And I thought that I was in a rational century without totalitarian governments that have the capabilities to do things like this. Isn't this out of some SCI-Fi movie?
You mean that it's wrong for any countries other than the UK or US to do something like this? After reading the headline, I was thinking what they really need is to stick tons of solar cells on top, have a means storing that power, and several air to ground lasers. You'd still need cops for indoor crime, but hey, if you are going all out on your evil overlord bit, you might as well get as much use from those platforms as possible.
Forget anti-virus or malware vendors. We'll just admit that we live in the wild west/various mob ruled internet. How long do you think that it'll take them to figure out that they might be able to shack down the owners of those PCs for say a $30 a year "protection" fee from other anti-virus/anti-malware/ general evil spreading software products?
Furthermore, you don't throw together a $12 billion proposal and not take into account such things. Anything you can think of regarding this project has likely been thought of already by the planners. If crustal movement was to have a serious impact, we would not be hearing about this proposal, because it would have been scrapped long ago.
We can only hope. Trust me, humans are stupid enough to have the thing 3/4 done and then think about little things like that and then go back and spend 10x the original amount retrofitting the tunnel for the new found environmental conditions.
You're acting like this is the only fire retardant available, or that there aren't ways to reduce flammability that don't involve spraying toxics on your products or otherwise making them unsafe.
You know, I just had the thought that we are working at this problem from the wrong end. We need to make our products more flamable. Actually, I wasn't just thinking flamable, but once it's on fire, the product burns until it's at its rawest parts. The main problem that we have with fire's is smoke. We need to make products that don't smoke when they burn. They need to emit no air pollution while burning. Here is an idea, requiring a sample of every product produced to be burned and measuring the released air pollution. You'd start requiring the manufacures to design their products to emit the least possible amount when burning.
That's not the point, Kyte said. Deca is safe and shouldn't become the "poster child" for stricter regulations just because a chemical is detected in people or the environment.
Isn't that a HUGE issue? The chemical is CONCENTRATING itself in the food chain. Either show that it decomposes into safe, naturally occurring chemicals or realize that it is time to look at banning it BEFORE it hits levels that are hazardous.
You know, I'd want both. I'd want the manufactures to prove to me that such and such chemicals are safe for various animals with the known factoring of the concentrating effect. I'd also want those ecological folks to prove that the chemicals are harmful and such and such quantities. I take a mixed approach to it. We can't know if any of various "safe" chemicals are. Next thing that you know they'll go banning water cause that concentrates and it is deadly in improper ammounts. We need a sane safe way of doing things. Actually, I guess we need to start asking how are any non-natural man-made chemicals getting into the environment to begin with and let's start limiting all forms of pollution/waste. I have no idea how this substance is applied or leaks into the enviroment once applied to a product. I guess that we need to start asking ourselves how can we make sure all these chemicals/man made objects completly clean up after themselves once they hit "the evironment" instead of being "inside the environment that is should be in." Example having, an air sealed desktop/montior and if the airseal breaks, within an hour all harmful chemicals are completely broken down. Can we even do that?
I have no idea how much power that my family uses, or what the neighborhood average is, or how much is the city high, low, median for businesses. Now that I think about it, it would be awesome for anyone to find that information out. I'm into energy efficiency. I don't like the green/GW agenda, but I do think that knowing how much resources that you and your neighbors are using and attempting to use less is a good thing.
I can think evil thoughts when I want to. How would I be evil? I'd try to get a city/county/state law put into place that basically says that if your new residence/industry/government building uses more than the median usage than you get to pay for the extra power generation.;) Make the data centers/industry build/run their own power plants.
I wonder if ferns ever look at us and laugh saying that non-quantum-sourced energy is so 3 billion years ago. Maybe so, but then some herbivore eat a thousand of them, we eat a hundred herbivores, and we're the benefactor of all their magic! If humans were photoheterotrophic or photoautotrophic, we wouldn't have enough energy to do much more than sit there sulking like a stupid fern.
Hey, be nice to our existing photosynthesis plant underlords! They are the ultimate green pacifist liberals. Would you allow other lower order organisms to eat pieces of you or your community just for the prinicple of the thing? I sure wouldn't. Let's be thankful that our magic plant lords consent to convert energy into forms of food that we can eat! If it wasn't for them, all animal life would be in trouble.
They provide us with free bread, and we provide them with free entertainment. They are much smarter than we are and spend their entire lifes sitting around just laughing at the stuff we do. They are the ultimate couch potatos.
Instead I'll say: That may have been true once, but it isn't any more. It will become less and less true with time, as learning economies and economies of scale come into effect.
When will those start kicking in? I've had solar calculators all my life, and I've yet to see the tech cheaply scaled up for any other uses.
I might be able to come up with other scenarios if I give it more thought, but I think you get the point. The PV cell's $/Watt cost is not the only cost to consider.
I found your points funny. I then thought about it and they all really support the $/watt being the only thing that we need to focus on. Why? You didn't factor in the costs for each or the full $/Watt for the product.
Your 1 was acre per 100 watts at %1 of existing price for solar cells... It didn't factor in the price of the acres of land needed to power said building. If you need 10-20 acres to power a home fine, but it changes that $/watt equation.
Your 2 coould be said as the same thing. You had 1% cost, not much needed space, and high replacement/maintance costs. Well, that changes the $/Watt equation its still there you just have to do a ROI and factor everything in.
Your 3 was silly/funny about using reflectors to focus energy and then saying that isn't good because kids/teens would play with them and that you'd need to armor them up to prevent your own kids from messing with them. That's more of a parenting issue than a $/watt issue. You could still express it as $/watt and the amount of damage taken/caused by misuse. If your kid sets your pine tree on fire, and burns down the neighborhood, you'll be out more than your own home's value. How does human stupidity change the $/watt equation?
Oh sure, we COULD just go to the store and buy the thing, but instead we'll fill out form 361-B in triplicate, ensuring one is in English, one is in French and the other is in some language only three people in the world can speak (meaning you'll have to get approval and fill out more paperwork to fly them in to finish that section the form) and then wait 4-6 months for the document and its approval to weave it's way through the maze of middle management. Oh well, at least it keeps me and many other workers employed.
So this is what Esperanto and Klingon is for! Thanks. I just assumed that we had English as the offical langauage to make government easier to use. I forgot that bureaucracy exists to create more bureaucracy. We might as well bring back Greek and Latin for "educated" people to have that as the unoffical layer that people have to pass through to fill out the most secret of those governmental forms. Here is an idea, each agency that doesn't score an A has to teach its members an extinct lanuage and have all all their departments forms translated into it. All internal forms and communications should be held within said extinct lanuage.
Oh please... you expect us to believe that humans cause sunspots???
Um, yes we do. When we anger the god Apollo well he gets pised off at use makes more sunspots. We should listen to the priest of Apollo in order to appease the Sun God so that GW will end!
The number of sunspots has been near constant (on average) over the past 20 years, yet they are at the highest level in over 1000 years for the last 60 years "yet the average temperature of the earth has continued to increase". This shows the author doesn't understand lag times between applying extra energy input to the atmospheric system versus the time required for the large mass of the Earth's ecosystem to respond by warming land, sea and air to the point where average temperature changes can be measured.
These sort of incomplete descriptions give the average reader a bad view of what is really going on. It gives journalism a bad name.
Nope, it's just another GW article that could be filed under against GW except bad write up so will easily be "disproved" by GW fans.
Ok, this show has been promoted like wildfire on the net by conservatives and global warming deniers. Like with Michael Crichton, no matter how many times it is debunked, I see we will see this show quoted as truth for years to come and links to it get modded up....
To most people, it's just as factual as "An Inconvenient Truth." Remember 49% of the population wanted Gore the first time around, and 49% wanted Bush. So just taking those percentages into account, you'll have 49% of voters that think "An Inconvenient Truth" while those same votes think the others show is a pack of PR lies. The same thing applies in the other direction though, you have the other 49% of voters that think "An Inconvenient Truth"i s a pack of PR lies and the other show is a factual rebuttal of the PR piece.
In short it's too political for any real science to be done in the field. (Why do I say that? Because GW is a multibillion a year industry sort of like Tobacco is except GW has alot of government scientists on the payroll. So any debate on well neutral or anti-GW being rejected during "peer review" strikes a cord with those that think that that the budget for "climate studies" need to be slashed and used for their pet projects. I've given up hope on this issue.
Of course it's really worse than evolution. Why do I say that? Well, I'm not into the whole ID thing, but hey I've grown up with the theory of evolution and it's always been there. You'd have thought that maybe, just maybe that a lot of you know information supporting the theory would have eventually been taught. Nope, just the theory name and its idea. So I pretty much just took evolution on faith during school since I never was exposed to all the evidence for it only the political debates on both sides. I think that's how alot of people take GW. They don't know the facts or really care too much about them on GW. They just get pounded with the message GW is happening, GW is bad, to fix GW do what we tell you. It's a nice simple emotional message to control your voting population with.
Fundamentally there is no difference between Arab rulers and Chinese rulers. Both are authoritarian. Both control their masses with a mixture of ideology and ruthlessness.
That shows we are better than them because our leaders save their ruthlessness for foreigners. Our leaders control us through various means of ideology as well.
Well, let me quickly write a scenario for my boss. What will happen in 10 years if they dont immediately fund my division with an additional 3 million bucks and 22 new engineers. Can I say our customers will come to the corporate headquarters and sack and pillage it and carry away the fetching executive assistant the CFO has hired? Nah, wont work. Our management is not as dumb as the UK DoD.
What about a scenario where an entity be it aliens/government/natural turns off/absorbs electricity for the planet Earth and we need to prepare our business to run and thrive without using any forms of electicity! Our first order of business is buying all our employees bikes and relocating them all close enough to work so that they can use them to commute. Then we need to buy crossbows/swords for all our employees and train them in how to use them so they'll be armed during the transition period. We need to either buy all our local cafeteria food from the nearest farmer and make sure he can bring it to use by horse or ox drawn wagons. Taking these steps may seem alittle paranoid, but you never know if that magic substance electricity will just stop working so we need to prepare now while we still have it for the day when we might not have it to depend on!
The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. You can preempt that by running the country for the benefit of the people in general rather than for the billionaires.
You just make your PSPs, iPods, wifi/cell phones, internet, and TV cheap enough for the poor to afford and then the poor and middle class generally won't care about the divide.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that China's government and industry are completely unconcerned about the source of the technology that they mass-produce and sell to everyone. They just don't care, period, and I suppose when you get right down to it there's no reason they should. On the other hand, that just means there's no reason why we should respect their "intellectual property" either, and when their scientists and engineers come up with something good they damn well shouldn't expect us to concern ourselves over their rights either. If Google did indeed rip off their Chinese counterparts my feeling is... more power to 'em.
I take it as the same as my attitude for cheating through school and life in general. All is fair as long as you don't get caught or punished for doing it. Cheating and IP theft is fine and dandy as long as you don't get caught or punished much if caught. This applies to everyone and every type of entity such as governments and corporations. As long as they can get away with something without being caught or punished, they will.
The opposite is much more likely true : the nature of childhood is to be sheltered. Just as animals shelter their offspring until they are capable of coping with it without being immediately eaten.
Further: the young have a strong 'copy' instinct, which is how they seem to learn the basics. Putting the 'real world' in front of them before they have reached the age of autonomy is asking for trouble.
I've seen dropouts, highschool grads, college students, and some college grads from really sheltered Christain universties all hit "the real world" and find out that life ain't fair and everyone else is generally out to earn a buck off your stupidity/ignorance. The more sheltered an "adult" is from what the real world acual is or like the worse they'll generally get screwed. The ones that grew up with a hard life know that life sucks and atleast try to better themselves and screw others.
That copying instinct isn't a young thing. It's a human thing. Look at humans of any age group of similiar social political background and they'll all act similiar reguardless of age.
Why can't we continue to play hand-eye coordination improving games? I've played pinball and hung around arcades for over 30 years. When the fight 'em kick 'em punch 'em games came in, the arcade became a ghost town.
And I've never spent more than $5 total in my life time in an aracade. Maybe you didn't notice these things like NES, Sega, N64, Playstation, PS2, Xbox, and on and on. The reason that arcades are ghost towns is because most people would rather pay $20-50 on the game to play unlimited at home rather than pay $.25-1.00 on a game. We spend far more money and time with video games now because now we own them and can play them as much as we want. An arcade generally can't compete against gameboys or now a PSP. The only play that I've seen arcades is in the lobby of movie theaters and 1-2 at a pizza place. The home video game console is what killed aracades.
And believe it or not, our current climate models have made verifiable predictions, which makes it a little easier to think we must be doing something right with them. There are a few large scale atmospheric oscillations that were predicted by models and then later confirmed in historical data.
"Something right" and "a few succesful runs" are a far cry from useful for policy decisions. A stopped clock is right twice a day, doesn't mean it's useful to generally tell time. Actually, they may be a bit better than that but not near sundial level at telling time. Actually, if they were about as good as sundails they'd be useful. They aren't even as accurate as sand hour glasses and that's the problem. Yes, sand hour glasses can be useful, but there are lots of problems that you need better time keeping to solve. Heck, routine cooking nowadays is better than sanddail hourglass accurate. That's the problem with the models, that they can be useful for universities and rarely give up correct future patterns that would be enough for me or a politican to be useful tool for planning. A few successes or a few right passes doesn't mean that the models mostly work or nearly always work, or even better yet never fail. The way that they are marketed to the public is that they have few faults and are nearly always accurate, which isn't correct.
Care to elaborate on that? The models are available for you to play with. The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate. The satellite data indicating that the atmosphere is warming is available. The fact that we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere by the millions of tons is fairly simple to calculate.
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong, but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
Um, I don't have any faith that any of the models are near right. It doesn't matter how much they let the public fiddle with a few values. It's like trying to use SimEarth to predict climate change and saying that it allows you to adjust variables. Yes, but that doesn't mean SimEarth is anywhere accurate to what Earth actually does.
In this case isn't not GIGO, it's good data in trash out. Every one of our existing models is flawed and inaccurate. There are vast hordes that think our current models are great predictions of the future Earth. They are just as accurate as SimEarth is.
Those spots should be auctioned off. The more an employer is paying for an H1-B visa, the more highly-skilled the worker in question is likely to be. IOW, we really will be getting those people with skills we can't find here.
Auction them off both ways! Only the companies that pay the most, and the employees that pay the most get to enter to do business in the country. This is even one that I wouldn't have any gripes if other countries applied to us just make an auction only the highest paying companies and employees can enter your country.
This would effectively force the relative poor to stay in their home country and the richer segments of the population could go anywhere on the globe that they want.
Slashdot Mirror
And I thought that I was in a rational century without totalitarian governments that have the capabilities to do things like this.
Isn't this out of some SCI-Fi movie?
You mean that it's wrong for any countries other than the UK or US to do something like this? After reading the headline, I was thinking what they really need is to stick tons of solar cells on top, have a means storing that power, and several air to ground lasers. You'd still need cops for indoor crime, but hey, if you are going all out on your evil overlord bit, you might as well get as much use from those platforms as possible.
Forget anti-virus or malware vendors. We'll just admit that we live in the wild west/various mob ruled internet. How long do you think that it'll take them to figure out that they might be able to shack down the owners of those PCs for say a $30 a year "protection" fee from other anti-virus/anti-malware/ general evil spreading software products?
China's too busy taking our money to want to nuke us.
Now if we go bankrupt, then we'd have something to worry about.
Nah, then they wouldn't have to bother nuking us. They could just buy us out/up.
Furthermore, you don't throw together a $12 billion proposal and not take into account such things. Anything you can think of regarding this project has likely been thought of already by the planners. If crustal movement was to have a serious impact, we would not be hearing about this proposal, because it would have been scrapped long ago.
We can only hope. Trust me, humans are stupid enough to have the thing 3/4 done and then think about little things like that and then go back and spend 10x the original amount retrofitting the tunnel for the new found environmental conditions.
You're acting like this is the only fire retardant available, or that there aren't ways to reduce flammability that don't involve spraying toxics on your products or otherwise making them unsafe.
You know, I just had the thought that we are working at this problem from the wrong end. We need to make our products more flamable. Actually, I wasn't just thinking flamable, but once it's on fire, the product burns until it's at its rawest parts. The main problem that we have with fire's is smoke. We need to make products that don't smoke when they burn. They need to emit no air pollution while burning. Here is an idea, requiring a sample of every product produced to be burned and measuring the released air pollution. You'd start requiring the manufacures to design their products to emit the least possible amount when burning.
That's not the point, Kyte said. Deca is safe and shouldn't become the "poster child" for stricter regulations just because a chemical is detected in people or the environment.
Isn't that a HUGE issue? The chemical is CONCENTRATING itself in the food chain.
Either show that it decomposes into safe, naturally occurring chemicals or realize that it is time to look at banning it BEFORE it hits levels that are hazardous.
You know, I'd want both. I'd want the manufactures to prove to me that such and such chemicals are safe for various animals with the known factoring of the concentrating effect. I'd also want those ecological folks to prove that the chemicals are harmful and such and such quantities. I take a mixed approach to it. We can't know if any of various "safe" chemicals are. Next thing that you know they'll go banning water cause that concentrates and it is deadly in improper ammounts. We need a sane safe way of doing things. Actually, I guess we need to start asking how are any non-natural man-made chemicals getting into the environment to begin with and let's start limiting all forms of pollution/waste. I have no idea how this substance is applied or leaks into the enviroment once applied to a product. I guess that we need to start asking ourselves how can we make sure all these chemicals/man made objects completly clean up after themselves once they hit "the evironment" instead of being "inside the environment that is should be in." Example having, an air sealed desktop/montior and if the airseal breaks, within an hour all harmful chemicals are completely broken down. Can we even do that?
Civilian firefights are not going to solve the problem unless you get people to wear good guy/bad guy armbands or something.
Um, so all cops and soliders are always the good guys, and who ever they happen to be shooting at are by definition the bad guys?
I have no idea how much power that my family uses, or what the neighborhood average is, or how much is the city high, low, median for businesses. Now that I think about it, it would be awesome for anyone to find that information out. I'm into energy efficiency. I don't like the green/GW agenda, but I do think that knowing how much resources that you and your neighbors are using and attempting to use less is a good thing.
;) Make the data centers/industry build/run their own power plants.
I can think evil thoughts when I want to. How would I be evil? I'd try to get a city/county/state law put into place that basically says that if your new residence/industry/government building uses more than the median usage than you get to pay for the extra power generation.
I wonder if ferns ever look at us and laugh saying that non-quantum-sourced energy is so 3 billion years ago.
Maybe so, but then some herbivore eat a thousand of them, we eat a hundred herbivores, and we're the benefactor of all their magic!
If humans were photoheterotrophic or photoautotrophic, we wouldn't have enough energy to do much more than sit there sulking like a stupid fern.
Hey, be nice to our existing photosynthesis plant underlords! They are the ultimate green pacifist liberals. Would you allow other lower order organisms to eat pieces of you or your community just for the prinicple of the thing? I sure wouldn't. Let's be thankful that our magic plant lords consent to convert energy into forms of food that we can eat! If it wasn't for them, all animal life would be in trouble.
They provide us with free bread, and we provide them with free entertainment. They are much smarter than we are and spend their entire lifes sitting around just laughing at the stuff we do. They are the ultimate couch potatos.
Instead I'll say: That may have been true once, but it isn't any more. It will become less and less true with time, as learning economies and economies of scale come into effect.
When will those start kicking in? I've had solar calculators all my life, and I've yet to see the tech cheaply scaled up for any other uses.
I might be able to come up with other scenarios if I give it more thought, but I think you get the point. The PV cell's $/Watt cost is not the only cost to consider.
I found your points funny. I then thought about it and they all really support the $/watt being the only thing that we need to focus on. Why? You didn't factor in the costs for each or the full $/Watt for the product.
Your 1 was acre per 100 watts at %1 of existing price for solar cells... It didn't factor in the price of the acres of land needed to power said building. If you need 10-20 acres to power a home fine, but it changes that $/watt equation.
Your 2 coould be said as the same thing. You had 1% cost, not much needed space, and high replacement/maintance costs. Well, that changes the $/Watt equation its still there you just have to do a ROI and factor everything in.
Your 3 was silly/funny about using reflectors to focus energy and then saying that isn't good because kids/teens would play with them and that you'd need to armor them up to prevent your own kids from messing with them. That's more of a parenting issue than a $/watt issue. You could still express it as $/watt and the amount of damage taken/caused by misuse. If your kid sets your pine tree on fire, and burns down the neighborhood, you'll be out more than your own home's value. How does human stupidity change the $/watt equation?
Oh sure, we COULD just go to the store and buy the thing, but instead we'll fill out form 361-B in triplicate, ensuring one is in English, one is in French and the other is in some language only three people in the world can speak (meaning you'll have to get approval and fill out more paperwork to fly them in to finish that section the form) and then wait 4-6 months for the document and its approval to weave it's way through the maze of middle management. Oh well, at least it keeps me and many other workers employed.
So this is what Esperanto and Klingon is for! Thanks. I just assumed that we had English as the offical langauage to make government easier to use. I forgot that bureaucracy exists to create more bureaucracy. We might as well bring back Greek and Latin for "educated" people to have that as the unoffical layer that people have to pass through to fill out the most secret of those governmental forms. Here is an idea, each agency that doesn't score an A has to teach its members an extinct lanuage and have all all their departments forms translated into it. All internal forms and communications should be held within said extinct lanuage.
Ok. I've had my crazy thought for the day.
Eight agencies earned A grades
At least now we know which agencies are capable of hacking into the system to change their grades:
They were all Intelligence Agencies so they should be smart enough for that!
Oh please... you expect us to believe that humans cause sunspots???
Um, yes we do. When we anger the god Apollo well he gets pised off at use makes more sunspots. We should listen to the priest of Apollo in order to appease the Sun God so that GW will end!
The number of sunspots has been near constant (on average) over the past 20 years, yet they are at the highest level in over 1000 years for the last 60 years "yet the average temperature of the earth has continued to increase". This shows the author doesn't understand lag times between applying extra energy input to the atmospheric system versus the time required for the large mass of the Earth's ecosystem to respond by warming land, sea and air to the point where average temperature changes can be measured.
These sort of incomplete descriptions give the average reader a bad view of what is really going on. It gives journalism a bad name.
Nope, it's just another GW article that could be filed under against GW except bad write up so will easily be "disproved" by GW fans.
Ok, this show has been promoted like wildfire on the net by conservatives and global warming deniers. Like with Michael Crichton, no matter how many times it is debunked, I see we will see this show quoted as truth for years to come and links to it get modded up....
To most people, it's just as factual as "An Inconvenient Truth." Remember 49% of the population wanted Gore the first time around, and 49% wanted Bush. So just taking those percentages into account, you'll have 49% of voters that think "An Inconvenient Truth" while those same votes think the others show is a pack of PR lies. The same thing applies in the other direction though, you have the other 49% of voters that think "An Inconvenient Truth"i s a pack of PR lies and the other show is a factual rebuttal of the PR piece.
In short it's too political for any real science to be done in the field. (Why do I say that? Because GW is a multibillion a year industry sort of like Tobacco is except GW has alot of government scientists on the payroll. So any debate on well neutral or anti-GW being rejected during "peer review" strikes a cord with those that think that that the budget for "climate studies" need to be slashed and used for their pet projects. I've given up hope on this issue.
Of course it's really worse than evolution. Why do I say that? Well, I'm not into the whole ID thing, but hey I've grown up with the theory of evolution and it's always been there. You'd have thought that maybe, just maybe that a lot of you know information supporting the theory would have eventually been taught. Nope, just the theory name and its idea. So I pretty much just took evolution on faith during school since I never was exposed to all the evidence for it only the political debates on both sides. I think that's how alot of people take GW. They don't know the facts or really care too much about them on GW. They just get pounded with the message GW is happening, GW is bad, to fix GW do what we tell you. It's a nice simple emotional message to control your voting population with.
Fundamentally there is no difference between Arab rulers and Chinese rulers. Both are authoritarian. Both control their masses with a mixture of ideology and ruthlessness.
That shows we are better than them because our leaders save their ruthlessness for foreigners. Our leaders control us through various means of ideology as well.
Well, let me quickly write a scenario for my boss. What will happen in 10 years if they dont immediately fund my division with an additional 3 million bucks and 22 new engineers. Can I say our customers will come to the corporate headquarters and sack and pillage it and carry away the fetching executive assistant the CFO has hired? Nah, wont work. Our management is not as dumb as the UK DoD.
What about a scenario where an entity be it aliens/government/natural turns off/absorbs electricity for the planet Earth and we need to prepare our business to run and thrive without using any forms of electicity! Our first order of business is buying all our employees bikes and relocating them all close enough to work so that they can use them to commute. Then we need to buy crossbows/swords for all our employees and train them in how to use them so they'll be armed during the transition period. We need to either buy all our local cafeteria food from the nearest farmer and make sure he can bring it to use by horse or ox drawn wagons. Taking these steps may seem alittle paranoid, but you never know if that magic substance electricity will just stop working so we need to prepare now while we still have it for the day when we might not have it to depend on!
The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat.
You can preempt that by running the country for the benefit of the people in general rather than for the billionaires.
You just make your PSPs, iPods, wifi/cell phones, internet, and TV cheap enough for the poor to afford and then the poor and middle class generally won't care about the divide.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that China's government and industry are completely unconcerned about the source of the technology that they mass-produce and sell to everyone. They just don't care, period, and I suppose when you get right down to it there's no reason they should. On the other hand, that just means there's no reason why we should respect their "intellectual property" either, and when their scientists and engineers come up with something good they damn well shouldn't expect us to concern ourselves over their rights either. If Google did indeed rip off their Chinese counterparts my feeling is ... more power to 'em.
I take it as the same as my attitude for cheating through school and life in general. All is fair as long as you don't get caught or punished for doing it. Cheating and IP theft is fine and dandy as long as you don't get caught or punished much if caught. This applies to everyone and every type of entity such as governments and corporations. As long as they can get away with something without being caught or punished, they will.
The opposite is much more likely true : the nature of childhood is to be sheltered. Just as animals shelter their offspring until they are capable of coping with it without being immediately eaten.
Further: the young have a strong 'copy' instinct, which is how they seem to learn the basics. Putting the 'real world' in front of them before they have reached the age of autonomy is asking for trouble.
I've seen dropouts, highschool grads, college students, and some college grads from really sheltered Christain universties all hit "the real world" and find out that life ain't fair and everyone else is generally out to earn a buck off your stupidity/ignorance. The more sheltered an "adult" is from what the real world acual is or like the worse they'll generally get screwed. The ones that grew up with a hard life know that life sucks and atleast try to better themselves and screw others.
That copying instinct isn't a young thing. It's a human thing. Look at humans of any age group of similiar social political background and they'll all act similiar reguardless of age.
Why can't we continue to play hand-eye coordination improving games? I've played pinball and hung around arcades for over 30 years. When the fight 'em kick 'em punch 'em games came in, the arcade became a ghost town.
And I've never spent more than $5 total in my life time in an aracade. Maybe you didn't notice these things like NES, Sega, N64, Playstation, PS2, Xbox, and on and on. The reason that arcades are ghost towns is because most people would rather pay $20-50 on the game to play unlimited at home rather than pay $.25-1.00 on a game. We spend far more money and time with video games now because now we own them and can play them as much as we want. An arcade generally can't compete against gameboys or now a PSP. The only play that I've seen arcades is in the lobby of movie theaters and 1-2 at a pizza place. The home video game console is what killed aracades.
And believe it or not, our current climate models have made verifiable predictions, which makes it a little easier to think we must be doing something right with them. There are a few large scale atmospheric oscillations that were predicted by models and then later confirmed in historical data.
"Something right" and "a few succesful runs" are a far cry from useful for policy decisions. A stopped clock is right twice a day, doesn't mean it's useful to generally tell time. Actually, they may be a bit better than that but not near sundial level at telling time. Actually, if they were about as good as sundails they'd be useful. They aren't even as accurate as sand hour glasses and that's the problem. Yes, sand hour glasses can be useful, but there are lots of problems that you need better time keeping to solve. Heck, routine cooking nowadays is better than sanddail hourglass accurate. That's the problem with the models, that they can be useful for universities and rarely give up correct future patterns that would be enough for me or a politican to be useful tool for planning. A few successes or a few right passes doesn't mean that the models mostly work or nearly always work, or even better yet never fail. The way that they are marketed to the public is that they have few faults and are nearly always accurate, which isn't correct.
Care to elaborate on that? The models are available for you to play with. The basic experiments (CO2 laden air traps more heat) are easy to replicate. The satellite data indicating that the atmosphere is warming is available. The fact that we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere by the millions of tons is fairly simple to calculate.
None of that is absolutely conclusive, and could well be misleading or wrong, but when it comes to making policy it would be nice to have a more constructive argument than "I just don't buy it."
Um, I don't have any faith that any of the models are near right. It doesn't matter how much they let the public fiddle with a few values. It's like trying to use SimEarth to predict climate change and saying that it allows you to adjust variables. Yes, but that doesn't mean SimEarth is anywhere accurate to what Earth actually does.
In this case isn't not GIGO, it's good data in trash out. Every one of our existing models is flawed and inaccurate. There are vast hordes that think our current models are great predictions of the future Earth. They are just as accurate as SimEarth is.
Those spots should be auctioned off. The more an employer is paying for an H1-B visa, the more highly-skilled the worker in question is likely to be. IOW, we really will be getting those people with skills we can't find here.
Auction them off both ways! Only the companies that pay the most, and the employees that pay the most get to enter to do business in the country. This is even one that I wouldn't have any gripes if other countries applied to us just make an auction only the highest paying companies and employees can enter your country.
This would effectively force the relative poor to stay in their home country and the richer segments of the population could go anywhere on the globe that they want.