but it wouldn't turn in to something to eat or drink.
That transfer of control may, of course, fit very well with your objectives. But given that the very-very-rich often use their riches for nothing more than generating more riches whilst gaining control over stuff (mainly because there's only so much you can usefully consume anyway) you should be wary of thinking that taking the $x of wealth owned by the top y% of people means that everyone else can have $x/(pop. * 1-y) more....you might find that mostly what you get is higher prices, at least when more typical economic times return.
It's also between typical people in rich countries and poor ones. Global inequality has been falling whilst, simultaneously, within-country inequality has been rising almost everywhere. So......more offshoring? (grin) (Actually, I suspect that wouldn't work, and that the best way to really help the poor is for richer countries to reduce their raw material use, including food (eg, less meat) and the raw materials in imports).
One of the things the US needs to start doing is paying for its imports. What 'the average manufacturing job in China pays $134 per month' means is that US citizens can exchange a small amount of their own output for the results of a very large amount of Chinese labour, which is very advantageous to them as a whole. However, the US doesn't even send that small amount in exchange....it hands over assets and promises of future exports instead (ie, the Chinese are buying US debt and companies). That's going to mean the US producing more but consuming a smaller proportion of that output, which won't be directly popular but might help with the equity (and joblessness) problem. That's going to imply that the incomes of those currently working will rise more slowly than output, quite possibly more slowly than inflation.
And... what? Will the link explode? Or will the cheap Rolex replica strangle the owner? Just who is actually in danger and need protection?
Smug people who want to shout to the world 'I'm so wealthy that I can afford to spend $5000 on a watch that keeps time less well than one which cost $100' and are now faced not just with the response 'Do you know that you're a gullible idiot?' but also the response 'And it's probably a replica anyway'.
I did give one good reason: future research on it or using it may produce useful information or products. But with huge amounts spent on trading and preserving enormous numbers of ancient human artifacts, historical documents, dinosaur skeletons and old masters just because people like to learn about, learn from, look at and be in the presence of them it isn't a big stretch to apply the same motivation to a species. Many of those were not originally preserved for any specific reason at all.
And maybe their niche will be filled, whether by a new species (eventually) or other species extending their range. But that doesn't mean that the situation afterwards is better for humans or that man will never have a good reason (possibly a very good reason) to try to re-establish it. To throw away forever something of interest to scientists which could be preserved at reasonable cost and will otherwise be impossible to recreate just because there's no five-point-plan to use it is foolish.
The problem as I see it is we in the west can't really do shit.
Stop buying Chinese goods and stop outsourcing to India?
That won't, in the end, stop China and India from developing and industrializing. Some manufacturing would certainly move back to western countries and maybe be done more energy efficiently and cleanly, but as China and India develop consumption by their own populations that'll swamp the effect of western consumption.
That's certainly not an excuse for not doing anything! Ultimately, everyone on the planet should use only their fair share of its pollution absorbing capacity. China and India themselves may wish to limit their pollution, too, for the same reasons the west does. But it's difficult to tell them that they're only allowed a tiny fraction of the pollution-per-person that the west is allowed. At a minimum, the west must do it, too, ultimately to the level we wish China and India to stick to. They probably won't, but it'll certainly be politically impossible to push them in to cutting back if we don't do it, too.
What happened to natural selection? The planet constantly changes, and species die all the time, if ocean temperatures are going to kill them off how do they expect them to survive in a warmer ocean!!
Natural selection is still there. But natural selection is a process, not a goal or a reason or a definition of what ought to happen. Yes, species die all the time, but that's not a good reason not to try to preserve them, even if they can never be re-established in the wild.
I didn't think it was ocean temperatures which were the problem for coral (if so, there must be cooler oceans somewhere), I thought it was ocean chemistry and pH? From what I remember of a lecture on that given by someone studying it, higher CO2 acidifies oceans but this also increases erosion rates on-land, washing more calcium-laden water in to the oceans.....and the past CO2 rises were slow enough to keep ocean chemistry much more balanced, whereas the current one is not.
Maybe I am getting ahead of myself with what there overall plan really is. I am sure there is a detailed plan, even another press article out there.
I wouldn't personally trust a journalist an inch to get across a balanced view of the motivation of even a single scientist, never mind the reasons for doing something. In any case, I can't see why there should be a specific plan. An obvious reason for wanting to preserve and grow these things in captivity is for future research, which could have unknown benefits or at the very least merely be interesting. And if a reason arises, isn't it better to have some stored coral available, providing it's at reasonable cost? Of course, if you want a 'plan' then how about genetically engineering or selecting and breeding coral to be more tolerant of different conditions?
I'm no expert; but they are definitely animals. They can reproduce sexually(since they don't move around much once mature, the do a coordinated mass gamete release and let the water do the mixing). Some can also reproduce by budding or if divided.
I'm not so sure that reproducing sexually is the reason they're classified as animals. Yeast, for example, also reproduces sexually (and by budding or division). Possibly it has more to do with having mouths and eating food.
A degree isn't only about training. It is just as much evidence that you can set a long term goal and achieve it, and jump through all of the hoops necessary along the way.
Not having a degree myself, I find this answer patronizing and just plain wrong. There are many circumstances whee not having a degree is no fault of your ow (including lack of funds/loans, better opportunities, etc). At this point in time, a degree is simply a "checkbox" item for HR to use to filter candidates. No degree, no chance as HR tosses your resume before it gets to anyone doing the actual hiring. So the real problem for you is how to get through the HR filter.
The technical name for it is signaling. Pure signaling works like this: Take two bunches of people, who we'll call Good Programmers and Bad Programmers. Suppose employers can't distinguish between them easily or well. Invent an essentially pointless task which provides no direct benefit whatsoever to anyone but is much harder for Bad Programmers than Good, and so carrying it out imposes a greater cost on Bad than Good. Then, as an employer, offer enough in rewards to make it worthwhile for the Good but not the Bad.
Degrees are not pure signaling, but there's an element. Degrees do not separate people purely based on how good they are as employees - background, culture, money, etc., all come in to the 'cost' of a degree, and the underlying trait selected for isn't perfectly correlated to your value as an employee - but there's an element. Employers do have some power to distinguish between good and bad themselves, but universities do it better and at less cost to each employer with 100 applicants. There's information in whether or not you have a degree, and employers inevitably use this information.
But, yes, there's always going to be some irrational (from the employer's point of view) conservatism when it comes to hiring someone without a degree just because it's not conventional, no matter how much evidence you have of your worth. But it may not be irrational from the HR assessor or interviewer's point of view. Employ someone unusual and you're more likely to get personal blame if he's no good than if on paper he's just like all the good people you already have. So go for smaller employers where there'll be both more variation in attitude and someone (like a business owner) who doesn't have to worry about being sacked.
The real trick to landing a job in this situation is who you know. Get out there and talk to people. Show your skills in a way non-tech people can "get". Impress the right people, and keep them in your back pocket. Every decent job I've had has come by impressing the right people and having them think of me when they see a need. By doing this, they are willing to stick their neck out and tell HR "Interview this guy, regardless of resume".
Yes, I agree, it's a big help. It's still possible to find jobs if you don't know anyone, but you're going to find it harder, especially if you're not so good on paper. But university can be a big help here. You meet a lot of people.
Umm....do you actually have to accept a licence at all? The GPL is effectively a certain set of permission granted to the whole world by the copyright holder, a bit like standing up in a room and shouting 'I give you all permission to use my software'. You've got permission whether you like it or not....but you don't have to use it. It's not like a licence agreement - a contract in which you agree to be bound by/do certain things (such as pay the copyright holder) in exchange for your copyright licence. Surely there is no contract when a GPL licence is granted?
So it's possible that slower deficit reduction (over two parliaments rather than one) will turn out to have been the most sensible and prudent option.
We'll find out in the next two years or so who's right. Although I'm sure if it all goes tits up, the govt will claim it's the eurozone and the world economy entirely to blame and nothing to do with 'overenthusiastic' austerity measures.
I don't think we'll ever find out who is right. There's no low risk strategy, no obvious right answer, and we probably won't know what would have happened had the alternative course been taken. Slower deficit reduction might have resulted in a sudden withdrawal of new credit with worse consequences than a more controlled cutting of government spending, but we won't know whether or not that would have happened. We also won't really know what effect it would have on longer term growth, or as a result of entering the next crisis with more debt, or as a result of it affecting our trade balance (eg, reducing our exports), or as a result of crowding out private sector investment (public borrowing has to come from somewhere, and that means the government having to attract funds away from other investment opportunities, so a direct effect of high debt is higher rates and tighter credit all round).
What REALLY upsets me is not the argument over whether cuts must be 12% or 20%, but politicians persistent abuse of public finances for shorter term personal political gain. Surpluses in 98-02 turned to deficits during a boom to further Gordon Brown's personal ambitions (and he's just an example, it doesn't seem to be unique to a party or country). The failure to pay down debt and prepare for recessions during good times is an important part of this crisis and it's utterly contemptible.
Except that the reason other euro states want to bail out Greece isn't so simple. The Greek government owes a lot of money to banks in other euro countries. If the Greek government were to default then it might lead to those governments having to bail out banks suffering losses on those debts. Having Greece default through a falling currency wouldn't be any easier for those banks. I'm sure that trying to save the euro is contributing a great deal (and contributing to wanting to bail out the Greek government rather than the banks), but the incentive would still be there even if Greece had already left the euro.
I used to shoot recurve bows. A longbow is a plain wooden thing with no sights and is very difficult to use and aim. You could probably hit an army with it, most of the time, but hitting an individual would be very very difficult indeed. You also need to be very strong indeed to go any worthwhile distance (can you lift 50-100lbs with three fingers?). A very good recurve bow archer (not me) could probably hit an individual at 50m usefully frequently, providing the target was standing still and the archer had a chance to get the range right. Arrows from recurve bows drop very significantly in flight and are affected by exactly how much you draw that day (and probably by moisture and certainly wind), so having a moving target or being higher or lower than your target will make your life very difficult indeed. A compound bow would be a lot better....I've never tried one of those. A crossbow will give you one very powerful shot indeed followed by an awful lot of reloading.
So you might be able to assassinate someone, but bows really aren't guns, aren't nearly as efficient or easy to use and aren't something you could carry around casually for self-protection. You probably aren't going to have a loaded bow to hand if you get in to an argument or happen to feel suicidal. You won't be able to carry it along the street without someone noticing, unless it's in pieces in a box in which case you've got five minutes of assembly. They're difficult to carry, large (4-5ft long, say), very hard to conceal, recurve and compound bows weigh several kilograms and you have to hold them at arms length, you have to have some strength to draw them, you can't store them strung, they take some considerable time to prepare and you have to reload, re-draw and re-aim for each shot. They won't penetrate like a bullet and will certainly not pass through a human or tumble inside someone's body. You also need to pay a lot more attention to wind, range, height difference and movement.
I don't know about slings, but bows don't offer nearly the same opportunity for spontaneous stupidity or criminality to a wide audience the way guns do. There's a reason why UK criminals use knives or illegal guns (with a risk of a five year sentence just for possession) rather than a legal bow.
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It's not implausible that large numbers of two-income households might have increased the level of competition for adequate housing in space constrained areas and pushed the prices out of reach of most of those without two incomes.
The Nazis were capitalists.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
How was it not 'capitalist'?
Because it's not control of production by those individuals who supplied the capital to it. (I'm obviously not counting governments who use tax revenues to establish industries, firstly because they're not individuals, and secondly because it would include typical and obvious communist economies). 'Capitalism' isn't 'favouring an economy with markets in it', nor 'favouring an economy in which some people control large commercial organizations and have a lot of power over the rest of society'. It has a specific meaning: a belief that the individuals who pay for the factory should get to control it, not those who work in it, not those in government, not those who supply it, not those who live near it and not those who buy from it. It doesn't mean that those individuals shouldn't be subject to all sorts of outside pressure, nor does it mean that they should have power outside of their factory. Those may or may not be true, but that's a different question and a different concept.
Naturally, no economy is pure capitalist because such an economy would both serve its purpose poorly and because it's practically impossible with corporations of any size, or with diverse ownership, or where investors haven't got enough time to manage all of their investments properly and have to rely on professional fund managers. The Nazi economy most certainly was not capitalist - those who supplied the capital (taxpayers, people who had property confiscated, people forced to work to create it, etc) had little control over the industry.
Actually it's the job of IT to support the employees who are designing the products that bring in the revenue. It isn't the role of IT to dictate what those employees can use.
IT departments can be given an impossible task. On the one hand their purpose is to be the servant of their users, to help them do their jobs. On the other they're given responsibilities which can only be achieved by being an enforcer which restricts their users and forces them to do things which make their jobs harder. (I'm particularly thinking of data security, but also of disaster recovery, continuity in the face of staff turnover and of legal liability and discovery). Doing one almost always increases the level of failure at the other....more convenient access to data reduces security and vice versa. This makes it almost impossible to present themselves to their users in the way that doesn't make them look inconsistent, attitudinally-challenged, useless, obstructive or incompetent.
Worse, security (and the rest) and ease of performing productive organizational functions have to be balanced. The incentives to get work done are put on the users, the incentives to keep things secure/recoverable/legal on the IT department. No-one is in a position to balance them properly because on-one close enough to them experiences both, and the outcome is that of a power struggle. Users won't demand security unless forced to because it's not their problem (until its too late, anyway, when they can at least know its not their fault). IT departments won't care about security getting in the way of work unless forced to, either, because its insecurity that gets them fired.
I've no idea how it'd work (my guess is 'badly in most environments'), but in theory you could do better by putting responsibility for security, disaster recovery, etc., on the users and having the IT department be their servant in providing it. I bet what would happen, though, is that users would want IT to give them a 'this is secure enough' indemnity when they supply something so that it goes back to being IT's fault when it goes wrong, and IT would hedge all their advice with caution and warnings. But at least that way IT might have to give a clear analysis of the risks to the users they are serving and ask that they accept them....at least then the risk will be more likely to be properly analyzed by someone who knows whether or not they should be taken.
Except, of course, a lot of the enterprise business depends on Java clients on desktops to talk to all those J2EE servers. Hence, say, JavaFX.
tl;dr version - emissions will go down when it's cheaper to produce green energy than to burn coal, and not one moment before.
It's a little more complicated than that. The costs of those includes local pollution costs - disease, poorer quality of life from poorer air quality, damage to building and crops - and global pollution costs (from climate changes). These costs are ALREADY very likely to be high enough to make a big difference and to tip the balance in favour of reductions in emissions (and, if not, it's not worth trying to reduce global warming through political action anyway).
Emissions will be pushed lower when the PRICE of green energy is lower than coal energy (and oil, etc., eventually). The economic cost of producing energy includes costs which buyers do not pay - by which I mean that an individual buyer does not pay his own individual addition to the costs. The costs I listed are almost entirely in that category. In some countries there are further costs that buyers don't pay because energy is subsidized (in, eg, India and Iran). The are also elements of the price which buyers pay which are not part of the economic cost - taxes.
This leads to an obvious step to take - raise taxes on energy - or, better, CO2 and pollutants from all sources - until the price and cost match. Or are at least closer (there are many limits on our knowledge of the economic cost of the energy, and limits on how closely taxes can match the costs of an individual transaction). Governments generally tax labour income more than any other kind of income. Government should begin moving the burden of their taxation away from labour and on to pollution sources.
This is pretty much a textbook economic argument, and is unfortunately difficult to carry out in practice because taxes on energy are, for whatever stupid reason, more politically sensitive than taxes on labour incomes. I still believe it to be a good idea. Production will move around the world in response, of course, and limit its effectiveness, especially if China doesn't join in....but it already moves around in response to taxes on labour, and this shift would reduce those effects. Oil producing countries would be unhappy, though.....a likely side-effect of, say, higher petrol and diesel taxes is to move tax revenue from producer country governments to consumer country governments.
India and China will develop anyway. It's not like they don't have enough consumers, and it's not like all the knowledge and information required is not available to them. Ultimately, the only competition between India/China and the west is for natural resources. The west has been able to grab a large proportion of the world's natural resources because the west is much better at producing things - cars, aeroplanes, chemicals, drugs, software, services - which it can swap for them. (And as soon as India and China become as good at that resource prices will be enormously higher).
As The Economist pointed out recently, large numbers of people die in heatwaves in India but few in Texas. The differences is air conditioning. It's difficult to tell Indians they aren't allowed to have it. I would go on to say that it'll ultimately be politically impossible for the west to argue that everyone else is allowed a lower limit on emissions per person. China's emissions are approaching European levels, but India's are much lower and they're both a long long way from US levels (and, given self interest, it'll obviously be the US they'll compare themselves to). Reducing western levels of emissions to contemporary Chinese levels, especially in the US, is a political precondition to getting any action from China and India. And, of course, the same technology can be used there.
BTW, IIRC China have claimed to have done more than anyone else to reduce their CO2 emissions - via their one-child policy. I can't remember where or when, but whether they have or not they'd have a point.
What are the different competing mainstream political views in, ummm...., Malaysia? In China? What are the relative strengths of different opinions of the US among far-eastern Russians'? You probably don't know, most people in most countries probably don't know, and it's hardly surprising. I happen to have heard of Michele Bachmann, and of Fox News, and the tea partiers, and Sarah Palin and quite a few others and know a little of US politics.....but I'm an Economist-reading English speaker in a democratic country with a substantially free press and historical links to the US. I know more about US politics than politics in my neighbouring countries. Of course most people in most countries will have a simplified lumped-together view of the US, based on local and US media, the actions of its government, how US-associated products are advertised and perceived, and so on. He might be right, and remain right if he put any other country in that sentence instead of 'US'. Average citizens tend to have simplified views because there are many countries and foreign politics is just not that interesting...they have better things to do.
? You want a product more than the money, the publisher wants the money more than the product. Who's losing? Obviously, it gets more complicated with partially non-rival goods like books, but there's still no reason why it has to be harmful to consumers in principal. It might be, but you've failed to establish that.
It sounds like it was your boss that was the problem rather than the project. If you can't communicate properly to your boss why there is a problem, what it is, what the consequences are, what you will have to do to fix it, approximately how long it will take and which problems/systems have and have not been fixed (and therefore problems are all your responsibility) then it isn't going to work out. That's a lot of work, unlikely to be a lot of fun, and takes two people: you, to give the right information, and him, to actually listen and understand and honestly report it to the rest of the organization. If, after you've communicated properly, he STILL blames you for prior inadequacies he can see (but maybe not admit) are not your fault then you're probably going to have a problem no matter what state the systems are in.
Oh, and you don't say "I took a broken system and made it run like clockwork". You say something more like, if you can, "I specified, designed and deployed a whole new x/y/z system in a successful x month project which reduced support problems/reduced downtime/increased throughput/increased capacity from x to y within existing hardware and budgetary constraints". That demonstrates more than "I took a system which already works well and managed not to break it"
Or just carry plenty along, depending on which is the better choice for mass.
Good plan - the best thing to do is send along a catholic priest. Then, while he's busy transmuting wine in to the blood of christ and bread in to the body of christ, he can transmute stale CO2-ridden air in to the oxygen of christ.
As I've argued in another comment (here), redistributing the wealth of the sort of CEO who receives a $100m severance package won't necessarily have the impact on the consumption of the poor as you might expect. Some, of course, but redistributing $100m of wealth won't necessarily translate to ~$350 of extra consumption for everyone else, especially when the economic climate is more normal.
Secondly, you mention corporations. Corporations which own assets own them as proxies for their owners. Taxing corporations is equivalent to taxing the incomes of their owners. I'd argue it's better to target their owner's incomes (and employees) because then your tax rate will be appropriate to that person's income.....the non-wealthy retired granny living partly on the dividends from the stock she bought when she was younger doesn't then get hit by your tax. In short, I don't believe there to be a second big pot for you to go after for distribution.....not least because big chunks of those pots are also being counted in the wealth of the wealthy via the value of their stock holdings.
Finally, whatever process your favoured economic system uses to distribute or redistribute output will have two effects. It'll have the obvious one, that of causing a different distribution of consumption, but it'll have a secondary one of changing the incentives economic actors face. Redistribution almost always imposes a cost in the form of poorer economic decisions (less output, wrong output, under/over-employment for some individuals, etc.) caused by distorted incentives. Maybe it's vanishingly tiny for those with $100m, maybe that CEO will retire and be replaced with a corporate clone, but it's probably more important for those being paid $500k per year. The cost may be worth it, depending on your views, but it's there.
You haven't said how large you think the effect would be, but I think you may be naive about just how much redistributing the wealth of the wealthy can affect the lives of the poor without broadening your definition of 'wealthy' to include quite a lot of those you might think of as 'middle class'. I'd guess that a much bigger change would come from something else: there are millions who want to consume more, there are millions un/under-employed willing to produce more...join them up.
There's an interesting aspect to this, at least as far as the very very wealthy are concerned (not the top 1%, but maybe the top 0.001%). The share of both wealth and income that, say, Bill Gates has are unlikely to represent the share of economic output he actually consumes.
If your Revolutionary Guard were to execute him and redistribute everything he owns, earns and consumes then mostly what your comrades would receive would be Microsoft stock and other such assets. They'd get some food, cars, energy, land, coach class air travel and so on which they could consume, but mostly what they'd get is control over corporations. They could sell that to someone else, thus further moving around consumption, but it wouldn't turn in to something to eat or drink.
That transfer of control may, of course, fit very well with your objectives. But given that the very-very-rich often use their riches for nothing more than generating more riches whilst gaining control over stuff (mainly because there's only so much you can usefully consume anyway) you should be wary of thinking that taking the $x of wealth owned by the top y% of people means that everyone else can have $x/(pop. * 1-y) more....you might find that mostly what you get is higher prices, at least when more typical economic times return.
It's also between typical people in rich countries and poor ones. Global inequality has been falling whilst, simultaneously, within-country inequality has been rising almost everywhere. So......more offshoring? (grin) (Actually, I suspect that wouldn't work, and that the best way to really help the poor is for richer countries to reduce their raw material use, including food (eg, less meat) and the raw materials in imports).
One of the things the US needs to start doing is paying for its imports. What 'the average manufacturing job in China pays $134 per month' means is that US citizens can exchange a small amount of their own output for the results of a very large amount of Chinese labour, which is very advantageous to them as a whole. However, the US doesn't even send that small amount in exchange....it hands over assets and promises of future exports instead (ie, the Chinese are buying US debt and companies). That's going to mean the US producing more but consuming a smaller proportion of that output, which won't be directly popular but might help with the equity (and joblessness) problem. That's going to imply that the incomes of those currently working will rise more slowly than output, quite possibly more slowly than inflation.
And... what? Will the link explode? Or will the cheap Rolex replica strangle the owner? Just who is actually in danger and need protection?
Smug people who want to shout to the world 'I'm so wealthy that I can afford to spend $5000 on a watch that keeps time less well than one which cost $100' and are now faced not just with the response 'Do you know that you're a gullible idiot?' but also the response 'And it's probably a replica anyway'.
I did give one good reason: future research on it or using it may produce useful information or products. But with huge amounts spent on trading and preserving enormous numbers of ancient human artifacts, historical documents, dinosaur skeletons and old masters just because people like to learn about, learn from, look at and be in the presence of them it isn't a big stretch to apply the same motivation to a species. Many of those were not originally preserved for any specific reason at all.
And maybe their niche will be filled, whether by a new species (eventually) or other species extending their range. But that doesn't mean that the situation afterwards is better for humans or that man will never have a good reason (possibly a very good reason) to try to re-establish it. To throw away forever something of interest to scientists which could be preserved at reasonable cost and will otherwise be impossible to recreate just because there's no five-point-plan to use it is foolish.
The problem as I see it is we in the west can't really do shit.
Stop buying Chinese goods and stop outsourcing to India?
That won't, in the end, stop China and India from developing and industrializing. Some manufacturing would certainly move back to western countries and maybe be done more energy efficiently and cleanly, but as China and India develop consumption by their own populations that'll swamp the effect of western consumption.
That's certainly not an excuse for not doing anything! Ultimately, everyone on the planet should use only their fair share of its pollution absorbing capacity. China and India themselves may wish to limit their pollution, too, for the same reasons the west does. But it's difficult to tell them that they're only allowed a tiny fraction of the pollution-per-person that the west is allowed. At a minimum, the west must do it, too, ultimately to the level we wish China and India to stick to. They probably won't, but it'll certainly be politically impossible to push them in to cutting back if we don't do it, too.
What happened to natural selection? The planet constantly changes, and species die all the time, if ocean temperatures are going to kill them off how do they expect them to survive in a warmer ocean!!
Natural selection is still there. But natural selection is a process, not a goal or a reason or a definition of what ought to happen. Yes, species die all the time, but that's not a good reason not to try to preserve them, even if they can never be re-established in the wild.
I didn't think it was ocean temperatures which were the problem for coral (if so, there must be cooler oceans somewhere), I thought it was ocean chemistry and pH? From what I remember of a lecture on that given by someone studying it, higher CO2 acidifies oceans but this also increases erosion rates on-land, washing more calcium-laden water in to the oceans.....and the past CO2 rises were slow enough to keep ocean chemistry much more balanced, whereas the current one is not.
Maybe I am getting ahead of myself with what there overall plan really is. I am sure there is a detailed plan, even another press article out there.
I wouldn't personally trust a journalist an inch to get across a balanced view of the motivation of even a single scientist, never mind the reasons for doing something. In any case, I can't see why there should be a specific plan. An obvious reason for wanting to preserve and grow these things in captivity is for future research, which could have unknown benefits or at the very least merely be interesting. And if a reason arises, isn't it better to have some stored coral available, providing it's at reasonable cost? Of course, if you want a 'plan' then how about genetically engineering or selecting and breeding coral to be more tolerant of different conditions?
I'm no expert; but they are definitely animals. They can reproduce sexually(since they don't move around much once mature, the do a coordinated mass gamete release and let the water do the mixing). Some can also reproduce by budding or if divided.
I'm not so sure that reproducing sexually is the reason they're classified as animals. Yeast, for example, also reproduces sexually (and by budding or division). Possibly it has more to do with having mouths and eating food.
A degree isn't only about training. It is just as much evidence that you can set a long term goal and achieve it, and jump through all of the hoops necessary along the way.
Not having a degree myself, I find this answer patronizing and just plain wrong. There are many circumstances whee not having a degree is no fault of your ow (including lack of funds/loans, better opportunities, etc). At this point in time, a degree is simply a "checkbox" item for HR to use to filter candidates. No degree, no chance as HR tosses your resume before it gets to anyone doing the actual hiring. So the real problem for you is how to get through the HR filter.
The technical name for it is signaling. Pure signaling works like this: Take two bunches of people, who we'll call Good Programmers and Bad Programmers. Suppose employers can't distinguish between them easily or well. Invent an essentially pointless task which provides no direct benefit whatsoever to anyone but is much harder for Bad Programmers than Good, and so carrying it out imposes a greater cost on Bad than Good. Then, as an employer, offer enough in rewards to make it worthwhile for the Good but not the Bad.
Degrees are not pure signaling, but there's an element. Degrees do not separate people purely based on how good they are as employees - background, culture, money, etc., all come in to the 'cost' of a degree, and the underlying trait selected for isn't perfectly correlated to your value as an employee - but there's an element. Employers do have some power to distinguish between good and bad themselves, but universities do it better and at less cost to each employer with 100 applicants. There's information in whether or not you have a degree, and employers inevitably use this information.
But, yes, there's always going to be some irrational (from the employer's point of view) conservatism when it comes to hiring someone without a degree just because it's not conventional, no matter how much evidence you have of your worth. But it may not be irrational from the HR assessor or interviewer's point of view. Employ someone unusual and you're more likely to get personal blame if he's no good than if on paper he's just like all the good people you already have. So go for smaller employers where there'll be both more variation in attitude and someone (like a business owner) who doesn't have to worry about being sacked.
The real trick to landing a job in this situation is who you know. Get out there and talk to people. Show your skills in a way non-tech people can "get". Impress the right people, and keep them in your back pocket. Every decent job I've had has come by impressing the right people and having them think of me when they see a need. By doing this, they are willing to stick their neck out and tell HR "Interview this guy, regardless of resume".
Yes, I agree, it's a big help. It's still possible to find jobs if you don't know anyone, but you're going to find it harder, especially if you're not so good on paper. But university can be a big help here. You meet a lot of people.
Umm....do you actually have to accept a licence at all? The GPL is effectively a certain set of permission granted to the whole world by the copyright holder, a bit like standing up in a room and shouting 'I give you all permission to use my software'. You've got permission whether you like it or not....but you don't have to use it. It's not like a licence agreement - a contract in which you agree to be bound by/do certain things (such as pay the copyright holder) in exchange for your copyright licence. Surely there is no contract when a GPL licence is granted?
No, instead they get to pay patent royalties.
So it's possible that slower deficit reduction (over two parliaments rather than one) will turn out to have been the most sensible and prudent option.
We'll find out in the next two years or so who's right. Although I'm sure if it all goes tits up, the govt will claim it's the eurozone and the world economy entirely to blame and nothing to do with 'overenthusiastic' austerity measures.
I don't think we'll ever find out who is right. There's no low risk strategy, no obvious right answer, and we probably won't know what would have happened had the alternative course been taken. Slower deficit reduction might have resulted in a sudden withdrawal of new credit with worse consequences than a more controlled cutting of government spending, but we won't know whether or not that would have happened. We also won't really know what effect it would have on longer term growth, or as a result of entering the next crisis with more debt, or as a result of it affecting our trade balance (eg, reducing our exports), or as a result of crowding out private sector investment (public borrowing has to come from somewhere, and that means the government having to attract funds away from other investment opportunities, so a direct effect of high debt is higher rates and tighter credit all round).
What REALLY upsets me is not the argument over whether cuts must be 12% or 20%, but politicians persistent abuse of public finances for shorter term personal political gain. Surpluses in 98-02 turned to deficits during a boom to further Gordon Brown's personal ambitions (and he's just an example, it doesn't seem to be unique to a party or country). The failure to pay down debt and prepare for recessions during good times is an important part of this crisis and it's utterly contemptible.
Except that the reason other euro states want to bail out Greece isn't so simple. The Greek government owes a lot of money to banks in other euro countries. If the Greek government were to default then it might lead to those governments having to bail out banks suffering losses on those debts. Having Greece default through a falling currency wouldn't be any easier for those banks. I'm sure that trying to save the euro is contributing a great deal (and contributing to wanting to bail out the Greek government rather than the banks), but the incentive would still be there even if Greece had already left the euro.
I used to shoot recurve bows. A longbow is a plain wooden thing with no sights and is very difficult to use and aim. You could probably hit an army with it, most of the time, but hitting an individual would be very very difficult indeed. You also need to be very strong indeed to go any worthwhile distance (can you lift 50-100lbs with three fingers?). A very good recurve bow archer (not me) could probably hit an individual at 50m usefully frequently, providing the target was standing still and the archer had a chance to get the range right. Arrows from recurve bows drop very significantly in flight and are affected by exactly how much you draw that day (and probably by moisture and certainly wind), so having a moving target or being higher or lower than your target will make your life very difficult indeed. A compound bow would be a lot better....I've never tried one of those. A crossbow will give you one very powerful shot indeed followed by an awful lot of reloading.
So you might be able to assassinate someone, but bows really aren't guns, aren't nearly as efficient or easy to use and aren't something you could carry around casually for self-protection. You probably aren't going to have a loaded bow to hand if you get in to an argument or happen to feel suicidal. You won't be able to carry it along the street without someone noticing, unless it's in pieces in a box in which case you've got five minutes of assembly. They're difficult to carry, large (4-5ft long, say), very hard to conceal, recurve and compound bows weigh several kilograms and you have to hold them at arms length, you have to have some strength to draw them, you can't store them strung, they take some considerable time to prepare and you have to reload, re-draw and re-aim for each shot. They won't penetrate like a bullet and will certainly not pass through a human or tumble inside someone's body. You also need to pay a lot more attention to wind, range, height difference and movement.
I don't know about slings, but bows don't offer nearly the same opportunity for spontaneous stupidity or criminality to a wide audience the way guns do. There's a reason why UK criminals use knives or illegal guns (with a risk of a five year sentence just for possession) rather than a legal bow.