You're right. There's only so much you can dumb it down without sacrificing the quality of the code. As they say, make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Nevertheless, I would argue that you should be trying to accommodate a programmer less skilled than yourself.
Sometimes an algorithmically inferior, but more easily understood algorithm, is actually the way to go. If your performance requirements are meager, and the elegant algorithm will take significantly longer to implement -- or for the next guy to comprehend well enough to debug -- then the simpler way is better for you, and for the people who come after you.
However, if you think there are strong reasons for using the awesome algorithm, go for it. There's a huge difference between, "I have to write code that a less-skilled programmer can deal with" (which is true) and "I have to write code that a less-skilled programmer can deal with at his current level of understanding" (which is the strawman you seem to want to argue against).
It's certainly proper to leave your explanation at "implements the Viterbi algorithm to find the most likely next keystroke", so long as the code itself is a pretty straightforward implementation. You might want to explain where you're keeping critical data, like your path history. But nobody is asking you to teach the concepts if they're documented elsewhere.*
Do we try to make brain surgery so easy that a 10-year-old could do it?
No.
That depends entirely on whether or not a ten year old will be performing the brain surgery. You can complain all you like about your idiot co-workers, and how they're not fit to kiss Donald Knuth's loafers. Go ahead. I love a good rant. But like it or not, you're doing your employer a disservice if you write code that they don't have a prayer of maintaining.
* If you've invented your own algorithm, don't gripe about having to document it clearly and thoroughly.
I feel like a ridiculous geek for even stepping into this conversation, but I'd always assumed that River's mind-reading abilities were the main source of her hand-to-hand combat skills. Knowing where your opponent's blade is going before he does is a pretty compelling advantage.
Plus, science is already finding ways to generate some of the biochemical effects of exercise without having to actually hop on the treadmill. So I think it's safe to assume that they have the technology, that they can make her better, stronger, faster.
Last, I was pretty happy with the Alliance's true motivations. They're hunting a girl who is A) a dangerous weapon, and B) living evidence of a nefarious top-secret government program that turns innocent kids into mind-reading assassins. If anything, adding C) she can blow the lid off an Alliance-sponsored program that killed millions of people and released a race of supercannibals onto the solar system... well that could almost be called overkill.
I'm not a fan of PHP, but if the class was focused on doing a big web project, it might be a good choice.
Now, if I were teaching such a class, and a student wanted to go further in web-oriented programming, I'd encourage them to take what they've learned and move over to a framework like Rails or Django. But PHP + web gives you a good dose of instant gratification, which I think is *the* secret ingredient for any introductory programming class.
Stay away from script languages because they don't really do much long term wise. IF you can write in a language like Java, C++, you can write in Python. That is not true the other way around.
That's like saying "If you can read The New England Journal of Medicine, you can read Dick and Jane. That is not true the other way around."
You said that "once you have concepts, every language becomes syntax". Yet you want to start kids off with languages like C++, whose syntax is an abomination that would take the entire course to teach.
Java: class HelloWorld {
static public void main( String args[] ) {
System.out.println( "Hello World!" );
} }
Python: # Hello World in Python print "Hello World"
Questions raised by the C++ program: * What is iostream.h? * What does the # do? * What is main? * What is cout? * What does the double-less-than do? * What does return 0 do? * Why do some lines end with a semicolon and not others?
I think the Java program raises even more and trickier questions. For each question that is raised, there is a 1 to 1 mapping with a mistake that the student can make, which will keep the program from running.
Python has a gentle learning curve, and will go from zero to "finished project that means something to a student" in three seconds flat. Plus, while Java may be more "real world", Python is still real world enough that Google uses it. It may not be the perfect language, but it's a wonderful introductory language. Java, despite its obvious strengths for experienced coders, is not.
I've noticed that those who recommend a "hard" language like Java for beginners are those who also recommend that only people interested in programming take an introductory course. Perhaps that's because they recognize that only the truly devoted nerd would put up with Java as a first language.
Yeah, teaching something that forces people to become more logical thinkers and better problem solvers is an utter waste.
End sarcasm.
Unlike you, I don't think of education time as precious. Schools -- even the best ones -- are as much about warehousing students as educating them. How much of a given day does even a good student spend truly engaged in the material being presented?
I think programming shines as an educational task:
* The students spend more time doing than listening to the teacher. * There is usually instant feedback when something is going wrong. * The class can be a gateway to a career for quite a few students. Let's see embroidery do that. * You can simultaneously teach a host of math concepts. * Computers are increasingly integral to our lives, and programming teaches you about them far better than any "here's how to use a word processing app" class.
An introductory class should be about solving broad problems. Not blitting pixels to a framebuffer, or writing to a file using low-level system calls. I think that in a good general ed. class, libraries should abstract away most of the techy stuff. But I think most good education consists of breaking down a problem into its components, boiling away all the irrelevant details, and reasoning about solutions.
Programming teaches problem-solving and logical thinking. So long as the programming language is powerful enough to be a vehicle for that sort of exploration, yet simple enough to keep the class from bogging down in syntactic minutiae, how can a programming class be a bad thing?
I haven't programmed in the former since I was about fifteen. But I can't think of a single advantage that Basic has over Python, either as a programming language or as an instructional tool.
Real-world utility? Python, hands down.
Availability of libraries? Again, Python.
Ease of programming? Clarity of the resulting code? Ability to program to solve non-trivial, real-world problems? Ease of installation? Ease of demonstrating programming concepts? I'm just not seeing where Basic has any utility.
I know you're only half serious. But in the short term, the number of people employed by the changeover to the new records systems is going to dramatically outweigh the number of people that the new systems make unnecessary. It's only once the systems start coming online that the carnage begins.
Compared to all the great achievements of the late 19th century and early 20th century, do we have anything in basic science to show for ourselves (other than the atomic bomb, thank you very much), for all the money government stole from people and wasted in "science"?
Big Pharma spends money on marketing because it makes them money. They spend almost nothing on basic R & D because basic scientific facts cannot be patented, and therefore anything they discover can be used as easily by their competitors as by themselves. So if we want new basic scientific facts to be discovered, of course we need to "subsidize it", to let researchers "suc[k] off the taxpayer teat for their funding."
My question to you is, what the hell is so wrong with that, that you'd denigrate fundamental scientific inquiry with such rhetoric. Even if you're a proponent of small government, you should be able to understand why science is a public good, and therefore worthy of public dollars.
The fact is that the government is (and I believe ought to be) providing most of the funding for this sort of research. Therefore, the ban on federal funding did have the effect of greatly diminishing the amount of research being done. Thankfully, California took the hit for us all in the interim. And guess where most of the stem cell research is being done now? As bad off as California is right now, they clearly won that bet.
Define "failure". In fact, define "Obama's plan". He's got a dozen of them going right now.
The economic stimulus plan? He's taking criticism from both sides. For every expert you can dredge up to say that it will make things worse, I can find you a critic whose primary problem is that the plan is too small to cover the gap between the economy's current output and its potential output.
The bank bailout plan? Obama has a lot to be criticized for here, but A) it's a really thorny and complex problem, and B) most of the "experts" agree that doing nothing would have been ruinous, and C) a lot of the criticism is demanding emergency nationalization, not half-measures. The government should jump in, declare many of the biggest banks insolvent, wipe out the shareholders, and run the banks until they can find private investors.
By "the majority of indicators," you actually mean "the stock market." The stock market is a lousy proxy for the economic confidence of the country for a variety of reasons. Its view is too narrow, because half the stocks in this country are owned by the wealthiest 1% of Americans, because a rising DJIA only tells you how a relative handful of entrenched companies are doing, and because things that are good for the economy as a whole can be really bad for individual stocks.
For example, the only reason the stocks of some of the banks are still trading above zero: investors believe that Obama will probably keep the government bailout money trickling in, rather than swooping in and wiping out the current investors. I believe that the latter plan would be far better for the economy as a whole, but it would be bad for at least that sector of the stock market.
Also, as a commenter on the previous link pointed out, the stock market dropped 24% after Reagan took office, not because investors were made nervous by Reagan's free market talk, but because there were real problems that needed to be sorted out before growth would resume. Pretending that the stock market is a proxy for America's actual confidence in Obama's policies (forget the 62% approval rating) is a bald-faced lie that you Right-wingers will drop like a plague-ridden dead cat as soon as the market starts recovering.
Basic scientific research is a "public good". You can't get the proper levels of funding by asking the private sector to do it, simply because the bulk of the benefits will be impossible to monetize. Since anyone can use the products of basic research, those who fund it create something that their freeloading competitors can use just as easily as they can. So basic research will always be starved under a private sector regime.
Invoking Hollywood? It's hard for me to believe that you're really pro-choice, since that's nothing but standard Right-wing culture war claptrap. Hollywood is in the business of making movies, not identifying promising avenues for scientific research. This research is going to benefit even the few hardcore pro-lifers who want to see it outlawed, and even the wealthy corporations who would starve the government of funding to shave a few points off their tax burden will be able to use this research to create new lifesaving products. So why shouldn't the burden of funding that research fall on the population as a whole?
My guess is that you're "pro-choice" the way most wackjob libertarians are: you revile abortion as immoral, just not quite as immoral as a government who would dare to ever tell anyone what to do. As soon as you find a way to get the free market to ban abortion, you'll do it.
Finally, if you think that Obama's tiny increases in the marginal rate are going to prevent every American from ever becoming or staying rich (which is what it would take to "kill off the possibility of private funding," you're off your rocker. The rich did very well after Clinton raised taxes. But the poor and the middle class also did very well for themselves, which probably irks you.
Technically, a "patent troll" company is one which offers no products or services to sell. Instead, they own nothing but a "patent portfolio", and use litigation as their sole or primary source of revenue. True-blue patent trolls exploit an asymmetry: because they don't sell any products or services, they can't be sued for infringing on the patents of others, rendering one of the primary deterrents to patent litigation (mutually assured destruction) moot.
These guys don't meet the strict definition, since they actually do sell an (apparently terrible) ORM product.
It's not too much of a worry. Concentrating solar power costs have been falling quickly as well, and they require nothing more exotic than reflective surfaces and mineral oil.
Also from the Wikipedia page: "Recently, researchers have added an unusual twist - astrophysicists identify tellurium as the most abundant element in the universe with an atomic number over 40." Which disagrees with the thrust of your objections, but hey, it's Wikipedia. Who knows if it's thinking straight today. The tellurium page also says that cosmic abundance is far higher than terrestrial.
Another thing to keep in mind: one of the reasons so little tellurium is mined is because nobody has had much use for it before. Also, if tellurium becomes a limiting factor, we should be able to get more energy out of each ton by using concentrating reflectors.
As for the "put a ton in your basement" strategy, it may be sound. But Wikipedia advises that it is mildly toxic and should be handled with care.
And in many parts, it's much more. That's especially true of the places where these panels will be initially installed. They're going almost entirely to big, centralized generation projects. See here
1) For the full cost of building and operating a nuclear power plant, you could "generate" far more energy by investing in energy efficiency.
2) Proponents never tell you that costs go up quite a bit in order to reprocess spent fuel.
3) Nuclear power has to be highly centralized and highly regulated in a way that solar and wind do not. If you like heavy government involvement, you'll love nuclear power. It's no coincidence that France -- the poster child for nuclear energy -- is a country that horrifies most nuclear proponents in just about every other way.
4) The costs of wind and solar are plummeting. You don't see the same sort of trends in nuclear power.
5) Once you build the infrastructure for solar and wind, the fuel is free. Uranium's price can fluctuate dramatically. I'm pretty sure it rose and plunged with the recent commodities bubble.
6) Nobody wants a nuclear power plant in their back yard. Okay, maybe you. But overall they're pretty unpopular.
I'd greatly prefer nuclear to coal, but those aren't our only options. All forms of alternative energy are making quick progress, and will make even more progress over the thirty year lifespan of a fission reactor. Unless fusion comes along and makes the whole thing moot, I don't see nuclear as a viable candidate for future power generation.
Bah. In a hundred years, the Hive Mind will be able to recognize just about every person and location in most photographs, and probably have a good shot at sorting them chronologically. We'll be looking at tens of thousands of pictures taken by complete strangers, where we just happened to be in the camera's line of sight.
I never said comparative advantage is "wrong". I said that laypeople often foolishly latch on to it, then propose the outsourcing of broad, important swaths of the economy. I further added that these people do so without really considering the pitfalls, which include economic dependence and increased volatility. Then I concluded with a gratuitous "yo mama so fat" joke.
None of that makes comparative advantage "wrong". Just easily misapplied.
Much of your response is based on the idea that rebuilding lost food infrastructure will be relatively quick and easy, even in the throes of a profound economic crisis. Orchards take decades to mature. Without artificial fertilizer, marginal farmland can take several years and large biomass inputs to become productive. Transportation? Despite your glib dismissals, a long term oil shortage would do more than cripple our transportation infrastructure; it would essentially invalidate trillions of dollars worth of existing infrastructure. Infrastructure that would need to be replaced.
If I understand correctly, not only is NYC not food-sufficient, but the entire state of New York falls far short. So it's not just a matter of "getting food from the surrounding countryside". Cities rely on imports from thousands of miles away.
> No. I'm not saying local food production is "unnecessary". Instead I believe that the opportunity cost of implementing local food production is worse than doing nothing at all. That is, it is even worse than unnecessary.
By the same reasoning, insurance is "worse than unnecessary". You're converting high value dollars into something that has zero utility to you except in extreme circumstances. Consider the value of all the other things those wasted insurance dollars could have bought!
> Let's once again rehash the arguments:
> 1) You are converting high value real estate to low value farmland which is particularly harmful given there is plenty of existing farmland,
That's not necessarily true. Structures like this could be wrapped around existing vertical buildings, in such a way that they not only produced food, but lowered cooling costs as well. There is no reason to demolish existing office space, and building new skyscrapers with such a farm integrated from the beginning would probably cost very little. It may be that, as with green roofs, the overall cost of the project is reduced.
The farms could also double as recreational space, adding value to the nearby office space.
You're also presuming that existing farmland (or potential farmland) has no value in its uncultivated state.
> 2) food production doesn't help very much with short term emergency food shortages. > A warehouse of food is superior.
For mid to long-term emergencies, the converse is true.
> 3) You have yet to come up with a valid long term scenario that somehow keeps food from entering cities yet preserves the city and its hungry inhabitants.
Given your imagination's ability to grow a new orchard in a matter of months, I doubt I'll be able to find a situation that is acceptably serious to you. It's like trying to play a game of superheroes with a six year old with no sense of fair play. But here's my short list:
* Civil war or other war. * Outbreak of disease. * Severe, long term oil shortage, or other permanent increase in transportation costs. * Sudden loss of Midwestern agricultural productivity.
The first two could lead to blockades or quarantines. The latter two would only have the effect of cutting off a city from the food-producing regions of the U.S., not from its immediate surroundings. In those cases, improving agriculture within the region would probably be more economical.
> Oil shortages and vague transportation difficulties are not long term problems.
"Your laser bounced off my force field and hit you!" If you want to insist that we could replace our oil-based agriculture and our oil-based transportation infrastructure
Paul Krugman's Nobel was awarded because he helped explain why so little trade follows the model predicted by standard comparative advantage theory. The original theories you're citing were often simply naive. They didn't account for the risks of outsourcing entire vital sections of the economy, and they generally assumed that whatever trade was going on could not be disrupted by transportation breakdowns, foreign policy crises, or simple changes in taste.
While economists have probably gotten better, some laypeople use comparative advantage to insist that we should create a one-product economy. Whether that product is technology, financial services, or online pet stores seems to be irrelevant. So whenever someone starts trying to hang too much intellectual framework off this solitary idea, I feel the urge to point out the pitfalls.
A reminder: Back in the 1700s, Britain had (and enforced) a perfect comparative advantage relationship with the U.S. We would send them raw materials, and they would send us back finished goods. We Yanks thought this was nothing less than a conspiracy to keep us poor, and we all know how the story ended.
Your counteranalysis of the floovits crisis doesn't convince me. I don't see the U.S. having a plan B in case our oil suppliers decide to cut us off. Yet you insist that we'd have tractors and combines at the ready in the event of a sharp fall in imports. Then you say, okay, maybe we might not make such emergency provisions, but dismiss the fact with a "boy, that was dumb of us". Because if we're stupid then mass starvation is an appropriate punishment, I suppose.
Note that there was nothing in my scenario that said that the Earth was inherently overpopulated. We could assume that the arable land was still available (though it would be tempting to pave over it rather than leave it fallow or letting nature reclaim it). But what good does that do us if the knowhow is gone, the equipment is rusted, the transportation system is whithered, the orchards have long since died off, and so on?
Cuba is an excellent case study. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians heavily subsidized the Cuban agricultural sector with big equipment, oil, and fertilizer. Then, all at once, those subsidies disappeared. Russia was in chaos, and couldn't afford to send aid anymore. They transitioned to small-scale organic farming, with almost no oil inputs. But while the result was successful, it took a very long, very hungry decade. We could argue about whether a more free-market system would have made the transition more easily, but you can't pretend that it would have been painless.
Saying that local food production is unnecessary is tantamount to saying that nothing could ever interrupt the current systems. The world will always want New York City's financial acumen.* OPEC will never do anything too disruptive. The Xalanaxians will always need their floovits. I will never need to know how to grow my own beets.
These funky looking towers don't require a complete collapse of the social order (and so long as they're low-maintenance, I dispute your claim that such a collapse would render them useless). The cost of transportation simply needs to rise greatly, or the value of dense office space needs to fall. Now, the buildings would also have to pass certain sanity checks, like not being starved for sunlight and water. But the practicality of vertical farming is critical to deciding when these things make sense.
* Can anyone take that idea seriously, even today? Seriously, they seem to suck at it.
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You're right. There's only so much you can dumb it down without sacrificing the quality of the code. As they say, make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Nevertheless, I would argue that you should be trying to accommodate a programmer less skilled than yourself.
Sometimes an algorithmically inferior, but more easily understood algorithm, is actually the way to go. If your performance requirements are meager, and the elegant algorithm will take significantly longer to implement -- or for the next guy to comprehend well enough to debug -- then the simpler way is better for you, and for the people who come after you.
However, if you think there are strong reasons for using the awesome algorithm, go for it. There's a huge difference between, "I have to write code that a less-skilled programmer can deal with" (which is true) and "I have to write code that a less-skilled programmer can deal with at his current level of understanding" (which is the strawman you seem to want to argue against).
It's certainly proper to leave your explanation at "implements the Viterbi algorithm to find the most likely next keystroke", so long as the code itself is a pretty straightforward implementation. You might want to explain where you're keeping critical data, like your path history. But nobody is asking you to teach the concepts if they're documented elsewhere.*
That depends entirely on whether or not a ten year old will be performing the brain surgery. You can complain all you like about your idiot co-workers, and how they're not fit to kiss Donald Knuth's loafers. Go ahead. I love a good rant. But like it or not, you're doing your employer a disservice if you write code that they don't have a prayer of maintaining.
* If you've invented your own algorithm, don't gripe about having to document it clearly and thoroughly.
Let me guess. You think you're a Josh.
I feel like a ridiculous geek for even stepping into this conversation, but I'd always assumed that River's mind-reading abilities were the main source of her hand-to-hand combat skills. Knowing where your opponent's blade is going before he does is a pretty compelling advantage.
Plus, science is already finding ways to generate some of the biochemical effects of exercise without having to actually hop on the treadmill. So I think it's safe to assume that they have the technology, that they can make her better, stronger, faster.
Last, I was pretty happy with the Alliance's true motivations. They're hunting a girl who is A) a dangerous weapon, and B) living evidence of a nefarious top-secret government program that turns innocent kids into mind-reading assassins. If anything, adding C) she can blow the lid off an Alliance-sponsored program that killed millions of people and released a race of supercannibals onto the solar system... well that could almost be called overkill.
I'm not a fan of PHP, but if the class was focused on doing a big web project, it might be a good choice.
Now, if I were teaching such a class, and a student wanted to go further in web-oriented programming, I'd encourage them to take what they've learned and move over to a framework like Rails or Django. But PHP + web gives you a good dose of instant gratification, which I think is *the* secret ingredient for any introductory programming class.
Stay away from script languages because they don't really do much long term wise. IF you can write in a language like Java, C++, you can write in Python. That is not true the other way around.
That's like saying "If you can read The New England Journal of Medicine, you can read Dick and Jane. That is not true the other way around."
You said that "once you have concepts, every language becomes syntax". Yet you want to start kids off with languages like C++, whose syntax is an abomination that would take the entire course to teach.
Compare "hello world" for C++, Java, and Python:
C++:
#include <iostream.h>
main()
{
cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
return 0;
}
Java:
class HelloWorld {
static public void main( String args[] ) {
System.out.println( "Hello World!" );
}
}
Python:
# Hello World in Python
print "Hello World"
Questions raised by the C++ program:
* What is iostream.h?
* What does the # do?
* What is main?
* What is cout?
* What does the double-less-than do?
* What does return 0 do?
* Why do some lines end with a semicolon and not others?
I think the Java program raises even more and trickier questions. For each question that is raised, there is a 1 to 1 mapping with a mistake that the student can make, which will keep the program from running.
Python has a gentle learning curve, and will go from zero to "finished project that means something to a student" in three seconds flat. Plus, while Java may be more "real world", Python is still real world enough that Google uses it. It may not be the perfect language, but it's a wonderful introductory language. Java, despite its obvious strengths for experienced coders, is not.
I've noticed that those who recommend a "hard" language like Java for beginners are those who also recommend that only people interested in programming take an introductory course. Perhaps that's because they recognize that only the truly devoted nerd would put up with Java as a first language.
Yeah, teaching something that forces people to become more logical thinkers and better problem solvers is an utter waste.
End sarcasm.
Unlike you, I don't think of education time as precious. Schools -- even the best ones -- are as much about warehousing students as educating them. How much of a given day does even a good student spend truly engaged in the material being presented?
I think programming shines as an educational task:
* The students spend more time doing than listening to the teacher.
* There is usually instant feedback when something is going wrong.
* The class can be a gateway to a career for quite a few students. Let's see embroidery do that.
* You can simultaneously teach a host of math concepts.
* Computers are increasingly integral to our lives, and programming teaches you about them far better than any "here's how to use a word processing app" class.
An introductory class should be about solving broad problems. Not blitting pixels to a framebuffer, or writing to a file using low-level system calls. I think that in a good general ed. class, libraries should abstract away most of the techy stuff. But I think most good education consists of breaking down a problem into its components, boiling away all the irrelevant details, and reasoning about solutions.
Programming teaches problem-solving and logical thinking. So long as the programming language is powerful enough to be a vehicle for that sort of exploration, yet simple enough to keep the class from bogging down in syntactic minutiae, how can a programming class be a bad thing?
Basic? Bah.
Python? Yay!
I haven't programmed in the former since I was about fifteen. But I can't think of a single advantage that Basic has over Python, either as a programming language or as an instructional tool.
Real-world utility? Python, hands down.
Availability of libraries? Again, Python.
Ease of programming? Clarity of the resulting code? Ability to program to solve non-trivial, real-world problems? Ease of installation? Ease of demonstrating programming concepts? I'm just not seeing where Basic has any utility.
:)
I know you're only half serious. But in the short term, the number of people employed by the changeover to the new records systems is going to dramatically outweigh the number of people that the new systems make unnecessary. It's only once the systems start coming online that the carnage begins.
Would you like to lay out your alternative theory in detail?
You missed the crux of the issue: You cannot patent basic scientific research!
That's where I stopped reading. Good day.
Big Pharma spends money on marketing because it makes them money. They spend almost nothing on basic R & D because basic scientific facts cannot be patented, and therefore anything they discover can be used as easily by their competitors as by themselves. So if we want new basic scientific facts to be discovered, of course we need to "subsidize it", to let researchers "suc[k] off the taxpayer teat for their funding."
My question to you is, what the hell is so wrong with that, that you'd denigrate fundamental scientific inquiry with such rhetoric. Even if you're a proponent of small government, you should be able to understand why science is a public good, and therefore worthy of public dollars.
The fact is that the government is (and I believe ought to be) providing most of the funding for this sort of research. Therefore, the ban on federal funding did have the effect of greatly diminishing the amount of research being done. Thankfully, California took the hit for us all in the interim. And guess where most of the stem cell research is being done now? As bad off as California is right now, they clearly won that bet.
[citation needed]
Define "failure". In fact, define "Obama's plan". He's got a dozen of them going right now.
The economic stimulus plan? He's taking criticism from both sides. For every expert you can dredge up to say that it will make things worse, I can find you a critic whose primary problem is that the plan is too small to cover the gap between the economy's current output and its potential output.
The bank bailout plan? Obama has a lot to be criticized for here, but A) it's a really thorny and complex problem, and B) most of the "experts" agree that doing nothing would have been ruinous, and C) a lot of the criticism is demanding emergency nationalization, not half-measures. The government should jump in, declare many of the biggest banks insolvent, wipe out the shareholders, and run the banks until they can find private investors.
By "the majority of indicators," you actually mean "the stock market." The stock market is a lousy proxy for the economic confidence of the country for a variety of reasons. Its view is too narrow, because half the stocks in this country are owned by the wealthiest 1% of Americans, because a rising DJIA only tells you how a relative handful of entrenched companies are doing, and because things that are good for the economy as a whole can be really bad for individual stocks.
For example, the only reason the stocks of some of the banks are still trading above zero: investors believe that Obama will probably keep the government bailout money trickling in, rather than swooping in and wiping out the current investors. I believe that the latter plan would be far better for the economy as a whole, but it would be bad for at least that sector of the stock market.
Also, as a commenter on the previous link pointed out, the stock market dropped 24% after Reagan took office, not because investors were made nervous by Reagan's free market talk, but because there were real problems that needed to be sorted out before growth would resume. Pretending that the stock market is a proxy for America's actual confidence in Obama's policies (forget the 62% approval rating) is a bald-faced lie that you Right-wingers will drop like a plague-ridden dead cat as soon as the market starts recovering.
Basic scientific research is a "public good". You can't get the proper levels of funding by asking the private sector to do it, simply because the bulk of the benefits will be impossible to monetize. Since anyone can use the products of basic research, those who fund it create something that their freeloading competitors can use just as easily as they can. So basic research will always be starved under a private sector regime.
Invoking Hollywood? It's hard for me to believe that you're really pro-choice, since that's nothing but standard Right-wing culture war claptrap. Hollywood is in the business of making movies, not identifying promising avenues for scientific research. This research is going to benefit even the few hardcore pro-lifers who want to see it outlawed, and even the wealthy corporations who would starve the government of funding to shave a few points off their tax burden will be able to use this research to create new lifesaving products. So why shouldn't the burden of funding that research fall on the population as a whole?
My guess is that you're "pro-choice" the way most wackjob libertarians are: you revile abortion as immoral, just not quite as immoral as a government who would dare to ever tell anyone what to do. As soon as you find a way to get the free market to ban abortion, you'll do it.
Finally, if you think that Obama's tiny increases in the marginal rate are going to prevent every American from ever becoming or staying rich (which is what it would take to "kill off the possibility of private funding," you're off your rocker. The rich did very well after Clinton raised taxes. But the poor and the middle class also did very well for themselves, which probably irks you.
Fixed that for you!
Technically, a "patent troll" company is one which offers no products or services to sell. Instead, they own nothing but a "patent portfolio", and use litigation as their sole or primary source of revenue. True-blue patent trolls exploit an asymmetry: because they don't sell any products or services, they can't be sued for infringing on the patents of others, rendering one of the primary deterrents to patent litigation (mutually assured destruction) moot.
These guys don't meet the strict definition, since they actually do sell an (apparently terrible) ORM product.
It's not too much of a worry. Concentrating solar power costs have been falling quickly as well, and they require nothing more exotic than reflective surfaces and mineral oil.
Also from the Wikipedia page: "Recently, researchers have added an unusual twist - astrophysicists identify tellurium as the most abundant element in the universe with an atomic number over 40." Which disagrees with the thrust of your objections, but hey, it's Wikipedia. Who knows if it's thinking straight today. The tellurium page also says that cosmic abundance is far higher than terrestrial.
Another thing to keep in mind: one of the reasons so little tellurium is mined is because nobody has had much use for it before. Also, if tellurium becomes a limiting factor, we should be able to get more energy out of each ton by using concentrating reflectors.
As for the "put a ton in your basement" strategy, it may be sound. But Wikipedia advises that it is mildly toxic and should be handled with care.
And in many parts, it's much more. That's especially true of the places where these panels will be initially installed. They're going almost entirely to big, centralized generation projects. See here
I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
My problems with nuclear:
1) For the full cost of building and operating a nuclear power plant, you could "generate" far more energy by investing in energy efficiency.
2) Proponents never tell you that costs go up quite a bit in order to reprocess spent fuel.
3) Nuclear power has to be highly centralized and highly regulated in a way that solar and wind do not. If you like heavy government involvement, you'll love nuclear power. It's no coincidence that France -- the poster child for nuclear energy -- is a country that horrifies most nuclear proponents in just about every other way.
4) The costs of wind and solar are plummeting. You don't see the same sort of trends in nuclear power.
5) Once you build the infrastructure for solar and wind, the fuel is free. Uranium's price can fluctuate dramatically. I'm pretty sure it rose and plunged with the recent commodities bubble.
6) Nobody wants a nuclear power plant in their back yard. Okay, maybe you. But overall they're pretty unpopular.
I'd greatly prefer nuclear to coal, but those aren't our only options. All forms of alternative energy are making quick progress, and will make even more progress over the thirty year lifespan of a fission reactor. Unless fusion comes along and makes the whole thing moot, I don't see nuclear as a viable candidate for future power generation.
Because everything is always about you?
Some of us are interested in how the rest of the world is going.
Bah. In a hundred years, the Hive Mind will be able to recognize just about every person and location in most photographs, and probably have a good shot at sorting them chronologically. We'll be looking at tens of thousands of pictures taken by complete strangers, where we just happened to be in the camera's line of sight.
I never said comparative advantage is "wrong". I said that laypeople often foolishly latch on to it, then propose the outsourcing of broad, important swaths of the economy. I further added that these people do so without really considering the pitfalls, which include economic dependence and increased volatility. Then I concluded with a gratuitous "yo mama so fat" joke.
None of that makes comparative advantage "wrong". Just easily misapplied.
Much of your response is based on the idea that rebuilding lost food infrastructure will be relatively quick and easy, even in the throes of a profound economic crisis. Orchards take decades to mature. Without artificial fertilizer, marginal farmland can take several years and large biomass inputs to become productive. Transportation? Despite your glib dismissals, a long term oil shortage would do more than cripple our transportation infrastructure; it would essentially invalidate trillions of dollars worth of existing infrastructure. Infrastructure that would need to be replaced.
If I understand correctly, not only is NYC not food-sufficient, but the entire state of New York falls far short. So it's not just a matter of "getting food from the surrounding countryside". Cities rely on imports from thousands of miles away.
> No. I'm not saying local food production is "unnecessary". Instead I believe that the opportunity cost of implementing local food production is worse than doing nothing at all. That is, it is even worse than unnecessary.
By the same reasoning, insurance is "worse than unnecessary". You're converting high value dollars into something that has zero utility to you except in extreme circumstances. Consider the value of all the other things those wasted insurance dollars could have bought!
> Let's once again rehash the arguments:
> 1) You are converting high value real estate to low value farmland which is particularly harmful given there is plenty of existing farmland,
That's not necessarily true. Structures like this could be wrapped around existing vertical buildings, in such a way that they not only produced food, but lowered cooling costs as well. There is no reason to demolish existing office space, and building new skyscrapers with such a farm integrated from the beginning would probably cost very little. It may be that, as with green roofs, the overall cost of the project is reduced.
The farms could also double as recreational space, adding value to the nearby office space.
You're also presuming that existing farmland (or potential farmland) has no value in its uncultivated state.
> 2) food production doesn't help very much with short term emergency food shortages.
> A warehouse of food is superior.
For mid to long-term emergencies, the converse is true.
> 3) You have yet to come up with a valid long term scenario that somehow keeps food from entering cities yet preserves the city and its hungry inhabitants.
Given your imagination's ability to grow a new orchard in a matter of months, I doubt I'll be able to find a situation that is acceptably serious to you. It's like trying to play a game of superheroes with a six year old with no sense of fair play. But here's my short list:
* Civil war or other war.
* Outbreak of disease.
* Severe, long term oil shortage, or other permanent increase in transportation costs.
* Sudden loss of Midwestern agricultural productivity.
The first two could lead to blockades or quarantines. The latter two would only have the effect of cutting off a city from the food-producing regions of the U.S., not from its immediate surroundings. In those cases, improving agriculture within the region would probably be more economical.
> Oil shortages and vague transportation difficulties are not long term problems.
"Your laser bounced off my force field and hit you!" If you want to insist that we could replace our oil-based agriculture and our oil-based transportation infrastructure
Paul Krugman's Nobel was awarded because he helped explain why so little trade follows the model predicted by standard comparative advantage theory. The original theories you're citing were often simply naive. They didn't account for the risks of outsourcing entire vital sections of the economy, and they generally assumed that whatever trade was going on could not be disrupted by transportation breakdowns, foreign policy crises, or simple changes in taste.
While economists have probably gotten better, some laypeople use comparative advantage to insist that we should create a one-product economy. Whether that product is technology, financial services, or online pet stores seems to be irrelevant. So whenever someone starts trying to hang too much intellectual framework off this solitary idea, I feel the urge to point out the pitfalls.
A reminder: Back in the 1700s, Britain had (and enforced) a perfect comparative advantage relationship with the U.S. We would send them raw materials, and they would send us back finished goods. We Yanks thought this was nothing less than a conspiracy to keep us poor, and we all know how the story ended.
Your counteranalysis of the floovits crisis doesn't convince me. I don't see the U.S. having a plan B in case our oil suppliers decide to cut us off. Yet you insist that we'd have tractors and combines at the ready in the event of a sharp fall in imports. Then you say, okay, maybe we might not make such emergency provisions, but dismiss the fact with a "boy, that was dumb of us". Because if we're stupid then mass starvation is an appropriate punishment, I suppose.
Note that there was nothing in my scenario that said that the Earth was inherently overpopulated. We could assume that the arable land was still available (though it would be tempting to pave over it rather than leave it fallow or letting nature reclaim it). But what good does that do us if the knowhow is gone, the equipment is rusted, the transportation system is whithered, the orchards have long since died off, and so on?
Cuba is an excellent case study. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians heavily subsidized the Cuban agricultural sector with big equipment, oil, and fertilizer. Then, all at once, those subsidies disappeared. Russia was in chaos, and couldn't afford to send aid anymore. They transitioned to small-scale organic farming, with almost no oil inputs. But while the result was successful, it took a very long, very hungry decade. We could argue about whether a more free-market system would have made the transition more easily, but you can't pretend that it would have been painless.
Saying that local food production is unnecessary is tantamount to saying that nothing could ever interrupt the current systems. The world will always want New York City's financial acumen.* OPEC will never do anything too disruptive. The Xalanaxians will always need their floovits. I will never need to know how to grow my own beets.
These funky looking towers don't require a complete collapse of the social order (and so long as they're low-maintenance, I dispute your claim that such a collapse would render them useless). The cost of transportation simply needs to rise greatly, or the value of dense office space needs to fall. Now, the buildings would also have to pass certain sanity checks, like not being starved for sunlight and water. But the practicality of vertical farming is critical to deciding when these things make sense.
* Can anyone take that idea seriously, even today? Seriously, they seem to suck at it.