Python itself is fairly sweet. The language is easy to work with, and it's got several helpful modules. I've only played a little with TurboGears (the Python answer to RoR).
Back when Napster was still an interesting thing, my mom (a lifelong scouter) asked me where I'd gotten a bunch of oldies music. Here's how I remember the conversation:
"It's called Napster. It's a place where you can download free music off the Internet."
"Is it legal?"
"Not really. They'll probably have it shut down in a month or two."
"Well, hurry and get what you can."
My mom is as honest a person as I know. I just don't see this merit badge winning a whole lot of hearts and minds.
Whenever I hear a call for 'personal responsibility,' it always sounds to me like a call to abandon social responsibility. Unless you're proposing a sweeping eugenics program to remove anyone lacking ironclad self-control from the gene pool, we're always going to have a certain fraction of the population which will be unable to regulate their use of habit-forming things. People are not all going to be mature and responsible, whether we're talking about regulating their own behavior or accepting responsibility for their own inability to regulate it.
There is a strong genetic component to many aspects of human behavior, and addictive personalities is very likely one of them. Arguing that all responsibility for regulating behavior rests on the individual is tantamount to saying that it is right and just to doom people with a certain genetic profile to a far worse life than they could have if society provided some support for them.
In closing, I believe that cheap holodeck technology will be the downfall of humankind.
I nearly spit on my screen when I saw this. I mean, the laughing too hard sort of spitting, not the angry sort of spitting. I mean, it's like sending a fire truck to put out a nuclear explosion, but the sentiment is a good one.
My advice to everybody: step away from the computer, step outside, and pretend the whole world is 'The Sims.'
Firstly, people may not understand that they have an addictive personality until they've already gotten themselves hooked on several things.
Second, the whole point of an addictive disorder is that the people who have them have an unusual amount of trouble controlling their own behavior. Arguing that those who don't resist these especially powerful urges deserve to have their lives ruined is more than a little inhumane.
I think Blizzard really ought to be doing more to help users regulate their own behavior. For example, allow users to set the maximum number of hours they're allowed to play an account in a week, and only give them the opportunity to raise that limit once a month. Or provide in-game reinforcement. For example, the longer you've been away, the more likely you are to get cool items, or playing for more than a few hours at a time turns your character stupid, making it harder to get experience.
You'll probably argue that doing so would put Blizzard in the paternalistic position of encouraging and discouraging certain uses of their product. But it already does that, usually in harmful ways. For example, after a certain point in the game, you have to re-roll in order to continue generating feelings of accomplishment without devoting huge stretches of time to the game. Also, the whole honor system is designed to massively reward people for living their entire lives inside the game.
Blizzard's product is wonderful for the majority of players. But it's severely damaging to some, and nobody is in a better position than Blizzard itself to ameliorate that harm.
Not an original idea, but: what would be really fun is a website where people can go and bet on the likelihood of various future events. For example, everyone starts out with 1000 credits, which they can bet on events like, "The Republicans will retain control of the House in the November 7th election," or "Terrorists will detonate a nuclear warhead on American soil before January 1, 2015." Odds would vary over time as bets are placed, so that on average the winning side will make as much as the losing side will lose.
I've heard of variations that make it more like the stock market, but I'm not entirely clear on how they would work.
This would provide a "crowd's eye view" on the likelihood of events, and also provide a mechanism for finding people whose opinions are uncannily accurate. Plus, if we could make politicians and pundits legally obligated to participate, we might find out just how full-o-crap they really are.
I think the CIA wanted to try this at one point, but people misunderstood and got all indignant.
The analogy is imperfect (to put it mildly), but there is a grain of truth to it. Both provide a shortcut to feelings of happiness that are more difficult to find in real life. Both are habits that are very difficult for many people to control.
I find myself playing more WoW when the rest of my life feels like it sucks. I also find myself posting to slashdot more. Hmm, seventeen posts yesterday. Not a good day. I think my frustration shows in a lot of them.
Anyhow, I think your characterization is a bit unfair, or maybe just a little too close to home.
About the genetic thing: It's not necessarily true that a person with a given genetic profile will develop autism. It may only mean that the person is susceptible to developing autism when given (or deprived of) a certain stimuli.
The fact that autistic children behave differently in front of children is also unsurprising, and possibly not relevant. After all, the study in question is talking about TV viewing between the ages of 0 and 3, long before children are actually disagnosed with autism. If it's true (and it probably is), it doesn't mean that their brains were predestined to respond that way to TV.
Re: misdiagnosis. If it were just a lack of knowledge, then you should see a lot of these cases being reclassified now that the knowledge is there. AFAIK, that isn't happening.
Finally, it may not be the number of mirror neurons that is at issue. I could speculate that there is some quality to the mirror neurons of autism-prone kids that makes them susceptable to degradation by TV.
All in all, there are too many open questions. Meantime, parents, don't sit your toddler down in front of the tube for hours on end, and don't beat yourself up for letting the TV give you a twenty minute break every once in a while. Your sanity is important to you and your kids.
If their theroy is true, it would mean that Canada, Sweden, and UK should all have higher autism rate than say California.
Not exactly. It's really misrepresenting the study to say that "rainy places have higher rates of autism." As best I can tell, they're really asserting that, for a given area, more children whose 0-3 years were wetter years had a higher rate than children whose 0-3 years were drier years.
That's the reason for pursuing the second variable: the prevalence of cable TV, which isn't strongly related to weather, but is likely to be correlated with TV viewing time (because of the availability of child-targetted channels). They have two variables which shouldn't correlate with each other, but both of which should correlate with TV watching, and they've found that both correlate with autism.
There are a lot of possible pitfalls in this line of reasoning, but it looks to me like reverse causality isn't one of them.
You make a fair point. But it sounds to me like the methodology of the study eliminated the possibility of reversing cause and effect. Had they gone and simply asked the parents of autistic and non-autistic children "How much TV did your child watch before the age of 3," you might see such an effect. You also might see the parents of the autistic children underreporting more severely than the parents of normal kids.
Anyhow, what they did was take a fairly commonsense (but possibly arguable) notion: children watch more TV when it's raining outside than when it's sunny. They look at weather patterns, and assume that children watched more TV in years when the weather was rainy. If they see the children who were toddlers during rainier years having more autism, then they draw a tentative conclusion. The great thing about this is it eliminates self-reporting bias altogether.
I have sympathy for parents of autistic children who let them watch a lot of TV to keep hold of their sanity. It makes sense, in a way.
"CURES CANCER" might be too big a stretch for most people. But there have been plenty of studies showing that baseless claims sell products. Just look at the whole dietary supplements industry for proof. If manufacturers are given the ability to make whatever claim they like, there will be an immediate arms race to see who can make the most remarkable claims, and the public is surprisingly credulous, especially when there is no easy way to substantiate or debunk the claim.* It's happened plenty often enough in the past (see Marion Nestle's Food Politics).
* You know the old saying, "If I tell you that the galaxy has 300 billion stars, you'll nod. If I tell you that the paint on this wall is wet, you'll touch it to make sure."
Global starvation isn't a result of our growing our cows inefficiently. It's a result of growing our cows at all. It takes 5-10 calories of grain to produce one calorie of meat. If you care about starving people, rather than about scoring points against environmentalists, then you shouldn't eat meat and you shouldn't go back for seconds. But I don't get the feeling that you care much for the whole "live simply so that others may simply live" lifestyle. You strike me as more of an SUV kind of guy.
The reason for #3 is pretty obvious: If all macaroni is FAT FREE, then saying that your Kraft Macaroni is FAT FREE is confusing consumers. They are allowed to say "macaroni is a fat free food," and even allowed to tout this as a key selling point. What they can't do is try to use this information to differentiate themselves from other macaroni on the market.
For #4, you suggest the solution yourself: Have the extra information in a separate location on the package. You'll be hard-pressed to convince me that the FDA's demand for a certain amount of packaging space is a big deal. I do think you're right about them needing to switch to a "meets or exceeds" mode, even though there might be abuses.
You're also right that there aren't sufficient allowances for small farms and producers, and for setups that don't meet the FDA's expectations (The Omnivore's Dilemma has an interesting example there, with an organic farm that did its slaughtering outdoors. Since they couldn't get the FDA to sign off on a seemingly safe and healthy practice, they were limited to selling meat directly to consumers.)
Your first source claims that the intent of Congress was to reduce the risk of using pharmeceuticals to zero, and that the FDA has failed because the risk of using pharmeceuticals is not zero. Without the FDA, he adds, the threat of litigation will successfully keep our drugs safe and effective.
With intellectual lights like these, no wonder you strike me as being so dim.
What is the FDA doing to stop vegans from getting the extra information that they need? Nothing.
The FDA is simply requiring a certain amount of information that nutritionists generally agree is necessary to make informed health decisions. If you're trying to attract the kosher market, you go through whatever certification that requires, and you put it elsewhere on the packaging.
I'm not sure what additional data you would put in for low-carb and diabetic shoppers.
As far as I'm concerned, the big problem with the FDA is that their nutritional guidelines are far too friendly to the meat and dairy industry. If they were working solely on the basis of a maximally healthy diet, they'd be screaming from the rooftops that too much meat will kill you dead.
Many stats show that poor people who are driven to succeed do succeed
Wow.
Are these the same stats that show that people who work really hard at being good basketball players become taller?
You heard right, folks: dada just invoked the "No True Scotsman" fallacy to show that the poor deserve their miserable lot in life. Anyone who is poor must be lazy, because everyone who is not lazy is not poor. What about this guy who... Nope, must be lazy.
I'll not question the implicit assumption that those in society who deserve the best life are those who exhibit the most raw, ruthless, and naked ambition. Because our society is founded on the glorious principle of "get whatever you can, from whoever you can, whenever you can, and expect the same treatment in return." God bless you, dada, for your clear insight, for understanding that what this world needs is more greedy assholes.
Unequal information isn't the basis of profit. Different needs, and different access to resources is. When person X makes a profit because person Y lacks information that person X has, it's not capitalism; it's just screwing somebody.
What, precisely, is stopping the manufacturers from providing more information than the FDA does? If you want to say exactly how much molybdenum is in your product, and the FDA doesn't require that information, there is nothing stopping you.
It's a different situation for health claims, but all the FDA requires is that you demonstrate that the claim is backed by a good deal of scientific consensus. I really doubt the world would be better off if General Mills could put "CURES CANCER" on every box of cereal. But it would make their cereal sell better, and isn't that the holy grail of free market capitalism? So, yes, we should let food manufacturers go crazy, with their absurd claims in bold fonts.
I triple dog dare you to give me a single example of how FDA labeling rules prevent manufacturers from giving me useful, accurate information.
You're kept "healthy, slim, and energized" by beef, cream, and cheese?
You think that having everyone call up and ask the manufacturer what's in their product is a superior system for distributing nutritional information?
You refuse to eat even a single gram of trans-fats, to the point that you call for confirmation when the label says zero grams? Hint: they occur naturally in the beef and cheese that you love so very very much.
My god, have you ever once written a post that you actually believed?
They're not using it to power 1000 homes. The number is just to give you an idea of the capacity of the installation. The story isn't clear about where exactly the electricity will be going, but the installation itself will be at their HQ, so it would make sense to use it there rather than putting it back on the grid.
Explain to me again why you're claiming that a fifteen year lifespan is an "educated estimate" when many panel manufacturers warranty them for 25 or 30 years? Your suspicions mean bupkis to me.
That's the way it's supposed to work, and it often works very well. But you have to remember that economics is implemented by people, and that people are stupid. Or, to be a bit more fair, people do not behave in fully rational ways, and the market price of something may not reflect all the costs involved.
For example, say that you happen to own a stretch of forest. If you harvest trees from it in a sustainable way (that is, in such a way that you can expect it to produce the same amount every year off into forever), then you might get 3% ROI on the money you've invested. Meanwhile, everyone around you is making 8 or 9% a year on their stock market investments. So there is pressure for you as a landowner to harvest in such a way as to match that ROI, even though doing so ensures that eventually the forest will stop producing timber at all. Plus, you haven't been benefitting directly from many of the things that the forest is producing (clean air, erosion prevention, habitat for fuzzywuzzies, attractive scenery, etc.), so when you destroy those things to generate profit for yourself, that loss doesn't come out of your bottom line.
The world is eating into its non-renewable resources and overharvesting its renewable ones at a prolific rate, because the profits of doing so come now, and the costs of doing so come in the distant future. But the future is getting much less distant, even as we increase our rate of consumption. Having a lot of clean energy on hand will make our future problems a lot more tractable.
Slashdot Mirror
Python itself is fairly sweet. The language is easy to work with, and it's got several helpful modules. I've only played a little with TurboGears (the Python answer to RoR).
Back when Napster was still an interesting thing, my mom (a lifelong scouter) asked me where I'd gotten a bunch of oldies music. Here's how I remember the conversation:
"It's called Napster. It's a place where you can download free music off the Internet."
"Is it legal?"
"Not really. They'll probably have it shut down in a month or two."
"Well, hurry and get what you can."
My mom is as honest a person as I know. I just don't see this merit badge winning a whole lot of hearts and minds.
Well, yeah. But was Bush under oath when he took the oath of office?
I assume that chirping, crickety sound is you realizing that Bush has never lied under oath.
Ladies and gentlemen, the defense rests.
Bigger disk quotas are always appreciated.
More web environments would be nice (PHP, Perl, Ruby on Rails).
MySQL backends for said web pages.
Bulk up on the software available from the shell.
Publicly accessible CVS/SVN repositories. As in, users can host their projects there, and grant others rights to check out and maybe even commit.
NetHack.
Whenever I hear a call for 'personal responsibility,' it always sounds to me like a call to abandon social responsibility. Unless you're proposing a sweeping eugenics program to remove anyone lacking ironclad self-control from the gene pool, we're always going to have a certain fraction of the population which will be unable to regulate their use of habit-forming things. People are not all going to be mature and responsible, whether we're talking about regulating their own behavior or accepting responsibility for their own inability to regulate it.
There is a strong genetic component to many aspects of human behavior, and addictive personalities is very likely one of them. Arguing that all responsibility for regulating behavior rests on the individual is tantamount to saying that it is right and just to doom people with a certain genetic profile to a far worse life than they could have if society provided some support for them.
In closing, I believe that cheap holodeck technology will be the downfall of humankind.
I nearly spit on my screen when I saw this. I mean, the laughing too hard sort of spitting, not the angry sort of spitting. I mean, it's like sending a fire truck to put out a nuclear explosion, but the sentiment is a good one.
My advice to everybody: step away from the computer, step outside, and pretend the whole world is 'The Sims.'
Firstly, people may not understand that they have an addictive personality until they've already gotten themselves hooked on several things.
Second, the whole point of an addictive disorder is that the people who have them have an unusual amount of trouble controlling their own behavior. Arguing that those who don't resist these especially powerful urges deserve to have their lives ruined is more than a little inhumane.
I think Blizzard really ought to be doing more to help users regulate their own behavior. For example, allow users to set the maximum number of hours they're allowed to play an account in a week, and only give them the opportunity to raise that limit once a month. Or provide in-game reinforcement. For example, the longer you've been away, the more likely you are to get cool items, or playing for more than a few hours at a time turns your character stupid, making it harder to get experience.
You'll probably argue that doing so would put Blizzard in the paternalistic position of encouraging and discouraging certain uses of their product. But it already does that, usually in harmful ways. For example, after a certain point in the game, you have to re-roll in order to continue generating feelings of accomplishment without devoting huge stretches of time to the game. Also, the whole honor system is designed to massively reward people for living their entire lives inside the game.
Blizzard's product is wonderful for the majority of players. But it's severely damaging to some, and nobody is in a better position than Blizzard itself to ameliorate that harm.
Not an original idea, but: what would be really fun is a website where people can go and bet on the likelihood of various future events. For example, everyone starts out with 1000 credits, which they can bet on events like, "The Republicans will retain control of the House in the November 7th election," or "Terrorists will detonate a nuclear warhead on American soil before January 1, 2015." Odds would vary over time as bets are placed, so that on average the winning side will make as much as the losing side will lose.
I've heard of variations that make it more like the stock market, but I'm not entirely clear on how they would work.
This would provide a "crowd's eye view" on the likelihood of events, and also provide a mechanism for finding people whose opinions are uncannily accurate. Plus, if we could make politicians and pundits legally obligated to participate, we might find out just how full-o-crap they really are.
I think the CIA wanted to try this at one point, but people misunderstood and got all indignant.
I recommend succulent carrot juice.
r osis+vegetarian&spell=1
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=osteopo
I am a vegetarian shill.
s/a\ videogame/drugs/
The analogy is imperfect (to put it mildly), but there is a grain of truth to it. Both provide a shortcut to feelings of happiness that are more difficult to find in real life. Both are habits that are very difficult for many people to control.
I find myself playing more WoW when the rest of my life feels like it sucks. I also find myself posting to slashdot more. Hmm, seventeen posts yesterday. Not a good day. I think my frustration shows in a lot of them.
Anyhow, I think your characterization is a bit unfair, or maybe just a little too close to home.
About the genetic thing: It's not necessarily true that a person with a given genetic profile will develop autism. It may only mean that the person is susceptible to developing autism when given (or deprived of) a certain stimuli.
The fact that autistic children behave differently in front of children is also unsurprising, and possibly not relevant. After all, the study in question is talking about TV viewing between the ages of 0 and 3, long before children are actually disagnosed with autism. If it's true (and it probably is), it doesn't mean that their brains were predestined to respond that way to TV.
Re: misdiagnosis. If it were just a lack of knowledge, then you should see a lot of these cases being reclassified now that the knowledge is there. AFAIK, that isn't happening.
Finally, it may not be the number of mirror neurons that is at issue. I could speculate that there is some quality to the mirror neurons of autism-prone kids that makes them susceptable to degradation by TV.
All in all, there are too many open questions. Meantime, parents, don't sit your toddler down in front of the tube for hours on end, and don't beat yourself up for letting the TV give you a twenty minute break every once in a while. Your sanity is important to you and your kids.
That's the reason for pursuing the second variable: the prevalence of cable TV, which isn't strongly related to weather, but is likely to be correlated with TV viewing time (because of the availability of child-targetted channels). They have two variables which shouldn't correlate with each other, but both of which should correlate with TV watching, and they've found that both correlate with autism.
There are a lot of possible pitfalls in this line of reasoning, but it looks to me like reverse causality isn't one of them.
You make a fair point. But it sounds to me like the methodology of the study eliminated the possibility of reversing cause and effect. Had they gone and simply asked the parents of autistic and non-autistic children "How much TV did your child watch before the age of 3," you might see such an effect. You also might see the parents of the autistic children underreporting more severely than the parents of normal kids.
Anyhow, what they did was take a fairly commonsense (but possibly arguable) notion: children watch more TV when it's raining outside than when it's sunny. They look at weather patterns, and assume that children watched more TV in years when the weather was rainy. If they see the children who were toddlers during rainier years having more autism, then they draw a tentative conclusion. The great thing about this is it eliminates self-reporting bias altogether.
I have sympathy for parents of autistic children who let them watch a lot of TV to keep hold of their sanity. It makes sense, in a way.
"CURES CANCER" might be too big a stretch for most people. But there have been plenty of studies showing that baseless claims sell products. Just look at the whole dietary supplements industry for proof. If manufacturers are given the ability to make whatever claim they like, there will be an immediate arms race to see who can make the most remarkable claims, and the public is surprisingly credulous, especially when there is no easy way to substantiate or debunk the claim.* It's happened plenty often enough in the past (see Marion Nestle's Food Politics).
* You know the old saying, "If I tell you that the galaxy has 300 billion stars, you'll nod. If I tell you that the paint on this wall is wet, you'll touch it to make sure."
Global starvation isn't a result of our growing our cows inefficiently. It's a result of growing our cows at all. It takes 5-10 calories of grain to produce one calorie of meat. If you care about starving people, rather than about scoring points against environmentalists, then you shouldn't eat meat and you shouldn't go back for seconds. But I don't get the feeling that you care much for the whole "live simply so that others may simply live" lifestyle. You strike me as more of an SUV kind of guy.
Your first two examples are bogus.
The reason for #3 is pretty obvious: If all macaroni is FAT FREE, then saying that your Kraft Macaroni is FAT FREE is confusing consumers. They are allowed to say "macaroni is a fat free food," and even allowed to tout this as a key selling point. What they can't do is try to use this information to differentiate themselves from other macaroni on the market.
For #4, you suggest the solution yourself: Have the extra information in a separate location on the package. You'll be hard-pressed to convince me that the FDA's demand for a certain amount of packaging space is a big deal. I do think you're right about them needing to switch to a "meets or exceeds" mode, even though there might be abuses.
You're also right that there aren't sufficient allowances for small farms and producers, and for setups that don't meet the FDA's expectations (The Omnivore's Dilemma has an interesting example there, with an organic farm that did its slaughtering outdoors. Since they couldn't get the FDA to sign off on a seemingly safe and healthy practice, they were limited to selling meat directly to consumers.)
Your first source claims that the intent of Congress was to reduce the risk of using pharmeceuticals to zero, and that the FDA has failed because the risk of using pharmeceuticals is not zero. Without the FDA, he adds, the threat of litigation will successfully keep our drugs safe and effective.
With intellectual lights like these, no wonder you strike me as being so dim.
What is the FDA doing to stop vegans from getting the extra information that they need? Nothing.
The FDA is simply requiring a certain amount of information that nutritionists generally agree is necessary to make informed health decisions. If you're trying to attract the kosher market, you go through whatever certification that requires, and you put it elsewhere on the packaging.
I'm not sure what additional data you would put in for low-carb and diabetic shoppers.
As far as I'm concerned, the big problem with the FDA is that their nutritional guidelines are far too friendly to the meat and dairy industry. If they were working solely on the basis of a maximally healthy diet, they'd be screaming from the rooftops that too much meat will kill you dead.
Are these the same stats that show that people who work really hard at being good basketball players become taller?
You heard right, folks: dada just invoked the "No True Scotsman" fallacy to show that the poor deserve their miserable lot in life. Anyone who is poor must be lazy, because everyone who is not lazy is not poor. What about this guy who... Nope, must be lazy.
I'll not question the implicit assumption that those in society who deserve the best life are those who exhibit the most raw, ruthless, and naked ambition. Because our society is founded on the glorious principle of "get whatever you can, from whoever you can, whenever you can, and expect the same treatment in return." God bless you, dada, for your clear insight, for understanding that what this world needs is more greedy assholes.
Unequal information isn't the basis of profit. Different needs, and different access to resources is. When person X makes a profit because person Y lacks information that person X has, it's not capitalism; it's just screwing somebody.
What, precisely, is stopping the manufacturers from providing more information than the FDA does? If you want to say exactly how much molybdenum is in your product, and the FDA doesn't require that information, there is nothing stopping you.
It's a different situation for health claims, but all the FDA requires is that you demonstrate that the claim is backed by a good deal of scientific consensus. I really doubt the world would be better off if General Mills could put "CURES CANCER" on every box of cereal. But it would make their cereal sell better, and isn't that the holy grail of free market capitalism? So, yes, we should let food manufacturers go crazy, with their absurd claims in bold fonts.
I triple dog dare you to give me a single example of how FDA labeling rules prevent manufacturers from giving me useful, accurate information.
You're kept "healthy, slim, and energized" by beef, cream, and cheese?
You think that having everyone call up and ask the manufacturer what's in their product is a superior system for distributing nutritional information?
You refuse to eat even a single gram of trans-fats, to the point that you call for confirmation when the label says zero grams? Hint: they occur naturally in the beef and cheese that you love so very very much.
My god, have you ever once written a post that you actually believed?
They're not using it to power 1000 homes. The number is just to give you an idea of the capacity of the installation. The story isn't clear about where exactly the electricity will be going, but the installation itself will be at their HQ, so it would make sense to use it there rather than putting it back on the grid.
Explain to me again why you're claiming that a fifteen year lifespan is an "educated estimate" when many panel manufacturers warranty them for 25 or 30 years? Your suspicions mean bupkis to me.
That's the way it's supposed to work, and it often works very well. But you have to remember that economics is implemented by people, and that people are stupid. Or, to be a bit more fair, people do not behave in fully rational ways, and the market price of something may not reflect all the costs involved.
For example, say that you happen to own a stretch of forest. If you harvest trees from it in a sustainable way (that is, in such a way that you can expect it to produce the same amount every year off into forever), then you might get 3% ROI on the money you've invested. Meanwhile, everyone around you is making 8 or 9% a year on their stock market investments. So there is pressure for you as a landowner to harvest in such a way as to match that ROI, even though doing so ensures that eventually the forest will stop producing timber at all. Plus, you haven't been benefitting directly from many of the things that the forest is producing (clean air, erosion prevention, habitat for fuzzywuzzies, attractive scenery, etc.), so when you destroy those things to generate profit for yourself, that loss doesn't come out of your bottom line.
The world is eating into its non-renewable resources and overharvesting its renewable ones at a prolific rate, because the profits of doing so come now, and the costs of doing so come in the distant future. But the future is getting much less distant, even as we increase our rate of consumption. Having a lot of clean energy on hand will make our future problems a lot more tractable.