Yes, but the consequences of a major nuclear accident are far more serious, wide ranging and long lasting than other forms of energy. That has to be considered when evaluating risk.
No. We kill about 50,000 people per year in the USA alone from coal emissions, which is about 6 Chernobyls every year. Also, there have been dams bursting which killed tens of thousands of people all at once--far more than Fukushima or Chernobyl.
[hydroelectric completely changes ecosystems] Only if you do it wrong.
No. All hydroelectric power requires completely altering the course of large water flows and this severely changes the ecosystem.
How much do you want to bet that Germany and Japan are not like that in 10 or 20 years time?
My bet is that Germany still gets most of its electricity from coal burning and Japan from nuclear.
Had Fukushima been any other type of power station the consequences would not be so severe.
A coal plant poses more than 100x the risk to health and the environment as a nuclear plant with similar output.
You could argue that people are being over cautious, but when it comes to their health and the health of their families people are always going to be very conservative
People are not being over-cautious. We kill 50,000 people per year right now in the USA from coal burning, which is 6 Chernobyls every single year. In addition we risk raising the sea level, inundating large fractions of the terrestrial surface of the earth, badly damaging the entire ecosystem, and negatively affecting billions of people. The response of almost everyone has been "Eh, so what." The problem obviously ISN'T over-cautiousness. The problem is that we respond with irrational panic to scary images on television, while ignoring the real dangers, and while failing to do any rational comparison of the risks. As a result we panic over things like nuclear reactors, mad cow disease, vaccines, nuclear waste in Nevada, SARS, etc, which are all very small risks, while at the same time totally ignoring massively destructive things which are happening all the time.
In the U.S. we decided to abandon our nuclear plans during the 1970s, and we discarded more than 100 reactors which had already been started or were on order. Instead we replaced them all with coal plants, thereby predictably increasing the death rate and killing several million excess people, from emphysema and lung disease, over 4 decades. We did this for safety.
The problem with nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima is that they leave large portions of land unusable for millenia.
If you believe the AGW crowd, then coal will cause a significant fraction of the Earth's terrestrial surface to fall below sea level. Like much of the deep south, and south asia, and northern china.
You should compare the surface area lost to Fukushima against the surface area underwater from even the most conservative global warming projections.
In addition, coal has spread mercury everywhere so children and pregnant women aren't supposed to eat fish anymore. So we can also compare the respective areas of contamination.
The problem with nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima is that they leave large portions of land unusable for millenia.
Nuclear contamination loses more than 99% of its radioactivity within 300 years.
In my opinion [nuclear's dangers are] larger than coal.
Then you are severely misinformed about the relative dangers of each. A coal plant poses more than 100x as much risk to health and the environment than a nuclear plant with similar capacity.
Apotheker showed a shocking poverty of understanding of the empire he was entrusted to run that it makes me seriously question the competency of the people that vetted him?
My sentiment exactly. Apotheker made decisions which were easily predicted to fail. How could he have seriously expected the WebOS tablet thing to be successful. He should have been fired awhile ago, even though he's only been CEO for less than a year.
Instead look a human nature. The primary sin being vanity... Assume the word "I" in double bold capital letters is the most important word in the universe. Assume it's about personal aggrandisement, power etc... Life will start to make more sense to you.
I think it's more likely that Apotheker is just incompetent as a CEO, and he made mistakes.
His incentives are at least somewhat aligned with those of the company. He is paid primarily in options. If HP makes a big profit then his options are worth a lot, he makes tons of money, he is seen as a successful CEO, he continues on in his powerful role, etc.
How does it help his vanity, or power, or personal aggrandisement, to make these silly decisions and then be fired from HP for failing to increase its profits?
On a smaller scale given a particular time-frame, true, but it is inevitable. The value is intrinsic, not extrinsic. For example, the Cotton Gin -objectively- created wealth, and if no one involved with it in the types of roles you mention did as they did historically, it still -inevitably- would have done so, with a different set of ancillary facilitators.
This just means that the investors and laborers are delayed, that they step in later ("inevitable" in your words). If there were really never any investors or laborers (ie the cotton gin was invented but never implemented or used) then it would not have value.
It is merely by the happenstance that an investor happens to have money that the Engineer does not, that the investor is credited with any relevance to the process at all.
It is also merely happenstance that the engineer has understanding of engineering when the investor does not. Thus it is only happenstance that the engineer is credited with any relevance to the process at all.
Of course it's possible for the engineer to save his money and do the investment himself. He could also rent machine tools, and build his creation himself, without laborers. But this doesn't mean that only engineers create value. This means only that one person is acting in all three roles (engineer, investor, laborer) at different times. It would also be possible for an investor to go to engineering school so he can realize his business idea. These scenarios mean only that all functions are necessary but one person has chosen to perform all of them.
Wealth is not dollars-per-unit of time provided by the market.
We're speaking about economics here, so "wealth" refers to something which you own and which has a market price. And the term "value" means something for which consumers are willing to pay money and has greater worth to them than the cost. "Wealth" can involve something that doesn't require engineers at all; for example, diamonds. "Value" can refer to things which are transient, like food.
When you buy a PC with an Intel processor, you are attaching value to investment and management. You didn't just buy an engineering diagram made by a single person. The fact that the processor could not have been made without a $4 bn investment in capital equipment, and that you and many other people buy it, implies that investment has value. Of course engineering and labor also contribute value.
No single one of these activities (labor, investment, engineering) is fundamental, however. They are all required since lacking any one of them would mean that there is no resulting product. Of course you could bring up an example of some kind of Robinson Crusoe economy where a single person grows his own food and stores it for the winter, etc, but this means that a single person is performing a primitive form of all these functions. He designs simple tools, he performs labor, he anticipates winter and stores food.
Perhaps your original comment was too short to convey what you were getting at. It appeared that you were against all corporations.
I agree that corporations can easily live within the current regulatory framework and even much more restrictive ones. What I object to is the oft-heard claim that corporations per se are bad and are reducing our quality of life.
Capital gains on traded shares comes from all the gambling on share prices at the stock market.
A stock market isn't gambling and has nothing to do with gambling. Just because you say "oh, look, there's chance involved" doesn't mean it's identical to a casino. There's chance involved in surgery, or meteorology, or construction.
Gambling is creating a risk (rather than distributing it), it's totally random (rather than people using information to try to make prediction), it does not generate any net earnings for the gamblers (unlike investment), it doesn't convey information or allocate resources (unlike investment), it does not involve gamblers even selling things to each other, and on and on. In fact gambling and investment have nothing in common other than chance and money, which gambling also shares with (say) surgery and meteorology and bridge construction. Anyone who says that the stock market is a casino understands nothing about either.
It has NOTHING to do with tax on company profits.
It has everything to do with a tax on company profits, since profits ultimately drive all capital gains. There could never be sustained share appreciation without profits and growth of profits. There couldn't even by a bubble.
You sir, are fucking idiot or a troll, I can't decide which.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and you're a child as well.
Managers qua managers do not create wealth. Investors do not create wealth. Engineers create wealth, by multiplying the value of labor and materials.
No, no, no...
Managers, investors, engineers, and laborers all create wealth, and all collaborate to do so using prices and wages.
Look at it this way. If nobody ever saved any money (investors) and nobody every coordinated activities (managers) and nobody worked in factories (laborers) then would Engineers really create wealth all by themselves? Would they each draw a separate diagram, then those things would suddenly materialize moments later, requiring no saving of money, or labor, or coordination? No wealth could be created if any of those functions listed (management, investment, engineers, factory workers) were absent.
This will be discovered soon enough in the U.S. when we have plenty of people still willing to move money around, and move people who create money around (as long as it pays sizable dividends for marginal actual personal value-add), and nobody actually creating the value
You're claiming that the savings and investment rates are too high in the USA and that we have too few employees? This claim is contradicted by all the evidence, and the evidence isn't even trending in the direction which you suggest.
Corporations can feel free to GTFO and make room for someone else who won't require us to race to the bottom with regards to our standard of living, environmental regulations and so forth.
Standard leftist silliness. Do you seriously think that things like capital investment, assembly lines, factories, mass production, etc, (which are really only possible with corporations), has led the "race to the bottom" of wages? Without these things your wages would soon be about $500/yr, which is about the level of wages in places where corporations have never arisen or penetrated.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of a regulated economy, and I'm not proposing letting corporations do whatever they want. However it would benefit nobody if corporations would simply "GTFO."
And yet those 50% that pay nothing in taxes control 2% of the wealth. Fair huh?
Usually it's fair, because wealth usually depends upon how much you save (except in cases of inheritance).
The bottom 50% of the population has little wealth because most of them save nothing. In fact, most people in the middle and upper-middle classes also save nothing, or even save a negative amount. So it's fair that they have no savings.
There might be unfairness in income, but savings are totally discretionary within any level of income.
It's not true that they don't make enough money to save. Almost everyone in the US makes enough money to save something.
The super rich earn their entire living (in most cases) off of capital gains and dividends which are taxed at a flat 15%.
This is not exactly true. Dividends are taxed twice--once when the company (which you own) is paying taxes on earnings, and again when you receive their earnings. Only the second part is reported.
Also, capital gains are taxed for illusory gains caused by inflation.
Most of the tax unfairness which favors the rich, in my opinion, is little-known write-offs for things like Yacht depreciation etc, which greatly reduces the tax burden of high-income individuals. These tax dodges aren't protested by the middle class because they are unnoticed by the middle class. Each one is buried in thousands of pages of regulation for unrelated laws. The rich can exploit these dodges because the rich hire tax accountants who do nothing but study the many obscure write-offs which were added. Of course the dodges are added explicitly to benefit high-income individuals who contribute to campaigns.
However, taxes on capital gains and dividends are (IMO) reasonably fair because you must take into account double taxation of various kinds, caused by inflation (taxing illusory gains) and taxation on corp income both before and after disbursement.
Even if everybody had the means to and greed to get a... tailored suit... and enough money to invest after that, society would fall apart if everybody were investors... and no-one were workers
Yes, but society would also fall apart if everybody were workers and no-one was an investor. There couldn't have been any capital investment, and so no factories, computer chips, cars, cement, buildings other than those constructed by their inhabitants, roads or bridges, etc. You may protest that roads and bridges are paid for the government, but they are paid for by issuing bonds and so couldn't be done without someone willing to save money.
For that matter, society would fall apart if everyone was a plumber, or if everyone started doing any single activity. Society requires several tasks (like investment and various kinds of labor) and they are all compensated in proportion to their demand.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAH. LOL. The vast majority of this income in this range is "Unearned Income."
The term "unearned income" is leftist propaganda from the Marxist era, and it contains an embedded error.
Income from investments is not unearned. It requires someone to save money in the first place (delay gratification), then evaluate investments and take risks. These activities are absolutely required by the economy, but are abhorred by the vast majority of people, who are totally unwilling to do them. Even delaying gratification is something 90% of the population would never do. In fact, most people take out loans for cars etc, and so are "anti-investing"; they don't even live on their present income or pay cash for their purchases, but instead use savings of others for consumption which otherwise could have gone to capital investment. Most people not only don't invest, but they anti-invest.
Bear in mind that a person has to acquire money before investing it. They must delay gratification, evaluate investments, and take risks. If this were easy then many people would do it, because it's a compensated activity.
Even when everyday people do start investing, they invariably fail at it.
If the economy demands something difficult, and very few are willing to do it, then the income from it is not unearned. Just because something doesn't involve manual labor doesn't mean the income is "unearned."
Granted, some people acquired their initial investment through inheritance. I suppose you could say that their income is "unearned," and you would be partly correct (their income was earned by their progenitors who gave it to them).
The very term "unearned income" derives from the incorrect and easily-refuted notion that all value derives from labor. In fact, value derives from demand, in which case investment is earned income.
You are wrong. I highly doubt that you actually do your own laundry.
This isn't what the article was claiming. Nobody doubts that we have washing machines, elevators, lawn sprinklers, car washes, etc. My grandparents had washing machines, and had them during the Depression in the 1930s. We had elevators and car washers during the early 1970s when I was a kid.
I granted this point in my original post: "Obviously robots are good at certain highly repetitive tasks which do not depend on image recognition. Robots already took over those few jobs, decades ago."
What the article claimed, however, is that robots were about to take over things like driving, manufacturing, housework, etc. Those tasks depend on complicated image/scene recognition, and aren't done by robots much more often than they were in the 1970s. Since there are still large unsolved problems in those areas, it seems very unlikely to me that robots will take over those functions within the next 10 years.
Most people DO use a robot to wash their cars though.
Robots are still fairly incompetent at washing cars even though it's a very simple task. As a result, most car washing shops in Los Angeles use a "hybrid model" where there's an automated car wash with robots at the front end, then humans at the back end who do "touch up" work on the areas which the robot missed. This is because the robot cannot do good scene recognition, and so can't do "spot work" for particular areas that are very dirty etc. Also the detailing is still done entirely by humans more than 4 decades after car washers were introduced, as is washing the inside.
Robots are all around you.
Nobody is denying this. Robots are very good at highly repetitive tasks which do not require scene/image recognition. Robots took over those few tasks decades ago, as I said in my post. What I dispute is that robots will soon take over everything else, or almost everything else. Robots aren't much more prevalent in society now than when I was a kid.
Do you think that technology has progressed exponentially in your lifetime? Looking over mine, I'd say no.
It appears to me that the most rapid technological progress occurred during the period from 1865-1965. During that period, people went from subsistence farming-type economies and lifestyles, to a modern technological society. During that time we introduced internal combustion, cars, jet planes, automation, widespread new materials (aluminum, fiberglass, reinforced concrete, etc), mechanized farming, widespread usage of electricity, the service economy, computers, nuclear technology, modern medicine (antibiotics and vaccines), modern weapons of war (tanks, jets, auto machine guns), modern communications (radio, television) and many other things. After that period of 1865-1965, it seems to me that progress has slowed down. My society and lifestyle is not drastically different from when I was a child (I'm about 40). Many of the things I use today (cars, washing machines, the electric grid, jet airplanes, freeways, antibiotics, tylenol, and so on) are essentially the same as they were then, and were introduced during that period.
Granted, computers have been a huge exception. Computers and information technology continue to advance at the same rapid rate they did in the 1950's and 60's. So far they show no sign of slowing down, and they continue to cause huge changes to society.
In general, however, technology doesn't seem to be increasing exponentially.
Having been in the field, I will say that we're now at the point where throwing money at the problem works. That wasn't true in the 1980s and 1990s.
I definitely agree with you; I'm definitely not claiming that no progress is made whatsoever.
My problem with the original article, is that it claimed some kind of robot revolution is right around the corner and that most human labor would soon be replaced. That claim has been made repeatedly (and incorrectly) over the years. Replacing all or most human labor would require solving some very hard problems which still aren't solved, as you pointed out. I'm glad we're making progress, but it still seems like we're fairly far away.
You can get a bionic arm now, there are robots that can work in swarms, we have robots surveillance, you can buy a car that parks it self, applies breaks when needs, and maintain a constant speed, we have walking robots,
I'm not sure you carefully read my post, because none of your examples are even relevant. I was claiming that we don't have adequate scene/image recognition within robots, so they won't take over many tasks which the article claimed they would take over, anytime soon. Saying "but we have cruise control!" isn't even relevant to that, because cruise control is nothing new and doesn't rely upon scene/image recognition, and is not the kind of robots which the article was talking about. Similarly with bionic arms and cars that park themselves. Those are all simple tasks which I granted that robots could perform: "[from my post] Obviously robots are good at certain highly repetitive tasks which do not depend on image recognition."
And that s just hard robots. How many software robots do you use every day? I have written complete system that take a loan application, apply decisions and determine the recommend acceptance and rate.
That's just changing the topic. The issue was whether there would be robots which drive cars, robots which perform all the housework, etc. But you're talking about software for loan applications now, which isn't even a robot and which frankly isn't even novel or relevant to the topic of discussion. You're talking about a web application or something similar. Nobody was denying that banking/financial software exists. The claim from the original article was that robots would soon take over almost all human labor like housework, driving, manufacturing, and so on.
And just so you know, the largest hurdles is powe.
"Just so you know," you don't know what you're talking about. The largest hurdle obviously isn't power. The largest hurdles are scene recognition and object recognitiion which are still done only very crudely by robots, and do not come close to matching the scene/object recognition of humans. Power problems are fairly easily solved. If you had a robot which did all housework, cooked all meals, constructed all housing, performed all mining and manufacturing, etc, but you had to plug it in, or needed a cable, then it would still obviously be worth it and would already be very widespread.
wow. So wrong. Fujitsu has been selling a chip for robot recognition since about 08'
Wow.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Saying "Fujitsu has a chip" means absolutely nothing, because the chip obviously doesn't solve these problems.
There are liars, damned liars, and robotics engineers.
Robotics has progressed painfully slowly. If you all remember, during the 1960's and 1970's it was a common belief that robots would soon replace most humans. Supposedly, robots would soon be doing all the tedious, boring labor. There were cartoons like "The Jetsons" which showed a home robot that did all the housework, cleaning, cooking, chores, etc. There was also the endless banter about how cars would drive themselves. Now, 35 years later, I am still doing my own laundry, cleaning my own bathroom, driving my own car, cooking my own food (or paying another human to cook it), and so on, despite huge research being piled into driverless cars and various kinds of robots. Yet this article has the gall to claim:
By 2015, 30% of all cars may be intelligent, driverless vehicles
What utter BS. I will bet my entire life savings (which is considerable) that that won't happen. After all, it's already 2011, leaving only 4 years until "I, Robot" is supposedly driving me around.
Obviously robots are good at certain highly repetitive tasks which do not depend on image recognition. Robots already took over those few jobs, decades ago. (Perhaps even centuries ago; you could argue that machines like a combine harvester or a power tiller are "robots" if they have any kind of self-guiding machinery). However robots have gotten no better at image recognition, and still have great difficulty at simple tasks like folding towels, if the towels are arranged randomly and have different shapes.
Robotics which rely upon sophisticated image recognition are no more prevalent today than they were 30 years ago and are making no obvious progress. Probably there will eventually be some kind of breakthrough which makes those kinds of robots (versatile ones with image recognition) common; but that breakthrough hasn't happened yet.
Gold does have "various technological uses" but they're minor.
Gold has one interesting property: it doesn't corrode at all when it's exposed to oxygen. For this reason, it's useful for things like stereo plugs which are often exposed to air and which would be ruined if they developed a very thin layer of rust.
Reality check, there's a reason Honda, Toyota, Nissan... have all opened plants here in the U.S
A large part of the reason those manufacturers have opened plants in the US is because labor costs are lower in the mid-Southern states (like Tennessee and Kentucky, where the plants are located) than in Japan. Also those companies can advertise that the cars are "made in the USA" when it fact, only final assembly is done in the USA; engines, transmissions, and electronics are still shipped from the home country.
you better have 3000 processors or hard drives in there if you want to contain the costs to something reasonable.
A standard shipping container is 1,360 cubic feet, which can fit approximately 6,000 pairs of shoes. Which means it costs approx $0.50 per pair of shoes, to ship them between essentially any two large ports in the world.
For processors and hard drives (using your examples), shipping costs would be an extremely negligible fraction of the retail cost. Your hard drive could be shipped from Shanghai to LA for less than $0.10.
Almost all manufacturers can fill an entire container. Computer components are mass manufactured.
Again, please refrain from childish or irrelevant remarks.
OK then, consider a flat sheet of glass on a frame above a patch of ground with no walls to stop air flow and the sheet mounted high enough above the ground so that it's not going to slow down heat loss by convection, the same air flow as if there was no glass there at all... Is the area under the glass going to have a higher temperature in sunlight than another area exposed to the same light?
Yes but only very slightly since that factor is negligible.
This experiment has already been repeated thousands of times. Many commercial greenhouses in the Netherlands have vents on the sides with small solar panels that open the vents in the middle of the day. When all the vents are open, such a greenhouse resembles your flat sheet of glass. When the vents are opened, the greenhouse rapidly cools until it's only slightly warmer than the surrounding atmosphere. Thus, your proposed mechanism is not the important one.
The same experiment can be done in a car with a sunroof, when the Sun is directly overhead and there's no wind. If you crack the doors and the sunroof, the car will rapidly cool, even though the flat sheet of glass above is in almost the same position.
A similar experiment can be done with a polyethelene greenhouse. Polyethylene doesn't insulate or abosrb IR radiation well, at all. So a polyethelene greenhouse shouldn't even work according to your model. However, a polyethelene greenhouse works as well as a glass one: "Polyethylene greenhouses, however, seem to work just about as well as glass ones -- and polyethylene is nearly as translucent to thermal infrared radiation as it is to solar radiation." This quotation, by the way, is from the first paragraph of the original linked article, and I'm not quoting out of context. The article then goes on to say that this means a greenhouse works by preventing convection.
Again, I'm not trying to insult you, but I don't see how you've presented any evidence or supportive reasoning at all. Instead, you've provided the name of a textbook (which doesn't support your claims), a series of irrelevant personal insults, a few fallacies, and numerous repetitions that you have a model, without any evidence that it's the correct model. On the other hand, you can see several sources which clearly contradict your model and your claims.
Here's another quote from the wikipedia article:
Thus, the primary heating mechanism of a greenhouse is convection. This can be demonstrated by opening a small window near the roof of a greenhouse: the temperature drops considerably... Thus, the glass used for a greenhouse works as a barrier to air flow... The air that is warmed near the ground is prevented from rising indefinitely and flowing away.
I think that's pretty clear. I'm not quoting out of context, since I've now quoted almost the entire explanation from wikipedia.
For quite awhile, I've assumed that you're just trolling, that you don't really believe what you say, and that this is all for fun. I certainly don't mind a bit of fun, but this is growing tiring. You can respond as you wish, and I'll read it, but I don't think I'll respond any more.
Don't attack me just because I have to dumb it down a lot to get the message across
Man, you are the only one here who's "attacking" here. Read your own post:
Let's bring the horse to water... I have to dumb it down... before the next time you try to "correct" somebody... Don't fuck about... parroting stuff... I've insulted you almost as much as you deserve... WTF...crap?... Look, you can't understand a simple model... fucking... you've wasted more time
...and this was just out of 4 paragraphs. You can barely get through a single sentence without some kind of emotional outburst. Frankly, it's silly.
You will notice that my post was devoid of the irrelevant personal insults and hyper-emotional outbursts which you continually issue, and which were absent from this thread until you arrived. I apologize if I CAPITALIZED out of frustration, but I certainly am not engaging in what you're doing.
Also WTF is it with the "one possible explanation" crap? This stuff has been understood for a very very long time.
You're just assuming your conclusion here, which is a logical fallacy. You must present evidence, and not just say "it's been understood for a long time."
Look, you can't understand a simple model (which is all that is needed in this case) so why go looking for a more complex one that gives you the same thing?
An insult is not an argument! I understand your model, but it's the wrong model. You must provide some evidence or reasoning that it's the correct model, not just repeat your claim, or say that I must not understand it.
A simple model is not all that's needed. You have already admitted that there are several factors at work here ("Welcome to the world"). You cannot get the correct answer by modelling only one of them.
Anyway, you've wasted more time here than it would take for you to take a look at a heat transfer text,
I clicked on the link you posted, searched through the text for "greenhouse", and read their explanation. It does not support what you say at all. I also previously read a text on heat transfer (a long time ago, granted), and it did not support what you say.
Slashdot Mirror
No. We kill about 50,000 people per year in the USA alone from coal emissions, which is about 6 Chernobyls every year. Also, there have been dams bursting which killed tens of thousands of people all at once--far more than Fukushima or Chernobyl.
No. All hydroelectric power requires completely altering the course of large water flows and this severely changes the ecosystem.
My bet is that Germany still gets most of its electricity from coal burning and Japan from nuclear.
A coal plant poses more than 100x the risk to health and the environment as a nuclear plant with similar output.
People are not being over-cautious. We kill 50,000 people per year right now in the USA from coal burning, which is 6 Chernobyls every single year. In addition we risk raising the sea level, inundating large fractions of the terrestrial surface of the earth, badly damaging the entire ecosystem, and negatively affecting billions of people. The response of almost everyone has been "Eh, so what." The problem obviously ISN'T over-cautiousness. The problem is that we respond with irrational panic to scary images on television, while ignoring the real dangers, and while failing to do any rational comparison of the risks. As a result we panic over things like nuclear reactors, mad cow disease, vaccines, nuclear waste in Nevada, SARS, etc, which are all very small risks, while at the same time totally ignoring massively destructive things which are happening all the time.
In the U.S. we decided to abandon our nuclear plans during the 1970s, and we discarded more than 100 reactors which had already been started or were on order. Instead we replaced them all with coal plants, thereby predictably increasing the death rate and killing several million excess people, from emphysema and lung disease, over 4 decades. We did this for safety.
If you believe the AGW crowd, then coal will cause a significant fraction of the Earth's terrestrial surface to fall below sea level. Like much of the deep south, and south asia, and northern china.
You should compare the surface area lost to Fukushima against the surface area underwater from even the most conservative global warming projections.
In addition, coal has spread mercury everywhere so children and pregnant women aren't supposed to eat fish anymore. So we can also compare the respective areas of contamination.
Nuclear contamination loses more than 99% of its radioactivity within 300 years.
Then you are severely misinformed about the relative dangers of each. A coal plant poses more than 100x as much risk to health and the environment than a nuclear plant with similar capacity.
My sentiment exactly. Apotheker made decisions which were easily predicted to fail. How could he have seriously expected the WebOS tablet thing to be successful. He should have been fired awhile ago, even though he's only been CEO for less than a year.
I think it's more likely that Apotheker is just incompetent as a CEO, and he made mistakes.
His incentives are at least somewhat aligned with those of the company. He is paid primarily in options. If HP makes a big profit then his options are worth a lot, he makes tons of money, he is seen as a successful CEO, he continues on in his powerful role, etc.
How does it help his vanity, or power, or personal aggrandisement, to make these silly decisions and then be fired from HP for failing to increase its profits?
This just means that the investors and laborers are delayed, that they step in later ("inevitable" in your words). If there were really never any investors or laborers (ie the cotton gin was invented but never implemented or used) then it would not have value.
It is also merely happenstance that the engineer has understanding of engineering when the investor does not. Thus it is only happenstance that the engineer is credited with any relevance to the process at all.
Of course it's possible for the engineer to save his money and do the investment himself. He could also rent machine tools, and build his creation himself, without laborers. But this doesn't mean that only engineers create value. This means only that one person is acting in all three roles (engineer, investor, laborer) at different times. It would also be possible for an investor to go to engineering school so he can realize his business idea. These scenarios mean only that all functions are necessary but one person has chosen to perform all of them.
We're speaking about economics here, so "wealth" refers to something which you own and which has a market price. And the term "value" means something for which consumers are willing to pay money and has greater worth to them than the cost. "Wealth" can involve something that doesn't require engineers at all; for example, diamonds. "Value" can refer to things which are transient, like food.
When you buy a PC with an Intel processor, you are attaching value to investment and management. You didn't just buy an engineering diagram made by a single person. The fact that the processor could not have been made without a $4 bn investment in capital equipment, and that you and many other people buy it, implies that investment has value. Of course engineering and labor also contribute value.
No single one of these activities (labor, investment, engineering) is fundamental, however. They are all required since lacking any one of them would mean that there is no resulting product. Of course you could bring up an example of some kind of Robinson Crusoe economy where a single person grows his own food and stores it for the winter, etc, but this means that a single person is performing a primitive form of all these functions. He designs simple tools, he performs labor, he anticipates winter and stores food.
Perhaps your original comment was too short to convey what you were getting at. It appeared that you were against all corporations.
I agree that corporations can easily live within the current regulatory framework and even much more restrictive ones. What I object to is the oft-heard claim that corporations per se are bad and are reducing our quality of life.
A stock market isn't gambling and has nothing to do with gambling. Just because you say "oh, look, there's chance involved" doesn't mean it's identical to a casino. There's chance involved in surgery, or meteorology, or construction.
Gambling is creating a risk (rather than distributing it), it's totally random (rather than people using information to try to make prediction), it does not generate any net earnings for the gamblers (unlike investment), it doesn't convey information or allocate resources (unlike investment), it does not involve gamblers even selling things to each other, and on and on. In fact gambling and investment have nothing in common other than chance and money, which gambling also shares with (say) surgery and meteorology and bridge construction. Anyone who says that the stock market is a casino understands nothing about either.
It has everything to do with a tax on company profits, since profits ultimately drive all capital gains. There could never be sustained share appreciation without profits and growth of profits. There couldn't even by a bubble.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and you're a child as well.
No, no, no...
Managers, investors, engineers, and laborers all create wealth, and all collaborate to do so using prices and wages.
Look at it this way. If nobody ever saved any money (investors) and nobody every coordinated activities (managers) and nobody worked in factories (laborers) then would Engineers really create wealth all by themselves? Would they each draw a separate diagram, then those things would suddenly materialize moments later, requiring no saving of money, or labor, or coordination? No wealth could be created if any of those functions listed (management, investment, engineers, factory workers) were absent.
You're claiming that the savings and investment rates are too high in the USA and that we have too few employees? This claim is contradicted by all the evidence, and the evidence isn't even trending in the direction which you suggest.
Standard leftist silliness. Do you seriously think that things like capital investment, assembly lines, factories, mass production, etc, (which are really only possible with corporations), has led the "race to the bottom" of wages? Without these things your wages would soon be about $500/yr, which is about the level of wages in places where corporations have never arisen or penetrated.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of a regulated economy, and I'm not proposing letting corporations do whatever they want. However it would benefit nobody if corporations would simply "GTFO."
Usually it's fair, because wealth usually depends upon how much you save (except in cases of inheritance).
The bottom 50% of the population has little wealth because most of them save nothing. In fact, most people in the middle and upper-middle classes also save nothing, or even save a negative amount. So it's fair that they have no savings.
There might be unfairness in income, but savings are totally discretionary within any level of income.
It's not true that they don't make enough money to save. Almost everyone in the US makes enough money to save something.
This is not exactly true. Dividends are taxed twice--once when the company (which you own) is paying taxes on earnings, and again when you receive their earnings. Only the second part is reported.
Also, capital gains are taxed for illusory gains caused by inflation.
Most of the tax unfairness which favors the rich, in my opinion, is little-known write-offs for things like Yacht depreciation etc, which greatly reduces the tax burden of high-income individuals. These tax dodges aren't protested by the middle class because they are unnoticed by the middle class. Each one is buried in thousands of pages of regulation for unrelated laws. The rich can exploit these dodges because the rich hire tax accountants who do nothing but study the many obscure write-offs which were added. Of course the dodges are added explicitly to benefit high-income individuals who contribute to campaigns.
However, taxes on capital gains and dividends are (IMO) reasonably fair because you must take into account double taxation of various kinds, caused by inflation (taxing illusory gains) and taxation on corp income both before and after disbursement.
Yes, but society would also fall apart if everybody were workers and no-one was an investor. There couldn't have been any capital investment, and so no factories, computer chips, cars, cement, buildings other than those constructed by their inhabitants, roads or bridges, etc. You may protest that roads and bridges are paid for the government, but they are paid for by issuing bonds and so couldn't be done without someone willing to save money.
For that matter, society would fall apart if everyone was a plumber, or if everyone started doing any single activity. Society requires several tasks (like investment and various kinds of labor) and they are all compensated in proportion to their demand.
The term "unearned income" is leftist propaganda from the Marxist era, and it contains an embedded error.
Income from investments is not unearned. It requires someone to save money in the first place (delay gratification), then evaluate investments and take risks. These activities are absolutely required by the economy, but are abhorred by the vast majority of people, who are totally unwilling to do them. Even delaying gratification is something 90% of the population would never do. In fact, most people take out loans for cars etc, and so are "anti-investing"; they don't even live on their present income or pay cash for their purchases, but instead use savings of others for consumption which otherwise could have gone to capital investment. Most people not only don't invest, but they anti-invest.
Bear in mind that a person has to acquire money before investing it. They must delay gratification, evaluate investments, and take risks. If this were easy then many people would do it, because it's a compensated activity.
Even when everyday people do start investing, they invariably fail at it.
If the economy demands something difficult, and very few are willing to do it, then the income from it is not unearned. Just because something doesn't involve manual labor doesn't mean the income is "unearned."
Granted, some people acquired their initial investment through inheritance. I suppose you could say that their income is "unearned," and you would be partly correct (their income was earned by their progenitors who gave it to them).
The very term "unearned income" derives from the incorrect and easily-refuted notion that all value derives from labor. In fact, value derives from demand, in which case investment is earned income.
Are you sure about this. A quick check on google reveals that the US has a GDP about 4.2x higher than Germany.
This isn't what the article was claiming. Nobody doubts that we have washing machines, elevators, lawn sprinklers, car washes, etc. My grandparents had washing machines, and had them during the Depression in the 1930s. We had elevators and car washers during the early 1970s when I was a kid.
I granted this point in my original post: "Obviously robots are good at certain highly repetitive tasks which do not depend on image recognition. Robots already took over those few jobs, decades ago."
What the article claimed, however, is that robots were about to take over things like driving, manufacturing, housework, etc. Those tasks depend on complicated image/scene recognition, and aren't done by robots much more often than they were in the 1970s. Since there are still large unsolved problems in those areas, it seems very unlikely to me that robots will take over those functions within the next 10 years.
Robots are still fairly incompetent at washing cars even though it's a very simple task. As a result, most car washing shops in Los Angeles use a "hybrid model" where there's an automated car wash with robots at the front end, then humans at the back end who do "touch up" work on the areas which the robot missed. This is because the robot cannot do good scene recognition, and so can't do "spot work" for particular areas that are very dirty etc. Also the detailing is still done entirely by humans more than 4 decades after car washers were introduced, as is washing the inside.
Nobody is denying this. Robots are very good at highly repetitive tasks which do not require scene/image recognition. Robots took over those few tasks decades ago, as I said in my post. What I dispute is that robots will soon take over everything else, or almost everything else. Robots aren't much more prevalent in society now than when I was a kid.
I agree with Amara, but not with Kurzweil.
Do you think that technology has progressed exponentially in your lifetime? Looking over mine, I'd say no.
It appears to me that the most rapid technological progress occurred during the period from 1865-1965. During that period, people went from subsistence farming-type economies and lifestyles, to a modern technological society. During that time we introduced internal combustion, cars, jet planes, automation, widespread new materials (aluminum, fiberglass, reinforced concrete, etc), mechanized farming, widespread usage of electricity, the service economy, computers, nuclear technology, modern medicine (antibiotics and vaccines), modern weapons of war (tanks, jets, auto machine guns), modern communications (radio, television) and many other things. After that period of 1865-1965, it seems to me that progress has slowed down. My society and lifestyle is not drastically different from when I was a child (I'm about 40). Many of the things I use today (cars, washing machines, the electric grid, jet airplanes, freeways, antibiotics, tylenol, and so on) are essentially the same as they were then, and were introduced during that period.
Granted, computers have been a huge exception. Computers and information technology continue to advance at the same rapid rate they did in the 1950's and 60's. So far they show no sign of slowing down, and they continue to cause huge changes to society.
In general, however, technology doesn't seem to be increasing exponentially.
I definitely agree with you; I'm definitely not claiming that no progress is made whatsoever.
My problem with the original article, is that it claimed some kind of robot revolution is right around the corner and that most human labor would soon be replaced. That claim has been made repeatedly (and incorrectly) over the years. Replacing all or most human labor would require solving some very hard problems which still aren't solved, as you pointed out. I'm glad we're making progress, but it still seems like we're fairly far away.
I'm not sure you carefully read my post, because none of your examples are even relevant. I was claiming that we don't have adequate scene/image recognition within robots, so they won't take over many tasks which the article claimed they would take over, anytime soon. Saying "but we have cruise control!" isn't even relevant to that, because cruise control is nothing new and doesn't rely upon scene/image recognition, and is not the kind of robots which the article was talking about. Similarly with bionic arms and cars that park themselves. Those are all simple tasks which I granted that robots could perform: "[from my post] Obviously robots are good at certain highly repetitive tasks which do not depend on image recognition."
That's just changing the topic. The issue was whether there would be robots which drive cars, robots which perform all the housework, etc. But you're talking about software for loan applications now, which isn't even a robot and which frankly isn't even novel or relevant to the topic of discussion. You're talking about a web application or something similar. Nobody was denying that banking/financial software exists. The claim from the original article was that robots would soon take over almost all human labor like housework, driving, manufacturing, and so on.
"Just so you know," you don't know what you're talking about. The largest hurdle obviously isn't power. The largest hurdles are scene recognition and object recognitiion which are still done only very crudely by robots, and do not come close to matching the scene/object recognition of humans. Power problems are fairly easily solved. If you had a robot which did all housework, cooked all meals, constructed all housing, performed all mining and manufacturing, etc, but you had to plug it in, or needed a cable, then it would still obviously be worth it and would already be very widespread.
Wow.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Saying "Fujitsu has a chip" means absolutely nothing, because the chip obviously doesn't solve these problems.
There are liars, damned liars, and robotics engineers.
Robotics has progressed painfully slowly. If you all remember, during the 1960's and 1970's it was a common belief that robots would soon replace most humans. Supposedly, robots would soon be doing all the tedious, boring labor. There were cartoons like "The Jetsons" which showed a home robot that did all the housework, cleaning, cooking, chores, etc. There was also the endless banter about how cars would drive themselves. Now, 35 years later, I am still doing my own laundry, cleaning my own bathroom, driving my own car, cooking my own food (or paying another human to cook it), and so on, despite huge research being piled into driverless cars and various kinds of robots. Yet this article has the gall to claim:
What utter BS. I will bet my entire life savings (which is considerable) that that won't happen. After all, it's already 2011, leaving only 4 years until "I, Robot" is supposedly driving me around.
Obviously robots are good at certain highly repetitive tasks which do not depend on image recognition. Robots already took over those few jobs, decades ago. (Perhaps even centuries ago; you could argue that machines like a combine harvester or a power tiller are "robots" if they have any kind of self-guiding machinery). However robots have gotten no better at image recognition, and still have great difficulty at simple tasks like folding towels, if the towels are arranged randomly and have different shapes.
Robotics which rely upon sophisticated image recognition are no more prevalent today than they were 30 years ago and are making no obvious progress. Probably there will eventually be some kind of breakthrough which makes those kinds of robots (versatile ones with image recognition) common; but that breakthrough hasn't happened yet.
"Intrinsic value" is not taken from economics.
None of the terms actually used in economics are vague. Not even its most questionable theories (like the EMH) are vague.
Gold has one interesting property: it doesn't corrode at all when it's exposed to oxygen. For this reason, it's useful for things like stereo plugs which are often exposed to air and which would be ruined if they developed a very thin layer of rust.
A large part of the reason those manufacturers have opened plants in the US is because labor costs are lower in the mid-Southern states (like Tennessee and Kentucky, where the plants are located) than in Japan. Also those companies can advertise that the cars are "made in the USA" when it fact, only final assembly is done in the USA; engines, transmissions, and electronics are still shipped from the home country.
A standard shipping container is 1,360 cubic feet, which can fit approximately 6,000 pairs of shoes. Which means it costs approx $0.50 per pair of shoes, to ship them between essentially any two large ports in the world.
For processors and hard drives (using your examples), shipping costs would be an extremely negligible fraction of the retail cost. Your hard drive could be shipped from Shanghai to LA for less than $0.10.
Almost all manufacturers can fill an entire container. Computer components are mass manufactured.
Again, please refrain from childish or irrelevant remarks.
Yes but only very slightly since that factor is negligible.
This experiment has already been repeated thousands of times. Many commercial greenhouses in the Netherlands have vents on the sides with small solar panels that open the vents in the middle of the day. When all the vents are open, such a greenhouse resembles your flat sheet of glass. When the vents are opened, the greenhouse rapidly cools until it's only slightly warmer than the surrounding atmosphere. Thus, your proposed mechanism is not the important one.
The same experiment can be done in a car with a sunroof, when the Sun is directly overhead and there's no wind. If you crack the doors and the sunroof, the car will rapidly cool, even though the flat sheet of glass above is in almost the same position.
A similar experiment can be done with a polyethelene greenhouse. Polyethylene doesn't insulate or abosrb IR radiation well, at all. So a polyethelene greenhouse shouldn't even work according to your model. However, a polyethelene greenhouse works as well as a glass one: "Polyethylene greenhouses, however, seem to work just about as well as glass ones -- and polyethylene is nearly as translucent to thermal infrared radiation as it is to solar radiation." This quotation, by the way, is from the first paragraph of the original linked article, and I'm not quoting out of context. The article then goes on to say that this means a greenhouse works by preventing convection.
Again, I'm not trying to insult you, but I don't see how you've presented any evidence or supportive reasoning at all. Instead, you've provided the name of a textbook (which doesn't support your claims), a series of irrelevant personal insults, a few fallacies, and numerous repetitions that you have a model, without any evidence that it's the correct model. On the other hand, you can see several sources which clearly contradict your model and your claims.
Here's another quote from the wikipedia article:
I think that's pretty clear. I'm not quoting out of context, since I've now quoted almost the entire explanation from wikipedia.
For quite awhile, I've assumed that you're just trolling, that you don't really believe what you say, and that this is all for fun. I certainly don't mind a bit of fun, but this is growing tiring. You can respond as you wish, and I'll read it, but I don't think I'll respond any more.
Man, you are the only one here who's "attacking" here. Read your own post:
You will notice that my post was devoid of the irrelevant personal insults and hyper-emotional outbursts which you continually issue, and which were absent from this thread until you arrived. I apologize if I CAPITALIZED out of frustration, but I certainly am not engaging in what you're doing.
You're just assuming your conclusion here, which is a logical fallacy. You must present evidence, and not just say "it's been understood for a long time."
An insult is not an argument! I understand your model, but it's the wrong model. You must provide some evidence or reasoning that it's the correct model, not just repeat your claim, or say that I must not understand it.
A simple model is not all that's needed. You have already admitted that there are several factors at work here ("Welcome to the world"). You cannot get the correct answer by modelling only one of them.
I clicked on the link you posted, searched through the text for "greenhouse", and read their explanation. It does not support what you say at all. I also previously read a text on heat transfer (a long time ago, granted), and it did not support what you say.