I think you're misinterpreting the nature of the objection. He never said anything about "rounding up". The practice is an annoyance because it allows gas retailers to advertise $2.24 gas when they know perfectly well that the actual price is $2.25. The upside is that, since everyone does it, it doesn't affect your decision of where to buy gas.
>>> First you said: I think I understand economics better than your average citizen, but you'd probably be happy to disqualify me for not seeing it quite the way you do.
>>> Then you said: First, let me state that I believe that GDP is little more than a measure of the rate at which we turn useful natural resources into landfill. A bit overstated? Maybe.
>> Try "definitely."
My point is, so long as the GDP counts the extraction and use of a natural resource as a plus, but doesn't count the future unavailability of that resource as a negative, the accounting principles involved are hopelessly misleading. We can easily increase and increase our GDP by simply choosing to extract at a faster rate, until it's gone, like a person with a big inheritance can live it up more by simply choosing to spend it faster.
Which gets to my larger point: GDP is a bad number to base policy on. It makes no distinction between sustainable and unsustainable production, nor between investment in the future and pointless consumption. Better, more accurate accounting principles have been proposed, but for the most part businesses don't like them.
>>> For example, had we decided in 1971 to devote all our increased productivity to working less rather than doing more, we'd have about a 1971 standard of living, but we'd be supporting it by working a mere 20 hours a week.
>> Hmmm, interesting thought. I'm not sure that sloth is an admirable goal, though. Working 40 hours/week hardly seems unreasonable or abusive. I'm also not sure your theory holds since the world economy has become much more globalized in the last 35 years and we're facing competition from countries we didn't used to have to compete with. Working 20 hours a week is not conducive to staying ahead of them.
"I'm not sure sloth is an admirable goal?" That's exactly the position the right took when we started passing laws against child labor, overtime laws, and the 96 hour work week. You're assuming that all the extra time would be put into increased TV watching or something, but my experience is that people veg out in front of the TV precisely because they're too exhausted from work to do anything useful. Anyone who has ever volunteered for a non-profit or devoted spare time to an open source project can serve as a counterexample.
And frankly, our communities need more participation, our kids need parents spending more time on their education, and our world needs less environmental degradation caused by economic activity. So I think it's a great trade to make.
As to international competition, there are only two reasons I can think of for wanting to "stay ahead of them." The first is mere jingoism, and the second is the fear that they'll destroy us once they get a leg up on us. To the second one, all I can say is that our foreign policy seems explicitly designed to make that fear warranted. Mission accomplished.
>>> Next, wealth distribution is a very important part of deciding whether GDP actually indicates that the CO2 is being emitted for a good cause. If half the CO2 from a country is going to support the lifestyles of 1% of a country's population, then the moral justification for that pollution is called into question.
>> Do you have any evidence it is??? I'm just saying that looking at absolute CO2 production without looking at the amount of economic productivity produced is short-sighted. What happens within the country is a matter to be resolved by the country internally, not by the world community.
While my numbers are "hypothetical", in the U.S., 50% of all stocks and bonds are owned by 1% of its citizens. Of course, this ignores real estate wealth, which is more equally distributed.
I agree with your broader point, that the amount of production you get from a unit of CO2 is critical to deciding whether it's worth producing it. I think cap-and-trade systems do a great job at bringing emissions into the domain of market fo
Yeah, yeah. Everyone in the world is in the position they're in because of their own personal worth, so there's no reason to ever feel sorry for anybody, ever.
The only point I was ever trying to make was that people almost never judge their position in society relative to how much worse they could have it. They judge their happiness--and how well they feel society has treated them--by their relative standing within their society, not by how much more stuff they have than the average Bedouin tribesman.
I never said jack about a "hypothetical couple." I was trying to say to the poster, "live in the luxurious situation you're raving about, and see how great those conditions really are." He would be miserable. The luxurious poverty he describes makes people miserable, and we should be working to alleviate it.
I made an unsubstantiable claim, for which I'm sorry. But it does pretty much nothing to undermine my larger point. The ten countries listed above us have a combined population of about 11M, compared to the United States' 300M, so when discussing other countries as sources of CO2, the lot of them are nothing but a rounding error compared to us. More important, my main point was that any across-the-board rules would disproportionately affect large-scale CO2 producers. The fact that other countries will have to make large sacrifices because of their current overproduction only highlights the fact that the U.S. isn't being singled out. ALL developed economies are supposed to make sacrifices, and claiming that Kyoto meant to single out the United States is just jingoistic blather.
Now, as far as who can and who cannot participate in the discussion, I really don't trust your intuitions about who is qualified. I think I understand economics better than your average citizen, but you'd probably be happy to disqualify me for not seeing it quite the way you do.
First, let me state that I believe that GDP is little more than a measure of the rate at which we turn useful natural resources into landfill. A bit overstated? Maybe. But I like throwing cold water on this idea of economic activity as being a universal good. Certainly some is good, but more isn't necessarily better once you've got your needs taken care of. For example, had we decided in 1971 to devote all our increased productivity to working less rather than doing more, we'd have about a 1971 standard of living, but we'd be supporting it by working a mere 20 hours a week. Bell bottoms aside, the idea is not without appeal.
Next, wealth distribution is a very important part of deciding whether GDP actually indicates that the CO2 is being emitted for a good cause. If half the CO2 from a country is going to support the lifestyles of 1% of a country's population, then the moral justification for that pollution is called into question. This is even more true when we realize that the effects of global warming are going to be disproportionately laid upon the backs of the poor. Remember Katrina?
Then there is the question of how to ideally distribute resources. I figure that, if economic activity doesn't actually make people happier, then there isn't much point. Yet the evidence shows that within the developed world, there is only the most tenuous link between income and reported happiness. In the poorest countries, the correlation is much tighter. While I'm not ready to formally get behind the idea of Gross National Happiness, I think that if loosening CO2 quotas for a very poor country led to greater economic prosperity and hence to greater happiness for its citizens, it might be done even if a developed country could use it more "efficiently."
Really, what's the point of increasing our economic activity, when the key to greater happiness has little to do with that activity? Will a trip to Europe make us happier than a deeper appreciation of our own cities? Will a cure for cancer make us happier than an unafraid respect for our own mortality? Does it make sense to buy pills to remove fat from our bodies and lower our cholesterol, rather than simply eating nutritious food in reasonable quantities in the first place?
In closing, Ireland has less than a third the per-capita GNP, yet the Irish report being noticeably happier than Americans. So, before you convince me that MAXGNP is the best criteria for deciding who is most entitled to pollute, explain what all that extra wealth is actually doing for me.
It's called a hypothetical situation. I wasn't saying, "You, the person who posted this, are not qualified for anything that pays more than Home Depot grunt wages." Though, given the fact that he just plagarized the Heritage Foundation, I'm reserving judgment. Instead, what I was saying is, "If you, the poster, were in the luxurious situation you describe, how would you feel about it? How would you feel towards the society that put you there."
The fact that people like you or I have more control over our lives than an 'unskilled wage' affords doesn't give us permission to turn a blind eye to people who have it worse.
Fine. Tell me--in excruciating, 192-page report detail--about your plan for reducing CO2 emissions, that somehow manages not to disproportionately affect the country that both produces the most CO2 and the most CO2 per capita.
Maybe your alternative would be some sort of proportionate draw-down, effectively saying that we have a Jesus-given right to produce more CO2 than any country simply because we've been burning fossil fuels faster and harder than anyone else over the last fifty years. That's foolish. In the long-term, it's only fair that China be allowed to produce three times as much CO2 as us, since they have about three times the population.
Thanks. I would just add that ambition, drive, and ability to delay gratification are also unequally distributed (there is a definite genetic component to all these traits).
You're confusing effort with outcome, when the correlation isn't nearly as certain as you want to mislead us into believing.
Some people work very hard, but lack the innate gifts necessary to fully take advantage of schooling. Or they might never have been taught proper study techniques. Or they might have had to devote too much of their hard work to simply providing themselves with the means to attend college. Or they might not have any good role models to pattern their success after.
Meanwhile, a person with great innate gifts, a little bit of ambition, and a basic support structure will have a very easy time succeeding. Beyond that, a person who has neither gifts nor ambition might succeed entirely due to the resources his family can bring to bear on his behalf. I'm talking to you, Mister President.
You talk about physical labor like someone who has never done it. Or maybe you had a roofing job for a couple of summers after high school. Hard labor forty hours a week for forty years, without medical insurance, will wear your body out and put you in an early grave. If anything, sitting at your computer typing clever things, and getting paid well for it, is what more easily deserves to be "mistaken" for hard work.
Finally, do we as a society have no obligation to teach people how to direct their hard work in rewarding ways? Certainly we do, even if only for self-interested reasons. So if this person "has not learnt the most productive ways in which to direct his hard work," that is partly our shame, and our loss.
Okay, let's say you lost your job, your house burned down, you lost your nest egg, etc. You have to take an $8/hr job at Home Depot (who, coincidentally, just gave their departing CEO a piddling $200M for doing such a poor job) and move into the luxurious conditions you describe above.
Are you going to tell your wife how wonderful it is that you and she aren't huddling in a cave, chewing on a raw gazelle leg like your ancestors? Or are the two of you going to be looking around at our society with all its wonderful technology and luxuries, realize that you can't afford much of anything, and feel a bit miffed at your present state?
And if the only source of food that meets your hectic life and limited options is Mickey-Dees, are you going to be appreciative of the weight you gain, taking it as a sign of luxury? Or are you going to count up the money spent and the nutrition ingested, and realize that you're feeding your body a calorie-rich but nutrient-deficient diet?
I must misunderstand the rules of the challenge, or your economics department is worryingly unimaginative. Here's my list of things that you can do with money to harm a country. All are perfectly legal, and all are currently being practiced:
* Advertise enormous, gas guzzling SUVs. Convince people that it's not safe to drive in anything smaller.
* Pay think tanks to release studies that confuse the public about the dangers of global warming and the sustainability of an oil-based economy, injuring the market by making decisions less responsive to reality.
* Advertise the regular use of antibacterial products (soaps, floor wax, etc.)
* Advertise as a necessity anything that people were perfectly happy without.
* Loan the money to others, under terms that make it unlikely that the borrowers can ever repay it. Then, as a bonus, when people start defaulting on these loans, go blubbering to Congress about how your borrowers are being irresponsible, and how they need to rewrite the bankruptcy laws to enforce your criminally stupid loans.
* Lobby for the repeal of all manner of consumer protections. All in the name of economic prosperity, of course.
* Pour vast amounts of currency into a small country with liberalized financial rules. Overheat the economy, then pull it out, causing a crash. I understand hedge funds do this all the time, to enormous profit.
* Hell, use it for any purpose where your gain is less than the rest of the country's loss. Just find any externality you can, fund the hell out of it, bribe politicians to ignore your behavior, and when they are finally forced by public outrage to act, move on to the next externality.
Whatever rules your little thought experiment had to keep these options off the table, they seem rather beside the point. The question should be, "If you give me ten billion dollars or so, could I could truly wreck this country?" I believe I could, and that I could probably take a number of other countries down with what was left over.
I'll give two reasons why that's a wrongheaded way of looking at the issue.
First, people don't evaluate their well-being based on how well they can afford the absolute necessities of life. By and large, everyone in the United States (homeless included) can afford sufficient food, clothing, and shelter necessary to survive. Once the absolute necessities are taken care of, people start worrying about things like, "What is my place in society?" and "What desires do I want to fulfill?" From that vantage, your relative position can plummet even as your absolute standard of living rises. Further, if the incomes of your peers are rising faster than your own, you see more and more evidence of others having things that you do not, which leads to a sense of dissatisfaction in all but the most zen-ful of us.
Next reason: we have what is called the Ultimatum Game. It is a social interaction experiment where one person is given a dollar, and told to offer some portion of the dollar to another person (called 'the responder'). If the responder accepts the split, both players get their respective portions. If the opponent rejects it, neither player gets anything. Now, according to the economic psychology you're proposing, no matter how small the split being offered, the responder should accept the offer, because it will make her better off. In fact, even if the responder is offered $0.00, she should accept, because she shouldn't begrudge the other player his dollar, since it doesn't actually diminish her economic situation.
What really happens in these experiments: stingy offers (20%) are usually rejected. Apparently, the feeling of being treated unfairly is a more powerful motivator than the money is. So, the question is, is this a matter of people not understanding economics? Or of economists not understanding people? I would say the latter.
You know, I can honestly say I have a lack of self-confidence (not that you could tell from the arrogance of my posts) that hasn't exactly helped my job search. But you've given me a little bit of an ego boost. At least I know the difference between "a bill passing the House" and "a bill becoming law".
>> A person who THINKS they are less capable is just a bad as a person who is really is less capable. In fact there's no difference, in my opinion.
Not really. The former is doing reasonably good work, and not recognizing it as such. The latter is checking all manner of crap into your code repository, and not recognizing it as such. I know which one I'd rather have on my team.
The company *does* have a relationship with that individual. He/she is someone who has applied for a job with your company. As the popular motto goes, every employee is part of the public relations department. It would also be wise to remember that every person is a potential customer, and that every applicant you reject might relay their experiences to people your company might want to have deeper relationships with.
Plus, there is a game theory aspect to the question. If you recognize deficiencies in a person who doesn't recognize them in himself, and you fail to spend a piddly few minutes (oh, GOD! The loss of efficiency!) explaining how he might correct them, he'll most likely blithely go on applying to a dozen other companies. The best case scenario is that he simply wastes twenty minutes of other peoples' time here and there. In the worst case, he might get a job with one of your suppliers or customers, and bring his deficiencies to them, indirectly making your company's life a bit harder.
Anyhow, the game theory aspect: You've got all these bad candidates out there, wasting precious interviewing time. Assume it's not in any given employer's interest to provide feedback, because the candidate will never interview twice with the same company. But it is in every company's interest for the candidate to receive feedback before ever interviewing. Also assume that some portion of the bad candidates are capable of accepting the advice, learning the areas where they have deficiencies, and becoming good candidates. Your proposal is "always defect," which means that other companies will see more bad candidates. But if a significant number of companies take the same approach, you'll see more bad candidates, which wastes your time.
Finally, the "the company is more efficient, so it's all good" idea is crap. First, it's crap because people don't want to be treated facelessly. They want to feel noticed, respected, and appreciated. Humans are more social creatures than economic ones. Second, it's crap because while you may represent the company, an interview is invariably an exchange between individuals. The company probably doesn't care if you spend a few minutes jaw-jacking about last night's game before diving into the meat of the interview. But if it makes the interview go more smoothly, makes your job a little less tedious, and leaves the interviewee with happy feelings towards the company as a whole, it was time well spent.
The same goes for the rejection. The "we do not require your services at this time" approach is the lowest common denominator, with zero risk and zero reward. You don't risk your time, or much ill will from the candidate. But I think most candidates would be glad for an honest, polite assessment of the impressions they left, and if such advice actually improves their job prospects in the future, karma might come back on you and your company in the long run.
Weird. Bottled water is great for emergency relief efforts, but they seem to want to use it as a long-term solution. I can't see the point.
Re:"Disagreement on Terminology"
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Ajax Design Patterns
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· Score: 2, Informative
Nah, that wasn't flamebait. That was just some guy disagreeing with you.
Now THIS is flamebait: Your post sounds like it comes directly from the "I've never done it, so it can't possibly be hard" school of thought.
See the difference? In the latter instance, I'm questioning your competence in a none-too-subtle manner, in order to evoke a heated emotional response. Aside from the "Okay, smarty" (which seemed pretty justified given your apparent belief that AJAX techniques can be fully mastered in fifteen minutes by a drooling monkey), the guy was just explaining his position.
I'm sure you're a top-notch programmer, and your approach to application design serves you very well. But what's up with this axe you're obviously grinding against all things AJAX-y?
>> I'd roll my own. If I really needed to write an application that constantly transferred huge amounts back to the client, it'd probably be a clue that a proper desktop client/server app would be a better architecture.
Of course, that loses all the advantages of developing it as a web app: no installation, multi-platform, the ability to access your data from just about any computer, etc. I don't see the advantages of a desktop app, unless the data being worked with changes infrequently enough to do client-side caching. But regardless, there are times and situations when you really want the sort of minimal barrier to entry that you can get with a web application.
I disagree with your armchair psychoanalyzing. If you're a nonprofit with a small budget, you might have the money and manpower to distribute a million doses of a critical vaccine. But if you tried to spend that same budget on a truly self-sufficient vaccine producing facility, you'd be broke before you spent even a few percent of the money necessary. It requires building the factory, educating the people who run it, buying the ingredients, etc.
Now, a water treatment facility would be a different story, since trucking in water for the indefinite future would be the bigger undertaking. But nobody is actually talking about doing that. "Providing clean water" isn't meant to be taken literally; rather, it's a shorthand for providing water purification/filtration systems of various scales.
>> That's too bad. Because I just explained to you why environmentalists are more interested in shutting down "big business" than simply assessing them their true quotal share of the costs.
No, you didn't explain why. You simply asserted that they were, proposed a plan which basically reflects the Kyoto Protocol (which environmentalists generally support), and claimed that because environmentalists don't support such a plan (when in fact most do) that they must only be interested in shutting down big business.
>> I could refute it line by line, but I know you probably haven't bothered to seriously read the stuff in that link yourself. You can hurl links at me all day long and I'll spend 20x as much time refuting them, only for you to move on to the next link. Nevertheless, it's the same crock: 1) The "tax subsidy" is simply because the oil industry has unusual structuring of capital expenses; any other industry with the same kinds of projects would be treated the same way. 2) Roads are a subsidy to transportation, *irresepective* of the fuel source of that transportation, and therefore cannot be counted as an oil subsidy; and they're are already paid for through taxes. Yes, there's a shortfall; this is due to expenditures on underused roads. 3) The sales tax bit is flat out wrong. The federal tax alone is more than the typical state sales tax.
1) is just handwaving about how the oil industry is special, in a way that is too complex for a buffoon like me to understand. If these record profits must not be taxed because of the sheer capital investment needed to maintain oil production, that's a damned good sign that the industry as a whole needs to be abandoned as soon as possible. 2) is a load of crap, since more than 99% of the vehicles on the road consume gasoline alone. The fact that our public policies generally support lots of road-building rather than reliance on mass transit does increase demand for oil, and hence is properly seen as a subsidy to the oil industry. 3) The federal tax is specifically earmarked towards building and maintaining roads, which support the oil industry. States charge their own sales taxes on gasoline (which go into the general fund), but these are typically far lower than sales taxes on other goods and services. Nowhere is the oil industry charged for deaths and illnesses related to air pollution caused by their products (one estimate puts that subsidy at around $10B/year for the Los Angeles area alone). Nor is it being charged for the damage done by the CO2 put into the atmosphere. When these things start happening, I'll believe that the oil industry isn't getting special treatment.
>>> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING! You're exactly right: you can get all the oil you want from these places simply by paying the market rate. Hence, no troops necessary. Hence, troops are not a true cost of getting oil. Hence, not having troop costs embedded in the price of oil is not a subsidy.
Dude, the U.S. learned their lesson in the 1970's, when the OPEC countries exercised their independence and soveriegnty in 1973. They decided to stop selling to Israel and its allies. Our Sacred Economy went into a tailspin. But while most of them reacted by pursuing meaningful energy independence,
Also, you can try to paint the oil industry as the hapless recipient of misguided and unrequested public assistance, but I think the oil companies are begging for us to continue our military meddling in the Middle East. When Iran nationalized the oil industry in the 1950s, the CIA helped overthrow prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, exchanging him for a shah that would give its oil industry back to BP. Obviously, the nationalization (with no compensation) was cutting deeply into oil profits, and I doubt that the oil industry would just sit back and take it, when they had the ear of a country with a hug
1) So build machines plant trees to act as carbon sinks. Fund this by charging each CO2 producer, including people who burn wood, in proportion to emissions. No one wants this, because everyone would laugh at how little they'd be paying. And the purpose of environmentalism was never to save the environment but to shut down "big business".
I'm not dignifying this with a response.
2) There are no subsidies for oil producers. The alleged impact on foreign policy says more about the policy makers than about the impact of oil. Fact: Singapore, Switzerland, China, Japan, South Africa, and India manage to import Middle Eastern oil without putting troops there. The cost of troops is not a true cost of getting the oil. If anything, a military presence impedes the flow of oil.
There are tons of direct subsidies, which are well documented, so saying "there are no subsidies for oil producers" is wrong.
Our Middle East policy has always been about two things: oil and Israel. We liberated Kuwait in 1991, which had nothing to do with "freedom on the march", and everything to do with keeping oil supplies stable. I mean, seriously, had it been any two oil-poor African countries, would we have done more than file a complaint with the U.N.? I think not.
In 2003, as the Bush administration was telling us what a jolly grand war we'd be having, one of their main arguments was that it could be done cheaply; Iraqi oil revenues would finance both liberation and reconstruction. (Just as an aside, we shouldn't forget that we were the ones who destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, then placed an embargo so that they couldn't rebuild, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the process.)
I don't know the particulars of how all the other countries you mention conduct their international affairs, but they probably get their oil the old-fashioned way: by asking for it, and offering some sort of goods and services in return. I've never heard of Switzerland supporting a coup inside another country to forestall the nationalization of oil resources, at any rate. I'll agree that in the long run, American policies make the oil supply less stable, but as I argue down below, business interests can be very myopic.
3) What a crock. Markets efficiently allocate goods intertemporally as well. It's called a "futures market". Look it up. Markets don't "believe" oil is infinite; prices already reflect current knowledge of just how finite oil is. If you really believe in that Peak Oil crap, go long on oil.
I'll set aside the fact that I only said the oil industry wanted to believe in infinity, not the market as a whole.
Your arguments run up against what I consider one of the biggest flaws of the current markets: betting against something is much, much harder than betting in favor of something. For example, if I believe that the stock market as a whole is overvalued, how do I invest so as to take advantage of that fact? The financial tools just don't exist. But if I believe the stock market will keep going up, I'll just buy into an index fund.
Now tell me, how would I "short oil?" Shorting only works for timing short-term market fluctuations. When you're talking about long-term trends (on the order of decades), there is no way to short oil directly. The best I can come up with is investing in companies devoted to green technologies (which, by the way, I already do). The idea of taking out an oil contract for twenty years down the road is a bit brain-straining.
The markets are fundamentally, structurally designed to be optimistic. Even with the pessimistic financial tools that currently exist (selling short), they are seldom used, awkward (akin to trying to profit off a stock's increase, but being required to sell it at a specific date), and generally regarded as unsportsmanlike. And let's not even talk about the many ways that entrenched businesses try to buy government protection of the status quo rather than adjust to changing conditions.
I'll grant that there will be winners and losers in any climate change. But let me lay out my reasons for believing that the losers will greatly outnumber the winners.
First, it is expected that global warming will tend to make storms more energetic. That means more money spent on prevention and repair of storm damage.
Next, it is expected that rising oceans and other effects of climate change could create hundreds of millions of refugees, which will lead to all manner of suffering and political instability.
Finally, an unpredictable, changing climate is bad for an economy in its own right. Take an example from my own back yard: The Salt Lake Valley has billions of dollars invested in its ski resorts and related tourism. Hell, we spent billions just on the 2002 Winter Olympics, in the hopes of making this a destination. Now there is a very real fear inside the local industry that global warming could turn our area into a third-rate destination, and even put the resorts out of business. That loss could have effects on the wider economy by making Salt Lake City a less attractive place to live. Even if global warming somehow also increases snowpack in Aspen, Colorado, the billions invested in Utah resorts will still be wasted, and not everyone who gained expertise here will want to move.
There are vast swaths of the economy that depend heavily on climate, and it is much less risky to invest when you know that the climate fundamentals aren't going to change out from under you. If it turns out that the world needs to abandon its breadbasket in the U.S. midwest in favor of building up a new one in Siberia, that means hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure that needs to be built to take advantage of the new conditions. Adjustments within the free market never come without costs, and these ones will be ginormous.
You sound like you're saying that once fuel costs more than nothing, the price doesn't matter. That sounds absurd on its surface, but it's the only conclusion to be drawn from your insistence that a tax is unnecessary, since "incentives already exist." The simple fact is, the higher the tax on fuel, the greater the incentive for fuel efficiency.
Since it's unlikely that you're actually trying to argue otherwise, then maybe you're arguing that the free market is already achieving optimal fuel usage patterns. This is false for several reasons:
1) The current market doesn't account for the effects of usage on global warming. Those who extract, refine, distribute, and burn all that fuel are not the ones who will be paying the costs associated with climate change. They don't call climate change "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen" for nothing.
2) The current market for fuel is heavily subsidized by our government. I'm not talking about direct oil industry subsidies (though they do exist). I'm specifically thinking about the way our addiction to oil fuels and distorts our foreign policy. 9/11 (and the incredibly expensive wars that followed it) would never have happened had our country not been so heavily involved in the Middle East these last few decades, and a great part of that involvement was due to the oil resources of that region.
3) The market doesn't want to believe that oil (or any resource, for that matter) is finite. This is especially true for the oil industry, which would be greatly hurt if people were to believe en masse that they couldn't expect cheap gasoline for the forseeable future. Car manufacturers mostly go along with this, because they don't want to change the way they do business, and it doesn't hurt them if their customers are left holding the bag in a few years when gas hits $5/gallon.
If we preemptively increase the price of gasoline, it will generate far more demand for aggressive fuel-efficiency technology than currently exists. I believe such a measure is necessary to ensure an early (and smoother) transition away from an oil-based economy.
You also criticize the idea of taxes in general. Of course it would cost money to administer, but taxes can be designed for low administrative overhead. For example, a tax scheme that required individuals to report their annual mileage (broken down into taxable and tax-exempt usage) would require a huge administrative infrastructure. One that simply requires gas stations to cut a check based on the number of gallons sold would require far less. Sticking to the "a tax is a tax is a tax is an abomination" mantra simply leads to crappy policy.
Yes, a tax on fuel is going to have wide ramifications on the economy, generally making goods and services more expensive. I don't object to that fact, because I believe that such a tax would be a corrective measure, counterbalancing the artificial cheapness of fuel that exists when we allow fuel users to pass much of the cost of fuel use (climate change, for example) onto third parties.
My response to your "fuel tax == regressive tax" argument is threefold.
1) Fuel use patterns are more nuanced than the equation suggests. Wealthier people are more able to buy fuel-efficient cars, but are also able to live in the suburbs and take more elaborate vacations. Very poor people are more likely to use mass transit.
2) The regressiveness of the tax could be (imperfectly) counterbalanced by simply increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit. Such an action would require almost no additional administrative overhead. It could also be countered by a tax rebate. The tax could even be made revenue-neutral, by passing back as much money as is collected.
3) Since when have conservative free-market ideologues ever cared about the poor?
Regarding #3: please try not to become a cynical misanthrope like myself. It just isn't healthy.
Don't look at it as a car that will only go 40 miles before you have to plug it in again or add gasoline. That's really the wrong end of the telescope. Look at it as a car that will still go 40 miles after the gasoline is gone. The battery pack is cache, not main memory.
I think you should be pointing the telescope back the other way. The Volt wouldn't be at all consequential if the batteries just gave you an excuse to ignore the Need Gas light on your dash for a few dozen more miles. The advantages to electric cars arise from the ability to get most of your driving miles without using any gas at all. According to this (note source) getting your driving power off the grid is about five to ten times more energy efficient than getting it from an internal combustion engine.
> I mean, come on, he even cites someone named "S. Di Paola"...
That's just one of the many things that bothered me about the paper. The desperate need for proofreading bothered me, the refusal to capitalize properly (Html instead of HTML, Ajax instead of AJAX)... I tried to live with that. But when the authors start citing themselves without giving any indication of the fact, it just makes me feel like somebody is trying to pull a fast one.
I'm not nearly as impressed by this exploit as you appear to be. My understanding is, it only works for a given browser instance/tab (because each one is running its own JS engine, and different tabs don't share the same object definitions). If my understanding is correct, this vulnerability could be prevented by simply restarting the Javascript engine every time you leave one domain for another (which seems like it ought to be a minor patch for any browser), or by noting any requests made to third-party sites.
I fail to see how the vulnerability is AJAX-specific, since you could overwrite the alert() and document.write() functions as easily as you could XMLHTTPRequest functions. To that extent, it seems that the authors are simply trying to take advantage of the Web2.0 hype machine.
I'm no more an expert than the other people weighing in here, so my understanding may be incomplete.
Not quite correct. The problem is, in order to verify that the password matches the hash, the program needs to know how to salt it. Which means that the salt has to be stored somewhere and applied to the password in some known way, which means it's basically an extension of the password (which you can't assume your opponent won't know).
The point of salting isn't to protect an individual password. It can be as easily brute-forced/dictionaried as anything. As I understand it, the point of a salt is that the salt is different for each user in the system, so a password -> hash dictionary you develop for user A is going to be utterly useless against person B. This vastly increases the amount of processing you need to do to crack each password.
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I think you're misinterpreting the nature of the objection. He never said anything about "rounding up". The practice is an annoyance because it allows gas retailers to advertise $2.24 gas when they know perfectly well that the actual price is $2.25. The upside is that, since everyone does it, it doesn't affect your decision of where to buy gas.
>>> First you said: I think I understand economics better than your average citizen, but you'd probably be happy to disqualify me for not seeing it quite the way you do.
>>> Then you said: First, let me state that I believe that GDP is little more than a measure of the rate at which we turn useful natural resources into landfill. A bit overstated? Maybe.
>> Try "definitely."
My point is, so long as the GDP counts the extraction and use of a natural resource as a plus, but doesn't count the future unavailability of that resource as a negative, the accounting principles involved are hopelessly misleading. We can easily increase and increase our GDP by simply choosing to extract at a faster rate, until it's gone, like a person with a big inheritance can live it up more by simply choosing to spend it faster.
Which gets to my larger point: GDP is a bad number to base policy on. It makes no distinction between sustainable and unsustainable production, nor between investment in the future and pointless consumption. Better, more accurate accounting principles have been proposed, but for the most part businesses don't like them.
>>> For example, had we decided in 1971 to devote all our increased productivity to working less rather than doing more, we'd have about a 1971 standard of living, but we'd be supporting it by working a mere 20 hours a week.
>> Hmmm, interesting thought. I'm not sure that sloth is an admirable goal, though. Working 40 hours/week hardly seems unreasonable or abusive. I'm also not sure your theory holds since the world economy has become much more globalized in the last 35 years and we're facing competition from countries we didn't used to have to compete with. Working 20 hours a week is not conducive to staying ahead of them.
"I'm not sure sloth is an admirable goal?" That's exactly the position the right took when we started passing laws against child labor, overtime laws, and the 96 hour work week. You're assuming that all the extra time would be put into increased TV watching or something, but my experience is that people veg out in front of the TV precisely because they're too exhausted from work to do anything useful. Anyone who has ever volunteered for a non-profit or devoted spare time to an open source project can serve as a counterexample.
And frankly, our communities need more participation, our kids need parents spending more time on their education, and our world needs less environmental degradation caused by economic activity. So I think it's a great trade to make.
As to international competition, there are only two reasons I can think of for wanting to "stay ahead of them." The first is mere jingoism, and the second is the fear that they'll destroy us once they get a leg up on us. To the second one, all I can say is that our foreign policy seems explicitly designed to make that fear warranted. Mission accomplished.
>>> Next, wealth distribution is a very important part of deciding whether GDP actually indicates that the CO2 is being emitted for a good cause. If half the CO2 from a country is going to support the lifestyles of 1% of a country's population, then the moral justification for that pollution is called into question.
>> Do you have any evidence it is??? I'm just saying that looking at absolute CO2 production without looking at the amount of economic productivity produced is short-sighted. What happens within the country is a matter to be resolved by the country internally, not by the world community.
While my numbers are "hypothetical", in the U.S., 50% of all stocks and bonds are owned by 1% of its citizens. Of course, this ignores real estate wealth, which is more equally distributed.
I agree with your broader point, that the amount of production you get from a unit of CO2 is critical to deciding whether it's worth producing it. I think cap-and-trade systems do a great job at bringing emissions into the domain of market fo
Yeah, yeah. Everyone in the world is in the position they're in because of their own personal worth, so there's no reason to ever feel sorry for anybody, ever.
The only point I was ever trying to make was that people almost never judge their position in society relative to how much worse they could have it. They judge their happiness--and how well they feel society has treated them--by their relative standing within their society, not by how much more stuff they have than the average Bedouin tribesman.
I never said jack about a "hypothetical couple." I was trying to say to the poster, "live in the luxurious situation you're raving about, and see how great those conditions really are." He would be miserable. The luxurious poverty he describes makes people miserable, and we should be working to alleviate it.
I made an unsubstantiable claim, for which I'm sorry. But it does pretty much nothing to undermine my larger point. The ten countries listed above us have a combined population of about 11M, compared to the United States' 300M, so when discussing other countries as sources of CO2, the lot of them are nothing but a rounding error compared to us. More important, my main point was that any across-the-board rules would disproportionately affect large-scale CO2 producers. The fact that other countries will have to make large sacrifices because of their current overproduction only highlights the fact that the U.S. isn't being singled out. ALL developed economies are supposed to make sacrifices, and claiming that Kyoto meant to single out the United States is just jingoistic blather.
Now, as far as who can and who cannot participate in the discussion, I really don't trust your intuitions about who is qualified. I think I understand economics better than your average citizen, but you'd probably be happy to disqualify me for not seeing it quite the way you do.
First, let me state that I believe that GDP is little more than a measure of the rate at which we turn useful natural resources into landfill. A bit overstated? Maybe. But I like throwing cold water on this idea of economic activity as being a universal good. Certainly some is good, but more isn't necessarily better once you've got your needs taken care of. For example, had we decided in 1971 to devote all our increased productivity to working less rather than doing more, we'd have about a 1971 standard of living, but we'd be supporting it by working a mere 20 hours a week. Bell bottoms aside, the idea is not without appeal.
Next, wealth distribution is a very important part of deciding whether GDP actually indicates that the CO2 is being emitted for a good cause. If half the CO2 from a country is going to support the lifestyles of 1% of a country's population, then the moral justification for that pollution is called into question. This is even more true when we realize that the effects of global warming are going to be disproportionately laid upon the backs of the poor. Remember Katrina?
Then there is the question of how to ideally distribute resources. I figure that, if economic activity doesn't actually make people happier, then there isn't much point. Yet the evidence shows that within the developed world, there is only the most tenuous link between income and reported happiness. In the poorest countries, the correlation is much tighter. While I'm not ready to formally get behind the idea of Gross National Happiness, I think that if loosening CO2 quotas for a very poor country led to greater economic prosperity and hence to greater happiness for its citizens, it might be done even if a developed country could use it more "efficiently."
Really, what's the point of increasing our economic activity, when the key to greater happiness has little to do with that activity? Will a trip to Europe make us happier than a deeper appreciation of our own cities? Will a cure for cancer make us happier than an unafraid respect for our own mortality? Does it make sense to buy pills to remove fat from our bodies and lower our cholesterol, rather than simply eating nutritious food in reasonable quantities in the first place?
In closing, Ireland has less than a third the per-capita GNP, yet the Irish report being noticeably happier than Americans. So, before you convince me that MAXGNP is the best criteria for deciding who is most entitled to pollute, explain what all that extra wealth is actually doing for me.
It's called a hypothetical situation. I wasn't saying, "You, the person who posted this, are not qualified for anything that pays more than Home Depot grunt wages." Though, given the fact that he just plagarized the Heritage Foundation, I'm reserving judgment. Instead, what I was saying is, "If you, the poster, were in the luxurious situation you describe, how would you feel about it? How would you feel towards the society that put you there."
The fact that people like you or I have more control over our lives than an 'unskilled wage' affords doesn't give us permission to turn a blind eye to people who have it worse.
Kyoto was designed "to damage the U.S. economy?"
Fine. Tell me--in excruciating, 192-page report detail--about your plan for reducing CO2 emissions, that somehow manages not to disproportionately affect the country that both produces the most CO2 and the most CO2 per capita.
Maybe your alternative would be some sort of proportionate draw-down, effectively saying that we have a Jesus-given right to produce more CO2 than any country simply because we've been burning fossil fuels faster and harder than anyone else over the last fifty years. That's foolish. In the long-term, it's only fair that China be allowed to produce three times as much CO2 as us, since they have about three times the population.
Thanks. I would just add that ambition, drive, and ability to delay gratification are also unequally distributed (there is a definite genetic component to all these traits).
You're confusing effort with outcome, when the correlation isn't nearly as certain as you want to mislead us into believing.
Some people work very hard, but lack the innate gifts necessary to fully take advantage of schooling. Or they might never have been taught proper study techniques. Or they might have had to devote too much of their hard work to simply providing themselves with the means to attend college. Or they might not have any good role models to pattern their success after.
Meanwhile, a person with great innate gifts, a little bit of ambition, and a basic support structure will have a very easy time succeeding. Beyond that, a person who has neither gifts nor ambition might succeed entirely due to the resources his family can bring to bear on his behalf. I'm talking to you, Mister President.
You talk about physical labor like someone who has never done it. Or maybe you had a roofing job for a couple of summers after high school. Hard labor forty hours a week for forty years, without medical insurance, will wear your body out and put you in an early grave. If anything, sitting at your computer typing clever things, and getting paid well for it, is what more easily deserves to be "mistaken" for hard work.
Finally, do we as a society have no obligation to teach people how to direct their hard work in rewarding ways? Certainly we do, even if only for self-interested reasons. So if this person "has not learnt the most productive ways in which to direct his hard work," that is partly our shame, and our loss.
Okay, let's say you lost your job, your house burned down, you lost your nest egg, etc. You have to take an $8/hr job at Home Depot (who, coincidentally, just gave their departing CEO a piddling $200M for doing such a poor job) and move into the luxurious conditions you describe above.
Are you going to tell your wife how wonderful it is that you and she aren't huddling in a cave, chewing on a raw gazelle leg like your ancestors? Or are the two of you going to be looking around at our society with all its wonderful technology and luxuries, realize that you can't afford much of anything, and feel a bit miffed at your present state?
And if the only source of food that meets your hectic life and limited options is Mickey-Dees, are you going to be appreciative of the weight you gain, taking it as a sign of luxury? Or are you going to count up the money spent and the nutrition ingested, and realize that you're feeding your body a calorie-rich but nutrient-deficient diet?
And if, god forbid, you are revealed to be a no-talent hack who plagarizes paid shills for Social Darwinism, whatever will you do?
I must misunderstand the rules of the challenge, or your economics department is worryingly unimaginative. Here's my list of things that you can do with money to harm a country. All are perfectly legal, and all are currently being practiced:
* Advertise unhealthy, artery-clogging foods. Incessantly.
* Advertise enormous, gas guzzling SUVs. Convince people that it's not safe to drive in anything smaller.
* Pay think tanks to release studies that confuse the public about the dangers of global warming and the sustainability of an oil-based economy, injuring the market by making decisions less responsive to reality.
* Advertise the regular use of antibacterial products (soaps, floor wax, etc.)
* Advertise as a necessity anything that people were perfectly happy without.
* Loan the money to others, under terms that make it unlikely that the borrowers can ever repay it. Then, as a bonus, when people start defaulting on these loans, go blubbering to Congress about how your borrowers are being irresponsible, and how they need to rewrite the bankruptcy laws to enforce your criminally stupid loans.
* Lobby for the repeal of all manner of consumer protections. All in the name of economic prosperity, of course.
* Pour vast amounts of currency into a small country with liberalized financial rules. Overheat the economy, then pull it out, causing a crash. I understand hedge funds do this all the time, to enormous profit.
* Hell, use it for any purpose where your gain is less than the rest of the country's loss. Just find any externality you can, fund the hell out of it, bribe politicians to ignore your behavior, and when they are finally forced by public outrage to act, move on to the next externality.
Whatever rules your little thought experiment had to keep these options off the table, they seem rather beside the point. The question should be, "If you give me ten billion dollars or so, could I could truly wreck this country?" I believe I could, and that I could probably take a number of other countries down with what was left over.
I'll give two reasons why that's a wrongheaded way of looking at the issue.
First, people don't evaluate their well-being based on how well they can afford the absolute necessities of life. By and large, everyone in the United States (homeless included) can afford sufficient food, clothing, and shelter necessary to survive. Once the absolute necessities are taken care of, people start worrying about things like, "What is my place in society?" and "What desires do I want to fulfill?" From that vantage, your relative position can plummet even as your absolute standard of living rises. Further, if the incomes of your peers are rising faster than your own, you see more and more evidence of others having things that you do not, which leads to a sense of dissatisfaction in all but the most zen-ful of us.
Next reason: we have what is called the Ultimatum Game. It is a social interaction experiment where one person is given a dollar, and told to offer some portion of the dollar to another person (called 'the responder'). If the responder accepts the split, both players get their respective portions. If the opponent rejects it, neither player gets anything. Now, according to the economic psychology you're proposing, no matter how small the split being offered, the responder should accept the offer, because it will make her better off. In fact, even if the responder is offered $0.00, she should accept, because she shouldn't begrudge the other player his dollar, since it doesn't actually diminish her economic situation.
What really happens in these experiments: stingy offers (20%) are usually rejected. Apparently, the feeling of being treated unfairly is a more powerful motivator than the money is. So, the question is, is this a matter of people not understanding economics? Or of economists not understanding people? I would say the latter.
You know, I can honestly say I have a lack of self-confidence (not that you could tell from the arrogance of my posts) that hasn't exactly helped my job search. But you've given me a little bit of an ego boost. At least I know the difference between "a bill passing the House" and "a bill becoming law".
>> A person who THINKS they are less capable is just a bad as a person who is really is less capable. In fact there's no difference, in my opinion.
Not really. The former is doing reasonably good work, and not recognizing it as such. The latter is checking all manner of crap into your code repository, and not recognizing it as such. I know which one I'd rather have on my team.
The company *does* have a relationship with that individual. He/she is someone who has applied for a job with your company. As the popular motto goes, every employee is part of the public relations department. It would also be wise to remember that every person is a potential customer, and that every applicant you reject might relay their experiences to people your company might want to have deeper relationships with.
Plus, there is a game theory aspect to the question. If you recognize deficiencies in a person who doesn't recognize them in himself, and you fail to spend a piddly few minutes (oh, GOD! The loss of efficiency!) explaining how he might correct them, he'll most likely blithely go on applying to a dozen other companies. The best case scenario is that he simply wastes twenty minutes of other peoples' time here and there. In the worst case, he might get a job with one of your suppliers or customers, and bring his deficiencies to them, indirectly making your company's life a bit harder.
Anyhow, the game theory aspect: You've got all these bad candidates out there, wasting precious interviewing time. Assume it's not in any given employer's interest to provide feedback, because the candidate will never interview twice with the same company. But it is in every company's interest for the candidate to receive feedback before ever interviewing. Also assume that some portion of the bad candidates are capable of accepting the advice, learning the areas where they have deficiencies, and becoming good candidates. Your proposal is "always defect," which means that other companies will see more bad candidates. But if a significant number of companies take the same approach, you'll see more bad candidates, which wastes your time.
Finally, the "the company is more efficient, so it's all good" idea is crap. First, it's crap because people don't want to be treated facelessly. They want to feel noticed, respected, and appreciated. Humans are more social creatures than economic ones. Second, it's crap because while you may represent the company, an interview is invariably an exchange between individuals. The company probably doesn't care if you spend a few minutes jaw-jacking about last night's game before diving into the meat of the interview. But if it makes the interview go more smoothly, makes your job a little less tedious, and leaves the interviewee with happy feelings towards the company as a whole, it was time well spent.
The same goes for the rejection. The "we do not require your services at this time" approach is the lowest common denominator, with zero risk and zero reward. You don't risk your time, or much ill will from the candidate. But I think most candidates would be glad for an honest, polite assessment of the impressions they left, and if such advice actually improves their job prospects in the future, karma might come back on you and your company in the long run.
Weird. Bottled water is great for emergency relief efforts, but they seem to want to use it as a long-term solution. I can't see the point.
Nah, that wasn't flamebait. That was just some guy disagreeing with you.
Now THIS is flamebait: Your post sounds like it comes directly from the "I've never done it, so it can't possibly be hard" school of thought.
See the difference? In the latter instance, I'm questioning your competence in a none-too-subtle manner, in order to evoke a heated emotional response. Aside from the "Okay, smarty" (which seemed pretty justified given your apparent belief that AJAX techniques can be fully mastered in fifteen minutes by a drooling monkey), the guy was just explaining his position.
I'm sure you're a top-notch programmer, and your approach to application design serves you very well. But what's up with this axe you're obviously grinding against all things AJAX-y?
>> I'd roll my own. If I really needed to write an application that constantly transferred huge amounts back to the client, it'd probably be a clue that a proper desktop client/server app would be a better architecture.
Of course, that loses all the advantages of developing it as a web app: no installation, multi-platform, the ability to access your data from just about any computer, etc. I don't see the advantages of a desktop app, unless the data being worked with changes infrequently enough to do client-side caching. But regardless, there are times and situations when you really want the sort of minimal barrier to entry that you can get with a web application.
I have a two year old nephew lying around the house. Can someone link to the HOWTO?
Remember, kids: it's only judicial activism when the rulings support left-wing positions.
I disagree with your armchair psychoanalyzing. If you're a nonprofit with a small budget, you might have the money and manpower to distribute a million doses of a critical vaccine. But if you tried to spend that same budget on a truly self-sufficient vaccine producing facility, you'd be broke before you spent even a few percent of the money necessary. It requires building the factory, educating the people who run it, buying the ingredients, etc.
Now, a water treatment facility would be a different story, since trucking in water for the indefinite future would be the bigger undertaking. But nobody is actually talking about doing that. "Providing clean water" isn't meant to be taken literally; rather, it's a shorthand for providing water purification/filtration systems of various scales.
>>> I'm not dignifying this with a response.
>> That's too bad. Because I just explained to you why environmentalists are more interested in shutting down "big business" than simply assessing them their true quotal share of the costs.
No, you didn't explain why. You simply asserted that they were, proposed a plan which basically reflects the Kyoto Protocol (which environmentalists generally support), and claimed that because environmentalists don't support such a plan (when in fact most do) that they must only be interested in shutting down big business.
>> I could refute it line by line, but I know you probably haven't bothered to seriously read the stuff in that link yourself. You can hurl links at me all day long and I'll spend 20x as much time refuting them, only for you to move on to the next link. Nevertheless, it's the same crock: 1) The "tax subsidy" is simply because the oil industry has unusual structuring of capital expenses; any other industry with the same kinds of projects would be treated the same way. 2) Roads are a subsidy to transportation, *irresepective* of the fuel source of that transportation, and therefore cannot be counted as an oil subsidy; and they're are already paid for through taxes. Yes, there's a shortfall; this is due to expenditures on underused roads. 3) The sales tax bit is flat out wrong. The federal tax alone is more than the typical state sales tax.
1) is just handwaving about how the oil industry is special, in a way that is too complex for a buffoon like me to understand. If these record profits must not be taxed because of the sheer capital investment needed to maintain oil production, that's a damned good sign that the industry as a whole needs to be abandoned as soon as possible. 2) is a load of crap, since more than 99% of the vehicles on the road consume gasoline alone. The fact that our public policies generally support lots of road-building rather than reliance on mass transit does increase demand for oil, and hence is properly seen as a subsidy to the oil industry. 3) The federal tax is specifically earmarked towards building and maintaining roads, which support the oil industry. States charge their own sales taxes on gasoline (which go into the general fund), but these are typically far lower than sales taxes on other goods and services. Nowhere is the oil industry charged for deaths and illnesses related to air pollution caused by their products (one estimate puts that subsidy at around $10B/year for the Los Angeles area alone). Nor is it being charged for the damage done by the CO2 put into the atmosphere. When these things start happening, I'll believe that the oil industry isn't getting special treatment.
>>> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING! You're exactly right: you can get all the oil you want from these places simply by paying the market rate. Hence, no troops necessary. Hence, troops are not a true cost of getting oil. Hence, not having troop costs embedded in the price of oil is not a subsidy.
Dude, the U.S. learned their lesson in the 1970's, when the OPEC countries exercised their independence and soveriegnty in 1973. They decided to stop selling to Israel and its allies. Our Sacred Economy went into a tailspin. But while most of them reacted by pursuing meaningful energy independence,
Also, you can try to paint the oil industry as the hapless recipient of misguided and unrequested public assistance, but I think the oil companies are begging for us to continue our military meddling in the Middle East. When Iran nationalized the oil industry in the 1950s, the CIA helped overthrow prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, exchanging him for a shah that would give its oil industry back to BP. Obviously, the nationalization (with no compensation) was cutting deeply into oil profits, and I doubt that the oil industry would just sit back and take it, when they had the ear of a country with a hug
There are tons of direct subsidies, which are well documented, so saying "there are no subsidies for oil producers" is wrong.
Our Middle East policy has always been about two things: oil and Israel. We liberated Kuwait in 1991, which had nothing to do with "freedom on the march", and everything to do with keeping oil supplies stable. I mean, seriously, had it been any two oil-poor African countries, would we have done more than file a complaint with the U.N.? I think not.
In 2003, as the Bush administration was telling us what a jolly grand war we'd be having, one of their main arguments was that it could be done cheaply; Iraqi oil revenues would finance both liberation and reconstruction. (Just as an aside, we shouldn't forget that we were the ones who destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, then placed an embargo so that they couldn't rebuild, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the process.)
I don't know the particulars of how all the other countries you mention conduct their international affairs, but they probably get their oil the old-fashioned way: by asking for it, and offering some sort of goods and services in return. I've never heard of Switzerland supporting a coup inside another country to forestall the nationalization of oil resources, at any rate. I'll agree that in the long run, American policies make the oil supply less stable, but as I argue down below, business interests can be very myopic.
I'll set aside the fact that I only said the oil industry wanted to believe in infinity, not the market as a whole.
Your arguments run up against what I consider one of the biggest flaws of the current markets: betting against something is much, much harder than betting in favor of something. For example, if I believe that the stock market as a whole is overvalued, how do I invest so as to take advantage of that fact? The financial tools just don't exist. But if I believe the stock market will keep going up, I'll just buy into an index fund.
Now tell me, how would I "short oil?" Shorting only works for timing short-term market fluctuations. When you're talking about long-term trends (on the order of decades), there is no way to short oil directly. The best I can come up with is investing in companies devoted to green technologies (which, by the way, I already do). The idea of taking out an oil contract for twenty years down the road is a bit brain-straining.
The markets are fundamentally, structurally designed to be optimistic. Even with the pessimistic financial tools that currently exist (selling short), they are seldom used, awkward (akin to trying to profit off a stock's increase, but being required to sell it at a specific date), and generally regarded as unsportsmanlike. And let's not even talk about the many ways that entrenched businesses try to buy government protection of the status quo rather than adjust to changing conditions.
I'll grant that there will be winners and losers in any climate change. But let me lay out my reasons for believing that the losers will greatly outnumber the winners.
First, it is expected that global warming will tend to make storms more energetic. That means more money spent on prevention and repair of storm damage.
Next, it is expected that rising oceans and other effects of climate change could create hundreds of millions of refugees, which will lead to all manner of suffering and political instability.
Finally, an unpredictable, changing climate is bad for an economy in its own right. Take an example from my own back yard: The Salt Lake Valley has billions of dollars invested in its ski resorts and related tourism. Hell, we spent billions just on the 2002 Winter Olympics, in the hopes of making this a destination. Now there is a very real fear inside the local industry that global warming could turn our area into a third-rate destination, and even put the resorts out of business. That loss could have effects on the wider economy by making Salt Lake City a less attractive place to live. Even if global warming somehow also increases snowpack in Aspen, Colorado, the billions invested in Utah resorts will still be wasted, and not everyone who gained expertise here will want to move.
There are vast swaths of the economy that depend heavily on climate, and it is much less risky to invest when you know that the climate fundamentals aren't going to change out from under you. If it turns out that the world needs to abandon its breadbasket in the U.S. midwest in favor of building up a new one in Siberia, that means hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure that needs to be built to take advantage of the new conditions. Adjustments within the free market never come without costs, and these ones will be ginormous.
You sound like you're saying that once fuel costs more than nothing, the price doesn't matter. That sounds absurd on its surface, but it's the only conclusion to be drawn from your insistence that a tax is unnecessary, since "incentives already exist." The simple fact is, the higher the tax on fuel, the greater the incentive for fuel efficiency.
Since it's unlikely that you're actually trying to argue otherwise, then maybe you're arguing that the free market is already achieving optimal fuel usage patterns. This is false for several reasons:
1) The current market doesn't account for the effects of usage on global warming. Those who extract, refine, distribute, and burn all that fuel are not the ones who will be paying the costs associated with climate change. They don't call climate change "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen" for nothing.
2) The current market for fuel is heavily subsidized by our government. I'm not talking about direct oil industry subsidies (though they do exist). I'm specifically thinking about the way our addiction to oil fuels and distorts our foreign policy. 9/11 (and the incredibly expensive wars that followed it) would never have happened had our country not been so heavily involved in the Middle East these last few decades, and a great part of that involvement was due to the oil resources of that region.
3) The market doesn't want to believe that oil (or any resource, for that matter) is finite. This is especially true for the oil industry, which would be greatly hurt if people were to believe en masse that they couldn't expect cheap gasoline for the forseeable future. Car manufacturers mostly go along with this, because they don't want to change the way they do business, and it doesn't hurt them if their customers are left holding the bag in a few years when gas hits $5/gallon.
If we preemptively increase the price of gasoline, it will generate far more demand for aggressive fuel-efficiency technology than currently exists. I believe such a measure is necessary to ensure an early (and smoother) transition away from an oil-based economy.
You also criticize the idea of taxes in general. Of course it would cost money to administer, but taxes can be designed for low administrative overhead. For example, a tax scheme that required individuals to report their annual mileage (broken down into taxable and tax-exempt usage) would require a huge administrative infrastructure. One that simply requires gas stations to cut a check based on the number of gallons sold would require far less. Sticking to the "a tax is a tax is a tax is an abomination" mantra simply leads to crappy policy.
Yes, a tax on fuel is going to have wide ramifications on the economy, generally making goods and services more expensive. I don't object to that fact, because I believe that such a tax would be a corrective measure, counterbalancing the artificial cheapness of fuel that exists when we allow fuel users to pass much of the cost of fuel use (climate change, for example) onto third parties.
My response to your "fuel tax == regressive tax" argument is threefold.
1) Fuel use patterns are more nuanced than the equation suggests. Wealthier people are more able to buy fuel-efficient cars, but are also able to live in the suburbs and take more elaborate vacations. Very poor people are more likely to use mass transit.
2) The regressiveness of the tax could be (imperfectly) counterbalanced by simply increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit. Such an action would require almost no additional administrative overhead. It could also be countered by a tax rebate. The tax could even be made revenue-neutral, by passing back as much money as is collected.
3) Since when have conservative free-market ideologues ever cared about the poor?
Regarding #3: please try not to become a cynical misanthrope like myself. It just isn't healthy.
> I mean, come on, he even cites someone named "S. Di Paola"...
That's just one of the many things that bothered me about the paper. The desperate need for proofreading bothered me, the refusal to capitalize properly (Html instead of HTML, Ajax instead of AJAX)... I tried to live with that. But when the authors start citing themselves without giving any indication of the fact, it just makes me feel like somebody is trying to pull a fast one.
I'm not nearly as impressed by this exploit as you appear to be. My understanding is, it only works for a given browser instance/tab (because each one is running its own JS engine, and different tabs don't share the same object definitions). If my understanding is correct, this vulnerability could be prevented by simply restarting the Javascript engine every time you leave one domain for another (which seems like it ought to be a minor patch for any browser), or by noting any requests made to third-party sites.
I fail to see how the vulnerability is AJAX-specific, since you could overwrite the alert() and document.write() functions as easily as you could XMLHTTPRequest functions. To that extent, it seems that the authors are simply trying to take advantage of the Web2.0 hype machine.
I'm no more an expert than the other people weighing in here, so my understanding may be incomplete.
Not quite correct. The problem is, in order to verify that the password matches the hash, the program needs to know how to salt it. Which means that the salt has to be stored somewhere and applied to the password in some known way, which means it's basically an extension of the password (which you can't assume your opponent won't know).
The point of salting isn't to protect an individual password. It can be as easily brute-forced/dictionaried as anything. As I understand it, the point of a salt is that the salt is different for each user in the system, so a password -> hash dictionary you develop for user A is going to be utterly useless against person B. This vastly increases the amount of processing you need to do to crack each password.