"Spanking" only describes the location of the blows. That is to say, you can't spank a child's face, but you can spank the butt until it bleeds. It doesn't adequately describe force, duration, what implements were used.
Therefore, to me, "spanking" should not be legal or illegal. But leaving bruises, or welts that last more than, say, an hour, probably should be.
France is exactly my point. Nuclear power is the epitome of Big Government solutions. France's nuclear industry is wholly government owned and operated, and for good reason.
You say "All power creation (not brokering a la Enron) has been and always will be highly regulated because of national security and potential for pollution." If you're implying some sort of equivalency, then you're pushing hornswoggle. Look at the regulations involved in the mining, refining, transporting, burning, and disposing of nuclear material, and the meticulous safety measures and triple redundancies and physical security required for a nuclear power plant. Hell, there are even international treaties in play.
Then compare all that to their involvement in, say, a few million rooftop solar installations. The government doesn't even need to know who has them or where they're installed. Your local utility probably has more say over an installation than the Feds do. If there was a big enough move towards small-scale solar, the national power grid would be far less of a national security issue than it is now, since the bulk of energy would be created locally.
In short, you really didn't think this through.
Finally, before you get all indignant over alternative energy subsidies,* remember that the nuclear industry also gets hefty government subsidies, including guarantees limiting a plant's liabilities in the event of accident. Not only is this subsidy worth billions to the industry every year, but without it it's very unlikely that any nuclear power plant could get insured. No insurance, no construction.
* which are only a couple of pennies per kWh anyways.
Thank you for your interesting, respectful, and -- above all -- long response.
I agree that, given the choice between nuclear power and runaway global warming, we have to choose nuclear power, and lots of it. But I don't believe that those are the only two choices. We disagree over the potential of alternative energy, energy efficiency, and lifestyle changes. I think all three have good potential, and between the three, I think that we can achieve our most important environmental goals without giving nuclear power a large role.
First, the potential of alternative energy:
Wind power is currently in the lead, at around 4-8 cents per kWh. But solar is starting to show huge potential. The big bottleneck lately has been silicon, and a whole bunch of new silicon refining capacity is coming on line this year. The cost of panels should drop hard and soon. But I actually have more hope for concentrating solar, which requires only reflectors and tubing, and can keep generating electricity long after the sun goes down. Currently, it's at 12c/kWh, and expected to drop to 6 as economies of scale kick in. The costs are getting down to where the phrase "cheaper than coal" gets thrown about. If
Lots of people talk about how renewables simply cannot scale, because they're "intermittent". But if you hook enough geographically dispersed facilities together -- which is going to require some upgrades to the grid -- then you can eliminate most of the need for overcapacity. Concentrating solar is relatively well-buffered, but can do very poorly on cloudy days. Wind is somewhat unpredictable, though it's getting better now that turbines are getting more out of low winds. Photovoltaics only work when the sun is up, but do relatively well when it's cloudy. Geothermal is relatively expensive, but highly reliable. All of them can be used to make hydrogen, charge electric cars, cool down freezers, pump water uphill, or whatever else we can think of to store or time-shift energy.
But it's still a helluva lot of infrastructure to build. Which brings us to energy efficiency.
Actually, energy efficiency is too narrow a term. Energy efficacy is more relevant. Driving a Prius is wasteful if you don't need to make the trip. But when you start making value judgments, you start moving into discussions of lifestyle, so I'll defer that to part three.
There are billions of incandescent bulbs that need to be replaced right now. An incandescent bulb burns off about 60kWH over the course of its life, while a similar CFL would burn about 17. If you assume that the CFL costs as much as the seven incandescent bulbs that would have given you those same hours of light, you've just removed about 300kWH of demand, for free.
Some energy efficiency projects actually make money. Others are a bit of a loss. But across the board, my understanding is that reducing demand can usually be done for about 2-3 cents per kWh. That's cheaper than coal, and cheaper than nuclear.
To see just how much potential there is to be gained from energy efficiency, just look at the efficiency of a normal car. The engine is about 10% efficient, the car probably outweighs the driver by 5 times, and drag and friction probably suck away another 20%. So how much of the embodied energy in the gasoline is doing actual work? That is to say, moving your body from point A to point B? Less than 2%. Look at it another way: If you could get a 14% efficient car, it would get well over a hundred miles to the gallon.
Not that there would be any particular reason to run it on gasoline. Hydrogen or batteries would probably make more sense.
I've got my own hyperefficient vehicle: an electric bicycle. It's rare that I let the motor do all the work, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that I do. Figuring that the coal gets burnt at 40% efficiency, that you lose another 20% charging the battery, and that only 75% of the work being done is actually useful (the bike weighs 60 pounds, while I weigh
Does your $0.05/kWH include the capital costs of the nuclear plant, or just the ongoing costs of running the plant? If we can ignore capital costs, suddenly solar and wind get very, very cheap.
I remember ten years ago reading an article somewhere about large-scale computing problems. One piece of advice they gave: if you have a problem that will take ten years to solve on today's hardware, wait two years to buy the computers. Then it would only take seven years to solve.
Cost per installed watt of solar has been dropping by about half every six years, pretty much since photovoltaics were invented. If you take those numbers as law, then yeah, over the life of the system you could produce more power for a lower price by waiting six years to buy it.
Of course, if everyone takes this approach, the panel companies go out of business and nobody gets solar power ever.
I think the point your respondents are missing is that -- while the machines are clearly flawed -- the electronic voting machines didn't greatly magnify the officials' ability to corrupt the vote. Had one of them altered hundreds of votes using a USB stick and three minutes of "alone time" with the machines, this story would have a completely different flavor for me.
IOW, Kentucky electoral officials can't hack. What scares me is that this is probably why they got caught; there must have been a dozen people involved. I'm sure the more tech-savvy vote riggers are just getting away with it.
I guarantee that the moment the economy takes a good upswing, gas will be back up to $3/gallon. Buying a gas-guzzler based on this temporary dip is stupid, unless you honestly expect demand to stay depressed for the life of the vehicle (and how can it, with everyone buying gas guzzlers?)
Re: your sig.
1) Kool-aid has a hyphen in it.
2) The comparison between the Jonestown cult and the Obama cult is facile.
3) Explaining the reference really takes all the fun out of it, and makes it sound like you think said reference is far more clever and obscure than it really is.
Economic hand-waving does no good when the physical world doesn't cooperate.
You say that after 25 years, the panels "wear out". This isn't true. Since you're assuming that the entire $1B initial investment disappears after 25 years, this blows your analysis all to hell.
Most solar panels are warrantied to still be producing 80% of their initial rating at the end of 25 years. So you're assuming about five times the actual rate of depreciation on a billion dollar investment.
Thin film panels wear out much faster, but given their low cost, it's a good trade-off.
How much does it cost to install a few miles of barbed wire fence and a dozen man-eating rotweilers?
The things are in the middle of the desert, and aren't likely to be subject to random acts of vandalism. As for theft, how the hell are you going to load up a semi full of solar panels without attracting notice from the aforementioned man-eating rotweilers?
Seriously, security costs should be minimal, and will most likely be paid by the plant. It's not like they have quantities of highly dangerous material to guard. To say that a solar plant should pay taxes as though A) those acres were displacing other useful economic activity, and B) they were putting a proportional burden on law enforcement, is a bit absurd.
"Enviro-nazis?" Could you be a little more dismissive of the people who gave you national parks, renewable energy, clean air, the people who sounded the alarm about global warming in the first place?
I ask you: do you really think Greenpeace is as stupid as you claim? Think hard now. Greenpeace has been pushing renewables hard. Do you think that they simply don't realize how much acreage it will take? It seems to me that they must believe that renewables can be deployed on a huge scale without terrible environmental repercussions.
Either you think they are incredibly stupid or incredibly craven. Maybe you think both, but if you can't even envision that they might actually believe renewables to be our best hope, then you're clearly committed to the proposition that those who disagree with you are evil.
You also seem to have a very specific thing in mind when you invoke "sustaining modern civilization." But our lifestyles, and the amount of energy needed to sustain them, are both malleable. If we pushed hard for a 100% increase in energy efficiency across the board, suddenly we'd need about half as much energy infrastructure to support our needs. If society moved towards simpler lifestyles,* we'd again find that we needed to deploy fewer acres of solar panels.
I see you're pushing nuclear pretty hard. Perhaps that's because it's the only technology that will let us continue using energy so wastefully. Perhaps you like that it gets under the skin of us environmentalists. I'm okay with that, and it doesn't mean you're not sincere. But my firm belief is that the solution to our energy needs lies in energy efficiency. Once we start mining negawatts with abandon, it really doesn't matter how we produce the power.
* If you read that phrase and assumed that I was calling for a return to the stone age, you really need to spend some time listening to some actual environmentalists, instead of what Rush O'Hannity says we say.
1) Reprocessing is more expensive, and greatly raises the per-kilowatt costs pro-nuclear peeps sling about.
2) Is it ethical to rely on reprocessing, when we start talking invasion when our geopolitical enemies try to do it?
3) Regarding stupid regulations: since most of the pro-nuclear crowd is drawn from the Right, why are they so eager to demand reliance on a source of energy that basically requires huge amounts of government meddling? I would think that solar and wind -- which can be harnessed by anyone -- would tickle their fancy more.
4) Or is the goal to get nuclear power in a big way, then deregulate the hell out of it? Be honest, do you think Americans would be eager to see that come to pass?
By what stretch of the imagination can you call countries broken down by debts to the West*, who are having their natural resources funneled to the multinationals at pennies on the dollar, whose governments have to take marching orders from the IMF in order to remain solvent, INDEPENDENT?
Colonialism didn't die. It just metastasized.
* No, they didn't get much benefit from the loans. The dollars that didn't go straight to some despot's Cayman bank account went to first world corporations in exchange for stuff that usually didn't do anyone much good.
Sexual reproduction came about 1 billion years ago, not 3 billion. Minor point, though.
I didn't say that it was "the human mind" that broke the link between sex and reproduction. Mind-having humans are as driven to have sex as any monkey. Contraceptives broke the link. Please read more carefully.
You claim that A) contraception started over fifty years ago (agreed), and B) that natural selection will outmaneuver us within a generation (utter bollocks... evolution just isn't that fast). So why is the per-person reproductive rate still going down? Why have some countries been flat for decades? Shouldn't evolution have already started them skyrocketing again?
Your entire argument ignores the *absolute* *incontrovertible* *fact* that evolution is no longer the primary driver of change in the species. Though evolution didn't stop, technology drives us forward now.*
Within a generation or two, far too little time for evolution to cope, our species will be selecting its own genes and controlling how or if they manifest. If you're stricken with an insatiable, physical need to have a dozen children, you won't have a dozen children; you'll have an appointment with a psychopharmacologist who will give you a pill to stop your cravings.
* You take a baby from ancient Egypt and give him to a couple in modern Denmark, or vice versa, and both would do about as well. Both would adapt rather easily to conditions quite alien to their parents and grandparents. That's because our highly plastic minds are so very adaptable. Try making such a swap between any other modern creature and an equally different ancestor.
Memes also play a role. I would posit that a sufficiently strong set of memes against uncontrolled reproduction would be sufficient to stabilize population, even without new breakthroughs in technology.
How does "fairness in opportunity" play into the Bill Gates success story. If someone as smart and talented had decided to plunge into the operating system field, say, five years after Microsoft was founded, the most success he could have hoped to achieve was... getting bought up by Microsoft.
Microsoft got there first. That's 70% of the Microsoft success story in four words. When IBM needed something to run their hardware, Bill Gates bought and repackaged the operating system of somebody less ambitious than himself, then leveraged that initial monopoly into ever more expansive monopolies, to his personal fortune, but probably to the detriment of the industry as a whole.
Fairness in opportunity cannot exist without some pre-existing fairness in outcome. If Parent A's failure means that his kid's education will be vastly inferior to the child of Parent B, you can guess how the kids' respective lives will go, regardless of how they would have done given equal opportunities. The same thing can be said if one kid lacks health insurance, proper nutrition, a fortunate genetic makeup, or even parents who are able to get her back on track after her disastrous first encounter with a credit card.*
In short, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome tend to blend into and play off each other, to where it's not easy to draw a line. However, it's really easy to draw the line when the real message is, "The virtuous man keeps his grubby mitts off my stuff! Death before taxes!"
* regarding that last one: My point here is that, when a basically decent kid makes a mistake, a good support structure can make the difference between a little bump in the road and having her career path derailed for years or worse. I see lots of people who are still paying for choices they didn't know they were making when they were fourteen, and there's nothing remotely fair about that.
There's some truth there. We all want to be special and glamorous. We all expect it. It's a real kick in the wahooni to discover that we're not really either, because if you don't have those things, it seems like you don't matter.
It's one of the great shames of our society. The vast majority of the people are too old, too fat, too ugly, too dumb, too untalented, or just plain too ordinary to really get that Stamp of Approval that so many people crave.
The thing that makes your Stand and Deliver quote villainous is the implications of "ordinary" for the lives of the young people. For them, impoverished kids spat out by an indifferent school system, the "ordinary" life meant a string of low pay, backbreaking service sector jobs and a life without health insurance at best. At worst, it was a path of crime, gangs, jail, and an early grave. If "ordinary" could lead to a middle-class life, proper health care, and opportunities for creative expression, would the villain's advice be objectionable?
Not everyone can be a professional author, or a full-time engineer. But most people, I think, could learn to write a story from their lives so that their descendants would cherish it, or build something that could be of use to them or their neighborhood. Not everyone can be president, but everyone can and should contribute what they can to our political process. So I think everyone's creativity should be cultivated, and everyone should be pushed to make themselves better.
But that's a far different thing from setting up a society where your choices are to either excel, or to be crushed by the excellent. I don't want to celebrate mediocrity, or punish excellence (or whatever the right wing is saying this week to keep Obama from raising taxes on the wealthy), and I don't want to send young people out in futile pursuit of unrealistic. But much of the anti-self-esteem bandwagon seems loaded down with people who want to treat the losers in life's competition as subhuman.
Iceland, I've heard, has a culture where failure is celebrated. Well, not celebrated, exactly. But they love stories of bold attempts to do something interesting and remarkable, and the more interesting the failure the better the story.
America is different. Either the failure builds the groundwork for later success, or the story serves as a scornful cautionary tale.
Okay, I'm not saying that I'm actually proud of being average. I mean, it's not like it's something to strive for.
Correction, it's something that half the population can strive for.
Depending on the distribution of the given trait.
To be more precise, I think I'm an above (but not all that far above) average intellect, crippled with a flaky work ethic and an overactive desire for novelty. Hopefully it all averages out to about average.
I've noticed that the people who decry the loss of "competition" in public education are the ones who want the losers in the "adult competition" of life to end up dying penniless in the gutters, so that the resources that once kept them alive can be put to a more productive use. Given that, is it any wonder that some of us want to make public education a less competitive place?
I'm rather proud of my sense of entitlement, and willing to fight for every person's right to mooch. Suck on that, Ayn Rand!
I think you have a great misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is not the all-powerful tyrant you seem to imagine. Evolution didn't build us as thinking machines with an ingrained desire to have lots and lots of babies. Evolution built thinking machines that wanted lots of sex, figuring that babies would be the inevitable outcome. Which they no longer are.
Now that the causal link is broken, evolutionary forces would tend to favor people who want lots of babies in their own right. But evolution works on very long timescales. By the time it starts to catch up, I'm sure we'll be rewriting our genes at will. Evolution is therefore irrelevant to the fertility rates of modern humans in industrialized societies.
So what does affect human fertility rates?
In places where people's needs are being met, the birth rate -- and overall population growth -- is far lower than in places where they are not [graph]. Notice that the big gains occur up to about $12000/year, which is about where social scientists plant the "having your needs met" marker.
Beyond that, the differences are mostly cultural, and relatively adaptable. Even in societies which have traditionally valued big families, birth rates are trending downward. As overpopulation becomes an increasingly important topic, I think that trend will continue.
You assume that any population control measures would have to be a Chinese-style civil rights nightmare. Many alternatives have been proposed, which would be far more respectful of individual freedom. But given that we already have numerous societies with almost no population growth, your assumptions seem absurd on their face.
I'm confused. Do you only bill your clients for the "actual hours of production"?
I would assume not. If a coder spends an eight hour day tasked to Client Project X, I'm guessing you bill the entire eight hours, even if he took bathroom breaks, even if he's taking longer to accomplish than he would with a couple of years under his belt.
Also, given that your n00b employees are inherently less valuable, isn't that all the more reason to throw them at interesting, experimental things that may not pan out?
IOW, it sounds to me like you're inflating your figures so you can come up with a big number to throw at any employee with the temerity to come to you, Oliver Twist-like, and say, "Please sir, may I have something more interesting?"
Honestly, I mean no disrespect here. But it sounds to me like your operating premise is that work is supposed to be drudgery, and that fun, interesting work is a product of "stupid money". Now, that's certainly a valid way to run a business, but it's definitely one that will turn off quite a few potential employees, some of whom would be great hires.
Slashdot Mirror
"Spanking" only describes the location of the blows. That is to say, you can't spank a child's face, but you can spank the butt until it bleeds. It doesn't adequately describe force, duration, what implements were used.
Therefore, to me, "spanking" should not be legal or illegal. But leaving bruises, or welts that last more than, say, an hour, probably should be.
France is exactly my point. Nuclear power is the epitome of Big Government solutions. France's nuclear industry is wholly government owned and operated, and for good reason.
You say "All power creation (not brokering a la Enron) has been and always will be highly regulated because of national security and potential for pollution." If you're implying some sort of equivalency, then you're pushing hornswoggle. Look at the regulations involved in the mining, refining, transporting, burning, and disposing of nuclear material, and the meticulous safety measures and triple redundancies and physical security required for a nuclear power plant. Hell, there are even international treaties in play.
Then compare all that to their involvement in, say, a few million rooftop solar installations. The government doesn't even need to know who has them or where they're installed. Your local utility probably has more say over an installation than the Feds do. If there was a big enough move towards small-scale solar, the national power grid would be far less of a national security issue than it is now, since the bulk of energy would be created locally.
In short, you really didn't think this through.
Finally, before you get all indignant over alternative energy subsidies,* remember that the nuclear industry also gets hefty government subsidies, including guarantees limiting a plant's liabilities in the event of accident. Not only is this subsidy worth billions to the industry every year, but without it it's very unlikely that any nuclear power plant could get insured. No insurance, no construction.
* which are only a couple of pennies per kWh anyways.
Thank you for your interesting, respectful, and -- above all -- long response.
I agree that, given the choice between nuclear power and runaway global warming, we have to choose nuclear power, and lots of it. But I don't believe that those are the only two choices. We disagree over the potential of alternative energy, energy efficiency, and lifestyle changes. I think all three have good potential, and between the three, I think that we can achieve our most important environmental goals without giving nuclear power a large role.
First, the potential of alternative energy:
Wind power is currently in the lead, at around 4-8 cents per kWh. But solar is starting to show huge potential. The big bottleneck lately has been silicon, and a whole bunch of new silicon refining capacity is coming on line this year. The cost of panels should drop hard and soon. But I actually have more hope for concentrating solar, which requires only reflectors and tubing, and can keep generating electricity long after the sun goes down. Currently, it's at 12c/kWh, and expected to drop to 6 as economies of scale kick in. The costs are getting down to where the phrase "cheaper than coal" gets thrown about. If
Lots of people talk about how renewables simply cannot scale, because they're "intermittent". But if you hook enough geographically dispersed facilities together -- which is going to require some upgrades to the grid -- then you can eliminate most of the need for overcapacity. Concentrating solar is relatively well-buffered, but can do very poorly on cloudy days. Wind is somewhat unpredictable, though it's getting better now that turbines are getting more out of low winds. Photovoltaics only work when the sun is up, but do relatively well when it's cloudy. Geothermal is relatively expensive, but highly reliable. All of them can be used to make hydrogen, charge electric cars, cool down freezers, pump water uphill, or whatever else we can think of to store or time-shift energy.
But it's still a helluva lot of infrastructure to build. Which brings us to energy efficiency.
Actually, energy efficiency is too narrow a term. Energy efficacy is more relevant. Driving a Prius is wasteful if you don't need to make the trip. But when you start making value judgments, you start moving into discussions of lifestyle, so I'll defer that to part three.
There are billions of incandescent bulbs that need to be replaced right now. An incandescent bulb burns off about 60kWH over the course of its life, while a similar CFL would burn about 17. If you assume that the CFL costs as much as the seven incandescent bulbs that would have given you those same hours of light, you've just removed about 300kWH of demand, for free.
Some energy efficiency projects actually make money. Others are a bit of a loss. But across the board, my understanding is that reducing demand can usually be done for about 2-3 cents per kWh. That's cheaper than coal, and cheaper than nuclear.
To see just how much potential there is to be gained from energy efficiency, just look at the efficiency of a normal car. The engine is about 10% efficient, the car probably outweighs the driver by 5 times, and drag and friction probably suck away another 20%. So how much of the embodied energy in the gasoline is doing actual work? That is to say, moving your body from point A to point B? Less than 2%. Look at it another way: If you could get a 14% efficient car, it would get well over a hundred miles to the gallon.
Not that there would be any particular reason to run it on gasoline. Hydrogen or batteries would probably make more sense.
I've got my own hyperefficient vehicle: an electric bicycle. It's rare that I let the motor do all the work, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that I do. Figuring that the coal gets burnt at 40% efficiency, that you lose another 20% charging the battery, and that only 75% of the work being done is actually useful (the bike weighs 60 pounds, while I weigh
80c/kWh? Where? By which government? Federal? State? Local?
Everything I've read indicates that solar is between 15 and 30 cents unsubsidized, and wind power is down to around 7 cents.
Meanwhile, the federal subsidy is 1.7 cents per kWh. 80 cents sounds utterly impossible.
Cite your sources.
[citation needed]
Another, much higher estimation: 8-11 cents per kWH for a nuclear plant built today, somewhat higher than the average cost.
Does your $0.05/kWH include the capital costs of the nuclear plant, or just the ongoing costs of running the plant? If we can ignore capital costs, suddenly solar and wind get very, very cheap.
No, he could have a point.
I remember ten years ago reading an article somewhere about large-scale computing problems. One piece of advice they gave: if you have a problem that will take ten years to solve on today's hardware, wait two years to buy the computers. Then it would only take seven years to solve.
Cost per installed watt of solar has been dropping by about half every six years, pretty much since photovoltaics were invented. If you take those numbers as law, then yeah, over the life of the system you could produce more power for a lower price by waiting six years to buy it.
Of course, if everyone takes this approach, the panel companies go out of business and nobody gets solar power ever.
I think the point your respondents are missing is that -- while the machines are clearly flawed -- the electronic voting machines didn't greatly magnify the officials' ability to corrupt the vote. Had one of them altered hundreds of votes using a USB stick and three minutes of "alone time" with the machines, this story would have a completely different flavor for me.
IOW, Kentucky electoral officials can't hack. What scares me is that this is probably why they got caught; there must have been a dozen people involved. I'm sure the more tech-savvy vote riggers are just getting away with it.
I am in awe of the awesomeness of your reply.
I guarantee that the moment the economy takes a good upswing, gas will be back up to $3/gallon. Buying a gas-guzzler based on this temporary dip is stupid, unless you honestly expect demand to stay depressed for the life of the vehicle (and how can it, with everyone buying gas guzzlers?)
Re: your sig.
1) Kool-aid has a hyphen in it.
2) The comparison between the Jonestown cult and the Obama cult is facile.
3) Explaining the reference really takes all the fun out of it, and makes it sound like you think said reference is far more clever and obscure than it really is.
Economic hand-waving does no good when the physical world doesn't cooperate.
You say that after 25 years, the panels "wear out". This isn't true. Since you're assuming that the entire $1B initial investment disappears after 25 years, this blows your analysis all to hell.
Most solar panels are warrantied to still be producing 80% of their initial rating at the end of 25 years. So you're assuming about five times the actual rate of depreciation on a billion dollar investment.
Thin film panels wear out much faster, but given their low cost, it's a good trade-off.
How much does it cost to install a few miles of barbed wire fence and a dozen man-eating rotweilers?
The things are in the middle of the desert, and aren't likely to be subject to random acts of vandalism. As for theft, how the hell are you going to load up a semi full of solar panels without attracting notice from the aforementioned man-eating rotweilers?
Seriously, security costs should be minimal, and will most likely be paid by the plant. It's not like they have quantities of highly dangerous material to guard. To say that a solar plant should pay taxes as though A) those acres were displacing other useful economic activity, and B) they were putting a proportional burden on law enforcement, is a bit absurd.
"Enviro-nazis?" Could you be a little more dismissive of the people who gave you national parks, renewable energy, clean air, the people who sounded the alarm about global warming in the first place?
I ask you: do you really think Greenpeace is as stupid as you claim? Think hard now. Greenpeace has been pushing renewables hard. Do you think that they simply don't realize how much acreage it will take? It seems to me that they must believe that renewables can be deployed on a huge scale without terrible environmental repercussions.
Either you think they are incredibly stupid or incredibly craven. Maybe you think both, but if you can't even envision that they might actually believe renewables to be our best hope, then you're clearly committed to the proposition that those who disagree with you are evil.
You also seem to have a very specific thing in mind when you invoke "sustaining modern civilization." But our lifestyles, and the amount of energy needed to sustain them, are both malleable. If we pushed hard for a 100% increase in energy efficiency across the board, suddenly we'd need about half as much energy infrastructure to support our needs. If society moved towards simpler lifestyles,* we'd again find that we needed to deploy fewer acres of solar panels.
I see you're pushing nuclear pretty hard. Perhaps that's because it's the only technology that will let us continue using energy so wastefully. Perhaps you like that it gets under the skin of us environmentalists. I'm okay with that, and it doesn't mean you're not sincere. But my firm belief is that the solution to our energy needs lies in energy efficiency. Once we start mining negawatts with abandon, it really doesn't matter how we produce the power.
* If you read that phrase and assumed that I was calling for a return to the stone age, you really need to spend some time listening to some actual environmentalists, instead of what Rush O'Hannity says we say.
A few counterpoints:
1) Reprocessing is more expensive, and greatly raises the per-kilowatt costs pro-nuclear peeps sling about.
2) Is it ethical to rely on reprocessing, when we start talking invasion when our geopolitical enemies try to do it?
3) Regarding stupid regulations: since most of the pro-nuclear crowd is drawn from the Right, why are they so eager to demand reliance on a source of energy that basically requires huge amounts of government meddling? I would think that solar and wind -- which can be harnessed by anyone -- would tickle their fancy more.
4) Or is the goal to get nuclear power in a big way, then deregulate the hell out of it? Be honest, do you think Americans would be eager to see that come to pass?
By what stretch of the imagination can you call countries broken down by debts to the West*, who are having their natural resources funneled to the multinationals at pennies on the dollar, whose governments have to take marching orders from the IMF in order to remain solvent, INDEPENDENT?
Colonialism didn't die. It just metastasized.
* No, they didn't get much benefit from the loans. The dollars that didn't go straight to some despot's Cayman bank account went to first world corporations in exchange for stuff that usually didn't do anyone much good.
I like solar optimism as much as the next guy, but c'mon. You couldn't coat a quarter of Arizona in quarter-inch deep gravel for $20-30M.
Start talking tens of billions, and I'll stop wondering how to get some of what you're smoking.
You're still quite confused.
Sexual reproduction came about 1 billion years ago, not 3 billion. Minor point, though.
I didn't say that it was "the human mind" that broke the link between sex and reproduction. Mind-having humans are as driven to have sex as any monkey. Contraceptives broke the link. Please read more carefully.
You claim that A) contraception started over fifty years ago (agreed), and B) that natural selection will outmaneuver us within a generation (utter bollocks... evolution just isn't that fast). So why is the per-person reproductive rate still going down? Why have some countries been flat for decades? Shouldn't evolution have already started them skyrocketing again?
Your entire argument ignores the *absolute* *incontrovertible* *fact* that evolution is no longer the primary driver of change in the species. Though evolution didn't stop, technology drives us forward now.*
Within a generation or two, far too little time for evolution to cope, our species will be selecting its own genes and controlling how or if they manifest. If you're stricken with an insatiable, physical need to have a dozen children, you won't have a dozen children; you'll have an appointment with a psychopharmacologist who will give you a pill to stop your cravings.
* You take a baby from ancient Egypt and give him to a couple in modern Denmark, or vice versa, and both would do about as well. Both would adapt rather easily to conditions quite alien to their parents and grandparents. That's because our highly plastic minds are so very adaptable. Try making such a swap between any other modern creature and an equally different ancestor.
Memes also play a role. I would posit that a sufficiently strong set of memes against uncontrolled reproduction would be sufficient to stabilize population, even without new breakthroughs in technology.
If you want to be the next Bill Gates, build a biotech or nanotech business.
There will never be another Bill Gates of the software world. That plane has boarded and left.
On second thought, a fundamental breakthrough in AI might be the ticket. But most widely-used software is thoroughly commoditized.
How does "fairness in opportunity" play into the Bill Gates success story. If someone as smart and talented had decided to plunge into the operating system field, say, five years after Microsoft was founded, the most success he could have hoped to achieve was... getting bought up by Microsoft.
Microsoft got there first. That's 70% of the Microsoft success story in four words. When IBM needed something to run their hardware, Bill Gates bought and repackaged the operating system of somebody less ambitious than himself, then leveraged that initial monopoly into ever more expansive monopolies, to his personal fortune, but probably to the detriment of the industry as a whole.
Fairness in opportunity cannot exist without some pre-existing fairness in outcome. If Parent A's failure means that his kid's education will be vastly inferior to the child of Parent B, you can guess how the kids' respective lives will go, regardless of how they would have done given equal opportunities. The same thing can be said if one kid lacks health insurance, proper nutrition, a fortunate genetic makeup, or even parents who are able to get her back on track after her disastrous first encounter with a credit card.*
In short, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome tend to blend into and play off each other, to where it's not easy to draw a line. However, it's really easy to draw the line when the real message is, "The virtuous man keeps his grubby mitts off my stuff! Death before taxes!"
* regarding that last one: My point here is that, when a basically decent kid makes a mistake, a good support structure can make the difference between a little bump in the road and having her career path derailed for years or worse. I see lots of people who are still paying for choices they didn't know they were making when they were fourteen, and there's nothing remotely fair about that.
There's some truth there. We all want to be special and glamorous. We all expect it. It's a real kick in the wahooni to discover that we're not really either, because if you don't have those things, it seems like you don't matter.
It's one of the great shames of our society. The vast majority of the people are too old, too fat, too ugly, too dumb, too untalented, or just plain too ordinary to really get that Stamp of Approval that so many people crave.
The thing that makes your Stand and Deliver quote villainous is the implications of "ordinary" for the lives of the young people. For them, impoverished kids spat out by an indifferent school system, the "ordinary" life meant a string of low pay, backbreaking service sector jobs and a life without health insurance at best. At worst, it was a path of crime, gangs, jail, and an early grave. If "ordinary" could lead to a middle-class life, proper health care, and opportunities for creative expression, would the villain's advice be objectionable?
Not everyone can be a professional author, or a full-time engineer. But most people, I think, could learn to write a story from their lives so that their descendants would cherish it, or build something that could be of use to them or their neighborhood. Not everyone can be president, but everyone can and should contribute what they can to our political process. So I think everyone's creativity should be cultivated, and everyone should be pushed to make themselves better.
But that's a far different thing from setting up a society where your choices are to either excel, or to be crushed by the excellent. I don't want to celebrate mediocrity, or punish excellence (or whatever the right wing is saying this week to keep Obama from raising taxes on the wealthy), and I don't want to send young people out in futile pursuit of unrealistic. But much of the anti-self-esteem bandwagon seems loaded down with people who want to treat the losers in life's competition as subhuman.
Iceland, I've heard, has a culture where failure is celebrated. Well, not celebrated, exactly. But they love stories of bold attempts to do something interesting and remarkable, and the more interesting the failure the better the story.
America is different. Either the failure builds the groundwork for later success, or the story serves as a scornful cautionary tale.
I hear Iceland is very nice in the summer.
Meh. He actually sounds like a pretty reasonable guy to me.
Average and proud. That's me!
Okay, I'm not saying that I'm actually proud of being average. I mean, it's not like it's something to strive for.
Correction, it's something that half the population can strive for.
Depending on the distribution of the given trait.
To be more precise, I think I'm an above (but not all that far above) average intellect, crippled with a flaky work ethic and an overactive desire for novelty. Hopefully it all averages out to about average.
I've noticed that the people who decry the loss of "competition" in public education are the ones who want the losers in the "adult competition" of life to end up dying penniless in the gutters, so that the resources that once kept them alive can be put to a more productive use. Given that, is it any wonder that some of us want to make public education a less competitive place?
I'm rather proud of my sense of entitlement, and willing to fight for every person's right to mooch. Suck on that, Ayn Rand!
I think you have a great misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is not the all-powerful tyrant you seem to imagine. Evolution didn't build us as thinking machines with an ingrained desire to have lots and lots of babies. Evolution built thinking machines that wanted lots of sex, figuring that babies would be the inevitable outcome. Which they no longer are.
Now that the causal link is broken, evolutionary forces would tend to favor people who want lots of babies in their own right. But evolution works on very long timescales. By the time it starts to catch up, I'm sure we'll be rewriting our genes at will. Evolution is therefore irrelevant to the fertility rates of modern humans in industrialized societies.
So what does affect human fertility rates?
In places where people's needs are being met, the birth rate -- and overall population growth -- is far lower than in places where they are not [graph]. Notice that the big gains occur up to about $12000/year, which is about where social scientists plant the "having your needs met" marker.
Beyond that, the differences are mostly cultural, and relatively adaptable. Even in societies which have traditionally valued big families, birth rates are trending downward. As overpopulation becomes an increasingly important topic, I think that trend will continue.
You assume that any population control measures would have to be a Chinese-style civil rights nightmare. Many alternatives have been proposed, which would be far more respectful of individual freedom. But given that we already have numerous societies with almost no population growth, your assumptions seem absurd on their face.
Bertrand Russell was a known Communist sympathizer.
I'm confused. Do you only bill your clients for the "actual hours of production"?
I would assume not. If a coder spends an eight hour day tasked to Client Project X, I'm guessing you bill the entire eight hours, even if he took bathroom breaks, even if he's taking longer to accomplish than he would with a couple of years under his belt.
Also, given that your n00b employees are inherently less valuable, isn't that all the more reason to throw them at interesting, experimental things that may not pan out?
IOW, it sounds to me like you're inflating your figures so you can come up with a big number to throw at any employee with the temerity to come to you, Oliver Twist-like, and say, "Please sir, may I have something more interesting?"
Honestly, I mean no disrespect here. But it sounds to me like your operating premise is that work is supposed to be drudgery, and that fun, interesting work is a product of "stupid money". Now, that's certainly a valid way to run a business, but it's definitely one that will turn off quite a few potential employees, some of whom would be great hires.