I believe that in many states, if you refuse the breathalyzer, the police can take you down to the station and compel a blood test. Now, at that point, a really aggressive lawyer can try to attack them on chain of custody issues.
I don't know. It sounds very strange to me that, in any state, you could guarantee lesser charges by refusing a breathalyzer.
Re: gun ownership. Most states require that firearms be registered, so it's not like they're asking about the ins and outs of your sex life with your spouse. Moreover, I doubt that gun ownership would be a major roadblock for any appointee. But it would be prudent of them to look over a person's ownership history and make sure they complied with the relevant laws at all times. After all, if they don't do opposition research, FOX News will.
If I want to pirate a movie, I can go to a single site, find multiple options (1080p, 720p, ipod, ect) for just about every movie in existence. All of which are "in stock" and most of which I can download to my computer in less time it would take to drive to the store.
The selection is great, but how do I turn off the Swedish subtitiles?
There isn't much detail on the "stolen computers" angle on the story, but given that I (working for a very tiny outfit) have ten computers here whose only function is to take up space, whose best years are at least a decade behind them, I can see how you could paint some genuinely innocent actions as "stealing".
Hell, the pornography in question might not meet any reasonable definition of the term. We'll have to wait and see.
Or, more likely with stories like these, we'll never hear the follow up.
Hard to say. But when you're in charge of a 5000 computer installation, any single decision you make can suddenly look ginormous.
Imagine that, over the last ten years, the IT director has purchased 15,000 computers. If he was unwittingly paying $70/box more than he could have, that's $1M right there. If most of the computers are using only 10% of their disk space (pretty common in a desktop work environment), you could argue that he bought well over $1M worth of worthless hard drive space.
Or, if the computers are poorly configured, so that the computers waste ten minutes of each teacher's day for ten years, you get:
(8500 students * 1 teacher / 30 students * 180 days * 10 years * 10 min/day * $12/60 min) = $1,020,000
I'd better stop before I give the district more ideas.
So, it's a pretty decent sized chunk of responsibility, and while we're only hearing the district's side, he really shouldn't have been running unnecessary software. Too much is at stake to be playing. But nothing about the SETI thing strikes me as worthy of criminal charges, and the other stuff ("pornography", "stolen computers") is either blown out of proportion, or just the everyday sort of misconduct that gets people fired without making national news.
"Unelected bureaucrats" "target[ing] your big screen for elimination?" Sounds oooh so scary. The California Energy Commission isn't an elected body, but they are appointed by people Californians elected. And the very story that "target for elimination" links to indicates the following:
* The proposed regulations aren't particularly stringent. They're about on par with the EnergyStar guidelines. * Many popular models of HDTV already meet the proposed regulations. * The regulations are technology neutral. * The regulations are probably only going to slightly accelerate a shift that consumers are already demanding.
The other link, aside from being puerile, childish, and unthinkingly parroting the talking points of an industry astroturf group, proposes a solution too stupid to count as satire.
Put this in context: California has long regulated many categories of appliances this way. In most every case, manufacturers have found it much cheaper to make every appliance conform to the California standards than to make separate products for other states. So the price differential cannot be all that great.
I expect that, as usual, industry's screams of doom and terror are detached from reality.
I'm in favor of taxing energy, but I think that regulation would have a far more immediate and beneficial effect on the TV sector.
As I see it, California has been regulating the energy efficiency of a wide variety of appliances for decades, with no noticeable effect on the economy. All states benefit from many of these regulations, precisely because the added cost to the appliances is so minimal that it's cheaper to make all appliances conforming than to have a separate product line for California and the other states that adopt their regulations.
The reason this minimal cost wasn't being paid before is simple: the guy selling you the appliances isn't paying your electric bill.
That should give you an indication of why a broad energy tax will only have a small effect on TV energy efficiency: it would have to be absolutely huge to get it in the front of people's minds as they're wandering the local Best Buy.
Let the Californians regulate their TVs. If the cost of making them energy efficient is significant (I doubt it will be), then you'll get separate product lines and people hauling in out-of-state TVs. If it's insignificant, manufacturers will make all their products energy efficient, and out-of-staters will benefit.
>> I feel I have been stolen from when an unauthorized copy of my software is made.
I went to your blog, because I was interested in finding out just what program you'd written that was so heavily pirated. Not only could I not find the program, but every six seconds of the nightmarish slog was punctuated with "Poker: How To Beat No-Limit Hold Em 6-max Cash Games".
Fine. Then might I ask why George Bush doesn't show up on your list of world leaders trying to restore the monarchies/oligarchies? His administration was the one with the audacity to send Congress a bill that basically said, "Give ex-Goldman-Sacher Hank Paulson 700B, and no you don't get any say in how he divvies up the spoils." He demanded the Patriot Act, the warrantless wiretapping, etc. He emptied the national coffers to pay for tax cuts that mostly put money back in the pockets of the extremely wealthy. He was the one who joked about his "base" being "the haves, and the have mores". He oversaw an economy where the wealthy got an ever larger share of the national income even as the number of people in poverty skyrocketed.
In short, he is a textbook case of economic royalism, and you admit that many of his policies reduced freedom. He deserves not only to be on the list, but to be at the top of it.
I don't like where Obama (and Sarkozy and Conroy and Gordon Brown) are taking western civilization. It's as if they are trying to restore the monarchies/oligarchies that existed pre-1800, where the government (nobility) restricts and circumscribes the daily routines of its citizens (commoners) rather than allow true liberty, and I am a fan of anybody who challenges them.
To the extent that the government responds to the will of the people, it is not the nobility. To the extent that the government responds to the will of the plutocrats rather than voters, it is a tool of the nobility. But it's a tool the plutocrats would happily let cripple and wither, because it has to make at least a show of being on the side of the citizens, and it could someday change its mind and actually start serving their interests.
In other words, they would be delighted if government got out of the business of providing social safety nets, and restricted itself to enforcing whatever unfair contracts the powerful could compel the powerless into signing. Then they could pillage with absolute impunity, and remake the world economy into a machine entirely devoted to serving their whims while the invisible masses starved.
You and Glenn Beck are both unwitting dupes whose constant deluge of anti-government rhetoric only enables the forces of privilege and excess, forces that quite honestly don't care about your freedoms. All they want is to wield power over others.
California's problems stem primarily from Prop 13, which makes it nigh unto impossible to raise taxes (a very red state policy), coupled with a ballot initiative system that makes it easy for the people to pass laws demanding that the government allocate the budget in certain ways (a kinda blue state policy).
I would call it a bipartisan train wreck, especially since Prop 13 puts vast powers into the hands of an otherwise irrelevant California Republican party.
I vaguely remember something like that being claimed, back when this was news. But it seemed like a really selective interpretation of the facts. Source?
But he's a Ron Paul supporter! He must be up to no good!
I'm proud of anyone who stands up for his right to privacy in the face of The Man. But I saw this guy on a couple of interviews, and he's definitely a paranoid freak to think that those cops would have subjected him to something worse had he admitted that the money was collections from a Republican candidate's rally.
Now, if it had been collections for the movement to legalize marijuana, then he might have had some reason for concern. Donations from a Hillary rally might have gotten him some pissed off looks, but no real harassment. But Ron Paul? They'd be like, "Dude, you rock!"
Sure, man. The cops have a well-known anti-Republican bias.
I think that the reason that intelligent, well meaning people get up in arms when race and intelligence are discussed together is simple: the evidence just isn't there. Or at least, the evidence is too vague and contradictory to be anything but inflammatory in discussions about why some races seem to have better success in society.
Example: it's pretty well known that whites outperform blacks on tests designed to measure intelligence. Some people read that and automatically assume that this reveals something innate, something which accounts for widespread poverty among black people.
Two facts argue against that. The first it that, in Ireland, you find the same discrepancy in test scores between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority, even though both have ancestry that we think of as "white".
This draws attention to the second fact: expectation biases account for at least a substantial portion of the discrepancy. You put a white kid and a black kid in the same room, and give them a test that you've told them will measure their intelligence, the black kid very often performs worse than he would have if you'd just introduced it as a bunch of interesting problems you want the kids to solve.
Interestingly, the expectation bias has a negative effect on the white kids too, if you sit them next to Asian kids.
So when IQ is presented as something that is innate, and varies between the races, it does real damage. I am a believer in academic freedom and intellectual exploration, but going into the minefield of race and IQ doesn't just mean facing outrage; it also means risking harm to others. IOW, think responsibly.
>> This contradicts what is usually meant by correlation.
The idea that something might correlate well throughout a given range, and less well along other ranges, is pretty common. For example, happiness and income correlate fantastically well between the range of $0-$10,000 per year. Much beyond that, and extra income doesn't make you significantly happier.
Or the rates of scurvy and vitamin C intake might correlate well up to half the US RDA, then become completely unrelated.
It's a simple fact (at least in the United States) that MOST millionaires are NOT millionaires through inheritance.
Can you say the same thing about billionaires? Also, what percentage of millionaires had parents whose incomes were below the poverty line?
Expanding wealth significantly takes some combination of skill, hard work, luck, greed, willingness to sacrifice, and willingness to screw over your fellow man. I think any two can make you a millionaire, but you're going to need at least three to become a billionaire.
The fact remains that the wealth of your parents is the single best predictor of your own wealth. The poor are less likely to enter or graduate college, regardless of skill. In fact, if you take the most academically gifted quarter of the poorest kids, and compare their college graduation rates to those of the least academically gifted quarter of the richest kids, the dumb rich come out ahead.
Sorry, I just love throwing that stat in the face of anyone who seems to be under the delusion that America has a meritocratic economy.
Why should I want my genes to continue? And "tribes" today are such nebulous things, the idea of intertribe competition on any scale smaller than the nation-state is laughable.
Get over your genes and learn to enjoy other people.
Levitt was wrong about so very many things in the global warming section of his book, that it's very hard to take him seriously.
He claims that global warming today is somehow equivalent to the overblown global cooling warnings of the 1970s. The fact that he leads the chapter with the climate change deniers' Argument Zero does not inspire confidence.
Some of his primary sources clearly have no idea what they're talking about. One of them (Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, and a cofounder of the company that wants to put up the eighteen mile high SO2 chimney) claimed that solar power was infeasible because solar panels are black, which would significantly alter the Earth's albedo. He also claims that it would take 30-50 years to pay back all the energy required to set up a solar photovoltaics grid (the actual time taken to pay back a panel's energy debt is about 2 years and falling).
But I think the big failing of his book is that he offers the very optimistic projections (regarding both effectiveness and cost) of the people who want to sell the technology to the world as pretty much fact, while completely ignoring the huge potential downfalls of his approach, or the economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions. He just slaps a trillion dollar price tag on carbon mitigation, a ten billion dollar price tag on his own solution, then says, "Clearly, we should be doing this."
There are huge problems with that.
We don't know if SO2 injection will work on a large scale.
We don't know if it will have unintended side effects (and Levitt's predictions that it won't are based on the same computer climate models he tries to discredit earlier in the chapter).
We do know that reducing sunlight will cause solar panels to be less efficient.
We do know that the geoengineering technique will do nothing about ocean acidification, which is nearly as scary as global warming itself.
We do know that, if we start down this path, then decide to turn off the SO2 injections, any heating we were deflecting will be back within a decade, which could cause a huge shock to the ecosystem.
We do know that CO2 mitigation, if pursued aggressively enough, will work to reduce *all* the effects of global warming, without the potential side effects of the geoengineering option.
Most important, we know that many of the approaches we could take to mitigation will benefit the economy, not hinder it. Some estimates even say that the benefits will cancel out the costs, leaving us exactly as well off as we would be if we did nothing (plus we get to, you know, continue inhabiting the globe, which might be worth something). Levitt completely ignores any economic benefits to any CO2 mitigation strategy, which is the only way to achieve his trillion dollar price tag.
I think we should be investigating geoengineering options. I think we should do so aggressively, because there may come a time when mitigation isn't enough, and it's the only technique that can stand between us and something nasty. But it should be the ultimate nuclear option.*
Finally, I've been watching Levitt's response to his critics, and he is an embarrassment. He constantly avoids directly addressing the actual substance of his critics arguments, while claiming that they're just mad because he's a heritic to the global warming religion. He clearly thinks (or at least wants his fans to believe) that he is the only rational person in the debate.
* Which leads to another of the scandals of the Superfreakonomics book. One of his main sources for the geoengineering material was written about as though he believed that geoengineering was a replacement for CO2 mitigation, when in fact the source's thinking is more like my own.
I think it's safe to say that we are well past the limits of sustainability, given the current set of technologies we're using to provide for ourselves. In the short to mid term, oil disappears. In the next couple of centuries, coal disappears (even if we did find a way of harvesting its energy without a huge increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations). Even nuclear fuel will eventually hit a peak. Water is going to be a huge issue over the next couple of decades.
I'm sure that solutions will be found for many of these challenges. But generally speaking, each solution usually brings about its own new set of problems. The import of the potato to Ireland led to a massive population increase, as food suddenly became far cheaper and more plentiful than before. But the underlying dynamics of poverty didn't change, so when the technology supporting the growth suddenly disappeared (as it did during the potato famine), it resulted in mass starvation and emigration. In the same way, we're now completely dependent on the technology that supports us in a way that we wouldn't be had we limited our population to perhaps half a billion from the outset.
In that hypothetical, small population world, we could survive the sudden disappearance of oil relatively easily. We'd all have to be farmers for a while, but it's a much simpler problem than trying to feed thirteen times as many people with the same resources and technology. Engineering our way to ever greater populations is a risky path. I'm hoping that we'll level out around 10B
I'm half-inclined to agree with what your blog post says about population control. But I think you overestimate the population effects of differential breeding on attitudes (and apparently, intelligence). Arguably, Republicans have been outbreeding Democrats for quite a while now, but that trend has been pretty much negated by the increasing urbanization of the United States (urban dwellers tend to vote Democratic). Even if you had a hard-line group of ideological non-breeders, they would never entirely die out, because their attitudes didn't come from being descendants of a long line of childless people. Their attitudes also come from the cultural influences of the day, from the way their formative experiences wired their brains, etc.
You wrote, "We need a political party that encourages intelligent, resourceful people to have lots of children--and to educate them well." Given the massive wave of genetic manipulation that will happen over the next fifty years, will a couple of generations of incentives for selective breeding make a hint of difference? No, we should grow our supergeniuses the way God intended: in giant plexiglass cylinders filled with green glop, overseen by a cackling mad scientist.
Not quite as simple as that. The move out of poverty leads to much smaller families. The move from the countryside into the cities also leads to much smaller families. But continuing to pour wealth on after you reach a decent standard of living has little or no effect, as decisions start to be more a matter of personal preference and cultural influences.
"More growth" works in some circumstances, not others.
Any continued population growth, if carried out within a closed system for long enough, will indeed lead to a reduced standard of living. It's just a mathematical fact.
You're also ignoring part of the "sustainability" argument, which is that the things that are fueling our current growth -- cheap access to dirty energy -- are not going to hold much longer. The sky is getting too crowded with exhaust, and the earth doesn't have much more cheap oil to give us. You can argue over whether this is a surmountable obstacle, or whether switching to a new source of energy will be easy or difficult. But until we actually start recognizing and respecting the limits of our planet, we're going to hit these walls with increasing frequency.
If true, the farmer is saving a lot of money, a lot of fossil-fuels (in the form of fertilizer), and temporarily sequestering carbon that would have gone into the atmosphere. I hope this proves successful, and becomes wildly popular.
Two possible responses:
1) This proves that the market can respond to the global warming crisis just fine, and we therefore don't need government intervention.
2) This proves that, with proper incentives, amazing solutions can be found for our carbon problem, and we therefore should expect that CO2 mitigation will be far cheaper than the economic doomsayers claim.
I think they're both partly right. The biggest problem with response 1 is that without government intervention, the market will remain forever 'carbon blind', externalizing the costs of pollution. The only mitigation strategies that will ever be pursued are the ones that also pad the bottom line.
The difference here is that the "gub'mint takeover of journalism" should proceed differently. In the case of GM (the only actual "firing" I can find), the government plunked down some of our money, directly bought a share of the company, and then started using that share as leverage to pursue government aims. Since those aims mostly involved job preservation (the Big 3, plus their associated auto parts manufacturers, plus their retailer network, represent about 4M American jobs), I'm not too worked up about that.
On the other hand, if a bailout of the news business proceeded along the same lines, I would be shouting bloody murder. The government having a stake in hundreds of media outlets would give them too much leverage in controlling how the news is reported. While I would argue that our current president -- being a constitutional scholar and all, would be less likely to use that power than some presidentsI can think of, the temptation would still be too strong.
I fundamentally agree with conservatives on that point. We part ways on two issues: First, that the free market will quickly and inevitably yield something better to replace the current failing business model. Second, that government money unavoidably leads to government control.
Point the first: The Internet is an amazing thing, and given a copious supply of open government data, it can do a lot of the job that traditional media has been doing (poorly). But I don't think there will ever be a replacement for the intrepid journalist who finds a story, and keeps prodding sources and asking questions until the truth comes out. There isn't enough of that going on right now, and the problem will only get worse as local and national newspapers and TV news outlets scale back on their reporters.
Point the second: As I've said in other posts, there are ways to set up the disbursment of funds in such a way that the government plays no role in it. One option is to give the funds to an independent panel to disburse according to some set formula. Another is similar to a proposal I once read about for financing elections. You could give $50 to each American to donate to any qualifying journalistic endeavor, with decisions about who qualifies also being farmed out to an independent panel.
In my mind, this would make for an ideal world, where so long as a handful of people believed in a journalist's work, they would be completely free to pursue any story wherever it led, without having to worry what the government, the owners of some newspaper, or some newspaper's advertisers thought.
The only reason you see NPR/PBS as completely, irredeemably biased is because you disagree with them. Not even with them, but with your uninformed perception of the views that Rush et. al. have told you that they project. I have never, in all my years of listening to NPR, gotten the impression that it, as an institution, believes that "Governments should run every facet of your life".
It's good to know, though, that you managed to incorporate contrary evidence without even the slightest hint of reduction in your certainty that teh PBS r EEVULZ! Watching your cognitive dissonance in action will hopefully make me more careful about overcertaintly in my own thinking.
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Congratulations. You have managed to confuse "being charged" with "being guilty." You have unlocked the FAIL achievement.
I believe that in many states, if you refuse the breathalyzer, the police can take you down to the station and compel a blood test. Now, at that point, a really aggressive lawyer can try to attack them on chain of custody issues.
I don't know. It sounds very strange to me that, in any state, you could guarantee lesser charges by refusing a breathalyzer.
Re: gun ownership. Most states require that firearms be registered, so it's not like they're asking about the ins and outs of your sex life with your spouse. Moreover, I doubt that gun ownership would be a major roadblock for any appointee. But it would be prudent of them to look over a person's ownership history and make sure they complied with the relevant laws at all times. After all, if they don't do opposition research, FOX News will.
The selection is great, but how do I turn off the Swedish subtitiles?
There isn't much detail on the "stolen computers" angle on the story, but given that I (working for a very tiny outfit) have ten computers here whose only function is to take up space, whose best years are at least a decade behind them, I can see how you could paint some genuinely innocent actions as "stealing".
Hell, the pornography in question might not meet any reasonable definition of the term. We'll have to wait and see.
Or, more likely with stories like these, we'll never hear the follow up.
Hard to say. But when you're in charge of a 5000 computer installation, any single decision you make can suddenly look ginormous.
Imagine that, over the last ten years, the IT director has purchased 15,000 computers. If he was unwittingly paying $70/box more than he could have, that's $1M right there. If most of the computers are using only 10% of their disk space (pretty common in a desktop work environment), you could argue that he bought well over $1M worth of worthless hard drive space.
Or, if the computers are poorly configured, so that the computers waste ten minutes of each teacher's day for ten years, you get:
(8500 students * 1 teacher / 30 students * 180 days * 10 years * 10 min/day * $12/60 min) = $1,020,000
I'd better stop before I give the district more ideas.
So, it's a pretty decent sized chunk of responsibility, and while we're only hearing the district's side, he really shouldn't have been running unnecessary software. Too much is at stake to be playing. But nothing about the SETI thing strikes me as worthy of criminal charges, and the other stuff ("pornography", "stolen computers") is either blown out of proportion, or just the everyday sort of misconduct that gets people fired without making national news.
"Unelected bureaucrats" "target[ing] your big screen for elimination?" Sounds oooh so scary. The California Energy Commission isn't an elected body, but they are appointed by people Californians elected. And the very story that "target for elimination" links to indicates the following:
* The proposed regulations aren't particularly stringent. They're about on par with the EnergyStar guidelines.
* Many popular models of HDTV already meet the proposed regulations.
* The regulations are technology neutral.
* The regulations are probably only going to slightly accelerate a shift that consumers are already demanding.
The other link, aside from being puerile, childish, and unthinkingly parroting the talking points of an industry astroturf group, proposes a solution too stupid to count as satire.
Put this in context: California has long regulated many categories of appliances this way. In most every case, manufacturers have found it much cheaper to make every appliance conform to the California standards than to make separate products for other states. So the price differential cannot be all that great.
I expect that, as usual, industry's screams of doom and terror are detached from reality.
I'm in favor of taxing energy, but I think that regulation would have a far more immediate and beneficial effect on the TV sector.
As I see it, California has been regulating the energy efficiency of a wide variety of appliances for decades, with no noticeable effect on the economy. All states benefit from many of these regulations, precisely because the added cost to the appliances is so minimal that it's cheaper to make all appliances conforming than to have a separate product line for California and the other states that adopt their regulations.
The reason this minimal cost wasn't being paid before is simple: the guy selling you the appliances isn't paying your electric bill.
That should give you an indication of why a broad energy tax will only have a small effect on TV energy efficiency: it would have to be absolutely huge to get it in the front of people's minds as they're wandering the local Best Buy.
Let the Californians regulate their TVs. If the cost of making them energy efficient is significant (I doubt it will be), then you'll get separate product lines and people hauling in out-of-state TVs. If it's insignificant, manufacturers will make all their products energy efficient, and out-of-staters will benefit.
>> I feel I have been stolen from when an unauthorized copy of my software is made.
I went to your blog, because I was interested in finding out just what program you'd written that was so heavily pirated. Not only could I not find the program, but every six seconds of the nightmarish slog was punctuated with "Poker: How To Beat No-Limit Hold Em 6-max Cash Games".
Now *I* feel robbed.
Fine. Then might I ask why George Bush doesn't show up on your list of world leaders trying to restore the monarchies/oligarchies? His administration was the one with the audacity to send Congress a bill that basically said, "Give ex-Goldman-Sacher Hank Paulson 700B, and no you don't get any say in how he divvies up the spoils." He demanded the Patriot Act, the warrantless wiretapping, etc. He emptied the national coffers to pay for tax cuts that mostly put money back in the pockets of the extremely wealthy. He was the one who joked about his "base" being "the haves, and the have mores". He oversaw an economy where the wealthy got an ever larger share of the national income even as the number of people in poverty skyrocketed.
In short, he is a textbook case of economic royalism, and you admit that many of his policies reduced freedom. He deserves not only to be on the list, but to be at the top of it.
To the extent that the government responds to the will of the people, it is not the nobility. To the extent that the government responds to the will of the plutocrats rather than voters, it is a tool of the nobility. But it's a tool the plutocrats would happily let cripple and wither, because it has to make at least a show of being on the side of the citizens, and it could someday change its mind and actually start serving their interests.
In other words, they would be delighted if government got out of the business of providing social safety nets, and restricted itself to enforcing whatever unfair contracts the powerful could compel the powerless into signing. Then they could pillage with absolute impunity, and remake the world economy into a machine entirely devoted to serving their whims while the invisible masses starved.
You and Glenn Beck are both unwitting dupes whose constant deluge of anti-government rhetoric only enables the forces of privilege and excess, forces that quite honestly don't care about your freedoms. All they want is to wield power over others.
California's problems stem primarily from Prop 13, which makes it nigh unto impossible to raise taxes (a very red state policy), coupled with a ballot initiative system that makes it easy for the people to pass laws demanding that the government allocate the budget in certain ways (a kinda blue state policy).
I would call it a bipartisan train wreck, especially since Prop 13 puts vast powers into the hands of an otherwise irrelevant California Republican party.
I vaguely remember something like that being claimed, back when this was news. But it seemed like a really selective interpretation of the facts. Source?
But he's a Ron Paul supporter! He must be up to no good!
I'm proud of anyone who stands up for his right to privacy in the face of The Man. But I saw this guy on a couple of interviews, and he's definitely a paranoid freak to think that those cops would have subjected him to something worse had he admitted that the money was collections from a Republican candidate's rally.
Now, if it had been collections for the movement to legalize marijuana, then he might have had some reason for concern. Donations from a Hillary rally might have gotten him some pissed off looks, but no real harassment. But Ron Paul? They'd be like, "Dude, you rock!"
Sure, man. The cops have a well-known anti-Republican bias.
Barring pharmaceutical assistance, I think you would be wrong in 95% of cases.
I think that the reason that intelligent, well meaning people get up in arms when race and intelligence are discussed together is simple: the evidence just isn't there. Or at least, the evidence is too vague and contradictory to be anything but inflammatory in discussions about why some races seem to have better success in society.
Example: it's pretty well known that whites outperform blacks on tests designed to measure intelligence. Some people read that and automatically assume that this reveals something innate, something which accounts for widespread poverty among black people.
Two facts argue against that. The first it that, in Ireland, you find the same discrepancy in test scores between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority, even though both have ancestry that we think of as "white".
This draws attention to the second fact: expectation biases account for at least a substantial portion of the discrepancy. You put a white kid and a black kid in the same room, and give them a test that you've told them will measure their intelligence, the black kid very often performs worse than he would have if you'd just introduced it as a bunch of interesting problems you want the kids to solve.
Interestingly, the expectation bias has a negative effect on the white kids too, if you sit them next to Asian kids.
So when IQ is presented as something that is innate, and varies between the races, it does real damage. I am a believer in academic freedom and intellectual exploration, but going into the minefield of race and IQ doesn't just mean facing outrage; it also means risking harm to others. IOW, think responsibly.
>> This contradicts what is usually meant by correlation.
The idea that something might correlate well throughout a given range, and less well along other ranges, is pretty common. For example, happiness and income correlate fantastically well between the range of $0-$10,000 per year. Much beyond that, and extra income doesn't make you significantly happier.
Or the rates of scurvy and vitamin C intake might correlate well up to half the US RDA, then become completely unrelated.
Can you say the same thing about billionaires? Also, what percentage of millionaires had parents whose incomes were below the poverty line?
Expanding wealth significantly takes some combination of skill, hard work, luck, greed, willingness to sacrifice, and willingness to screw over your fellow man. I think any two can make you a millionaire, but you're going to need at least three to become a billionaire.
The fact remains that the wealth of your parents is the single best predictor of your own wealth. The poor are less likely to enter or graduate college, regardless of skill. In fact, if you take the most academically gifted quarter of the poorest kids, and compare their college graduation rates to those of the least academically gifted quarter of the richest kids, the dumb rich come out ahead.
Sorry, I just love throwing that stat in the face of anyone who seems to be under the delusion that America has a meritocratic economy.
Why should I want my genes to continue? And "tribes" today are such nebulous things, the idea of intertribe competition on any scale smaller than the nation-state is laughable.
Get over your genes and learn to enjoy other people.
Levitt was wrong about so very many things in the global warming section of his book, that it's very hard to take him seriously.
He claims that global warming today is somehow equivalent to the overblown global cooling warnings of the 1970s. The fact that he leads the chapter with the climate change deniers' Argument Zero does not inspire confidence.
Some of his primary sources clearly have no idea what they're talking about. One of them (Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, and a cofounder of the company that wants to put up the eighteen mile high SO2 chimney) claimed that solar power was infeasible because solar panels are black, which would significantly alter the Earth's albedo. He also claims that it would take 30-50 years to pay back all the energy required to set up a solar photovoltaics grid (the actual time taken to pay back a panel's energy debt is about 2 years and falling).
But I think the big failing of his book is that he offers the very optimistic projections (regarding both effectiveness and cost) of the people who want to sell the technology to the world as pretty much fact, while completely ignoring the huge potential downfalls of his approach, or the economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions. He just slaps a trillion dollar price tag on carbon mitigation, a ten billion dollar price tag on his own solution, then says, "Clearly, we should be doing this."
There are huge problems with that.
We don't know if SO2 injection will work on a large scale.
We don't know if it will have unintended side effects (and Levitt's predictions that it won't are based on the same computer climate models he tries to discredit earlier in the chapter).
We do know that reducing sunlight will cause solar panels to be less efficient.
We do know that the geoengineering technique will do nothing about ocean acidification, which is nearly as scary as global warming itself.
We do know that, if we start down this path, then decide to turn off the SO2 injections, any heating we were deflecting will be back within a decade, which could cause a huge shock to the ecosystem.
We do know that CO2 mitigation, if pursued aggressively enough, will work to reduce *all* the effects of global warming, without the potential side effects of the geoengineering option.
Most important, we know that many of the approaches we could take to mitigation will benefit the economy, not hinder it. Some estimates even say that the benefits will cancel out the costs, leaving us exactly as well off as we would be if we did nothing (plus we get to, you know, continue inhabiting the globe, which might be worth something). Levitt completely ignores any economic benefits to any CO2 mitigation strategy, which is the only way to achieve his trillion dollar price tag.
I think we should be investigating geoengineering options. I think we should do so aggressively, because there may come a time when mitigation isn't enough, and it's the only technique that can stand between us and something nasty. But it should be the ultimate nuclear option.*
Finally, I've been watching Levitt's response to his critics, and he is an embarrassment. He constantly avoids directly addressing the actual substance of his critics arguments, while claiming that they're just mad because he's a heritic to the global warming religion. He clearly thinks (or at least wants his fans to believe) that he is the only rational person in the debate.
* Which leads to another of the scandals of the Superfreakonomics book. One of his main sources for the geoengineering material was written about as though he believed that geoengineering was a replacement for CO2 mitigation, when in fact the source's thinking is more like my own.
Wow. A Latter-day Singularitan. :)
I think it's safe to say that we are well past the limits of sustainability, given the current set of technologies we're using to provide for ourselves. In the short to mid term, oil disappears. In the next couple of centuries, coal disappears (even if we did find a way of harvesting its energy without a huge increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations). Even nuclear fuel will eventually hit a peak. Water is going to be a huge issue over the next couple of decades.
I'm sure that solutions will be found for many of these challenges. But generally speaking, each solution usually brings about its own new set of problems. The import of the potato to Ireland led to a massive population increase, as food suddenly became far cheaper and more plentiful than before. But the underlying dynamics of poverty didn't change, so when the technology supporting the growth suddenly disappeared (as it did during the potato famine), it resulted in mass starvation and emigration. In the same way, we're now completely dependent on the technology that supports us in a way that we wouldn't be had we limited our population to perhaps half a billion from the outset.
In that hypothetical, small population world, we could survive the sudden disappearance of oil relatively easily. We'd all have to be farmers for a while, but it's a much simpler problem than trying to feed thirteen times as many people with the same resources and technology. Engineering our way to ever greater populations is a risky path. I'm hoping that we'll level out around 10B
I'm half-inclined to agree with what your blog post says about population control. But I think you overestimate the population effects of differential breeding on attitudes (and apparently, intelligence). Arguably, Republicans have been outbreeding Democrats for quite a while now, but that trend has been pretty much negated by the increasing urbanization of the United States (urban dwellers tend to vote Democratic). Even if you had a hard-line group of ideological non-breeders, they would never entirely die out, because their attitudes didn't come from being descendants of a long line of childless people. Their attitudes also come from the cultural influences of the day, from the way their formative experiences wired their brains, etc.
You wrote, "We need a political party that encourages intelligent, resourceful people to have lots of children--and to educate them well." Given the massive wave of genetic manipulation that will happen over the next fifty years, will a couple of generations of incentives for selective breeding make a hint of difference? No, we should grow our supergeniuses the way God intended: in giant plexiglass cylinders filled with green glop, overseen by a cackling mad scientist.
Not quite as simple as that. The move out of poverty leads to much smaller families. The move from the countryside into the cities also leads to much smaller families. But continuing to pour wealth on after you reach a decent standard of living has little or no effect, as decisions start to be more a matter of personal preference and cultural influences.
"More growth" works in some circumstances, not others.
Any continued population growth, if carried out within a closed system for long enough, will indeed lead to a reduced standard of living. It's just a mathematical fact.
You're also ignoring part of the "sustainability" argument, which is that the things that are fueling our current growth -- cheap access to dirty energy -- are not going to hold much longer. The sky is getting too crowded with exhaust, and the earth doesn't have much more cheap oil to give us. You can argue over whether this is a surmountable obstacle, or whether switching to a new source of energy will be easy or difficult. But until we actually start recognizing and respecting the limits of our planet, we're going to hit these walls with increasing frequency.
If true, the farmer is saving a lot of money, a lot of fossil-fuels (in the form of fertilizer), and temporarily sequestering carbon that would have gone into the atmosphere. I hope this proves successful, and becomes wildly popular.
Two possible responses:
1) This proves that the market can respond to the global warming crisis just fine, and we therefore don't need government intervention.
2) This proves that, with proper incentives, amazing solutions can be found for our carbon problem, and we therefore should expect that CO2 mitigation will be far cheaper than the economic doomsayers claim.
I think they're both partly right. The biggest problem with response 1 is that without government intervention, the market will remain forever 'carbon blind', externalizing the costs of pollution. The only mitigation strategies that will ever be pursued are the ones that also pad the bottom line.
I thought somebody might bring that up.
The difference here is that the "gub'mint takeover of journalism" should proceed differently. In the case of GM (the only actual "firing" I can find), the government plunked down some of our money, directly bought a share of the company, and then started using that share as leverage to pursue government aims. Since those aims mostly involved job preservation (the Big 3, plus their associated auto parts manufacturers, plus their retailer network, represent about 4M American jobs), I'm not too worked up about that.
On the other hand, if a bailout of the news business proceeded along the same lines, I would be shouting bloody murder. The government having a stake in hundreds of media outlets would give them too much leverage in controlling how the news is reported. While I would argue that our current president -- being a constitutional scholar and all, would be less likely to use that power than some presidents I can think of, the temptation would still be too strong.
I fundamentally agree with conservatives on that point. We part ways on two issues: First, that the free market will quickly and inevitably yield something better to replace the current failing business model. Second, that government money unavoidably leads to government control.
Point the first: The Internet is an amazing thing, and given a copious supply of open government data, it can do a lot of the job that traditional media has been doing (poorly). But I don't think there will ever be a replacement for the intrepid journalist who finds a story, and keeps prodding sources and asking questions until the truth comes out. There isn't enough of that going on right now, and the problem will only get worse as local and national newspapers and TV news outlets scale back on their reporters.
Point the second: As I've said in other posts, there are ways to set up the disbursment of funds in such a way that the government plays no role in it. One option is to give the funds to an independent panel to disburse according to some set formula. Another is similar to a proposal I once read about for financing elections. You could give $50 to each American to donate to any qualifying journalistic endeavor, with decisions about who qualifies also being farmed out to an independent panel.
In my mind, this would make for an ideal world, where so long as a handful of people believed in a journalist's work, they would be completely free to pursue any story wherever it led, without having to worry what the government, the owners of some newspaper, or some newspaper's advertisers thought.
The only reason you see NPR/PBS as completely, irredeemably biased is because you disagree with them. Not even with them, but with your uninformed perception of the views that Rush et. al. have told you that they project. I have never, in all my years of listening to NPR, gotten the impression that it, as an institution, believes that "Governments should run every facet of your life".
It's good to know, though, that you managed to incorporate contrary evidence without even the slightest hint of reduction in your certainty that teh PBS r EEVULZ! Watching your cognitive dissonance in action will hopefully make me more careful about overcertaintly in my own thinking.