your need to charge actually has a possible solution. I did not see anyone mention that with the right electric supply you can do a 80% charge in 20-30 minutes. Oregon's local greenie governor is planning on putting stations like this along the main interstate, hmm, every 100 miles?. He has some federal money to do it. Now he plans to locate these sites where is there is some existing retail and other amenities. Hey, few greenies would call me green, but I think this particular idea is a reasonable thing to try.
I think the electrical tech is say a 440v supply. Nothing really exotic. Big computers require that sort of stuff. A home workshop might rarely have that sort of supply.
Anyway, to state the obvious, no real government code changes required. Figure that if the customer base was there, I think safeway would love to provide you a charging station while you go in to buy stuff. If you spend 30 minutes shopping and stroke safeway with some money for the electricity, everyone is happy for at least that day.
I do not want to look like a silly invisible hand guy, but my approach here fits a capitalist system better. The local gov is doing the right thing too, demoing the tech and market, so that the risk adverse big capital types can see a sure way to make some gilt without necessarily raping the population.
Atheist! god's invisible hand will make it all, including the "externalities", come out for the best for all of us. Everyone knows and understands this. At least, most of the Fox commentators understand this.
also a finite number of axioms is required. note that there are formal systems that cannot do arithmetic. I suppose the usual logic systems are an example. But getting past me being picky, what does "recursive" mean here? Yah, I know about recursive code and I know that people tried to add a new axiom to invalidate Godel (hah, in both math and physics, before he was done) and suppose that was to eliminate self-reference, but does this mean eliminate recursion? Thinking about the code and what little I recall of the silly axiom add-on, that might be the case?
Hah, I am in the universe (maybe:-)) and I can do some arithmetic. Am I a non-recursive finite axiomatic system? I do not think so... I suspect those that assume that you have to do logic-math sequences to get to science are just silly. Kind of an interesting position, as I think about it. Hah, the intelligent design people should try working on that sort of line. They might get vaguely interesting after a while.
The usual numbers for the NASA profit result are 1000% percent, I often hear. This is economic spin-off, not image. There is a difference between a limited entity making a "profit" and the economy in general making a "profit". But you did not even notice that reference point in the part you actually quoted.
Assuming you are not a total ideologue, did the early 19th century canals, which we still use, generate a "profit". Perhaps the problem is that you define "profit" as something that can be only associated with some sort of private shareholder value. Hah, maybe you think the only possible "profit" must be monetarizable.
Here is an interesting question. To what extent is the computer on your desk a NASA spin-off? I seem to recall some early NASA financing of the development of the concept of ICs. If this is somewhat true, how would you characterize the "profit"?
My personal view is that an operational speed, actually in production and use, is really the defining number. I am not quite sure how to classify this number, but it looks more interesting. The reason is largely societal. The French apparently built some good gizmos, but were not really committed enough to make them "real". The Chinese on the other hand likely think of rail as a key strategic element, not just in economic development, but in national security.
China seems to be the world expert on rail in arctic environments and depending on your definition of high speed, has the most high speed rail. Although the Russians, with Chinese help, are going high speed rail with a vengeance. Hah, if we had a President that was actual planning on having a positively functioning US economy, we might have already gone with the Russian intentions for a Bering strait rail tunnel, and I suspect we would classify the rail there as high-speed. And the Chinese would want this tunnel too.
Ah well. Some countries are willing to invest in infrastructure. The US prefers to loot its infrastructure.
Hah, you might be understating your case. I once read a knife book which claimed that if you have been drawn down on, are 15 feet away, have a knife, have skill, then you can take the gun holder out. I do not know that it is a true claim.
On other grounds, people complain about obesity health issues and want to play with diet, but exercise might be even bigger than food. The time I picked up a black belt, I lost 50 lbs in the process without trying,. I suspect if instead of spending money on k-12 team sports, the schools offered some martial arts classes for Physical Education, it would solve some problems in a number of areas. But think of the liability.:-)
If you leave out the sometime rather silly individualism expressed by a segment of gun owners, regarding opposing government oppression, the everyone should carry argument does have a claim to a rather obvious virtue: people would quickly tend to be rather civil with one another. But martial arts training not only has that aspect, but tends toward a lot of self-control anyway.
Actually, the usual criteria for something that might be claimed credible is two independent sources. Obviously, in evaluating source material, you are more interested in what is said in private, than what is said to the news media. And if you do like media reporting, how do you evaluate "source unidentified because he is not authorized to comment." ?
One way to evaluate what's his names intelligence sources is to observe that there is a good chance that, given the story told as true, some significant portions of the Swedish intelligence community would be pissy about the US doing ultimatums to the Swedish government. Thus, "porous". So on the front of it, we have a consistency. So maybe you are putting out the bullshit.
If you look around there are all sorts of different definitions of fascism. You might look at the wikipedia summary on this. I use a deviate definition. Admittedly I am a little vague on the details. Try this.
Austerity on the general population. Think of it as looting their living standards, their lives, and ultimately their bodies. A financial structure that needs that loot to keep going a little longer. A big economic crisis.
I sort of think we could include the late roman empire under this rubic as fascist. So I am not inclined to buy it as a capitalist or corporate issues as some do. Oh sure, right now, we have big speculative investment banks (corporations) and they are defended as some sort of capitalist ideal somehow or the other. Maybe not today exactly, at least by very many people, but go back just to 2008. People of a certain sort like to complain about greedy capitalists, but the complainers could be helpful if they tried for precision.
The right approach is to try for a general definition and a general perspective on items that are complicated enough not to be machine-like.
As far as a parochial viewpoint, locally, in this time and country, it is not hard to identify specific people who have died from current "cut-backs" and here I think of California Fire Department cut-backs. I claim it is fair to call the current state and local government situation "austerity". What do you think?
I look around for some links, but to think that meat uncooked is as energy efficient as meat cooked is just wrong. Beyond that, there is no lower animal that prefers uncooked to cooked. I expect this last claim has not been exhaustively tested, but for apes it has been tested. Hah, this was trivial to find:http://pdfcast.org/pdf/cooking-and-grinding-reduces-the-cost-of-meat-digestion
There is a particular difficulty in your general "we do not quite need tech"..Last I heard "we" had fire 4 meg years ago, based on sooted rocks. And through cooking, we changed our morphology. It seems to me to be difficult to argue that that with which we created ourselves is unnecessary to our future. But I liked your numbers. I guess we can say the anti-tech people are genocidal maniacs?
Oh, it is a nice story. But there are some inconveniences. I hear the labor component of a ton of steel made in the USA is less than the shipping cost of a ton of steel from China to the USA. Never the less, USA government funded structures end up getting their steel from China. I believe the new Narrows Bridge in Tacoma WA might have been an example of this.
I figure there are both subjective and objective factors. Here is a subjective factor that seems to have objective implications. Chinese elites favor economic development in their country. And back it up with nice, actually world-historic deals, with the Russians and others. Here what immediately comes to mind is Chinese/Russian cooperation on developing the Russian Far East. And I do believe they are building 10k miles of high-speed rail every year. I imagine there could be quite a list, pretty much getting off the ground starting in October of last year..
On our side, hmm Asia has over a hundred new nukes going in, but the USA has 1, sort of. Thorium based full fuel cycle? India is pushing real hard on that, with Russian participation. We will not be building them, will we? Rail? Looted. Cannot even do regular speed mostly. Space program? Instrumentation is pushed on a cost efficiency basis. Cannot have the kids getting excited about manned space exploration anytime soon.
Here is an objective factor. As of 2009, the official bailout and loan guarantee total by the feds was 23.4 trillion USD. Obama touts a 50 billion USD infrastructure program. And I bet it would all be old tech stuff. The last number I saw on deferred maintenance of US infrastructure was 2.4 trillion USD. And I believe this is government infrastructure. I suspect that gas explosion in california will turn out to be deferred maintenance of sort of a private infrastructure element.. (also probably a government failure to inspect and regulate. That would be an inconvenient fact for you.) You I recall from an earlier posting like infrastructure. Good for you. But in a conceptual twist, you might want to define infrastructure as new and transforming of the economy.
I expect you can make some valid comments and additions. But I do not see a solution coming from you.
Try this. Push for glass-steagall reinstatement like FDR had it. This has a lot of bipartisan support and the public wants to screw the speculators. But Obama would have to fight desperately to stop it. And when he lost, he would be bye-bye. If we do it right, we might even free up some trillions of dollars we have pissed down the speculator drain. Then you could have some infrastructure, old and new, and jack up our productivity.
Also, China is not so good in their position as they would like, IMO. Figure this: There is 1.4 quadrillion usd of speculative debt out there. It is unpayable, but all on someones books as a nice stable asset. This is not sustainable. Pooh, everyone who says anything says it. But people will disagree on when it busts. When it goes, I think Asia, including China, will go down, eventually. So I think the Chinese want to be in a position to disagree truthfully. Let us wish them luck, at least.
Your definition of government duties seems a little limited to me. Hmm, very traditionally, public health types have a lot of power to do "evil" by taking your liberty away if you have a dangerous contagious disease. I imagine they really just outsource to the cops and courts, but still. The phrase that comes to mind is "typhoid Mary". Ahh, but I really know little about the case, so I will go off and get a link, Here we go: http://history1900s.about.com/od/1900s/a/typhoidmary.htm. There seems to be a lot of google hits. It seems that the public health people were literally "after her" once she went on the run. So they did not do a complete outsource to the cops. But before we get silly defenses of your position, let us note from the cite information it is hard to call her "evil". So it is hard to be talking simple about a "choice of the lesser evil" in a personification basis.
Perhaps I am just stupid, What is your base definition of "evil" again? Perhaps it is not really very defensible, and a little ad hominem would make your definition of the duties of government suspect.
Economic collapses are not an exercise in gradualism. Hmm, Weimar again. In the spring, they looked sort of normal (a lot like us a bit ago). In the fall, 100 trillion bank notes. Or the dark ages. A deviant analysis says the Lombardi banking collapse reduced living standards such that a non-airborn plague had fertile ground to mutate into airborne. And then things got real bad real quick. How bad? Maybe half of small towns simply disappeared. Do you live in a small town?
Perhaps the most useful thing to say is that when you have a general institutional failure, (like us now?), until you get some replacements in, nothing works like you expect it to work. The joke is that you turn on the light switch and water starts running out the faucet.
But you are right in a key way. Peak oil is not a big problem. For instance, back in the day, we planned to have locally 1k nuke power plants ten years ago. We now have about, oh, 130. In the time line where we built the nukes, we would not see peak oil as quite as dire an occurrence.:-) An extra trillion watts would make a lot of difference in many ways. But you are not likely to find the difference between the two time lines in the usual objective universe.
Many things in some areas and occasions should be taken serious, but often the sane response is some chuckles.
Looking at your jumping off a building example, using the usual science, there is some probability that jumping off the building will turn out to be quite safe. Using the conventional cosmology, the probability is such that the universe is not really old enough for there ever to have been an actualization. Depending on your biases, chuckling at the expense of science might seem quite reasonable in this case and many others.
In terms of global warming, I took the supposed effects of the science claims (read that carefully) and put considerable money for me into screwing over Copenhagen. There was even the claim that I did a "little bit of good". So I sort of took "global warming" as politics and economics seriously. At that level of abstraction, the "global warming" science is pretty much irrelevant.. But I bet you are still unhappy with me.:-)
I confess I did not read all the OP or RTFA. But the category "expert" is interesting. Here is a thought: experts are experts because they can and do successfully predict future outcomes. This sort of thing is a hallmark of science, even if you do not have a field where you know how to do nice math. For a non-science, that has lots of experts and lots of math, consider the usual talking heads doing economic predictions. Or, for something personal, but not on today's front page, I think of McNamara and his whiz kids and their system analysis approach.
The word "professionalism" comes to mind. There is lots of history and theory around the concept. The usual criticism is that if you are a professional, then your praxis is positivism. Hah, see McNamara. And, of course, we might wonder if a particular class of professionals have any real science behind them, as is required by the usual theory on professionalism.
It is fun that, say, for software engineering, the usual official notice of professionalism, state licensing, is resisted by the practitioners and some, like the ACM, make arguments that there is not enough real "science" to put together a stable licensing knowledge requirement.
Anyway, OP, if you are fine with wrapping all the post content into one world view, okay, but take care if you claim that the view is predictive.:-)
Yah, I did not rtfa either. But hey you might know something. So here is where I am coming from: where do you use a kinematic causality model vs a dynamic causality model? So there was a odd slashdot article recently on someone who built a quantum computer that was reliable enough to get some statistics on. So I guess he did a thousand runs. He got the right answer 60% of the time and something apparently random 40% of the time. If I think kinematics, I think machine. And I wonder, was the quantum computer a machine? Oh, well. But the high random results are interesting. Any comments.
you are of course right. But be a little more realistic. With talking heads saying real unemployment is 22% and a better number being 30%, then consider all the really good reasons you can up with for cutting police resources:-) I am old enough to remember lots of federal troops and tanks in the street. And back in last crash, I believe MacAuthur was shooting people in the capital mall. So, before my time, but I googled a bit with "macauthur general riot suppression". I did not quite see "shooting".
So sure, fire chiefs are talking about big chunks of cities "accidentally" burning down as a result of cutbacks. But back in the day, we had whole blocks going up and the fires were not "accidental".
Welcome to early 21st century financial capitalism. In a few years, we may be happy to manage to have feudal economic relationships. But maybe that is the idea.
I just heard today about a town who put the entire fire department on half-time and at minimum wage. Infrastructure has been a know problem for decades and more recently even a matter of considerable public concern, as when an interstate bridge collapsed a few years back. But big cuts in public safety are new. And there is a nice pattern. The cuts are not something that make the mass media. but I saw a long summary compiled from local media last month, so I figure this is brand new.
Here is a quote I read yesterday in some semi-scholarly book that might be relevant. It is multiple thousands of years old and I am not smart enough to make a decent historical comparison, but it seems relevant.
Such is the senility of the world: atheism, dishonor, and the disregard of noble words. hmm, asclepius
Hah, if you are into desert tribal religions. I imagine you should get a peculiar satisfaction in our present situation. On the other hand, if you are not into eschatons, read not "world", but "international financial system". Or, "your future".
Your point toward not silly may be correct, but...
if you are a startup, you are probably not making a profit, therefore in washington state, the b&o is significant. Figure it is a percent and half of gross revenue.
and you tended towards a general confusion between taxes and income taxes, and now you make it a little worse. figure corporate income tax revenue is 12% of the federal revenue
saying "taxes are too much", which tends to be I think your point, *is* silly. But popular with some people. So, yeah, we are all going down the tube, except for the vultures, at least immediately,, and taxes are in fact part of what suck us dry, but talking about secondary issues like taxes, and not even doing that very precisely, does seem to be silly in a different way than I started out claiming.
doing really really well on the topic, doing the right question/claim, requires some decent concepts about economics, and the talking heads do not much even try. And of course, by their predictive ability, if they tried, they would not be able to succeed.
oh well. Looks like we will soon go from 25 trillion to 30 trillion of fiat bailout money. Once that generates the consequences, it will be easy to pay your present tax bill.
h, the problem ius that I used to live in Washington *state*, so I am talking about a state tax here. And I guess my mention of Oregon right afterward might have given a clue.
Oh, I know you were sort of talking about IRS stuff, but the idea that profit and taxes go together, and phrased as a general principle, is as I said silly. So why try to make the gereral statement?
As far as the rest, some people act like money has an intrinsic value, oh, psychological value no doubt, but still...
The claim after that is the obvious one that hyperinflation, very near term, will demo once again that money has no intrinsic value.
The numbers I quoted on the fiat money turn out to be flakey. Better: 25 trillion in loans and guarantees, as of 2009, and now another 5 trillion, as soon as Timmy G.can.
Here is something cute: if you have a lot of solar panels on your roof and your building catches fire, the fire department is liable to just let it burn to the ground!
I sort of think your statement "biggest depression since the Great Depression" is wrong. Oh, it has been clearly wrong since October 2009, but now the current numbers?? are getting worse than the 1930's. Hmm, I do not quite have the words to easily make the distinction between October and now in terms of the "numbers". Oh, here is the problem. Mostly the numbers are garbage. Aside from all the intentional fraud, the concepts are garbage. Hah, if the concepts were decent, we might have an actual economic science. But unemployment level numbers are close to something meaniful.
As far as the republicans, their religious belief in the invisible hand is just amusing. But the dems are so bad, republican economics is starting to look good in comparison. But treat the current problem as deeply bipartisan and try to find the particulars. It is not like either parties economic ideologies really mean anything. For instance, if the republicans were laisse-fare, how is that they bailed out the investment banks (while leaving the commercial banks to just stop functioning)?
And the dems like the little guy supposedly, but... in the first 9 months of Obama, we lost 4 million jobs. in the first 9 months of FDR, we gained 4 million jobs! A demographic analysis says that since the mid 1990's, we came up short 25 million jobs.
As far as green being hi-tech, oh, it is possible to be a sane environmentalist and it is praiseworthy, but solar panels? Best I can see if you include the batteries and the electronics and the supports, you have net energy lose. Yah, there are numbers all over the place. As near as I can tell, a metastudy came up with a standard deviation comparable to the signal. There is just no science there to drive studies that you can actually rely on.
amusing. as far as bad logic is concerned, do you not feel sort of silly when someone claims a correlation and you then attack a claim of causation. Sure, in fact I am fine with blaming anti-tech ideologies, but I am even happier to blame global financial system stuff.
so I have to look around hard to find anything useful in your response. Here is what I come up with. Your response to the correlation claim is "not green", because "industrialized, polluting, and unsustainable". So one part of your claim is that "industrialized"=!"green". So I think "anti-human" on your part, since I woyuld think you favor"green". After all, "fire", a tech, pretty much created us several million years ago, but more properly, because changing the universe is what we do for a living and always have. And then there is "polluting". I put that in with "unsustainability". Also, I really really tried to very concretely say that all resources are fixed, given a fixed tech level, and the resources will always run out if we do not push the tech, oh, like the Chinese are doing, and we are not doing.
correlation: change the climate/25% unemployment rate?
You might want to elaborate on that:-)
Hmm, for me, current history is post 1400. I wonder what "modern age" means?
hmm, per cap or per output? fair question. Now how should we go about deciding which is the proper measure? It is more than academic. India made the per cap argument in telling the no development crowd at copenhagen to go to hell and with a few other countries who valued their sovereignty derailed the agenda.
I consider this question illustrates part of the stupidity of statistical reasoning. Oh well.
But I guess having raised the question, I should take a shot, Hmm, try this. Thinking about mastodons and Brit pre-coal energy source depletion, can we say: Whatever the population density and what ever the output level, resources have always been finite and in some way will always be finite, even with magic tech or cave dwelling tech. On the other hand, resources are not fixed, and not "natural".
And the story we deal with here demos this "not finite" and "not natural" quite well. But is it not strange that people complain repeatedly about "unknown dangers" while accepting the idea that they and their children can actually survive with an intentionally fixed resource base?
So it seems that most immediately the problem is not scalar numbers but concepts.
But if you like statistics, here is a correlation to play with: 50 years of anti-tech green/ 25% unemployment rate.
haha, ah I did say state of undress:-) Not everyone wears pj's and midnight snack attacks do happen to people. And even fully decent, you might not really want someone to see you in the morning before you do your makeup and deal with your hair.
And people on slashdot would not know, but sometimes there is a good reason to undress in the kitchen!
Yeah, but the whole idea strokes my paranoia. So we put out video of the subject in possibly various stages of undress, not only on wifi but maybe on a cable internet connection? And the undress might not be really the issue. Simple being nosy to plotting an intrusion are possibie motivators.. Do some encryption on the feed.
Slashdot Mirror
your need to charge actually has a possible solution. I did not see anyone mention that with the right electric supply you can do a 80% charge in 20-30 minutes. Oregon's local greenie governor is planning on putting stations like this along the main interstate, hmm, every 100 miles?. He has some federal money to do it. Now he plans to locate these sites where is there is some existing retail and other amenities. Hey, few greenies would call me green, but I think this particular idea is a reasonable thing to try.
I think the electrical tech is say a 440v supply. Nothing really exotic. Big computers require that sort of stuff. A home workshop might rarely have that sort of supply.
Anyway, to state the obvious, no real government code changes required. Figure that if the customer base was there, I think safeway would love to provide you a charging station while you go in to buy stuff. If you spend 30 minutes shopping and stroke safeway with some money for the electricity, everyone is happy for at least that day.
I do not want to look like a silly invisible hand guy, but my approach here fits a capitalist system better. The local gov is doing the right thing too, demoing the tech and market, so that the risk adverse big capital types can see a sure way to make some gilt without necessarily raping the population.
Atheist! god's invisible hand will make it all, including the "externalities", come out for the best for all of us. Everyone knows and understands this. At least, most of the Fox commentators understand this.
also a finite number of axioms is required. note that there are formal systems that cannot do arithmetic. I suppose the usual logic systems are an example. But getting past me being picky, what does "recursive" mean here? Yah, I know about recursive code and I know that people tried to add a new axiom to invalidate Godel (hah, in both math and physics, before he was done) and suppose that was to eliminate self-reference, but does this mean eliminate recursion? Thinking about the code and what little I recall of the silly axiom add-on, that might be the case?
Hah, I am in the universe (maybe :-)) and I can do some arithmetic. Am I a non-recursive finite axiomatic system? I do not think so... I suspect those that assume that you have to do logic-math sequences to get to science are just silly. Kind of an interesting position, as I think about it. Hah, the intelligent design people should try working on that sort of line. They might get vaguely interesting after a while.
The usual numbers for the NASA profit result are 1000% percent, I often hear. This is economic spin-off, not image. There is a difference between a limited entity making a "profit" and the economy in general making a "profit". But you did not even notice that reference point in the part you actually quoted.
Assuming you are not a total ideologue, did the early 19th century canals, which we still use, generate a "profit". Perhaps the problem is that you define "profit" as something that can be only associated with some sort of private shareholder value. Hah, maybe you think the only possible "profit" must be monetarizable.
Here is an interesting question. To what extent is the computer on your desk a NASA spin-off? I seem to recall some early NASA financing of the development of the concept of ICs. If this is somewhat true, how would you characterize the "profit"?
Wrong!??? Maybe not. Test mode vs operational mode?
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/15928
My personal view is that an operational speed, actually in production and use, is really the defining number. I am not quite sure how to classify this number, but it looks more interesting. The reason is largely societal. The French apparently built some good gizmos, but were not really committed enough to make them "real". The Chinese on the other hand likely think of rail as a key strategic element, not just in economic development, but in national security.
China seems to be the world expert on rail in arctic environments and depending on your definition of high speed, has the most high speed rail. Although the Russians, with Chinese help, are going high speed rail with a vengeance. Hah, if we had a President that was actual planning on having a positively functioning US economy, we might have already gone with the Russian intentions for a Bering strait rail tunnel, and I suspect we would classify the rail there as high-speed. And the Chinese would want this tunnel too.
Ah well. Some countries are willing to invest in infrastructure. The US prefers to loot its infrastructure.
Hah, you might be understating your case. I once read a knife book which claimed that if you have been drawn down on, are 15 feet away, have a knife, have skill, then you can take the gun holder out. I do not know that it is a true claim.
On other grounds, people complain about obesity health issues and want to play with diet, but exercise might be even bigger than food. The time I picked up a black belt, I lost 50 lbs in the process without trying,. I suspect if instead of spending money on k-12 team sports, the schools offered some martial arts classes for Physical Education, it would solve some problems in a number of areas. But think of the liability. :-)
If you leave out the sometime rather silly individualism expressed by a segment of gun owners, regarding opposing government oppression, the everyone should carry argument does have a claim to a rather obvious virtue: people would quickly tend to be rather civil with one another. But martial arts training not only has that aspect, but tends toward a lot of self-control anyway.
But what do I know.
I intend to check out your sig recommendation.
Actually, the usual criteria for something that might be claimed credible is two independent sources. Obviously, in evaluating source material, you are more interested in what is said in private, than what is said to the news media. And if you do like media reporting, how do you evaluate "source unidentified because he is not authorized to comment." ?
One way to evaluate what's his names intelligence sources is to observe that there is a good chance that, given the story told as true, some significant portions of the Swedish intelligence community would be pissy about the US doing ultimatums to the Swedish government. Thus, "porous". So on the front of it, we have a consistency. So maybe you are putting out the bullshit.
If you look around there are all sorts of different definitions of fascism. You might look at the wikipedia summary on this. I use a deviate definition. Admittedly I am a little vague on the details. Try this.
Austerity on the general population. Think of it as looting their living standards, their lives, and ultimately their bodies.
A financial structure that needs that loot to keep going a little longer.
A big economic crisis.
I sort of think we could include the late roman empire under this rubic as fascist. So I am not inclined to buy it as a capitalist or corporate issues as some do. Oh sure, right now, we have big speculative investment banks (corporations) and they are defended as some sort of capitalist ideal somehow or the other. Maybe not today exactly, at least by very many people, but go back just to 2008. People of a certain sort like to complain about greedy capitalists, but the complainers could be helpful if they tried for precision.
The right approach is to try for a general definition and a general perspective on items that are complicated enough not to be machine-like.
As far as a parochial viewpoint, locally, in this time and country, it is not hard to identify specific people who have died from current "cut-backs" and here I think of California Fire Department cut-backs. I claim it is fair to call the current state and local government situation "austerity". What do you think?
I look around for some links, but to think that meat uncooked is as energy efficient as meat cooked is just wrong. Beyond that, there is no lower animal that prefers uncooked to cooked. I expect this last claim has not been exhaustively tested, but for apes it has been tested. Hah, this was trivial to find:http://pdfcast.org/pdf/cooking-and-grinding-reduces-the-cost-of-meat-digestion
There is a particular difficulty in your general "we do not quite need tech"..Last I heard "we" had fire 4 meg years ago, based on sooted rocks. And through cooking, we changed our morphology. It seems to me to be difficult to argue that that with which we created ourselves is unnecessary to our future. But I liked your numbers. I guess we can say the anti-tech people are genocidal maniacs?
Oh, it is a nice story. But there are some inconveniences. I hear the labor component of a ton of steel made in the USA is less than the shipping cost of a ton of steel from China to the USA. Never the less, USA government funded structures end up getting their steel from China. I believe the new Narrows Bridge in Tacoma WA might have been an example of this.
I figure there are both subjective and objective factors. Here is a subjective factor that seems to have objective implications. Chinese elites favor economic development in their country. And back it up with nice, actually world-historic deals, with the Russians and others. Here what immediately comes to mind is Chinese/Russian cooperation on developing the Russian Far East. And I do believe they are building 10k miles of high-speed rail every year. I imagine there could be quite a list, pretty much getting off the ground starting in October of last year..
On our side, hmm Asia has over a hundred new nukes going in, but the USA has 1, sort of. Thorium based full fuel cycle? India is pushing real hard on that, with Russian participation. We will not be building them, will we?
Rail? Looted. Cannot even do regular speed mostly. Space program? Instrumentation is pushed on a cost efficiency basis. Cannot have the kids getting excited about manned space exploration anytime soon.
Here is an objective factor. As of 2009, the official bailout and loan guarantee total by the feds was 23.4 trillion USD. Obama touts a 50 billion USD infrastructure program. And I bet it would all be old tech stuff. The last number I saw on deferred maintenance of US infrastructure was 2.4 trillion USD. And I believe this is government infrastructure. I suspect that gas explosion in california will turn out to be deferred maintenance of sort of a private infrastructure element.. (also probably a government failure to inspect and regulate. That would be an inconvenient fact for you.) You I recall from an earlier posting like infrastructure. Good for you. But in a conceptual twist, you might want to define infrastructure as new and transforming of the economy.
I expect you can make some valid comments and additions. But I do not see a solution coming from you.
Try this. Push for glass-steagall reinstatement like FDR had it. This has a lot of bipartisan support and the public wants to screw the speculators. But Obama would have to fight desperately to stop it. And when he lost, he would be bye-bye. If we do it right, we might even free up some trillions of dollars we have pissed down the speculator drain. Then you could have some infrastructure, old and new, and jack up our productivity.
Also, China is not so good in their position as they would like, IMO. Figure this: There is 1.4 quadrillion usd of speculative debt out there. It is unpayable, but all on someones books as a nice stable asset. This is not sustainable. Pooh, everyone who says anything says it. But people will disagree on when it busts. When it goes, I think Asia, including China, will go down, eventually. So I think the Chinese want to be in a position to disagree truthfully. Let us wish them luck, at least.
Your definition of government duties seems a little limited to me. Hmm, very traditionally, public health types have a lot of power to do "evil" by taking your liberty away if you have a dangerous contagious disease. I imagine they really just outsource to the cops and courts, but still. The phrase that comes to mind is "typhoid Mary". Ahh, but I really know little about the case, so I will go off and get a link, Here we go: http://history1900s.about.com/od/1900s/a/typhoidmary.htm. There seems to be a lot of google hits. It seems that the public health people were literally "after her" once she went on the run. So they did not do a complete outsource to the cops. But before we get silly defenses of your position, let us note from the cite information it is hard to call her "evil". So it is hard to be talking simple about a "choice of the lesser evil" in a personification basis.
Perhaps I am just stupid, What is your base definition of "evil" again? Perhaps it is not really very defensible, and a little ad hominem would make your definition of the duties of government suspect.
Economic collapses are not an exercise in gradualism. Hmm, Weimar again. In the spring, they looked sort of normal (a lot like us a bit ago). In the fall, 100 trillion bank notes. Or the dark ages. A deviant analysis says the Lombardi banking collapse reduced living standards such that a non-airborn plague had fertile ground to mutate into airborne. And then things got real bad real quick. How bad? Maybe half of small towns simply disappeared. Do you live in a small town?
Perhaps the most useful thing to say is that when you have a general institutional failure, (like us now?), until you get some replacements in, nothing works like you expect it to work. The joke is that you turn on the light switch and water starts running out the faucet.
But you are right in a key way. Peak oil is not a big problem. For instance, back in the day, we planned to have locally 1k nuke power plants ten years ago. We now have about, oh, 130. In the time line where we built the nukes, we would not see peak oil as quite as dire an occurrence. :-) An extra trillion watts would make a lot of difference in many ways. But you are not likely to find the difference between the two time lines in the usual objective universe.
Many things in some areas and occasions should be taken serious, but often the sane response is some chuckles.
Looking at your jumping off a building example, using the usual science, there is some probability that jumping off the building will turn out to be quite safe. Using the conventional cosmology, the probability is such that the universe is not really old enough for there ever to have been an actualization. Depending on your biases, chuckling at the expense of science might seem quite reasonable in this case and many others.
In terms of global warming, I took the supposed effects of the science claims (read that carefully) and put considerable money for me into screwing over Copenhagen. There was even the claim that I did a "little bit of good". So I sort of took "global warming" as politics and economics seriously. At that level of abstraction, the "global warming" science is pretty much irrelevant.. But I bet you are still unhappy with me. :-)
I confess I did not read all the OP or RTFA. But the category "expert" is interesting. Here is a thought: experts are experts because they can and do successfully predict future outcomes. This sort of thing is a hallmark of science, even if you do not have a field where you know how to do nice math. For a non-science, that has lots of experts and lots of math, consider the usual talking heads doing economic predictions. Or, for something personal, but not on today's front page, I think of McNamara and his whiz kids and their system analysis approach.
The word "professionalism" comes to mind. There is lots of history and theory around the concept. The usual criticism is that if you are a professional, then your praxis is positivism. Hah, see McNamara. And, of course, we might wonder if a particular class of professionals have any real science behind them, as is required by the usual theory on professionalism.
It is fun that, say, for software engineering, the usual official notice of professionalism, state licensing, is resisted by the practitioners and some, like the ACM, make arguments that there is not enough real "science" to put together a stable licensing knowledge requirement.
Anyway, OP, if you are fine with wrapping all the post content into one world view, okay, but take care if you claim that the view is predictive.:-)
Yah, I did not rtfa either. But hey you might know something. So here is where I am coming from: where do you use a kinematic causality model vs a dynamic causality model? So there was a odd slashdot article recently on someone who built a quantum computer that was reliable enough to get some statistics on. So I guess he did a thousand runs. He got the right answer 60% of the time and something apparently random 40% of the time. If I think kinematics, I think machine. And I wonder, was the quantum computer a machine? Oh, well. But the high random results are interesting. Any comments.
you are of course right. But be a little more realistic. With talking heads saying real unemployment is 22% and a better number being 30%, then consider all the really good reasons you can up with for cutting police resources :-) I am old enough to remember lots of federal troops and tanks in the street. And back in last crash, I believe MacAuthur was shooting people in the capital mall. So, before my time, but I googled a bit with "macauthur general riot suppression". I did not quite see "shooting".
So sure, fire chiefs are talking about big chunks of cities "accidentally" burning down as a result of cutbacks. But back in the day, we had whole blocks going up and the fires were not "accidental".
Welcome to early 21st century financial capitalism. In a few years, we may be happy to manage to have feudal economic relationships. But maybe that is the idea.
Maybe, but you may be parochial.
I just heard today about a town who put the entire fire department on half-time and at minimum wage. Infrastructure has been a know problem for decades and more recently even a matter of considerable public concern, as when an interstate bridge collapsed a few years back. But big cuts in public safety are new. And there is a nice pattern. The cuts are not something that make the mass media. but I saw a long summary compiled from local media last month, so I figure this is brand new.
Here is a quote I read yesterday in some semi-scholarly book that might be relevant. It is multiple thousands of years old and I am not smart enough to make a decent historical comparison, but it seems relevant.
Such is the senility of the world: atheism, dishonor, and the disregard of noble words. hmm, asclepius
Hah, if you are into desert tribal religions. I imagine you should get a peculiar satisfaction in our present situation. On the other hand, if you are not into eschatons, read not "world", but "international financial system". Or, "your future".
Your point toward not silly may be correct, but ...
if you are a startup, you are probably not making a profit, therefore in washington state, the b&o is significant. Figure it is a percent and half of gross revenue.
and you tended towards a general confusion between taxes and income taxes, and now you make it a little worse. figure corporate income tax revenue is 12% of the federal revenue
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/revenue.cfm
saying "taxes are too much", which tends to be I think your point, *is* silly. But popular with some people. So, yeah, we are all going down the tube, except for the vultures, at least immediately,, and taxes are in fact part of what suck us dry, but talking about secondary issues like taxes, and not even doing that very precisely, does seem to be silly in a different way than I started out claiming.
doing really really well on the topic, doing the right question/claim, requires some decent concepts about economics, and the talking heads do not much even try. And of course, by their predictive ability, if they tried, they would not be able to succeed.
oh well. Looks like we will soon go from 25 trillion to 30 trillion of fiat bailout money. Once that generates the consequences, it will be easy to pay your present tax bill.
h, the problem ius that I used to live in Washington *state*, so I am talking about a state tax here. And I guess my mention of Oregon right afterward might have given a clue.
Oh, I know you were sort of talking about IRS stuff, but the idea that profit and taxes go together, and phrased as a general principle, is as I said silly. So why try to make the gereral statement?
As far as the rest, some people act like money has an intrinsic value, oh, psychological value no doubt, but still...
The claim after that is the obvious one that hyperinflation, very near term, will demo once again that money has no intrinsic value.
The numbers I quoted on the fiat money turn out to be flakey. Better: 25 trillion in loans and guarantees, as of 2009, and now another 5 trillion, as soon as Timmy G.can.
I liked your play!
Here is something cute: if you have a lot of solar panels on your roof and your building catches fire, the fire department is liable to just let it burn to the ground!
I sort of think your statement "biggest depression since the Great Depression" is wrong. Oh, it has been clearly wrong since October 2009, but now the current numbers?? are getting worse than the 1930's. Hmm, I do not quite have the words to easily make the distinction between October and now in terms of the "numbers". Oh, here is the problem. Mostly the numbers are garbage. Aside from all the intentional fraud, the concepts are garbage. Hah, if the concepts were decent, we might have an actual economic science. But unemployment level numbers are close to something meaniful.
As far as the republicans, their religious belief in the invisible hand is just amusing. But the dems are so bad, republican economics is starting to look good in comparison. But treat the current problem as deeply bipartisan and try to find the particulars. It is not like either parties economic ideologies really mean anything. For instance, if the republicans were laisse-fare, how is that they bailed out the investment banks (while leaving the commercial banks to just stop functioning)?
And the dems like the little guy supposedly, but ... in the first 9 months of Obama, we lost 4 million jobs. in the first 9 months of FDR, we gained 4 million jobs! A demographic analysis says that since the mid 1990's, we came up short 25 million jobs.
As far as green being hi-tech, oh, it is possible to be a sane environmentalist and it is praiseworthy, but solar panels? Best I can see if you include the batteries and the electronics and the supports, you have net energy lose. Yah, there are numbers all over the place. As near as I can tell, a metastudy came up with a standard deviation comparable to the signal. There is just no science there to drive studies that you can actually rely on.
Oh well, it is late. Thanks for the response.
amusing. as far as bad logic is concerned, do you not feel sort of silly when someone claims a correlation and you then attack a claim of causation. Sure, in fact I am fine with blaming anti-tech ideologies, but I am even happier to blame global financial system stuff.
so I have to look around hard to find anything useful in your response. Here is what I come up with. Your response to the correlation claim is "not green", because "industrialized, polluting, and unsustainable". So one part of your claim is that "industrialized"=!"green". So I think "anti-human" on your part, since I woyuld think you favor"green". After all, "fire", a tech, pretty much created us several million years ago, but more properly, because changing the universe is what we do for a living and always have. And then there is "polluting". I put that in with "unsustainability". Also, I really really tried to very concretely say that all resources are fixed, given a fixed tech level, and the resources will always run out if we do not push the tech, oh, like the Chinese are doing, and we are not doing.
correlation: change the climate/25% unemployment rate?
You might want to elaborate on that :-)
Hmm, for me, current history is post 1400. I wonder what "modern age" means?
Past 50 years? As from earlier in your post?
hmm, per cap or per output? fair question. Now how should we go about deciding which is the proper measure? It is more than academic. India made the per cap argument in telling the no development crowd at copenhagen to go to hell and with a few other countries who valued their sovereignty derailed the agenda.
I consider this question illustrates part of the stupidity of statistical reasoning. Oh well.
But I guess having raised the question, I should take a shot, Hmm, try this. Thinking about mastodons and Brit pre-coal energy source depletion, can we say: Whatever the population density and what ever the output level, resources have always been finite and in some way will always be finite, even with magic tech or cave dwelling tech. On the other hand, resources are not fixed, and not "natural".
And the story we deal with here demos this "not finite" and "not natural" quite well. But is it not strange that people complain repeatedly about "unknown dangers" while accepting the idea that they and their children can actually survive with an intentionally fixed resource base?
So it seems that most immediately the problem is not scalar numbers but concepts.
But if you like statistics, here is a correlation to play with: 50 years of anti-tech green/ 25% unemployment rate.
you point to the flakiness of statistical analysis in relation to truth
haha, ah I did say state of undress :-) Not everyone wears pj's and midnight snack attacks do happen to people. And even fully decent, you might not really want someone to see you in the morning before you do your makeup and deal with your hair.
And people on slashdot would not know, but sometimes there is a good reason to undress in the kitchen!
Yeah, but the whole idea strokes my paranoia. So we put out video of the subject in possibly various stages of undress, not only on wifi but maybe on a cable internet connection? And the undress might not be really the issue. Simple being nosy to plotting an intrusion are possibie motivators.. Do some encryption on the feed.