Use e-voting and you will see the powerful grab control, one way or another. Use paper.
Or if you like, use both.
Using some cryptographic design principles plus paper ballots for marking votes and computers for tallying them, and including some random verification processes to tighten the whole thing, Chaum and Rivest's Scantegrity II system provides and end-to-end verifiable system which allows every voter to verify that their vote was counted correctly, without giving them the ability to prove how they voted to anyone else (an important anti-coercion feature). It also allows anyone to verify (with arbitrarily high probability) that the votes were tallied correctly.
It's awesome from a voting security/integrity point of view, and also very practical.
It is not, however, possible to do it online. There's simply no way to make that secure while retaining anonymity. And any kind of at-home voting (including mail-in paper ballots) is inherently vulnerable to vote buying and coercion.
The NSA has already been participating in many standards bodies overtly and covertly. But that doesn't really matter. IETF protocols are designed in public, so backroom attempts to subvert them don't work. The only thing the NSA et al can do is to try to get the standards weakened in subtle, non-obvious ways they can exploit. But being able to do that effectively requires being significantly smarter than everyone else who is looking at and commenting on the designs so they can design and insert weaknesses which no one realizes are weaknesses.
One ploy they can use that doesn't require super genius insight is to try to promote complexity in new standards. Complexity makes implementation harder and increases the probability of exploitable mistakes, in both design and implementation. That won't give them any guaranteed avenues of attack, but it will increase the odds of exploitable weaknesses. So we need to guard against excessive complexity in standards... but that's always been the case anyway.
I found a few. I admit I did underestimate the number, though let's not forget that "he pulled a gun and the robber ran away" does not mean the robbery would've happened otherwise.
This is precisely the fact that causes the large variance (25X!) in studies on defensive gun use. Small differences in methodology and definitions dramatically change the numbers. However, the formal study that found the lowest rate of defensive gun use, directed and funded by an organization which was interested in showing that it was insignificant, still found 100,000 incidents per year. That says a lot.
If guns were such a dramatic factor in decreasing crime, then other countries with stricter gun laws should have higher crime rates, right? But they don't.
Some do, some don't. It's very difficult to compare across countries due to differing cultures, standards of data collection, definitions of crimes, etc. There is actually a small negative correlation between guns per capita and homicide rate (homicide is one crime that tends to be well-reported and consistently defined worldwide), though the coefficient is only -0.23.
Looking at longitudinal studies in the US, there is evidence that liberalizing concealed carry laws, increasing the number of law-abiding citizens who are armed on a daily basis and therefore increasing the opportunity for defensive use, lowers violent crime rates. The effect is not large, but is statistically significant. The pattern of decrease seems to imply that the biggest effect comes not so much from actual defensive use but from making criminals aware that their targets might be armed, because the biggest drop occurs shortly after the changes in the law, well before the number of citizens carrying increases significantly. It continues as the number of carriers rises, though.
There is no evidence that increasing the number of lawful carriers increases gun violence, by the way, which is what fans of the "but people get mad at each other and if they have guns they'll shoot!" theory would expect. This is true even in "constitutional carry" states, where anyone who can legally possess a gun is allowed to carry it, so there's no filter created by background checks and permit training and procedural requirements.
In my personal experience, and that of many others with whom I've spoken (no formal studies have been done AFAICT), being armed is actually a strong psychological counterweight to anger and violence. Possession of a deadly weapon tends to make people think a lot harder about the possible consequences of allowing tense situations to escalate. It's a sort of mental bucket of cold water that cools people down as they think "Oh shit, this could get bad."
Training is good, but the statistical evidence shows no negative impact from allowing citizens with no legally-required training to carry (in fact, liberalized concealed carry seems to reduce crime rates). Since individual freedom is and should be the default, if you want to argue for restricting freedom by requiring training you have to demonstrate -- with facts, not theories or anecdotes -- that doing so actually solves a real-world problem.
You can't demonstrate that, because it's not true.
Your first argument removes the external pressure of environmental damage, while your second argument removes human involvement altogether.
But you can't actually counter the arguments, or you would have. So instead you attack their political impact (which you mischaracterize). Nice.
I don't think there is any question as to whether Earth itself will survive; it's our own well-being which is in question.
I don't think there's any question that humanity will survive just fine, either. All that is in question is which choice will have the lowest economic impact on us, and therefore best allow us to continue improving our standard of living (globally, not just in the wealthy countries).
You should probably avoid describing the positions of others as "simplistic" when your own statements entirely misrepresent the alternative point of view.
I didn't make any representations about the alternative point of view.
SCTP already exists, and is reasonably well supported. No one uses it because it turns out TCP and UDP actually do most of what we need pretty well.
A more recent alternative, which gets through firewalls better, is Google's QUIC protocol (successor to SPDY). It's built on top of UDP which means it can't do quite as much as an IP-level protocol can, but it can be and is a lot smarter than TCP. It also provides multiplexed streaming, server push and other performance features and has NO unencrypted mode. It's all encrypted and authenticated, all the time.
2: ISIS requires a new SIM card because of the app installed.
Google Wallet doesn't use a SIM.
3: ISIS is choosy about what phones it uses, and what ROMs. Got a rooted phone, ISIS will give you the middle finger.
Not sure about Google Wallet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's the same. When you root your phone you bypass a lot of the OS security features. This allows you to do some things, but it also opens other doors which generally weakens the security guarantees which are important for stuff like doing payments with your phone. I think Google needs to figure out what people are trying to accomplish by rooting and provide built-in alternatives that don't require root. Not so rooting can be disabled, just so it's less necessary, because it comes at a cost.
4: ISIS has competition. Paypal, Google Wallet, and many other places are vying for retailer point of sale terminals. This means that there is not a high chance that you will be able to use it.
Yes, but they all use the same protocols, which runs on the same backend rails. A reader for one of them will accept the others. I have heard that some terminals are denying Google Wallet because its current solution uses a MasterCard Debit to front whatever card you configure, which results in high fees to the merchant. 7-11 seems to have stopped accepting GW. This will get sorted, I'm sure.
5: No iOS device supports it, nor are there any publically announced plans of Apple doing so in the future.
True, but Apple has been hiring people with NFC skills for a couple of years. Well, they've been advertising positions for them, anyway. Perhaps that is very clever misdirection?
ISIS is a nice start, but it is a version 0.1. It has a long ways to go, and there are many entrenched competitors with as good, if not better products.
Sure, but the point is that there is competition, at least on Android. As it starts to get more popular (which probably won't happen in a big way until the liability shift nears) I expect to see the market for mobile wallets heat up.
Now that any Android 4.4+ device can use Google Wallet
The rest of the problem becomes getting manufacturers and carriers to push out Android 4.4 images.
New phones seem to be the only way:-(
Still, though it may take 2-3 years for large numbers to make it out to people, it'll happen. And we're still nearly two years from the liability shift.
(Note: This comment is US-centric. I'll let others do the analysis for the rest of the world, but the case is actually easier there.)
NFC is still coming, and soon. Now that any Android 4.4+ device can use Google Wallet and with ISIS deployed to AT&T, Verizon & T-mobile customers who want it, one half of the secure mobile payments infrastructure problem is all but solved. Android 4.4 includes open APIs so that anyone else can implement NFC payment apps, also, and there are rumors of many coming. There are hints that Apple is also doing something with NFC.
The other half of the infrastructure problem is merchant acceptance. Visa and MasterCard announced in 2012 (IIRC) that the liability shift will be implemented end of 2015. What that means is that after the shift takes place, any merchant will be able to completely stop paying for any credit card fraud simply by deploying chip (including NFC) payment terminals. Given that merchants pay for nearly all fraud, and that it costs many billions annually, you'll see them moving fast. Already in some parts of the country I can go through a whole day using nothing but my phone for payment, and it's improving rapidly.
It's about a decade later than when the industry thought it would be but contactless smart card / NFC payment is in full rollout mode now.
Square is wise to drop their custom, proprietary solution to a problem that has an industry-standard solution in deployment.
Averting the worst effects of climate change now will cost quantifiable value (N). Putting this cost off until a later date will necessarily cost quantifiable value (N), multiplied...
You're assuming that the cost of changing our emissions profile in the future is the same as the cost of doing it today, plus inflation. This assumes that our technological ability to maintain our standard of living with lower emissions will not change, which is clearly false. In fact what's almost certainly the case is that -- looking only at the cost of changing our emissions profile -- changing slowly and in particular deferring much of the change until the time that it's forced by increasing fossil fuel costs will be much less expensive than forcing the change fast, now.
In fact, I think there's a very reasonable argument that developing technologies will eventually make non carbon-emitting power generation technologies cheaper than fossil fuels. We seem to be headed that way fairly quickly; it's already the case that in many parts of the developed world you can switch to PV power generation and save money vs buying coal-generated electricity. My electric vehicle costs far less to operate than my gasoline-powered vehicle. Assuming that trend continues, the eventual cost of the transition to cleaner technology is zero, because it'll save us money vs using fossil fuels. Pushing that changeover faster than dictated by natural economic effects will add cost, slowing short-term economic growth. The mechanics of compound growth mean that we're unlikely to regain that lost ground.
Actually, there's another assumption implicit in your statement, which is that we even have to change our emissions profile! Specifically, you're assuming that it's impossible to achieve a new equilibrium which includes high levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. I think geologic history indicates that this is clearly false. The earth has found many equilibria over it's long history. It's not an unstable system. If it were it would have run away in one direction or another, never to return. In fact through ice ages and warm periods the overall temperature of the earth has actually remained within a fairly narrow range.
I suspect that the cost of reducing our emissions is less than the cost of dealing with climate change (actually, I suspect that we're already going to have to deal with a lot of it, but we can probably reduce the future impact), but simplistic arguments like yours don't help.
You probably also don't understand that your employees are in fact people who occasionally need to get things organized during the day
Meh.
Businesses have legitimate reasons for monitoring the use of their equipment and networks. Employees have legitimate reasons for doing some personal stuff at work. The obvious compromise is exactly what happens: Businesses monitor and employees can decide whether they're okay with their personal stuff being monitored. If not, they have other options like doing it at home, or on their smartphone.
That said, I do appreciate that my employer doesn't monitor my traffic.
Google probably weights your search reults more by what it knows about you than anything else. For instance, I play the bagpipes and searching for anything with the term "pipe" in it doesn't result in plumbing results. Of course, if you're a bagpipe-playing plumber, you're in trouble...
Matt Cutts says that the personalization-based weighting isn't the strongest part of the weighting. He specifically says it's weaker than location. https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Google disagrees. In fact, that disagreement was the reason why Google's IPO modeled the voting stock structure on that of publicly-owned newspapers and other media companies. The danger is that public ownership may drive the company to push perspectives that the shareholders want, so voting rights are retained in a small group whose editorial integrity is trusted. Google's founders demanded that the IPO be set up as it was specifically so that they couldn't be forced by shareholders to manipulate search results, because they felt that it was critical for Google's sake that it continue to be an honest index of web content. It has now become big enough that it is important not just to Google but to the integrity of the world's political processes.
As others have pointed out, this may represent an improvement over the status quo ante, in which the available political news was decided by media which were overtly political. On the other hand, the new world of automatically-personalized search engines exacerbate the risk of the filter bubble. Search engines don't create this risk, because it has always been possible for people to choose to subscribe to news sources that confirm their own biases (and many, many people have), but in that case at least people know they're choosing one source over another, even if they may not recognize why they're doing it.
On the other hand, it's possible for Google et al to counter the filter bubble effect by occasionally inserting high-quality counter-preference results. The interesting thing about that approach is that it can be argued that it is a case of deliberate manipulation, while selecting for preference is just a logical way to better serve the user by giving them what they're looking for.
FYI, Matt Cutts (one of the leaders of Google's Web Search team) responded to filter bubble questions on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/i.... Among other things, he says Google does do some things to increase diversity in results. He also mentions that you can easily disable web personalization if you don't want it.
On the other hand, warmed land = increase in available resources, as much land which is presently too cold to be much occupied becomes more pleasant. And, frankly, it's not like humans actually occupy a huge percentage of the available land mass.
What will happen is significant shift in wealth tied to real estate. Owners of large swaths of less-valuable interior land will get rich, while owners of coastal land lose their shirts.
It's certainly likely that in some parts of the world these changes will lead to violence, but I see no reason to expect that regions which already have good systems for non-violent resolution of civil conflict should go that way. It will stress them, but it'll also happen slowly enough to be manageable.
There's evidence that we could spend some money now to reduce the warming, thereby reducing the total cost.
Cite?
Is there some study that attempts to quantify the costs of emission controls and weigh them against estimates of the cost of dealing with rising seas and changing weather patterns? I've been looking for that for some time and haven't seen it. I'd be particularly interested to see what portion of the cost of climate change is now inevitable. Granted that such a study would have to be wildly speculative, but careful, intelligent, informed speculation can be useful.
However, I suspect that there is no such research and your claims of evidence are wishful thinking.
Thus freedom is preserved, and only those who are actually guilty of harming others are punished, rather than the population as a whole.
Similarly, we should cease enforcement of all traffic rules and regulations. We should only punish drivers whose actions actually injure or kill someone else. Anything else is government overreach.
Badly-flawed analogy. The analogous actions for firearms are shooting within city limits, carrying in public without a permit, threatening someone with a gun, taking a gun on an airplane, etc. There are already plenty of firearm regulations that correspond with the traffic rules and regulations. In fact, if you start drawing parallels, the gun laws are a lot more restrictive, particularly when you consider how much more dangerous a car is than a gun.
After all, civilians are almost always closer to the place & time of crime than the police.
Which is why we get news about brave armed civilians preventing crimes nearly every day, right? Wait, we don't. Maybe there's a flaw in your theory?
Actually, if you follow such news nationally you do get a few stories per week. Studies that have attempted to quantify such incidents have found a very wide range of results, from 2.5 million incidents per year at the high end to 100,000 incidents at the low end (in a Brady Campaign-supported study). But even the low end is actually a rather large number.
If you need, and will actually read them, I'm happy to provide citations.
Marine corps are trained to handle firearms. The US is a scary place where you can get a half hour gun safety course and buy several Rugers.
So if what you're describing is actually a problem, we should see large numbers of deaths caused by insufficiently-trained gun owners. Care to cite them? Actually it should be even worse because in most places in the US no safety training is required, just a clean criminal record. And you can buy guns that are much more powerful than most Rugers (Ruger does make some heavier guns, but they're mostly famous for their.22 LR rifles and handguns).
(Note that I'm a strong believer in firearm safety training, in fact I'm a certified firearms instructor and I often teach classes to both kids and adults. I'm certainly not arguing that there's no value in training, but I'm sure that you're vastly overestimating the practical impact of the lack of legally-enforced training requirements.)
If I happen to think Al Franken is a moron on the basis of past actions, does that mean I have to agree with the FCC? Ouch! Easier to re-examine Franken!
Or... you could just realize that it's possible for someone to agree with you on some topics and disagree with you on others. And it's even possible for someone who is not a moron to disagree with you. Personally, I disagree with Al Franken in far more areas than I agree with him, but I'm in complete agreement on this one.
Intention -- searching for those who will work for the least, in countries that have more relaxed environmental regulations and to avoid taxes
Effect -- increased localized unemployment, a "race to the bottom" on wages, damage to the environment and government budget crises
That's one local, short term effect.
The non-local short term effect is increasing wages in the other country. With increasing wealth comes increasing desire for a clean environment, etc., or do you think that people in other countries are inherently less interested in those things than you are? They aren't, they just don't yet have the means to pay attention to them, because they're focused on survival. As their wealth rises that will change... which if you care about the environment is a Very Good Thing, because it's not like their pollution stays where it is.
Spreading the work around increases the wealth of the human race as a whole. Sure, it may well decrease, at least temporarily, the wealth of your tribe, but from a global perspective that's actually a good thing. And one thing we've learned over the past millennia is that increasing participation in commerce eventually benefits everyone -- a rising tide lifts all boats. In the long run your tribe will be economically better off, too.
But, morally, the best way to approach the issue is to expand your tribe to include the entire human race.
Slashdot Mirror
Use e-voting and you will see the powerful grab control, one way or another. Use paper.
Or if you like, use both.
Using some cryptographic design principles plus paper ballots for marking votes and computers for tallying them, and including some random verification processes to tighten the whole thing, Chaum and Rivest's Scantegrity II system provides and end-to-end verifiable system which allows every voter to verify that their vote was counted correctly, without giving them the ability to prove how they voted to anyone else (an important anti-coercion feature). It also allows anyone to verify (with arbitrarily high probability) that the votes were tallied correctly.
It's awesome from a voting security/integrity point of view, and also very practical.
It is not, however, possible to do it online. There's simply no way to make that secure while retaining anonymity. And any kind of at-home voting (including mail-in paper ballots) is inherently vulnerable to vote buying and coercion.
The NSA will try to infiltrate the IETF.
The NSA has already been participating in many standards bodies overtly and covertly. But that doesn't really matter. IETF protocols are designed in public, so backroom attempts to subvert them don't work. The only thing the NSA et al can do is to try to get the standards weakened in subtle, non-obvious ways they can exploit. But being able to do that effectively requires being significantly smarter than everyone else who is looking at and commenting on the designs so they can design and insert weaknesses which no one realizes are weaknesses.
One ploy they can use that doesn't require super genius insight is to try to promote complexity in new standards. Complexity makes implementation harder and increases the probability of exploitable mistakes, in both design and implementation. That won't give them any guaranteed avenues of attack, but it will increase the odds of exploitable weaknesses. So we need to guard against excessive complexity in standards... but that's always been the case anyway.
I found a few. I admit I did underestimate the number, though let's not forget that "he pulled a gun and the robber ran away" does not mean the robbery would've happened otherwise.
This is precisely the fact that causes the large variance (25X!) in studies on defensive gun use. Small differences in methodology and definitions dramatically change the numbers. However, the formal study that found the lowest rate of defensive gun use, directed and funded by an organization which was interested in showing that it was insignificant, still found 100,000 incidents per year. That says a lot.
If guns were such a dramatic factor in decreasing crime, then other countries with stricter gun laws should have higher crime rates, right? But they don't.
Some do, some don't. It's very difficult to compare across countries due to differing cultures, standards of data collection, definitions of crimes, etc. There is actually a small negative correlation between guns per capita and homicide rate (homicide is one crime that tends to be well-reported and consistently defined worldwide), though the coefficient is only -0.23.
Looking at longitudinal studies in the US, there is evidence that liberalizing concealed carry laws, increasing the number of law-abiding citizens who are armed on a daily basis and therefore increasing the opportunity for defensive use, lowers violent crime rates. The effect is not large, but is statistically significant. The pattern of decrease seems to imply that the biggest effect comes not so much from actual defensive use but from making criminals aware that their targets might be armed, because the biggest drop occurs shortly after the changes in the law, well before the number of citizens carrying increases significantly. It continues as the number of carriers rises, though.
There is no evidence that increasing the number of lawful carriers increases gun violence, by the way, which is what fans of the "but people get mad at each other and if they have guns they'll shoot!" theory would expect. This is true even in "constitutional carry" states, where anyone who can legally possess a gun is allowed to carry it, so there's no filter created by background checks and permit training and procedural requirements.
In my personal experience, and that of many others with whom I've spoken (no formal studies have been done AFAICT), being armed is actually a strong psychological counterweight to anger and violence. Possession of a deadly weapon tends to make people think a lot harder about the possible consequences of allowing tense situations to escalate. It's a sort of mental bucket of cold water that cools people down as they think "Oh shit, this could get bad."
Training is good, but the statistical evidence shows no negative impact from allowing citizens with no legally-required training to carry (in fact, liberalized concealed carry seems to reduce crime rates). Since individual freedom is and should be the default, if you want to argue for restricting freedom by requiring training you have to demonstrate -- with facts, not theories or anecdotes -- that doing so actually solves a real-world problem.
You can't demonstrate that, because it's not true.
Your first argument removes the external pressure of environmental damage, while your second argument removes human involvement altogether.
But you can't actually counter the arguments, or you would have. So instead you attack their political impact (which you mischaracterize). Nice.
I don't think there is any question as to whether Earth itself will survive; it's our own well-being which is in question.
I don't think there's any question that humanity will survive just fine, either. All that is in question is which choice will have the lowest economic impact on us, and therefore best allow us to continue improving our standard of living (globally, not just in the wealthy countries).
You should probably avoid describing the positions of others as "simplistic" when your own statements entirely misrepresent the alternative point of view.
I didn't make any representations about the alternative point of view.
SCTP already exists, and is reasonably well supported. No one uses it because it turns out TCP and UDP actually do most of what we need pretty well.
A more recent alternative, which gets through firewalls better, is Google's QUIC protocol (successor to SPDY). It's built on top of UDP which means it can't do quite as much as an IP-level protocol can, but it can be and is a lot smarter than TCP. It also provides multiplexed streaming, server push and other performance features and has NO unencrypted mode. It's all encrypted and authenticated, all the time.
ISIS has the same problems as Google Wallet:
1: You need an ISIS approved credit card.
Google Wallet works with any credit card.
2: ISIS requires a new SIM card because of the app installed.
Google Wallet doesn't use a SIM.
3: ISIS is choosy about what phones it uses, and what ROMs. Got a rooted phone, ISIS will give you the middle finger.
Not sure about Google Wallet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's the same. When you root your phone you bypass a lot of the OS security features. This allows you to do some things, but it also opens other doors which generally weakens the security guarantees which are important for stuff like doing payments with your phone. I think Google needs to figure out what people are trying to accomplish by rooting and provide built-in alternatives that don't require root. Not so rooting can be disabled, just so it's less necessary, because it comes at a cost.
4: ISIS has competition. Paypal, Google Wallet, and many other places are vying for retailer point of sale terminals. This means that there is not a high chance that you will be able to use it.
Yes, but they all use the same protocols, which runs on the same backend rails. A reader for one of them will accept the others. I have heard that some terminals are denying Google Wallet because its current solution uses a MasterCard Debit to front whatever card you configure, which results in high fees to the merchant. 7-11 seems to have stopped accepting GW. This will get sorted, I'm sure.
5: No iOS device supports it, nor are there any publically announced plans of Apple doing so in the future.
True, but Apple has been hiring people with NFC skills for a couple of years. Well, they've been advertising positions for them, anyway. Perhaps that is very clever misdirection?
ISIS is a nice start, but it is a version 0.1. It has a long ways to go, and there are many entrenched competitors with as good, if not better products.
Sure, but the point is that there is competition, at least on Android. As it starts to get more popular (which probably won't happen in a big way until the liability shift nears) I expect to see the market for mobile wallets heat up.
Now that any Android 4.4+ device can use Google Wallet
The rest of the problem becomes getting manufacturers and carriers to push out Android 4.4 images.
New phones seem to be the only way :-(
Still, though it may take 2-3 years for large numbers to make it out to people, it'll happen. And we're still nearly two years from the liability shift.
(Note: This comment is US-centric. I'll let others do the analysis for the rest of the world, but the case is actually easier there.)
NFC is still coming, and soon. Now that any Android 4.4+ device can use Google Wallet and with ISIS deployed to AT&T, Verizon & T-mobile customers who want it, one half of the secure mobile payments infrastructure problem is all but solved. Android 4.4 includes open APIs so that anyone else can implement NFC payment apps, also, and there are rumors of many coming. There are hints that Apple is also doing something with NFC.
The other half of the infrastructure problem is merchant acceptance. Visa and MasterCard announced in 2012 (IIRC) that the liability shift will be implemented end of 2015. What that means is that after the shift takes place, any merchant will be able to completely stop paying for any credit card fraud simply by deploying chip (including NFC) payment terminals. Given that merchants pay for nearly all fraud, and that it costs many billions annually, you'll see them moving fast. Already in some parts of the country I can go through a whole day using nothing but my phone for payment, and it's improving rapidly.
It's about a decade later than when the industry thought it would be but contactless smart card / NFC payment is in full rollout mode now.
Square is wise to drop their custom, proprietary solution to a problem that has an industry-standard solution in deployment.
Averting the worst effects of climate change now will cost quantifiable value (N). Putting this cost off until a later date will necessarily cost quantifiable value (N), multiplied...
You're assuming that the cost of changing our emissions profile in the future is the same as the cost of doing it today, plus inflation. This assumes that our technological ability to maintain our standard of living with lower emissions will not change, which is clearly false. In fact what's almost certainly the case is that -- looking only at the cost of changing our emissions profile -- changing slowly and in particular deferring much of the change until the time that it's forced by increasing fossil fuel costs will be much less expensive than forcing the change fast, now.
In fact, I think there's a very reasonable argument that developing technologies will eventually make non carbon-emitting power generation technologies cheaper than fossil fuels. We seem to be headed that way fairly quickly; it's already the case that in many parts of the developed world you can switch to PV power generation and save money vs buying coal-generated electricity. My electric vehicle costs far less to operate than my gasoline-powered vehicle. Assuming that trend continues, the eventual cost of the transition to cleaner technology is zero, because it'll save us money vs using fossil fuels. Pushing that changeover faster than dictated by natural economic effects will add cost, slowing short-term economic growth. The mechanics of compound growth mean that we're unlikely to regain that lost ground.
Actually, there's another assumption implicit in your statement, which is that we even have to change our emissions profile! Specifically, you're assuming that it's impossible to achieve a new equilibrium which includes high levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. I think geologic history indicates that this is clearly false. The earth has found many equilibria over it's long history. It's not an unstable system. If it were it would have run away in one direction or another, never to return. In fact through ice ages and warm periods the overall temperature of the earth has actually remained within a fairly narrow range.
I suspect that the cost of reducing our emissions is less than the cost of dealing with climate change (actually, I suspect that we're already going to have to deal with a lot of it, but we can probably reduce the future impact), but simplistic arguments like yours don't help.
You probably also don't understand that your employees are in fact people who occasionally need to get things organized during the day
Meh.
Businesses have legitimate reasons for monitoring the use of their equipment and networks. Employees have legitimate reasons for doing some personal stuff at work. The obvious compromise is exactly what happens: Businesses monitor and employees can decide whether they're okay with their personal stuff being monitored. If not, they have other options like doing it at home, or on their smartphone.
That said, I do appreciate that my employer doesn't monitor my traffic.
Google probably weights your search reults more by what it knows about you than anything else. For instance, I play the bagpipes and searching for anything with the term "pipe" in it doesn't result in plumbing results. Of course, if you're a bagpipe-playing plumber, you're in trouble...
Matt Cutts says that the personalization-based weighting isn't the strongest part of the weighting. He specifically says it's weaker than location. https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
The difference is that Google is not media.
Google disagrees. In fact, that disagreement was the reason why Google's IPO modeled the voting stock structure on that of publicly-owned newspapers and other media companies. The danger is that public ownership may drive the company to push perspectives that the shareholders want, so voting rights are retained in a small group whose editorial integrity is trusted. Google's founders demanded that the IPO be set up as it was specifically so that they couldn't be forced by shareholders to manipulate search results, because they felt that it was critical for Google's sake that it continue to be an honest index of web content. It has now become big enough that it is important not just to Google but to the integrity of the world's political processes.
As others have pointed out, this may represent an improvement over the status quo ante, in which the available political news was decided by media which were overtly political. On the other hand, the new world of automatically-personalized search engines exacerbate the risk of the filter bubble. Search engines don't create this risk, because it has always been possible for people to choose to subscribe to news sources that confirm their own biases (and many, many people have), but in that case at least people know they're choosing one source over another, even if they may not recognize why they're doing it.
On the other hand, it's possible for Google et al to counter the filter bubble effect by occasionally inserting high-quality counter-preference results. The interesting thing about that approach is that it can be argued that it is a case of deliberate manipulation, while selecting for preference is just a logical way to better serve the user by giving them what they're looking for.
FYI, Matt Cutts (one of the leaders of Google's Web Search team) responded to filter bubble questions on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/i.... Among other things, he says Google does do some things to increase diversity in results. He also mentions that you can easily disable web personalization if you don't want it.
On the other hand, warmed land = increase in available resources, as much land which is presently too cold to be much occupied becomes more pleasant. And, frankly, it's not like humans actually occupy a huge percentage of the available land mass.
What will happen is significant shift in wealth tied to real estate. Owners of large swaths of less-valuable interior land will get rich, while owners of coastal land lose their shirts.
It's certainly likely that in some parts of the world these changes will lead to violence, but I see no reason to expect that regions which already have good systems for non-violent resolution of civil conflict should go that way. It will stress them, but it'll also happen slowly enough to be manageable.
There's evidence that we could spend some money now to reduce the warming, thereby reducing the total cost.
Cite?
Is there some study that attempts to quantify the costs of emission controls and weigh them against estimates of the cost of dealing with rising seas and changing weather patterns? I've been looking for that for some time and haven't seen it. I'd be particularly interested to see what portion of the cost of climate change is now inevitable. Granted that such a study would have to be wildly speculative, but careful, intelligent, informed speculation can be useful.
However, I suspect that there is no such research and your claims of evidence are wishful thinking.
Thus freedom is preserved, and only those who are actually guilty of harming others are punished, rather than the population as a whole.
Similarly, we should cease enforcement of all traffic rules and regulations. We should only punish drivers whose actions actually injure or kill someone else. Anything else is government overreach.
Badly-flawed analogy. The analogous actions for firearms are shooting within city limits, carrying in public without a permit, threatening someone with a gun, taking a gun on an airplane, etc. There are already plenty of firearm regulations that correspond with the traffic rules and regulations. In fact, if you start drawing parallels, the gun laws are a lot more restrictive, particularly when you consider how much more dangerous a car is than a gun.
After all, civilians are almost always closer to the place & time of crime than the police.
Which is why we get news about brave armed civilians preventing crimes nearly every day, right? Wait, we don't. Maybe there's a flaw in your theory?
Actually, if you follow such news nationally you do get a few stories per week. Studies that have attempted to quantify such incidents have found a very wide range of results, from 2.5 million incidents per year at the high end to 100,000 incidents at the low end (in a Brady Campaign-supported study). But even the low end is actually a rather large number.
If you need, and will actually read them, I'm happy to provide citations.
Marine corps are trained to handle firearms. The US is a scary place where you can get a half hour gun safety course and buy several Rugers.
So if what you're describing is actually a problem, we should see large numbers of deaths caused by insufficiently-trained gun owners. Care to cite them? Actually it should be even worse because in most places in the US no safety training is required, just a clean criminal record. And you can buy guns that are much more powerful than most Rugers (Ruger does make some heavier guns, but they're mostly famous for their .22 LR rifles and handguns).
(Note that I'm a strong believer in firearm safety training, in fact I'm a certified firearms instructor and I often teach classes to both kids and adults. I'm certainly not arguing that there's no value in training, but I'm sure that you're vastly overestimating the practical impact of the lack of legally-enforced training requirements.)
It's more accurate to say that we have summer on occasion.
A dubious claim.
That's a natural consequence of our plurality-rules voting system, unfortunately.
If I happen to think Al Franken is a moron on the basis of past actions, does that mean I have to agree with the FCC? Ouch! Easier to re-examine Franken!
Or... you could just realize that it's possible for someone to agree with you on some topics and disagree with you on others. And it's even possible for someone who is not a moron to disagree with you. Personally, I disagree with Al Franken in far more areas than I agree with him, but I'm in complete agreement on this one.
Your anecdotes do not constitute data. Statistics from 27 years of real-world experience do.
You wanna know what else increases the likelihood of being hit? Doing unexpected shit, like not stopping for a stop sign.
And yet, actual statistical evidence shows that your belief is wrong. RTFA.
+1
Intention -- searching for those who will work for the least, in countries that have more relaxed environmental regulations and to avoid taxes Effect -- increased localized unemployment, a "race to the bottom" on wages, damage to the environment and government budget crises
That's one local, short term effect.
The non-local short term effect is increasing wages in the other country. With increasing wealth comes increasing desire for a clean environment, etc., or do you think that people in other countries are inherently less interested in those things than you are? They aren't, they just don't yet have the means to pay attention to them, because they're focused on survival. As their wealth rises that will change... which if you care about the environment is a Very Good Thing, because it's not like their pollution stays where it is.
Spreading the work around increases the wealth of the human race as a whole. Sure, it may well decrease, at least temporarily, the wealth of your tribe, but from a global perspective that's actually a good thing. And one thing we've learned over the past millennia is that increasing participation in commerce eventually benefits everyone -- a rising tide lifts all boats. In the long run your tribe will be economically better off, too.
But, morally, the best way to approach the issue is to expand your tribe to include the entire human race.