What the military is used for, and how big its budget is are to different subjects. Always try to emphasize one point when making an argument and don't throw in a random tangent.
You think it's that clean cut? Ever heard the adage, "If all you have is a hammer, you start seeing nails everywhere?" Our outrageous military spending and our outrageously militaristic behavior are joined at the hip.
1) A substantial amount of military research remains hidden from the public, so dollar for dollar I would hazard that the DoD is the least efficient vehicle for scientific research that benefits the public.
2) As a pure jobs program, the military is remarkably inefficient. If your goal is to keep people gainfully employed, you could probably create ten times as many jobs by just handing out picks, shovels, and an offer to pay $10/hr for anyone who wants to plant trees. Divide the number of dollars spent by the number of people employed. It's abysmal.
3) You don't see any consequences to our behavior? Do you think we'd have invaded Iraq if our military wasn't just sitting there like a big, idle ball peen hammer? The fact that we have it makes it very hard not to use it. It makes it hard not to threaten to use it. It makes it hard not to imply that it might be used if we don't get our way. In short, it makes it very hard to convince any country that we're negotiating as equals.
4) So, the U.S. spends most of its military budget on... building and maintaining the military? Were you expecting there to be a line item for "bribes, kickbacks, and other gratuities" or "chopping limbs off orphans"? I fail to see the "that's not so bad." As to the GDP argument, I found a list, and the countries that devote a bigger chunk of their economy to military spending reads like a who's-who of Places Which I'd Rather Have My Testicles Dynamited Off Than Spend a Week In.
Also, you can't pretend proportionality is a good metric. Two reasons. First, if you assume that some amount of military spending constitutes a necessity, then as the economy gets bigger, then the amount of money spent on necessities should go down.
Of course, military spending is odd, necessity-wise. How much you have to spend depends heavily on how much your enemies are spending. If you're in a standoff with the country across the strait, and they quadruple their spending, then you're compelled to spend a lot more as well.
Which raises the questions: who the hell is forcing us to spend this much? and how much of the rest of the world's spending is driven by the fear of Crazy Uncle Sam deciding to turn its super nifty military's attention towards them?
They're probably not, but you seem to be under the impression that labor ought to be priced entirely by what business owners see fit to pay. Care to elaborate?
Interesting? Maybe in the "Oh my God, an extremely advanced civilization has targeted us for conversion or extermination" sense. In the "Wow that means Yeshua bar Yosef really was the son of God" sense? Doubtful. Of course a few religions would find parallels to their own teachings, and do their little victory dances. But it will be a combination of mere happenstance and wishful thinking, mark my words. Mark them, dammit!
There are a couple of problems with this comment. First, it assumes that all impact on resources are externalities.
That's a feature, not a bug.
The way I see it, market forces do zilch for properly allocating resource use. Consider oil. Has it ever made sense to use a finite resource as quickly as we can possibly extract it? No. But the market price for oil (in fact, for all resources) seems to be determined by the extraction rate over a short time frame (certainly less than a generation). Market forces don't really kick in until the feasible extraction rate starts to fall behind demand, by which time we may have already degraded the long-term productivity of the resource.
In order to create a real "resources market", you would have to find a way to do the impossible: allow future people to bid in the present market. Someone nine hundred generations down the line might have a very valuable use for a barrel of oil, something that would make it well worth paying $3000/barrel for it. But he can't bid, so the oil is used by the person willing to pay $90/barrel today.
In short, every non-renewable resource will be depleted before it has the chance to be put to its best use. Semi-renewable resources (forests, fishing stocks, etc.) will tend to be overharvested. Market forces do a great job of telling us "it's more efficient to use 5 units of X than 12 units of Y," but they do a poor job of telling us "we need to be using less of everything."
I'd recommend reading "Steady State Economics," by Herman Daly. He goes into great detail about these sorts of problems, and has some interesting ideas on how to fix them.
I'm not convinced. Firstly, because you're assuming that the people who have lost their jobs are going to be able to find/develop new economic niches where they can be productive. If a country already has 40% unemployment, wouldn't some of the unemployed people have already found those niches?
The other problem is "food security" (actual food security, not the euphemistic sort that we used to call "hunger"). If China found a way to grow corn at half the price (or even a tenth the price) of corn grown in the U.S., would it be a good idea for us to turn off our combines, import everything, and retrain our farmers as iPod repairmen? In the rareified world of economic models, of course it would be. In the real world, even those who are favorably disposed towards China would bridle at the idea of letting them decide whether or not we ate.
There are advantages to self-sufficiency that don't show up on the short-term balance sheet, that might make it worthwhile for a country to pay more for food. I would list things like jobs (and the social stability that comes with them), widely distributed knowhow, local control, and the ability to resist diplomatic pressures. Local, small-scale food production is also a hedge against the demise of cheap oil, and other disruptions to the world economy.
Yes, that's the way it's supposed to play out over the long haul. In specific situations, though, it can go just as the grandparent describes.
Example: The WTO tells a third world nation to drop its agricultural tariffs in order to get a development loan. Nation does so. Suddenly, local farmers have to compete with cheap food products from the U.S. Non-farmers are arguably better off, since the price of food has dropped. The farmers are initially worse off, since they can no longer make a living farming. How long that disruption lasts depends at least in part on whether the labor market can find some alternate use for the labor that got freed up. If the nation was already suffering from 40% unemployment, the overall economy is probably worse off now that the agricultural market has become "more efficient."
The industrialization process is always eating out of the bottom of the labor market, killing off the jobs that are easiest to automate. Those jobs were initially the dirtiest, most repetitive, and most backbreaking ones. But automation can also killing off a certain number of jobs that didn't seem so bad at the time. Now that certain IT jobs are joining telegraph and switchboard operators on the dustbin of history, the idea that automation always frees us to do something "more interesting" is starting to ring false for me. When AIs start making high-level business decisions for us, what "more interesting" work will we be freed up for?
You seem to think that automation is an eternal process, and that there will always be "more interesting" work out there to replace the less interesting work. I don't think that's true. Eventually, there is no "better" work to be had, and at that point we'll have to either sever the link between occupation and income, or simply drag the unemployed out behind the chemical shed.
Of course, I also think that the existence of those 5,100,000,000 (actually, you should tack on 600M to that figure) extra people is a looming disaster, rather than something to be lauded. In breeding such numbers, we're likely sacrificing the tens of trillions of people who would have eventually lived, had we taken a more sustainable course. I think we'll fall prey to our own success long before the automation utopia arrives.
Technology (technology might be better defined broader to include economic, legal, and other types of technology) is about solving more problems with less resources. The only reason solving problems with less resources could ever be a problem is if we ran out of problems.
No, it's about solving more problems, full stop. The worry over making solutions resource-efficient only happens when the market begins to perceive them as scarce. Of course, by the time that happens, we may already be five miles up the creek, with a paddle the size of a tablespoon.
It should also be mentioned that many of the "problems" technology has to solve today are byproducts of the last few iterations of technological solutions.
I'm a little confused, because in one part of your post you're talking about the transition from industrial to post-industrial society, and in another you're warning against the alternative of "backbreaking menial subsistence farming".
Those seem like two wholly separate transitions to me. If Heinlein is right, and specialization really is for insects, then I would say that the subsistence farmer of yore was more effectively human than his great grandson doing the same repetitititititive job a thousand times a day on the assembly line.
In short, I think our humanity actually bottomed out with "industrial" society, and the transition to post-industrial society (if such a thing is indeed possible, and not merely the mad dream of a society drunk on cheap oil) promises to free us somewhat.
Shutting down the use of high carbon fuel such as coal, fuel oil, and diesel will put the crunch on the limited natural gas supply. How many ways do you want to spell SHORTAGE?
Now that you've revealed your secret logic, I can't begin to describe my disappointment. In the face of a penny per kilowatt tax on coal plants, the entire country would immediately shut down all the coal plants and switch completely to natural gas? THAT is why you felt justified in claiming that these states would be banning air conditioning, and that they were hypocrites for having roads and cars?
Nobody is talking about immediately pulling the plug on coal. Nobody. Anyone who pretends otherwise is scaremongering. You are scaremongering. You are pathetic, and I no longer care what you have to say.
It would have to comply with Negroponte's definition of "better", and he has been insistent that the system has to be as open as possible, from the hardware on up, so that anyone else can get into the laptop building racket.
Unless Microsoft provides the source code, it's unlikely. If they offer a free and non-discriminatory license to Windows-OLPC, maybe they have a prayer. But I don't see it happening.
Argue all you like over the merits of "an SUV tax". I'd favor it, myself.
If you had read the article, and understood that their proposals included things like taxing coal-fired plants and raising CAFE standards, why the hell were you scare-mongering about shutting off peoples' heat and electricity, and sounding like you thought they were being hypocritical because "The states suing still have roads and permit the use of heating oil and gas heat"?
I'm sorry, but your original essay did not demonstrate understanding of the material that was presented, and deserves an F. If you want a make-up exam, see me after class on Monday.
So, someone in a financially desperate situation, who has already exhausted every other method he can think of to appease his creditors, has gone through the humiliation of asking family and friends for money to no avail, has had his electricity shut off, and is about to lose the roof over his head, manages to convince himself that he'll be able to have the money back in his account before the lender cashes the check next week. He thinks wrong.
For this, for simply daring to hope that things could get better, you would condemn him to years of financial servitude?
This is not about survival of the fittest. Being in poverty doesn't stop anyone from having kids, and you're not going to convince a significant number of people that letting the poor die in the streets is a good plan, even if you believe it would weed out bad character traits. Some people will always be easy victims to anyone who manipulates their hopes and fears, so saying that "personal responsibility" is the solution to predatory lending is reprehensible.
I place most of the blame for the subprime fiasco on the lenders and the real estate agents, not the borrowers. First, it's clear that the lenders weren't properly vetting borrowers to see if they had a snowball's chance in hell of making the introductory monthly payments, much less the ballooned payments. After all, in the market they were working in, housing prices were expected to rise. So if they had to foreclose on the owners, they would make money on the deal. More important, lots of the lenders were packaging the loans up and selling them to investors, allowing them to cash out before things turned ugly. Real estate agents were willing to do whatever it took to get a family into a house, regardless of their ability to keep it, because they got their commission as soon as the deal closed.
What about the lenders? What should they be thinking, when they saw the monthly payment that would kick in after two years? They were thinking exactly what the lenders and the real estate people were telling them to think: "Look at what house prices are doing! [Show big graph with red line going up up up] If you buy now, you'll be able to refinance easily, because your house is worth so much more, so you'll never actually have to pay that big, scary number. But if you don't move now, house prices will explode out of your reach, and you'll be renting for the rest of your life."
That's the spiel they would get if they showed foresight. Of the three interested parties, I don't see one of them that was showing the sort of "personal responsibility" that you claim to prize. But only the borrowers are really getting hurt. Why is that acceptable to you?
Honestly, I don't see "less government regulation" and "greater personal freedom" as interchangeable. In fact, I think they often work at cross-purposes.
The way I see it, massive deregulation and reduction in the size and scope of government would simply pave the way for business interests to take liberty from the average person. Ask someone who is on the losing end of a payday loan with an APR of 390% whether they would feel more free if the government cracked down on such usurious practices. Ask someone with clean drinking water if they would feel more free if the government got out of the business of defending water quality.
Show me a plan to get more bang for the buck out of a government program, or a plan that reduces the regulatory burden on business while still protecting people from bad business practices, unsafe working conditions, dangerous products, and environmental degradation, and you have my enthusiastic interest. Show me a plan that simply assumes that, in the absence of government regulations, business will "do the right thing," and you offer a plan to feed us to the wolves.
As best I can tell, that's Ron Paul's plan, and the plan of every "Constitution-first'er". Given my current understanding of the candidate, I could not in good conscience support him.
Still, he's a principled fellow, he's very aware of the excesses of the "War on Terror", and he's about a thousand times better than Guliani. I get why people are so excited about him. I just have trouble seeing how corporate overlords are better than government overlords.
After that big Blackwater shooting back in mid-September, I remember reading an analysis of the tactics they used to protect the convoys under their care. It basically said that if you multiplied the number of civilians who were shot at or run off the road by each convoy by the number of convoys that travel through Baghdad every day, by the number of friends and family who heard the tale, and you had the number of hearts and minds lost by Blackwater.
Of course, Blackwater is paid for successful trips, and not fined for any feelings hurt along the way. So they use "any means necessary," even if those means are making it harder to fight the broader war. Our actual soldiers are generally much more PR-savvy, but it's hard for civvies to tell the difference between the groups. It was a pretty good argument for putting Blackwater under military command, if nothing else.
I can't find anything you've said that gives me a moment's comfort. Just because there exists a class of substances whose radiation emissions are high enough to be useful, we don't actually have to be worried about storing nuclear waste over the long haul?
The stuff bears the name "high level *WASTE*" for a reason: nobody has a use for it. According to Wikipedia, the worldwide production of this waste is about 12,000 tons a year. As yet, we have no long-term solution for storing all that waste. Yucca mountain is controversial, since it may not be as geologically inert as once believed, and it will fill up quickly. Plus it will have to be guarded for thousands of years in order to keep dirty bomb materials out of the hands of malcontents.
Nuclear waste is a serious concern, one we haven't come close to solving. If you think that industry can repurpose all that spent fuel, you're wrong. If that's not what you're arguing, then your reasoning is flawed. If some material could be repurposed (a tricky task, given the need to keep such material out of the wrong hands), the rest still presents some thorny storage problems.
All the preceding ignores the problem of intermediate-level nuclear waste, which doesn't emit useful amounts of radiation, but is still very dangerous if it contaminates your surroundings. There's lots of the stuff, from a wide variety of sources (not just the nuclear energy industry). The nukes-first crowd also ignores the non-radioactive but still lethal tailings that are left over when uranium is mined.
To be brief, you seem to have this facile idea that, if a substance has a long half-life, then it doesn't have significant health risks. Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,100 years, but I doubt you'd willingly keep a ball of the stuff in your apartment. These substances often have health effects that arise from their chemical properties; uranium will destroy your kidneys long before it gives you cancer.
no action will actually be taken on any of the issues at hand for a decade or more.
Read the article. Several of the states involved in the suit have already passed specific pieces of legislation, which the EPA is keeping from taking effect. The moment the EPA approves the waiver, these states will be "taking action."
Attention whore or not, don't argue that this lawsuit would accomplish nothing.
I'm glad you took Chemistry 101, so you could enlighten all the morons involved with this suit. If it weren't for you, the states suing for the right to regulate CO2 wouldn't have the foggiest idea how they were going to carry it out.
Seriously, what insight are you adding to this conversation? There is no need to speculate about how these states could ever possibly hope to control CO2 emissions, as though they had announced their intention to overthrow the laws of thermodynamics. The article goes into specifics about what steps they intend to take, and -- surprise of surprises -- they're not banning air conditioning or cars or warm houses. Yeah, yeah, I know you didn't read it, and hardly anyone does. That's a pitiful excuse for injecting this sort of ill-informed noise into the debate.
The problem is that as rates go up, people will use less electricity from the grid (whether by running air conditioners less or buying rooftop solar for homes or businesses), and reduce the profit of the companies.
That's why enlightened states like California decouple the profits of the energy providers from the amount of energy they deliver.
Ask your state legislature if Decoupling is right for you.
Despite whatever you might believe, or whatever hyperbolic excesses might or might not have been uttered by B-list celebrities, acid rain was a serious problem. You seem to think that, because the world still stands, and because fresh-faced children are still able to skip through meadows covered with wildflowers, that the danger of acid rain was illusory.
But the reason you don't hear such doom and gloom over acid rain these days is because we started regulating sulfur dioxide emissions. SO2 is actually one of the big regulatory success stories, and good evidence that such regulations don't significantly harm industry. When the regulations were being proposed, the energy lobby claimed it would cost industry $1200 for each ton of SO2 prevented. It turned out to be closer to $100.
Pollution knows no borders. Pollutants dumped into the river in Ohio can harm the people in Louisiana, sulfur dioxide emitted in Nevada can cause acid rain in Virginia.
There is nothing in your "laboratory of American states" utopian fantasy that allows one state to control the actions of another, even when one state is clearly harming another. Or do you suggest that pollution be regulated by a blizzard of state-on-state lawsuits?
The need for a regulatory body like the EPA should be obvious. Anyone suggesting that the EPA itself is unconstitutional -- unless they propose in the very same breath that we pass a constitutional amendment to remedy the situation -- should be considered dangerous, because no reasonable person would want to disband the EPA merely for the sake of constitutional purity.
The fact that the Founding Fathers didn't make such allowances in the Constitution shows that they either didn't have the wisdom to foresee the need, or they didn't believe they could ratify the Constitution if they included such allowances. In either case, the Constitution is an imperfect document that hardly warrants the sort of reverence that you strict constructionists give it.
were each state given the ability to mandate their own efficiency requirements for cars, the result would be a broad range of such standards and car companies would have to meet the most efficient denominator, with a drastic (skyward) impact on the price of cars.
What you're basically saying is that, you're in favor of states' rights, except when they make it more difficult for corporations to make money.
The "problem" you cite (individual states forcing higher standards on the country as a whole) is actually a blessing. California's hard-assed energy efficiency requirements have made all sorts of big appliances more energy efficient (and I defy you to show that they've added significantly to the cost of your fridge).
But that's not the way it would play out in this case. At least when it comes to the transportation sector, the states involved in the suit want to jack up the CAFE standards for their own states. CAFE standards describe properties of the auto fleet as a whole, not individual cars. Car companies wouldn't have to build a separate, more fuel efficient Hummer for California; they simply wouldn't be able to sell as many Hummers in California (as a proportion of the overall fleet). The real expenses come when manufacturers are forced to have two separate manufacturing processes for a given product, which is why so many just give up and make all their products according to the most stringent standards. Instead, these laws give them the option of complying by increasing the number of smaller cars they sell in California, which wouldn't require any change to any individual car or manufacturing process.
You seem to be forgetting that, the last time CAFE standards were raised, American auto manufacturers threw a hissy fit, claiming that the new regs were huge burdens and would put them out of business. If anything, 1980-1984 (the years when the CAFE standards went into effect, and started ratcheting up) marked the recovery of the American auto industry from the doldrums of the 1970's. Our country has fuel efficiency standards that are half those of the EU or Japan, and lower than China's. Raising the standards would help our car companies compete in some huge foreign markets.
One of the purposes of the Attorney General's office is to protect the rights of the consumer. The rights of the consumer are NOT being trampled in this situation. Everybody in America has the opportunity to buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle.
Pop quiz: Which logical fallacy are you committing here? Just because one of the purposes of X is to do Y, that doesn't mean that X can't have other purposes. The Office of the Attorney General is tasked with conducting the legal affairs of its government. Nothing requires that an AG office to have a "consumer rights" justification for every suit they bring.
Here's how it went down: in the last round of litigation, these states looked at the laws governing the EPA, which gave them the job of controlling the emission of pollutants. The EPA claimed that CO2 was not a pollutant, so they didn't have to regulate it, and could forbid state governments from regulating it as well. The states' position was that CO2 was clearly a pollutant, and that the EPA needed to grant the states a waiver to regulate it if they weren't going to do it themselves.
The Supreme Court sided with the states. Despite this, the EPA has been dragging its heels on actually issuing the waivers the states need. So the states are taking them back to court.
This is where your "analysis" of "the proper way to get the EPA to change its guidelines" falls down. The states aren't trying to force a change in the EPA's guidelines; they're simply asking the EPA to enforce the law as it exists now. If it weren't for the ability to bring suits exactly like this, there would be almost no way to compel the executive branch to follow the laws of the legislative branch. According to your "proper" system, the only way to effect change at the EPA is to have the legislators change the EPA's guidelines. But how does that help when the EPA isn't living up to existing guidelines?
Your rule against "the government suing the government" is senseless.
I don't think that Greenpeace is the only environmental group that the Dittoheads try to smear as raving loons. Anyone who demands any environmental protection that could conceivably detract from the GDP, or force industry to do anything against their will, receive basically the same treatment.
Wait... sorry, my bad. I thought you were talking about Slashdot and Gizmondo.
I read the Greenpeace response as "we go after everybody, not just high-profile targets that grab headlines," which Gizmondo spun into the exact opposite, and Slashdot uncritically swallowed.
Slashdot Mirror
1) A substantial amount of military research remains hidden from the public, so dollar for dollar I would hazard that the DoD is the least efficient vehicle for scientific research that benefits the public.
2) As a pure jobs program, the military is remarkably inefficient. If your goal is to keep people gainfully employed, you could probably create ten times as many jobs by just handing out picks, shovels, and an offer to pay $10/hr for anyone who wants to plant trees. Divide the number of dollars spent by the number of people employed. It's abysmal.
3) You don't see any consequences to our behavior? Do you think we'd have invaded Iraq if our military wasn't just sitting there like a big, idle ball peen hammer? The fact that we have it makes it very hard not to use it. It makes it hard not to threaten to use it. It makes it hard not to imply that it might be used if we don't get our way. In short, it makes it very hard to convince any country that we're negotiating as equals.
4) So, the U.S. spends most of its military budget on... building and maintaining the military? Were you expecting there to be a line item for "bribes, kickbacks, and other gratuities" or "chopping limbs off orphans"? I fail to see the "that's not so bad." As to the GDP argument, I found a list, and the countries that devote a bigger chunk of their economy to military spending reads like a who's-who of Places Which I'd Rather Have My Testicles Dynamited Off Than Spend a Week In.
Also, you can't pretend proportionality is a good metric. Two reasons. First, if you assume that some amount of military spending constitutes a necessity, then as the economy gets bigger, then the amount of money spent on necessities should go down.
Of course, military spending is odd, necessity-wise. How much you have to spend depends heavily on how much your enemies are spending. If you're in a standoff with the country across the strait, and they quadruple their spending, then you're compelled to spend a lot more as well.
Which raises the questions: who the hell is forcing us to spend this much? and how much of the rest of the world's spending is driven by the fear of Crazy Uncle Sam deciding to turn its super nifty military's attention towards them?
They're probably not, but you seem to be under the impression that labor ought to be priced entirely by what business owners see fit to pay. Care to elaborate?
Interesting? Maybe in the "Oh my God, an extremely advanced civilization has targeted us for conversion or extermination" sense. In the "Wow that means Yeshua bar Yosef really was the son of God" sense? Doubtful. Of course a few religions would find parallels to their own teachings, and do their little victory dances. But it will be a combination of mere happenstance and wishful thinking, mark my words. Mark them, dammit!
The way I see it, market forces do zilch for properly allocating resource use. Consider oil. Has it ever made sense to use a finite resource as quickly as we can possibly extract it? No. But the market price for oil (in fact, for all resources) seems to be determined by the extraction rate over a short time frame (certainly less than a generation). Market forces don't really kick in until the feasible extraction rate starts to fall behind demand, by which time we may have already degraded the long-term productivity of the resource.
In order to create a real "resources market", you would have to find a way to do the impossible: allow future people to bid in the present market. Someone nine hundred generations down the line might have a very valuable use for a barrel of oil, something that would make it well worth paying $3000/barrel for it. But he can't bid, so the oil is used by the person willing to pay $90/barrel today.
In short, every non-renewable resource will be depleted before it has the chance to be put to its best use. Semi-renewable resources (forests, fishing stocks, etc.) will tend to be overharvested. Market forces do a great job of telling us "it's more efficient to use 5 units of X than 12 units of Y," but they do a poor job of telling us "we need to be using less of everything."
I'd recommend reading "Steady State Economics," by Herman Daly. He goes into great detail about these sorts of problems, and has some interesting ideas on how to fix them.
I'm not convinced. Firstly, because you're assuming that the people who have lost their jobs are going to be able to find/develop new economic niches where they can be productive. If a country already has 40% unemployment, wouldn't some of the unemployed people have already found those niches?
The other problem is "food security" (actual food security, not the euphemistic sort that we used to call "hunger"). If China found a way to grow corn at half the price (or even a tenth the price) of corn grown in the U.S., would it be a good idea for us to turn off our combines, import everything, and retrain our farmers as iPod repairmen? In the rareified world of economic models, of course it would be. In the real world, even those who are favorably disposed towards China would bridle at the idea of letting them decide whether or not we ate.
There are advantages to self-sufficiency that don't show up on the short-term balance sheet, that might make it worthwhile for a country to pay more for food. I would list things like jobs (and the social stability that comes with them), widely distributed knowhow, local control, and the ability to resist diplomatic pressures. Local, small-scale food production is also a hedge against the demise of cheap oil, and other disruptions to the world economy.
Yes, that's the way it's supposed to play out over the long haul. In specific situations, though, it can go just as the grandparent describes.
Example: The WTO tells a third world nation to drop its agricultural tariffs in order to get a development loan. Nation does so. Suddenly, local farmers have to compete with cheap food products from the U.S. Non-farmers are arguably better off, since the price of food has dropped. The farmers are initially worse off, since they can no longer make a living farming. How long that disruption lasts depends at least in part on whether the labor market can find some alternate use for the labor that got freed up. If the nation was already suffering from 40% unemployment, the overall economy is probably worse off now that the agricultural market has become "more efficient."
The industrialization process is always eating out of the bottom of the labor market, killing off the jobs that are easiest to automate. Those jobs were initially the dirtiest, most repetitive, and most backbreaking ones. But automation can also killing off a certain number of jobs that didn't seem so bad at the time. Now that certain IT jobs are joining telegraph and switchboard operators on the dustbin of history, the idea that automation always frees us to do something "more interesting" is starting to ring false for me. When AIs start making high-level business decisions for us, what "more interesting" work will we be freed up for?
You seem to think that automation is an eternal process, and that there will always be "more interesting" work out there to replace the less interesting work. I don't think that's true. Eventually, there is no "better" work to be had, and at that point we'll have to either sever the link between occupation and income, or simply drag the unemployed out behind the chemical shed.
Of course, I also think that the existence of those 5,100,000,000 (actually, you should tack on 600M to that figure) extra people is a looming disaster, rather than something to be lauded. In breeding such numbers, we're likely sacrificing the tens of trillions of people who would have eventually lived, had we taken a more sustainable course. I think we'll fall prey to our own success long before the automation utopia arrives.
It should also be mentioned that many of the "problems" technology has to solve today are byproducts of the last few iterations of technological solutions.
I'm a little confused, because in one part of your post you're talking about the transition from industrial to post-industrial society, and in another you're warning against the alternative of "backbreaking menial subsistence farming".
Those seem like two wholly separate transitions to me. If Heinlein is right, and specialization really is for insects, then I would say that the subsistence farmer of yore was more effectively human than his great grandson doing the same repetitititititive job a thousand times a day on the assembly line.
In short, I think our humanity actually bottomed out with "industrial" society, and the transition to post-industrial society (if such a thing is indeed possible, and not merely the mad dream of a society drunk on cheap oil) promises to free us somewhat.
Nobody is talking about immediately pulling the plug on coal. Nobody. Anyone who pretends otherwise is scaremongering. You are scaremongering. You are pathetic, and I no longer care what you have to say.
It would have to comply with Negroponte's definition of "better", and he has been insistent that the system has to be as open as possible, from the hardware on up, so that anyone else can get into the laptop building racket.
Unless Microsoft provides the source code, it's unlikely. If they offer a free and non-discriminatory license to Windows-OLPC, maybe they have a prayer. But I don't see it happening.
I read that OLPC was trying to team up with Heifers for Humanity, but Heifer balked when they demanded that each cow have a USB port installed.
Argue all you like over the merits of "an SUV tax". I'd favor it, myself.
If you had read the article, and understood that their proposals included things like taxing coal-fired plants and raising CAFE standards, why the hell were you scare-mongering about shutting off peoples' heat and electricity, and sounding like you thought they were being hypocritical because "The states suing still have roads and permit the use of heating oil and gas heat"?
I'm sorry, but your original essay did not demonstrate understanding of the material that was presented, and deserves an F. If you want a make-up exam, see me after class on Monday.
So, someone in a financially desperate situation, who has already exhausted every other method he can think of to appease his creditors, has gone through the humiliation of asking family and friends for money to no avail, has had his electricity shut off, and is about to lose the roof over his head, manages to convince himself that he'll be able to have the money back in his account before the lender cashes the check next week. He thinks wrong.
For this, for simply daring to hope that things could get better, you would condemn him to years of financial servitude?
This is not about survival of the fittest. Being in poverty doesn't stop anyone from having kids, and you're not going to convince a significant number of people that letting the poor die in the streets is a good plan, even if you believe it would weed out bad character traits. Some people will always be easy victims to anyone who manipulates their hopes and fears, so saying that "personal responsibility" is the solution to predatory lending is reprehensible.
I place most of the blame for the subprime fiasco on the lenders and the real estate agents, not the borrowers. First, it's clear that the lenders weren't properly vetting borrowers to see if they had a snowball's chance in hell of making the introductory monthly payments, much less the ballooned payments. After all, in the market they were working in, housing prices were expected to rise. So if they had to foreclose on the owners, they would make money on the deal. More important, lots of the lenders were packaging the loans up and selling them to investors, allowing them to cash out before things turned ugly. Real estate agents were willing to do whatever it took to get a family into a house, regardless of their ability to keep it, because they got their commission as soon as the deal closed.
What about the lenders? What should they be thinking, when they saw the monthly payment that would kick in after two years? They were thinking exactly what the lenders and the real estate people were telling them to think: "Look at what house prices are doing! [Show big graph with red line going up up up] If you buy now, you'll be able to refinance easily, because your house is worth so much more, so you'll never actually have to pay that big, scary number. But if you don't move now, house prices will explode out of your reach, and you'll be renting for the rest of your life."
That's the spiel they would get if they showed foresight. Of the three interested parties, I don't see one of them that was showing the sort of "personal responsibility" that you claim to prize. But only the borrowers are really getting hurt. Why is that acceptable to you?
Honestly, I don't see "less government regulation" and "greater personal freedom" as interchangeable. In fact, I think they often work at cross-purposes.
The way I see it, massive deregulation and reduction in the size and scope of government would simply pave the way for business interests to take liberty from the average person. Ask someone who is on the losing end of a payday loan with an APR of 390% whether they would feel more free if the government cracked down on such usurious practices. Ask someone with clean drinking water if they would feel more free if the government got out of the business of defending water quality.
Show me a plan to get more bang for the buck out of a government program, or a plan that reduces the regulatory burden on business while still protecting people from bad business practices, unsafe working conditions, dangerous products, and environmental degradation, and you have my enthusiastic interest. Show me a plan that simply assumes that, in the absence of government regulations, business will "do the right thing," and you offer a plan to feed us to the wolves.
As best I can tell, that's Ron Paul's plan, and the plan of every "Constitution-first'er". Given my current understanding of the candidate, I could not in good conscience support him.
Still, he's a principled fellow, he's very aware of the excesses of the "War on Terror", and he's about a thousand times better than Guliani. I get why people are so excited about him. I just have trouble seeing how corporate overlords are better than government overlords.
After that big Blackwater shooting back in mid-September, I remember reading an analysis of the tactics they used to protect the convoys under their care. It basically said that if you multiplied the number of civilians who were shot at or run off the road by each convoy by the number of convoys that travel through Baghdad every day, by the number of friends and family who heard the tale, and you had the number of hearts and minds lost by Blackwater.
Of course, Blackwater is paid for successful trips, and not fined for any feelings hurt along the way. So they use "any means necessary," even if those means are making it harder to fight the broader war. Our actual soldiers are generally much more PR-savvy, but it's hard for civvies to tell the difference between the groups. It was a pretty good argument for putting Blackwater under military command, if nothing else.
I can't find anything you've said that gives me a moment's comfort. Just because there exists a class of substances whose radiation emissions are high enough to be useful, we don't actually have to be worried about storing nuclear waste over the long haul?
The stuff bears the name "high level *WASTE*" for a reason: nobody has a use for it. According to Wikipedia, the worldwide production of this waste is about 12,000 tons a year. As yet, we have no long-term solution for storing all that waste. Yucca mountain is controversial, since it may not be as geologically inert as once believed, and it will fill up quickly. Plus it will have to be guarded for thousands of years in order to keep dirty bomb materials out of the hands of malcontents.
Nuclear waste is a serious concern, one we haven't come close to solving. If you think that industry can repurpose all that spent fuel, you're wrong. If that's not what you're arguing, then your reasoning is flawed. If some material could be repurposed (a tricky task, given the need to keep such material out of the wrong hands), the rest still presents some thorny storage problems.
All the preceding ignores the problem of intermediate-level nuclear waste, which doesn't emit useful amounts of radiation, but is still very dangerous if it contaminates your surroundings. There's lots of the stuff, from a wide variety of sources (not just the nuclear energy industry). The nukes-first crowd also ignores the non-radioactive but still lethal tailings that are left over when uranium is mined.
To be brief, you seem to have this facile idea that, if a substance has a long half-life, then it doesn't have significant health risks. Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,100 years, but I doubt you'd willingly keep a ball of the stuff in your apartment. These substances often have health effects that arise from their chemical properties; uranium will destroy your kidneys long before it gives you cancer.
Attention whore or not, don't argue that this lawsuit would accomplish nothing.
I'm glad you took Chemistry 101, so you could enlighten all the morons involved with this suit. If it weren't for you, the states suing for the right to regulate CO2 wouldn't have the foggiest idea how they were going to carry it out.
Seriously, what insight are you adding to this conversation? There is no need to speculate about how these states could ever possibly hope to control CO2 emissions, as though they had announced their intention to overthrow the laws of thermodynamics. The article goes into specifics about what steps they intend to take, and -- surprise of surprises -- they're not banning air conditioning or cars or warm houses. Yeah, yeah, I know you didn't read it, and hardly anyone does. That's a pitiful excuse for injecting this sort of ill-informed noise into the debate.
Ask your state legislature if Decoupling is right for you.
Despite whatever you might believe, or whatever hyperbolic excesses might or might not have been uttered by B-list celebrities, acid rain was a serious problem. You seem to think that, because the world still stands, and because fresh-faced children are still able to skip through meadows covered with wildflowers, that the danger of acid rain was illusory.
But the reason you don't hear such doom and gloom over acid rain these days is because we started regulating sulfur dioxide emissions. SO2 is actually one of the big regulatory success stories, and good evidence that such regulations don't significantly harm industry. When the regulations were being proposed, the energy lobby claimed it would cost industry $1200 for each ton of SO2 prevented. It turned out to be closer to $100.
The EPA is unconstitutional?
Pollution knows no borders. Pollutants dumped into the river in Ohio can harm the people in Louisiana, sulfur dioxide emitted in Nevada can cause acid rain in Virginia.
There is nothing in your "laboratory of American states" utopian fantasy that allows one state to control the actions of another, even when one state is clearly harming another. Or do you suggest that pollution be regulated by a blizzard of state-on-state lawsuits?
The need for a regulatory body like the EPA should be obvious. Anyone suggesting that the EPA itself is unconstitutional -- unless they propose in the very same breath that we pass a constitutional amendment to remedy the situation -- should be considered dangerous, because no reasonable person would want to disband the EPA merely for the sake of constitutional purity.
The fact that the Founding Fathers didn't make such allowances in the Constitution shows that they either didn't have the wisdom to foresee the need, or they didn't believe they could ratify the Constitution if they included such allowances. In either case, the Constitution is an imperfect document that hardly warrants the sort of reverence that you strict constructionists give it.
The "problem" you cite (individual states forcing higher standards on the country as a whole) is actually a blessing. California's hard-assed energy efficiency requirements have made all sorts of big appliances more energy efficient (and I defy you to show that they've added significantly to the cost of your fridge).
But that's not the way it would play out in this case. At least when it comes to the transportation sector, the states involved in the suit want to jack up the CAFE standards for their own states. CAFE standards describe properties of the auto fleet as a whole, not individual cars. Car companies wouldn't have to build a separate, more fuel efficient Hummer for California; they simply wouldn't be able to sell as many Hummers in California (as a proportion of the overall fleet). The real expenses come when manufacturers are forced to have two separate manufacturing processes for a given product, which is why so many just give up and make all their products according to the most stringent standards. Instead, these laws give them the option of complying by increasing the number of smaller cars they sell in California, which wouldn't require any change to any individual car or manufacturing process.
You seem to be forgetting that, the last time CAFE standards were raised, American auto manufacturers threw a hissy fit, claiming that the new regs were huge burdens and would put them out of business. If anything, 1980-1984 (the years when the CAFE standards went into effect, and started ratcheting up) marked the recovery of the American auto industry from the doldrums of the 1970's. Our country has fuel efficiency standards that are half those of the EU or Japan, and lower than China's. Raising the standards would help our car companies compete in some huge foreign markets.Pop quiz: Which logical fallacy are you committing here? Just because one of the purposes of X is to do Y, that doesn't mean that X can't have other purposes. The Office of the Attorney General is tasked with conducting the legal affairs of its government. Nothing requires that an AG office to have a "consumer rights" justification for every suit they bring.
Here's how it went down: in the last round of litigation, these states looked at the laws governing the EPA, which gave them the job of controlling the emission of pollutants. The EPA claimed that CO2 was not a pollutant, so they didn't have to regulate it, and could forbid state governments from regulating it as well. The states' position was that CO2 was clearly a pollutant, and that the EPA needed to grant the states a waiver to regulate it if they weren't going to do it themselves.
The Supreme Court sided with the states. Despite this, the EPA has been dragging its heels on actually issuing the waivers the states need. So the states are taking them back to court.
This is where your "analysis" of "the proper way to get the EPA to change its guidelines" falls down. The states aren't trying to force a change in the EPA's guidelines; they're simply asking the EPA to enforce the law as it exists now. If it weren't for the ability to bring suits exactly like this, there would be almost no way to compel the executive branch to follow the laws of the legislative branch. According to your "proper" system, the only way to effect change at the EPA is to have the legislators change the EPA's guidelines. But how does that help when the EPA isn't living up to existing guidelines?
Your rule against "the government suing the government" is senseless.
I don't think that Greenpeace is the only environmental group that the Dittoheads try to smear as raving loons. Anyone who demands any environmental protection that could conceivably detract from the GDP, or force industry to do anything against their will, receive basically the same treatment.
You're absolutely right!
Wait... sorry, my bad. I thought you were talking about Slashdot and Gizmondo.
I read the Greenpeace response as "we go after everybody, not just high-profile targets that grab headlines," which Gizmondo spun into the exact opposite, and Slashdot uncritically swallowed.