funny the post a bit above you, perhaps by awg scientist, moted world government as possibly a necessity. I like more complicated conspiracy theories than al gore is behind it all, but if someone thinks there is a conspiracy to loot his standard of living, i think he is being very objective. it is not yet useful, but it is the right view.
i sort of approve of nicolas of cusa, so i find value in soverign nation states.
looking at some trends, I think policy options like world fascist government, killing five billion people, and going backwards on tech are all in play. I figure the motivations do not have much to with whatever science you think you have. So you do not get to be left alone to decide what to do. Thinking you should be, as a serious position, is a little odd.
i am not aware of any human endeavor where consensus is equivalent to truth, although i suspect a sophist might disagree with me.
so in science, maybe the 30's, some crazy chemist thought the continents moved. I guess everyone had to die off before the idea was accepted.
there was, pauling, with his ideas about vitamin C. so this guy i think had a nobel prize in another field and then switched fields. i suppose he had enough of a reputation that he was humored for a while, but in the end it was not very nice for him.
consider the 1.5 quadrillion dollars in derivatives and the need for a speculatative. bubble to prop them up for just a little longer. and let us not forget the loot available from reducing living standards. then there are 5 billion people to be killed and that would free up some loot.
no doubt a few weeks ago you would included a concern for the reputation of that leading climate scientist Jones
let us try treating this very broadly.
Let us reflect on the ozone hole. As I recall the ground based ozone observation station date had a big margin of error and had to be used very carefully. The guy who had spent 50 years putting the network together denounced the way the data was handled. then there were a lot of dire predictions, a greenie uproar, and eventually treaties. now all this was based on suspect data use and a compuer model which did not have much validation. the effect was to to break the cold chain in the third world and i suppose quite a few people died as a result, we now have some more history. it would be useful to test the old code against the new data set and see what you get. Interestingly, the deniers talked solar cycle causes. this all seems a bit like AWG.
then there was the global cooling stuff in the seventies. if you looked real close at the science techniques, I wonder what you would find.
then there was ddt. greenies again. some us epa like head banned ddt with the comment, this was politics and there was no scientific basis. treaties again, millions of people died.
so maybe a good look at ideology plus science is warrented
ah economic expertise is in practice not based on predictive record, so it is not even engineering, let alone science. traditonally it has been been a field for lackies. so i am not impressed with an economics nobel. pooh, it is not quite even a real nobel.
about that time, in the us, there was a switch to latex paint on the weather stations.
a mere meterologist got interested and thought this was causing a temperature rise. I guess he eventually involved a real scientist and came up with a one degree centigrade rise
later he managed to get data on over 1000 high quality weather stations, he figured 80% failed to meet official location criteria, things like a parking lot within 30 feet. oh, his full raw data set is on the web, so if any of the cru types think they know more about weather stations, it can be nicely evaluated.
then consider a bit of fraud, relating to chinese weather stations. i guess the analysis involved selecting the high quality weather stations and there were some valid criteria for that. except somehow sometimes nearby low quality data was selected over high quality data, and interestingly, one might think there was a bias toward the higher temperature results
leaving aside the data issues, the hockey stick was a big deal. this has interesting history. i guess stygler, a mere statistics guy, got interested because the original hockey stick reminded him of some stock frauds he had seen. Even as an outsider, he managed to force major revisions to two major data sets. Now he is saying that the hockey stick algorithm is such that whatever data you put in you get a hockey stick. I saw this at www.copenhagenscandal.org.
styglers name popped up in the emails. as i recall it was something like i would rather destroy the data than give it to stygler. he would just use it to find mistakes. this is not very pretty and reflects a commitment to a conclusion. it is quite reasonable to suspect a political commitment.
now consider people have been after the raw data for a long time and been stonewalled. it had got to the point of sort of FOIA lawsuits. One of the emails was requesting the deletion of some emails. So I guess this guy is a criminal too. And now it turns out the raw data was destroyed in the 80's. I do not doubt it has been destroyed, but i am suspicious of the timeframe.
Looking at just the thermometers, and wildly assuming the data was any good, I figure there is not enough time period to say anything about climate.
so you look at the proxies, if post 1960 tree data does not correlate, what can you really about pre-1960 data. something theoretical is at least incomplete, if you trust the post-1960 thermometers.
but consider the nice easy to understand proxy of orange trees growing in london. On the same site I referenced i think stygler commented that this period data set was minimized.
and a nice slashdot issue, this stuff is all computer modeling and it is not predictive. indeed one of the cru emails was real incensed about i think this. he called it a travesty. interesting it seems a bit hard for some people to acknowledge. i have noted reference to individuallv recent hot days as a pattern. i guess this is to support the ideology. but it does not say anything to support scientifically the validity of the model. and some say the pattern data is another fraud.
the site has a lot of political and economic orientation. looks like the real policy question is how badly you dislike technological advances. if you feel moral, how many billions of people are you willing to kill to advance greenie ideology. these seem to be relevant questions.
for the soviet union, wealth is inherent in the sweat on the workers brow
which reminded me that lenin thought he could keep variable capital low indefinitely
which suggests i should raise the question of the relation of cultural level to the creation of wealth
as far as the definition of wealth, i think the paper uses a very psychologically based definition
which reminds of the white house behavorial economists that currently control economic policy and who believe that economics is irrational and you can get people to do anything
I found it promising. It was existential and seemed to distingish objects based on use.
Now you used wealth in two different contexts. to clarify what you mean, i ask you to consider three reductionistically equivalent pieces of food. one i eat because i am hungry; one i serve at my wedding feast to impress the guests, and one i feed to my cat. the cat is an ordinary cat and is not a mouser. which food items are wealth.
Now try it again and figure I have a vasectomy.
Oh, suppose I am sick and being fed intervenously. I am likely to die soon. Is the food wealth? Nasty, but very topical, question.
as far as most economists go, the physical economy is pretty much off the radar screen. I consider this study to be about the physical economy. No wonder economists do not like it. And the author observes that collapse or reduction in living standards is not much discussed. I wonder why. But we are getting austerity policies to pay for bailing out the speculators while the physical economy collapses.
So here is something that seems to be true and relevant. Considering humans, from before fire and on, we have made our living by increased energy *density*. We seem, especially from the study, to get population density from increased energy, but new fundamental physical principles come from the density, and thus the really new tech.
What we need to do right now is get rid of monetarist stuff like the 1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivatives. The waste has killed the physical economy. This is no longer enough, but it is obvious and part of a possibly successful approach.
okay, you like exchange-value. There have been a lot of communialist experiments in the US and I doubt thet were all based on exchange-value. And I recall some renegade jesuits on the pacific coast of south america had an odd thing going and were being successful until maybe the Spanish made a point of sending a military expedition. I do not think they were exchanged based. Figure it was deity based totalitarianism with a communalist slant. Exchange-value events do not fit in well.
But let us take a more contemporary example. In mid-twenthieth century there was a solitary feral human living in the mountains of California. So there was not any exchange-value events going on. I suppose he was stone age. He could kill animals and fashion tools out of the bones. This was very laborous. Now I think it is fair to say these tools had existential significance for him. Were they wealth?
And just for grins, I will mention that I treat economics as having an existential base. And I consider economics an existential issue.
of couse, you right, but aietreme's definition did not require that. and he actually had an actual definition while you just make a practical observation, which seems to imply that wealth is selling something, presumedly desired by a willing buyer and I guess we presume he has something the seller wants to give in exchange. This is not quite right. Consider the versallias treaty and the french invasion of the ruhr? The french looted the industrial capital. the trigger for world war ii. Now wealth presumedly changed hands, but there was not much selling. So my treatment of your position is not quite right and I wonder about the word selling in what you say.
Now suppose OPEC was a big food producing region. They were an autarky. Everyone there was well-fed. Suppose they had an economic system that did not involve selling. No oil. Do they have some wealth?
The species has been around a long time and we have had economies for a while and they often have a difference or two. And I figure we have had wealth longer than we have had economies. I think these observations are useful, particularly if you treat wealth as a fundamental question.
i agree that this is the fundamental question of economics.
Note that your answer is reductionistic and can be attacked on that basis. I agree that it works pretty well for say an individual company, but when you try to apply it to a national economy, perhaps there are problems. Suppose you have wealth as you define it and then I suppose you are wealthy. Now OPEC has a lot of oil and people want it. So I guess they are wealthy. What should they do to stay weathy? I guess the best thing to do is not pump oil. Then they stay wealthy. If they pump oil, then they run out and maybe are no longer weathy. So maybe something is missing in your definition of wealth.
It is useful to note that many of the comments had a bit of a process approach.
Looking at the contempory scene, it is pretty much monetarist. In practice, this treats money as wealth. And it is of course very reductionist. And it gets results like 1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivatives demanding servicing. Since people want money, I guess this is wealth by your definite. In practice, a lot of this was based on a greater fool principle and I think they ran out of fools. I note in detail this supports your view, but so much wealth simply disappearing raises some questions.
Perhaps it is useful to note that in lots of cases, your definition of wealth is dominated by sentiment. Note that Obama is dominated by a cadre of behavioral economists.
so i read many of the comments and thought most were unexpectly fine. so i read the TFA and many of the comments and many of the comments were fine. so i will try to ask a relevant scientific question.
What is wealth?
A good answer tends to explain much, but i have never gotten a response in previous attempts. I suspect it makes people uncomfortable. Yet many of the comments here touch on the question. even TFA touches.
I figure we can say increased climate varability. Factoids need context, usually a theory. But the different theories compete on which best explains the facts, and hopefully on testable predictions.
Take artic melting. I recall a theory from the sixties that talked about artic melting as a precursor for an ice-age. I tried to google for it, but did not find anything I considered useful. Anyway, we can all probably say we are overdue for an ice age.
Some people are looking for astronomical causes to climate. I guess they have found some interesting stuff. Another poster talked about this and said AWG people considers them enemies.
So there are problems.
Then you get to the models. I treat climate as a complex dynamic system and I assume a lot of medium range forces. Last I checked this sort of thing is hard to do. And when you get done, how do you evaluate the model. Well, one thing you do is test it against past data. And you make a prediction. As best I know a lot of the trumpeted models have not done very well. Hah, I like to take the big view and insolation has increased 25% over the past few billion years. And on that time scale, maybe the climate has not changed much, as we can tell from the existence of the biosphere. Now I would be impressed if a reductionist model could deal that dataset.
looking at the data sets, there have been several posts that question the reliability of the data. My favorite is a meterologist type who in the 70's looked at a change in weather station paint and figured that this was causing a one degree rise in temperature. At that time, you would be hard put to treat this perjogatively. Sure he is just a meterologist, but I figure he know more about weather stations than the climategate guy. So he went on to do a survey of the noaa highest rated weather stations in the us. looks to me that if the official government standards are meaniful, the us temperature data is junk. And all his data is very public. so what should we say about someone who relies on these temperature reading?
on strategy, you might reflect on having a depression, bailing out the speculators, and starting to put in austerity programs to pay for the bailout. when the austerity is no longer tolerated by the population, what is the usual strategy? this circumstance is why i think greshman's law should be repealed.
Darn, I got interupted, the cat stepped on my computer, and now I have to start over again with my response.
So, notice you still have not responded to my assertion that all resources are finite, relative to a given tech. you need to think about that.
Regarding the cites, this kind of stuff is easily invalidated, but in your case, the process starts with my finite resources assertion, and it seems very difficult to get a response from you to that assertion. So why should I try to do a detailed response any more?
logic: that was a pretty much a by the way comment, but logic is not usually treated ss an ideological issue, so perhaps it is worth responding to. consider
Sane? I don't consider nuclear power sane. As for those whose policies favored nuclear power, ump. Ike, Dwight D Eisenhower, favored policies friendly to nuclear power. He also warned about the military industrial complex, yet he made them powerful, with his push against democracy in Viet Nam. Yes he opposed democracy in Viet Nam. By 1954-55 the French and North and South Vietnam came to an agreement whereby the people in Viet Nam would vote for reunification. Ike sent then Colonel Edward Lansdale [wikipedia.org] to South Vietnam to arm and train Vietnamese who opposed reunification. If it hadn't been for that military contractors may never have gotten so big. They had a new war, the Vietnam War.
So this is sophism, but you misread your audience, so you are not even a good sophist. Most people use sophism as a perjogative. It is generally considered not very logical. My treatment is a little different.
It is an ad hominem attack, and I doubt you can show relevancy. In any csse, jfk consulted ike and macauthur who both recommended against a big land war in asia.
You might perhaps respond, but emperically, it will not be to my finite resources assertion.
Interesting, I had treated greenie insanity as kind of a consequence matter thing. But it seeme to be actually clinical. Ok, your arguments are very ideological based and the ideology is evil. (I do not bother to use evil as a perjogative.) But this does not define you as insane. Your logic is deteriorately as we go along. But that does not mean you are insane. What is significant is that you unconsciously avoid thinking about my arguments. It is pretty much as if the arguments were never made.
Now I could respond to your posting point by point, but if you are simply unable to process, it is sort of pointless.
So let us try it one sentence ar a time and see what happens.
All resources are finite, relative to a given technological level.
Try to focus. Ruminate for a few days. You can do it. Then get back to me.
I once had a printer catch on fire. At least the paper. It had four big matrix heads with big selenoids driving the wires. They drew quite a bit of current. One jammed up the wires, heated up, and paper started smoking and charing. Naturally, it was the payroll checks, but as a result I was keeping a close eye on them. Only time I missed payroll deadlines.
I notice you did not comment on my limited resources refutation. Most of my arguments are of thst form. If you did not get the argument, you will not get the following.
I thought your characterization of NIMBYs had some merit. I think cuk ltural optimism, which necessarily accepts change, will help a great deal.
photocells: a more sophisticated approach as to how we make our living is that we increase the energy density in the productive process. Indeed, if our prehuman anscestors had discovered fire, we would never hve existed. So, I oppose general power supplies from solar power. Too low density to be really helpful for our continued existence. An exception would be up next to the sun, but is at least a 200 year project. A wide effect of the lower power density is that last I looked lifetime net power production of solar cells was negative. They are kind of like batteries. Sahara: While I agree desertification needs to be stopped and reversed, and it has priority over the Sahara, note that the way this would work is through upgrading the economy of the region.
As far as the szhara is concerned, I claim that a biology will tend to get more complex and diverse if it possible. What is so special about the little life that is there that it needs to be preserved? Somehow "natural" now means non-man. I think helping out the biology is quite natural.
environmental friendly. I much prefer being proplr friendly. Note that the local biology is of course relatively fixed, and we depend on it, so we need to take better care of it than we do. If you deal with that then we can talk about aesthetic and spirtual values.
Now on to sanity. suppose we had a nuclear spasm. would you classify that as sane? If not, why not? If not sane, how do classify the people who advocated this? How do you classify the people whose policies led to this?
So, there is a fair possibility of a 5 billion person die off over the next 50 years. It has already started. Yet it is still avoidable for a very short time And the greenies are a big part of the problem locally in avoiding this. So how should I classify greenies?
As far as the Sahara is concerned, another was to talk about how we make our living is by changing nature for man. Doing this sort of thing seems quite sane to me. Maybe we will grow wheat on it. Maybe we will make it into a park. This is not an urgent question. If we do okay in the next couple of years, we will be spending 50 years rebuilding.
Oh, a little bit relevant. Back in the 50's-60's, the south koreans completely deforested the country. They needed the trees to cook their food. In the 70's you could travel across the whole country without seeing a tree. Now they have lots of trees. What happened?
What you do with insolvent organizations is pot then through bankrupcy. A nice orderly bankruotcy of the commercial banks, protecting actually existing assets, would have solved a lot of problems, I suspect I would not have bothered with Citibank, Note that last I heard the bailout banks had a 100 trillion in derivatives. And goldman sacs, now a "bank", is back at the same old stand, doing the same things as before.
Of course, now it is too late. There is no longer a domestic solution for the united states.
So why did they bail out the banks? That was not quite what they did, but the reason was to preserve the international financial system. But it is doomed, and on a short time scale. The disease is destroying the real economy and civilization with it. What does 1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivates, world-wide, mean for your future and that of your chi8ldren and grandchildren?
So if there is no longer a domestic solution, what is the solution? Trans-pacific alliance to replace trans-atlantic alliance.
Some news from apec. There were really only two topics in informal discussions: frustration with Obama and what the new Asian relationships portend
This site is pretty wothless. I do not much care what my state got. No doubt the local porkbarrel politicians want me to know how much bacon they brought home. People increasingly have more basic demands,"listen to us".
But a good r&d stimulus policy would be surprisingly sane. But here, at a minium, an evaluation would require looking at 50 seperate data sets. Pook, a xlm feed of the database would have made me feel better.
Slashdot Mirror
funny the post a bit above you, perhaps by awg scientist, moted world government as possibly a necessity. I like more complicated conspiracy theories than al gore is behind it all, but if someone thinks there is a conspiracy to loot his standard of living, i think he is being very objective. it is not yet useful, but it is the right view.
i sort of approve of nicolas of cusa, so i find value in soverign nation states.
looking at some trends, I think policy options like world fascist government, killing five billion people, and going backwards on tech are all in play. I figure the motivations do not have much to with whatever science you think you have. So you do not get to be left alone to decide what to do. Thinking you should be, as a serious position, is a little odd.
i am not aware of any human endeavor where consensus is equivalent to truth, although i suspect a sophist might disagree with me.
so in science, maybe the 30's, some crazy chemist thought the continents moved. I guess everyone had to die off before the idea was accepted.
there was, pauling, with his ideas about vitamin C. so this guy i think had a nobel prize in another field and then switched fields. i suppose he had enough of a reputation that he was humored for a while, but in the end it was not very nice for him.
so tell me about consensus.
clearly no formal system is worth much for science if the participants are going to mix in ideology, so what is your point?
following the money is not bad
consider the 1.5 quadrillion dollars in derivatives and the need for a speculatative. bubble to prop them up for just a little longer. and let us not forget the loot available from reducing living standards. then there are 5 billion people to be killed and that would free up some loot.
no doubt a few weeks ago you would included a concern for the reputation of that leading climate scientist Jones
let us try treating this very broadly.
Let us reflect on the ozone hole. As I recall the ground based ozone observation station date had a big margin of error and had to be used very carefully. The guy who had spent 50 years putting the network together denounced the way the data was handled. then there were a lot of dire predictions, a greenie uproar, and eventually treaties. now all this was based on suspect data use and a compuer model which did not have much validation. the effect was to to break the cold chain in the third world and i suppose quite a few people died as a result, we now have some more history. it would be useful to test the old code against the new data set and see what you get. Interestingly, the deniers talked solar cycle causes. this all seems a bit like AWG.
then there was the global cooling stuff in the seventies. if you looked real close at the science techniques, I wonder what you would find.
then there was ddt. greenies again. some us epa like head banned ddt with the comment, this was politics and there was no scientific basis. treaties again, millions of people died.
so maybe a good look at ideology plus science is warrented
there was an earlier post on this with a link to the nature article. the posters review of the article was
i do not know
trees are living things, not thermometere
the pre-1960 data is valid
if this is an essentially correct review, i guess you think i should still be impressed by the nature article
ah economic expertise is in practice not based on predictive record, so it is not even engineering, let alone science. traditonally it has been been a field for lackies. so i am not impressed with an economics nobel. pooh, it is not quite even a real nobel.
suppose we rely on "the gold standard"
consider weather stations, post 1960
about that time, in the us, there was a switch to latex paint on the weather stations.
a mere meterologist got interested and thought this was causing a temperature rise. I guess he eventually involved a real scientist and came up with a one degree centigrade rise
later he managed to get data on over 1000 high quality weather stations, he figured 80% failed to meet official location criteria, things like a parking lot within 30 feet. oh, his full raw data set is on the web, so if any of the cru types think they know more about weather stations, it can be nicely evaluated.
then consider a bit of fraud, relating to chinese weather stations. i guess the analysis involved selecting the high quality weather stations and there were some valid criteria for that. except somehow sometimes nearby low quality data was selected over high quality data, and interestingly, one might think there was a bias toward the higher temperature results
leaving aside the data issues, the hockey stick was a big deal. this has interesting history. i guess stygler, a mere statistics guy, got interested because the original hockey stick reminded him of some stock frauds he had seen. Even as an outsider, he managed to force major revisions to two major data sets. Now he is saying that the hockey stick algorithm is such that whatever data you put in you get a hockey stick. I saw this at
www.copenhagenscandal.org.
styglers name popped up in the emails. as i recall it was something like i would rather destroy the data than give it to stygler. he would just use it to find mistakes. this is not very pretty and reflects a commitment to a conclusion. it is quite reasonable to suspect a political commitment.
now consider people have been after the raw data for a long time and been stonewalled. it had got to the point of sort of FOIA lawsuits. One of the emails was requesting the deletion of some emails. So I guess this guy is a criminal too. And now it turns out the raw data was destroyed in the 80's. I do not doubt it has been destroyed, but i am suspicious of the timeframe.
Looking at just the thermometers, and wildly assuming the data was any good, I figure there is not enough time period to say anything about climate.
so you look at the proxies, if post 1960 tree data does not correlate, what can you really about pre-1960 data. something theoretical is at least incomplete, if you trust the post-1960 thermometers.
but consider the nice easy to understand proxy of orange trees growing in london. On the same site I referenced i think stygler commented that this period data set was minimized.
and a nice slashdot issue, this stuff is all computer modeling and it is not predictive. indeed one of the cru emails was real incensed about i think this. he called it a travesty. interesting it seems a bit hard for some people to acknowledge. i have noted reference to individuallv recent hot days as a pattern. i guess this is to support the ideology. but it does not say anything to support scientifically the validity of the model. and some say the pattern data is another fraud.
the site has a lot of political and economic orientation. looks like the real policy question is how badly you dislike technological advances. if you feel moral, how many billions of people are you willing to kill to advance greenie ideology. these seem to be relevant questions.
thank you for your reply
my first thought in reading on this was
wealth is inherent in a certain kind of pain
which reminded me of
for the soviet union, wealth is inherent in the sweat on the workers brow
which reminded me that lenin thought he could keep variable capital low indefinitely
which suggests i should raise the question of the relation of cultural level to the creation of wealth
as far as the definition of wealth, i think the paper uses a very psychologically based definition
which reminds of the white house behavorial economists that currently control economic policy and who believe that economics is irrational and you can get people to do anything
you might consider a process definition of wealth
thank you for your reply.
I found it promising. It was existential and seemed to distingish objects based on use.
Now you used wealth in two different contexts. to clarify what you mean, i ask you to consider three reductionistically equivalent pieces of food. one i eat because i am hungry; one i serve at my wedding feast to impress the guests, and one i feed to my cat. the cat is an ordinary cat and is not a mouser. which food items are wealth.
Now try it again and figure I have a vasectomy.
Oh, suppose I am sick and being fed intervenously. I am likely to die soon.
Is the food wealth? Nasty, but very topical, question.
as far as most economists go, the physical economy is pretty much off the radar screen. I consider this study to be about the physical economy. No wonder economists do not like it. And the author observes that collapse or reduction in living standards is not much discussed. I wonder why. But we are getting austerity policies to pay for bailing out the speculators while the physical economy collapses.
So here is something that seems to be true and relevant. Considering humans, from before fire and on, we have made our living by increased energy *density*. We seem, especially from the study, to get population density from increased energy, but new fundamental physical principles come from the density, and thus the really new tech.
What we need to do right now is get rid of monetarist stuff like the 1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivatives. The waste has killed the physical economy. This is no longer enough, but it is obvious and part of a possibly successful approach.
okay, you like exchange-value. There have been a lot of communialist experiments in the US and I doubt thet were all based on exchange-value. And I recall some renegade jesuits on the pacific coast of south america had an odd thing going and were being successful until maybe the Spanish made a point of sending a military expedition. I do not think they were exchanged based. Figure it was deity based totalitarianism with a communalist slant. Exchange-value events do not fit in well.
But let us take a more contemporary example. In mid-twenthieth century there was a solitary feral human living in the mountains of California. So there was not any exchange-value events going on. I suppose he was stone age. He could kill animals and fashion tools out of the bones. This was very laborous. Now I think it is fair to say these tools had existential significance for him. Were they wealth?
And just for grins, I will mention that I treat economics as having an existential base. And I consider economics an existential issue.
of couse, you right, but aietreme's definition did not require that. and he actually had an actual definition while you just make a practical observation, which seems to imply that wealth is selling something, presumedly desired by a willing buyer and I guess we presume he has something the seller wants to give in exchange. This is not quite right. Consider the versallias treaty and the french invasion of the ruhr? The french looted the industrial capital. the trigger for world war ii. Now wealth presumedly changed hands, but there was not much selling. So my treatment of your position is not quite right and I wonder about the word selling in what you say.
Now suppose OPEC was a big food producing region. They were an autarky.
Everyone there was well-fed. Suppose they had an economic system that did not involve selling. No oil. Do they have some wealth?
The species has been around a long time and we have had economies for a while and they often have a difference or two. And I figure we have had wealth longer than we have had economies. I think these observations are useful, particularly if you treat wealth as a fundamental question.
thank you for your reply.
i agree that this is the fundamental question of economics.
Note that your answer is reductionistic and can be attacked on that basis. I agree that it works pretty well for say an individual company, but when you try to apply it to a national economy, perhaps there are problems. Suppose you have wealth as you define it and then I suppose you are wealthy. Now OPEC has a lot of oil and people want it. So I guess they are wealthy. What should they do to stay weathy? I guess the best thing to do is not pump oil. Then they stay wealthy. If they pump oil, then they run out and maybe are no longer weathy. So maybe something is missing in your definition of wealth.
It is useful to note that many of the comments had a bit of a process approach.
Looking at the contempory scene, it is pretty much monetarist. In practice, this treats money as wealth. And it is of course very reductionist. And it gets results like 1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivatives demanding servicing. Since people want money, I guess this is wealth by your definite. In practice, a lot of this was based on a greater fool principle and I think they ran out of fools. I note in detail this supports your view, but so much wealth simply disappearing raises some questions.
Perhaps it is useful to note that in lots of cases, your definition of wealth is dominated by sentiment. Note that Obama is dominated by a cadre of behavioral economists.
so i read many of the comments and thought most were unexpectly fine. so i read the TFA and many of the comments and many of the comments were fine. so i will try to ask a relevant scientific question.
What is wealth?
A good answer tends to explain much, but i have never gotten a response in previous attempts. I suspect it makes people uncomfortable. Yet many of the comments here touch on the question. even TFA touches.
I figure we can say increased climate varability. Factoids need context, usually a theory. But the different theories compete on which best explains the facts, and hopefully on testable predictions.
Take artic melting. I recall a theory from the sixties that talked about artic melting as a precursor for an ice-age. I tried to google for it, but did not find anything I considered useful. Anyway, we can all probably say we are overdue for an ice age.
Some people are looking for astronomical causes to climate. I guess they have found some interesting stuff. Another poster talked about this and said AWG people considers them enemies.
So there are problems.
Then you get to the models. I treat climate as a complex dynamic system and I assume a lot of medium range forces. Last I checked this sort of thing is hard to do. And when you get done, how do you evaluate the model. Well, one thing you do is test it against past data. And you make a prediction. As best I know a lot of the trumpeted models have not done very well. Hah, I like to take the big view and insolation has increased 25% over the past few billion years. And on that time scale, maybe the climate has not changed much, as we can tell from the existence of the biosphere. Now I would be impressed if a reductionist model could deal that dataset.
looking at the data sets, there have been several posts that question the reliability of the data. My favorite is a meterologist type who in the 70's looked at a change in weather station paint and figured that this was causing a one degree rise in temperature. At that time, you would be hard put to treat this perjogatively. Sure he is just a meterologist, but I figure he know more about weather stations than the climategate guy. So he went on to do a survey of the noaa highest rated weather stations in the us. looks to me that if the official government standards are meaniful, the us temperature data is junk. And all his data is very public. so what should we say about someone who relies on these temperature reading?
try mixing ideology and science as an explanation
I tend to look at the big picture, so it is useful to ask questions about the sensibility of the ideology and where it came from
on strategy, you might reflect on having a depression, bailing out the speculators, and starting to put in austerity programs to pay for the bailout. when the austerity is no longer tolerated by the population, what is the usual strategy?
this circumstance is why i think greshman's law should be repealed.
Darn, I got interupted, the cat stepped on my computer, and now I have to start over again with my response.
So, notice you still have not responded to my assertion that all resources are finite, relative to a given tech. you need to think about that.
Regarding the cites, this kind of stuff is easily invalidated, but in your case, the process starts with my finite resources assertion, and it seems very difficult to get a response from you to that assertion. So why should I try to do a detailed response any more?
logic: that was a pretty much a by the way comment, but logic is not usually treated ss an ideological issue, so perhaps it is worth responding to.
consider
Sane? I don't consider nuclear power sane. As for those whose policies favored nuclear power, ump. Ike, Dwight D Eisenhower, favored policies friendly to nuclear power. He also warned about the military industrial complex, yet he made them powerful, with his push against democracy in Viet Nam. Yes he opposed democracy in Viet Nam. By 1954-55 the French and North and South Vietnam came to an agreement whereby the people in Viet Nam would vote for reunification. Ike sent then Colonel Edward Lansdale [wikipedia.org] to South Vietnam to arm and train Vietnamese who opposed reunification. If it hadn't been for that military contractors may never have gotten so big. They had a new war, the Vietnam War.
So this is sophism, but you misread your audience, so you are not even a good sophist. Most people use sophism as a perjogative. It is generally considered not very logical. My treatment is a little different.
It is an ad hominem attack, and I doubt you can show relevancy. In any csse, jfk consulted ike and macauthur who both recommended against a big land war in asia.
You might perhaps respond, but emperically, it will not be to my finite resources assertion.
Interesting, I had treated greenie insanity as kind of a consequence matter thing. But it seeme to be actually clinical. Ok, your arguments are very ideological based and the ideology is evil. (I do not bother to use evil as a perjogative.) But this does not define you as insane. Your logic is deteriorately as we go along. But that does not mean you are insane. What is significant is that you unconsciously avoid thinking about my arguments. It is pretty much as if the arguments were never made.
Now I could respond to your posting point by point, but if you are simply unable to process, it is sort of pointless.
So let us try it one sentence ar a time and see what happens.
All resources are finite, relative to a given technological level.
Try to focus. Ruminate for a few days. You can do it. Then get back to me.
regarding your sig
I once had a printer catch on fire. At least the paper. It had four big matrix heads with big selenoids driving the wires. They drew quite a bit of current. One jammed up the wires, heated up, and paper started smoking and charing. Naturally, it was the payroll checks, but as a result I was keeping a close eye on them. Only time I missed payroll deadlines.
Thank you for your reply.
I notice you did not comment on my limited resources refutation. Most of my arguments are of thst form. If you did not get the argument, you will not get the following.
I thought your characterization of NIMBYs had some merit. I think cuk
ltural optimism, which necessarily accepts change, will help a great deal.
photocells: a more sophisticated approach as to how we make our living is that we increase the energy density in the productive process. Indeed, if our prehuman anscestors had discovered fire, we would never hve existed. So, I oppose general power supplies from solar power. Too low density to be really helpful for our continued existence. An exception would be up next to the sun, but is at least a 200 year project. A wide effect of the lower power density is that last I looked lifetime net power production of solar cells was negative. They are kind of like batteries.
Sahara: While I agree desertification needs to be stopped and reversed, and it has priority over the Sahara, note that the way this would work is through upgrading the economy of the region.
As far as the szhara is concerned, I claim that a biology will tend to get more complex and diverse if it possible. What is so special about the little life that is there that it needs to be preserved? Somehow "natural" now means non-man. I think helping out the biology is quite natural.
environmental friendly. I much prefer being proplr friendly. Note that the local biology is of course relatively fixed, and we depend on it, so we need to take better care of it than we do. If you deal with that then we can talk about aesthetic and spirtual values.
Now on to sanity. suppose we had a nuclear spasm.
would you classify that as sane? If not, why not? If not sane, how do classify the people who advocated this?
How do you classify the people whose policies led to this?
So, there is a fair possibility of a 5 billion person die off over the next 50 years. It has already started. Yet it is still avoidable for a very short time And the greenies are a big part of the problem locally in avoiding this. So how should I classify greenies?
As far as the Sahara is concerned, another was to talk about how we make our living is by changing nature for man. Doing this sort of thing seems quite sane to me. Maybe we will grow wheat on it. Maybe we will make it into a park. This is not an urgent question. If we do okay in the next couple of years, we will be spending 50 years rebuilding.
Oh, a little bit relevant. Back in the 50's-60's, the south koreans completely deforested the country. They needed the trees to cook their food. In the 70's you could travel across the whole country without seeing a tree. Now they have lots of trees. What happened?
What you do with insolvent organizations is pot then through bankrupcy. A nice orderly bankruotcy of the commercial banks, protecting actually existing assets, would have solved a lot of problems, I suspect I would not have bothered with Citibank, Note that last I heard the bailout banks had a 100 trillion in derivatives. And goldman sacs, now a "bank", is back at the same old stand, doing the same things as before.
Of course, now it is too late. There is no longer a domestic solution for the united states.
So why did they bail out the banks? That was not quite what they did, but the reason was to preserve the international financial system. But it is doomed, and on a short time scale. The disease is destroying the real economy and civilization with it. What does 1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivates, world-wide, mean for your future and that of your chi8ldren and grandchildren?
So if there is no longer a domestic solution, what is the solution? Trans-pacific alliance to replace trans-atlantic alliance.
Some news from apec. There were really only two topics in informal discussions: frustration with Obama and what the new Asian relationships portend
This site is pretty wothless. I do not much care what my state got. No doubt the local porkbarrel politicians want me to know how much bacon they brought home. People increasingly have more basic demands,"listen to us".
But a good r&d stimulus policy would be surprisingly sane. But here, at a minium, an evaluation would require looking at 50 seperate data sets. Pook, a xlm feed of the database would have made me feel better.
No transperency here.