None of those criticisms can be properly countered with "then just don't use multiplayer."
"I have to pay for multiplayer even if I don't use it." - "Well, then don't use multiplayer."
"I have to wait for the publisher to perfect the multiplayer features, even if I don't want them." - "Well, then don't use multiplayer."
"I'm constantly reading in the media that multiplayer is the future, and game publishers are pushing more and more multiplayer-oriented features, often to the point that standalone play suffers." -- "Well, then don't use multiplayer."
This dose of reading comprehension brought to you by AOC.
I applaud you on putting forward a truly mind-bending thought. It took me a surprisingly long time to recognize that I mostly agreed with it.
But I don't see a good solution to the problem, because the biggest problem is that modern society is just so friggin' complex, that there is no way to educate a fifteen year old in such a way that he/she has a good shot at succeeding in a way that we commonly think of as "independent". Once we've taught them the sort of basic maturity that can allow them to value their own long-term interests and the interests of others (a sometimes impossible task), we still have to teach them a laundry list of knowledge and skills: basic household and auto repairs, how to do their taxes, how to balance a checkbook, how to pay their bills, how to plan and shop for and prepare nutritious meals, how to clean up after themselves, how to manage their time, how to use the Internet, how to drive safely, how to be responsible and effective at their chosen occupation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Again, that's assuming that the desire to be an honest, hardworking, successful person already exists.
Without restructuring of society to abstract away all the tricky bits, it's more than even the most astute teenager can be reasonably expected to handle.
So, we're faced with the problem: How do we protect them from the consequences of their actions until they've learned enough to manage all of life's various risks, without impeding their maturation, while respecting their autonomy.
The abstinence-only crowd has one solution: teach them not to do the things that would cause these negative consequences. Don't have sex. It's a simple approach, easy to comprehend. But the bankruptcy of that approach is revealed when you start asking advocates about the exceptions. What happens to those who don't get the message? The more I study their reactions to that simple question, the more clearly I think I understand their conception of the world. They are the "good" people, with a message that other "good" people will accept and act on. If the message is taught loud and long enough, all the other good people will avoid sex before marriage. The rest of them, the ones who don't heed the message, are seen as either acceptable collateral damage or bad people who deserve all the misery and suffering life can offer.
Sounds harsh, yes. But when I see conservative, religious folks getting fighting mad because somebody wants to take some very simple, very effective precautions to reduce a consequence of "inappropriate" sexual behavior, what else can I conclude? Take the recent insanity over the new HPV vaccine. HPV is an STD that a majority of women will contract at some point in their lives, which is known to raise the risk of cervical cancer. Several states are working on laws that would use the education system to deliver the vaccine to young people. Critics of these plans say that we mustn't carry them out, because vaccinating a sixth grader is tantamount to telling them that it's fine for them to be having sex.
It seems that the goal of reducing the amount of sexual activity is more important to such people than protecting kids from the harm these kids could inflict on themselves through their behavior. It's like saying that we shouldn't disarm some of the mines in a minefield, because people would be more likely to walk through it.
The alternative is to protect kids from the potential consequences of risky behavior, as the proponents of comprehensive sex ed suggest. The criticism of that position is usually of the "if we remove all consequences to their behavior, then how will they learn?" It's a strong argument in many other domains. The argument is weaker in the case of sexual activity, because most of the consequences of sexual activity can be minimized or eliminated, leaving an exciting and pleasurable activity in its wake. What they really seem to be asking is, "if our children can engage in consequence-free sex, what leverage do we have in our ques
Most water is heated by gas, not by electricity. So the hot water thing might not work well.
Assuming you know what times the electricity is cheap and when it's expensive, you could just turn the thermostat down, cooling the freezer extra cold, when power was cheap, and then set it back up higher when electricity is expensive.
That's a pretty restraining assumption. It's also possible that the energy savings just aren't worth the effort, if done manually. Given that we've gotten very good at automating things, why not turn that talent to this problem?
One thing to remember is that household fridges don't trap their heat very long (certainly when judging by the scale of several hours). So in order to get such small devices in on this "usage shifting", they'd need to be actively receiving information on much shorter timescales. This, in turn, requires that the energy grid communicate with attached appliances. There is a fair bit of research going into smart grids and smart appliances (though I'm not terribly familiar with it).
The point is, if you knew that you could save yourself half a penny of electricity by turning your fridge's thermostat down now, and back up in three minutes, you probably wouldn't bother. You wouldn't even bother subscribing to a news feed that offered such marginally useful information. But give the appliances themselves that information, and everyone saves like crazy.
You're fighting really hard to nail the idea over a simple semantic gaffe. When they say "store energy," they really mean "pre-use". We get that. Journalists can be idiots. We get that as well.
You're right, shifting power usage to more convenient times is a standard practice for conserving energy and smoothing out peak loads. But this is a very interesting way to do it. More important, every new method we discover for doing so makes intermittent energy sources like wind power and solar more viable.
It also highlights the need to "smarten up" our energy grid, giving the appliances connected to them information that they can use. In order for this method to work effectively (especially for smaller refrigeration units that can't hold their cold for an entire day) the unit needs to know when the grid generators are overproducing. A refrigerated warehouse could probably turn off for several hours and only rise a degree or two. But a smaller unit (maybe even a household fridge) changes temperature a lot faster, and so would need up-to-the-minute information to guide it.
Incidentally, my power company offered incentives last summer to people who would install regulators on their air conditioners, giving them some control over exactly when they turned on and off. The idea was that, by coordinating the appliances in an area, they could lower peak demand and avoid expensive infrastructure work. That idea could work well in tandem with this one.
That's a bit trite. It could also be said that unsatisfying, frustrating jobs tend to make people poorer performers. It sounds like you're putting all the blame on the employees.
I really think that the guy who gave that quote recognized that he was describing a catch-22 situation, which probably went over the reporter's head. I don't think anyone could pull that quote off by accident. Cognitive dissonance alone would keep him from thinking about the two things at the same time.
Translation: I use people solely as a means to my own ends.
Kant damn you!
But since you're not big on the idea of caring about the happiness of someone you've worked alongside for years, because he is no longer making you teh moneeyz, might I suggest that you treat the person well anyways? That way, in his future dealings with industry colleagues, he'll give much more positive reviews. When it comes to jobs, relationships, or whatever other experience you care to mention, people are likely to remember how it ended, and let those memories color the overall experience. This will, in turn, color the perceptions of a lot of other people, many of whom may turn out to be future employees or customers.
Chances are, by the time your employee has given notice, he's already been giving a 60% effort for months. You just didn't notice. So it's odd to think that getting 100% out of an employee's remaining time is more important than giving him time to get some documentation together for his replacement.
Or look at it another way. If the guy gives you two weeks notice, and you immediately throw him out the door with one week's pay, you've just paid one week's salary for zero hours of work. Whereas, if you let him work those last two weeks at 50% effort, you'll be paying two weeks' salary for forty hours of work (which will probably save his replacement far more than that).
Another liability you haven't accounted for: You're treating a soon-to-be former employee like dirt, shoving him out the door like that. He'll remember that when advising people about working for you, or buying from you (hardly an idle threat; the mere fact that he works for you means he's in your industry). And under most circumstances, you can't argue that you're protecting the company from a disgruntled employee by not letting him work those last two weeks. Whatever damage or mischief you expect your ex-employee to cause is irrelevant; whatever caused him to leave, he's probably known it for quite a while, so he's already had plenty of opportunity to set up whatever you imagine him to be capable of. Further, even if he hasn't set up any backdoors or copied any files, he still has knowledge of the company that he could use to create problems. By catapulting him, you make him far more likely to use it. BSA audit, anyone?
Question: Do you fire people when they have family crises? God knows you can't get 100% work out of somebody going through a divorce, or someone with a sick family member.
In short, I'm not buying any of your excuses for generating ill will among your former employees. They all sounds like rationalizations for petty vengeance.
I'm not clear about your point. It's just not physically possible to get anywhere near CFL-like efficiency when you're generating light by heating a filament.
The California legislature isn't "picking winners" so much as "picking a single, highly wasteful loser." The remaining products on the market are still forced to compete on attributes like cost, energy efficiency, light quality, etc. By removing the most energy inefficient bulbs from the market altogether, they're going to greatly expand the market for efficient bulbs (regardless of the lightmaking technique used), promote investment and research into improving efficient bulb design, and generally make the lightbulb market more competitive, not less.
Modern CFLs come in a wide variety of light color outputs, and the recent move towards electronic ballasts rather than magnetic ballasts has made both flicker and slow start-up times a near non-issue. The EnergyStar page describes the qualities needed to carry the EnergyStar label:
In addition to other quality requirements, must turn on instantly, produce no sound, and fall within a warm color range or be otherwise labeled as providing cooler color tones.
A couple of people in this discussion have claimed that CFLs give them headaches because of the flicker. This should only be true for older bulbs using magnetic ballasts (which flicker at about 60-75 Hz, about the same as a CRT computer screen). Electronic ballasts cycle at around 20,000Hz, and I defy anyone to demonstrate that their eyeballs can detect that.
In short, many of the CFL-products on the market are already good enough to compete on their own merits, and intra-CFL competition should be enough to drive out the worst practices (at least, the ones that affect the end-user experience).
I've spent the last hour scouring the InterTubes for information about mercury and CFLs. My conclusions:
* Mercury-free CFLs are nigh unto impossible. * CFLs cause minimal residential exposure, even if broken. * Widespread adoption of CFLs will greatly reduce the overall amount of mercury being put into the environment. * It would also move the mercury hotspots from "downwind of the power plant" to "the municipal dump." This might be a bad thing. * Recycling programs can help with this. But as I said before, consumer education isn't an easy thing. * The EPA doesn't classify CFLs or CFL corpses as hazardous waste.
So while there are a couple of tradeoffs to account for, I think CFLs are significantly better mercury-wise as well. But it took me (a fairly scientific and interested person who knows the 'Net very well) a good deal of effort to come to these conclusions. How is a free market full of harried, apathetic, scientifically illiterate consumers going to work with a self-serving business world that can pass on the costs of mercury pollution to others, and thereby hone in on this fact?
The companies that make CFL are the same evil industrialists as all the others.
What do you know? I weave all my own CFLs out of recycled, organically grown hemp from the local co-op.
"The market" generally does a horrible job of making products more environmentally friendly. Government regulations often do a great job (with some approaches being more useful than others). Markets tend to do environmental things for two reasons: either greater energy efficiency will lower the overall operating costs of an item (making it more desirable to the consumer), or they intend to try and market the product to the devoted environmentalists.
In the first case, consumer education is hard, so unless the products are right next to each other and both advertise their lifetime usage (in dollars and cents), the consumer is probably going to base the decision on other factors. Example: You have two fridges, being sold at the same price. Fridge A claims it will save $15/year over Fridge B. Fridge B shoots back, "Yeah, but I have an ice dispenser."
In the second case, effective and informed pro-environment consumption is hard, much harder than simply trying to figure out the best price-quality-features tradeoff for yours truly. Businesses take advantage of the confusion, giving ordinary products green-sounding names, making the packaging out of 30% post-industrial waste, slapping a picture of a pine tree on it, then jacking the price up by 25%. Using such strategies, they can capture the bulk of the "granola crowd" without changing anything about their business practices.
Along comes big, evil, intrusive government. Regulators look at a situation where the people selling the lightbulbs and the appliances might save on production costs by going the low-efficiency route, while not paying for the extra energy that will need to be produced, the extra pollutants that will need to be created, or the extra infrastructure the electric company will need to build to handle all the new demand. Situations where manufacturers can pass on costs like that are damaging to the overall economy. So regulators do what they do best: regulate.
Take California. Before the 1970's, there were no energy efficiency standards for appliances. The government of California took a look at the environmental and business costs created by low-efficiency appliances. They also looked at the prices of appliances, and discovered that the efficient appliances ran basically the same range of prices as the inefficient ones. So they simply banned the less efficient ones from the market. Now, consumers theoretically could have individually educated themselves on the hidden costs of these inefficient appliances, then add these hidden costs in when they went to shop for a new fridge (assuming the manufacturers even published energy usage stats). But a true accounting would require at least a masters-level economic analysis, all that duplicated research would have been wasteful and time-consuming, and the purchasers would only account for the costs that affected them, not the ones that they could pass on as well. By allowing the government to intervene in the market, people who couldn't be called upon to make change for a twenty could benefit from more efficient appliances, and people who were being harmed by economic decisions beyond their control were harmed no longer.
You're forgetting quite a few things in your analysis.
Firstly, the "incandescent bulbs heat your house" argument is great during the winter. During the summer, they have quite the opposite effect. On the other hand, light is most needed at night, when demand for AC is lower.
Next, and probably more important, you can't compare the energy and pollutants required to manufacture an incandescent and a fluorescent. You have to compare seven or fourteen incandescents to a single fluorescent. Either way, the amount of energy needed to create either sort of bulb is dwarfed by the amount of energy it will use over the course of its life. As for pollutants, energy production itself generates pollutants, so the less energy we have to generate, the better.
I'm still a little skittish about the mercury thing. While some argue that mercury emissions are actually reduced by CFLs (since power plants are no longer producing as much), more of it is emitted in residential areas. I'd also love to see the estimated exposure caused by CFLs compared to the exposure you get from a high fish diet.
I think it's safe to say that it's simply a physical impossibility for incandescents to improve their efficiency significantly. You've got electricity heating a filament, with the vast majority of the radiation being produced outside the visible spectrum.
So in this case, I think mandating against a specific technology is reasonable. OTOH, demanding a certain energy efficiency rating for lightbulbs would therefore do the same thing.
Do you really think it's a good idea for the power company (who is in a really good position to help reduce overall energy demand) to be rewarded based on the amount of product sold?
California got this right a long time ago. Rather than providing a perverse incentive to their utilities to "grow the market" for electricity, they decoupled the amount the utilities are paid from the amount of electricity they provide. Then when they push for things like energy efficient appliance standards, the utilities are pushing right along with them, because reduced demand means providers have to build out less infrastructure.
I think the issue (such that it is) falls under the category of "conflict of interest." If you're writing a book report, and giving it a glowing review, and providing a link that will give you money if people buy the book, it becomes more difficult to accept the glowingness of the review on its own terms.
It's not a huge deal to me, but it may be to some people.
Oh, one more possibility. For long-distance trucking, just let the rigs hook into overhead power lines, the way light rail systems and electric buses do. Admittedly, electric buses do sometimes jump the track, so the driver needs to hop out and hook it back up. But it would save a lot of energy simply due to the fact that the rig no longer has to carry its own energy supply and engine.
To your claims of the impracticality of electrical, I say, "Meh!"
Two obvious solutions spring to mind. First, plugin hybrid vehicles. A majority of gasoline is consumed in relatively short trips, and it's easy to build hybrids with an electric only range of forty miles or so. Range is even better if you can plug in at your destination as well as your home.
The other solution: swappable batteries. When you go to a fueling station, instead of putting eighty pounds of gasoline into your tank, you replace the empty battery pack with a full one. Under such a system, you could do away with the hybrid engine altogether, saving more weight for additional batteries. Thus the range would be extended, while making electric cars practical for much longer trips.
I haven't read past the first page of the Argonne study, but this absolutely floors me:
As you can see, the fossil energy input per unit of ethanol is lower--0.74 million Btu fossil energy consumed for each 1 million Btu of ethanol delivered, compared to 1.23 million Btu of fossil energy consumed for each million Btu of gasoline delivered.
These claims are based on the use of two different accounting methods designed to show ethanol in a positive light. The energy balance for ethanol is calculated for the entire life cycle, and that for gasoline is calculated on the basis of a barrel of crude oil ready to be refined. We can calculate gasoline based on an entire life cycle to obtain a true apples to apples comparison. It takes only about 1 barrel of oil energy input to net 10-30 barrels of oil from the ground, depending on the source. So, this step has an efficiency of at least 1000%. Once the 85% energy efficiency is factored in for refining gasoline from the oil, the positive energy balance for gasoline ranges from 850% to well over 1,000%. That's why gasoline costs significantly less than ethanol on a BTU basis.
He also faults at least one USDA study for double-counting coproducts. This isn't an oil shill talking. In the same entry, he says, "I share the view that an oil peak is on the horizon, and I believe that it is critical for our very way of life to prepare for the imminent changes ahead."
As explained in your third link, "For every BTU dedicated to producing ethanol there is a 34% energy gain." By the same accounting practices, devoting a BTU to producing gasoline will net 8 to 10 BTUs of fossil fuel energy. I'd be interested to see how solar, wind, and fission ranked in such an analysis.
Pimentel may be off his rocker to claim that ethanol is a net energy loss, but I don't see that as the main issue. In the long term, ethanol could be seen as a method for energy storage, and all the energy inputs needed to produce it could be gotten from non-fossil sources, so ethanol might be viable even as a net energy loser. The real question is, "is this the most practical, efficient way to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels?" I don't think it is. It pushes up the prices of food, causes significant environmental degradation, and is a diversion from primarily electric plugins, which I think should be the ultimate goal.
As an unabashed "green environmental lefty," the last hour's worth of reading has convinced me that ethanol is probably a non-solution. It might be of some small use as a relatively "backward-compatible" way of extending fuel supplies to older vehicles (since the energy inputs don't all necessarily have to come from fossil fuels). But as a long term solution, the energy net is either non-existent, or too small to be really viable.
I'm definitely leaning towards plug-in hybrids as the current best solution.
But if you want to dismiss the entire swath of the population which disagrees with you as unreasonable idiots whose opinions are never swayed by reason, well, have fun with that.
>>> First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided
>> What media is that! The popular "media" I see and read is about as one sided as you can get.
You're right, the two of us do seem to be getting our news from completely different sources. The media I read is more than happy to bring up the views of climate skeptics like Fred Singer and Willie Soon, and their bought-and-paid-for-by-Exxon advocacy groups like the George C. Marshall Institute, CATO, and the Heritage Foundation.
>>> In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming
>> Talk to some and find out. Pop in to the nearset conference on the issue (if you are in the US they are very expensive however). Count me as a gloabal warming beliver and "humans are the Cause" doubter. Even better read some of the papers already published in peer rewived jornals. Its not as clear cut as it seems.
Personally, I don't have access to enough data points to convince myself one way or another. I'd like to see an objective poll (read: not funded by the Heritage Foundation) comparing and contrasting opinions from three groups: the overall population, people with a Masters or higher in any scientific discipline, and active climate researchers. My suspicion is that, the more familiar people are with the material, the more accepting they are of anthropogenic global warming.
My reason for this: When climate skeptics cite their own expert witnesses and papers, they usually cite non-peer-reviewed material and experts in marginally related fields like astrophysics, geology, physics, engineering, etc. When you hear of letters and statements signed by "thousands of scientists skeptical of climate change", you see the same pattern: almost none of the signers have strong credentials in the most relevant fields.
>>> You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.
>> And in your opinion what does some who can get a paper out sound like? I have only 3 papers published in peer reviewed jornals and 1 book chapter that was also peer reviewed. But the postdoc sould bump that up.
My concern is that it doesn't sound like you have a very deep grasp of the chaos theory that you frequently rely on in your responses. As I mentioned earlier, you freely conflate weather models and climate models, which is understandable for a layman, but completely unforgivable for a climate scientist. Certainly, there is some overlap and interaction between the two types of models, but it's perfectly possible to be unable to create an accurate 30 day weather forecast, and yet able to create an accurate 30 year climate forecast.
I would be lying shamelessly if I said I was any sort of chaos theory expert myself. I'm just going with my own best understanding.
Out of curiosity, what is your PhD in, and what were the subjects of the three papers you've published?
You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.
You don't seem to understand the chaos theory you rely on, especially the difference between predicting small-scale events and long-term trends. The difference between weather and climate has been beaten to death in this forum, so I'll just limit my commentary to stating that your demand for a good thirty day forecast strikes me as irrelevant.
You say that climate is always changing, and that's true. But you're only arguing against a rather naive and simplistic view that the environment is entirely static, which no informed person on any side of the global warming debate shares (read: strawman). Having said that, it's clear that we've had about ten thousand years of relative stability, followed by a century of abrupt warming that coincides with mankind pumping billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. While certainly there is such a thing as coincidence, no alternative explanation can compete with the anthropogenic theory. Solar forcing is often proposed, but it only manages to account for a small fraction of the total.
Scientists know full well that they're dealing with a chaotic system when they're looking at the climate. But the climate has been reasonably stable over recent history, and that stability has been very good for human activity. Chaotic systems often fall into regions of stability, but they can be knocked out by external influences (say, pouring billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere). So if we know nothing else about the climate (as you want to lead us to believe) that only leads us to conclude that we're better off not messing with it so brazenly, because we don't know where it will end up or how easy it will be to adapt to the new conditions.
You want to convince us that "real science" doesn't do consensus, and that the media has been painting a false picture of emerging scientific agreement. I would argue the opposite: that the consensus among active researchers is far stronger than the media usually portrays. Two things are happening here. First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided, so if journalists believe that there might be two sides to the issue, they usually try to at least pay lip service to both. Second, entrenched industrial interests take advantage of this by paying a small, incestuous group of climate skeptics and policy organizations to cast doubt on the reality of global warming, its human origins, and the need to take political action to counter it.
In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming, and I would be skeptical of claims of robust disagreement. Industry forces have certainly tried to manufacture the illusion of deep disagreement in the past.
This is a clear case of early technological experimentation. A caveman-scientist tried to learn more about fire by torching a mammoth, which ran straight back to the herd, setting all those mammoths on fire, sending them all scattering to surrounding herds. The chain reaction continued until all the mammoths had been ignited, sending billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Or not. Your question presupposes a really terrible strawman of an argument. Nobody, anywhere, at any time, has seriously claimed that humans are the sole agents of climate change.
> I teach argumentative writing to freshmen, and they aren't allowed to cite wikipedia for me either.
Person X believes Y, therefore, Y.
Appeal to authority. Next?
> In fact, unless someone is writing about wkipedia, I can't see any reason to use it as a bibliographic source in an academic paper.
Argument from lack of imagination. I don't know if there is a formal name for that one, but "I can't imagine how X could happen" => "X cannot happen" seems like a problematic formulation.
> And I don't know anyone who would sanction wikipedia as an acceptable source.
Argument ad populum! Ha! Take that!
I agree with your sentiment; I'm just ribbing you because you teach argumentative writing. Citing Wikipedia doesn't just make for bad scholarship, allowing the practice just makes many papers too easy to write. Getting familiar with primary sources and drawing conclusions from them is a big part of scholarly writing. Having it all laid out for a student, and letting them accept it without investigating it, is doing them a huge disservice.
I remember a few years back that SETI@Home was down for a couple of weeks because some dude damaged a fiber optics line at Berkeley while trying to make off with some phone cabling.
Slashdot Mirror
None of those criticisms can be properly countered with "then just don't use multiplayer."
"I have to pay for multiplayer even if I don't use it." - "Well, then don't use multiplayer."
"I have to wait for the publisher to perfect the multiplayer features, even if I don't want them." - "Well, then don't use multiplayer."
"I'm constantly reading in the media that multiplayer is the future, and game publishers are pushing more and more multiplayer-oriented features, often to the point that standalone play suffers." -- "Well, then don't use multiplayer."
This dose of reading comprehension brought to you by AOC.
He said "public interest," not "state interest". I do see where you're coming from, but you're describing the latter.
I applaud you on putting forward a truly mind-bending thought. It took me a surprisingly long time to recognize that I mostly agreed with it.
But I don't see a good solution to the problem, because the biggest problem is that modern society is just so friggin' complex, that there is no way to educate a fifteen year old in such a way that he/she has a good shot at succeeding in a way that we commonly think of as "independent". Once we've taught them the sort of basic maturity that can allow them to value their own long-term interests and the interests of others (a sometimes impossible task), we still have to teach them a laundry list of knowledge and skills: basic household and auto repairs, how to do their taxes, how to balance a checkbook, how to pay their bills, how to plan and shop for and prepare nutritious meals, how to clean up after themselves, how to manage their time, how to use the Internet, how to drive safely, how to be responsible and effective at their chosen occupation, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Again, that's assuming that the desire to be an honest, hardworking, successful person already exists.
Without restructuring of society to abstract away all the tricky bits, it's more than even the most astute teenager can be reasonably expected to handle.
So, we're faced with the problem: How do we protect them from the consequences of their actions until they've learned enough to manage all of life's various risks, without impeding their maturation, while respecting their autonomy.
The abstinence-only crowd has one solution: teach them not to do the things that would cause these negative consequences. Don't have sex. It's a simple approach, easy to comprehend. But the bankruptcy of that approach is revealed when you start asking advocates about the exceptions. What happens to those who don't get the message? The more I study their reactions to that simple question, the more clearly I think I understand their conception of the world. They are the "good" people, with a message that other "good" people will accept and act on. If the message is taught loud and long enough, all the other good people will avoid sex before marriage. The rest of them, the ones who don't heed the message, are seen as either acceptable collateral damage or bad people who deserve all the misery and suffering life can offer.
Sounds harsh, yes. But when I see conservative, religious folks getting fighting mad because somebody wants to take some very simple, very effective precautions to reduce a consequence of "inappropriate" sexual behavior, what else can I conclude? Take the recent insanity over the new HPV vaccine. HPV is an STD that a majority of women will contract at some point in their lives, which is known to raise the risk of cervical cancer. Several states are working on laws that would use the education system to deliver the vaccine to young people. Critics of these plans say that we mustn't carry them out, because vaccinating a sixth grader is tantamount to telling them that it's fine for them to be having sex.
It seems that the goal of reducing the amount of sexual activity is more important to such people than protecting kids from the harm these kids could inflict on themselves through their behavior. It's like saying that we shouldn't disarm some of the mines in a minefield, because people would be more likely to walk through it.
The alternative is to protect kids from the potential consequences of risky behavior, as the proponents of comprehensive sex ed suggest. The criticism of that position is usually of the "if we remove all consequences to their behavior, then how will they learn?" It's a strong argument in many other domains. The argument is weaker in the case of sexual activity, because most of the consequences of sexual activity can be minimized or eliminated, leaving an exciting and pleasurable activity in its wake. What they really seem to be asking is, "if our children can engage in consequence-free sex, what leverage do we have in our ques
One thing to remember is that household fridges don't trap their heat very long (certainly when judging by the scale of several hours). So in order to get such small devices in on this "usage shifting", they'd need to be actively receiving information on much shorter timescales. This, in turn, requires that the energy grid communicate with attached appliances. There is a fair bit of research going into smart grids and smart appliances (though I'm not terribly familiar with it).
The point is, if you knew that you could save yourself half a penny of electricity by turning your fridge's thermostat down now, and back up in three minutes, you probably wouldn't bother. You wouldn't even bother subscribing to a news feed that offered such marginally useful information. But give the appliances themselves that information, and everyone saves like crazy.
You're fighting really hard to nail the idea over a simple semantic gaffe. When they say "store energy," they really mean "pre-use". We get that. Journalists can be idiots. We get that as well.
You're right, shifting power usage to more convenient times is a standard practice for conserving energy and smoothing out peak loads. But this is a very interesting way to do it. More important, every new method we discover for doing so makes intermittent energy sources like wind power and solar more viable.
It also highlights the need to "smarten up" our energy grid, giving the appliances connected to them information that they can use. In order for this method to work effectively (especially for smaller refrigeration units that can't hold their cold for an entire day) the unit needs to know when the grid generators are overproducing. A refrigerated warehouse could probably turn off for several hours and only rise a degree or two. But a smaller unit (maybe even a household fridge) changes temperature a lot faster, and so would need up-to-the-minute information to guide it.
Incidentally, my power company offered incentives last summer to people who would install regulators on their air conditioners, giving them some control over exactly when they turned on and off. The idea was that, by coordinating the appliances in an area, they could lower peak demand and avoid expensive infrastructure work. That idea could work well in tandem with this one.
That's a bit trite. It could also be said that unsatisfying, frustrating jobs tend to make people poorer performers. It sounds like you're putting all the blame on the employees.
I really think that the guy who gave that quote recognized that he was describing a catch-22 situation, which probably went over the reporter's head. I don't think anyone could pull that quote off by accident. Cognitive dissonance alone would keep him from thinking about the two things at the same time.
Translation: I use people solely as a means to my own ends.
Kant damn you!
But since you're not big on the idea of caring about the happiness of someone you've worked alongside for years, because he is no longer making you teh moneeyz, might I suggest that you treat the person well anyways? That way, in his future dealings with industry colleagues, he'll give much more positive reviews. When it comes to jobs, relationships, or whatever other experience you care to mention, people are likely to remember how it ended, and let those memories color the overall experience. This will, in turn, color the perceptions of a lot of other people, many of whom may turn out to be future employees or customers.
Chances are, by the time your employee has given notice, he's already been giving a 60% effort for months. You just didn't notice. So it's odd to think that getting 100% out of an employee's remaining time is more important than giving him time to get some documentation together for his replacement.
Or look at it another way. If the guy gives you two weeks notice, and you immediately throw him out the door with one week's pay, you've just paid one week's salary for zero hours of work. Whereas, if you let him work those last two weeks at 50% effort, you'll be paying two weeks' salary for forty hours of work (which will probably save his replacement far more than that).
Another liability you haven't accounted for: You're treating a soon-to-be former employee like dirt, shoving him out the door like that. He'll remember that when advising people about working for you, or buying from you (hardly an idle threat; the mere fact that he works for you means he's in your industry). And under most circumstances, you can't argue that you're protecting the company from a disgruntled employee by not letting him work those last two weeks. Whatever damage or mischief you expect your ex-employee to cause is irrelevant; whatever caused him to leave, he's probably known it for quite a while, so he's already had plenty of opportunity to set up whatever you imagine him to be capable of. Further, even if he hasn't set up any backdoors or copied any files, he still has knowledge of the company that he could use to create problems. By catapulting him, you make him far more likely to use it. BSA audit, anyone?
Question: Do you fire people when they have family crises? God knows you can't get 100% work out of somebody going through a divorce, or someone with a sick family member.
In short, I'm not buying any of your excuses for generating ill will among your former employees. They all sounds like rationalizations for petty vengeance.
The California legislature isn't "picking winners" so much as "picking a single, highly wasteful loser." The remaining products on the market are still forced to compete on attributes like cost, energy efficiency, light quality, etc. By removing the most energy inefficient bulbs from the market altogether, they're going to greatly expand the market for efficient bulbs (regardless of the lightmaking technique used), promote investment and research into improving efficient bulb design, and generally make the lightbulb market more competitive, not less.
Modern CFLs come in a wide variety of light color outputs, and the recent move towards electronic ballasts rather than magnetic ballasts has made both flicker and slow start-up times a near non-issue. The EnergyStar page describes the qualities needed to carry the EnergyStar label: A couple of people in this discussion have claimed that CFLs give them headaches because of the flicker. This should only be true for older bulbs using magnetic ballasts (which flicker at about 60-75 Hz, about the same as a CRT computer screen). Electronic ballasts cycle at around 20,000Hz, and I defy anyone to demonstrate that their eyeballs can detect that.
In short, many of the CFL-products on the market are already good enough to compete on their own merits, and intra-CFL competition should be enough to drive out the worst practices (at least, the ones that affect the end-user experience).
I've spent the last hour scouring the InterTubes for information about mercury and CFLs. My conclusions:
* Mercury-free CFLs are nigh unto impossible.
* CFLs cause minimal residential exposure, even if broken.
* Widespread adoption of CFLs will greatly reduce the overall amount of mercury being put into the environment.
* It would also move the mercury hotspots from "downwind of the power plant" to "the municipal dump." This might be a bad thing.
* Recycling programs can help with this. But as I said before, consumer education isn't an easy thing.
* The EPA doesn't classify CFLs or CFL corpses as hazardous waste.
So while there are a couple of tradeoffs to account for, I think CFLs are significantly better mercury-wise as well. But it took me (a fairly scientific and interested person who knows the 'Net very well) a good deal of effort to come to these conclusions. How is a free market full of harried, apathetic, scientifically illiterate consumers going to work with a self-serving business world that can pass on the costs of mercury pollution to others, and thereby hone in on this fact?
"The market" generally does a horrible job of making products more environmentally friendly. Government regulations often do a great job (with some approaches being more useful than others). Markets tend to do environmental things for two reasons: either greater energy efficiency will lower the overall operating costs of an item (making it more desirable to the consumer), or they intend to try and market the product to the devoted environmentalists.
In the first case, consumer education is hard, so unless the products are right next to each other and both advertise their lifetime usage (in dollars and cents), the consumer is probably going to base the decision on other factors. Example: You have two fridges, being sold at the same price. Fridge A claims it will save $15/year over Fridge B. Fridge B shoots back, "Yeah, but I have an ice dispenser."
In the second case, effective and informed pro-environment consumption is hard, much harder than simply trying to figure out the best price-quality-features tradeoff for yours truly. Businesses take advantage of the confusion, giving ordinary products green-sounding names, making the packaging out of 30% post-industrial waste, slapping a picture of a pine tree on it, then jacking the price up by 25%. Using such strategies, they can capture the bulk of the "granola crowd" without changing anything about their business practices.
Along comes big, evil, intrusive government. Regulators look at a situation where the people selling the lightbulbs and the appliances might save on production costs by going the low-efficiency route, while not paying for the extra energy that will need to be produced, the extra pollutants that will need to be created, or the extra infrastructure the electric company will need to build to handle all the new demand. Situations where manufacturers can pass on costs like that are damaging to the overall economy. So regulators do what they do best: regulate.
Take California. Before the 1970's, there were no energy efficiency standards for appliances. The government of California took a look at the environmental and business costs created by low-efficiency appliances. They also looked at the prices of appliances, and discovered that the efficient appliances ran basically the same range of prices as the inefficient ones. So they simply banned the less efficient ones from the market. Now, consumers theoretically could have individually educated themselves on the hidden costs of these inefficient appliances, then add these hidden costs in when they went to shop for a new fridge (assuming the manufacturers even published energy usage stats). But a true accounting would require at least a masters-level economic analysis, all that duplicated research would have been wasteful and time-consuming, and the purchasers would only account for the costs that affected them, not the ones that they could pass on as well. By allowing the government to intervene in the market, people who couldn't be called upon to make change for a twenty could benefit from more efficient appliances, and people who were being harmed by economic decisions beyond their control were harmed no longer.
see: Externality
You're forgetting quite a few things in your analysis.
Firstly, the "incandescent bulbs heat your house" argument is great during the winter. During the summer, they have quite the opposite effect. On the other hand, light is most needed at night, when demand for AC is lower.
Next, and probably more important, you can't compare the energy and pollutants required to manufacture an incandescent and a fluorescent. You have to compare seven or fourteen incandescents to a single fluorescent. Either way, the amount of energy needed to create either sort of bulb is dwarfed by the amount of energy it will use over the course of its life. As for pollutants, energy production itself generates pollutants, so the less energy we have to generate, the better.
I'm still a little skittish about the mercury thing. While some argue that mercury emissions are actually reduced by CFLs (since power plants are no longer producing as much), more of it is emitted in residential areas. I'd also love to see the estimated exposure caused by CFLs compared to the exposure you get from a high fish diet.
I think it's safe to say that it's simply a physical impossibility for incandescents to improve their efficiency significantly. You've got electricity heating a filament, with the vast majority of the radiation being produced outside the visible spectrum.
So in this case, I think mandating against a specific technology is reasonable. OTOH, demanding a certain energy efficiency rating for lightbulbs would therefore do the same thing.
Do you really think it's a good idea for the power company (who is in a really good position to help reduce overall energy demand) to be rewarded based on the amount of product sold?
California got this right a long time ago. Rather than providing a perverse incentive to their utilities to "grow the market" for electricity, they decoupled the amount the utilities are paid from the amount of electricity they provide. Then when they push for things like energy efficient appliance standards, the utilities are pushing right along with them, because reduced demand means providers have to build out less infrastructure.
I think the issue (such that it is) falls under the category of "conflict of interest." If you're writing a book report, and giving it a glowing review, and providing a link that will give you money if people buy the book, it becomes more difficult to accept the glowingness of the review on its own terms.
It's not a huge deal to me, but it may be to some people.
You might want to make sure your fly is zipped.
Oh, one more possibility. For long-distance trucking, just let the rigs hook into overhead power lines, the way light rail systems and electric buses do. Admittedly, electric buses do sometimes jump the track, so the driver needs to hop out and hook it back up. But it would save a lot of energy simply due to the fact that the rig no longer has to carry its own energy supply and engine.
To your claims of the impracticality of electrical, I say, "Meh!"
Two obvious solutions spring to mind. First, plugin hybrid vehicles. A majority of gasoline is consumed in relatively short trips, and it's easy to build hybrids with an electric only range of forty miles or so. Range is even better if you can plug in at your destination as well as your home.
The other solution: swappable batteries. When you go to a fueling station, instead of putting eighty pounds of gasoline into your tank, you replace the empty battery pack with a full one. Under such a system, you could do away with the hybrid engine altogether, saving more weight for additional batteries. Thus the range would be extended, while making electric cars practical for much longer trips.
As explained in your third link, "For every BTU dedicated to producing ethanol there is a 34% energy gain." By the same accounting practices, devoting a BTU to producing gasoline will net 8 to 10 BTUs of fossil fuel energy. I'd be interested to see how solar, wind, and fission ranked in such an analysis.
Pimentel may be off his rocker to claim that ethanol is a net energy loss, but I don't see that as the main issue. In the long term, ethanol could be seen as a method for energy storage, and all the energy inputs needed to produce it could be gotten from non-fossil sources, so ethanol might be viable even as a net energy loser. The real question is, "is this the most practical, efficient way to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels?" I don't think it is. It pushes up the prices of food, causes significant environmental degradation, and is a diversion from primarily electric plugins, which I think should be the ultimate goal.
As an unabashed "green environmental lefty," the last hour's worth of reading has convinced me that ethanol is probably a non-solution. It might be of some small use as a relatively "backward-compatible" way of extending fuel supplies to older vehicles (since the energy inputs don't all necessarily have to come from fossil fuels). But as a long term solution, the energy net is either non-existent, or too small to be really viable.
I'm definitely leaning towards plug-in hybrids as the current best solution.
But if you want to dismiss the entire swath of the population which disagrees with you as unreasonable idiots whose opinions are never swayed by reason, well, have fun with that.
>>> First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided
>> What media is that! The popular "media" I see and read is about as one sided as you can get.
You're right, the two of us do seem to be getting our news from completely different sources. The media I read is more than happy to bring up the views of climate skeptics like Fred Singer and Willie Soon, and their bought-and-paid-for-by-Exxon advocacy groups like the George C. Marshall Institute, CATO, and the Heritage Foundation.
>>> In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming
>> Talk to some and find out. Pop in to the nearset conference on the issue (if you are in the US they are very expensive however). Count me as a gloabal warming beliver and "humans are the Cause" doubter. Even better read some of the papers already published in peer rewived jornals. Its not as clear cut as it seems.
Personally, I don't have access to enough data points to convince myself one way or another. I'd like to see an objective poll (read: not funded by the Heritage Foundation) comparing and contrasting opinions from three groups: the overall population, people with a Masters or higher in any scientific discipline, and active climate researchers. My suspicion is that, the more familiar people are with the material, the more accepting they are of anthropogenic global warming.
My reason for this: When climate skeptics cite their own expert witnesses and papers, they usually cite non-peer-reviewed material and experts in marginally related fields like astrophysics, geology, physics, engineering, etc. When you hear of letters and statements signed by "thousands of scientists skeptical of climate change", you see the same pattern: almost none of the signers have strong credentials in the most relevant fields.
>>> You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.
>> And in your opinion what does some who can get a paper out sound like? I have only 3 papers published in peer reviewed jornals and 1 book chapter that was also peer reviewed. But the postdoc sould bump that up.
My concern is that it doesn't sound like you have a very deep grasp of the chaos theory that you frequently rely on in your responses. As I mentioned earlier, you freely conflate weather models and climate models, which is understandable for a layman, but completely unforgivable for a climate scientist. Certainly, there is some overlap and interaction between the two types of models, but it's perfectly possible to be unable to create an accurate 30 day weather forecast, and yet able to create an accurate 30 year climate forecast.
I would be lying shamelessly if I said I was any sort of chaos theory expert myself. I'm just going with my own best understanding.
Out of curiosity, what is your PhD in, and what were the subjects of the three papers you've published?
You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.
You don't seem to understand the chaos theory you rely on, especially the difference between predicting small-scale events and long-term trends. The difference between weather and climate has been beaten to death in this forum, so I'll just limit my commentary to stating that your demand for a good thirty day forecast strikes me as irrelevant.
You say that climate is always changing, and that's true. But you're only arguing against a rather naive and simplistic view that the environment is entirely static, which no informed person on any side of the global warming debate shares (read: strawman). Having said that, it's clear that we've had about ten thousand years of relative stability, followed by a century of abrupt warming that coincides with mankind pumping billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. While certainly there is such a thing as coincidence, no alternative explanation can compete with the anthropogenic theory. Solar forcing is often proposed, but it only manages to account for a small fraction of the total.
Scientists know full well that they're dealing with a chaotic system when they're looking at the climate. But the climate has been reasonably stable over recent history, and that stability has been very good for human activity. Chaotic systems often fall into regions of stability, but they can be knocked out by external influences (say, pouring billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere). So if we know nothing else about the climate (as you want to lead us to believe) that only leads us to conclude that we're better off not messing with it so brazenly, because we don't know where it will end up or how easy it will be to adapt to the new conditions.
You want to convince us that "real science" doesn't do consensus, and that the media has been painting a false picture of emerging scientific agreement. I would argue the opposite: that the consensus among active researchers is far stronger than the media usually portrays. Two things are happening here. First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided, so if journalists believe that there might be two sides to the issue, they usually try to at least pay lip service to both. Second, entrenched industrial interests take advantage of this by paying a small, incestuous group of climate skeptics and policy organizations to cast doubt on the reality of global warming, its human origins, and the need to take political action to counter it.
In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming, and I would be skeptical of claims of robust disagreement. Industry forces have certainly tried to manufacture the illusion of deep disagreement in the past.
This is a clear case of early technological experimentation. A caveman-scientist tried to learn more about fire by torching a mammoth, which ran straight back to the herd, setting all those mammoths on fire, sending them all scattering to surrounding herds. The chain reaction continued until all the mammoths had been ignited, sending billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Or not. Your question presupposes a really terrible strawman of an argument. Nobody, anywhere, at any time, has seriously claimed that humans are the sole agents of climate change.
> I teach argumentative writing to freshmen, and they aren't allowed to cite wikipedia for me either.
Person X believes Y, therefore, Y.
Appeal to authority. Next?
> In fact, unless someone is writing about wkipedia, I can't see any reason to use it as a bibliographic source in an academic paper.
Argument from lack of imagination. I don't know if there is a formal name for that one, but "I can't imagine how X could happen" => "X cannot happen" seems like a problematic formulation.
> And I don't know anyone who would sanction wikipedia as an acceptable source.
Argument ad populum! Ha! Take that!
I agree with your sentiment; I'm just ribbing you because you teach argumentative writing. Citing Wikipedia doesn't just make for bad scholarship, allowing the practice just makes many papers too easy to write. Getting familiar with primary sources and drawing conclusions from them is a big part of scholarly writing. Having it all laid out for a student, and letting them accept it without investigating it, is doing them a huge disservice.
I remember a few years back that SETI@Home was down for a couple of weeks because some dude damaged a fiber optics line at Berkeley while trying to make off with some phone cabling.