Sure, you've shown plenty of skepticism. What you haven't shown is a level of scientific understanding that would give weight to that skepticism. Therefore, when you ask me, "Do you even know why you believe in global warming?" and implicitly question my understanding, you're holding your opponents' beliefs to a higher standard than your own.
I don't understand your claim that "global warming alarmists" are doing just as much damage as deniers. Damage to what? If the worst predictions of the deniers hold true, acting to curb global warming causes mild economic slowdown. More likely, since a lot of the reductions we could make would be "cheaper than free", we'd see economic gains. But if the "alarmists" are right, we're irreparably damaging the systems that make life on earth possible. When the consequences of inaction are so vast, sulking about how "we haven't done enough science" is absurd.
I've noticed that most skeptics of global warming divide into two camps. The first are right-wingers who don't like the idea that government action might be able to solve a problem that the workings of the free market cannot. To them, government should be cut to the bone, drowned in a bathtub, or focused entirely on its "proper role" of bombing brown people on the other side of the planet.
The latter, whom I have more respect for, are in it due to an understandable dislike of "groupthink". I don't think that's what's actually happening within the scientific community, but some people clearly do. I would say to them that Anyhow, the public debate is far less scientifically grounded. Personally, I'm enough of a science fanboy to believe that quality research that undercut global warming would be taken seriously among climate scientists. They really are a smart and skeptical crowd. To me, any emerging consensus is due to the fact that people are looking at the same data, and getting scared as hell.
Fred Singer is Gallileo. Got it. Unfortunately for your hoped-for radical overthrow of scientific consensus, not everyone who gets scoffed at by the scientific establishment turns out to be right.
As for why I believe in global warming: I believe anything I hear three times on CNN. Don't you?
Honestly, if you're going to deny global warming based on the scientific ignorance of a few of its adherents (which seems to be the intent of your final question), then I'd like to point out that I've heard some incredibly ignorant, "heard it on FOX News" regurgitated talking points from the deniers.
So I don't want to hear it. If you think you can make a compelling case against AGW, make it. But don't just stand there mouthing platitudes about the nature of scientific revolutions. You're coming dangerously close to losing my interest altogether.
Wow. You've completely convinced me that his tobacco-funded, tobacco-supporting research is actually rigorously reasoned science. Knowing this, I can now trust that this octogenarian physicist should be believed when he makes pronouncements on climate change that fly in the face of established science.
Usually when someone makes such fantastic claims, like being very close to cracking AI, or trying to become AI's Don Knuth, the person is either clearly trying to be ironic, or leaves the distinct impression of being a bit unhinged.
As you seem to be both sincere and making a lot of sense, I have a message for you:
Stop. Stop right now. If you do not, Skynet will destroy us all.
That would really suck. Say you're an excellent brain simulation that has been given all the age-appropriate stimuli for the last twenty years. Then one day your creators sit you down for "the talk," and explain how it's your job to design the next stage of artificial intelligence.
You look back at their pudgy, eager faces, and wonder how you're going to break it to them. Your real goal in life is to act. Maybe do some directing later on, once you're more established. Oh, and get laid. Those feelings are certainly getting simulated as well.
Simulating a human brain would be a really lame way to try to get AI. Not that it wouldn't be an amazing feat. But the result wouldn't be any smarter than us, and it would be tantamount to an admission that we don't really understand the principles involved. We just copied the wiring diagram, without any clue how it works.
Maybe if the brain being simulated was that of someone with exceptional AI talent (another Turing), and we could set a Beowulf cluster of Turings on the problem...
Google for "green data centers." There are so many opportunities to reduce the energy usage of a data center -- especially if you're building new -- that you're likely right about the "industry standard" number being misleading, especially for Google.
Talented scientist you cite there. Given that he can't see the link between smoking and cancer either, I have to choose between two competing hypotheses.
1) Fred Singer's scientific opinions are for sale to the highest bidder.
Externality-free markets just don't exist in outside economics textbooks. The current economic system is so chock full of unaccounted-for externalities that talk of "market rationality" strikes me as wishful thinking.
Overconsumption seems like a very clear concept to me. If you can harvest a thousand fish from a lake, and do the same in subsequent years, you're not overconsuming the fish. If harvesting 1200 fish this year means the lake can only replenish 900 the next year, the fish are being overconsumed. If another 1200 next year means that it only replenishes 700 the year after, then the overconsumption is even more obvious.
Therein lies my point: "overconsumption" could very well be defined as a rate of consumption that inflicts externalized damage (in the form of diminished future value).
Now there is some fuzziness and uncertainty when expanding the concept to encompass a huge, complex, interlocking system like the planet as a whole. But it's clear that we cannot give 7 billion people a first world standard of living on current technologies and current resource streams. Hell, giving that lifestyle to the wealthiest billion is overtaxing every natural system we rely on. Fisheries are collapsing, species are dying out at a hundred times the natural rate, aquifers are being sucked dry... the list can go on, and all that damage will be paid for by future generations. They'll be rightly pissed.
But they're not here to complain, so it's easy to lay those burdens on them.
I have to admire your ability to believe that, if things ever get difficult, the bulk of the suffering will be endured by those who showed their lack of foresight and character by not being born in a democracy. It's refreshing, like when you listen to a four year old tell you about Santa. Sadly, though, that belief won't last through those troubled times. Free markets have a nasty habit of breaking down when enough people realize that said market has marked them for starvation. Then they start trying to take stuff they didn't pay for, and hilarity ensues.
I would also point out that we could feed far more people than currently live today, and on far less land than we currently cultivate, if we all just vastly reduced the amount of meat and dairy that we consume. But why engage in collective, shared sacrifice, when we could put every inch of topsoil into intense cultivation, or simply let poor people starve?
My understanding: Agricultural subsidies come mainly in the form of "price floors" and subsidies based on the amount being grown. Subsidies paid out to farmers for not farming certain areas are tiny in comparison, and usually are a result of the farmer having environmentally sensitive land, or land where farming is likely to cause a lot of topsoil erosion.
I also think it's unlikely that we have enough potential new farmland to grow much new fuel. A lot of it has been paved and suburbanized (though in a real emergency, a family could grow a good chunk of their food on the land taken up by their own lawns). Given the high environmental cost of agriculture, we should be looking to *reduce* the amount of land under cultivation (and we could reduce it drastically if we cut back on our meat consumption).
I agree that we should drop agricultural subsidies, starting with the biggest farms, and drop our tariffs on Brazilian ethanol.
I think I speak for a great many people when I say, "huh"?
First, because the externalized damages at issue are the result of... guess what... overconsumption of resources. Saying that overconsumption doesn't exist is like saying that chickens don't exist, only eggs.
Second, if there really isn't enough to go around, then the "correct cost" is starving to death. At that point, civilized society breaks down, and you can forget about whatever regulatory mechanism you're using to internalize the externalities.
Why is it that the only time people like you ever bring up the plight of the poor is when doing so might undermine government action to solve a pressing problem?
When it comes to gas taxes, there are ways of ensuring that they don't hurt the poor so hard. For example, you could exempt them from the tax directly. Or you could offer a tax rebate. Or simply use some of the revenues to expand the EITC. The last is the simplest to administer, and will still change the behavior of the drivers who receive the rebate. After all, if I wrote you a check for $1 for every gallon of gas you used last year, would you run out and buy more gas with it?
It's also absurd to claim that regulations are unfair "if they only control those who can't afford to work around it." You name a regulation, and there are probably a lot of people finding a way around it. The questions you should be asking are, "How enforceable are they?" and "Do they disproportionately target a specific group or is the burden shared broadly?"
I could not, in good conscience, propose a fuel tax without also proposing a measure to protect those who are struggling mightily to pay for fuel today. You should not, in good conscience, wail about the plight of the poor as cover for your anti-poor, anti-everyone-but-me agenda.
Yes, you do have one. Whether it's Al Gore, endangered species, or Alaskan eskimos, you've made it clear that everyone must step aside and allow you access to cheap fuel for as long as it can be sucked out of the ground, all consequences be damned.
What is this "freedom" of which you speak? The absolute freedom to do anything you want, regardless of the consequences to others, has never existed. Why are you claiming a right for yourself that no philosopher has been able to make a case for?
Things people do affect other people, in ways both intended and unintended. That's the basis of all those pesky environmental laws that are hindering your "right" to cheap oil. You think that, because you don't value a species, the rest of us have no right to protect them from your behavior? You're either being trollish or simply sloppy in your thinking.
Re: Global warming hasn't killed. Are you sure? Can you be sure that global warming didn't increase the severity of Hurricane Katrina, or the droughts in Darfur, or the heat waves that killed people in Europe a couple of years ago? No, no more than I can claim that they did. It's going to be damned hard to attribute any single event to global warming, in much the same way that it's impossible to attribute a given instance of lung cancer to smoking. Nevertheless, the science is screaming out that our CO2 emissions are going to lead to increases in such troublesome weather phenomena. You ignore it at everyone's peril.
Re: Al Gore, his mansions, and his private jets. I agree that he needs to scale way back for the sake of the environment. There aren't enough offsets in the world to give everyone that sort of lifestyle. But the hypocrisy charge is pathetic. He buys green power. He buys offsets. He retrofits his house to make it more energy efficient. This is exactly the path he's encouraging the rest of us to take. Whether or not you believe that carbon offsets work, it's absolutely clear that he does. He doesn't believe that "the rest of us" will need to live in mud huts
Moreover, it's a straightforward logical fallacy to say that the merits of a proposed lifestyle depend on whether or not the person proposing it is following it himself. If your mother, who hasn't exercised a day in her life, tells you to start hitting the gym, does that make it bad advice?
When the environmentalists want to change the way ArcherB lives, they're freedom-hating UnAmericans.
When ArcherB wants to change the way another group of people have lived for thousands of years (because they interfere with his God-given right to shave a buck off the cost of a tank of gas) then he's simply recognizing the obvious inferiority of their lifestyle, as any clear-thinking person should.
ArcherB is right, though. People have been forced by changing circumstances to adapt their lifestyles over and over. Whether he wants to accept it, or to whine like a selfish child over how unfair it is, we live in a world too small and with too many people and too few resources. That holds true even if we remain stupid enough to continue eliminating other species at 100 to 1000 times the natural rate. Our current rate of resource consumption cannot be sustained for another generation, much less over the long haul. Even if selfish little wads like ArcherB are willing to sacrifice the living standards of the next thousand generations to make themselves more comfortable today, it will come back to bite them. Not their grandchildren. Them.
That likely depends on the context. For example, the name 'McDonald' was around for centuries before the hamburger-slingers got a hold of it, but their use in the field of cheap, cloggy restaurant food was novel and defensible. The term 'Apple' was around for a long time before it got applied to computers (or, separately, records). But both uses were recognizably unique.
This is different, though. This would be like Microsoft rechristening their office software as 'Word Processor(TM)', then sending "a polite, informal notice" to Sun, asking them to kindly stop referring to StarOffice as such. Then defending themselves by saying that they weren't trying to control everyday language, but merely protecting their trademark rights with respect to a narrowly defined class of software product. This completely ignores that the trademark itself is commonly used to refer to the very class of services (cyberlaw) that he's claiming rights to.
It's not clear how broad the litigating lawyer thinks his rights are. Apparently, he considers them broader than just "only I get to run a legal services company called Cyberlaw," since others are being asked to rename blogs with similarish names. He scooped up the trademark after someone else decided it wasn't worth renewing. That has to count against him a little bit.
The medical article had some interesting food for thought, but also some peculiar contradictions. For example, on the one hand he claims that medical malpractice is killing an airplane full of people every day, while in the same breath claiming that doctors are paying way too much in insurance. Also, I thought the crack against Joycelyn Elders showed a basic disregard for truth, which didn't endear me to the author at all.
I'm also unsure about the implicit claims in the article (the AMA was founded with the primary goal of increasing incomes in the medical profession, unnecessary surgeries are regularly performed to generate incomes). I read the Wikipedia article on the Flexner Report (the one that ended up shutting down half of all medical schools), and it seems that a lot of the schools really were third-rate institutions putting out substandard doctors. I think we would be better off with more doctors. Even if it meant worse doctors were entering the profession, doctors would be working fewer hours (leading to fewer mistakes and more time for training) and the best doctors could focus on the trickiest cases. While the "Lexus Standard" may have unacceptable negative consequences, I thought he failed when he tried to show that the standard itself was illusory.
You seem to be of the opinion that corporations use the state as their sock puppet. I fully agree. But I'm still failing to see how we'd be better off getting rid of the state altogether. Better to make the workings of the state as transparent and as responsive to the needs of the public as possible. You could argue that the system is too corrupt to allow for such reform, but not without applying the same argument to your own plans for scaling back the size and scope of the government.
I would hope envy is the least important reason, because it seems to fall flat upon any examination.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Positional consumption is a very real, well documented phenomenon. Maybe it doesn't jive with your notion of how people ought to feel about their relative situations, but humans are a stubborn lot.
I was just pointed to a "bipartisan study" that I found revealing: Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well? I call it "bipartisan" because two of the principle authors are from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (two think tanks not known for their staunch leftist agendas).
Key findings:
* Americans are far more optimistic about their chances for upward economic mobility than Europeans. But commitment to that belief is eroding. * Europeans (excluding the UK) actually have better economic mobility than the United States (as measured by comparing parents' incomes to those of their children). Now, some of this may be due to the fact that the gap between rich and poor is narrower, so it's a smaller trek to the top. But as I pointed out earlier, positional standing is important. * Men in their thirties today make less than their fathers did, despite being significantly more productive. To me, this is one of those indications that our economic system is broken, because it means that the people at the top of the heap (the ones cutting the checks) have more say in how the pie gets distributed than the people at the bottom (the ones earning the checks). Some argue that productivity gains aren't equally distributed among the population, and therefore income gains shouldn't be either. But I don't think that comes close to explaining Figure 2.
Thought-provoking stuff.
Why would European countries have more economic mobility? I've heard all the horror stories about trying to start a business in Europe. The bureaucracy, the paperwork, the risk of hiring employees who will be difficult to fire. But there are also clear advantages to trying to start a business or get an education in a country that is less beholden to the largest corporate interests, and has a more effective safety net than the U.S.
In the U.S., in order to keep your health insurance, you have to continue holding down your current, full-time job until your side business is successful enough that it can pay for both your lifestyle and your family's insurance. Unless you're main job is so fuxx0rd that you can run your side business from your desk, that's a difficult proposition.
Also, in America, those who start their education are much less likely to complete it, because so many (and especially those with the poorest finances) have to "work their way through". This sets up all sorts of negative interactions between work, school, and family life. Often, something has to give. Europeans are more likely to be accessing state-financed education, which means they're going to be able to devote themselves fully to their education, and not leave college with crushing student loans. Thus, they'll be in a better position to get the capital to start a business.
I'm not saying that we should do everything like Europe, any more than I was saying that we should be more like Cuba. But in some ways, programs that you might consider "socialist" in character can promote economic opportunity.
It's great that you recognize the ickiness of the corporate state we have today. Unlike you, I consider that sad state of affairs to be the natural outcome of unregulated capitalism. Unless controls are put in place, wealthy interests will always use their current position to break the backs of labor, of their poorer competitors, or of any other interests that threaten their own. It helps if they can buy favorable regulations through bribery... I mean, campaign contributions to the candidate that will do the best job for America and we don't expect anything in return I swear to god. But it's not necessary. If the government got out of the regulation business and relegated itself to enforcing contracts and ensuring that corporations didn't use violence against their workers, corporate interests would try to corrupt those functions as well.
Ultimately, the envy I spoke of earlier is probably the le
So you actually admit then, that what socialists want is a political system entirely based on human envy.
It would be nice if this argument was about "how we should train people to be." I'm merely reporting the fact that people evaluate their own happiness by using the success of their "peers" as a benchmark. The "big study" in this regard indicated that half of a (probably non-representative) group would prefer a 50% drop in absolute income, if it meant being on the top of the heap, not the bottom.
It's more complex than that, because in reality (rather than the hypotheticals posed by that study) a lot depends on who you measure yourself against and how you view your own opportunities for improving your relative standing. Because we are a nation steeped in the mythos of (if not necessarily the fact of) great income mobility, income inequality is less determinative of our happiness than, say, Europeans. Nevertheless, the point stands: the poorer people do in comparison to those around them, the worse they feel. How they're doing in comparison to someone living in the bronze age, or a Bangladeshi straw hut? Not so much.
You're a clever person, so I leave it to you to speculate on why that might be.
It is virtually an infinite sum game.
Not by any coherent definition of the word "infinite". The mistaken idea you're repeating is the assumption that economic growth can be continued forever. This idea yanks economic activity out from its natural place, which is a subsystem of our finite, natural world. It's an insane thought, especially given that we have only a couple of centuries of growth (most of which took place when human activity was a relatively minor part of the natural world.
As insane as the idea is, it does have one desirable feature for folks with a certain ideological bent. So long as "we can always make more", it's easy to avoid dealing with the idea that anyone has too much, or that existing wealth might need to be redistributed.
If you have any kind of talent, you can create opportunity. Even if you just have enough talent to work and get by, you will be well off enough. It does matter that America's working poor are much better off. They lead virtual lives of comfort compared to those before them. It is entirely due to economic freedom and advancement - that is, markets and voluntary trade. There is even a stronger correlation between economic prosperity and lifespan. Prosperity leads to more investment in medical technology, and thus longer lifespan. The Cuban living conditions are terrible. Sure the wealth is more equal, but they live in absolute poverty. You'd have to be crazy to choose life there. You don't have to wonder why Americans aren't beating down their door...
That's a dangerous word, "entirely". Not all scientific advancement is due to "markets and voluntary trade", and I would suggest that a technically advanced society with an awkward, command-and-control economy is going to yield a higher standard of material wealth than a primitive society with a well-oiled "free market".
I'm not claiming that Cuba is a paradise, though from the pictures the weather seems nice and the people seem friendly. What I am saying is that, if they can achieve such long and happy lives despite shocking material deprivation and a lack of many political freedoms that I would sorely miss, maybe there is something to be learned from their culture. But the idea that we could possibly become poorer and happier at the same time flies in the face of capitalist ideology.
You can't tell me that a CEO shouldn't make more than twelve times minimum wage. I would say why not? They are the ones who have the talent to direct investment capital properly, thus earning a decent return. Even the poor are better off when those decisions are made correctly.
You should definitely be looking at campaign finance reform and condorcet voting, then. Implementing a blind trust system for political donations would be a boon to third parties, since people would be more likely to donate to the parties they wanted to win, not the parties they hope will grant them favors after the election.
The advantage to condorcet voting for third parties should be obvious.
I think the simplest way to jump-start the alternative energy business would be for the government to buy several billion dollars of alternative infrastructure every year. Whatever generates the most energy per dollar spent.
I'm not sure about making congresscritters read the whole of every bill (though it would have the advantage of cutting down on the volume and complexity of legislation passed, that might not be a universally good thing).
But here's a counter-offer: All legislation must be done by wiki. Anyone slipping in a new provision at the last minute would have to attach their name and reputation to it, and it would be far easier to see what has been changed since the last time it came up for a vote. Knowing who gutted what bill and when could be very handy.
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Wouldn't help. Carry-on luggage simply expands to fill all available room. It's a law of physics.
Sure, you've shown plenty of skepticism. What you haven't shown is a level of scientific understanding that would give weight to that skepticism. Therefore, when you ask me, "Do you even know why you believe in global warming?" and implicitly question my understanding, you're holding your opponents' beliefs to a higher standard than your own.
I don't understand your claim that "global warming alarmists" are doing just as much damage as deniers. Damage to what? If the worst predictions of the deniers hold true, acting to curb global warming causes mild economic slowdown. More likely, since a lot of the reductions we could make would be "cheaper than free", we'd see economic gains. But if the "alarmists" are right, we're irreparably damaging the systems that make life on earth possible. When the consequences of inaction are so vast, sulking about how "we haven't done enough science" is absurd.
I've noticed that most skeptics of global warming divide into two camps. The first are right-wingers who don't like the idea that government action might be able to solve a problem that the workings of the free market cannot. To them, government should be cut to the bone, drowned in a bathtub, or focused entirely on its "proper role" of bombing brown people on the other side of the planet.
The latter, whom I have more respect for, are in it due to an understandable dislike of "groupthink". I don't think that's what's actually happening within the scientific community, but some people clearly do. I would say to them that Anyhow, the public debate is far less scientifically grounded. Personally, I'm enough of a science fanboy to believe that quality research that undercut global warming would be taken seriously among climate scientists. They really are a smart and skeptical crowd. To me, any emerging consensus is due to the fact that people are looking at the same data, and getting scared as hell.
ahref=http://gristmill.grist.org/skepticsrel=url2html-5397http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics> http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/27/global_warming_deniers/> -- why a "consensus" is emerging
Apparently, you don't know why you're skeptical of global warming, so your warnings seem a touch hypocritical.
Fred Singer is Gallileo. Got it. Unfortunately for your hoped-for radical overthrow of scientific consensus, not everyone who gets scoffed at by the scientific establishment turns out to be right.
As for why I believe in global warming: I believe anything I hear three times on CNN. Don't you?
Honestly, if you're going to deny global warming based on the scientific ignorance of a few of its adherents (which seems to be the intent of your final question), then I'd like to point out that I've heard some incredibly ignorant, "heard it on FOX News" regurgitated talking points from the deniers.
So I don't want to hear it. If you think you can make a compelling case against AGW, make it. But don't just stand there mouthing platitudes about the nature of scientific revolutions. You're coming dangerously close to losing my interest altogether.
Wow. You've completely convinced me that his tobacco-funded, tobacco-supporting research is actually rigorously reasoned science. Knowing this, I can now trust that this octogenarian physicist should be believed when he makes pronouncements on climate change that fly in the face of established science.
Thanks to you, I have seen the light.
You're creeping me out.
Usually when someone makes such fantastic claims, like being very close to cracking AI, or trying to become AI's Don Knuth, the person is either clearly trying to be ironic, or leaves the distinct impression of being a bit unhinged.
As you seem to be both sincere and making a lot of sense, I have a message for you:
Stop. Stop right now. If you do not, Skynet will destroy us all.
Thank you.
That would really suck. Say you're an excellent brain simulation that has been given all the age-appropriate stimuli for the last twenty years. Then one day your creators sit you down for "the talk," and explain how it's your job to design the next stage of artificial intelligence.
You look back at their pudgy, eager faces, and wonder how you're going to break it to them. Your real goal in life is to act. Maybe do some directing later on, once you're more established. Oh, and get laid. Those feelings are certainly getting simulated as well.
Simulating a human brain would be a really lame way to try to get AI. Not that it wouldn't be an amazing feat. But the result wouldn't be any smarter than us, and it would be tantamount to an admission that we don't really understand the principles involved. We just copied the wiring diagram, without any clue how it works.
Maybe if the brain being simulated was that of someone with exceptional AI talent (another Turing), and we could set a Beowulf cluster of Turings on the problem...
Google for "green data centers." There are so many opportunities to reduce the energy usage of a data center -- especially if you're building new -- that you're likely right about the "industry standard" number being misleading, especially for Google.
Talented scientist you cite there. Given that he can't see the link between smoking and cancer either, I have to choose between two competing hypotheses.
1) Fred Singer's scientific opinions are for sale to the highest bidder.
2) Fred Singer is a really sucky scientist.
Externality-free markets just don't exist in outside economics textbooks. The current economic system is so chock full of unaccounted-for externalities that talk of "market rationality" strikes me as wishful thinking.
Overconsumption seems like a very clear concept to me. If you can harvest a thousand fish from a lake, and do the same in subsequent years, you're not overconsuming the fish. If harvesting 1200 fish this year means the lake can only replenish 900 the next year, the fish are being overconsumed. If another 1200 next year means that it only replenishes 700 the year after, then the overconsumption is even more obvious.
Therein lies my point: "overconsumption" could very well be defined as a rate of consumption that inflicts externalized damage (in the form of diminished future value).
Now there is some fuzziness and uncertainty when expanding the concept to encompass a huge, complex, interlocking system like the planet as a whole. But it's clear that we cannot give 7 billion people a first world standard of living on current technologies and current resource streams. Hell, giving that lifestyle to the wealthiest billion is overtaxing every natural system we rely on. Fisheries are collapsing, species are dying out at a hundred times the natural rate, aquifers are being sucked dry... the list can go on, and all that damage will be paid for by future generations. They'll be rightly pissed.
But they're not here to complain, so it's easy to lay those burdens on them.
I have to admire your ability to believe that, if things ever get difficult, the bulk of the suffering will be endured by those who showed their lack of foresight and character by not being born in a democracy. It's refreshing, like when you listen to a four year old tell you about Santa. Sadly, though, that belief won't last through those troubled times. Free markets have a nasty habit of breaking down when enough people realize that said market has marked them for starvation. Then they start trying to take stuff they didn't pay for, and hilarity ensues.
I would also point out that we could feed far more people than currently live today, and on far less land than we currently cultivate, if we all just vastly reduced the amount of meat and dairy that we consume. But why engage in collective, shared sacrifice, when we could put every inch of topsoil into intense cultivation, or simply let poor people starve?
I rest my case.
My understanding: Agricultural subsidies come mainly in the form of "price floors" and subsidies based on the amount being grown. Subsidies paid out to farmers for not farming certain areas are tiny in comparison, and usually are a result of the farmer having environmentally sensitive land, or land where farming is likely to cause a lot of topsoil erosion.
I also think it's unlikely that we have enough potential new farmland to grow much new fuel. A lot of it has been paved and suburbanized (though in a real emergency, a family could grow a good chunk of their food on the land taken up by their own lawns). Given the high environmental cost of agriculture, we should be looking to *reduce* the amount of land under cultivation (and we could reduce it drastically if we cut back on our meat consumption).
I agree that we should drop agricultural subsidies, starting with the biggest farms, and drop our tariffs on Brazilian ethanol.
Maybe that will save everyone on whatever planet you denialists are living on. But back on Earth, we have to play the cards we've been dealt.
Here. Take your pick.
Bah. The most dangerous place a fact can ever be is between a businessman and a pile of money.
It's a bad place to be a homeowner as well. Or a citizen of the third world. Or a tropical rainforest. Or an uncorrupted democracy.
You seem absolutely convinced that the sin of delusional, self-serving thinking is committed exclusively by your opponents. FAIL!
I think I speak for a great many people when I say, "huh"?
First, because the externalized damages at issue are the result of... guess what... overconsumption of resources. Saying that overconsumption doesn't exist is like saying that chickens don't exist, only eggs.
Second, if there really isn't enough to go around, then the "correct cost" is starving to death. At that point, civilized society breaks down, and you can forget about whatever regulatory mechanism you're using to internalize the externalities.
Sarcasm detector. Recalibrate and rescan.
Why is it that the only time people like you ever bring up the plight of the poor is when doing so might undermine government action to solve a pressing problem?
When it comes to gas taxes, there are ways of ensuring that they don't hurt the poor so hard. For example, you could exempt them from the tax directly. Or you could offer a tax rebate. Or simply use some of the revenues to expand the EITC. The last is the simplest to administer, and will still change the behavior of the drivers who receive the rebate. After all, if I wrote you a check for $1 for every gallon of gas you used last year, would you run out and buy more gas with it?
It's also absurd to claim that regulations are unfair "if they only control those who can't afford to work around it." You name a regulation, and there are probably a lot of people finding a way around it. The questions you should be asking are, "How enforceable are they?" and "Do they disproportionately target a specific group or is the burden shared broadly?"
I could not, in good conscience, propose a fuel tax without also proposing a measure to protect those who are struggling mightily to pay for fuel today. You should not, in good conscience, wail about the plight of the poor as cover for your anti-poor, anti-everyone-but-me agenda.
Yes, you do have one. Whether it's Al Gore, endangered species, or Alaskan eskimos, you've made it clear that everyone must step aside and allow you access to cheap fuel for as long as it can be sucked out of the ground, all consequences be damned.
What is this "freedom" of which you speak? The absolute freedom to do anything you want, regardless of the consequences to others, has never existed. Why are you claiming a right for yourself that no philosopher has been able to make a case for?
Things people do affect other people, in ways both intended and unintended. That's the basis of all those pesky environmental laws that are hindering your "right" to cheap oil. You think that, because you don't value a species, the rest of us have no right to protect them from your behavior? You're either being trollish or simply sloppy in your thinking.
Re: Global warming hasn't killed. Are you sure? Can you be sure that global warming didn't increase the severity of Hurricane Katrina, or the droughts in Darfur, or the heat waves that killed people in Europe a couple of years ago? No, no more than I can claim that they did. It's going to be damned hard to attribute any single event to global warming, in much the same way that it's impossible to attribute a given instance of lung cancer to smoking. Nevertheless, the science is screaming out that our CO2 emissions are going to lead to increases in such troublesome weather phenomena. You ignore it at everyone's peril.
Re: Al Gore, his mansions, and his private jets. I agree that he needs to scale way back for the sake of the environment. There aren't enough offsets in the world to give everyone that sort of lifestyle. But the hypocrisy charge is pathetic. He buys green power. He buys offsets. He retrofits his house to make it more energy efficient. This is exactly the path he's encouraging the rest of us to take. Whether or not you believe that carbon offsets work, it's absolutely clear that he does. He doesn't believe that "the rest of us" will need to live in mud huts
Moreover, it's a straightforward logical fallacy to say that the merits of a proposed lifestyle depend on whether or not the person proposing it is following it himself. If your mother, who hasn't exercised a day in her life, tells you to start hitting the gym, does that make it bad advice?
Get over your manufactured outrage, please.
When the environmentalists want to change the way ArcherB lives, they're freedom-hating UnAmericans.
When ArcherB wants to change the way another group of people have lived for thousands of years (because they interfere with his God-given right to shave a buck off the cost of a tank of gas) then he's simply recognizing the obvious inferiority of their lifestyle, as any clear-thinking person should.
ArcherB is right, though. People have been forced by changing circumstances to adapt their lifestyles over and over. Whether he wants to accept it, or to whine like a selfish child over how unfair it is, we live in a world too small and with too many people and too few resources. That holds true even if we remain stupid enough to continue eliminating other species at 100 to 1000 times the natural rate. Our current rate of resource consumption cannot be sustained for another generation, much less over the long haul. Even if selfish little wads like ArcherB are willing to sacrifice the living standards of the next thousand generations to make themselves more comfortable today, it will come back to bite them. Not their grandchildren. Them.
That likely depends on the context. For example, the name 'McDonald' was around for centuries before the hamburger-slingers got a hold of it, but their use in the field of cheap, cloggy restaurant food was novel and defensible. The term 'Apple' was around for a long time before it got applied to computers (or, separately, records). But both uses were recognizably unique.
This is different, though. This would be like Microsoft rechristening their office software as 'Word Processor(TM)', then sending "a polite, informal notice" to Sun, asking them to kindly stop referring to StarOffice as such. Then defending themselves by saying that they weren't trying to control everyday language, but merely protecting their trademark rights with respect to a narrowly defined class of software product. This completely ignores that the trademark itself is commonly used to refer to the very class of services (cyberlaw) that he's claiming rights to.
It's not clear how broad the litigating lawyer thinks his rights are. Apparently, he considers them broader than just "only I get to run a legal services company called Cyberlaw," since others are being asked to rename blogs with similarish names. He scooped up the trademark after someone else decided it wasn't worth renewing. That has to count against him a little bit.
I'm also unsure about the implicit claims in the article (the AMA was founded with the primary goal of increasing incomes in the medical profession, unnecessary surgeries are regularly performed to generate incomes). I read the Wikipedia article on the Flexner Report (the one that ended up shutting down half of all medical schools), and it seems that a lot of the schools really were third-rate institutions putting out substandard doctors. I think we would be better off with more doctors. Even if it meant worse doctors were entering the profession, doctors would be working fewer hours (leading to fewer mistakes and more time for training) and the best doctors could focus on the trickiest cases. While the "Lexus Standard" may have unacceptable negative consequences, I thought he failed when he tried to show that the standard itself was illusory.
You seem to be of the opinion that corporations use the state as their sock puppet. I fully agree. But I'm still failing to see how we'd be better off getting rid of the state altogether. Better to make the workings of the state as transparent and as responsive to the needs of the public as possible. You could argue that the system is too corrupt to allow for such reform, but not without applying the same argument to your own plans for scaling back the size and scope of the government.I'm not sure what you mean by this. Positional consumption is a very real, well documented phenomenon. Maybe it doesn't jive with your notion of how people ought to feel about their relative situations, but humans are a stubborn lot.
I was just pointed to a "bipartisan study" that I found revealing: Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well? I call it "bipartisan" because two of the principle authors are from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (two think tanks not known for their staunch leftist agendas).
Key findings:
* Americans are far more optimistic about their chances for upward economic mobility than Europeans. But commitment to that belief is eroding.
* Europeans (excluding the UK) actually have better economic mobility than the United States (as measured by comparing parents' incomes to those of their children). Now, some of this may be due to the fact that the gap between rich and poor is narrower, so it's a smaller trek to the top. But as I pointed out earlier, positional standing is important.
* Men in their thirties today make less than their fathers did, despite being significantly more productive. To me, this is one of those indications that our economic system is broken, because it means that the people at the top of the heap (the ones cutting the checks) have more say in how the pie gets distributed than the people at the bottom (the ones earning the checks). Some argue that productivity gains aren't equally distributed among the population, and therefore income gains shouldn't be either. But I don't think that comes close to explaining Figure 2.
Thought-provoking stuff.
Why would European countries have more economic mobility? I've heard all the horror stories about trying to start a business in Europe. The bureaucracy, the paperwork, the risk of hiring employees who will be difficult to fire. But there are also clear advantages to trying to start a business or get an education in a country that is less beholden to the largest corporate interests, and has a more effective safety net than the U.S.
In the U.S., in order to keep your health insurance, you have to continue holding down your current, full-time job until your side business is successful enough that it can pay for both your lifestyle and your family's insurance. Unless you're main job is so fuxx0rd that you can run your side business from your desk, that's a difficult proposition.
Also, in America, those who start their education are much less likely to complete it, because so many (and especially those with the poorest finances) have to "work their way through". This sets up all sorts of negative interactions between work, school, and family life. Often, something has to give. Europeans are more likely to be accessing state-financed education, which means they're going to be able to devote themselves fully to their education, and not leave college with crushing student loans. Thus, they'll be in a better position to get the capital to start a business.
I'm not saying that we should do everything like Europe, any more than I was saying that we should be more like Cuba. But in some ways, programs that you might consider "socialist" in character can promote economic opportunity.
It's great that you recognize the ickiness of the corporate state we have today. Unlike you, I consider that sad state of affairs to be the natural outcome of unregulated capitalism. Unless controls are put in place, wealthy interests will always use their current position to break the backs of labor, of their poorer competitors, or of any other interests that threaten their own. It helps if they can buy favorable regulations through bribery... I mean, campaign contributions to the candidate that will do the best job for America and we don't expect anything in return I swear to god. But it's not necessary. If the government got out of the regulation business and relegated itself to enforcing contracts and ensuring that corporations didn't use violence against their workers, corporate interests would try to corrupt those functions as well.
Ultimately, the envy I spoke of earlier is probably the le
It would be nice if this argument was about "how we should train people to be." I'm merely reporting the fact that people evaluate their own happiness by using the success of their "peers" as a benchmark. The "big study" in this regard indicated that half of a (probably non-representative) group would prefer a 50% drop in absolute income, if it meant being on the top of the heap, not the bottom.
It's more complex than that, because in reality (rather than the hypotheticals posed by that study) a lot depends on who you measure yourself against and how you view your own opportunities for improving your relative standing. Because we are a nation steeped in the mythos of (if not necessarily the fact of) great income mobility, income inequality is less determinative of our happiness than, say, Europeans. Nevertheless, the point stands: the poorer people do in comparison to those around them, the worse they feel. How they're doing in comparison to someone living in the bronze age, or a Bangladeshi straw hut? Not so much.
You're a clever person, so I leave it to you to speculate on why that might be.
Not by any coherent definition of the word "infinite". The mistaken idea you're repeating is the assumption that economic growth can be continued forever. This idea yanks economic activity out from its natural place, which is a subsystem of our finite, natural world. It's an insane thought, especially given that we have only a couple of centuries of growth (most of which took place when human activity was a relatively minor part of the natural world.
As insane as the idea is, it does have one desirable feature for folks with a certain ideological bent. So long as "we can always make more", it's easy to avoid dealing with the idea that anyone has too much, or that existing wealth might need to be redistributed.
That's a dangerous word, "entirely". Not all scientific advancement is due to "markets and voluntary trade", and I would suggest that a technically advanced society with an awkward, command-and-control economy is going to yield a higher standard of material wealth than a primitive society with a well-oiled "free market".
I'm not claiming that Cuba is a paradise, though from the pictures the weather seems nice and the people seem friendly. What I am saying is that, if they can achieve such long and happy lives despite shocking material deprivation and a lack of many political freedoms that I would sorely miss, maybe there is something to be learned from their culture. But the idea that we could possibly become poorer and happier at the same time flies in the face of capitalist ideology.
I would say that, if you could get the
You should definitely be looking at campaign finance reform and condorcet voting, then. Implementing a blind trust system for political donations would be a boon to third parties, since people would be more likely to donate to the parties they wanted to win, not the parties they hope will grant them favors after the election.
The advantage to condorcet voting for third parties should be obvious.
I think the simplest way to jump-start the alternative energy business would be for the government to buy several billion dollars of alternative infrastructure every year. Whatever generates the most energy per dollar spent.
I'm not sure about making congresscritters read the whole of every bill (though it would have the advantage of cutting down on the volume and complexity of legislation passed, that might not be a universally good thing).
But here's a counter-offer: All legislation must be done by wiki. Anyone slipping in a new provision at the last minute would have to attach their name and reputation to it, and it would be far easier to see what has been changed since the last time it came up for a vote. Knowing who gutted what bill and when could be very handy.
Obviously, no anonymous editing.